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.
“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, cabrón, 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.
The major was down and he was bloody, but he wasn’t dead. The pistol lay in the doorway and the arm that had grabbed for it was torn and bleeding—though still attached. Ghost was crouched down over the officer, his bloody fangs clamped around his throat. Not hard enough to kill or even break the skin, but hard enough to make a very clear point: lie still or die.
The officer had put up a struggle, though. Blood was smeared eight feet into the room, which meant that he was trying to drag himself away from Ghost even while the dog was chomping on him. I glanced past the major. There was a glass case with a fire ax on the wall by the door to a small bathroom. Ghost had shifted from a tug of war with the major’s arm to a more effective hold on his throat only a few inches short of the wall with the ax. His teeth hadn’t torn into the man’s throat, but the pressure was there and the major was one bad decision away from dying.
He stopped and lay utterly still except for his heaving chest. The wounds on his arm must not have been as bad as they looked because they only bled sluggishly. Must have hurt like hell, though, because the officer’s face was as white as milk.
I drew my pistol and put the barrel to his temple.
To Ghost, I said, “Off. Watch.”
Ghost opened his jaws with great reluctance and moved to sit in the corner between the bathroom and a wall on which was a poster-sized copy of the same floor plan I had in my PDA. Ghost sat down where he and the major could have a meaningful visual encounter. Like me, Ghost had shaken off most of the ill effects of yesterday, and like me he was in no mood to get pushed around today.
Lydia appeared in the doorway with one of the rifles in her hands. Before she could speak I gave a quick shake of my head and then ticked my chin toward the door. She nodded and went outside without a word.
I knelt by the major. The officer was wide-eyed with fear, but he wasn’t looking at me. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Ghost, who was, to be fair, looking smug and giving him the evil eye. I snapped my fingers in front of the major’s eyes, and he flinched and shifted his gaze to me.
“Listen to me,” I said in hushed Persian, but I gave my accent a tweak, putting just a hint of Russian in it. “This can go two ways, and I don’t think I need to explain the bad way. If you play fair with me, I’ll let you bandage your arm and I’ll tie you up without further injury.”
The major’s lip curled back from his big horse teeth as he prepared to fire back a vicious comment, but Ghost warned him with a soft growl.
“We are not here to sabotage the refinery,” I said. “I don’t care if you believe that or not. It won’t change anything. Someone else is here to sabotage the place. Listen closely to what I’m about to say next. They have planted a nuclear device in one of the subcellars. I am here to de-arm it because neither of us wants that device to detonate. Can we agree on that?”
“No! We do not have any weapons like that here. What stupidity is this?”
I put a little extra pressure on the gun barrel. “Be nice. If you know anything about that device, then now would be a good time to unburden your soul.”
He started to shake his head, but the barrel wouldn’t permit the movement. Instead he said, “No!”
“Take a second,” I cautioned. “Think it through. It would be so unfortunate if I learned otherwise and had to come back here to discuss it with you.”
“No,” he said again. “Why would I plant a bomb in my own country? It is the Americans who—”
“Shhh,” I soothed. “You don’t want to debate politics with me right now, trust me on this. I’ll ask it one more time: do you know anything about the device?”
“No. Of course not!” He spat the words at me. “I do not believe it.”
If he was lying, then he was a pretty good actor.
“Very well. I’m going to step back and you can get up. Be smart about how you do that.” I kept the gun on him, and the major sat up, wincing and hissing with pain. He clamped his left hand over the ragged wounds in his right forearm. I asked him to tell me where the first aid kit was and he nodded toward a box mounted to a wall.
“Bandage your arm. Do it quickly,” I said and stepped back while he did so.
“I need to wash it,” he said and started walking toward the bathroom. That fire ax would have been an easy grab for him.
I put the barrel of the gun in his ear. “Nice try. Clean it with alcohol or wrap it dirty.”
He threw me ugly looks and aimed uglier looks at Ghost, who managed not to wilt and die under the lethal glare. The major opened the first aid kit and started angrily tearing open packaged alcohol swabs.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“No one,” I said. “I’m not even here.”
“You are not Russian,” he said, and then tried to prove it by rattling off a quick insult in that language. Something about my mother and a goat. In the same tongue I told him that his father dallied with little boys and ate pork during Ramadan. That shut him up and probably raised his blood pressure by too many points. He cut another look at the wall with the fire ax.
“Those are bad thoughts you’re having, friend,” I said.
He continued cleaning his wounds, though his eyes flicked to the wall over and over again.
My earbud buzzed and, through a burst of bad static, Khalid said he was two floors up. I touched the bud and, still in Russian, said to wait until further orders. Khalid doesn’t speak a word of Russian, but it didn’t matter. He was sharp enough not to spoil whatever play I was making. The major, however, looked somewhat mollified, if still alarmed and confused. And he kept shooting frightened looks at Ghost, who in turn occasionally licked at the blood on his muzzle. A nice effect.
When the major was done wrapping his arm, I took him into the adjoining bathroom and used his own metal handcuffs to chain him to the toilet pipes. Then I had Lydia stand guard as I dragged the other cops in and similarly secured them. It was a tight fit in the tiny bathroom cubicle. The place stank of old urine and fresh blood. The guards started coming around, but they were sick and dazed and hurt; they had no real fight left in them.
“If nothing goes boom,” I said to them, “someone will be along to let you out. Hopefully that will be today. If you start yelling or try to escape, I will come back here and kill you. Tell me you understand.”
The major answered for all of them. A s
hort guttural grunt. Good enough.
I closed and locked the door and barricaded it with a desk.
“Come on,” I said to Ghost, and went back out into the hall.
“Gaucho,” Lydia said quietly, “I’ve been trying to raise the rest of the team but all I’m hearing is my own voice.”
I tried my earbud. Nothing.
“Worry about it later,” I said. “We still have a nuke to find before it blows us all into orbit.”
She faked a coquettish grin. “Aww, you sure know how to sweet-talk a girl.”
The clock inside my head said tick-tock.
Chapter One Hundred Seven
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 5:52 a.m.
But the hall wasn’t telling us anything. It was a short run to a blank wall made from gray bricks. I pulled up the floor plans for this level and studied them. The original designs called for a corridor leading ten yards straight ahead and then a big square room forty yards per side. The plans had been to use the room for bulk storage and to build a heavy-duty elevator down from the loading bay. Technically this is where Abdul’s machine parts should have been taken to be uncrated and then switched to other elevators to bring them where the parts were needed. But the chamber had been x-ed off of the blueprints in favor of a more practical ground-level storehouse that would allow parts to be rolled in from trucks by forklift. Less expensive and cumbersome than a subterranean storeroom.
Lydia pounded a fist on the wall and shook her head. “This doesn’t make sense, Gaucho. I mean … it had to be expensive as hell—and time consuming—to cut a corridor this far into the rock just to put in a few extra storerooms and a security substation. And it would have cost even more to run plumbing, electricity, computer and phone lines, and everything else all the way the down here. Who does that without a reason?”
“No one does that,” I agreed.
And yet there was no door hidden in the wall.
“Shall we go ask the major again?” she asked.
“It’s that or go out for a beer.”