Death Becomes Her (The Kurtherian Gambit Book 1)

by Michael Anderle

  Carl figured it had to do with his almost complete lack of aging.

  In his fifteen years with the group, he started in his late teens, Bill had looked in his mid-thirties. He died looking the same age.

  Carl had talked with Michael about what he saw on the videos. Michael had explained that Bill should have remembered the stories about how the three agents had died in Japan so many years ago.

  Although Bill wasn’t one of Michael’s immediate sons, he was a first generation grandchild. He was still incredibly powerful. He lasted a long time during the transformation as Carl understood it, and somehow persevering during the transformation affected their strength.

  Bill was a bit of a ball-buster, but he had been fun at times, too.

  Carl wasn’t a complete nerd. He enjoyed watching most sports and an occasional MMA fight. He loved Indian food and the spices would drive Bill’s hypersensitive nose up the wall.

  He wouldn’t do it too often, just enough to ‘poke the lion’ and make life interesting around Bill.

  He made sure never to call him Billy Bob or anything like that except while on a mission when he couldn’t immediately retaliate. Bill had been an easy going vampire, all things considered, and if Carl didn’t piss him off, he would just let it go later.

  Carl was going to miss him.

  He was getting to the bottom of his drink.

  He wasn’t sure when Michael would get back, or if we would come on board. Carl had figured out early on that sunlight hadn’t affected Michael like it did Bill. That alone allowed Carl to realize just how they were different.

  There were a couple of times that Carl was allowed to watch them spar in the basement.

  If he could have seen the fight, he was sure it would have been spectacular. However, he just heard and felt it more than having seen much. Michael would come down dressed in his black ghi, and Bill in his yellow ghi. After some discussions, Michael would show Bill how to attack or block a move, and then let Bill throw Michael for practice. All of this was at a natural human pace. Then they would get serious.

  It just looked like a bunch of fast movements until you would hear a huge slam as Bill’s body would hit the mats. Michael would explain what he had just done to Bill and let Bill try it at human speed. Then they would fight until Bill was on his back again.

  Carl figured that Bill fighting Michael was about on par with the couple of times that Carl tried to take on Bill. Which was to say, impossible.

  For a human who wasn’t special ops, Carl was very good at fighting and with weapons. Well, he was good with guns. He totally sucked at most martial weapons. While he understood and was able to handle hand-to-hand combat for the most part, he just didn’t like edged weapons.

  He studied them, often as the eyes-and-ears, he had to be able to describe and name all sorts of weapons whether they shot projectiles or had been crafted hundreds of years ago. His sensors in place on any op would sniff the air to get any chemicals and possible bombs or poisons that might have been released. It hurt to realize that his sensors had failed so tragically.

  Considering some of the jobs they had worked on, Carl was happy to be safely out of the danger zone.

  As his mind mellowed and relaxed, it had been a very tense few days since Bill had died and Michael had been awakened. This was the first time he wasn’t focused on getting through the interview without scores of people dying and a price on his own head.

  He didn’t figure that the military would only blame Michael for everyone’s death. Somehow Carl thought ‘aiding and abetting’ would be attached to his name and he would go down as well.

  Ride the tiger and sometimes it will turn and bite you.

  They handled some incredibly important ops not just for the nation, but occasionally the world and it was as black as you could get. There wasn’t any proof anywhere that any of it happened. If there was, he wasn’t doing his job very well.

  Carl snorted, well that was something. If he did his job perfectly, there would never be any proof that he did his job at all.

  He wasn’t the best hacker in the world, but with the equipment and contacts the family had, he was certainly in the top one hundred. Probably top twenty. Half of those others in the top twenty belonged to major countries either in their spy or military services and six worked for companies and one worked for the American Council of Weres. Out of the other three there were two who were in the black market and one who was in Michael’s family, just over in Asia somewhere.

  So, how did someone know where Bill and I were going to hit, anyway? Carl put down the glass, now empty, and pulled out his laptop and propped up the laptop tray. This aircraft had its own connection to the Internet which randomly made requests to Netflix and had a couple of background applications running fake research requests. Underneath all of this traffic were the real requests. Carl became busy tracking down information on their enemy.

  All of this was being done inside the video communication in the network traffic. Carl didn’t believe for a second that the military wouldn’t intercept and try to sniff any and all packets to see what was going on with their communications. They were sitting on a government base. If Carl was the other guy, he sure as hell would be stealing all the info he possibly could.

  You know one of the best ways to annoy those who try to decrypt your data? Provide a data line with high-level encryption which you want to be decrypted after a significant effort and then have the data inside that data stream be complete gibberish. The inside data stream will look like another encrypted communication. The opposing team will focus on the obvious stream and if your video packets look and work well, they won’t continue to make the effort to see if you are sneaking anything else in.

  All this protection support for $9.99 a month, thank you Netflix.

  That attitude is what got Bill’s attention fifteen years ago and it was a good attitude to have today.

  Carl couldn’t bring Bill back, and he most likely couldn’t hurt whoever took him down.

  But if he could find them, he figured Michael would like a word with them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Military Base, Colorado Mountains

  Frank worked in the basement deep under an older building in Washington, D.C. He was near a couple of underground pathways which was pretty useful when he needed to meet with vampires who couldn’t see the sun.

  His arthritis would act up during the winter; it got pretty cold down here.

  He was too damn old for this and he knew it. It was time to bring in someone else to take control.

  He could and did tell himself that he stayed out of patriotism, but he really couldn’t pass the lie to himself. He enjoyed the game too much.

  When he was tapped to take over from his predecessor, Frank knew a few people in and around the city. He had been on the staff as naval liaison from the war.

  Young, but not dumb and with his family connections, he was well known enough in the right circles.

  He was approached during the middle of the war and recruited into this section. Having explained that what they did was Top Secret, Frank couldn’t wait to get into the action.

  He often wondered if he would have been more hesitant if the war wasn’t going on at the time.

  He wanted to be in the action and didn’t understand how helping his Navy boss at the time was helping take care of the Nazis.

  By the time he understood he wouldn’t be ‘on the front line’, he was too deep to back out without needing part of his brain yanked out of his head.

  There were secrets that the military and government kept from their people for good reason. It allowed them to sleep at night.

  It was the responsibility of the few who knew the nightmares to shoulder the burden for the rest of the nation.

  Many felt that the President had it the worst of all. A few who knew of secret responsibilities occasionally would argue amongst themselves over a brandy and cigar when they were alone together.

  We have all witnessed h
ow those who took the Presidency could go into the job looking young, only to have aged way beyond their years by the time they stepped down.

  It aged a person, the weight and shouldering of responsibility usually did.

  Frank would normally have left his position a couple of decades back had Michael not given him a small rejuvenation. He never figured out how it happened, exactly. It was back in the 1990s and they had a pretty nasty underground war going on in South America that was backed by one of the forsaken families. Michael had come to visit with him one night when he was working late, trying to pull information from the government’s assets down in Brazil.

  They had a good talk about what he wanted to do, and what kind of person he believed he needed in order to pass the baton.

  He remembered admitting that he wasn’t happy having to give up his post. He liked doing what he was doing. He might not have ever been on the front line, but like Carl, he understood that he wasn’t the right person for the front-line. For one thing, he wasn’t dead yet.

  Not that the vampires were really dead, they were humans who had been transformed into something... else.

  When he had just started with the group, he hadn’t listened to his mentor and had tried to find out more about the families. Fortunately, his mentor was watching for him to do this and stopped it before any of the requests had started to filter out through the security net.

  He had come in one morning, only to see that his mentor was waiting for him, with a handful of innocuous looking questions that Frank had so carefully worded to not raise any suspicions. His stomach dropped out of his body when he realized the notes were his.

  He had passed a test, somehow with those questions. He had been hired to take over the role, and he had to be smart. His office only had one Top Secret level dispatch line. He hadn’t known at the time that it only went straight to his boss who would then either approve its release, or hold it.

  He had held on to all of Frank’s requests for information for the last week to gather all of them. When Frank hadn’t requested any more info for two days, he came into the office and had the ‘talk’ with him.

  It seems that his boss had done something similar, and his boss’ mentor had been prepared like Frank’s boss had been prepared for Frank to do the same thing. When the time was right, he would do the same for his protégé. If his protégé didn’t even try this, they weren’t the right person for the job. They would wake up in a hospital and have a mild form of amnesia. They would probably only forget the last two or three months.

  His boss/mentor shared some of what he knew, after he was able to convince Frank that to have released the cables could have potentially dire consequences not only for himself, but the agency, the military and would have given the enemy a huge boost.

  Should enough people find out what was going on, then certainly Michael’s family would eventually all be found and killed. With their ethics, they would not be able to grow their family faster than they could be found and killed, for sure. The enemy did not subscribe to the same ethics as Michael did. They would be hurt, certainly. However, they didn’t care if a person wanted to become a vampire. Their family could grow so much faster, when in need, without the worry over moral issues.

  For the enemy, growth was always a balance between a need for new members and the potential that a new member would eventually challenge them for supremacy. In their families, it was always survival of the fittest and one way to stay that way would be to limit how many potential challengers there could ever be.

  If they didn’t have children, those children wouldn’t commit patricide.

  His mind was always agile, even now he didn’t feel like he had lost any of his keen intellect.

  Unlike others, Frank knew that keeping physically active each week helped the mind to stay sharp so much more than those silly games on everyone’s smartphones and online. He should know, he had access to the latest research whether it was published or not.

  When he had spoken to Michael two decades before, he never remembered finishing the conversation. He had woken up on the couch that doubled as a small bed when he needed one. He received the shock of his life when he looked in the mirror in the office suite’s bathroom that morning to shave.

  He looked twenty-five years younger. Instead of being in his mid-sixties, he looked like he had just turned forty.

  He knew Michael had done something to him, but didn’t know how it worked. For whatever reason, Michael had seen fit to extend his usefulness.

  He still felt and was fitter than he should be in his late nineties, but he knew that there wouldn’t be an extension this time. He had not lost any of his desire to keep in the action, but it was getting to be another generation’s game. With changes in the world came new attitudes and Frank’s attitudes, he noticed, weren’t that adjustable and easy going anymore. He needed to be able to work with those he contacted and to accomplish that required empathy and Frank realized his empathetic feelings had grown less and less over the years. Too many times, he wanted to just use a two-ton hammer to get through the bureaucracy he found himself having to deal with as the military and local first responders would keep asking questions. In his generation, if someone obviously way above you spoke, you listened and did.

  Now, he had to deal with people trying to figure out what was going on too many times. The Internet was both a great help and a huge problem for his group. They were able to find out about new outbreaks and problems quickly, and there were those who would get together in chat rooms and create wiki sites helping bring their own research together to find out what was going on.

  Most times, it wasn’t anything too big to worry about. Other times he would see if those who were doing the work had anything in their backgrounds to warrant a mention to the local police or tax office that might get them reasons to focus on other things in their life.

  One time he found one particular trouble maker was a bit of a Casanova and had three girlfriends who knew nothing about each other. Frank was kind enough to send two of them a request to meet at the romantic restaurant where the guy was on a date with the third girl. Frank hadn’t realized exactly how nasty it might become, and the lady who was at the table took her dinner knife to the guy.

  For those who Frank found to just be curious people and no real way for Frank to deal with, he would pass the information on to the liaison and within a few weeks that person would find something else fascinated them and they would drop off the supernatural interests group.

  He had been quietly researching for the past two years to narrow down his list of potential recruits and had a handful he considered approaching. Bethany Anne Reynolds had been his top choice until he had learned two months before that she was going to pass away.

  He had researched her exhaustively for his position for over a year. There had never been a female in his role, and he wanted to make sure the first one to work with the group made the right impression with Michael. He hadn’t expected Bethany to be end up on the short list to be transformed.

  Over the months of researching and watching her, he had grown to like this determined young woman. He had already mentally had her as his replacement before it was time for him to step down and felt a responsibility as if she was his star-pick to become the next quarterback for the football team.

  She needed good backup. Carl was becoming a good liaison for Michael’s team, but with Michael awake, and probably not going to sleep soon, she was going to be learning from the patriarch himself.

  Everyone was going to need to step up their game, and Frank was worried he had little game available to offer.

  He had four possibilities from his previous research. He needed an update on their activities, and to find out if any new agents might be available.

  Military Base, Colorado Mountains

  Bethany Anne watched her father’s face go through different emotions as she waited for the orders to be explained to her. She wasn’t sure if he would try to order her to seek more t
reatment, but if he did she would have to regretfully push back on that request.

  She felt pretty confident that her assignment didn’t have anything to do with her trying to get healed, so she could strike that down. However, in some form or fashion her orders gave him insight into her condition which he didn’t have before she walked in. So, he must have been expecting someone to show up suffering from a fatal disease.

  The clues she noticed since arriving suggested something was happening which wasn’t a straight up military project. She considered that a working hypothesis.

  So, what special request could someone have which would require someone of her talents and skills and particular morbidity?

  She pondered this while her father was concentrating. As Martin had expressed to her before she left, “That is the question.”