by Ryk E. Spoor
"Verne, you talked about how certain forces might have returned, right? Isn't it possible that what's happening to you is an attack? Maybe even carried by Kafan, not consciously, but nonetheless part of him?"
The silence on the other end was very long. Then:
"Not merely possible . . ." Verne said slowly, "but even probable. Nothing like this has ever happened to me, in all these thousands of years. Can it be coincidence that it happens now, of all times? Most unlikely. My brain must be affected as well, if I did not think of this myself."
"Is there a way to find out?"
"Most likely," Verne said. "With Sylvie's help, Morgan and I should be able to determine if any mystical forces other than my own are operant here."
"What about biological? You did say that living things could affect you."
Verne hesitated a moment, considering. His voice, given hope, was stronger now. "I do not believe any disease, howsoever virulent, could affect me without some small mystical component. This was one of the Lady's blessings, and it is not within the power of ordinary science to gainsay that, even in this era. My metabolism differs so greatly from that of anything else on this world that I doubt it would even be recognized as living by most tests. No, if this is an attack, it must be a magical one. Thank you, Jason."
"No problem. Will you need me for anything?"
"No, my friend. You have given all that was necessary. We will endeavor to make this as short as possible, that your lady be not unduly inconvenienced."
"Is it that obvious to everyone?"
Verne's laugh was the first genuinely cheerful thing I had heard from him in a week. "Jason, such things are always obvious. And welcome, I assure you. You have finally accepted that which was always in your heart."
"Don't you start. I may have been slow and dumb, but I don't have to be reminded every day."
He chuckled. "Good night, Jason."
39
I stared down at the disk in my hand. The fact that it contained possibly treasonous information made it seem as heavy as lead. But it wasn't the worst of the things I had to deal with. My date with Sylvie last night, our third "real" date, had been bittersweet at best. We were happy to be together finally, but another fact overshadowed our enjoyment: despite three days of careful work, Syl, Verne, Morgan, and their few other trusted contacts had turned up precisely nothing. My "brilliant idea" was a washout, and Verne was worse than ever. Once in a while he seemed to improve slightly for a few hours, but it always came back. No mystical influences alien to the house. No mental controls on Kafan that they could find. Nothing.
I sighed. Syl wasn't coming over today—the Silver Stake had three shipments that needed to be classified, and she didn't want to be faced with Verne right now anyway.
Putting the CD into a protective case, I put the case into my backpack. Time to send it off on a delivery.
As I opened the front door, I saw a package lying on the doorstep. I picked it up, noting that it had no mailing stamps, no return address, nothing.
Belatedly it occurred to me that being in this business I might expect to start getting mail bombs soon. Well, if it was a bomb, it certainly wasn't movement activated. I hefted it a couple of times; light, not much more than paper in here, if anything. There could still be enough plastique in it to do serious damage, though; it didn't take much high explosive to do a number on you.
I shrugged. Not likely to be a bomb; what the hell. I ripped it open.
No explosions. Looking inside, I saw another envelope and a sheet of paper. It was a note:
Jason, you have the god-damned devil's luck. Here are the IDs. Destroy the disk. Since I know you're too damn curious for your own good, I'll tell you that somehow whatever you're up to got the attention of one of my bosses and they caught me. Instead of shutting us down, he told me to make the IDs. Must be personal—he told me not to even mention this to the other members of our, um, group. So this one's free. But I'd worry, if I were you. If even HE thinks you're involved in something important enough to let you off a felony charge without so much as a warning, you're playing with nukes, not fire.
Jammer
I stared at the package, then opened the envelope. Birth certificate . . . passport . . . driver's license . . . Jesus, even documents showing he was proficient in woodworking and construction (about the only salable skills I could find) and a Black Belt certification from Budoukai Tai Kwan Do in California. I looked closer. That was a genuine passport, seal and all.
Who were these people? And what the hell had I gotten myself into now?
40
"Senator MacLain?"
The voice on the other end was as distinctive over the phone as it was in public address or on television: precise, educated, a pleasant yet cool voice that carried both authority and intelligence—it reminded me somehow of Katharine Hepburn. "This is Paula MacLain. Mr. Jason Wood?"
"Yes, ma'am. I don't know if you know who I am—"
"Young man, if I didn't, I wouldn't be speaking to you." There was a tinge of humor that took any sting out of the words. "In any case, a senator for New York who wasn't aware of everything having to do with Morgantown, in these days, would be a sad example of a legislator, don't you agree?"
"I certainly do, Senator. And I certainly didn't mean to imply—"
"Don't concern yourself with my feelings, Mr. Wood. I know when offense is meant and when it isn't. Now that you and I have finally managed to connect, let's waste no more time. What can I do for you? You were intriguingly uninformative to my staff."
I took a deep breath. I'd decided to go for the most honest route I could, while trying to tapdance around the more dangerous areas. "Senator, a few weeks ago, a man walked into my office, asking me for help in locating his family. To make a long story short, he originally comes from Vietnam. And the descriptions of his two children, and pictures made from those descriptions, match those of your adopted children in every particular."
There was a long silence on the other end; I'd expected as much, given her history. Finally, "That . . . is quite remarkable, Mr. Wood. Am I to presume that you would like to find a way to confirm that they are, or are not, your client's children? And that he would subsequently want to obtain custody of them, if they are indeed his children?" Her voice was carefully controlled, but not perfectly so; she wasn't taking this as calmly as she'd like me to think.
"Basically correct, Senator. But we also don't wish to distress the children overly much, either by giving them false hopes or by forcing them to leave a stable home. What I was hoping was that we could permit someone you trusted to take a sample for genetic comparison and do a paternity test on them."
Senator MacLain was known for her quick decisions. "That much I will certainly do. But I must warn you and your client, Mr. Wood: I will never relinquish custody of my children unless I am absolutely certain that they will be happy and well cared for, regardless of who is the blood parent. I love them both very much."
I nodded, though she couldn't see it. "Senator . . . Ms. MacLain . . . we expected no less, and to be honest if you felt any differently you wouldn't be a fit mother for them. It's not going to be easy either way, but I assure you, I feel the same way. I'll make that clear to my client."
"I appreciate that, Mr. Wood. And I appreciate, now, the trouble you went to to keep this all confidential. Let me see . . ." I heard the sounds of tapping on a computer keyboard, "Ah. If you would be so kind as to have the sample sent to Dr. Julian Gray, 101 Main, Carmel, New York, he will see to the comparisons. I have no trouble with your obtaining the samples for him; falsifying genetic evidence would seem a bit beyond anyone's capacities at the present time."
"Indeed. Thank you very much for your time, Senator. Good-bye."
Maybe not beyond anyone's capacities, I thought as I hung up the phone, but certainly beyond mine.
The invoice for the State Police job finished printing, and I tore it off and stuffed it into the package along with all the originals and enhan
ced versions. Sealing it up, I affixed the prewritten label and dumped it into my outbox.
So much for the simple part of my current life.
It had taken a couple of days to install my newest machine, a Lumiere Industries' TERA-5. Without Verne's money, I'd still be looking at the catalog entries and drooling and thinking "maybe next decade." Now that it was up and running, I'd given it the biggest assignment I had: sorting through all the recent satellite data that I'd been able to find, beg, borrow, or . . . acquire, and look for various indications of hidden installations. So far it had given me at least twenty positives, none of which turned out to look at all promising. I was starting to wonder if there was a bug in some section of the program; some of the positives it was giving me were pretty far outside of the parameters of the installation as described by Kafan. There was one that might be a hidden POW camp—I'd forwarded that to one of the MIA-POW groups I knew about. Never thought those things really existed any more, but maybe there was more than hearsay behind all the rumors.
The TERA-5 was still chugging away at the job, meter by detailed meter on the map, but this was going to take a while even for the fastest commercially available general-purpose machine ever made. A specifically designed machine for map-comparison searching would be far faster, but not only would it be lots more expensive, but it'd be next to useless for anything else; there's always a catch somewhere. I preferred to wait a little longer and have a use for the machine later on as well. My only consolation was that I could bet that only an intelligence agency had better equipment and programs for the job.
Of course, with the situation with Verne, I didn't know what good this was going to do. Without Verne, we'd be pretty much stuck even if I did know where the installation was. I looked sadly down at the thick document lying on my desk. Verne's will. Morgan as executor, Kafan and his family as major heirs, and, maybe not so surprisingly, me and Sylvie figuring prominently in it as well. This aside from numerous bequests to his efficient and often nearly invisible staff. The sight of it told me more than I needed to know. Verne knew his time was up.
My friend was dying. It hit me harder than anything all of a sudden. I collapsed into my chair, angry and sad and frustrated all at once. He'd been the gateway through which a whole world of wonder opened up for me, and he'd said I'd helped him regain his faith. It wasn't fair that it end like this, him wasting away to nothing for no reason.
And there was nothing I could do. Yesterday night he'd shown us all the secrets of his house . . . "just in case," he said . . . but we knew there was no doubt in his mind. The place he called the Heart, built out of habit and tradition, only recently having been used by him for the purposes that it had existed . . . once more to become an unused cave when he died. All his papers and books and even tablets, here and elsewhere.
He'd found his lost son, I'd found his son's children, and for what? He wouldn't live long enough to see them reunited, he'd barely lived long enough to be sure it was his son. Dammit! I slapped at the wall switch, killing the lights as I turned to leave.
Then I froze.
I remembered what I'd said to Verne months ago, when Virigar first showed: "I don't like coincidences. I don't believe in them."
What if my idea was still basically true?
There was just one possibility. I switched on the lights again, spun the chair back around and switched the terminal back on. It was a crazy idea . . . but no crazier than anything else! Just a few things to check, and I'd know.
It took several hours—the data was hard to find—but then my screen lit up with a few critical pieces of information. I grabbed my gun, spare clips, a small toolbox, and a large flashlight and sprinted out the door.
41
Morgan opened the door, startled as I pushed past him without so much as a "hello." "Master Jason . . . ?"
I looked around, shrugged, jogged into the living room and climbed up on a chair. Verne was in that room, staring at me curiously out of hollow eyes set in a leathery, lined face and framed by pure white hair. "J . . . Jason," he said slowly, as I mumbled a curse to myself and dragged the chair over a bit, "what . . . are you doing?"
"Maybe making a fool of myself."
I reached up and unscrewed one of the bulbs from the fixture and pulled the fixture itself towards me. Everything looked normal . . .
The other lights on the fixture went out. Morgan stood near the switch. "Perhaps, if you are intending on tinkering with the lighting, you may wish the electricity off, sir."
"Thanks, Morgan." I said absently. Pulling out a small screwdriver, I unfastened the interior baseplate of the fixture.
There. Underneath the base. I didn't know what it was . . . but in essence, I did. "Morgan, you said it. Kill the electricity—all the electricity in the house! Now!"
"Sir . . . ?" Morgan only hesitated for a moment, then hurried off towards the basement and the main breakers. I switched on the flashlight; a moment later the house was plunged into darkness.
"What . . . what is going on, Jason?" Verne asked.
"I was right all along, Verne," I said. Morgan entered; he had a much larger portable light. "You might even want to shut off that light, Morgan. Go with candles, unless you bought that light in the last few days." I turned back to Verne. "It wasn't magic. It was technology that was killing you. Every one of your lights, and maybe even some other devices, is fitted with a gadget that turns ordinary light into the kind of light that hurts you. In the short term, it can't damage you, but with enough exposure . . ."
" . . . yes." Verne said slowly. "It . . . it becomes like a slow cancer, eating away at me. But even in the day, when I sleep in darkness?"
"Probably a device in those rooms does the same thing. If, as I suspect, it's not just one wavelength of light but a combination of them, it probably can't do enough in darkness to continue hurting you during the day, but it could slow your recovery so that you'd always be getting damaged more than you were healing during your rest. Especially if the really critical wavelengths are combinations of ultraviolet and infrared."
"How did you know?"
"There were a lot of clues, but the biggest one—that didn't register until almost too late—was that the few times you were outside of your house you actually started to look a tiny bit better. But when you and Sylvie couldn't find anything, I was stumped . . . until I remembered that coincidence is damn unlikely."
We both thought for a moment. "I must confess, Jason, that I don't quite understand." Verne said finally. His voice was slightly steadier already, testament to the tremendous recuperative powers that were his, and I started to relax slightly. It looked like I might be right. No, I knew I was.
"Take both your stories. Let's say that they're both true. Well, to kill you, someone would have to know what you are, exactly. Maybe one of your old enemies, right? Who else would know precisely how you could be killed subtly, without alerting everyone for miles around? But this happened just as Kafan showed up, so that's not coincidence either.
"So what if the lab Raiakafan escaped from was being run by the same people who were your enemies, Verne?"
"Impossible," Verne breathed. "After all this time . . ."
"But it would explain everything. And there's evidence for it. Raiakafan himself—if your enemies didn't have a hand in this, how else? You survived all these years, they certainly could have. And another thing, one that's bothered us both for quite a while: Klein. Where the hell did he come from? Only another vampire—of the kind made by one of your enemies, note—could create him. And what did he do? He set you up, that's what—tried to get you killed off! Somebody knew where you were, and what you were! Somebody who knew that converting Klein would give them a weapon to entrap you, and they damn near succeeded. If Virigar hadn't shown up, I suspect there would have been another attack on your life." I took another breath, continued, "And look at the timing. Klein showed up sporting a new set of fangs, if my calendar's right, a few weeks after Kafan whacked the good doctor. They knew
who Kafan really was, and they knew where he was coming."
"Very good, Mr. Wood."
I knew that voice. "And Ed Sommer's business started about the same time. Funny thing, that, Ed. Digging into your background produced some fascinating blanks."
Ed was holding a large-caliber gun—.44, I guessed—pointed at us. While ordinary bullets wouldn't hurt Verne and probably not Morgan, either, none of us expected that he would be using ordinary bullets. For me, of course, the point was moot; if you fired a wad of gum at the speed of a bullet it'd still probably kill me. "I've gotta hand it to you, Jason. If we hadn't been watching the house constantly the past couple of days, you might have blown the whole thing. We wanted him," he nodded at Verne, "to go unconscious before we actually moved."
"How very convenient for you that I happened to decide on remodeling at just the right time." Verne tried to deliver the lines in his usual measured and iron-sure way, but his weakening had gone far past the point that a mere effort of will would banish it.
"Convenient, but hardly necessary. Morgan, down on the floor. Once we'd tested to make sure that our precautions rendered us invisible to your casual inspection, the installation could have been made at any time. More dangerous and risky, but no major enterprise is without risk. And after we began remodeling, the whole house was wired in more than one way." He smiled. "We learned a great deal recently. It does bother me about Kafan's new identity. Why anyone would take that much interest in this case is a matter for concern. But not for you." Ed shifted his aim directly to Morgan and, to my horror, began to squeeze the trigger.
Weakened and sick Verne might have been, but when it came to the life of his friend and oldest retainer all his supernal speed must have come back. There was movement, a blur that fogged the darkened air between Ed and Morgan for a split second; then Ed Sommer was hurled backwards into the front stairwell with an impact that shook the house. The gun vanished somewhere in the darkness.
