Cade knew he could not contact the White House—Prador was compromised. He’d tried calling Zach, but there was no answer. He threw his own phone into the ocean. If anyone tracked its GPS chip, it was on the seabed, where Cade was supposed to be.
Without Zach, he had no direct way of reaching the president. And he was stranded half a world away from the U.S.
It was his own fault. He’d only been reacting since this started. Graves had planned, thought tactically and improvised. Cade had come into the game late, but that was no excuse for playing like such an amateur. Now he was forced to rely on his own networks and resources.
In this corner of the world, this man was his only option.
He certainly didn’t look like the World’s Greatest Secret Agent. And in truth, those days were long past.
His once hard jawline was gone, replaced by a double chin. His hair was combed over a bald spot that refused to hide. And his days of filling an Armani tux were gone; now his belly slopped over the waist of his Dockers stain-resistant pants.
Years ago, he had worked the back alleys of global politics, making sure the Cold War stayed perfectly frigid. He discovered plots that never made the news: secret space missions, vanishing islands, strange weapons and deadly assassins with steel teeth. With that much time in the dark, he soon found the same nightmares Cade was sworn to fight. They compared notes, traded information and even saved each other from time to time.
As he got older, he was moved to the farthest outposts of the American empire. His set of skills was considered obsolete, and the files of his missions were forgotten or shredded. As far as the current heads of the world’s intelligence services were concerned, he was just another bureaucrat in a sweltering third-world country. That suited him just fine. A spy doesn’t live long if he draws attention to himself.
Cade could never be certain where his loyalties actually were—or if he even had any. But he was unquestionably the very best at his job, once upon a time.
And more important, he owed Cade a favor.
“Cade,” he said. “How’s Griff doing?”
“Dead. I need something.”
“You’re even more sociable than I remembered.”
“I’m pressed for time.”
He took a swig of his beer and motioned the bartender for another. “The world ending, forces of evil on the march, doomsday clock running down to zero? That sort of thing?”
“Something like that. What am I calling you these days?”
“Flint,” he said, and grinned. “I’d offer to buy you a drink, but I don’t think they carry your brand.”
Cade regarded him carefully. “You’re not being very discreet.”
“Nobody cares anymore, Cade. Or hadn’t you noticed?” The bartender, a young man with a patchy beard and a surly look, brought over another beer, bright yellow in a frosted glass. “Take Nawaz here. He knows I’m just another fat American bastard sitting in a country where I don’t belong. Isn’t that right, Nawaz?”
The bartender curled his lip at Flint, then walked to the other side of the bar.
“See? He doesn’t care. Back when he started, Nawaz spent every day eavesdropping on conversations, hoping to have something to report back to the Mukhabarat.”
Nawaz barely flinched at the mention of the Egyptian Secret Service.
“Now he daydreams about all the ways he’d like to violate the waitresses and wishes they would show the soccer matches on the screens here. Not going to happen, Nawaz. It ain’t football if you don’t wear a helmet. And to top it all off, he can’t even make a decent martini.”
Nawaz kept his back to them.
“You see what I’m talking about? It’s easy to keep secrets when nobody gives a damn.”
“You know why I’m here.”
“I have an inkling,” he said. “You threw quite a party on that boat.”
“It was unavoidable. It’s not like Innsmouth. It’s contagious this time.”
Flint’s eyes sharpened.
“How contagious?”
“It spreads in the bites and the blood. Transformation begins immediately.”
Flint thought about the implications. For an instant, Cade saw the cold warrior emerge from his doughy features again. In that moment, he imagined he could see Flint struggle with the urge to rise from his bar stool and ride into action.
But the moment passed. Flint took another drink and turned to watch the game on the nearest screen.
“So what do you want from me? I told you about the bodies in Uganda. I kept you in the loop. But that’s all I know.”
“I don’t need any more information,” Cade said. “I know who’s behind it. A man called Graves—”
Flint turned at the name. “Graves?”
“You know him?”
“Same church. Different denomination.”
“He’s on his way to the source of the contagion now, a black site. I don’t know where.”
“I don’t mess with the Company. Not anymore.”
“I need an exact location and transport. That’s all.”
“That’s all? You know what will happen to me if they find out I not only gave you the address, I drove you to the front door?”
Flint pretended to consider it, but Cade knew he’d already decided. He simply had to make it look good for anyone watching.
“Fine,” he said. “But you do something for me.”
“What?”
Flint checked his watch. “In a few minutes, a hit squad, tipped off by Nawaz, will enter the bar and spray everyone down with automatic weapons. In turn, they are supposed to be killed by Egyptian security forces. Islamic militants will be blamed. But it’s all a cover for the real target: me.”
“You said no one cared anymore.”
“Sometimes they get nostalgic. Take care of them and I’ll arrange your ride.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“Damn well better be. I told Nawaz to make the call an hour ago.”
Cade looked at the bartender, who smirked.
“He’s coming along nicely, don’t you think?” Flint said.
“You must be very proud,” Cade said. He noticed the three men enter the bar, wearing what they thought were the outfits of typical college students. They had to wear jackets over their weapons, short, stubby machine pistols that bulged under their arms.
They were sweating. Nervous. Trying to work up the courage to open fire on a room of unarmed civilians.
Cade’s fangs emerged. He pulled them back with effort. Too many witnesses. This had to be handled quietly.
“Back in a moment,” Cade said.
Faster than the eye could follow, he was across the room, standing behind the men.
Instantly his whole face changed, turning into a happy, gassy balloon inflated by a five-beer drunk.
He clapped his arms around all three men, hanging on them and laughing, as if hugging old friends.
The two on the outside froze. They were the followers, and they didn’t know what to do. The first hit man was their leader, and Cade had pinned him between the other two, unable to move.
Cade used their moment of hesitation to grip their necks, right at the base of the skull. He popped their vertebrae cleanly in two, severing their spinal cords from their brain stems. Their lives went as quietly as a lamp unplugged from the wall.
The first hit man turned his face to Cade, struggling against the press of the bodies. He didn’t know what was happening, but he opened his mouth to shout something as he struggled to get to his gun.
Cade still had to hold the other two men up, as if they were all drunk and stumbling together. He had several options. But as it turned out, he didn’t need to use any of them.
Tania appeared in front of them, squealing with sorority-girl glee, and rushed to join the embrace. Along the way, she drove her hand into the hit man’s sternum, sending shards of bone into his heart and lungs.
His face grew purple and his eyes grew panicked. He
tried to get something out of his mouth, but he was too busy drowning internally on his own blood.
Tania and Cade, meanwhile, spun all three of the bodies out toward the hallway again, walking arm-in-arm like old friends.
“I had him,” Cade said.
Tania shrugged. “Sure you did, dear.”
If anyone looked, Nawaz was there, by their side, to make it appear as if customers were being escorted by the hotel staff.
Cade left Tania with the corpses in the meat locker. He didn’t want to watch her feed. He returned to Flint.
Flint had a freshly poured beer in front of him.
“You haven’t lost your touch,” Flint said.
“You either.”
“You have a suspicious mind, Cade,” Flint said, lighting a cigarette. “Just so I can prepare for the fallout. How bad is this going to be?”
“Do you remember 1963?”
Flint didn’t say anything. Just gulped what remained of his beer, then closed his eyes tight, as if trying not to see whatever memories Cade had evoked.
Office of the Attorney General, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., 1964
The building was largely deserted when Cade entered. Most of the employees had gone home. But not the man who was—for a few more days, anyway—their leader.
Cade walked into the office without knocking. The attorney general did not seem to notice him. He was holding one of his brother’s suit jackets, as he often did these days. He stared into space, looking at nothing.
Cade waited. The AG noticed him a moment later, jumping slightly in his seat.
He covered it well. “Cade,” he said. “Thank you for coming. How goes it?”
“It’s over.”
The AG appeared to shift gears in his mind. He forgot, like most people did, that Cade’s personality didn’t allow for many social graces.
“What do you mean, over? I thought—”
“I’ve tracked each man as far as possible. It ends with anonymous notes from unknown superiors. Money left in dead drops. A cutout system. I cannot go any further.”
“What about the last men—they wouldn’t talk?”
“They talked. They had nothing to say.”
The AG took a cigar from a desk drawer—another habit of his brother’s that he’d picked up since Dallas. He chewed it for a moment, then lit it. “You believed them?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Cade said. “I can’t find the men who gave the order to murder your brother. I’ve failed.”
The AG shook his head. “No, you haven’t. You went as far as you could from the bottom up. If anyone failed, it was me. I never should have used them.”
Cade usually never questioned his orders, or the people who gave them. But he wanted to know. “Used who?”
Pain filled the man’s face. “There are levels of government even you don’t know about, Cade. There are men in our intelligence services who will do—well, they will do things—”
“The jobs I wouldn’t,” Cade finished for him.
“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes, we need someone willing to cross the lines you won’t.”
“Those lines were drawn for me.”
“All the more reason to have someone with a little more flexibility on the team.”
“And you believe these men were behind the killing of your brother?”
The AG gave him a sad grin. “I can’t prove it.”
Cade didn’t move, but the AG felt the whole room shift along with Cade’s attitude. His anger was a thing that seemed to join them in the office.
“Give me their names.”
The AG looked at Cade calmly. “No,” he said. “I can’t prove anything. And I don’t want to dig this up again. The body’s practically still warm.”
Cade understood. The AG and his brother had things to hide.
“They shouldn’t get away with this,” Cade said.
The AG rose from his chair.
“They won’t. I just need to play this a bit smarter next time. Put the lessons I’ve learned here to use, when I get back.”
Cade was puzzled. The AG’s resignation to run for the Senate was well known. “Back?”
“To the White House, Cade,” the AG said. “You got as far as you could, working from the bottom. I fully intend to finish the job—from the top down.”
There it was. The AG planned to run for president someday. And whatever dealings led to the assassination—whatever secret plots that Cade was not privy to—he didn’t want those spilling out. Not just for his brother. But for his own chances as well.
Cade felt something almost like disappointment.
The attorney general stubbed out his cigar and put on his jacket. Then he folded his brother’s over his arm and carried it with him to the exit.
“See you in the Oval Office, Cade. I’m sure you’ll still be around.”
Cade didn’t say anything. He had no gift to see the future. But he was certain he would never see the man again.
TWENTY-NINE
We’ve long theorized that the purpose of occult ritual is to reprogram the human brain. It’s been demonstrated that new thoughts and new ideas actually create new neural pathways in the brain. The chanting, sleep-deprivation, music, visual and other stimuli of the occult ritual—especially as it’s repeated, over and over—create a similar effect, until the brain conforms to the purpose of the ritual. In one sentence: the rituals reinforce certain thoughts until the brain is capable of thinking only those thoughts.
—Dr. William Kavanaugh, Sanction V research group
After he left Zach, Graves walked a few dozen yards and turned to the doors of the main lab. This was the heart of the Site, dead-center in the middle of Level Five, with prisoners located in spokes of cells radiating outward. Everything in Level Six below was maintenance or utilities.
There were good, logistical reasons to keep the main laboratory so close to the cells. During the initial development phase, the Company’s scientists and technicians went through test subjects at the rate of six or seven a day, and it was easier to cart them a short distance from their cells.
But there were other, less rational reasons. Designs for the Black Site came from both government blueprints and old translations of even older texts. There were ley lines to be considered, the position of the stars and the rituals of sacrifice.
Graves knew better than to question these touches. After a while, he began to think of them as another section of the building codes, like occult OSHA regulations.
He pressed his thumb to another encrypted lock, and heavy bolts thudded back. The steel-plated doors moved steadily, powered by self-contained hydraulics. Even in the midst of a total power outage, the doors would still operate. Graves hadn’t been in charge of the witchier sections of the Site’s design, but he planned for every other possible contingency.
He walked inside the long bays and lab tables of what he had come to think of as the Hatchery. A year ago, even six months, the place would have been crawling with mad scientists, disgraced biochemists, rogue theorists of every discipline. The Company had a small battalion of men and women willing to test the boundaries of science and sanity, who found the ethical constraints of academic and corporate R&D too confining. They needed a place to work, unlimited budgets and human test subjects. The Company was glad to supply all of these in exchange for everything they could produce.
Today, however, the Hatchery more or less ran itself. The process was fully automated, and only one man, a technician, was necessary to watch it work.
He had his feet on his desk, reading a white paper filled with molecular equations. He didn’t bother to get up.
“Colonel,” he said.
“Everything going smoothly?” Graves asked. “Anything I should know about?”
“Production is right on track. Quiet as babies on NyQuil.”
“You delivered the supplement to the last meal?”
The technician nodded, but now he looked a little nerv
ous. “I hope the cells hold,” he said. “They’re going to be hungry.”
“You let me worry about that,” Graves said to the technician. Then he turned and fired a shot from his pistol, blowing the man’s face through the back of his head.
For a second, the technician’s lifeless body teetered in his desk chair. Then gravity won and he fell over backward, legs comically up in the air for a moment before he hit the floor.
Graves didn’t think of this as a cruel betrayal. He barely thought about it at all. As far as he was concerned, everyone in here was going to die, sooner or later.
In this case, sooner was better.
THE TRAY SAT ON the floor of Zach’s cell. Someone had shoved it through the lower slot. Nutraloaf: dried potatoes, flour, maybe some cheese or milk mixed in, all baked to a hardened brick. Standard prison food.
Zach had seen it before, but never tasted it. He didn’t think today was going to be the day that changed.
He heard a hissing noise from the next cell. He started, then realized the noise was human. Someone was trying to get his attention.
Zach scooted over to the slot and listened.
“Don’t eat it,” a voice warned from the next cell. The tones were cultured, almost British.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Zach said.
“They have put something in the food. I heard them talking about it. The guards.”
“They told you about it?”
A slight chuckle. “Not intentionally. I am on a hunger strike. They were preparing food to force down my nose through a tube, when one told the other they still needed to get the supplement. I knew what that meant. They left hours ago.”
“Maybe they’re busy,” Zach said, hoping that an assault by a pissed-off vampire was the cause of the delay. “What’s in the food?”
“The blood of demons. I’ve seen them. Serpents. The guards take men away and turn them into snakes.”
“Yeah. I caught the live act.”
The prisoner’s voice lost some of its certainty for the first time. “What?”
The President's Vampire Page 19
