“No, Mother, it’s just-”
“Do I need to send a trainee instead? Someone who understands how to follow a simple order?”
Violin took a deep, steadying breath. It was that or put her fist through the monitor’s screen.
“No, Mother, but-”
“Then follow your orders,” barked Lilith. “Rasouli gave Ledger a flash drive with information on where as many as seven nuclear bombs have been hidden. Four, at least, are in the Middle East. Find Ledger and get that drive. Is that order simple enough for you?”
“My God! Wait-how do you know what Rasouli gave-?”
“How do you think?” snapped her mother. “I used common sense and asked the right question of the right person.”
Ah, so that’s it, thought Violin. Mother spoke with St. Germaine.
No wonder she’s so angry. On a secret level, Violin was pleased to see her mother discomfited.
“Mother, I’m trying to understand why the Order sent a knight after Ledger. How could they have known about the flash drive?”
“I… don’t know,” said Lilith, her anger dropping down several notches. “That’s a good question, too.”
“On the other hand, this seems to confirm one of my theories-that Rasouli is not planning on accepting the role of Murshid.”
But the screen had already gone dark.
Violin clenched her teeth. She considered taking the computer outside and backing her car over it a few times. It might make her feel good. Instead, she turned off the engine and got out of the car.
She was dressed in a traditional Iranian chador and headscarf, which made her shapeless and faceless. The eye makeup she had applied would fool anyone. She took a net-covered cloth grocery sack from the back seat and began walking slowly across the street. Not directly toward the white vans, but at an angle so that she would have to pass them. They appeared deserted.
As she approached, she could hear the squawk of a walkie-talkie and the hushed voice of a man speaking awkward Persian with a European accent, though she could not make out the words. The man was inside the second van. From his tone, though, he sounded agitated, concerned. He kept repeating a word, or perhaps a name, and got no replies.
“ Krystos! Krystos! ”
Then the rear door of the van opened and four men stepped out. They were dressed in ordinary clothes, but they held their sports coats closed in the way men do when they are trying to conceal something. Violin had seen it a thousand times. It amused her.
She needed to be amused. It was that or let the memory of her conversation with her mother turn her into a screaming wreck.
The men saw her and paused. They said nothing to her but their eyes were on her as she walked past the van. They were only pretending to be Iranian, but their stares were frank and impudent by Muslim standards. Invasive and rude.
No way to treat a lady, she thought.
Violin let herself trip over a crack in the sidewalk. She stumbled and dropped the grocery bag. One of the men made a reflexive move to catch her.
And he died.
The other three men never saw the blade. All they were aware of was a flash of black cloth and the sparkle of sunlight on steel, and then the man who had reached to help the woman was sagging to his knees as a jet of impossibly bright red geysered from his throat. Violin gracefully sidestepped to avoid the spray.
The men were shocked, but they were professionals. Even without understanding what was happening they knew something was wrong, that this was an attack of some kind. They went for their guns.
And then Violin was among them.
Her chador flapped and popped like laundry on a clothesline. Her hands became a blur as she moved into the center of the group, a blade in each hand, her body twisting with a dancer’s grace. The steel wove patterns of light around her. Rubies of blood filled the air and splashed along the side of the van and on the front of the building. One gun cleared its holster but the hand holding it was no longer attached to its owner’s wrist.
The men had no time to scream.
Violin cut their faces and throats and mouths and eyes. She slashed tendons and muscle and bone and then she suddenly froze in the center of the storm of blood. The men collapsed around her, their many parts creating a grotesquely artistic pattern on the ground.
From the first cut to the last it took four seconds.
Violin stared dispassionately down at the carnage.
Four seconds.
Beneath her scarf her mouth twitched in disgust.
It should only have taken three.
She looked up and down the empty street, then opened the back door of the lead van and examined the interior. In the back, one side was given over to a large and clunky array of surveillance equipment that looked like it might have first seen service during the Cold War. The other side was a weapons rack, with pistols and automatic rifles in metal clips, rows of tapered stakes hanging in rings mounted to the inner wall, and a sack filled with pouches of garlic.
Violin sneered at the equipment.
“ Idiota. ”
She spat into the van and turned away. Then she ran for her car.
By the time she reached the safe house, though, Joe Ledger was gone.
She searched the house and read the complete story told by the dead. The tortured couple upstairs, the others, killed by stake and bullets.
Violin stood in the living room for a full minute, staring at the dead man who lay slumped by the wall, a bullet hole glistening red over his heart. She read that, too, and nodded her approval.
Then she went to the doorway and peered up and down the empty street.
Violin stepped back into the quiet, shadowy, bloody hallway. She pushed back her sleeve and tapped the face of her watch. The image of the clock vanished to be replaced with a blank screen. Violin pressed her thumb to it for a moment. When she removed it the screen glowed green for a moment. Violin tapped the small receiver bud she wore in her left ear.
“Oracle.”
“Oracle welcomes you, Violin.”
“Addition to mission report. A full Sabbatarian hit team tried to ambush Joseph Ledger. I eliminated the backup squad. Ledger took out the main squad.”
“Status of Captain Ledger?” asked the computer.
“Unknown. I need that list of probable safe houses and bolt-holes.”
“Processing.”
While she waited, Violin smiled because Joseph Ledger was still alive, but her smile was fragile because she had lost his trail. Worse still-much worse, in fact-was that she was treading on very dangerous ground. She had saved Ledger from a Red Knight, but in her report she had filed it as a “righteous kill,” Arklight phrasing for a necessary assassination. Killing a knight would never be questioned, not even by Lilith or the other Mothers.
This action, though, could possibly be construed as an act of war. Arklight was not currently at war with the Sabbatarians. This hit could not be labeled as “righteous.” A clever and devious mind could make a convincing argument that it was an attempt to save Ledger’s life. That put it into a different category entirely. That was blood obligation. That was sacred ground filled with thorns and deadfalls.
As she drove, Violin racked her brain-and her heart-for an answer to the question that she knew would be coming. She prayed for another of her “flashes,” but aside from the brief one this morning, there was nothing. It infuriated her. What was God’s plan in giving her a gift that was faulty, questionable, and distracting? The fact that the flash had happened at all was skewing her focus. Was she acting on behalf of her mission objectives, or was she trying to save the life of Joseph Ledger?
It should have been an easy question to answer. Everything she had ever done, everything she had ever learned, had been geared toward making the response automatic. The Mission was all.
All.
Violin gripped the wheel. The muscles in her jaw ached from clenching.
The Mission was all.