The President's Vampire

by Christopher Farnsworth

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I Solomon said unto him: “Beelzeboul, what is thy employment?” And he answered me: “I destroy kings. I ally myself with foreign tyrants. And my own demons I set on to men, in order that the latter may believe in them and be lost.... And I will destroy the world.”

  —F. C. Conybeare, translator, The Testament of Solomon, c. A.D. 100

  A little less than six miles away, a phone rang in a two-story home in the suburbs of Fairfax, Virginia.

  The man in glasses was at the dining room table with his wife and kids. She was trying to make it a regular thing—dinner together, as a family, at least one night a week.

  She glared at him when he stood, mobile in hand.

  “Sorry, honey,” he said, checking the number. “It’s the office.”

  She let out a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. Take it. We’re just your family.”

  Sarcasm, he thought. If he was lucky, she’d leave it at that. He looked at his children, a boy and a girl, eight and ten. They were tense, waiting for the next move.

  He really had to take this.

  “I won’t be long,” he said, and got up from the table.

  “Eat your dinner,” his wife snapped at the kids. They dug into their food.

  The man in glasses felt a stab of genuine regret at causing them pain, and then turned his attention to the phone call.

  “What?”

  “Complications,” Graves said. “The package didn’t make it to the carrier.”

  “That’s disappointing.”

  “Wasn’t my idea. The chopper pilot made a detour. Instead of a fully armed aircraft carrier, loaded with young men brimming with testosterone, he put them down on a hospital ship.”

  “How did the new viral load perform?”

  “Hard to say. I’m fairly certain the carrier agent went critical as planned. Cade went in.”

  The man in glasses felt a headache coming on. This just kept getting better. “How many got away?”

  Graves sighed. “None.”

  “None?”

  “You heard me.”

  “None? Zero? Not one?”

  “I can say it again. It won’t change.”

  “Wounded? Any other carriers?”

  “He killed them all.”

  The man in glasses chuckled. “My God. Just when you think that one can’t surprise you again . . . Well. Where’s Cade now?”

  “I dealt with him.”

  “Permanently?”

  Graves paused, which said it all.

  “I didn’t see the body,” he admitted.

  The man sucked at a bit of chicken stuck in his teeth. “Well, this is a fairly large pile of shit you’re in, isn’t it? We were supposed to start the outbreak in the Middle East. You know the progression. We should be at several hot zones by now.”

  “ ‘ No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.’ You know that,” Graves said. “Cade intercepted our Somali shipment. He was drawn into this much earlier than I anticipated. I had expected our White House contacts to keep him away from us until—”

  “You really think the higher-ups will be impressed by those excuses?”

  “I don’t answer to you,” Graves said tightly. “You want to get your hands dirty? Hop on a plane. Otherwise, fuck off and let me do my job.”

  The man in glasses took a moment. It was still Graves’s show. He had to resist the urge to micromanage. “Point taken. But if you didn’t kill him, you know you will see Cade again.”

  “He can’t touch me.”

  “Mmm-hmm. We’ll see. What about Barrows?”

  Graves laughed. “Barrows is only human. It’s under control.”

  “This is where I would, ordinarily, list all the things that will happen to you if this goes off the rails,” the man in glasses said. “But you’re a grown-up. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks on your own.”

  Despite his best efforts, Graves pictured a range of possibilities. “I appreciate your trust, Proctor,” he said.

  “Of course. Oh, and one more thing: do not call during dinnertime. Ever. Or I’ll skullfuck you myself.”

  The man in glasses flipped the phone shut and looked up. His wife and kids were at the kitchen door, staring. They’d never heard him swear before, not so much as a “hell” or “damn.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “A little disagreement with one of our branch offices.”

  They kept staring.

  He smiled. “Who’s up for ice cream?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  SPRINGWOOD, OHIO—A couple of months ago, you could have called Springwood a “sleepy little town.” These days, nobody here is sleeping much at all. The city is in the grip of terror as a serial killer stalks adolescents from the ages of 13 to 19, always murdering the youths in their bedrooms when they are asleep. The killer enters and leaves homes without leaving a single piece of evidence or disturbing the other residents. While police are baffled, the town’s teenagers are doing everything they can to remain awake. Illegal amphetamine use is skyrocketing.

  —The Springwood Shopper, November 9, 1984

  GULF OF ADEN

  The sky began to turn gray on the horizon. Cade clung to the briefcase, bobbing in the waves. It was just buoyant enough to keep his head above water. The hospital ship was long gone, and the shore was far beyond his sight.

  Cade could not have reached it even if he’d known where it was. Vampires are not great swimmers. Cade’s muscle and bone were too dense to allow him to float, and though he didn’t necessarily need to breathe—he could live off the stored oxygen of his last meal for some time—he would sink like a stone until he hit the point where the water pressure would squeeze his brains out through his ears.

  He suspected this was what happened to the vampire who made him, all those years ago. Tossed overboard or otherwise lost at sea, stuck on the ocean floor until somehow, it made its way again to the surface, and Cade’s ship.

  It looked like Cade was going to test that theory himself.

  He couldn’t let that happen. He had to get to shore. He had to stop Graves.

  Admittedly, he wasn’t sure how he was going to work that. Dawn was coming. The wound in his chest refused to close, and the salt water seemed to leach what strength he had left.

  He heard a boat in the distance. He paddled around lamely, trying to see where it was coming from.

  He marshaled what resources he had left. Perhaps this was one of Graves’s men coming to finish him off. Tired as he was, he could try to fight. He could take the boat and hope to outrun the daylight.

  In a moment, he realized that wouldn’t be necessary.

  The boat was a slick, jet-powered racing craft. Cade had seen several of these moored at Eyl. They were fast, but they also had the range necessary to run out to the shipping lanes where the pirates did their work.

  Tania stood behind the wheel, hair whipping in the breeze. She looked for all the world like a rich girl out in her daddy’s favorite toy. Aside from her utter lack of a tan, she could have fit right in on the Riviera or South Beach.

  She drew the boat alongside him. Her mouth quirked into a smile as she looked him over.

  “Not your strongest moment, Nathaniel,” she said.

  Cade opened his mouth to speak and spat seawater. He lifted his chin and tried again. “I’ve had better days,” he admitted.

  “Aren’t you even going to ask how I found you?” She reached out a hand and pulled him on board.

  He collapsed behind the driver’s seat and finally was able to open the briefcase. He drank one of the packets of blood dry before he answered.

  “I’m willing to call it random chance.”

  She smiled again. “Really?”

  He looked at the briefcase and opened the next packet. “I don’t see the need to complicate my life any further right now.”

  “Smart move,” she said, and wheeled the boat around, back toward the shore.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  If they can get you asking
the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

  —Thomas Pynchon

  LIBERTY, IOWA

  Some conspiracy theorists will tell anyone who will listen that the shadow government—the one behind the scenes, the people really pulling the strings—built a secret concentration camp under Denver International Airport in Colorado. They’ll point to the project’s budget overruns, its massive complex of underground concrete tunnels, its razor-wire fence, and tell you its real purpose is to hold enemies of the New World Order—without trial, indefinitely, turning ordinary U.S. citizens into the same kind of detainees held at Guantánamo.

  They’re wrong, of course.

  It’s not under Denver Airport. It’s actually under the Liberty Mall, outside Liberty, Iowa.

  LIBERTY MALL was one of the largest shopping centers on the North American continent, the local chamber of commerce was proud to say. The members even had a plaque made and a special ceremony to celebrate the grand opening. They knew that without the mall, there wasn’t much going on in the greater Liberty area. Farming had been a losing proposition since the early ’80s for most of the residents, and attempts to rebrand the town as a new kind of high-tech Mecca—“The Silicon Prairie,” as one of the expensive consultants they’d hired called it—only drew a few companies that withered and died when they ran out of venture capital.

  But the Mall—it was always the Mall, capital M—drew over ten million visitors a year to gawk at its three million square feet of retail space. Everyone in the area depended on the Mall, in one way or another.

  This probably explained why the locals minimized or ignored some of the Mall’s unusual aspects. For starters, not many people knew the Mall was actually owned by a defense contractor, PKD Ltd. Or that its construction actually used three times as much concrete as specified on the blueprints filed with the city.

  There were other things, too. While standard rent-a-cops patrolled the upper floors and common areas of the Mall, the basement level was always guarded by private security wearing uniforms without any insignia or identifying badges. Some area kids complained of brutal treatment when they were caught trespassing after hours. These incidents were hushed up, as were a number of disappearances of Mall employees who worked late. And there was the razor-wire fence on the outskirts of the mall’s farthest borders, which angled inward, as if to keep someone from climbing over the fence from inside.

  The most visible anomaly, however, the one nobody in town would ever mention out loud, were the delivery doors built into the foundation of the Mall that were never used for deliveries. They were enormous, made of steel and concrete, like something designed to withstand a nuclear blast. They never opened, at least not when anyone was around to see it. If anyone in town had any idea where those doors led, they would have been glad.

  GRAVES ENTERED THE MALL just as the last of the shoppers were leaving. The movie theater would stay open for a few more hours, and so would the Hooters, but the rest of the place was locked down tight.

  He made his way to an elevator in the food court, marked by a somewhat disturbing mural on the adjacent wall. It was supposed to depict the brotherhood of mankind as well as the local Native American creation myths, but nobody who saw it ever had any warm and happy feelings. Instead, it seemed like a giant black bird was looming over a group of helpless children, ready to carry them off to feed some squirming nest of its young.

  Graves put his thumb against a keycard reader below the button panel, like the ones used in hotels for penthouse access. If anybody else touched it, that’s all it was. But behind the plastic face, a special DNA-encoded scanner sent a signal to an internal computer. The elevator began its descent, leaving the surface far behind.

  Half a mile into the earth, the doors opened again and Graves walked out into the place where the Shadow Company birthed its nightmares: the Black Site.

  He was home.

  THERE WERE SIX LEVELS below the Mall, the largest being Level Five, which contained the cells. There were over a thousand in all, based on the supermax model of federal correctional facilities. Each cell was fitted with a sink, toilet, timer-controlled shower and poured concrete bed.

  The Site was nowhere near full capacity. The staff was basically a skeleton crew now. Most of the lab personnel were gone, and it didn’t take many people to handle the prisoners. Only ninety-four Shadow Company operatives, including Bell and Book, were there at the moment.

  Graves would have liked to fill each cell, but he was out of time. It wasn’t as easy as some civilians thought, making someone vanish from the real world. This was where the disappeared sank down, out of sight and out of mind, each one meticulously scrubbed from all records aboveground, until they existed only in the memories of the few people who’d loved them.

  Along with terrorists and enemy combatants plucked from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, Graves collected dissidents of all stripes from within the U.S. He didn’t hold any political prejudices. His cells held militia members filled with hate and rage for the New World Order, firebombers who used animal rights as an outlet for pyromaniac fetishes, college students who wore the wrong T-shirt to a campaign rally, hitchhikers who wandered too close to classified airfields, and people who were unlucky enough to catch a glimpse of the Shadow Company in action.

  He had 532 prisoners now. That would have to be enough.

  Correction: 533 prisoners.

  ZACH’S WORLD SLOWLY filtered back in around the edges. He could feel the concrete floor under his cheek, the cold metal of a drain touching his forehead.

  His eyes snapped fully open. There was no light.

  He tried to sit up, and his head sloshed like a water balloon. He got a hand out in time to keep from planting his face back on the floor.

  He closed his eyes as pain radiated from the swollen lump at the crown of his head. Bell. Bell had hit him. He was concussed. He didn’t know how badly, but it wasn’t good.

  He closed his eyes and felt the world spinning. He opened them. Didn’t help. There was no light.

  Lost time. Maybe passed out again. He was against a wall now. He got his feet under him, pushed himself up to a standing position. His head still hurt, but the spinning had stopped.

  The air was cold and sterile. Something used-up and dead about it.

  The overhead light clicked on, and Zach blinked until he could see.

  The cell was a standard four-by-eight block, with a steel toilet and a cot built into the wall. There was a door with two slots; one for trays of food, and another for someone in the corridor to check inside.

  It took Zach a moment to realize the viewing slot was open and he was being watched.

  He cursed, jumped and nearly fell down as his head started spinning again.

  He heard Graves laugh.

  “ ‘A rag and a bone and a hank of hair, but the fool he called her his lady fair . . .’” Graves recited in a kind of singsong. “No need to be embarrassed, Barrows. Bell is a professional. You barely qualify for the amateur rankings.”

  Zach was too hurt and too tired for banter. “Cade is going to kill you,” he said flatly.

  “He tried. Didn’t take,” Graves said. “You’re all alone down here. No one is coming to save you.”

  “I’ve heard something like that before. You know what happened? Cade found me. He’ll find you, too.”

  “You know, I almost hope he does,” Graves said, and set off down the corridor, leaving Zach alone.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Memorandum for: Mr. Tolson (FILE ONLY)

  From: John Edgar Hoover, Director

  Subject: The so-called “Cross-Country Killings”

  I notice another report in the sensational press of bodies found alongside the road. I assume that some of the descriptions are hyperbole, given the source. (What else can one expect of a paper that boasts “crime scene photos—IN FULL COLOR,” and headlines such as “Strangled in Silk!”) However, some of the details lead me to believe this is part of
the vendetta of Mr. Cade. For starters, the three men found—in various bits and pieces—were all contractors known to be on the payroll of our sometime friends and constant nuisances at the CIA. For another, all were seen in New Orleans and Dallas in recent months. I shouldn’t have to tell you what this implies. Nor should I have to tell you what this might mean if it should find purchase in the minds of someone outside the tabloid press.

  And yet, I find myself telling you. Get a leash on this, Clyde. I don’t want to see another word in the press.

  —United States Department of Justice Memorandum, 5:53 P.M., December 12, 1963 (classified)

  CAIRO, EGYPT

  Cade walked into the bar, located in the lobby of a hotel that catered entirely to tourists. The designers wanted a spot where guests would be comfortable. The menu offered burgers, fries and Miller Lite. There were movie posters and old license plates on the walls. The air-conditioning was kept to a frosty sixty-eight degrees, and the TV screens showed nothing but football and old sitcoms. The end result could have been airlifted directly out of a suburban mall and plunked down in Egypt.

  Cade stood out. He’d needed clothes to seek out his contact, and he let Tania do the shopping. As a result, he was dressed in an Armani suit. It wasn’t his usual off-the-rack poly-wool blend, but he had to admit it fit very well.

  The man Cade was looking for, in contrast, seemed to be right at home. He sat at the bar, drinking a beer and eating a plate of buffalo wings that glowed neon-red with hot sauce.

  He belched and wiped his hands on a napkin as Cade sat down on the next stool.