by William Hill
There had been no time to examine records; the intelligence that had drawn them to this exquisite estate on the edge of Budapest had needed acting on immediately, and Carpenter had gathered the first four able-bodied men he could find. He was grateful that two of them had been Frankenstein and Turner, veterans of hundreds of operations, and two of his closest friends in Blacklight. Connor and Miller would just have to do what they had been trained to; eventually, every operator was required to sink or swim.
Carpenter had been overseeing the shift change in the Ops Room when the report had come in. At first he had thought it was a practical joke. It was written by a Blacklight major called John Bryant, who was celebrating his thirtieth wedding anniversary with his wife on a cruise down the Danube. He and his wife had taken a stroll along the river banks of Budapest and had literally walked into Alexandru Rusmanov and his wife, Ilyana.
Ninety minutes later, Carpenter’s team were in the air, heading east. They were strapped onto benches inside an EC725 Cougar that had been stripped down and essentially rebuilt. The improvements that most pleased Julian Carpenter had been to the rotors and the engines, which now delivered a cruising speed of just over 300 miles per hour. This was significantly faster than the publicly acknowledged world-record speed for a helicopter, and it meant that the flight to Budapest would take little more than an hour. The Mina, the supersonic Blacklight jet that could have covered the distance to Budapest in less than twenty minutes, was in Tokyo, and he could not afford to wait for the Harker brothers to bring her home.
Julian pressed a button in the console next to his seat, and a screen folded down from the ceiling. The most recent photo of Alexandru filled the frame, and he told the four men on the benches to study it carefully.
“This is Alexandru Rusmanov,” he said, raising his voice slightly above the steady pulse of the helicopter’s engines. “Turner, Frankenstein, I know you don’t need reminding of just how dangerous this target is. So Connor, Miller, I say this for your benefit; nothing in your training has prepared you for dealing with a vampire as old and powerful as Alexandru. Nothing.” He contemplated the eager, nervous faces of the two privates.
“You’re looking at the second oldest vampire in the world. He was turned by Dracula himself, along with his brothers, Valeri and Valentin, more than four hundred years ago. He is powerful in a way that distorts the scales; he can knock down buildings, he can move faster than your eyes can follow, he can fly indefinitely. And more than that, he is clever, and he is vicious. He views humanity as nothing more than a herd of cattle from which to draw his sustenance. If he chooses to, he will kill you without a millisecond’s hesitation.”
Carpenter pressed the button again, and the image changed to a black and white photo of a stunningly beautiful woman with dark hair and sharp features. “This is Ilyana, Alexandru’s wife. She is almost as old as he is; he turned her himself, with Dracula’s permission. She has stood at his side for more than four centuries and is every bit as dangerous as her husband. In modern psychological terminology, Ilyana is a pure sociopath, without empathy for others, without feelings for anyone apart from her husband. She is unpredictable-and she is deadly.”
A final press of the button sent the screen folding back into the ceiling. Carpenter looked at his team and saw fear in the faces of Connor and Miller.
Good, he thought. They need to be scared.
“Both these individuals are high-value targets, rated A1 by every Department in the world. Our orders are to eliminate them both. If that proves impossible, if the opportunity only arrives to make one kill, then Alexandru is the priority. Understood?”
The four men on the benches shouted that they did, and Julian nodded.
I hope you do, he thought. I really hope you do.
The helicopter touched down at a Hungarian Air Force Base on the outskirts of Budapest. The aircraft’s call sign meant it did not appear on civilian radar, and only a handful of military air traffic controllers in the world would have recognized the unique combination of letters and numbers that signified a Department 19 vehicle.
Working quietly and inconspicuously through the bars and restaurants of Budapest, the team picked up Alexandru’s trail. They followed an elderly vampire to his small apartment below the castle, and he told them about a bar called the Ramparts that had been much busier than usual in recent weeks, busy with the kind of creatures the old man stiffly informed them he had no wish to socialize with. When Turner pressed him, he confessed that he felt no kinship with young vampires, found their lust for violence abhorrent and avoided them wherever possible. Carpenter thanked him, and they moved on.
From the Ramparts, they trailed a vampire bartender to a warehouse rave in Budapest’s rundown industrial district. They dragged him out to the parking lot at the rear of the building, the bartender’s eyes wide and rolling, his teeth grinding as Bliss pumped through his system, and he told them that a huge man with a child’s face had dropped a card as he left the Ramparts four nights ago. The card was for a vampire club near Matthias Church, a place the bartender had only ever heard whispered about. When he claimed not to remember the address, Turner applied a UV torch to the vampire’s hand. It burst into flame, jogging his memory.
Outside a beautiful Gothic town house on Balta Koz, the five men sat in a jet-black car, watching. Anderson, the huge child-faced vampire who served as Alexandru’s right-hand man, had entered the building two hours earlier, apparently unaware that anyone was watching. A small gold plate by the door of the town house had been engraved with the words TABULA RASA, which Carpenter thought appropriate for a club frequented by vampires.
A blank slate is exactly what it gives them, he thought. The freedom to leave behind the people they were before they were turned and start again.
“Colonel,” said Paul Turner, in a low voice. Carpenter looked round and saw Anderson emerging from the carved stone doorway. The tall, hunched vampire cast a quick look up and down the quiet street, then stepped casually into the air and disappeared.
Carpenter turned to Private Miller, who was seated in the back of the vehicle, cradling a sleek black laptop that was connected to a spy satellite in geo-synchronous orbit above them.
“Do you have the heat trail?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” responded the young operator. “He’s heading north by northwest, sir.”
Six minutes after dawn the following morning, Julian ordered their car brought to a halt in front of the Molnar estate. Two ornate metal gates stood open, the first rays of sunlight glimmering on the wrought iron. The five men had strapped and clipped their body armor into place during the drive, and there was a heavy sense of anticipation inside the vehicle. Carpenter looked at his team and decided against saying anything more to them. If they weren’t ready, then nothing he could say at this late stage would correct that. And if they were, he didn’t want to give them anything extra to think about. They would soon have more than enough to deal with; of that he was quite sure.
The estate’s main building, an enormous seventeenth-century country house, squatted on top of a long, shallow rise, its upper floors visible from the gate. The road that led from the open entrance wound left then right, through dense lines of neatly clipped trees, then led straight up the hill toward a wide graveled driveway in front of the house. The trees fell away on both sides, and the five Blacklight operators were confronted with a hundred yards of immaculate, featureless lawn, a vast open space that would have filled Carpenter with dread were it not for the pale yellow sunlight reflecting off the morning dew.
They crossed the lawns quickly, moving in a tight X-shaped formation; Carpenter in the middle, Turner and Frankenstein leading the way, the two privates bringing up the rear. Their boots crunched across the gravel as they approached the home of the Molnar family, and then Turner pushed open the towering front door, and the five men slipped silently into the house.
The smell was the first thing that hit them as they stepped onto the tiled marble floor
of the atrium; a stench of rot so thick it felt as though you could have bitten into it. A dark haze of flies looped lazily in an open doorway at the rear of the room, and Carpenter led them toward it. Beyond the door was a large, spotlessly modern kitchen, big enough to have serviced a medium-sized restaurant. The smell intensified as they entered, waving the swarming flies away with their gloved hands. On a counter above one of the ovens, in a steel baking tray, was a leg of roast lamb. It was a virulent purple color and had swollen to almost double its size as the rot set in. The meat was leaking a milky fluid that was collecting in a thick pool in the tray, and maggots were swarming in wide crevices that had split open in the decaying flesh. Flies buzzed in a dense cloud above it, landing and taking off in a swirling pattern of shiny black bodies and translucent wings. Beside the tray stood bowls of black, liquidizing potatoes and vegetables, and a tray of crystal champagne flutes, their contents now long since flat.
Private Miller gagged, as quietly as he could.
“How long?” asked Turner, his voice as calm as ever.
“This time of year?” replied Carpenter. “A week, at least.”
The five men stood in silence, regarding the spoiled food. The likely implications for those who had been intending to eat it did not need vocalizing.
“Let’s keep moving,” said Carpenter.
The team moved into the lobby, a beautiful, cavernous space, with wooden walls and gleaming black-and-white marble tiles. Above them, a domed window let in the morning sun, lending the place a sense of peace and calm that couldn’t have been further from what the men were feeling.
In the dining room, they found the bodies.
It was more a hall than a room, a long oak-paneled hall, lined on one side by windows that overlooked the pale green grass of the lawns. A dark wood dining table sat in the middle of the room; stale bowls of bread sat on delicate serving plates in the middle of the surface, and gleaming water glasses and ornate silver cutlery stood expectantly in front of empty chairs.
A cavernous fireplace sat in the middle of the far wall and arranged around it were a number of comfortable-looking armchairs, no doubt the setting for thousands of after-dinner brandies over the years, and it was around these chairs that the Molnar family and their servants had been arranged.
There were six bodies in all. A man in his late fifties or early sixties sat in one of the armchairs, his head thrown back and his throat torn out. On his knee had been placed a girl, no more than seven years old, whose slender, pale neck bore two circular puncture marks. No other torment had been visited upon her, as far as Carpenter could see, and he felt a rush of relief at the quick death she had received, a privilege that had not been afforded the rest of the household.
The men approached slowly, although it was immediately obvious that nothing lived in this room. Their boots crunched softly as they tracked through a huge oval of dried blood, and even Turner winced at the sound. Two servants, a butler and a maid, had been laid end to end on the floor, their heads next to each other, their dead eyes staring up at the ceiling above them. Their throats had been slashed so violently that they almost appeared decapitated. Carpenter forced himself to focus on the last two victims, a boy and a girl in their early twenties. They had died with their arms around each other, huddled into one of the armchairs. The boy’s face wore an expression of defiance that brought a savage joy to Carpenter’s heart.
Good for you, boy, he thought. Didn’t give them the satisfaction. Good for you.
The girl, whose arms were wrapped tight around the boy’s neck, had clearly possessed no such steel; her face was a mask of terror and utter, hopeless misery. She had been beautiful, her face a perfect narrow oval, her hair the color of barley, her limbs long and slender. She was dressed in a ball gown made of a silver material that shimmered in the morning sunlight.
They had both been bled white. Below the girl’s shapely face, a second mouth had been opened on her throat, a savage grin of torn skin. The boy’s hands had been removed, the stumps of his arms ragged and chewed by the teeth of God alone knew how many vampires. There was not a drop of blood on either of the bodies, and it turned Carpenter’s stomach to think about where such a huge volume of liquid had gone.
“Sir.”
It was Private Miller’s voice, and Julian looked in his direction.
“What is it, Private?”
“Footprints, sir.” The young man gestured, and Carpenter followed the sweep of his arm. Several people had walked through the blood when it was still wet, toward a door set inconspicuously in the corner of the wood paneling, through which they had disappeared.
Carpenter nodded to Turner. The gray-eyed major stepped carefully forward and placed his ear against the wooden door. After a couple of seconds, he stepped back, drew the T-Bone from his belt, and kicked the door open. The frame shattered, and the door flew against a stone wall, cracking almost in two. There was a pregnant moment, then Turner stepped through the opening.
“Clear,” he said.
They stood in a narrow stone corridor, lit by an overhanging lightbulb. The walls were bare, and a worn staircase descended in front of them. Turner led them down it, his T-Bone pointing steadily before him. Carpenter drew his own weapon, motioned for the rest of the men to do the same, and followed.
After perhaps twenty steps, the floor leveled off and the passage widened into a large cellar. Shelves of dry goods lined one wall: sacks of rice and flour, barrels of olive oil and bottles of vinegar, sides of cured meat. The opposite wall was covered in a long row of floor-to-ceiling wooden racks, in which stood hundreds of bottles of wine, port and champagne. At the far end of the room, the final rack had been thrown over, smashing tens of bottles on the hard stone floor and filling the air with the strong scent of rotting fruit. They made their way through the cellar, and stopped in front of the downed rack. Behind it was an ancient carved stone arch, leading into utter blackness.
“Light,” said Carpenter.
Private Miller unclipped the torch from his belt and shone the beam into the hole. It illuminated the snarling face of a vampire, his teeth bared, his eyes crimson as he rushed toward them.
Julian wiped blood from his beard and flicked it disgustedly onto the floor.
“First guard,” said Turner, quietly.
“Agreed,” replied Frankenstein. “It’s possible they know we’re coming.”
“I don’t think so,” said Carpenter. “I think it was expecting police, or one of the family. I don’t think it raised an alarm.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” said Frankenstein.
The team advanced into the darkness, the beams of their torches illuminating a round stone passage, moving as quietly as possible. The path led around a corner and began to widen, until they were standing in front of a heavy-looking wooden door. Carpenter motioned Connor forward, and the young private lowered his shoulder and slowly pushed it open. The hinges screamed as he did so, the door opening onto another stretch of passage. Connor stepped through it, and as the order to wait rose in Carpenter’s throat, a dark shadow fell from the ceiling, driving him to the ground. The torch beams converged, and the team watched in stunned horror as a vampire girl, who appeared to be no older than eleven or twelve, ripped his helmet from his head and sank her teeth into his neck. Connor screamed and thrashed in her grip. Blood flew in the enclosed space, splattering the walls and the floor, and when she clamped her teeth together and tore into his throat, the scream dissolved into a terrible gurgling sound.
Turner was the first to react, as always. He stepped forward, pulled the stake from his belt, and slammed it into the girl’s left eye. She howled in pain, released Connor, and jumped to her feet, blood and yellow jelly pouring from her ruined eye socket. Frankenstein had drawn his T-Bone, and he pulled the trigger. The projectile thumped into her chest, driving her back along the passage, until she exploded in a torrent of gore. The stake whistled back into the barrel, and the four men rushed to where Private Connor lay bleedi
ng.
Carpenter knelt beside him and took his hand. Connor was on the verge of going into shock, his eyes rolling wildly, his pulse irregular and rapid. Blood was gushing out of the hole in his neck, and Turner took a wad of gauze from the medical kit on his belt and thrust it into the wound, pinching the artery shut. Connor screamed, blood frothing from his lips as he did so, but Turner didn’t even flinch.
“Easy, son,” said Carpenter. “Easy. We’re going to get you out of here.”
“Oh God,” said Miller. He was standing motionless, staring down at the blood-soaked man, his face a mask of utter horror.
“Come on,” said Carpenter. “Let’s get him up. Turner, call for an evac. We need to get him out of here, right now.”
Nobody moved.
“Come on!” roared Carpenter. “Those were direct orders!”
“Julian,” said Frankenstein, in a low voice. “You know it’s too late for that. We’re at least two hours away from the nearest place we can give him the transfusion he needs. If he doesn’t die, he’ll have turned by then.”
“I don’t accept that,” replied Carpenter, his voice bristling with anger. “And I don’t care if you’re right-we’re going to try anyway. I’m not going to let him die down here.”
“Sir…” Private Connor’s voice was thick, as though it was being spoken underwater. Carpenter looked down at him.
“I know there’s… nothing you can… do,” the young operator continued. “Don’t… let me turn. Please. Don’t… let me…”
Connor’s eyes rolled back white, and his mouth fell open. His chest was still rising and falling but barely, and blood had started running from his neck again, soaking Turner’s hand red.
