The Last Vampire Part 10

SEVEN.

Deathtrap Paul called Becky's cell phone for the fifth time in an hour. Her recording came back for the fifth time in an hour. He'd already requested that Communications in Langley track both officers, but their cell phones were off or the signals were blocked, so the GPS system could not find them. Just for the h.e.l.l of it, he tried Charlie again, also. Same s.h.i.+t.

It was now ten A.M. By his estimation they were two hours overdue, maybe more. He thrust another stick of gum in his mouth and chomped on it. Thank G.o.d he hated French cigarettes.

The cell phone rang. He grabbed for it. "Ward here."

"Paul, this is Justin."

What in h.e.l.l was Justin Turk calling him for now? It was five A.M. in Virginia. "Yeah?"

"I'm getting back to you."

"Look, man, I gotta have more support personnel."

"s.h.i.+t."

"One of the d.a.m.n creatures escaped from my net. I've followed it to Paris and lost it. I need more people and more equipment real fast."

"How fast is real fast?"

"Yesterday would've been good. I need at least five more field ops."

"I can't just put people in this thing. You know the kind of problems we're having. The discussions."

"I'm losing a vampire. One that travels, travels, for Chrissakes!" for Chrissakes!"

"It takes weeks to clear people for you. A whole new background check, all kinds of s.h.i.+t. Even when I don't have the director on my a.s.s. Which I obviously do."

"At least authorize the people I've still got in Kuala to follow me."

"That's a no-go."

"Come on, man, help me, here."

"This whole operation is under study. Until I have fresh orders, you're all frozen in place."

That sure was s.h.i.+tty news. "I need those people, man. This thing is going south fast."

"I'll work on it."

"Don't sound so convincing."

The conversation ended there, with muttered good-byes. Justin was a sort of a friend. That is to say, he'd be there for Paul as long as Paul wasn't a liability.

One thing was quite clear: There would be no new people, not with international human rights questions beginning to hang over the operation.

He saw somebody getting dropped down a shaft, and that somebody was him.

He hammered Becky's number into his cell phone, then Charlie's. Same results as before. "I'm in trouble," he muttered to himself.

Still, it was possible that the kids were okay. He just wished that they'd followed procedure with this break-in. There would be a h.e.l.l of a stink if the French found out that CIA personnel had invaded the records office of their security service. He'd be recalled, of course. He'd have to explain what he was doing in France, and why he'd gotten here by commandeering an Air Force general's private jet.

He sat and stared up at the blank, sunlit wall of the office tower and listened to the water drip in the sink. He looked at his watch. "Ten-fifty," he muttered to himself. "d.a.m.n and G.o.d G.o.d d.a.m.n." d.a.m.n."

And he decided to use the time well. A situation like this could burst into flames at any second. He was as prepared as he could be for the Surete and the White House. What he needed to do was to get ready for the really hard ones - the vampires. And there was actually something he could do right now, something d.a.m.n useful.

Becky had mentioned two areas of Paris: the Ninth and Thirteenth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nts. He opened his laptop and went to the CIA's database. The site didn't offer any magical insights into the workings of the world, just some very good information and lots of detail. You could find practically anybody here, and at his level of clearance, he could input requests for Echelon searches on keywords of concern to any operation approved for the system. Echelon would then look for those keywords amid the billions of phone conversations, e-mails, radio transmissions, and faxes that it monitored.

Problem was, you had to be d.a.m.n specific to get anything useful. What words might the traveler use on the telephone - what special, unique words? He didn't know who she might call or where she might go, or even if Paris was her final destination.

The CIA database also had a wealth of maps, better ones than could be bought in any store, including maps of Paris that had been drawn by the German military during World War II. Originally intended to be used in house-to-house warfare, they included detailed floor plans and plans of the sewer system that offered information down to which tunnels and pipes were big enough to admit a man.

The Germans had done this for most of the large cities in Europe. Many of the maps were outmoded, of course, and many like Paul had knowledge that the disastrous bombing of the Chinese emba.s.sy during the Kosovo conflict in 1999 had been caused by reliance on an improperly updated Werhmacht street plan of Belgrade. Since then, all maps in the CIA database been clearly marked with the last year of update.

He saw that the Ninth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt had not been touched since 1944. The map legends and street names were still in German, which wasn't very rea.s.suring. By contrast, the Thirteenth had been revised by the French in 1998, and there were annotations that it had been updated yearly since.

He settled down to stare at the screen. He had to memorize every street, every sewer pipe, every building plan.

The vampire would know its world down to the tiniest corner. It would be able to pick every lock, use every shadow, climb all the walls and cross all the roofs. It would use the sewer system like a railroad. It would be able to navigate the ductwork, the window ledges, the eaves.

Paul hadn't believed how smart and capable the vampire was, at least not at first. He hadn't believed it when he first saw one staring back at him with dark, still eyes, looking small and helpless. There had been a slight smile on its face, a drifting little smile that communicated a sort of casual amus.e.m.e.nt. Jack Dodge said, "Hey," and stepped toward it - and a knife shot out and sliced Jack's head from his body like a blossom from a stem.

Paul could still hear the sounds: the rip of Jack's skin, the crackle of his bones, then the shuss shuss of the fountain of blood that pumped out of the stump. of the fountain of blood that pumped out of the stump.

Those sounds came to Paul in his sleep, in the whine of the jets he took through the night, in the whispering of the wind in the ancient cities where he worked.

The creatures drifted through the cracks and corners of their world, leading him on an infinitely careful chase. They played a kind of chess with him, appearing here and there, slipping away, only to reappear somewhere else.

His pursuit of them had taught him how brilliant they were. They always stayed ahead of him. His only useful weapons were surprise and technology. Brilliance and speed were their tools, but they had no technology. They had been neatly outcla.s.sed by a computer database and infrared sight.

The death of the vampire was appalling. It haunted Paul, and he knew it haunted his people. The vampire fought harder for its life than it was possible for a human being to imagine. They hid like rats, because their lives were just so d.a.m.n precious to them. When you saw their death struggles, you could almost, at moments, sympathize. The vampire died hard. "Real hard," he said aloud.

He sat staring at the map of the Thirteenth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt's sewer system. There had been structural changes made as recently as a year ago. He tracked his finger along a tunnel that had been blocked up. Probably something to do with containing old waste from the tanneries and dye factories that used to be in the area.

No doubt that was why this map was so carefully kept up. The French had a problem with contaminated water and soils in the area, and they were cleaning it up.

The hotel phone rang. He grabbed it instantly.

"Two of your people were caught in the Department of Records of the Prefecture of Police at six-thirty this morning." It was Sam Mazur at the emba.s.sy.

"Oh, Christ."

"The French had them on video from the second they climbed down into the d.a.m.n room, Paul! Come on, this is amateur night, here!"

"Are they being -"

"They're being released under diplomatic immunity. But the frogs are gonna take 'em straight to the airport and put 'em on the first plane to Was.h.i.+ngton. They're totally, completely, and thoroughly blown. I'll tell you another thing - the reason that they got to stay so long in that very secure facility was so that the Surete could record every d.a.m.n keystroke they made as they hacked their way into the database. They know how they did it, what they found - everything."

"I'm on my way."

He didn't know the Metro well, but he did know that it was the fastest way around Paris in midday traffic. He got in the train at Montparna.s.se. It moved off at what seemed to him to be a maddeningly leisurely pace. His mind clicked methodically from possibility to possibility as he tried to devise a new way of saving Becky and Charlie and his whole operation.

In less than fifteen minutes he was trotting up the steps into the Place de la Concorde.

The American emba.s.sy was beautiful and very well guarded. It was also quiet, unlike many of its counterparts around the world. The crowds of visa seekers and unhappy citizens reporting lost pa.s.sports were at the consulate a few blocks away. His own diplomatic pa.s.sport got him straight past the French guards and the marines.

He entered through a metal detector, declaring and checking the gun that his false Interpol ID allowed him to carry. Well, false false was maybe too strong a word. The Interpol papers his team used were the result of an accommodation between the CIA and the international police agency. was maybe too strong a word. The Interpol papers his team used were the result of an accommodation between the CIA and the international police agency.

Sam's office was halfway down a wide corridor that looked as if it belonged in a palace. As indeed, it did. This building had been one before it became the U.S. emba.s.sy. He went in, and the atmosphere changed at once. Here there were computer screens and filing cabinets and a dropped ceiling. The outer office blazed with fluorescent light.

"I'm Paul Ward," he said to a receptionist who, to his surprise, turned out to be French. What a local national was doing working in a clearance-required job he did not know. Times had changed.

Sam sat at a steel desk. His venetian blinds were firmly shut on what was probably a view of an air shaft. The rumble of air-conditioning equipment shook the floor, but this office, itself, was not air-conditioned. It was just near the equipment.

"Paul, you old a.s.shole, I thought you'd be arrested on your way here."

"What about my people?"

"Business cla.s.s on Air France. Not too bad."

Until they reached Langley. This was not over, no way, not for any of them. It was a major screwup, and it was going to take a lot of time to fix it. If that was even possible. The White House had started asking its d.a.m.n questions at just the wrong time.

"Are they in the air yet?"

"They're being signed out of the hoosegow as we speak. The Frenchies don't like people getting into their secure areas, especially especially not us." not us."

"Sam, you're gonna hate me for this. But you gotta find a way to keep my people in country. I need them urgently, right now."

He shook his head. "It's over. So over."

"Call in favors. Do anything."

"Nothin' I can do. They're toast."

"Then I need an immediate appointment with the amba.s.sador."

Sam blinked. "You're kidding. You'd bring the politicos in on something like this? A jerk like you couldn't possibly have a congressional sugar daddy."

Paul tried using what he hoped might be a trump card. "It's terrorism, Sam. I'm in the middle of a heavy operation that involves France only because we happened to follow an international terrorist onto French soil. If we lose this woman, innocent people are gonna die."

Sam picked up the phone. "You don't need the amba.s.sador." He spoke in rapid-fire French. Paul couldn't follow it precisely, but he could tell that he was going up the ladder to somebody very senior somewhere, and this senior individual was being asked for urgent and immediate intervention.

Sam hung up. "The chief of the Division of Internal Security of the Surete will see us in ten minutes."

This time they had an emba.s.sy Citroen with a driver, so it was a lot easier to get around. "You're out there in the middle of nowhere without any support staff, the three of you," Sam said."Bound to be a problem, an operation that's being run that far outside of guidelines, that thinly staffed."

"We're effective. That's the bottom line."

"I don't want to intrude, Paul. But I gotta tell you, you look like h.e.l.l. In fact, I'd give road kill a better rating. Whatever it is you're doing that you're so effective at, it's taking you apart."

He and Sam had learned to strangle people with piano wire and plant microphones under the skin of pet cats together. They'd been in Cambodia together, where none of their training applied and nothing they did worked. They had fought the silent war together when it really was a war.

"It's just another s.h.i.+tty op, my friend. You look great, by the by. Tennised, golfed, and swum."

"Also pokered every Tuesday night with the Brits. It's a good life here, as long as you don't get yourself in the kind of trouble your two goons are in."

If only the French customs agents hadn't made such a mess of things at de Gaulle. If only he hadn't had to screen the operation through Interpol. The way he saw it, they should have disabled the creature with a shot as soon as it reached customs, then dropped it in a vat of sulfuric acid, or cremated it. Instead, they took it to an airport brig. It escaped before they even got it in the cell. Of course it did.

"I wish I could tell you what it is I'm doing," Paul said. "It'd be a lot easier if every d.a.m.n security officer and cop on the planet knew. But there would be huge problems. It'd be the most unpredictable G.o.dd.a.m.n thing you could imagine."

"Well, that explains that. You gonna get yourself wasted, old buddy, on this thing. Your politics are all used up, way I hear it."

They pulled up in front of the long, impressively French Victorian building that housed the Surete. Paul expected a lot of bureaucracy and a long wait, but they were soon in a very quiet, very ornate office facing an extremely fastidious midget.

"I am Colonel Bocage," he said.

"Where's Henri-Georges?" Sam asked.

"You will interview with me."

Paul said in French, "J'voudrais mon peuple, monsieur. Tout de suite." "J'voudrais mon peuple, monsieur. Tout de suite."

Colonel Bocage laughed. "Mr. Mazur, this is the man in charge, that you promised us to meet?"

Sam nodded. "I made that promise to Henri-Georges Bordelon."

"And he transmitted it to me." "I need my people," Paul said. "We're saving lives." "You speak French. You should think in French. It's more civilized . . ." "I can't think in French."

" . . . because we have so many ways of expressing concepts of good and evil." He smiled again, and Paul thought he looked, for a moment, like a very hard man. "Mr. Mazur, could you step out for a moment? I am sorry."

This wasn't the usual drill when you went to beg to keep your spies in place. But Paul was in no position to ask what was going on. When Sam had left, the colonel went to his window, which looked out over a lovely park. There was a difference between being a high official in the Surete and a lowly intelligence officer like Sam.

Colonel Bocage closed a manila folder he'd been appearing to review. It was only a pose, a tension builder. Paul had done it himself a thousand times, to a thousand nervous supplicants in ten different countries. "So," the colonel said at last, "you are here investigating les sauvages les sauvages. Tell me, what do you Americans call them?"

Paul Ward had not had the sensation of his heart skipping a beat since the moment he had looked upon his father's remains. No matter how violent or how dangerous his situation, he always remained icy calm . . . until this second. His heart was skipping a whole lot of beats. He parted his lips, but nothing came out.

The colonel raised an eyebrow and with it one corner of his mouth. "I am your counterpart," he said, "your French counterpart."

Paul wiped his face clean of expression. Tell him nothing.

"You are surprised, I see," Colonel Bocage said. "Genuinely surprised. Tell me, how long have the Americans been working on this?"

Paul reminded himself never to play poker with Colonel Bocage. "A few years," he said dryly.

"My friend, we have been struggling with this problem for fifty years."