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

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.”