Top’s face was filled with pain. “Khalid’s gone, Cap’n. You know that. You were there.”
But I didn’t remember.
“Gone? Christ, what happened at the refinery?”
“We got the scrambler. You did, you and Khalid. But…”
“But what? Stop screwing around and tell me.”
“Those knights. They killed some of the staff and took their places. They were rigging the whole place. C-4 charges on wellheads, charges all over. Looks like once the nuke was active they wanted to bury it under a couple million tons of flaming debris. Wouldn’t stop the nuke down there in the subbasement, but if we were an hour later we’d never have gotten to it. Not unless we knew the tunnel system, and we didn’t.”
“We stopped it, though, right?”
“The nuke? Yeah. Nobody’s going to set it off. Not now.”
I didn’t like the way he said that. “What’s wrong? What are you not telling me?”
Top sighed. He nodded to someone, and I slowly turned to see Bunny sitting at the back corner of the truck. There were tear tracks on his cheeks.
“Good to see you awake, Boss,” he said, but there was no life in his voice.
Top said, “Open the door.”
Bunny cut a worried look at me and back to Top. “Sure you want to do that?”
“Open it, Farmboy.”
With a heavy sigh, Bunny pushed the door open so that I could see the bright noonday sun.
Except that it was early morning and the sun was still behind the mountains.
The big smiling face of the sun was not that at all. It was the leering demon face of a mushroom cloud. Many miles distant but massive, and it seemed frozen against the darkness, like a brand burned onto the flesh of night. Not a nuclear blast, which is a mercy, I suppose. This was the entire Aghajari oil refinery curling upward in a fireball five hundred feet high.
I said the word that I didn’t want to say, asking it as a question.
“Violin?”
Top sighed.
“She and the Arklight team tried to stop the knights from setting off the charges. She… never made it out, Cap’n.”
I could feel all of the horror and outrage and fear of the last couple of days sear that image onto my soul. I knew that I would never forget it. I would never be able to forget it.
We had won, but we had also lost.
Epilogue
(1)
I was out of it for a long time.
Church was there when I opened my eyes. He looked haggard and old.
“Christ,” I said. “If you look that bad, I must be a frigging mess.”
He didn’t smile.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
I had to think about it, and I fell asleep a couple of times.
When I opened my eyes again it was morning and there was sunlight slanting in through the windows. Rudy was gone. Instead it was Mr. Church in the chair beside my bed.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“The trauma center at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.”
“In?”
“New York.”
I thought about that. My body was swathed in bandages and, although there was pain, it was buried under a heavy layer of something. Morphine. My head felt like it was stuffed with bubble wrap.
“What do you remember?” he asked,
“Rudy asked the same question.”
“When?”
I couldn’t answer that, and I realized that this wasn’t the same room. “I don’t know.”
“Do you remember the raid on the refinery?”
It took me a long time, and the memories were sluggish and reluctant. “Some of it. Maybe. Did we… did we win?”
Church nodded. “You had the code scrambler. All eight of the devices have been secured.”
“Eight? I… don’t remember eight.”
But then I did. And that memory brought other memories. Church watched my face as each came tumbling downhill at me. Grigor. The army of Upierczi. Everything else.
“My team,” I asked. “John Smith?”
“No,” he said.
“Khalid.”
“No.”
We sat in the silence of that for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Church said eventually. “They were good men.”
“They were family.”
“Yes,” he said. “They were.”
“What about the others?”
“Everyone else took some hits, but they will all recover.”
In body, I thought, but in spirit? In heart? I had my doubts. There was only so much loss a person could take.
“Ghost?”
“He’s recovering. He needed some work. He had cracked ribs and lost a couple of teeth. I arranged for dental implants. Titanium.”
“How-?”
“I have a friend in the industry,” he said with a faint smile.
There was one more name, but I was afraid to ask; and I vaguely remembered a moment like this with Top. Or was that a dream? Church read it on my face. He shook his head.
“No,” he said.
(2)
Church told me all of it.
The Book of Shadows was deciphered. Circe believed that it was the way the knights confessed their “sins” to God for everything they did to fulfill the Holy Agreement. Each entry was countersigned with the letter N. Nicodemus? Probably. Bill Toomey, the head of our handwriting analysis team, said that the same person countersigned every page, but of course that can’t be right.
Can it?
Toomey was doing carbon dating of the ink on all the signatures. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read his results.
Charles LaRoque was taken out by a Hellfire missile. Very appropriate. When the Iranians picked through the rubble they found three bodies. A driver, the remains of the last Scriptor of the Red Order, and the body of a man whose identity remains a mystery.
Grigor and the Upierczi from Aghajari? Like the song says, it’s all dust in the wind.
There are probably more of them out there. There are always monsters in the dark.
But Arklight is out there too. Hunting them, with the full resources of the DMS at its disposal.
If I were one of those bloodsucking freaks, I’d kill myself before I let Lilith’s people find me. I wonder if monsters have their own version of the boogeyman. I wonder if the thing that they dread when they go to sleep at night looks like a beautiful woman with eyes that hold not the slightest trace of mercy.
Rasouli tried to flee the country, too. Mr. Church made a phone call and even though Armanihandjob was in no way our friend, he was useful as a weapon. Rasouli will probably be in prison until the Middle East becomes a sunny center of tolerance and friendship for all.
Church, the presidents of America and Iran, and a few other key people met in Switzerland to discuss the Holy Agreement. The ayatollahs hoped to edit out Islamic involvement and lay it all on the Christian Church, but that was never going to happen.
“What will happen?” I asked Rudy, when he came back to visit me.
He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing visible. Nothing that will ever make the news.”
“Why the hell not?” I demanded, but Rudy looked at me with disappointment.
“What good could possibly be served by telling the world about this? Do you think it would stop hate crimes? Do you really think that it would end the violence in the Middle East?”
I sighed and turned away from him.
“Of course it wouldn’t,” he said sadly. “It would throw gasoline on it.”
“What happened to ‘the truth will set you free’?” I growled.
He sighed. “As much as I hate to say it, Cowboy, sometimes a lie is better.”
“Ignorance is bliss? Is that our stance?”
Rudy didn’t answer, because there was no answer.
And the world? It didn’t end. It still leans heavily on a crooked axis, and it still turns.
But as the weeks passed I saw something I hadn’t expected.
Throughout the region the guns have fallen silent. Tensions are down across the Middle East. No one exactly knows why. At least, no one in the press seems to know.
Without gasoline on the fire, maybe the fire is finally going to burn itself out.
That would be nice.