Church sensed movement and saw Lilith standing by the opening to the little arena, and he waved her inside. She studied the display and nodded approval.
“You always did like your toys,” she said with a faint smile.
“High technology used correctly allows for the greatest efficiency,” he murmured as he tapped keys to bring up another smaller set of display windows. This showed the screens that Rudy, Bug, and Circe were looking at. He and Lilith leaned forward to study them.
“Is that the translation?” asked Lilith.
“Yes.” He touched a button to open a line. “Circe, what do you have?”
“MindReader has decrypted four percent of the Book so far and about twice as much of the Voynich manuscript. Each one is different, and each is very disturbing in its own way.”
“How so?”
“The first few pages of the Book of Shadows is the Holy Agreement, and it’s what we expected. The Red Order and the Tariqa agree to work together to do ‘what is necessary’-that’s the phrasing they were apparently most comfortable with-in order to ‘lead the people to faith and to fealty to God in all things,’ yada yada. Essentially, it’s an argument in favor of hate crimes. Or maybe we should call them ‘faith crimes.’ Something like that. The rest of it though… my God! It’s a kind of history without commentary. It lists every single thing both sides have done to carry out the Agreement. If the whole book is like this, it will be the most complete confession of guilt ever recorded. Hundreds of thousands of deaths. More if you count wars that were started or extended because of the Holy Agreement. We even found a section that shows that the Order influenced Pope Clement V to disband and excommunicate the Knights Templar because the Red Order needed their fortune and resources to continue their private war. That will rewrite a lot of history books. Actually-this all will.”
Church didn’t comment. “Keep at it,” was all he said. He muted the audio feed.
He turned to Lilith. “This is what you wanted,” he said. “You can take this to the world court, to NATO, to any group of governments and they will start a new version of the Inquisition to hunt down anyone responsible, anyone still connected to the Order or the Tariqa.”
Lilith stood with her hand to her throat, considering it. “It doesn’t take down the Upierczi. Unless we can produce a body, no one will believe that they even exist.”
“They are slaves of the Order,” said Church. “Perhaps one of them will give the Upierczi up as part of a deal.”
But she shook her head. “This is where you and I differ,” she said. “You think Nicodemus is the power behind all of this. Nicodemus and now Vox. I don’t.”
“You think it’s Grigor.”
“I know it is. I can feel it in my bones, in my heart.” She closed her eyes. “I lived in one of his cells for fourteen years. He took thirteen children from me. Ripped them from my womb, one after the other. I can’t even count the number of times he raped me.” Her eyes were as hard as fists. “I know what his dreams were. It may have been the LaRoques who brought in the scientists and paid to have Upier 531 developed-but it was Grigor who demanded it. Yes, he demanded it. He made the Order repair the bloodline of his kind. It fulfilled a dream he had. He talked about that dream incessantly. In the night, in the long dark when no one from the Order was down there in the tunnels. Grigor talked to himself, to his people, about the dreams of the Shadow Kingdom. I would lay there at night, naked, filthy, starving, chained to the wall with an iron collar around my ankle, listening to the echoes of his words whispering through the darkness. You call them slaves, but they see themselves as warriors. A race of warriors. The Red Order kept them in shackles through faith, and then when God would not save the Upierczi, science did. Do you think that lesson was lost on Grigor?”
“What’s your point?”
“Look at it from Grigor’s perspective. At first the Upierczi were a scattered race of genetic freaks, or at best a dying and failed offshoot of Homo sapiens. The Red Order found them and gave them purpose, but for centuries kept them in chains. They are called knights, but they are slaves and they know it. Over the centuries, despite the promises of the Order and their own prayers, the bloodline of the Upierczi has failed, become polluted. They’ve faded to the brink of extinction. God did not come even when the Red Order called on Him. Then science saved them. By taking the DNA of the greatest among them, Grigor, their race was reborn. Not in the image of God. Not by the grace of God. They were remade in the image of Grigor. When faith fails and science answers, where do you turn?”
Church said nothing.
“When you have lived as slaves for centuries and accepted your slavery because it was God’s will, what happens when you stop believing that?”
Church said nothing.
“There is a war coming, Deacon, no doubt about it. But it’s not about oil and it’s not about politics. I’ve known you a long time and yet I don’t know you at all. So I wonder how willing you are to fight this kind of war.”
He stood up and walked to the entrance and looked out at the night for a long time. Far in the distance a night bird cried out in a voice that was as sad and desolate as all the pain in the world.
His cell phone rang. Mr. Church answered it and listened for a moment.
“I understand,” he said. “Thank you, Mr. President.”
He set his phone down and touched a button on the console. “Auntie, the word is given and it is ‘go.’”
Aunt Sallie nodded and sent the command signal. “All dogs off the leash.”
On the screen, the glowing dots began to move.
Church looked at Lilith. “A theory, however compelling, is not a target. If Arklight has any intel that you haven’t shared, then now is the time. Give me a target, Lilith, and I’ll show you what kind of war I am willing to wage against those monsters.”
There was a soft ping and Church touched the button to unmute the computer center.
“Mr. Church,” said Rudy, “we have something you need to see.”
“Is it about the Red Order?”
“It’s about the nukes,” said Circe. “There aren’t seven of them.”
“Then how-”
“There are eight.”
Chapter One Hundred Four
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 5:29 a.m.
We moved down a set of metal stairs that zigzagged along a steep wall, with Ghost’s nails clicking behind me. I was dressed like a security guard, and Lydia was in her chador and carrying a clipboard with important looking papers on it. She made sure not to make eye contact with any of the men, and she walked a half pace behind me. The men who passed us did not avoid looking at her. I don’t know how they were able to determine how good looking she was under the billowing black clothes-and Lydia was a hottie by any rational definition, a little bit of JLo but with a Michelle Rodriguez badass bad-girl sneer-but every single man who passed us gave her a thorough up and down.
At one point, when we were alone, she murmured, “I can’t tell… are they undressing me with their eyes or wondering how I would look with another layer of clothes on?”
“Beats me, sister.”
“I can’t tell you how much I’d like to flash my boobs at them just to see them have total coronaries.”
“I think they stone you for that here.”
“Might be worth it.”
I grinned and we kept going.
Although it’s usually cold beneath the desert floor, it was hot as hell down here. Steam hissed up from vents like the whole place was going to blow-or that’s how it looked to my frenzied imagination. When we passed refinery staff, they were going about their business as if it were just another day on the job, which to them it was. Actually, I guess for me it was too. Jesus, I need to get into a safer line of work. Lion taming, maybe; I heard the benefits package is good.
The farther down we went the more humid the air became, and the heavier the smell of raw oil and cooked petroleum. Two levels down I saw that the walls were lined with stretches of dark lichen and cobwebs.