Ghost had his tail between his legs and in my way so did I.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski
Munich, Germany
June 15, 9:54 a.m.
The young man sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the pistol he had just finished loading. It was a slim, lightweight. 22. Easily concealed, simple to operate. He had used guns like this for years. He had killed with them. Men and women. Many of them.
He even knew most of their names.
The fact that he did not know all of their names was like a nail in his head. The floor around the bed was littered with crumpled up sheets of paper on which lists of names had been scribbled. On the first few sheets, the names that he could remember were written in a neat, flowing script. On the more recent ones they were scrawled in haphazard fashion. More than once the tip of his pen had gouged into the notepad, cutting fresh pages like blades on flesh.
The young man knew about that, too. He had used knives more than once.
Even a garrote.
The most recent page lay crumpled on the floor between his bare feet. Beside it lay yesterday’s bottle of Scotch. Today’s was in splinters at the base of the wall where it had been thrown.
There were other bottles too. The room was a disaster, the trash can the only place uncluttered by discards. It stood empty, like a statement, by the open refrigerator door. Inside the fridge, a week’s worth of leftovers had become worlds for new life forms, and the odor was appalling.
The young man did not care.
“Dr. Sirois!” he shouted suddenly, remembering another name. With fevered hands he began his list again. Seventy- eight names now. Seventy-eight.
He wrote them as carefully as trembling fingers would allow. As neatly as his mind would allow, but by the time he was halfway done the list even he couldn’t read most of what he’d written. He’d lost count somewhere in the forties and tore the page from the pad, crushed it in his fist, and hurled it as far as he could.
Then he screamed.
“ Seventy-eight, you sodding freak! ”
Seventy-eight was too much. He knew that. Too many deaths. Too many murders. Far too many to atone for. There was no way anyone could be forgiven for that many deaths. A saint would burn for half as many, and he knew that he was far, far from that kind of grace.
Seventy-eight. Too many.
But not enough. There were more. He could remember them. He could remember the trigger-pulls, the plunge of blades. But why couldn’t he remember their names?
He screamed again, an inarticulate plea to a God he knew would not spit on him.
When the phone rang, his screams died in the humid air of his hotel room. There was a ghost of an echo, and then silence.
Until the second ring.
The young man stared at the phone.
Not the hotel phone, which had been silent since he checked in three weeks ago.
Not at his personal cell phone, which lay smashed on the floor under the shoe he had used to destroy it.
No, this was the other cell. A bright purple one with a ruggedized rubber shell. The one he had picked up a hundred times, ready to make a call, ready to beg for forgiveness, but which he had put down each time.
The phone kept ringing.
It had not rung for weeks. Not since he had left the private villa that sat in the shade of the Kolakchal Mountain, Jamshidiyeh Park in Tehran. Not since he had been caught reading the encrypted computer files. Hacking those files had taken months. Reading them had broken his heart. Being caught reading them had resulted in a terrible fight. Shouts, hard words, and a single punch-the hardest the young man had ever thrown-that left the owner of those files dazed and bleeding on the floor. The words that man had said as the young man backed away from the horror of what he had just done-those words had opened up a fissure in his mind. They had broken something that the young man knew could not be mended.
Maybe not even by God Himself.
The purple phone kept ringing.
On the eleventh ring, he answered it. He did not speak, did not say hello, did not ask who was calling. There was only one person who could possibly have this number.
“Toys,” whispered Hugo Vox. “C’mon, kid… say something for Christ’s sake.”
Toys bent forward as quickly and sharply as if he had been punched in the stomach.
“Toys!” begged Vox. “Are you there?”
Into the phone he said, “No.”
And he disconnected the call.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Private Villa Near Jamshidiyeh Park
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:59 a.m.
Hugo Vox drew in a ragged breath and let it out through his nostrils, feeling his whole body deflate.
That single word.
No.
Vox stared at the coded cell phone on his desk. It lay beside a bottle of Scotch and a tumbler that was nearly empty. Vox snatched up the glass and drained the last of the Scotch, shivering as the ice rattled against his teeth.
He refilled the glass, drank half of it, set it down.
His sleeve was still rolled up and he looked at the injection mark, then touched the others beneath his shirt. They still hurt, but other things hurt worse.
“You miserable backstabbing little fuck,” he said aloud. The house, however, was empty. Toys had been gone a month now, and Vox knew that he would never be back. On the computer monitor in front of him was the log-in screen of the bank to which he’d wired the billion he’d given to Toys after the Seven Kings fell apart. One hundredth of the assets Vox had in over seven hundred global markets, banks, and trusts. When Toys had left him, Vox had been determined to switch all but a penny out of it. That would have made a statement, sent a message.
So far he hadn’t done it, even though he logged in to the banking site as often as six or seven times a day.
The fact that he could not yet do it irritated the shit out of him.
“You goddamn Judas,” he growled. It was far from the first time he’d said that.
What troubled Vox most was his own reaction to Toys’s betrayal. He should have been doing an Irish jig instead of sulking. Toys had found exactly what Vox had wanted him to find. Upier 531, the Upierczi, the Holy Agreement. All of it, exactly as planned. Vox still could not understand why Toys had reacted so… weirdly. This was exactly the sort of thing Toys had been involved with his whole adult life, first as Sebastian Gault’s personal assistant and since then as Vox’s protege and unofficially adopted son. This was Toys’s fucking heritage. All he had to do was join him for this last little bit of fun and the kid would have access to the other ninety-nine billion dollars.
How could anyone piss on that?
He closed his eyes and remembered the fight they’d had.
Vox had been in the kitchen at their villa, removing cardboard containers of takeout food from a cloth bag and placing them on the table. Humming to himself, happy with the way things were going with Grigor, and with that numb-nuts Charlie LaRoque. When he heard Toys open the cellar door, he looked up and smiled.
But the smile died on his lips.
“What the fuck-?”
Toys stood swaying in the doorway, his eyes red-rimmed, cheeks streaked with old and new tears. A pistol hanging limply from his hand, the barrel pointed at the floor.
“Hey, kiddo,” Vox began, “what’s-?”
Toys tossed a ring of keys onto the counter. Duplicates for the keys to Vox’s office and the cabinet with his computer files. Vox shrugged; he’d known that Toys had made dupes. There were faint smudges of wax on two of the keys from where Toys had made impressions for copying.
“So what?” he asked.
“Upier 531.”
Vox removed a container of rice from the bag. He glanced from Toys to the pistol and back again. “Yeah.”