Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:42 a.m.
I kept expecting the woman to call back, but she didn’t.
Violin.
I went into the bathroom to pack my toiletries. Ghost came and sat in the doorway, watching me in case I happened to discover a beef bone in my shaving kit.
As I puttered around, I tried to make some sense of the pieces of the mystery I had, but it was like trying to assemble one picture with pieces from four different puzzles. There was the hikers thing. That’s why I was here in Iran. There was no intention or even possibility of any interaction with the Iranian government. I don’t think I had ever spoken Rasouli’s name aloud before today; until now it was only a name in news stories and in a handful of CIA field reports that crossed my desk.
Before Rasouli, there was not even a whisper of rogue nukes. I mean, sure, everyone knows about Iran’s nuclear project-which is not even a “leaked” secret. Iran was behind the first press stories. They wanted the fear of it to give them leverage. What the general public didn’t know was that their program was about eighteen months ahead of the timetable predicted in the press, and that the whole thing had been kicked off with technology sold to them, and overseen, by the Russians. The Cold War was far from over-it simply had a new mailing address.
The CIA analysts were convinced to a high degree of confidence that Iran already had nuclear bombs. Maybe ten of them. But those bombs would be much smaller than the unit in the photo. They would be tactical nukes built into warheads. It was a scary fact of political life, and it’s why the United States did absolutely nothing in direct support of the various waves of antigovernment unrest. And, it’s why they let the hikers rot for a year. If it wasn’t for the danger posed by leverage on Senator McHale, Echo Team would never have crossed the border.
So… okay, look at that. The hikers were collateral in the nukes thing; but the nuke in the picture isn’t an Iranian nuke. It was probably of Russian manufacture, in whole or part, but the Russians were sharing a sleeping bag with Iran and if Rasouli wasn’t lying, then this bomb was positioned as a threat against Iran.
“So whose nukes are they?” I asked Ghost.
He wagged his tail because that’s what dogs do. They’re too polite to interrupt.
Blowing up the Mideast oil field was a pointless act of destruction. Where was the advantage? How did that make a political statement useful to anyone involved in either the oil wars or the religious pissing contest?
And Violin? Who and what was she?
The fact that Rasouli knew Hugo Vox made all of my math fuzzy. This whole thing could be a Seven Kings beach party, in which case trying to sort through the lies to find the truth would be like trying to pick fly shit out of pepper.
I sighed. I had way too many questions and so far… not one single answer.
Ghost suddenly turned at a sound and then trotted into the other room. I didn’t hear a knock, but Mr. Church’s asset was due any minute. Maybe Ghost heard him on the stairs.
I reached for a clean shirt and was pulling it on when I suddenly heard two sounds that chilled me.
The first thing I heard was Ghost letting out a single savage bark of warning.
Then I heard a sharp yelp of pain. The sound was instantly cut off.
Chapter Thirty-One
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:53 a.m.
I came out of the bathroom at a dead run and slammed into a figure in dark clothes and a hood.
We rebounded from one another, and for a weird moment I thought it was a ninja and that I was in a very bad movie. Then I saw that his clothes were ordinary black pants and a baggy shirt, and his mask was a simple balaclava.
The eyes that glared at me through the opening in the mask were weird, though. Really weird. They were a luminous red-like a white rat’s eyes-with long slitted pupils like a snake’s. Obviously contact lenses, and probably for the dual purpose of disguising his looks and trying to spook his opponent. If I was the kind of guy to stand there and gawp at him, I’d be dead.
Ghost lay twitching on the rug by the front door. Two metal flechettes were buried in his pelt and electricity coursed into him through silver wires that trailed up to a Taser the man held at arm’s length. The attacker spun and tried to pistol-whip me with the Taser.
I ducked the swing, came up fast from the crouch and smacked him over the ear with an open palm. It’s a useful blow that hurts like hell and jolts the balance, but if he was hurt, it didn’t show; and his balance didn’t suffer at all. He reacted by dropping the Taser and punching me in the ribs hard enough to lift my feet an inch off the floor. He tried to combine it with an overhand hammerblow, but I chopped it aside with my elbow. My ribs were white hot with pain, but I let that simply stoke the fury that had been burning in me since Rasouli ruined my morning. I wanted to hurt something that would scream, so I pivoted and drove at him with a flurry of precise strikes and nasty low kicks.
He matched me like we’d rehearsed this, blocking and parrying, slipping and evading every single strike; and he foot-jammed all my kicks. Then he found a hole in my attack, ducked in low and fast and drove a two-knuckle punch into my solar plexus. It missed the xiphoid by an inch as I turned away from it, but another white hot flare of pain exploded in my torso.
The punch almost dropped me. That one glancing blow was so immensely powerful that it sent me reeling halfway across the room.
That gave him a bigger hole, and he launched himself at me, snapping out with a vicious front kick that I barely evaded by turning and dropping into a three-point crouch. He landed and pivoted and his second kick was a side thrust that missed my knee by half an inch and shattered the heavy wooden leg of the desk chair. This guy was slimmer and shorter than me, but damn if he wasn’t strong.
I hooked my fingers around the slatted backrest of the chair and swept it off the floor, catching him solidly on the shoulder. The blow knocked him against the wall, but he rebounded and shattered the chair with a backward sweep of his arm. I threw an arm up to protect my eyes from the splinters; but even as I did that I did a backward kick and caught him in the stomach with my heel. I put a lot of torque in that kick and it should have knocked him out and given stomach cramps to his whole family back home.
All he did was grunt.
I mean… holy shit. A full-grown silverback gorilla couldn’t have stayed on his feet after a kick like that. My kick did exactly jack squat.
Well, not entirely true. It made him mad. And it was no fun to discover that up till now he hadn’t actually been trying to kill me. The Taser and his first selection of attacks were meant to disable. Now he was pissed, and he drove at me, stabbing at my eyes with his fingertips and trying to crush my throat with the stiffened webbing between index finger and thumb. The vicious prick fought like I did-only he was a lot stronger and a whole lot faster.
And I am really frigging fast.
So I changed the game and barreled straight at him, wrapped my arms around his thighs and picked him up to drive him right into the cheap wooden dresser which exploded into a shower of splinters, socks, and underwear. We crashed down onto the floor and I tried to slam his head into the broken base of the dresser, but he kicked up between my legs, catching me on the butt and knocked me headfirst into the wall. I got my elbow up in time to save my skull, but it left my side open and he punched straight up and caught me in the gut.
As I staggered away from that, he kicked out with both feet and sent me flying back onto the bed. He was up before I finished landing and he pounced on me. The force trampolined us off the mattress and down on the far side between the bed and wall. The attacker put a knee on my chest and cocked his fist for another of those pile-driver punches of his, but I grabbed the edge of the night table and jerked it down into the path of the punch. His fist hit the table, and for the first time he reacted. He yanked back his fist and cursed.