The Last Vampire

by Whitley Strieber

  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 embassy.

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “The French had them on video from the second they climbed down into the damn 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 Washington. 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 Sûreté could record every damn 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 Métro well, but he did know that it was the fastest way around Paris in midday traffic. He got in the train at Montparnasse. 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 embassy 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 passports were at the consulate a few blocks away. His own diplomatic passport 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 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. embassy. 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 asshole, I thought you’d be arrested on your way here.”

  “What about my people?”

  “Business class 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 damn 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 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 ambassador.”

  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 ambassador.” 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 Sûreté will see us in ten minutes.”

  This time they had an embassy Citroën 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 hell. 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 shitty 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 damn security officer and cop on the planet knew. But there would be huge problems. It’d be the most unpredictable goddamn 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 Sûreté. 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.”

  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 Sûreté 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. 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.”

  “We cleared Asia.”

  “Cleared?”

  “We killed them, all of them.”

  “Except for Mrs. Tallman.”

  “Except for her.”

  “Elle est une sauvage, aussi?”

  “You call them savages?”

  “To keep the record clean. We know what they are. But you come from Asia, where we know you have been working very hard. Why not start in America, where the lives are more important to you?”

  “Our first solid lead was in Tokyo.”

  At that moment, Charlie and Becky were brought in.

  “Ah,” Colonel Bocage said, “your colleagues. Now, please, we shall all sit together.”

  “You guys okay?”

  “Fine,” Becky said. She looked wonderful when she was angry — her eyes full of sparks, her cheeks flushed, her lips set in a line that was at once grim and somehow suggestive.

  Beside her, Charlie played with the damn cigarette machine. His style under this kind of pressure was sullen defiance.

  There was a silence. Paul was trying to remember if he had ever felt quite this embarrassed and uncomfortable before. He decided that the answer was no.

  “This matter has the very highest level of secrecy attached to it in France,” Bocage said. “Government does not care to inform the population of such matters.” He paused. “You have concluded the same.”

  “All governments that we’ve been to have concluded the same.”

  “Given that we cannot protect our people, there seems little choice but to hide this until matters are resolved.”

  Bocage rested his eyes on Becky, so frankly that she looked away. Paul was fascinated. Becky was the very essence of self-possession, and Becky did not look away.

  “You obtained what you needed, I trust,” he said to her.

  “Yes.”

  He strolled over to his desk. “We used a computer spying program to watch your keystrokes,” he said, his voice rippling with self-satisfaction. There were few things more pleasant in the life of an intelligence agent than getting the drop on a colleague from a friendly country. Paul knew, he’d done it. “If you’d like a copy of your work —” He held a file folder toward Becky and Charlie. “In the interest of friendly cooperation.”

  “It’d be friendlier,” Paul said, “if you shared something with us that we didn’t already have.”

  “With pleasure, Mr. Ward,” he said. Then his mouth snapped closed, as if he had caught himself in a moment of indiscretion.

  Paul saw that the man’s carefully relaxed appearance was concealing a state of extraordinary emotional tension. Paul’s experience as a wartime interrogator told him that this man was about to address something that he considered extremely terrible.

  “Go ahead, Colonel,” Charlie said, no doubt reading the same signs.

  “We have had one of these creatures under observation in a house in —”

  “Let us tell you that,” Becky said. “Thirteenth Arrondissement. Rue des Gobelins.”

  “Very good. Do you know which house? Or exactly what has happened there?” The colonel was sweating now.

  “Tell us,” Paul said. He decided that the colonel was a man who habitually exploded in the face of his own staff, but in this situation had to contain the energy.

  “We have had une sauvage trapped in a house in the Rue des Gobelins for over a year. It hasn’t eaten for twelve months, but it still lives.”

  “So why not go in? If you got the thing trapped, kill it.”

  “We were hoping that it would attract some response from its peers — curiosity, compassion, something that would draw them to it. But it did not, and now — well, it’s too late.”

  Something had gone terribly wrong, which explained the ominous lowering of the colonel’s voice.

  “What’s the trouble, Colonel?”

  “The house is at this moment burning to the ground. In it, there are two vampires that we know of.” He stopped again. He rubbed his cheek, as if hunting for stubble. “There are six of my own people.”

  “God save them,” Paul said. He knew, now, why the map of the Thirteenth Arrondissement was so up-to-date, and also why the sewer system had been altered. They had cut off access from the vampire’s lair. Exactly the approach Paul would have taken.

  “But I do have some good news for you. This ‘Mrs. Tallman’ of yours was in the house.”

  “That’s goddamn good news, Colonel!” Maybe she hadn’t had time to spread her warning. Maybe now she would never have time. “Do you know how long she’s been there?”

  “She appeared yesterday afternoon at about six. That we know.”

  “Yesterday afternoon?”

  He nodded. “The taxi brought her from a hotel.”

  “It’s possible that she didn’t reach any of the others.”

  “It is. But they are aware that something is wrong, the Paris vampires.”

  Paul had assumed that there would be resistance if they realized they were under attack.

  “Only very recently,” the colonel continued, “have we been able to deal with them. Only since we understood the difficulties involved in — the difficulties with the blood —”

  “How do you kill ’em?”

  “We shoot them to incapacitate them with a gun that has been especially designed for the purpose, then we burn them to ash.”

  “That’ll work.”

  He bared his teeth, sucked in air with a hiss. Paul thought, This is one tough bastard. I like this guy. Bocage stuck out his jaw. “We made many kills over the years. But the numbers, they still went up. Slowly, but always up! My God!”

  “It’s been hard for us, too.”

  “We would shoot them in the chest, then bury them. They would come out, but carefully, so we would not notice the disturbance to the grave. We thought we were eradicating them, but we were accomplishing nothing. Eventually, even we could see that the pattern of killing went on. But we could not track it because they come up out of mines under the city. All sorts of places. No pattern, you see.”

  “What about the Ninth and the Thirteenth,” Becky asked.

  “We eventually tracked one of the creatures back to the Thirteenth. To Nineteen Rue des Gobelins, to be precise. The only one in Paris living above-ground. The rest of them — dear God, those mines are a horrible place.” He fell silent for a moment.“We have a seventy percent casualty rate down there.”

  Paul said nothing. Of the seven people who had started with him, he’d lost four. He and Justin had thought over fifty percent was monstrous.

  The telephone rang. Colonel Bocage went around his desk and answered it. He spoke in French at some length, then put it down abruptly. He stood, silent. Paul knew what had happened without even asking.

  “Another casualty report. The whole team that entered Nineteen Rue Gobelins was lost. Six men.”

  “Shit!” Charlie said.

  In the distanc
e, a church bell sounded.

  “There is good news. Of one sauvage, bones were found. They are being taken out to be burned.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Mrs. Tallman was reduced to ash.”

  “Then we’re done,” Becky said. “Back home to find out if my fiancé remembers my name.”

  “We are going to attempt to isolate and sterilize the mines,” Bocage said with that carefully practiced mildness of his. “We’re short six essential personnel. It’ll take us months to find and train replacements.” He raised his eyebrows. “I think that our two countries have some secrets to share.”

  Langley would be as nervous about this as an old maiden aunt about a slumber party. There were protocols to create, careful integration procedures so that the secrecy laws of both countries could be followed during the operation. He ought to go back and make a full report up supervisory channels. On the other hand, he could just stuff the whole damn process straight up Langley’s ass, and do it without telling them.

  “May I take it that you’re on board,” Colonel Bocage asked.

  He didn’t even need to look at Becky and Charlie. Their answer would be the same as his. “You bet.”

  EIGHT

  Flicker of Fire

  If she did not have blood immediately — absolutely fresh blood — she would die. Where she lay, trapped, helpless, and in agony, there could be no blood. Here in this dank place, with pain radiating through her body as if an army with burning coals for heels were marching up and down her, Miriam saw that she was coming to the final edge of life.

  She had ended up here for one reason only: She had been surprised by the disaster in Chiang Mai and running like a desperate rat ever since. No planning, no forethought, simply a wild race across the world.

  The humans had blocked the escape tunnel with concrete and reinforced it with bars of iron. She’d taken to the stairs, running up to the top of the house, to the ancient rooms where Lamia had lived. The old brocades still hung on the walls, rotting and falling though they were. And there was the bed she had used, where Miriam had cuddled with her, and where they had so happily shared kills. But the flames had come, marching like soldiers, and Miriam had been forced to the roof. She’d looked from the edges of the house; the streets had been filled with dozens of police and firemen. She could not climb down the wall into that, not in broad daylight. She could not jump to another building, not quite. She’d found a way, though. She always found a way. She had climbed down inside the chimney, down into the hearths in the basement, below the level of the fire. As she crawled out, covered with ash, the floor above had begun to cave in. Fire had swept over her, fire and the agony of fire.