Chapter Twenty-Eight · Adam's Robe Book 1

Alborz Range, Iran — Present Day

They moved on the chapel wing at three in the morning, the specific dead hour Katz had spent four decades teaching Leah to trust more than any other, when even disciplined men had been standing watch long enough that vigilance had started, without any of them quite noticing it happen, to cost more than it used to.

Cho triggered the diversion from a maintenance panel behind the generator shed — a deliberate, isolated fault in the central hall's backup power routing, nothing that would read as sabotage to anyone not already looking for it, only as the specific kind of ordinary mechanical failure a compound this hastily hardened was always going to produce eventually. It pulled four of the six rifles off the chapel door within ninety seconds, men jogging toward the generator noise with the particular unhurried alarm of soldiers responding to an inconvenience rather than a threat, and left two.

Katz took them both without a shot fired, close and fast and entirely silent, in the specific economical violence Leah had watched him apply exactly once before, in a wadi that had cost them Doron, and she understood, watching him now, exactly how much restraint it had taken him not to use it that night as well.

The door was unlocked. Nobody had thought to lock a door six rifles were standing in front of.

The chapel's interior held the particular hush of a room built for a purpose considerably older than the compound around it — bare walls, a low ceiling, three oil lamps burning instead of the electric light that ran everywhere else in Yekta, and Rostami kneeling at the room's center beside a low stone basin, the garment laid across his forearms, unwrapped now, fully visible for the first time to eyes that had spent six weeks chasing nothing but rumors of its shape.

Leah had expected, walking in, to feel something enormous. What she felt instead, in the first several seconds, was almost disappointingly small — plain, undyed cloth, unremarkable in cut, the kind of thing a museum would file under provincial and move past quickly. And then she registered, the way her eye had learned to register manuscript forgeries across nine years of dissertation work, the specific wrongness sitting underneath the ordinary shape of it: the three lamp flames in the room, none of them near enough to explain it by any draft she could account for, all three leaning, faintly but unmistakably, the same three degrees toward the fabric across Rostami's arms, as though the room itself had a single, quiet preference about where the light in it belonged.

She was still deciding whether she'd actually seen that, or simply wanted to have, when Rostami spoke without turning around.

"I wondered how long it would take you." His voice was unhurried, entirely without alarm, the same flat, terrible calm Leah had heard described secondhand from the wadi and was now, for the first time, hearing directly. "Colonel Nassiri believes his security failed tonight. I don't believe that's quite the correct way to describe what happened. I believe you were always going to reach this room eventually, Dr. Sarkisian, the same way I have come to believe a great many things lately that I would have called superstition eighteen months ago."

Katz had a weapon raised, low and steady, angled at the two remaining clerics rather than at Rostami himself. "Nobody in this room needs to be hurt tonight."

"I agree completely." Rostami still had not turned, still knelt with the garment held across his forearms with a stillness that read, to Leah's eye, considerably less like fear than like a man holding something he had already decided he would not be putting down on anyone else's schedule but his own. "I would like to finish what I'm doing. You are, of course, welcome to stop me by force, and I want to be honest with you about what I believe that would accomplish, because I don't think either of us benefits from you discovering it the hard way. This object does not require my cooperation to do what it does tomorrow. It requires a wearer, a witness, and an intention behind the giving of it. You can remove me from this room in the next thirty seconds. You cannot remove fourteen centuries of exactly what this ritual is for, and I suspect, watching your face right now, Dr. Sarkisian, that some part of you already understands that considerably better than the rest of you wants to."

"You don't actually believe that," Leah said, and heard, saying it, how much less certain the sentence sounded out loud than it had in her own head a moment ago.

"I believed considerably less of it eighteen months ago than I do tonight." Rostami finally turned, and the eyes that met hers held nothing of the fanaticism she'd braced herself, walking in, to find there — only a terrible, settled clarity, the specific expression of a man who had run out of room to doubt himself and had stopped finding that frightening somewhere around a hunting-ground bomb that fired half a second early. "I lost my son in February to a strike that never should have found him. I have spent every day since asking whether the god I have served my whole life abandoned this country, or whether he simply withdrew the ordinary kind of protection so that something considerably less ordinary could take its place instead. I do not expect you to believe what I believe, Dr. Sarkisian. I am asking you to consider, in the very little time either of us has left before that door draws attention, that you might be about to see the difference between us settled tonight whether either of us chooses it or not."

Somewhere beyond the chapel's single door, distant but unmistakable, a klaxon began to sound — the generator fault Cho had engineered, or the two guards Katz had put down, or simply the ordinary bad luck of a compound this tense discovering, eventually, that something was wrong. Cho's voice came low and urgent through Leah's earpiece, the specific flattened calm of someone doing arithmetic under pressure. We have maybe four minutes before that becomes a lot of people with rifles. Tell me what we're doing.

Leah looked at the garment across Rostami's arms, at three lamp flames still leaning the same three degrees toward it, at a cleric who had just told her, without raising his voice once, that whatever was about to happen in this room was no longer a question either of them fully controlled, and understood, with a certainty that had nothing to do with belief and everything to do with the specific cold clarity of a decision finally arriving, that there was no version of the next four minutes that let any of them simply walk away.

"We're not leaving without it," she said, and heard Katz, beside her, exhale once, the particular sound of a man who had been waiting his whole professional life to hear someone else say the reckless thing first.