Christopher Farnsworth - Nathaniel Cade [01] Read online

  And yet, they seemed ready to tear the operative apart with their bare hands.

  “Walk away now,” the operative said. His voice was stern, like he was being firm with an unruly child.

  The Alpha snarled. “You don’t order me around,” he said. “Your teeth aren’t sharp enough.”

  “Perhaps not,” the operative admitted. Quick as a blink, he whirled and brought out a knife. It reflected silver in the moonlight. “But this is. Walk away now, and you get to live.”

  The Alpha took a step back. He seemed more frightened of the knife—a simple KA-BAR, from what Wayne could see—than of all the heavy artillery around him.

  He still shook his head. “Only one of us gets to leave here alive tonight.”

  “You’re right,” the operative said. He put the box down.

  Then they were on him.

  In spite of himself, Wayne shouted, “Jesus Christ!” and prepared to fire.

  The CO’s voice came loud and clear over the channel. “Hold your fire!” he screamed. “Do not fire! Damn it, do not fire!”

  It was insane. The Serbs were going to kill the man. They were like rabid dogs: growling, snarling, flecks of foam at their mouths.

  Then the first Serb went flying out of the mob. He landed hard on a pile of rubble, his head nearly cut off by a jagged slash at his throat. Dead.

  And then another, launched out of the pack like he had been fired from a cannon. He clutched a bloody stump where his hand used to be.

  There were several more already on the ground, like broken dolls. Wayne could see the operative now—barely. He was a blur inside the trench coats, stopping only when he sliced one of them. Then another Serb would fall over.

  Wayne noticed the Alpha Male standing back, watching. He didn’t look pleased, but made no move to help his crew.

  The operative ducked, and kicked, and a Serb howled with pain, holding his knee where the lower leg flopped uselessly, shattered. The howling stopped, the operative’s knife blurring away from the Serb’s throat, blood floating in the air in its wake.

  The Alpha Male turned, the bag of cash in his hand. He was going to leave.

  The operative saw this. But he was still dealing with the other Serbs, who didn’t know or didn’t care that their leader was about to abandon them. They threw themselves back into the scrum, even if they were missing limbs. As if they felt no pain.

  The Alpha Male began to walk. He was going to get away.

  The hell he was.

  Wayne flipped his scope to focus solely on the Alpha.

  He aimed, breathed out smoothly and pulled the trigger.

  The sound of the M24 was a polite cough.

  It was a beautiful shot. It should have split the Alpha’s head right at the temple.

  Except the Alpha Male wasn’t there anymore.

  Impossible. A hundred yards, a bullet traveling at twenty-eight hundred feet per second . . . he would have had to move before the noise of the shot could reach his ears. Faster than the speed of sound.

  Frantically, Wayne scanned the courtyard, trying to reacquire the Alpha.

  He didn’t have to look far. The Serb leader stood just a few feet away. Scowling. At Wayne.

  He looked seriously pissed.

  Before Wayne could fire another shot—before he could even think about it—the Alpha was gone again.

  Dimly, he realized his sergeant was shouting at him over his earpiece: “—You fucking idiot, Denton, move, move, get out of there—”

  He noticed the operative was dealing with the last two members of the Wolf Pack. The only survivors. But the operative spared a glance up at the window. He looked almost as pissed as the Alpha had.

  Wayne stood, began to stow his gear. His legs were like wood. His movements were clumsy and slow.

  Then he heard something in the stairwell. Something coming.

  His mind shut down. He didn’t care anymore that it was impossible. That no one could climb thirty-two flights of stairs in less than thirty seconds.

  All he knew was the Alpha Male was coming for him.

  He lurched toward the door, his legs rubbery, his rifle in one hand, the rest of his gear on the floor.

  The door shattered open before he got there, flying off its hinges.

  The Alpha Male stood in the doorway. His wild beard had grown, joining the fur at his chest, on his head. His shape was twisted under the long coat, his arms and legs longer than anything human. He opened his mouth, and that’s when Wayne realized he was looking into a snout, filled with the sharp, jagged teeth of a dog.

  No. Not a dog.

  Sometimes, during firefights in Iraq, everything would slow down. Wayne would remember things. Like how an insurgent’s headband had the same colors as a football team he used to play against in high school.

  This time, it was something more immediate. He remembered what Vukodlak meant.

  It didn’t mean “wolf pack.” It meant “werewolves.” It was the Serbian word for werewolves.

  He smelled the blood and meat on the breath of the Alpha, and realized it wasn’t just a nickname.

  He raised the rifle, and heard, rather than felt, his fingers break as the Alpha tore the gun away.

  He was on his back, throat exposed, before he even knew how he’d gotten there.

  The long teeth were above his neck, and he felt saliva dripping from the Alpha’s mouth, smelled the feral stink of its excitement.

  He was going to die.

  There was a scrabbling noise, then movement at the window. Cold air rushed past Wayne, and the weight of the monster left him.

  The Alpha was knocked across the room, slamming into the crumbling plaster wall.

  Somehow, the operative was there, between the nightmare thing and Wayne.

  He’d covered sixteen stories almost as quickly as the Alpha—only he hadn’t used the stairs.

  Struggling to find words, Wayne pointed at the gun, trying to tell the man to use it.

  The operative ignored him. The Alpha got to his feet—Wayne noticed, for the first time, they were bent at an angle, like a dog’s hind legs. He hesitated, growling, a long string of drool hanging from his muzzle.

  He spoke, his words rough and high-pitched at the same time. Exactly like a dog that’s learned to talk, Wayne thought.

  “My pack,” was all he said.

  The operative smiled. “You should have kept your boys on a leash.”

  The operative still had the knife, gleaming bright where it wasn’t covered in blood.

  The Alpha Male looked at it, a challenge in his eyes.

  The operative nodded, and flung his weapon down. The knife thudded into the floor.

  The Alpha Male released a howl that became a scream as he leaped, growling and snapping, eyes burning with rage.

  The operative didn’t move.

  For a second, all Wayne could see was the Alpha Male’s muzzle, his bright white snarl.

  But somehow, the operative caught the werewolf by the neck, in midair. He held the thing there like it was a bad puppy. The Alpha thrashed and howled.

  Then the operative reached with his other hand, grabbed the Alpha’s lower jaw, right between those snapping teeth—and tore it clean off.

  Shock and pain filled the Alpha’s eyes, and it tried to howl again. But the noise was drowned by the sudden rush of blood pouring down its throat.

  The operative stood, holding the Alpha off the ground, until there was no more movement.

  He dropped the body to the floor. Went back to his knife and pulled it from the floor, then turned and sank it into the creature’s chest.

  The doglike rear legs kicked once, and didn’t move again. Wayne stared at the operative. The black fatigues were covered with blood, and torn, but the man didn’t have a mark on him.

  He glared at Wayne. The soldier suddenly realized he was alone with something infinitely more frightening than the Serbs.

  Wayne considered leaping out the window. It had to be preferable to whatever
else was coming.

  Maybe the operative realized this, because the anger on his face faded.

  He picked up the M24, and handed it, stock-first, back to Wayne.

  Wayne took it, fumbled and nearly dropped it. That was when he remembered the fingers of his right hand were broken.

  “You were ordered not to shoot for a reason,” the operative said, his voice cold. “It just makes them angry.”

  Wayne finally found his voice. “That was—” He stopped, looked at the corpse in the room with them.

  It was a man again. Missing his lower jaw and half his face, yes, but recognizably human.

  “That’s not possible,” Wayne said. “No way that just happened. That can’t be real.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “It never happened. Because if what you saw was real, you would never go home. You understand me?”

  Wayne nodded.

  “Good,” the operative said. He turned to leave.

  Wayne knew he should have stayed quiet. But the question escaped him before he could stop it, or even think about it.

  “What are you?” he asked quietly.

  He wasn’t sure the operative heard him. But then the man stopped at the door and turned back.

  He grinned in an unfunny way. “I’m on your side,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.”

  It took the other Rangers a half-hour to pile the dead bodies in the center of the courtyard. They poured gasoline. The corpses burned faster than Wayne had ever seen before.

  The operative had the metal box under his arm while he watched. The unit medic was splinting Wayne’s fingers when the CO approached.

  The CO had his hand out for the box. “I’ll take that now,” he said, in his usual, don’t-fuck-with-me tone of voice.

  The operative made no move to let go. “No,” he said. Simply, quietly. No room for argument.

  “My orders—”

  “You shouldn’t have lost it in the first place.”

  The CO looked uncomfortable. “Look,” he said. “I don’t want to fight with you . . .”

  The operative glanced at the pile of burning bodies, then back at the CO.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You don’t.”

  The CO wasn’t used to having anyone question his orders. But he wasn’t stupid. He walked off, catching Wayne’s eye as he went. Wayne looked away quickly.

  The operative kept the box.

  Debriefing was quick, and the CO and the sergeant both made the same point as the operative: this mission never happened. None of the Rangers saw anything. Forget you were ever in Kosovo.

  They were on a plane back to Iraq before morning. The box—and the casket, Wayne noticed—went back in another plane, headed for God knows where.

  Wayne was more than happy to forget it. He would work at it every day for the rest of his life, in fact.

  But there was one thing that stuck with him, that woke him up in a cold sweat until the day he died, no matter how much he tried to push it away.

  He’d never forget what he saw when the operative grinned. Only the man—of course, he wasn’t actually a man, but it made Wayne feel better to call him that—hadn’t been grinning.

  He was showing the long, curved fangs in his mouth, right where his eyeteeth should have been.

  And he still had the jawbone in one hand.

  TWO

  Politics is a blood sport.

  —Aneurin Bevan

  TWENTY HOURS LATER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Griff looked at the kid sitting across from him in the White House limo. Fidgeting, nervous. Bopping his head to some inner tune.

  Zach Barrows. Twenty-five years old. Volunteered on the current president’s senate campaign before he could vote, rewarded with a staff job after college. Then he ran three states in the election, delivering them comfortably to his boss.

  But no military experience, no time in law enforcement. Griff doubted that Zach had ever held a gun. For him, battles were fought with words and papers and backroom deals.

  Ours is not to reason why, Griff reminded himself.

  The kid looked away from the window, where the familiar sights of Washington, D.C., were scrolling past, and smiled at Griff.

  Griff recognized the smile—a politician’s grin, with the kind of animated delight reserved only for total strangers within its radius. A smile designed to win friends and influence people, so they could be used and later discarded.

  “So,” he said. “Where we headed?”

  Griff didn’t smile back. “We’ll be there soon,” he said.

  “You can’t tell me where we’re going?” His voice was full of disbelief “Information containment,” Griff said. “We tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.”

  The kid smirked. That was actually how Griff thought of him when the president introduced them in the Oval Office: 150-odd pounds of smirk in a suit. He leaned forward. Here it comes, Griff thought.

  “Look, Agent . . . Griffin, was it?” Zach said.

  “Griff is fine.”

  A more patronizing variety of the earlier smile. “Agent Griffin. I know you were probably wearing polyester and protesting Nixon before I was born. But I was the deputy director for White House affairs, and I’m not even thirty yet. Washingtonian magazine called me the next Karl Rove.”

  Griff kept his face bland. “Impressive.”

  “Thank you. So what say you quit with the spy stuff and just tell me what I want to know. I’m not here to play games.”

  Griff considered that for a moment.

  “The way I heard it,” he said, “you’re here because the Secret Service caught you with the president’s nineteen-year-old daughter in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

  He took a second to savor the look on Zach’s face. Then added: “Doing something that was definitely not for the purpose of procreation.”

  Zach opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and looked out the window instead.

  “Don’t worry, Zach. You’ll find out what’s going on soon enough.”

  Zach didn’t respond. Just kept sulking.

  Griff took a small amount of pity on him, thinking of his own introduction to the job, almost forty years earlier.

  “And then you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  The limo stopped.

  “We’re here,” Griff said, and got out.

  ZACH LOOKED AT THE BUILDING lit up under the security lights as the limo pulled away.

  “I’ve done the tour before,” he said.

  The older man didn’t turn around, just kept walking toward the wall of the Castle, the oldest part of the Smithsonian Institution.

  “We’re not doing the regular tour,” Griff said.

  Zach was used to being the youngest guy in any room. It came with the title of boy wonder. Old guys, especially in politics, didn’t want to listen to some whippersnapper with a bunch of newfangled ideas. So he’d been forced to come up with a variety of strategies for dealing with them, from flattery to outright insult. Then, once the target was unbalanced, Zach could take charge.

  None of that worked with this guy. Zach couldn’t seem to throw “Griff” off his stride. From what he’d seen so far, Zach figured the older man had to be near retirement, probably FBI, or maybe Secret Service—he moved with an easy, physical confidence despite the spare tire on his big frame—but that was all he’d been able to glean so far. He simply couldn’t get an angle on the guy.

  It was really starting to piss him off.

  For a moment, Zach thought of the only time he was ever in trouble with the law, when a cop found him and his buddies in a stolen car. He was sixteen. Zach was a fast talker even then and spun everything he had at the cop. The cop listened to the whole story, calmly and patiently.

  Then he arrested them anyway.

  Griff reminded him a lot of that cop.

  Zach watched as Griff pressed an otherwise ordinary looking brick.

  It sank a half-inch into the wall, and an old mechan
ism, created by master stonecutters over a century before, locked into place.

  A large slab of the wall lifted and revealed a hidden staircase, worn with use. It didn’t make a sound.

  Zach didn’t even try to hold back his laughter. Griff looked back.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me. A secret entrance? Seriously?”

  Griff just pointed to the stairs. “Watch your step.”

  Zach snorted again, but entered the passage. “When do I get my decoder ring?”

  No reply.

  Thirteen steps later—Zach counted—they were inside another chamber. The lights came up automatically, once they crossed the threshold.

  The carved-stone space looked, at first glance, like the museum above. The walls were lined with rows and rows of books; old, leather-bound volumes. Tables and display cases were arranged in the wide, open space between.

  But these exhibits were definitely not for the general public.

  Wicked, piranha-like teeth grinned at Zach from a man-sized fish head floating in a large jar. An old brass plaque identified it as SKELETAL REMAINS FROM INNSMOUTH, MASS., 1936. Pieces of cast-iron armor, like a robot made from an old woodstove, were mounted under a sign reading BRAINERD’S STEAM MAN, c. 1865. A large beetle, colored bright gold. Something blood-red and slimy in a glass case, called Allghoi Khorkhoi. Under another case sat what looked like an ordinary log: WOOD FROM THE “DEVIL. TREE,” BRITISH GUIANA, 1897.

  Other things. A crystal skull. Stone tablets. Carved idols. A mummified monkey’s paw.

  Zach’s attention was drawn, finally, to the coffin at the back of the room. There was no card or plaque on that.

  Zach didn’t know how long he’d been gaping at the exhibits when he heard Griff speak up behind him.

  “Welcome to the Reliquary, Zach,” Griff said.

  Zach managed to close his mouth before he turned around, put the necessary sarcasm into his voice.

  “Nice place. All that’s missing is a giant penny.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Zach.”

  “You’re telling me all this stuff is real?”

  Griff nodded.