The President's Vampire

by Christopher Farnsworth

  With a quick, hard snap, he broke the screw holding the scissors together, giving him two makeshift knives. He put a blade in each hand and stabbed wildly at the Snakehead.

  One blade bounced off the folded scales under the creature’s neck and fell to the floor. The other Zach brought around and jammed hard into its eye.

  The Snakehead let out a high squeal and lashed out, backhanding Zach away.

  The blade in its eye stayed stuck where it was.

  Without eyelids, it couldn’t clear its vision of the fluid and gore dripping from its eye socket. It flailed wildly, still grinning its crocodile grin, shrieking in pain.

  Zach came up immediately. Never stop, he heard Cade telling him. Never surrender for a second.

  He reached out and snagged the handle of a short, two-drawer file cabinet. He nearly wrenched his arm out of its socket as he heaved it around, swinging it like a club, into the Snakehead.

  It staggered, but Zach had given it a target. It turned toward him, knocking the file cabinet easily to the floor. Paper spilled everywhere.

  “Hey,” Bell screamed. The Snakehead turned as she threw something.

  Glass broke. Liquid splashed all over the Snakehead, dripping to the floor. Zach felt its odor sting his nostrils. He needed to get away. Fast.

  Zach kicked, pivoting on the ball of his back foot, putting all his weight behind it.

  The sole of his shoe connected solidly with the Snakehead’s chest, shoving it back. Zach used the space to dive clear.

  Bell, on the other hand, did the unthinkable. She got closer. She darted a hand out, holding a lighter to the spilled puddle beneath the Snakehead. She barely needed to touch it. Her hand was caught in the sudden bloom of heat and light.

  Embalming fluid is highly flammable.

  The Snakehead went up like a torch.

  It screeched and squealed, slamming itself into walls and floors and debris before it finally stopped screaming.

  It hit the floor, facedown. No movement.

  Zach stood there, panting, as the sprinklers above finally kicked in. A fire alarm rattled somewhere. The water did nothing against the chemical fire. It kept burning the Snakehead down to a charred lump.

  Bell stood up, cradling her hand. Zach realized they were both soaked.

  “I think you got him,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said, her voice weirdly calm. “Did he get you?”

  Zach shook his head. “Are you sure? No broken skin? No infection?”

  Zach carefully pulled up his sleeves, then lifted the cuffs of his pants. Not even a scratch.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I had to be sure. What about Candle? Do you think he might have—”

  “I don’t know.” He turned to look around the morgue again, and immediately slammed his shin into an open drawer, protruding from a desk.

  Zach swore and looked down. He was about to kick the desk. He stopped.

  The drawer was almost sloshing, filled with sticky, drying blood. Chunks of raw meat, wrapped in roughly cut strips of cloth.

  Zach could see the fabric of the cloth. Where it wasn’t stained with blood, it was marked with a pattern. He recognized it.

  EAT ME, it said.

  Zach swallowed bile that had climbed to the back of his throat.

  Bell couldn’t see from behind him. “What? What is it?”

  “I found Candle,” he told her. “Most of him.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The cultist believes he can summon the very hounds of hell to his aid; the intelligence agent can overthrow a government, terminate a politician, or call in an air strike. Either way, the Gates of the Underworld are opened.

  —Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft

  USNS VIRTUE, GULF OF ADEN

  It had been a long night. Cade had been through the ship twice, checking every hiding spot, every blind corner and dead end.

  The results were laid out on the deck. Some of them still looked quite human. Others were nothing but scales and teeth.

  Cade didn’t know if the virus died when its carrier did. He found a fuel hose near the helipad and began splashing it over the bodies.

  He looked at the rows. It took him a nanosecond to count: six hundred ninety-seven. God alone knew how many he’d sent over the side to be ground into chum by the prop.

  The black smoke rolled into the sky as the fire burned.

  He was still watching when Graves arrived.

  A Marine chopper dropped Graves off at the helipad but kept its rotors spinning, ready for a quick takeoff.

  Graves carried Cade’s briefcase, the one Zach had packed for him, in one hand.

  “We should go,” he said. “I brought your luggage.”

  He tried to make it sound lighthearted, but Cade was in no mood to act human right now.

  “How did they get here?” Cade asked, as much to himself as to Graves.

  “Maybe they came up over the sides. From the water. Hell, maybe that Marine was infected, after all. It was my fault, Cade. I’m sorry. But we do have to leave. There’s going to be an investigation. The ship will probably have to be scuttled. And we have other places to be. This is a dead end.”

  Cade said nothing.

  Graves snapped his fingers. “You there? Answer me.”

  Cade looked at him. Something nagged at him again, demanding his attention through the blood and pain. Something about those words, in that cadence. Years peeled away in seconds.

  He turned to stand face-to-face with Graves. “You were right,” he said. “We’ve never met before. But we have spoken on the phone.”

  Even behind the sunglasses, Cade could see Graves’s eyes go wide with fear.

  It was about time.

  Orange, Texas, Near the Louisiana Border, November 24, 1963

  Graves could not keep himself from trembling. Long after he’d commanded his rebellious body to stop, he just kept shaking.

  He walked to the door of the cheap motel room, past the office. Nobody saw him. The place was still asleep in the early morning.

  He checked the thermometer. It lied. No way it was only sixty degrees. Sweat dribbled down his ribs from his armpits. He felt like he was wrapped in a bag of heavy steam.

  He didn’t even have to knock when he reached the room. The door opened. Graves gaped.

  “You?” he blurted. He couldn’t help it. One more shock on top of all the others. The director of counterintelligence himself. CODE NAME: LORD. It was a play on his actual name, which every politician in Washington knew and feared. But he was supposed to be in Europe.

  The old man laughed, a wheeze like gas escaping a corpse. “Good to know I can still inspire terror. Come in, son.”

  Graves was dead. He knew it. He’d failed. He’d clearly punctured some veil of secrecy, because there was no way the old man would be here, not after Dallas, and certainly not if there was any chance Graves could tell anyone about it later.

  Graves considered taking off into the night beyond the parking lot, running until he got lost.

  “Don’t just stand there,” the old man said. “You’re letting the bugs in.”

  The urge to run faded. It was useless. They would find him. But more than that, Graves could not do it. He was trained and conditioned to follow orders. From table manners to Boy Scouts to this. There was no breaking free from what he was.

  He entered the room.

  Lord sat in the room’s one chair, a bucket of ice and a bottle of whiskey on the table beside him. Two glasses were already poured, beaded with condensation.

  The old man picked up his drink. He nodded, and Graves did the same.

  The old man sipped. Graves guzzled despite his best efforts.

  “You look better already,” the old man said. “Have a seat. We need to talk.”

  Graves sat on the bed. The whiskey burned, but didn’t take much of his anxiety away.

  Graves couldn’t contain himself any longer. “Sir, the men—all of them, Jesus, al
l of them, they’re all dead, sir.”

  “Of course they are.”

  What? Was that part of the plan? Was he expendable? Did they intend for this to happen?

  No, it couldn’t be. Graves had done everything right.

  The old man offered the bottle again. The glass shook in Graves’s hand, causing fat drops of liquor to spill on the carpet.

  Graves’s ears burned with shame. Even after all he’d seen recently, he felt the duty to maintain a stiff upper lip. Chin out, stand up straight, Yale down the spine all the way.

  But he gulped the drink anyway. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said.

  “Sorry for what?”

  Graves opened his mouth, then closed it. “For all of this,” he said. “For the failure of MORDRED.”

  AT FIRST, it had been a textbook operation. They’d set it up perfectly. The symbolic King of America, brought down while surveying his people. Their convenient suspect picked up at his rendezvous point by the police.

  Graves thought his shooters were safe and clear. Friendly Dallas PD officers escorted them away after the hit, told the press they were “drifters” and let them disappear.

  Then things began to go wrong.

  While the nation reeled, Air Force One was supposed to be blown out of the sky. Johnson and the grieving widow, taken out in one move. The wreckage would show evidence of a Cuban-made bomb. The Cubans would deny it, of course—because they were innocent—and the Soviets would come to their rescue after the invasion. With a few touches here and there, they were looking at a limited nuclear exchange and troops on the other side of the Iron Curtain within a month.

  The Agency would have what it wanted—war with Russia, a war Russia could not possibly win. A great sacrifice, yes, but all for the greater good.

  Nothing happened. Air Force One landed safely. LBJ sworn in. An orderly transfer of power.

  He went to the warehouse outside Dallas where his fake Cubans were supposed to be waiting.

  They were there. In pieces. Something had torn them apart and painted the walls with their remains.

  He ran back to his car and drove all night.

  He stopped only at pay phones, trying to find the gunmen. They were supposed to be at a series of safe houses, always reachable by phone.

  No one picked up until Graves was almost to Orange, the sun beginning to breach the sky at the horizon.

  Someone answered, but there was no sound. Not even the sound of breathing.

  “Mordred,” Graves said.

  Nothing.

  “Mordred. This is Morgan. I need your authentication.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?” In impatience, he’d snapped his fingers, a nervous habit he thought extinguished in training. “Anyone there?”

  “I’m coming for you,” the voice on the other end said. It wasn’t overtly threatening. It didn’t even sound angry. But Graves had never heard a voice quite like that. It was perfectly cold, perfectly calm and utterly inhuman.

  “Who is this?” Graves asked.

  “You’ll see,” the voice said, and in it, Graves heard dead leaves scraping on a gravestone.

  The call ended with a click. Graves had been shaking uncontrollably ever since.

  LORD GAVE HIM a kind smile.

  “You didn’t fail.”

  “Sir. With all due respect. The terminal phase of the operation. And my men . . .”

  Graves gagged, and nearly brought up the whiskey in his stomach. He managed to swallow. His throat burned. “Sorry,” he said again.

  “It’s understandable,” Lord said. “You’re still trying to comprehend what’s happened. I remember the first time I saw him.” A shudder, involuntary and quickly suppressed, shook the old man under his suit.

  “Him? You know who did this?”

  “Oh, yes. I know him.”

  “Sir, what I saw—what happened to the men—there’s no way anything human did that. It looked like some kind of animal.”

  “Not an animal, no,” he said. “A predator, but not an animal.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The old man sighed. “Before tonight, you thought you knew secrets. One of the few pressed into service, to carry the burdens of what it takes to keep this country safe. The elite. Don’t argue with me. Don’t look at me with that false humility. Admit it. You loved the idea of power. Of being privy to the real action in the world while everyone else swallowed lies.”

  Graves nodded.

  Lord grinned and moved closer. “Well, boy, let me tell you, you have no fucking idea.”

  Suddenly Graves was looking into the barrel of a .45, a WWII-vintage Colt Peacemaker.

  “Are you sure you want to know the truth?” Lord asked.

  Before Graves could say anything, the old man pushed the gun a little closer.

  “Think carefully. Do you want to know the real answers? I’m about to bring you inside the knowledge, son. But there is always a choice. Just say the word. I will set you free.”

  For a moment, Graves considered it. As if it was a real choice. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to live in a world where the things he’d seen over the past forty-eight hours could happen. Oddly, he thought of his mother. He hadn’t spoken to her since he had taken on his new name and identity. He barely even thought about her anymore, except perhaps at Christmas. But now he wondered, what would she think of what he’d become? Was this what she wanted for him?

  For a moment, he thought it might be better to take the bullet.

  But that was crazy. He blinked, and the moment was gone.

  “I have to know,” he said.

  Lord nodded and lowered the gun to the table. “Yes, you do. That’s our gift and our curse. We have to know the secrets. And we have to carry them, ever after. It’s why we chose you, after all.”

  “What does this have to do with anything? Who killed my men?”

  “A vampire,” the old man said.

  Despite everything, Graves almost laughed. But the old man’s face was devoid of humor.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every presidential assassination attempt since Lincoln has been carried out in broad daylight. Now you know why.”

  “Sir, when you say ‘vampire’—”

  Lord slammed his glass on the table, splashing whiskey and nearly upsetting the bottle. “I mean a goddamned vampire. Clear the wax out of your ears.”

  Graves apologized, but inside he wondered if the old man was insane, or if he was. If he had not seen the bodies of his agents, if he had not heard that voice on the phone, he would have run for the door.

  “There’s more to this world than the things you can see,” Lord said. “There are hidden chapters to history, and not all of them were written by men. Think about what you saw. Think about the voice you heard. Was that human?”

  Graves shook his head. No. That was not human. He was sure of that.

  “Just be grateful you didn’t meet him in person,” Lord said. “You wouldn’t be here.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You’ll find out. Along with many other things. But first, I want you to answer a very important question.”

  The old man leaned close.

  “Haven’t you ever noticed the similarities between spycraft and witchcraft?” Lord asked.

  Graves shook his head, confused.

  “Think about it. Witches revere true names—they are the way to control demons. While we use false names to get close to people, and then use their demons—alcohol, homosexuality, pederasty—to control them. Witches speak magic words to unlock secrets. We use code words. They talk of crossing over to the ‘Other Side,’ the place beyond death. We refer to the enemy as the Other Side, and when we find a traitor, we say he’s gone over. It’s all about who controls reality. That’s what we’re after. That’s what we’ve always been after.”

  Graves struggled to keep up. This was all starting to be too much. Sure, he’d heard about some esoteric projects run by the Agency. Things like MK
-ULTRA, or CONNECTICUT-HULU, or even the rumors about what they were keeping out at Groom Lake. That stuff sounded like science fiction, and it was real. He’d seen it. But this was past all that, right into fairy tales and nightmares.

  “We chose to operate this way. We prefer the shadows. The Order is only one more mask. The most secure form of rule is the one where the subjects don’t even know the names of their rulers. That is the purpose of espionage—to hide the true face in the mirror. We lie to the world, but more important, we lie to ourselves. You have no idea. But you’ll find out.”

  Graves felt he’d missed something. “Sir. I don’t understand. What does that have to do with a vampire?”

  “Never mind that right now,” Lord snapped. “What do you want? Why did you join the Agency?”

  Graves stammered, caught off guard. “I want—to serve my country, sir. To stand up against communism, and protect—”

  “Stop. Stop.” The old man’s eyes were sharp and mean. “You didn’t walk away from everyone you knew for that pabulum. You let us give you a new name and a new life, and you’ve killed for us in return. And it wasn’t for the U.S.A and Chevrolet. Tell me the truth: what do you want?”

  “I am telling you the truth, sir, I—”

  The old man put his hand on the gun again.

  “Do I really need to threaten you with this? I said the truth, you mewling little faggot. What. Do. You. Want.”

  Something came loose in Graves. All the tension and fear and anxiety came crumbling down. All that was left was rage.

  “Everything,” Graves hissed, and it was like gas escaping from under tons of rock and pressure. “I want it all. I want people to do what I tell them to do. I want money—enough to buy anything I see, just because it’s there. And I want women. All of them. On their knees, on their backs, I want them all, and I want all of that right now, and I want to slaughter anyone who gets in my way.”

  The old man leaned close. Graves could smell nicotine and rot on his breath.