Once we were past the markets, the streets became empty and quiet. No human or car traffic. No sign of Violin, no sign of the Red Knight, but I didn’t like the vibe. The atmosphere was supercharged with tension. I knew that a lot of it was nerves. This whole thing was freaking me out. Truly and deeply.
Haven lay right up the street, though, and I was already starting to breathe easier.
The best safe houses were run by the CIA. They’d been at this longer and they spent a lot of time developing teams to run and oversee the locations. The one Ghost and I headed to was at the fringe of a garment district, with an open lot on one side and a hardware store that was closed on the other. A “For Sale” sign was hung in the window of the store, and I suspected the Company owned that as well.
The safe house was occupied by husband and wife agents. They were a real married couple recruited years ago. Taraneh and Arastoo Mouradipour. Midthirties. His cover was a textile salesman, and she was floor manager for a small factory that made children’s clothes.
Ghost and I walked past the house twice, once from across the street heading west, then on the same side as the house going east. Everything looked normal and quiet. A ten-year-old blue Paykan was parked outside, its paint job faded by sand and heat, several rust spots coated with primer. The only other vehicles in the area were a pair of white vans parked in the lot of a telephone installation company a few blocks away.
We walked all the way around the block and then cut down the alley that led to the open lot. I walked along the side of the house. Back door and side windows were intact. Everything looked calm, which is exactly what I wanted to see. Calm sounded pretty good to me. I needed a bath, food, a first aid kit and a chance to make a private call to Church. There was so much I needed to tell him.
When we reached the front of the house I went to the door and knocked.
Ghost, who was still sluggish, flopped down on the step and looked like he was about to go to sleep. I was getting worried about him. There was no way to tell how much damage the Taser had done, but Ghost was definitely not himself; his senses were clearly dulled and his energy almost bottomed out.
There was no immediate answer. I knocked again.
The protocol was to knock no more than three times. After that you walk away and try another safe house. I didn’t want to walk into another house filled with blood and death, so I was willing to split if this didn’t play out. The next closest was a convenience store half a mile from here. However, I doubted Ghost had that much energy in him. I could sympathize. That goon in the hotel had really rung my chimes and now that the adrenaline was wearing off I could feel it.
I was about to knock a final time when I heard the lock click. The door opened a half inch and I saw a woman’s eye peer at me through the crack.
“Yes?” she asked.
“May I speak with Mr. Pourali?”
That was the current code, and it changed every few days.
“Who is calling?” she asked, right on cue.
“Mr. Hosseini.”
“Please come in,” she said, stepping back and pulling open the door.
I clicked my tongue for Ghost, who jerked awake and scrambled to his feet. He followed me inside.
“Thank you,” I said to the woman as she closed the door.
Ghost froze in place and let out a single sharp bark of warning, which was two seconds too late.
The woman produced a small black automatic from under her robes and pointed it at my face.
Chapter Fifty-Four
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 12:35 p.m.
“Inside or I’ll kill you where you stand,” she snapped, and she said it in English. Not good English, but good enough.
Ghost was trembling, caught between the impulses of his instincts and his training. I was pack leader and I hadn’t given the command to hit.
“January,” I said. It was today’s clarification code word. If this was all a big mistake then the code word would dial everything back to normal.
She said, “Shut up.”
Not the code reply I was hoping for.
I heard a floorboard creak behind me, and Ghost growled in time to warn me … but not in time to protect himself. As I whirled two men rushed at me through the doorway to the living room. They were not Red Knights, but that was the only consolation. The first threw a handful of powder in my face, blinding and gagging me; the other hurled a weighted metal-mesh net over Ghost. On another day, Ghost would have dodged the net and torn the man’s throat out, but the Taser had blunted all of his edge. Ghost cringed, caught in fear and indecision, and the net slapped down around him. He howled in anger, thrashing and twisting to get away from it, but his struggles only wrapped the thing around him. He tripped over it and crashed to the floor.
I saw this through a haze of powder.
I tried to paw the stuff out of my eyes. It was cloying and thick, but it didn’t seem like poison and it didn’t actually hurt. Then the guy who threw it stepped in and planted a mother of a punch into my solar plexus. The sucker punch slammed all of the air out of my lungs and dropped me to my knees. I honked and wheezed and gasped like a salmon on a river bank. The pain was enormous but the lack of air was ten times worse. I could not breathe.
“Shoot him!” barked one of the men, and I felt the cold barrel of the gun jab me in the back of the neck.
“Say the word, Victor…” growled the woman. She had a low, nasty voice. She wanted to pull that trigger.
“No!” cried the other man—who I assumed was Victor—and there was the sharp sound of flesh on flesh as he slapped the woman’s hand away. “We have to be sure.”
They weren’t speaking Persian. They spoke broken English and it sounded like each of them had a different native accent, but I was in no condition to analyze it.
Ghost whined and barked, but he couldn’t come to my rescue. Between the net and the Taser, he was done. I was on my hands and knees, blinking and gagging, my whole body heaving with silent convulsions.
The first man bent close to me. “You can see it, Victor! Look how he reacts. The powder is already doing its work.”
As I fought to control my traumatized diaphragm I struggled to process what they were saying.
The stuff they threw in my face definitely wasn’t poison or some kind of knockout drug. From the smell I think it was
garlic
. Regular, fine-grain, powdered garlic. Not exactly the kind of thing the bad guys usually throw. What was their follow-up? Tomato sauce and a bay leaf?
I managed to suck in a tiny bit of air with a sound like a deflating bagpipe.
“Let me kill him, Victor,” begged the woman. “For God, for the cause…”
“No! And point that damn gun somewhere else before you shoot one of us.”
Fingers knotted in my hair and then my head was jerked backward. The motion, violent as it was, helped open my airway and I gasped in a huge gulp of air like a swimmer coming up after staying underwater a minute too long.
The man named Victor—obviously the leader—touched the tip of something sharp and heavy under my chin and shifted around so that he could study my face. All I could see was a bleary version of his face. Heavy Slavic features and a thick moustache.
“I … don’t know … who you are…” I wheezed, “but you got the … wrong guy.”
“Shut up,” he snapped. I could see beads of sweat popping out on his brow and running down his cheeks. It wasn’t hot in the room—he was scared. Of me? Or of who he thought I was? He said to his companions, “Nadja, cover him. Be careful with that gun, but if he moves … blow his head off.”
The woman, Nadja, shifted around and pointed the pistol at me in a two-hand grip.
“Iñigo, be ready with the hammer.”
Hammer? Christ, that scared me more than the gun. A gun would at least be quick.
Victor squatted down and leaned so close to me I could smell his breath. It reeked of garlic and tobacco. I wanted to make a joke, something about being mugged by a cooking class, but somehow I didn’t think I had the audience for it. I held my tongue and tried to regulate my breathing.
“He doesn’t look like one of them. His eyes are blue.”
“Then he’s wearing contact lenses,” Nadja fired back. “Peel them off, you’ll see.”
The second man, Iñigo, still held my hair, so I was unable to move away as Victor placed his rough fingertips on my face. Thumb below my left eye, two fingers on my eyebrow, and then he slowly spread them apart, widening my eye. His other hand held the weapon against the soft underside of my chin. I did not know what they intended to do—blind me, stab me, shoot me, or pummel me with a hammer, but they were poised and tense and ready. And I was still recovering from the body blow. I was in deep shit and I could feel sweat greasing my own face.
Victor leaned even closer, and now I could feel the heat of his breath on my cheek and my eye.
“No,” he said slowly, dragging the word out in apparent surprise. “No, he is not wearing contacts.”
“Oh, you’re a blind fool, Victor,” snarled the woman. “Let me do it—”
“Hush!” Victor growled and the woman faltered.
Iñigo kicked me in the hip. “Cut an eye out and take a closer look. He’s one of
them
.”
“Hush!” ordered Victor. He repeated the eye-widening procedure with my right eye, frowning as he did so. “See? He is not a knight.”
Ah
, I thought, and I realized what he was looking for. My guardian angel sniper called the killer at the hotel a knight, and that goon with the fangs had worn weird contact lenses. As soon as I thought that I realized that it was wrong. The knight would have been wearing the horror-show contact lenses over his real eyes. Victor and the others were checking my eyes to see if my normal eyes were color contacts over …
My mind stalled at that.
Over
what
? Did they think that the knights really had blazing red eyes with slitted pupils? Or … was that really true of the knights?
If so …
I will rip your throat out and drink your life.
Holy shit. What the hell was I into here?
Church had warned me that I got off lucky when I fought the knight.
“Please,” I said, my voice strained because they had my head pulled back so far, “I’m not who you think I am.”
Victor’s frown turned into an ugly scowl. “Oh yes? And what do we think you are?”
“I have no idea … but whatever it is, you’re wrong. Why don’t we talk about this?”
“Victor, don’t listen to him,” warned Nadja. “He will try to control your mind.”
I expected Victor to rebuke her for the silliness of that comment, but instead I saw doubt and fear insinuate their way onto his features. He pulled his hand back and forked the sign of the evil eye at me and fired off a fragment of prayer, “O Lord, protect with Your right hand those who trust in Your name. Deliver them from the evil one, and grant them everlasting joy.”
Then he used his thumb to peel back my upper lip so he could examine my teeth. The others bent to look as well. Iñigo grunted.
“No,” stated Victor, “he’s human enough.”
Human?
“Absolutely,” I agreed, though with his fingers in my mouth it came out as “Ahzoluly.”
Then Victor turned his head and looked at Ghost, who lay helpless and panting in the net. “And see—he comes with a fetch dog.”
Iñigo’s grip on my hair eased a bit. “I don’t understand this. They said that he was a knight.”
“I know,” said Victor, licking his thick lips. “But when have you ever seen a knight in the presence of a fetch dog? I mean … how
could
that even happen?”
The others said nothing.
Victor straightened. “Krystos will be here any minute. He’ll know what’s happening. He’ll get to the truth.”
I really didn’t like the way Victor said that. I doubt I was supposed to like it; and it seemed to me that the bad situation I was in was about to get a whole hell of a lot worse.
Whoever this Krystos was, I didn’t want to meet him on my knees.
I had Iñigo to my right side holding my hair—though not as tightly as before. Nadja was behind him, aiming past his shoulder at my temple. Victor squatted in front of me, one hand still on my lip and the other holding some kind of spike under my chin. And Krystos and who knew how many others were on their way.
None of the odds were in my favor, and Lady Sniper was nowhere to be seen. I was outnumbered and outgunned; I had no weapons. Why should today be any different?
It was die—or go for it.
I went for it.
Chapter Fifty-Five
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 12:39 p.m.
I wasn’t nice about it, either.
With a bellow of pure rage, I kicked back with all my strength and caught Iñigo in the crotch. He flew backward, arms whipping wide, and his left forearm smashed Nadja across the nose and mouth. She screamed and her finger jerked the trigger, firing a bullet that punched a hole in the wall a foot from Victor’s head. Nadja and Iñigo fell together in a screeching tangle of arms and legs. The moment Iñigo’s hand released my hair, I darted my mouth forward and bit down hard on Victor’s fingers. Bones crunched and he howled in agony. As he jerked his hand away, the spike cut me laterally across the underside of the chin, but then it clattered from his hand.
All of this took place inside one hot second.
I launched myself off the floor at Victor, but my foot slid in the coating of garlic powder they’d thrown at me. My reaching hands missed him by an inch as he backpedaled toward the entrance to the living room.
“
Monstrul!
” he bellowed as he scrabbled inside his coat. I thought he was going for a gun, but he produced a second spike and a second item, a rubber-headed mallet. And a detached part of my brain realized that it wasn’t an ordinary spike. It was a piece of polished hardwood that had been lathed down to a deadly point. He raised both items as he dropped into a crouch to meet my charge.
The son of a bitch was going to fight me with a hammer and wooden stake.