Chapter Twenty-Nine — Climax · Adam's Robe Book 1

Alborz Range, Iran — Present Day

Rostami had spent eighteen months learning to recognize the specific shape of his own certainty, and so he knew, watching Colonel Nassiri come through the chapel door with eleven armed men behind him and a fury in his face that had nothing left in it of the careful arithmetic Rostami had come to respect, that the next thirty seconds were going to require something considerably more costly than certainty.

"Stand down," Nassiri said, to a room that did not contain anyone under his command. His weapon was already up, already leveled — not at Rostami, but at the woman standing beside the old Israeli, the one whose face had gone very still in the particular way of someone who has already done the arithmetic on her own odds and arrived somewhere she isn't willing to say out loud. "Whatever this is, whoever sent you, you are inside a secured military facility eleven hours before the single most important event this war has produced, and I will not—"

"Farhad." Rostami said his given name for the first time in three weeks of shared travel, quietly, and it stopped him more completely than the weapon in Katz's hand had. "Look at what you're about to do. Not what you're stopping. What you're about to do."

Nassiri's men had fanned into the small room the way trained men fan into any room too small for the numbers sent to clear it, weapons finding targets, and Rostami understood, with the flat, complete clarity that had governed every decision he'd made since a hunting-ground bomb fired half a second early, that somebody in this room was going to be dead within the next ten seconds unless he did the one thing he had spent eighteen months telling himself he would never do outside the ceremony this object was built for.

He stood, and the garment came up off his forearms and settled across his own shoulders the way a man puts on a coat he has never once, in his life, imagined actually wearing — an ordinary motion, unremarkable to look at, and he felt, in the half-second it took to settle, something considerably larger than fabric arrive with it, a weight that had nothing to do with the cloth's actual negligible mass.

"Lower your weapons," he said, not loudly, to eleven men who had never taken an order from a cleric in their lives.

They lowered them.

Not slowly, not reluctantly, not the way disciplined soldiers lower weapons on a superior's command they privately disagree with — their hands simply stopped obeying whatever instruction their training and their fear and Nassiri's own furious voice were still, audibly, still trying to give them. Rostami watched eleven trained fighters discover, in real time, that the muscles required to keep a rifle trained on another human being had quietly, completely, stopped answering to anyone but him, and watched the specific horror of that discovery arrive on each of their faces in turn, a half-second behind their own bodies.

Nassiri's weapon came down last, and slowest, and Rostami watched the operator's face do something he had never once seen it do in eighteen months — not fear exactly, not yet, but the first unmistakable crack in a certainty about the world that Nassiri had built his entire adult life on top of.

"That is not persuasion," Nassiri said, very quietly, to no one in particular.

"No," Rostami agreed. "It has never once been persuasion. I don't know why I let myself believe, for as long as I did, that it might only be that."

He felt it a moment later, the way one feels a room's temperature change before consciously registering why — a coolness settling into the fabric across his shoulders that had nothing to do with the chapel's own chill, a faint dryness under his fingers where he'd been holding the edge of it, and when he turned his wrist toward the nearest lamp, angling the cloth into the light the way he had angled ten thousand manuscripts across a scholarly lifetime, he saw it: a fine, unmistakable patterning in the weave, scaled and close and utterly wrong for anything a loom had ever produced, visible now in a way it had not been visible one minute earlier, before he had used it exactly the way every account he had ever read insisted it should never be used.

He had commanded. He had not asked, not invited, not modeled the surrender the tradition actually called for — he had reached for the fastest tool available to save two lives he had no real claim on saving, and the object had answered him exactly the way it had answered Nimrod, exactly the way four thousand years of the same warning, told in a dozen languages across a dozen centuries, had promised it would.

"It's telling you the truth about what you just did," Leah said, very quietly, watching his face rather than the frozen soldiers. "That's what your own compendium calls it, isn't it. Not corruption. Just — an honest accounting."

"Yes." Rostami's voice, when it came, sounded considerably less certain than it had at any point in the last eighteen months, and he found, to his own quiet astonishment, that he was grateful for that uncertainty rather than frightened by it, the way a man might be grateful to finally set down something he had been carrying for so long he'd forgotten it had weight. "I have spent a year and a half telling myself I understood what I was asking four hundred men to receive tomorrow. I understood it in theory. I have just understood it, for the first time, in my own hands."

Katz moved first, while the soldiers stood frozen and Nassiri stood shaking and nobody else in the room seemed able to. He crossed to the low stone basin, drew the knife he'd carried across a border two nights ago, and drew its edge, hard and fast, across the hem of the garment where it hung loose from Rostami's shoulder.

The blade turned. Not caught, not blunted — turned, the way a hand turns away from something it has decided, independent of the mind attached to it, not to touch, and Katz stood holding a knife that had failed to mark cloth thinner than a bedsheet with an expression Rostami recognized, because he had worn it himself less than a minute earlier.

"It doesn't cut," Katz said, to Cho, to Leah, to the room in general. "It doesn't burn, I'd guess, if we tried that next. Whatever this is, we are not walking out of here having destroyed it. That was never actually one of our options, and I suspect some part of all of us already knew that before we walked through that door."

"Then we take it," Cho said, already moving toward Rostami, already reaching, and stopped, hand still short of the fabric, because some part of her — Rostami watched it happen, watched the same hesitation cross her face that had crossed his own eighteen months ago in a warehouse he no longer let himself think about — some part of her had just watched exactly what this object did to the last three people who had reached for it with intention behind the reaching, and could not, in the moment that actually mattered, make her hand finish the motion.

"Take it where," Rostami said, and found, asking it, that the question was not a challenge but the truest thing he had asked anyone in a year and a half. "To a vault, the way it sat for fourteen centuries, waiting for the next person patient enough to go looking? Into your own custody, where I promise you, Dr. Sarkisian, the temptation to use it — quietly, for necessity, the way I told myself I was using it thirty seconds ago — will not announce itself as temptation any more clearly for you than it did for me?" He looked at Nassiri, still frozen, still shaking, still — Rostami understood, watching him — genuinely undone for the first time since a strike that should have killed him left him standing in a burning street eleven months ago. "There is a third option neither of you has said out loud yet, and I think you already know what it is, because I watched both your faces arrive at it roughly the same moment mine did."

Somewhere beyond the chapel's single door, the klaxon had not stopped, and beyond it, further out, Rostami could hear the specific low roar of several hundred men beginning to assemble for a ceremony that every person still capable of moving in this room now understood, with total and permanent clarity, could not be allowed to happen the way it had been planned — and equally could not, any of them, say with any honesty at all, be trusted to end the right way either.