Sister Sophia crept to the window and leaned an ear toward the drapes, listening. Her right fist was clutched so tightly around her rosary that her knuckles were white and her lips moved in a soundless prayer to the Virgin.
They waited. A minute. Two.
Five.
Silence was all they heard. Father Esteban let out a breath and uncurled his fingers from the knife.
Finally the nun began to relax, her cramped attitude of listening yielding first to conditional relief and then to rueful humor as she caught the eye of the priest.
“And here, look at us, cringing at sounds like children sent to bed on a moonless night. What a picture we are.”
Suddenly there was a tremendous crash as the shutters exploded inward, tearing the drapes from their rings and showering the nun with a storm of jagged splinters. The fierce impact staggered Sister Sophia, but she did not fall. Instead something dark lashed out and clamped around her throat, catching her, lifting her to her toes, choking off her screams. A bulky figure stepped through the shattered window, its face covered in a dark red mask, its body hidden beneath a cloak the color of old blood.
“Sophia!” screamed Father Esteban as he leapt to his feet and stared in uncomprehending horror at what he was seeing. The masked intruder held the nun with one hand. Sister Sophia twisted and writhed in the grip, beating at the hand with her small fist; and then the man did the impossible-he lifted the nun even higher until her toes barely touched the floor, and then higher still so that she hung inches above the stone.
With a cry of horror, Father Esteban snatched up the dagger he had just set down and rushed across the room, tottering on feet whose circulation had not fully returned.
The nun tried to scream a warning, or perhaps a plea, but she could force no sound at all past the stricture in her throat. Her pale face had flushed red and was now turning a violent purple.
“Let her go!” bellowed Esteban, and he drove the blade of the knife toward the chest of the figure cloaked in drapes and darkness. But the figure hissed at him like a jungle cat and flung the writhing nun at him with unnatural force. Father Esteban had no chance to dodge and he took her weight full in the chest; then they were falling in a shrieking sprawl of arms and legs. Father Esteban crashed to the stone floor and Sister Sophia’s weight landed hip first onto his chest with a sound like breaking sticks. Pain exploded in Father Esteban’s chest, and his eyes filled with sparks of white fire.
The nun sagged down, unconscious. Esteban struggled to push her off of him, to see the attacker, to draw in a single breath of air. The slender dagger was still clutched in one hand but it was useless to him.
Then, without warning, the weight was gone. The intruder was there, his fists knotted in the nun’s black habit, and without even a grunt of effort he tore the black cloth apart to reveal the white undergarments; then he slashed and ripped these until the naked and innocent flesh of the nun was revealed. It was a horrible transgression, and Father Esteban bellowed in outrage and fury, but the intruder ignored him as he studied the young breasts and clean limbs of the nearly naked woman. The intruder smiled and nodded.
“Yes, she will do very well” he said, and pushed her roughly aside.
The hulking black figure then turned slowly toward the priest. His red robes swirled in the stiff breeze that blew in through the destroyed window. There was no mark, no symbol or badge on any of his garments, and they covered him entirely except for a narrow opening through which two intensely unnatural eyes glared. They were fierce and strange, their irises as blood red as his clothes.
Like the eyes of a rat.
Like the eyes of a demon.
“God!” cried the priest, the word torn from him, from the deep well in which the last of his faith dwelled. He stabbed at the attacker, lunging with his failing strength to try to plunge the needle tip of the dagger into one of those inhuman eyes. But the man-the thing, for it could not possibly be a man-caught the priest’s wrist. Then, with an almost casual jerk, he snapped Father Esteban’s wrist as easily as if the bones were late winter icicles.
Red hot agony erupted in the priest’s arm and he screamed.
He screamed in pain and in fury and in outrage at this attack, and at all that it meant. He knew who and what this man had to be. A Saracen, one of the Hashashin come to murder him, come to silence the voice of the Holy Church.
But he, Father Esteban, was wrong about that, as he was wrong about so many things; and for him, clarity and understanding came far too late.
The intruder released his grip on the priest’s shattered wrist and reached up to his mask, pulling the red cloth slowly away. Revealing his face.
Not a Saracen face.
The skin was pale, the features narrow, the lips thin. A European face.
But not that either.
When the intruder smiled, Father Esteban knew with all certainty that this man did not belong to any country. He did not belong to this world. Thin, colorless lips peeled back to reveal teeth that were yellow and crooked. And wrong.
So wrong.
Each was tapered to a point as needle-sharp as Esteban’s dagger. Not filed the way some of the African cannibals do. No… Father Esteban knew that these teeth, as unnatural as they were, were completely natural to this man.
This creature.
“For the love of God!” cried the priest, his terror and shock greater than the pain in his chest and wrist.
The thing bent closer to him and Esteban could smell the rancid-meat stink of its breath.
“Yes, Father,” said the monster. “All things are done for the love of God.”
That awful mouth stretched open as the red-eyed thing lunged at him.
There was a moment of white-hot pain, and then the colors drained out of the world and took sound and feeling with them, leaving Father Esteban floating in a sea of nothingness. As the darkness wrapped its cloak around him, a single word echoed in his mind, pulsing slowly with the fading beats of his heart.
Vampiro.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Mustapha’s Daily Goods
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 6:47 p.m.
My cell vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it and looked at the code on the screen. Mr. Church. Jamsheed excused himself and went out to his store so I could take the call.
I doubted it was good news.
“I heard from Bug,” Church said. “He’s located a device here in the States.”
“Where?”
“Louisiana.”
Bang. There it was.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Mustapha’s Daily Goods
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 6:48 p.m.
“Christ,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Bug initiated a MindReader search of cargo ships, oil tankers, fishing fleets, and other craft capable of carrying a large, shielded device. Backtracking through ports where cargo could be quietly shifted from one craft to another. These are routes and transfers that would not ring bells on any standard-security computers, so we got lucky.”
“Now give me the bad news.”
“It’s on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico a few miles off the coast of New Orleans. We confirmed the presence of a nuclear signature with a flyover. Low levels, which means it is likely shielded, probably not a danger to the staff aboard the rig, but too high to be anything other than what it is. I have two of our people doing a soft infil right now under cover of a random inspection of blowout preventers. The rig is about due for a check, so we caught that break.”
“Shit.”
“I borrowed SEAL Team Six to work a coordinated operation with Riptide Team out of Miami. Aunt Sallie will coordinate it from the TOC at the Hangar.”
“When do they hit it?”
“The president is making that decision now.”
“Who’s stalling, him or you?”