“Something’s happened that made me realize that I’ve been screwing with the wrong guy here.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s LaRoque … he knows.”

“Knows what?”

“Everything. He knows about the bombs. He knows that the Upierczi are about to rise up. He knows everything.”

“Impossible!”

“No it’s not impossible. He’s kept you in chains for eight hundred years—do you think he hasn’t had you monitored? Especially since the rebirth? You’re more of a threat to him than ever, and he knows it. Just as he knows that the Order isn’t as strong as it used to be. The Agreement’s in pieces, and you know as well as I do that Rasouli is never going to restart the Shadow War. That fucker wants a true jihad. Guess who will be caught in the middle? Guess who LaRoque will use as cannon fodder to force a new Shadow War? Do you honestly think LaRoque or Nicodemus cares a wet fart about you?”

“So what?” sneered Grigor. “Let them come for us. Let them hunt us in the tunnels.”

“Jesus, man, do you ever listen to yourself? Stop auditioning for the remake of Dracula and pay attention. LaRoque isn’t going to come after you himself. He’s too afraid of you. No, he’s leaked information to the authorities. To the DMS, to that agent Ledger, the one who killed your son at the hotel. LaRoque will go into hiding while Special Forces teams come after you, and believe me they will hunt you through the tunnels, and there are a lot more of them than there are of you.”

Grigor was silent, and Vox smiled to himself. Nice. Now it was time to play his final card. The one real kicker. The one that would take all the chips on the table.

“Grigor … there’s one more thing.”

“What?” demanded the King of Thorns.

“The American Spec Ops teams have allies in this. Allies who can help them find you and hunt you.”

“Who? Those Sabbatarian fools? We laugh as we kill them—”

Vox said, “Arklight.”

The sound Grigor made was somewhere between a snarl of animal hatred and a hunting scream. Vox leaned away from the phone, wincing. He thought he heard the name Lilith in there somewhere. Vox was sure he had never heard so much hatred directed at a single person before.

It made his groin throb.

“Give me that password,” seethed Grigor. “I will show them a war like nothing they have ever seen. I will drown them in lakes of blood…”

Vox stopped listening to the tirade. He tapped in the password that would activate the code scrambler he had given Grigor. The scrambler, with its powerful satellite uplink that could send detonation codes to those lovely nuclear devices.