For a time, Wilkerson went off the rails. His detectives lost Vivi at the Rome airport. Her passport had cleared Customs, and then she’d vanished. His men turned Italy inside out, but they hadn’t found her.
It took him years to track down Vivienne. By then, he’d put vampires on the payroll, and they’d tracked Vivi and her Frenchman to a remote hilltop in eastern Tennessee, where they were raising a small girl.
Wilkerson sent six of his toughest Bulgarians to murder the Frenchman; the men were supposed to retrieve Vivi, the child, and the stolen artifacts. But the vampires had gone into a frenzy when the lovers had fought back. The house went up in flames. Everything had burned. Vivi, the child, the icon, and all ten pages of Historia Immortalis.
Now, years later, Vivi’s doppelgänger had gotten her picture in the newspaper for being a little fool. Again, Wilkerson had investigated, on the off chance that she had made it out of the burning house with the artifacts. His in-house detectives had quickly learned the girl’s name: Caroline Clifford.
Wilkerson’s men had pressured the tour agency for more information. Not only did the director hold a low opinion of Miss Clifford, he swore he didn’t have a London address on file, only an emergency contact at Norham Gardens in Oxford. A rather posh address for a silly guide. Until recently, she’d lived with an archaeologist—supposedly her uncle—but no one knew where she’d gone.
Vivienne had never mentioned relatives, except for some giddy cousins in Wiltshire. Wilkerson put his head detective on the case. Mr. Underwood learned that Sir Nigel Clifford was Vivienne’s second cousin. But the cousin was excavating in southern Bulgaria.
Wilkerson had dispatched operatives to Kardzhali with instructions to kidnap the archaeologist and shake him down for information. But they’d shaken too hard.
Mr. Underwood shuffled into the office, carrying a stack of papers. He was a dainty-boned man who wore off-the-rack suits from Marks & Spencer. Before joining Wilkerson Pharmaceuticals, he’d worked at Interpol, where his talents had been underappreciated.
He gaped up at Wilkerson and took a step backward. He breathed so hard, the lenses in his thick glasses fogged.
“I thought you were at lunch, sir,” Underwood said in a high-pitched voice. His eyes were completely obscured by the mist.
“What do you need, Mr. Underwood?”
“We should have Miss Clifford soon.” Underwood set the papers on Wilkerson’s desk, then pulled off his glasses. “I traced her mobile phone number to a Covent Garden flat.”
“Brilliant,” Wilkerson said. “Get someone on it.”
“I already have, sir.”
“Who’d you send?”
Underwood polished his glasses with his tie, as if afraid to meet Wilkerson’s gaze. “Moose Tipper,” he said.
“Not him!” Wilkerson slammed his fist against his desk.
“He was the only available operative, sir.”
“And do you know why, Mr. Underwood? Because he’s a buffoon.” Wilkerson waved an imperious hand. “Ring him this instant. Tell him to back off.”
“I believe it’s too late, sir.”
Wilkerson’s jaw tightened. “Find him.”
Underwood’s hands shook as he pulled out his mobile and punched in numbers. The call went straight to voice mail. Wilkerson sneered when Moose’s nasal, Cockney voice boomed from the phone: “Sorry, mate, I can’t take your bloody stupid call. Leave a message if you dare, but I won’t ring you back.”
“Mr. Underwood, I want Moose off this case. Send your men to Covent Garden this instant.”
“But that’s just it, sir.” Underwood’s Adam’s apple clicked. “There’s no one to send. They’re at the Hammersmith facility, getting transfusions. And that’s where Moose will bring the girl.”
“You’d better hope he does,” Wilkerson said. “Or you’ll end up as a guinea pig in my lab.”
CHAPTER 5
SOFIA, BULGARIA
Caro stepped into the arrival hall at Sofia International Airport and walked past a throng of taxi drivers. A short, stubby man began to follow her, and she flashed a stern glance over her shoulder to discourage him. A tall man loomed in the background. Both of them were wrapped head-to-toe in reflective capes, the type worn to deflect light in the desert. They wore wraparound sunglasses, too.
Their odd attire drew stares from the people around them. A woman in a red puffer jacket crossed herself. Two punks with blue hair called out something in a Slavic language—Croatian, maybe? Caro wasn’t sure. She’d almost made it to the Hertz counter when the squatty man hollered, “English girl! Stop!”
She had the impression he was speaking to her. But how did he know she was a Briton? Surely the embassy hadn’t sent him. If they had, forget it. She wasn’t letting this freak drive her to the train station. She’d take her chances with a taxi. Then cold air whooshed over her, and suddenly the man was in front of her. He snatched her duffel bag and bolted.
Dammit. Son of a bitch. Caro choked down a scream. Rule one for a tour guide: Don’t panic. But her icon was inside that bag. As she vaulted down the corridor, her hat flew off, and her hair burst out in every direction. All around her, the airport traffic seemed to blur. She heard shouting and a screech. In a flash, she was behind the man. She grabbed his ears and twisted, hard. He tripped over a suitcase and fell against the tile floor.
“Let go, you bloody lout!” Caro grabbed one end of the bag and yanked hard. The man rolled over and tugged in the opposite direction. He jerked the bag out of her grasp and started to rise. An officer blew a whistle and ran toward the commotion.
“He snatched my bag,” Caro explained.
The policeman seized the thief’s arm. Caro found her hat and slipped it over her head, tucking the militant curls inside. With as much dignity as she could muster, she unzipped her fanny pack and showed the policeman her passport.
He shoved the thief down the aisle. Caro looked for the man who’d yelled and the tall man who’d also been following her, but they’d vanished. She lifted a shaky hand and wiped her eyes, then she started down the crowded hall. Uncle Nigel had always made traveling seem easy. Negotiating with taxi drivers had been a snap because he’d spoken all of the Romance languages, including some Romanian. As soon as Caro had come to live with him, he’d placed one hand on her elbow and steered her through the world.
Over by the Supertrans window, she saw a man in a brown Harris Tweed jacket with a sign that read Clifford. She took a breath, walked over to him, and introduced herself.
“Lovely to meet you,” he said in a loud, nasal voice. “I’m Thurston Hughes, from the embassy.”
She smiled, then pulled off her gloves. They were black angora, patterned with sequined cats; Uncle Nigel had given them to her last year as a gag gift—Happy Christmas, Love, Dinah, he’d written. He’d always given presents from their felines.
“So sorry about your uncle.” Mr. Hughes paused. “Was he your only relative?”
“Yes.” Her hands shook as she tucked the gloves into her pocket. Be strong, she told herself. Uncle Nigel had always said that tears were for the living. The dead needed an Irish wake with lots of whiskey and laughter. God, she’d miss him.
“You won’t be taking the train, after all,” Mr. Hughes said. “We weren’t sure if you knew the Cyrillic alphabet. It’s frightfully easy to mix up the platforms. So I’m driving you to Kardzhali.”
Caro followed him through the glass doors, onto the sidewalk. Taxis and vans were lined up along the curb. Mr. Hughes stopped in front of a black Mercedes with a British Embassy seal on the doors. He helped her into the passenger seat, then scuttled around to the other side of the car. He eased into the leather seat, advising her to buckle her seat belt, and without further ado, started the engine.
“The ambassador was outraged about your uncle’s death,” he said. “He’s pressuring the Interior Ministry.” Mr. Hughes pursed his lips as he drove down a narrow concrete incline, steering past a row of taxis into the spitting sn
ow. “I’ve arranged for you to meet one of their officials, Ilya Velikov. Quite bureaucratic but incorruptible. You’re to meet him at your hotel this evening. Around seven-ish. I believe he said the mezzanine bar.”
“That will be helpful, thanks.”
“Not at all,” he said. “You look a bit peaky. There’s bottled water in the backseat. And a pillow if you wish to nap. It’s two hundred forty kilometers to Kardzhali.”
She looked out the window. A girl with blue-tipped hair and a nose ring jogged down the sidewalk. When Caro was her age, in a punk phase and longing to get a butterfly tattoo, Uncle Nigel had taken her on a dig near St. Petersburg. He’d bloodied the nose of a KGB agent who’d sold artifacts to black marketers. Uncle Nigel had been arrested, and the British embassy had made a diplomatic protest. The incident had made her uncle an archaeological rock star. She’d been left alone at the Dostoevsky Hotel for two days. Without adult supervision, Caro had entertained herself by hoarding room service rolls and throwing them off the balcony at BBC reporters.
“I don’t want to alarm you,” Mr. Hughes said, “but do be careful while you’re in Bulgaria. It’s not a hotbed of crime, but it’s not exactly bucolic, either.”
“You aren’t kidding. A man in the airport tried to steal my bag. He was rather peculiar—all covered in a foil poncho.”
“I saw him—he was with another chap, wasn’t he? They were wearing sunglasses. Probably to hide their pupils. I’m sure they were drug addicts.”
“I chased him. And I got my bag.”
“You were brave.” Mr. Hughes chuckled, and then his lips drew into a frown. “But next time, you might not be so lucky. Not all of the dangers are human. Not too long ago, wild dogs killed a British tourist.”
Caro thought of her dream and hugged herself.
“Not to scare you,” Mr. Hughes said, looking rather alarmed himself. “But it was frightfully grisly. Of course, we have the mundane, mafia-style killings. The European Union is pressuring Prime Minister Stanishev to deal with organized crime. But the country is steeped in it. People have gone missing, too. Of course, vanishings have always occurred in this part of the world.”
“But that was when Bulgaria was part of the Eastern Bloc,” she said. “People were defecting like mad, weren’t they?”
“That accounted for some disappearances. Now, of course, there’s no reason for defection. Last month, a town near the Greek border reported dozens of missing people.”
“What happened?”
“To the people? No one knows. The Interior Ministry looked into it. Apparently it’s not a communicable disease, and it’s not the Mafia.” He cast a sidelong glance. “But never mind that. Have you been to Sofia before?”
“Ten years ago.” She frowned. All this talk of missing people was making her jumpy.
“Bulgaria has joined the European Union since you were here,” Mr. Hughes said. “But the roads haven’t changed.
They’re paved but pocky. And the Bulgarians don’t believe in marking the lanes. Sometimes it’s slow going. The ruddy drivers don’t signal or observe the speed limit. One could reach Kardzhali sooner on a bicycle, I daresay.”
She smiled into her hand. Uncle Nigel had disliked the sluggish, rural traffic even more than he hated warp speed on the Autobahn. The summer they’d driven from Sofia to Polovitz, they’d kept stopping for goats and horse-drawn carts.
Caro leaned closer to the window. The capital was just as she remembered, tidy and modern for an eight-thousand-year-old city, with Byzantine architecture juxtaposed against gray, Stalinist-era buildings. But the traffic! Just then, a green car cut across two lanes and plowed into the side of a lorry.
“Welcome to Bulgaria,” Mr. Hughes said.
CHAPTER 6
WILKERSON PHARMACEUTICALS
EAST LONDON, ENGLAND
Harry Wilkerson sat on the edge of his desk and watched the flat-screen television on the far wall. A BBC reporter stood in front of a Covent Garden flat, the site of an early-morning murder. The victim was described as a twenty-five-year-old woman. Her name was being withheld pending notification of relatives.
Wilkerson looked away from the television and put one hand over his eyes. He had no doubt who the victim was or who had committed the crime. Moose. That pervert had killed the Clifford girl, and now the police had her body. Wilkerson would never know if she’d been his daughter. He’d never find his icon or those ten priceless pages of Historia Immortalis.
This was Underwood’s fault. He shouldn’t have sent that obsessive-compulsive oaf to Covent Garden. Years ago, when Moose had worked at the Hammersmith laboratory, he’d been banned from participating in bone marrow aspirations or biopsies on patients because he couldn’t control his feeding frenzies. What had Underwood been thinking? He should have sent a human technician.
Wilkerson lowered his hand, then traced his finger along the blue veins that forked below his knuckles. Having vampires on the payroll carried risks, so he’d found a way to deal with their hunger and manage them. He’d implemented a company policy requiring all vamps to receive daily transfusions at the Hammersmith facility. This allowed his researchers to perform covert studies, mainly clinical drug trials. It was a risky project, because if the vamps knew the truth, they’d revolt. In minutes they could overpower the scientists and guards.
That was why Wilkerson had ordered SSRIs to be added to the transfusions. It was best to keep the immortals cheerful, but they were discouraged from setting foot in Wilkerson Pharmaceutical’s headquarters on Waterloo Road. Some of the bolder ones paid no attention to rules. As a precautionary measure, Wilkerson hired a bodyguard, a Cambodian named Yok-Seng, who could put his foot through a man’s chest. No immortals, not even the Zuba brothers, messed with Yok-Seng.
Wilkerson glanced back at the telly. The BBC reporter was still talking about the murder. Wilkerson poured scotch into a crystal glass. If he could live for centuries—never aging, never succumbing to disease—he would accumulate a staggering fortune. He wouldn’t let anyone, or anything, threaten his dynasty, and that included loose ends.
The dead girl on Bow Street was more than a loose end. She’d been Wilkerson’s last chance to find Historia Immortalis. The book was much more than the history of vampirism: It held secrets to longevity and, interestingly enough, methods of destroying the immortals. If the tome fell into the wrong hands, it would pit science against religion. Men would lash out against vampires, depriving them of rights, but the battle would inevitably disintegrate into a predictable man-against-man conflict. Some humans would oppose the immortals, and some would offer support—or even breed with them.
Initially, the outing of vampirism would cause a social upheaval. The affluent, centuries-old clans would be ostracized. After all, the royals were a bit finicky about bloodlines. However, that would be the least of the vampires’ problems. The wealthy and common alike would go into hiding. While they reorganized, they’d be sought by fringe groups and bounty hunters. Enthusiasts might hunt them for sport.
Wilkerson took a sip of scotch, grimacing as the liquid burned his throat. It would be gratifying to watch the predators become prey, but the carnage would be short-lived. Humans were no match for the vampires’ longevity and superior physical abilities, not to mention their otherworldly skills such as telepathy and telekinesis. The lot were canny survivalists. For thousands of years, they’d endured in a symbiotic relationship with humankind. They’d restrained themselves. If they got the upper hand, humans would be openly slaughtered, and as the earth was depopulated, widespread panic would erupt. A polarized society is a weak society. Civilization would disintegrate. The immortals would roost in Buckingham Palace, feeding on animal blood, and humans would go the way of the Neanderthal.
But this won’t happen, Wilkerson thought. He was developing a biochemical means that would give humans like himself an edge. He took another sip of scotch and walked to the framed black-and-white photographs that lined the far wall. Each picture featured a
n herb or plant associated with longevity: water droplets sliding down an ephedra leaf, snow on mayapple blossoms, a spiderweb laced over ginkgo biloba. Higher plants were the foundation of many pharmaceuticals, and “green,” natural drugs were fashionable. As always, Wilkerson Pharmaceuticals would be on the cutting edge, creating products for aging baby boomers.
He patted his thickening midriff and frowned. He was getting older, and bursitis was settling into his joints. His Romanian biochemists were working on a promising drug. They called it “a facelift in a pill.” No surgery, no needles, no allergy testing. The effects were temporary, of course, but once the medication was perfected, women would line up at clinics, demanding prescriptions. Wilkerson would rise to the top of the Fortune 500 list. Time would name him “Man of the Year.”
The Romanian facility was also toying with stem cells, searching for biochemical ways to control aging—something far more permanent than an antiwrinkle pill. He’d recruited promising researchers from around the globe, and they were near a breakthrough in genome therapy. When that happened, Wilkerson would spend eternity without plucking gray hairs or enduring Botox and collagen injections. Laugh lines, his girlfriend called them. She should know, she had a few. Wilkerson didn’t. His face was a tight, unlined mask. He never laughed. Laughter was for bloody fools with nothing better to do.
Wilkerson walked back to his desk and glanced at the television. Perhaps Yok-Seng could handle Moose. If not, Wilkerson would have to bring in the Zuba brothers. God, he hated to do that. The Zubas were two Russian vampires with impulse control issues. When vampirism collided with any type of neurosis, the results were unpredictable. Savage, you might say.
From the desk, the intercom phone clicked, and his secretary’s tinny voice rose up. “Mr. Wilkerson? I have Mr. Underwood on line two.”
Wilkerson tossed down the scotch and picked up the receiver. “Yes?”
Acquainted With the Night (9781101546000) Page 4
