The woman produced a small black automatic from under her robes and pointed it at my face.

Chapter Fifty-four

Chapter Fifty-Four

CIA Safe House #11

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 12:35 p.m.

“Inside or I’ll kill you where you stand,” she snapped, and she said it in English. Not good English, but good enough.

Ghost was trembling, caught between the impulses of his instincts and his training. I was pack leader and I hadn’t given the command to hit.

“January,” I said. It was today’s clarification code word. If this was all a big mistake then the code word would dial everything back to normal.

She said, “Shut up.”

Not the code reply I was hoping for.

I heard a floorboard creak behind me, and Ghost growled in time to warn me … but not in time to protect himself. As I whirled two men rushed at me through the doorway to the living room. They were not Red Knights, but that was the only consolation. The first threw a handful of powder in my face, blinding and gagging me; the other hurled a weighted metal-mesh net over Ghost. On another day, Ghost would have dodged the net and torn the man’s throat out, but the Taser had blunted all of his edge. Ghost cringed, caught in fear and indecision, and the net slapped down around him. He howled in anger, thrashing and twisting to get away from it, but his struggles only wrapped the thing around him. He tripped over it and crashed to the floor.

I saw this through a haze of powder.

I tried to paw the stuff out of my eyes. It was cloying and thick, but it didn’t seem like poison and it didn’t actually hurt. Then the guy who threw it stepped in and planted a mother of a punch into my solar plexus. The sucker punch slammed all of the air out of my lungs and dropped me to my knees. I honked and wheezed and gasped like a salmon on a river bank. The pain was enormous but the lack of air was ten times worse. I could not breathe.

“Shoot him!” barked one of the men, and I felt the cold barrel of the gun jab me in the back of the neck.

“Say the word, Victor…” growled the woman. She had a low, nasty voice. She wanted to pull that trigger.

“No!” cried the other man—who I assumed was Victor—and there was the sharp sound of flesh on flesh as he slapped the woman’s hand away. “We have to be sure.”

They weren’t speaking Persian. They spoke broken English and it sounded like each of them had a different native accent, but I was in no condition to analyze it.