The pale man's voice was strange, heavily accented, and controlled, which made it a challenge for Vox to read inflection and subtext. Even so, he could detect an edge of contempt in Grigor's phrasing in that last sentence. Certainly disapproval, and maybe more than that.

"So, what, he phoned in about me? Just up and broke his word to me? He told you the secret he swore on his life that he wouldn't share with anyone?"

The pale man smiled and made a small dismissive gesture with one hand.

"No, uh-uh," persisted Vox, "we don't just drop that. How do you know about me?"

"It is the business of the Red Knights to know everything-"

"Yeah, cut the sales pitch. I'm not a rube and you're not at one with the universe. This is supposed to be a very hush-hush meeting and you are not supposed to know who I am. That information was mine to share or not. The fact that you do know makes me pretty goddamn twitchy about the whole deal. My business associates-"

"Your associates are terrorists, corrupt officials, and mass murderers, Mr. Vox. Let's not pretend they are anything else."

"And you're what? Kermit and the Muppet Babies? You really want to measure dicks to see who gets the bigger boner from screwing the public?"

Grigor looked amused. "What the Red Knights have done, and what we continue to do, has the blessing of the church."

"Bullshit. It has the blessing of one twisted fuck of a priest who is even scarier than you and me put together, and I know for a fact that the Vatican has no clue what he's giving his personal blessing to. If they did, they'd go Old Testament all over the Red Order, the Red Knights, and Father-frigging-Nicodemus, and you can put that in the bank."

Grigor said nothing. He steepled his long fingers and simply stared at Vox. Around them the shadows echoed with the scuttle of rat feet and the distant weeping of women.

"Fuck it," said Vox and stood up.

"The priest."

Vox stared at him. "What?"

"The Scriptor did not betray your trust. It was Father Nicodemus who told me your name. It was he who told me about the Seven Kings and what you and your mother are planning. Weaponized versions of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Father Nicodemus thinks that it is a beautiful plan."

Vox narrowed his eyes. "How does he know about that?"

"He did not say."

"No," muttered Vox. "He wouldn't. Spooky bastard."

Vox remained standing for a moment. He looked around and saw milk-white faces watching him from the tunnel mouths. The watchers seemed to be cast in black and white except for their eyes. Like the man on the dais, everyone down in the shadow kingdom had dark red eyes. Vox was only half sure that it was stage dressing designed to create exactly the reaction he was having. Naked fear.

To the pale man, Vox said, "Which means that LaRoque-excuse me, the Scriptor-probably knows, too."

"The Scriptor and the priest do not have secrets from one another. That is one of the pillars on which the Ordo Ruber was built."

The Red Order. Vox did not speak the translation aloud, but he knew what it was. LaRoque's grandfather had told him the whole story decades ago. That sharing had been a betrayal of the strict rules of the Red Order, and knowledge of it was supposed to be a death sentence for anyone not initiated into their ancient brotherhood.

"Okay," he said, "then let's both lay cards on the table. You know who and what I am? Fine. Turns out, I know who, and much more importantly, what you are."

The pale man looked skeptical. "Then who and what am I?"

Vox smiled thinly as he spoke a single word. "Upier."

He heard gasps and angry mutters from the surrounding shadows. Grigor's eyes widened briefly and then narrowed to dangerous slits.

Vox held up a hand. "If you're planning on giving me one of those 'men have died for less' speeches, save it for the tourists. We got off on a bad foot here. I'm appropriately skeeved out by you and your troops down here, so you can put that in your win category. Still-to make this completely fair, I think you should be a little more afraid of me."

Grigor smiled at that. "The Scriptor said that you were brash, but he neglected to tell me that you were a fool."

"The Scriptor is a paranoid schizophrenic and a fucking moron who couldn't find his own dick with both hands and a set of printed instructions," said Vox. "And just so you don't think I'm blowing smoke up your ass, take a look at what I brought."

He nodded to the briefcase. Grigor stared down at it with sudden suspicion, his pale lips parting slightly, but he made no move toward the case. Vox nodded approvingly.

"We both know what's supposed to be in the case," said Vox. "Contact info for every arms dealer on three continents, and some of my untraceable cell phones. But, since I'm not hideously stupid, the contact information is on a password-protected laptop and the cell phones can't be activated without a special access code."

Grigor's eyes narrowed to lethal slits. "You did not bring them?"

"No," said Vox, "I did not bring them down here to your deep, dark ultrascary secret lair. Like I said, I'm not stupid. What I brought instead, is a bomb."

He removed his right hand from his pocket and raised it to show the small black plastic device he held.

"Yup. Detonator. The case also has two pounds of C-4 in it. Probably won't kill everyone down here, but it'll turn both of us into clouds of pink mist and bring down a hundred tons of rubble on the rest.

Grigor's pale face went whiter still and he took an involuntary step backward, forking the sign of the Evil Eye at Vox and barking out a few sharp words in a language Vox could not recognize.

"Okay," said Vox in a hushed tone that did not carry beyond the small circle of lamplight in which they stood. "Now we know whose dick is bigger. Let's cut right to the chase. You think I came down here as a gofer for the Scriptor. Pretty apparent now that it isn't the case. Though the Scriptor thinks it is. He thinks I'm kindly old friend of the family. I can't begin to tell you how fucked up LaRoque is. He has no insight into people at all. He's known me his whole life, knows about the Seven Kings, and still thinks I'm just some guy he can send on errands."

He took a step forward. Grigor tensed, clearly debating whether to attack or run, but Vox showed him the trigger. A red light glowed beneath the arm of the detonator. "Dead man's switch. I die, you die. Stop thinking bad thoughts and let's see if we can talk serious business."

To his credit, and to Vox's appreciation, Grigor's body gradually relaxed and he held his ground. Still on the dais, a king of death looming above the king of fear.

"Why have you come here, then?" asked Grigor. "What do you want?"

"I'm here because you need me."

Grigor smiled, revealing his unnatural teeth. "What I need from you I could take."

Vox shivered despite himself. "Christ, don't do that, you big freak. I'm trying to talk business here."

The candlelight glimmered on the wicked points of Grigor's fangs. Vox licked his lips. It felt like the cavern floor was tilting under him. The moment was as terrifying as it was surreal, but he stood his ground even as sweat poured down his face and stung his eyes.

Finally, Grigor allowed his smile to fade and the fangs slowly vanished. He sat back in his chair. "Then talk business."

Vox let out a tremendous sigh. "Jesus H. Christ," he growled. "You really groove on your own mystique, don't you? Shit." He used his free hand to mop his forehead with a handkerchief, and despite the fact that every nerve he possessed screamed at him to run, he took a step closer to the foot of the dais. Grigor arched an eyebrow in surprise, or perhaps in appreciation for the nerve that such an action displayed. Vox said, "Since you know about the Kings, then it's only fair that I tell you that I know everything about the Red Order, and I do mean everything."

He watched Grigor's eyes, saw them jump in surprise, and saw how Grigor looked quickly away to hide his reaction.

"That is between you and the Scriptor," said the pale man.

"No it isn't," replied Vox, and Grigor's eyes settled once more on him. "When I say that I know everything about the Order, that means everything. That means I know about the Upierczi."

Grigor leaned forward. "And what is it that you think you know?"

"I know why you really want the names of all the arms dealers ... and it's not to buy guns, no matter what LaRoque says."

"No."

"What's a gun to someone like you? Maybe twenty years ago, maybe before you guys got your 'upgrade.' Yeah, don't look so surprised, Grigor. I told you I know all about you. I know how strong you've become. I don't think Charles LaRoque has a fucking clue."

Grigor did not correct him this time.

Vox took another step. "I know that despite being called a 'knight,' the Red Order thinks of you as a slave. They treat you like slaves. You are slaves."

In a pale and dangerous whisper Grigor said, "What else do you know?"

"I know that your slavery is about to come to an end. You want to break the chains. You want to stage a slave revolt that will make Spartacus and the gladiator rebellion look like a frat party." Vox smiled. "Don't you?"

Grigor's eyes burned with red flame. "Yes."

"And," said Hugo Vox, "I want to make sure that happens. That ... and so much more."

Chapter Eighteen.

Tactical Operations Center (TOC) The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn June 15, 12:49 a.m. EST Jerome Williams-"Bug" to everyone-sat amid a web of computer terminals, screens, coaxial cables, encoding buffers, and other equipment, and all of it inside a big glass box. Two inches of reinforced glass and a sophisticated multiform entry scanner separated him from the fifty other people in the sprawling Tactical Operations Center. The TOC was a monument to computer-driven sophistication, and rising like an obelisk was the primary processing tower of MindReader. That, too, was safe behind the bulletproof glass and guarded by two unsmiling soldiers with M4s.

Bug glanced up from his keyboard at the flow of people in the TOC. Some were hunched over workstations connected through monitored sockets to MindReader's servers; others spoke on phones or milled like frenzied insects, going about the thousand crucial tasks related to the current crisis.

Despite the constant flow of cool air into his fishbowl, Bug was sweating heavily. Six rogue nukes. Just the thought of those weapons hidden out there terrified him. Violence was such an alien concept to him, despite where and for whom he worked. Most of the time it was an abstraction, a crazy concept no more real than the aliens, monsters, orcs, and zombies he battled in video games. He knew that the problems the DMS faced were real, but they weren't real to him. He had never heard a shot fired in anger, never saw the enemy anywhere but on a computer screen. It was easy to stay detached if you lived like that.

Bug was a small man. Thin, spare, slightly hunched from a life spent at the keyboard. His work for the DMS was usually pure support. Crack a code, break through an anti-intrusion firewall, steal some guarded information. Fun stuff. Even when providing real-time intel for the field teams there wasn't much actual pressure on him. After all, MindReader was the fastest computer on the planet. The basement of the hangar had a cold room lined wall to wall with a supercomputer cluster. The primary computer block was made up of three thousand premarket upgrades of the Tianhe-1A system which flew at a speed of 2.507 petaflops. That was more than thirty percent faster than the Cray XT5 Jaguar. Sometimes Bug would sit with his palms flat on the MindReader obelisk and feel the power surging through him. That was real to him.

But today ... the real world seemed to have found a way past all of his personal anti-intrusion systems. Fear was like an unbearably shrill sound in his ears.

"Find those other devices." That's what Mr. Church had said to him before the Big Man went in for his conference with the president. Not "try" to find them. Find them.

It was on him.

Him.

He closed his eyes and breathed in long and deep through his nose. The air in the fishbowl was ripe with the hot-wire smell of ozone. A beautiful smell.

"Come on, baby," he said aloud as his fingers hovered above the keyboard. "Come on, my baby. Don't make me do this alone. Talk to me..."

Almost as if in answer to his plea, a bell softly pinged.

Chapter Nineteen.

Park Avenue and McMechen Street Bolton Hill Baltimore, Maryland June 15, 12:53 a.m. EST The bedside phone began ringing at precisely the wrong moment. Circe O'Tree was naked, covered in sweat, painted by candlelight, and on the verge of screaming as she moved in a frenzied pace up and down. Her black curls danced above her bouncing breasts as the rhythm drove her up and up and up toward the crest of climax. Beneath her, drenched and straining and grimacing with the beginnings of his own orgasm, Rudy Sanchez growled out her name over and over again.

The phone kept ringing.

They ignored it. They were only aware of it on some distant level, their immediate need transforming the intrusive sound into a mere component in the symphony of sounds and sensations. The music from the speakers, the sounds from the street outside of Circe's window, the creak of the bedsprings, the urgent slap of flesh against flesh, and their marathon panting breathing were all parts of something much greater.

"Oh, God!" cried Circe as the orgasm reared above her like a dark wave of velvet beauty, and she screamed incoherently as he came too. Together they spun to the edge of the precipice and plunged over, crying out each other's names, saying meaningless words, making sounds provoked by sensations that were beyond even the most precise articulation.

The phone rang through to voice mail.

Circe collapsed onto Rudy, showering his face with many small, quick kisses as beads of crystalline sweat dripped from every point of her onto his skin. He gathered her in his arms and kissed the hot hollow of her throat and her cheeks and her eyes and finally her lips.

The phone began ringing again.

They ignored it.

It rang five times and stopped.

Circe could feel Rudy's heart beating as insistently as hers. She clung to him, her body wrapped around his.

"I love you," she whispered.

"Te quiero," he murmured.

Then his cell phone began ringing.

They both glanced at it.

"Let it go," she said.

"Yes," he agreed. They did not move as it rang through to voice mail.

There was silence. Circle let herself fall off of him in delicious slow motion, his arms around her to catch her fall and keep her close. Rudy looked at her. Lean and yet ripe, tanned skin a shade lighter than olive, and eyes that held more mysteries than he could count. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever touched; the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Movie-star beauty coupled with a fierce intellect and a personality as complexly faceted as a diamond. He took a strand of her hair and held it to his nose. It smelled of incense and wood smoke and sex. He wanted to tell her all of this, but in more poetic terms, and he fished for words that would convey what he felt without sounding like lines cribbed from old movies.

"I-" Rudy began, and then her house phone started ringing.

And her cell.

And his cell.

All at the same time.

"Damn," Circe said.