Joe Ledger (32 page)

“I didn’t see you in the dark over there,” said Lilith after a few moments. “Not until you pointed your gun at me.”

“Your back was turned when I raised my weapon. You could not have seen the movement.”

She shrugged.

“One of these days,” said Deacon, “I would like to obtain a drop of your blood.”

“To test?”

“Of course.”

“You wouldn’t understand the results,” she said.

“I might.”

“No.”

“Why are you so sure?”

Her tone was flat. “Because I’m not like you. Not like anyone you know. You’d see the numbers and the chemistry, and maybe if you had the funding you would run some tests on my DNA, and all it would do is confuse you. Maybe scare you.”

“Fear is seldom a deterrent,” he said.

“Wouldn’t that depend on what there is to be afraid of?”

“Generally not.”

She made a moue of irritation. A very French thing, although Deacon knew that she was not French. He did not know everything about Lilith’s heritage—and some of what he’d been able to piece together was apocryphal or at least doubtful—but he knew that her mother had been a Warsaw Jew who had died badly at Sobibor. Deacon had no information beyond wild rumors as to who her father was. The only other family member Deacon could reliably identify was a daughter whose real name, like Lilith’s own, was buried beneath layers of secrecy and obfuscation. Although he would never say so, to her or anyone, it was the fact of having one genealogical foot planted in horror and the other planted in obscurity that engendered within him small feelings of kinship for her.

And, like his own history, there were questions about her past that most people would find difficult to answer and, if answered, challenging. Life, however, is far stranger than the greater population of this troubled old world would readily and comfortably accept.

While Lilith watched, Deacon dragged the two dead thugs, one at a time, to the stream and rolled them in. It was clear to them both that it required more effort on his part than she’d used to dispose of the man in the hazmat suit. Neither felt the need to comment on it.

When the last man vanished into the swirling waters, Deacon consulted his watch, glanced upstream and then over at the still-open door, and pushed his sleeve down to cover the watch.

Lilith said, “Those men were out here to hand that cooler off to someone.”

“Yes. A four-man team. Two Americans, a Brit, and their local contact.”

“When are they due?”

“Five minutes ago,” said Deacon.

She opened her mouth to ask for clarification, then thought better of it. She glanced at the rushing water as if expecting to see four bodies float by.

“Ah,” she said.

He nodded.

“So, your part in this is over?”

“I did what I came to do,” he answered. “Now tell me…what’s your interest here? Arklight has never expressed an interest in this area of
human
rights.”

Deacon, for his part, leaned on the word
human
. Making the point and leaving much understood but unspoken.

It seemed to both amuse and annoy Lilith, since various partially formed expressions came and went on her face in rapid succession.

He noted that Lilith did not flinch or rage at his mention of “Arklight.” Once before she had tried to kill him for speaking that name, for even knowing it. The fact that she had been unsuccessful formed one of the somewhat shaky pillars of the truce between them. The truce, he knew, was as substantial as vapor and existed only because they had yet to have directly conflicting agendas. Her tolerance of his use of the name of the highly secret and extremely dangerous group, of which Lilith was nominal head and chief operative, was as close to an olive branch as he ever expected to receive from her.

Finally she gestured to the open doorway. “The lab in there is partially funded by
Ordo Ruber
.”

Deacon said, “Ah.”

The Red Order was something that he had on his to-do list but which he currently lacked the funding and manpower to tackle. If his intelligence could be trusted, it was an ancient order along the lines of the Templars. Secretive and dangerous, with tendrils tangled into the underpinnings of several world governments, the OPEC nations, and the Catholic Church. He had not yet had the time to verify much of what he had heard and therefore had no framework for a cohesive case he could make to the President and Congress.

Lilith said, “There are rumors that the Order has been hiring scientists of all stripes—molecular biologists, geneticists, and others—to try to rebuild the genetic lines of the Red Knights. You know who they are?”

The Red Order was rumored to employ a group of special operatives known as the Red Knights. Like the ninja of ancient Japan, however, there was layer upon layer of misinformation and deliberate disinformation about who and, more importantly,
what
the Red Knights were. Some of the stories were preposterous. Others merely frightening.

“Rumors only,” admitted Deacon. “Feel free to share.”

She ignored that. “They want the Knights to become a more powerful and effective organization than ever.” Something, some strange fire, ignited in Lilith’s eyes. “I can’t allow that.”

“Then this is a straight hit?”

“No. This isn’t the central lab. We don’t know where that is. This is more of a processing and distribution center for research materials to be sent to researchers in the Order’s pocket.”

Deacon nodded. “And you mean to do what? Get hold of their bulk research materials and notes and use them to find leads to the scientists working for the Order.”

“You were always cleverer than the other little spies, Deacon. Yes, that’s exactly it.”

“Do you have a team coming to help you?”

“It’s only a small lab,” she said. “Staff of ten or twelve.” A pause. “These are scientists, lab techs, and a few foot soldiers. Three are already down.”

“What about the Red Knights?”

Lilith shook her head. “They don’t do guard duty. They won’t be here.”

Deacon looked at the gun he still held. He was about to say something when a buzzer suddenly sounded from inside the open doorway. Loud and insistent.

“Finally,” she said, resting her hands on her knives. They could hear shouts and running feet. “This part is mine.”

Deacon smiled and shook his head. “To be fair,” he said mildly, “you helped me when you eliminated the three men who came out here. I feel as if I should return the favor.”

But Lilith shook her head.

“I don’t want your help,” she said. “Be a nice little spy and go play James Bond somewhere else.”

The shouts grew louder.

Deacon took a breath and let it out slowly. Then he holstered his pistol and turned away. He picked up the cooler and faded into the shadows, watching over his shoulder as Lilith drew her weapons and moved like a blur of shadows and steel through the open doors. The tunnel immediately echoed with the rattle of automatic gunfire and the screams of men in terrible pain.

With the cooler under his arm, Deacon began walking back the way he’d come, a frown etched on his face.

He got almost a hundred yards before another scream split the air.

It wasn’t the dying scream of a man.

It was the shriek of a woman in terrible pain.

And in terrible fear.

Deacon dropped the cooler, tore the pistol from its holster, whirled and ran back along the edge of the black water as fast as he could.

Chap. 3

As he ran toward the door a man staggered out, blood streaming from deep crisscrossed cuts that gouged him from shoulders to hips. His belt was severed and with each step his trousers slipped further down his bloody legs. But he still held an AK-47 in his hands, finger jerking spasmodically on the trigger, bullets punching into the chamber beyond.

Deacon put a single .22 round into the back of the man’s head and shoved him out of the way.

He jumped through the doorway, pivoted as he dropped into a crouch, gun up and ready in both hands, eyes taking in the scene. He was at the end of a short tunnel that doglegged to the left and opened onto a large stone room that had been converted into a rough field lab. There were long work tables, banks of computers, and various kinds of processing machinery. Blowers pushed cool, clean air into the room and pulled dust out. Two men lay in a red tangle at the mouth of the tunnel. Automatic rifles lay inches from their dead hands. Three other men, a guard with a handgun and two men in white lab coats, were down inside the room, their faces and throats slashed to ribbons.

Inside the chamber there were seven uninjured men. All of them had weapons—guns, a fire axe, and a burly man with a black t-shirt held one of Lilith’s daggers. They were strung out in a wide half-circle around three figures who fought and tore at each other in the center of the room.

Lilith and two tall, pale-faced men dressed in dark clothes.

All of them were bleeding.

But Lilith was limping as she backpedaled from them. Her left arm curled gingerly around her middle. At first Deacon thought that the arm was broken, but then he saw the lines of bright red running down her loins and thighs.

She had her arm clamped over a stomach wound.

The men surrounding her were yelling and pointing weapons.

Lilith coughed, and there was blood on her lips.

The two men in dark clothes laughed.

Lilith’s invasion had gone horribly wrong.

Deacon took all of this in within the space of a heartbeat.

He did not pause, did not waste time processing or strategizing. He tore a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, hurled it.

It was a flash-bang, a stun grenade developed by the British SAS. Deacon dropped into a crouch and covered his head with his arms. Even so the bang was almost unbearably loud. The burst of light stabbed him through his shut eyelids.

The men in the room screamed.

Deacon immediately opened his eyes, took his guns in both hands again and began firing as he rose. He was peripherally aware that the two men with Lilith were beyond the effective range of the flash-bang and yet they had their hands to their ears, hissing in pain.

He noted it, but it was far from a matter of first importance as he felt his gun buck in his hands.

His first shot took a scientist in the side of the face. It was not intended as a kill shot, though the bullet punched a wet hole through cheekbone and out through the opposite cheek. The intention had been to drive that man into the men beside him. The collision took three of Deacon’s opponents out in one second. He swung his pistol and fired four shots, two each to guards, hitting them as they turned toward him, the first shot to each hitting bodies to jolt them to a stop and the second hitting them in the head. Small caliber rounds lack the power to exit the far side of a skull, so instead they bounce around inside and destroy the brain. It was why the caliber was the preferred weapon of assassins.

That left two men immediately able to respond.

One man had the fire axe.

The other had a pistol.

Deacon shot the second man in the face and then put the axeman down with a head shot.

He calculated his ammunition. Eight shots fired. Four dead, one wounded, two recovering from the collision with the scientist. That was a full magazine and the one he’d chambered. He dropped the magazine and reached for a second, but one of the two survivors rushed him so fast he had no time to finish the reload.

Deacon stepped into the attack, pivoting his body as he tilted his weight onto his front leg. Both hands moved out as he simultaneously blocked with his left forearm and rammed the unloaded pistol into the attacker’s face hard enough to jolt the man to a stop. Deacon recoiled his gun-hand and chopped the man in the Adam’s apple with the gun.

The man dropped at once.

But now the second man was up and in motion, bringing his rifle to bear. If he’d dropped the gun and used his hands, or if he’d swung the rifle stock at Deacon, he might have had a chance. Instead he tried to aim the weapon.

Deacon stepped into him, dropping his own pistol as he intercepted the swing of the barrel and grabbed the long-gun with both hands. He turned his second step into a flat-footed kick that shattered the man’s knee so badly the leg buckled and bent the other way. Deacon tore the gun from his hand, reversed it and pulled the trigger.

The gun bucked as two rounds hit the man in the chest, but then the slide locked back.

Empty.

Deacon tossed the gun aside.

Twenty feet away the two men in black and Lilith had all turned toward him.

Her eyes were filled with pain and hate.

Their eyes were filled with a pernicious delight that was appalling to behold. And those eyes were all wrong. The irises were not brown or blue or green. They were red. As red as the blood that painted this room. Instead of round pupils, theirs were slits. Like the eyes of reptiles.

The two men smiled at him.

Deacon felt the blood in his veins turn to ice.

The intelligence reports, the rumors about the killers called the Red Knights…so much had been beyond belief. Horror stories. Crazy lies.

Except….

Except now the truth was like a punch over the heart. It stopped the world for a terrible moment. It tore the mind open and jammed in like daggers.

As their lips curled back, Deacon saw their teeth.

So white.

So long and sharp.

They had teeth like dogs.

Like wolves.

Like monsters.

“They’re Red Knights,” screamed Lilith. “Deacon, they’ll tear you apart. For God’s sake…
run
!”

Chap. 4

He could have run. He was closer to the door than the Red Knights. He could be outside, reloading as he ran, safe in darkness.

He should have run. This was Lilith’s fight. His government—even the small, clandestine groups that endorsed Deacon’s personal agendas—had in no way sanctioned any contact with Arklight. The few people in the U.S. government who even knew of Arklight considered it a borderline terrorist organization. So this was not his fight, and Lilith was not his ally.