“Are we at the center of the earth yet?” asked Lydia.
“Australia’s a couple of floors down.”
When we were at the base of the last stairwell, Lydia slid back her sleeve and tapped the keys of the PDA strapped to her wrist. We studied the map and compared it to our surroundings. The floors were marked with old painted lines color-coded for different destinations for routine maintenance. We followed one that rounded a snaking series of turns, passing dozens of small rooms with locked doors.
Lydia was a better lockpick than I was and she fished out a couple of pieces of flexible plastic and loided the locked rooms. Janitorial office, supply closets, bathrooms. Nothing of interest, so we kept moving.
Ghost, with his heightened senses, was drinking it all in, cataloging a thousand smells and their variations. He was trained to react to nitrites from explosives, to decomposing flesh, and to a few other key smells, but so far he wasn’t giving me any of the signals that said he’d found anything. You can’t train dogs to detect nuclear materials.
When we were in a stretch of empty corridor Lydia checked the PDA again, then looked at the walls and up at the low ceiling. “We’re getting seriously deep here, Gaucho. We still have a signal?”
I tapped my earbud. “Talk to me, Dancing Duck.”
Khalid said, “Checked all my unknowns off the list on levels eight and seven. Nothing. Laundry rooms and showers. Heading down a level.”
His signal was almost buried under a hiss of static.
“Roger that,” I said. “Sergeant Rock?”
“Nothing yet but we need to finish level two. Five more unknowns to put eyes on. Lots of foot traffic here. Slowing us down.” His signal was even worse; he sounded like he was whispering at the bottom of a well.
“Copy. Your signal is weak and variable.”
“Back atcha. What’s your twenty, Cowboy?”
“We’re rock bottom. No joy. Moving to zero point.”
Zero point was the last spot where Abdul’s spies had been able to penetrate and add to the map. Based on the original design plans of the refinery, there should be four hundred yards of corridor and several utility rooms there.
We rounded another bend and encountered two problems at the same time.
The corridor ended forty feet beyond the turn. Not in a closed door but in a flat brick wall. There were doors along the side of the corridor, however, and one stood ajar as four security officers stepped out into the hall.
They glanced at me and Lydia and Ghost.
The guards were all low-ranking patrol officers, the kind who were too far down on the pecking order to know if I was part of the staff or not. Unfortunately the other guy wore the bars of a major in the Iranian security forces. The top ranking officer in the whole refinery was a major with big eyes and buck teeth. He ignored Lydia-who was pretending to look at the floor-and pointed at me.
“You!” he said.
One word, but he said it in a way that we all knew was going to be trouble.
Damn.
Chapter One Hundred Five
Arklight Camp
Outskirts of Tehran
June 16, 5:31 a.m.
Church put the call on speakerphone. Lilith bent to listen.
“Remember I told you that I thought this whole thing might be part of a doomsday cult?” asked Circe. “We all dismissed it because those kinds of cults are usually small and underfunded. Now I think I was right the first time.”
“Tell me,” said Church.
“When MindReader used the math code on the two anomalous pages Rasouli gave us, we think we found something. These are scans, of course, but from ultra-high-res analysis they don’t appear to use the same materials as the other pages. Toomey down in handwriting analysis tells me they were written with a fine-point gel pen, not a quill, fountain pen, or brush, which Voynich and the Book are.”
“This is modern?”
“This is recent. This is what we’re looking for. Rasouli had it but apparently couldn’t translate it. One page includes records of a purchase of eight nuclear devices. The five we’re already targeting and three we can’t locate. According to the records, the locations were picked by mutual agreement back in 1999, a year before the devices were purchased. The money was paid to black marketers in Kazakhstan in August 2001. The process of taking possession of them and delivering them to the refineries was slowed by everything that happened after 9/11. We also have the contact information for the black marketers, so we can target them whenever we want.”
Bug cut in at this point. “Now it gets tricky, Boss, because some entries aren’t in ciphertext-they’re simple two letter abbreviations. Like a personal shorthand. We were able to identify five of them because we already know where those nukes are. The codes are B/I, A/S, T/P, and L/A. That has to be Beiji oil refinery in Iraq, the Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, the Toot oilfield in Pakistan, and the Louisiana platform in America.”
“What are the other three codes?”
“V/I, M/S, and J/I,” said Circe. “We’re running pattern analysis but so far we haven’t figured it out.”
Chapter One Hundred Six
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 5:44 a.m.
We were twenty feet away.
The major’s hand strayed toward his holstered pistol. The other cops grabbed for the AK-47s slung from their shoulders.
I said, “Hit!”
Ghost went from a tense crouch to full speed in two steps. The bucktoothed major’s gun cleared his holster but that was as far as it was ever going to go because Ghost hit him like a cannonball, catching the man on the meat of his forearm and using all of his canine weight and mass to slam the major back against the edge of the doorway. The major screamed and fell down and out of sight with Ghost atop him.
I can’t run as fast as a shepherd, but I’m no slowpoke. I barreled right for the guards, all of whom made the mistake of taking half a second to gape in mingled horror and indecision. That was a half second too long.
When I was ten feet from them I threw myself into a rugby tackle that plucked two guys completely off their feet. They fell down and I bodysurfed one of them for three yards. I heard Lydia’s footfalls less than a yard behind me.
I hammered the rifle out of one guard’s hand, smashed him across the mouth with an elbow, and rolled sideways off of him and whipped the same elbow around into a backward blow that caught the second officer in the nose.
From that angle I saw Lydia slide into the third guard like Rickey Henderson stealing second base. Her right foot caught him on the shin and chopped his leg out from under him. His body crashed down on hers, but as he landed she caught his shoulders and turned at the perfect moment, slamming him face down onto the hard floor.
I had most of my weight on the second cop, and I gave his nose a couple of extra pops while I axe-kicked the first guard into dreamland. Then I pivoted on my hip and hopped atop the second guard, who, despite three hits to the face, was still full of game. I straddled his chest and arms with my thighs, grabbed two sides of his shirt and cross-choked him. Do it wrong and the guy either dies of a fractured hyoid bone or struggles with you like they do in the movies. Do it right, using valve pressure on both carotid arteries and the cloth to cut off the airway, and your opponent goes sleepy-by in eight seconds. I did it right.
As soon as he sagged down, I released the pressure, flipped him over, and speed-cuffed him with his own handcuffs. I looked up to see Lydia whipping cuffs around the third guard. His face was a mass of blood, but he was still struggling feebly.
“Hold still, cabron, or I’ll break off something you don’t want to lose.”
“Get the other one. Wrist and ankles,” I said, and left her to cuff the first cop. I was up and moving, skidding around the doorway into the office.