Vampire Unseen (Vampire Untitled Trilogy Book 2)

by Lee McGeorge

  Wendy chuckled. “You want to pay me not to stay in the hotel? My Dear, you can pay me for as many non-stays as you like.”

  ----- X -----

  Bogdan looked seriously jetlagged, almost to the point of being drugged. He wore sunglasses in the breakfast room of the hotel. His head would fall back like he was looking at the ceiling then he would pull it forward with effort to rest his chin on his chest.

  “Perhaps you should stay in bed for a few hours,” Corneliu suggested.

  Bogdan nodded with a yawn. “I will,” he agreed, “but I’ve got an appointment right now. Embassy Man is coming. I want you to be here too.”

  As they left the restaurant a man in jeans and a denim jacket waved to Bogdan. He was unshaven, rough looking, dirty. Corneliu found it hard to imagine he was an embassy employee.

  Bogdan spoke to the man alone and took a parcel from him that looked like a mail delivered package. Cardboard and bubble wrap, a printed address label, barcodes and delivery stickers. Embassy Man left the building and Bogdan ushered Corneliu to follow him to the elevators.

  “Are you telling me that guy works in diplomatic relations?”

  Bogdan smirked. “Him? No... Of course not. But to get in touch with him you need to know a man in the embassy.”

  They went to Bogdan’s room, two floors above Corneliu’s. Bogdan placed the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and began pulling the package apart.

  Corneliu watched.

  He saw what was in the parcel.

  Bogdan laid the contents on the bed.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. You know that’s totally illegal in Britain?” Corneliu asked. Bogdan nodded. He had two guns, one was a gas powered pistol, the other was an ominous mini revolver with a sound suppressor.

  “OK. Let me show you this,” Bogdan said taking the gas pistol. “This is an animal control injector, it fires thirteen millimetre darts and can deliver three millilitres of whatever you want. We will be using this stuff,” he held up a small dark bottle, “it’s called etorphine, M99, it’s an opiate about three thousand times more potent than morphine, strong stuff, normally used for tranquilizing elephants.”

  “I’m sorry... are you expecting us to find and catch McGovern?”

  “No. This is just a precaution.” He scratched behind his ear and motioned the small revolver, “Actually, this is for precaution, the tranquilizer is only if we get close, not for defence. You only get one shot and you’ll probably miss, so if you come up against McGovern and you only have that, just run the other way.”

  “Tell me about that one,” Corneliu nodded at the other gun. “Do you know that in Britain you get ten years in prison for just having a gun?”

  “Yes, I do,” Bogdan said with a nod. “Let me worry about it. I don’t want you to use either of them. By the way, the M99 for the injector is a controlled drug in Britain too so you don’t want to get caught with that either. Leave this stuff to me.”

  “Leave it to you? Then why are you showing me it?”

  Bogdan shrugged. “Precaution. Full disclosure.”

  “Can I see that gun,” Corneliu asked. Bogdan checked to make sure it was empty and handed it over. It was very small. “Why is there no hammer to pull back and cock?”

  “There is a hammer, but it’s encased inside the handle. It’s a clone of a concealed weapon system called a Colt Bodyguard.”

  The chassis was smoothed so there was nothing to snag if you pulled it from your clothing. The suppressor made it unwieldy and stopped it from being used as intended. Corneliu could see exactly what it was; the tool of a professional assassin. Small, silent, easy to conceal. Being a revolver it kept spent cartridges with the gun rather than ejecting them onto the crime scene. Corneliu handled the weapon carefully.

  “Bogdan,” he asked earnestly. “What is the intention?”

  “Kill or capture. From what we know it seems McGovern has no regard for human life anymore. If he is backed into a corner he is going to unleash the fury. Hopefully, if he’s discovered then the British armed police, the SCO19 will attend and they will put him down. That will be the end of him.”

  Corneliu handed the weapon back. “I want no part in this.”

  Bogdan went quiet. “I want you to have no part in it. Leave this side of things to me. Like I said, I’m showing you this just as a precaution. Full disclosure. In the off chance we get eyes on McGovern first I will try and capture using the M99. Embassy Man will arrange for McGovern to be collected, stored and shipped to Romania.” Bogdan changed tact, smoothing the situation. “Don’t worry, Corneliu. It’s just a precaution. The only reason I’m here like this is because you almost stumbled on to him. You weren’t supposed to find him, you were supposed to be digging up his history and nothing else. On that subject, how is the networking?”

  Corneliu shook his head. He felt weak. He wished Bogdan had not arrived. “I didn’t find McGovern by networking.” He sat on the edge of the bed, his legs weakening. “I haven’t even done any networking. I didn’t find him at all. It was the British police, they tracked his internet use and the girl’s mobile phone to within a few meters from where he had the girl. I stumbled onto it.”

  “Are you going back to networking?”

  “I assume so. It feels kind of redundant. I barely started it.”

  “Well, get back to it, but don’t share any information with the Brits. If you think you have a lead on where McGovern might go, let me know about it. After that, you don’t need to be involved.”

  ----- X -----

  Paul moved to a hostel filled with migrant workers and rented a single room to hide himself away. He spent the morning in a sleepy café trying to read the papers, but the stories were making him rage on the inside.

  He was still the main headline but today the papers had more information and a huge admiration for Detective Corneliu Latis. Paul read a panel that called him Romania’s Robocop.

  “You’re no Supercop, Latis,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “I could fucking snuff you with a single cut… I will kill you if you come close enough.”

  In the newspaper résumé, Latis rescued girls from forced prostitution. He was a crusader, a man who gets things done, a force for good. The tabloid falsely claimed that Paul was a frequent user of online S&M dating sites and had an interview with a lying woman titled ‘My lucky escape from madman’.

  “I’m vilified,” Paul whispered. “They’re talking shit about me. Making me a crass pervert. I should go to their newspaper office and fucking kill them. Liars. It’s bullshit, every word they print is a fucking lie.”

  Latis was under his skin. He wanted to slit his throat every time he saw his face. Wanted to stab knives between his ribs every time he read his name. The bastard had looked unsure and uncomfortable sitting at the table on the television news, yet when he was asked to comment, he cleared his throat, straightened his posture and spoke with gentle confidence. This was the man they’d sent to find him.

  He put the paper down and picked up a more serious broadsheet. Reading was hard; he was arguing with sentences and assertions in his head and could barely absorb the information. Another picture of Latis. Paul gripped the handle to a knife under his jacket. “You found Nisha and fucked everything you cunt. I should find you and kill you.”

  There was a panel of information with the picture. Detective Corneliu Latis. Nineteen years with the Brasov Police Department. Specialist Liaison Officer with Interpol. Recently ended his police role to work with The Institute of Psychopathological Research which specialises in handling and managing the most violent criminals. Is an expert at analysing criminal networks.

  Paul took an internet connection at the back of the café. He searched for The Institute of Psychopathological Research. Nothing. He tried adding Latis name and got nothing but news items. He found a Romanian language search engine and tried again. Nothing still. Paul scanned the newspapers looking for a missing clue but found no further information. He rearranged the words in the search term
just to make sure it wasn’t worded oddly in Romanian but still no matches came. There was no internet presence for this institute. On the outside chance he used a translation service to convert the name into Romanian and tried again.

  Institutul de Cercetare Psihopatologice.

  There was a webpage.

  Information was scant. They had a photograph of an imposing building amongst mountains and a sign displaying the name of the institute but the contact address was a street in Bucharest. Was this the place that Latis worked? He found a street-view of the given address. It was a doorway in a busy street, not the same building as the photograph.

  There was a name associated with the institute, The director was a man named Lucian Noica. Paul searched the name and was deluged with information. Lucian Noica was a media whore. Articles in magazines, scientific papers in medical journals. The first article was called, ‘Iluzii si Violenta’. Paul copied the text and translated it online. ‘Delusions and Violence.’ The sub heading translated as ‘The care and management of dangerous men.’ This had to be the place where Latis worked. He went back to the search results and clicked images.

  Lucian Noica.

  Groomed. Perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect smile. He’d never seen the man before but there was something utterly familiar about his face, as though he’d seen a long lost friend. It was the deepest deja vu ever felt. “Do I know you?” His hands began trembling, even his knees began to shake. He looked at the name again in the search bar. Doctor Lucian Noica, director of a research institute, a man who writes articles about men suffering delusions and violence.

  The penny dropped. The realisation was profound.

  “Holy shit…” Paul clamped his hands over his mouth at the realisation. “You know about this. You know about the illness, you know what makes vampires… You’ve got a whole fucking research institute.”

  Paul went back to the search results. Medical reports, articles, original research. He needed this. He’d just walked into the goldmine. Everything he needed was known by this man. The articles needed translating to English and printing out. He needed to get to work studying this stuff. He needed to know what Noica knew… He needed to talk with him.

  Latis.

  Corneliu Latis was his lapdog in London. He was here somewhere in the city and he knew what was going on. Latis was scum who deserved to be slaughtered, but before that, he needed to talk.

  ----- X -----

  Corneliu couldn’t face spending time with Bogdan, or networking, or anything else that he was supposed to do. He chose to spend a few days resting before going back to the task. Bogdan’s intentions added an unwanted dynamic to the situation.

  He was comfortable in London. The praise and admiration bestowed on him almost made life tolerable. He walked the streets and drank in bars. He found himself enjoying strolls along the South Bank of the river, sitting on benches with his coat pulled tight against the cold. It was the space he needed to clear his head. What would his future hold? Could this brief success be leveraged into something positive? Was there a future career with Noica?

  He waited a few days then visited Nisha Khumari in hospital. She was slumped upright in bed and an older woman with large thick rimmed glasses was feeding her with a syringe; he assumed it was her mother. Nisha wore a loose fitting hospital gown and her face was wrapped in a plastic half-mask like the Phantom of the Opera; a padded bandage ran over her head and under her chin which seemed double the size it should be.

  “Hi, My name is Corneliu Latis, I am the policeman who found you,” he said.

  Her eyes rolled around sleepily and closed; he thought she’d fallen asleep until tears began running and she found the strength to hum a noise of acknowledgement.

  “Her jaw is wired, Mr. Latis, she can’t speak,” her mother said. “Come in, please.”

  “Thank you... oh, these are for you.” He handed over flowers picked up in the gift shop and took a seat. Nisha wrote tiredly in a notebook.

  Her mother smiled at him. “We’ve been talking about you, Mr. Latis.”

  Fighting against sedatives, Nisha pushed the notebook forward, it said, “Thank you for everything,” and was followed by three love hearts. For a moment, Corneliu felt his own emotions swell and had to fight them down to remain composed. He nodded courteously and smiled but didn’t speak less he wore his heart on his sleeve.

  Nisha was damaged but would survive. She wasn’t cold and dead in the boot of a car missing organs. It was never his fault what had happened to those girls but he realised now that he’d taken on the responsibility. Those girls were what happened when he failed at his job. Nisha was what happened when he succeeded.

  She reached out and took hold of his hand. He felt awkward. He had nothing to say and was thankful when her mother resumed feeding her with a syringe.

  “Are you any closer to catching Paul McGovern?” the mother asked. He felt Nisha squeeze his hand.

  “I think the police are making progress. I feel confident that what can be done is being done.”

  “They said in the newspapers that you only found Nisha because you were searching for Paul McGovern. They said the British police weren’t searching.”

  “No, that’s not true. The British police tracked Nisha’s mobile telephone. I was in the area at the time looking for McGovern when the information came through.” He turned to Nisha directly. “We knew he had been in King’s Cross and when we saw your mobile phone in the same place we started looking everywhere. If I hadn’t found you, then someone else would have.” It was a kind lie; she would have died without him. She squeezed his hand. “Everybody was looking for you,” he reiterated. “There is no way they wouldn’t have found you.”

  Nisha wrote in the book, “What will happen when they catch him?”

  Corneliu felt a cold shiver thinking about Bogdan and his guns. He thought about what Bogdan had said of SCO19 and how they would put McGovern down. “When he’s caught, I assume he’ll be put on trial here first and Romania will request to extradite him. He’s wanted for two murders in Romania. Either way, he’ll be going to prison for the rest of his life.”

  “He deserves to,” the mother said.

  Corneliu nodded. “I think so too.”

  ----- X -----

  The few days break Cornel gave himself gently stretched out to a week. He received an email from Blackwell with a slew of magazine articles written by McGovern, some of which were for a fish keeping journal. The publishers would send McGovern the data and he would fashion the articles. He’d utilised this knowledge of fish and aquariums to get the job at UCL. McGovern’s resourcefulness constantly surprised.

  He drip fed the articles to Noica in daily emails. Subterfuge, to make it look like he was working, sending a new article or short story here and there as though he had just discovered it when in reality he was strolling along the river every day.

  He wasn’t motivated for the tedious task of combing McGovern’s contacts and knew they wouldn’t find him like that; McGovern had faked an identity and lived off the grid. He didn’t rely on other people to survive. The ball was now in the court of the British police and all they could do was wait for him to surface.

  A large part of his apathy was that he didn’t want to play a role engineering the ending. If Bogdan was to be believed, McGovern would die in a hail of bullets from SCO19, or a well placed shot from himself. As bad as McGovern was, Corneliu didn’t want any part arranging his murder.

  One thing that did play on his conscience was Nisha Khumari. He had photos of her injuries that made him feel sick. The photographs of her breasts in particular set his teeth on edge. The pictures showed deep slices, sutured with heavy butterfly stitches and painted with yellow antiseptic gel. The poor girl. The photographs were taken whilst she laid unconscious in bed with a huge dressing obscuring her face. Lovely dusky skin, then these horrendous wounds of mutilation to her breasts. He would never want her to know how close she came to being like those other victims. She was
only a few moves away from being found butchered with her organs missing.

  McGovern was a sadist. He had stripped her naked, chained her up, then cut her to inflict unbearable physical torture through some kind of misogynistic sadism. There was no reason for it, no reason at all. If he’d wanted to kill her he could have killed her, if he’d wanted to rape her he could have raped her; why had he wanted this? He had subjected Nisha Khumari to an unimaginable terror. He broke her skull, her jaw, shattered her cheekbone, sliced deeply through her breasts then locked her in absolute darkness. How could one human being inflict so much pain onto another?

  It was the darkness that really got to Cornel. Nisha was horrifically injured and McGovern left her to cry and panic in a dungeon of utter helplessness.

  His cruelty was absolute.

  His behaviour irredeemable.

  Maybe Bogdan was right. Maybe he did deserve to be put down like a sick animal. One thing was for certain, he had to be stopped before he did this to someone else, but what was wrong with him? What had made him change into this? Paul McGovern was a quiet kid who wrote magazine articles on how to keep tropical fish. Something had happened to him, some strange and inexplicable thing had turned that nice, capable young man with a promising future into a multiple murderer. Noica called it the source. There no longer seemed any reason to doubt. Corneliu had always insisted that he didn’t believe in vampires. Then Paul McGovern happened.

  He realised he’d changed his mind.

  Vampires aren’t storybook creatures that fly in the night. Vampires don’t have supernatural powers or a fear of garlic or engage in high-school romances… but real vampires exist… one of them was out there… and he was terrifying.

  ----- X -----

  Paul built a database of all the medium to expensive hotels within one mile of Scotland Yard. There were over two hundred. He would never have imagined there could be so many. His presumption was that Latis would have to stay somewhere close. He could be staying in a rented apartment or some other lodgings, but this seemed a fair way to begin.