by Simon Hawke
"Yes, I am descended from him," said Dracula. "Not many people outside my country know of him and those that do, such as yourself, invariably ask me if it is true that my ancestor was as bloodthirsty as the legend has it. He was, indeed. However, he is a national hero in my country for having driven out the Turks, who were quite savage in their own right. It is fortunate for all of us that we live in times that are so much more civilized. I fear that my ancestor would not have approved of me. He was a merciless warlord, a voivode. and I am merely an extravagantly wealthy vagabond. No one shall ever tell stories about me. But now I have forgotten what we were discussing. Ah, yes. Miss Crewe and Mr. Hesketh, was it not? They seemed quite taken with each other. Such a pity. They made such a delightful couple. Have I answered your question, Inspector ... Grayson, was it'?"
"Yes, thank you, Count," said Grayson, "I will not be taking up any more of your time. Sorry to trouble you." "No trouble at all. Good night to you, Inspector." "And good night to you, Count."
Grayson held the door for him as he climbed in. then he shut it and waved up at the coachman. For a moment, he froze, startled at the sight of the coachman's face staring down at him. The lower half of the man's face was covered by a muffler. He had long grey hair and he wore a high-collared tweed coat and a bowler hat, but it was the eyes that startled Grayson. They were looking down at him with an absolutely feral gaze. For a brief moment, they almost seemed to glow in the dark and then the coachman cricked the whip and the horses took off at a trot. Grayson stared after the coach until it disappeared into the fog.
Private Paul Ransome woke up strapped to a bed in a large, luxuriously appointed bedroom. He had been drugged and he did not know how long he had been unconscious. The restraints would not allow him any motion beyond some slight movements of his head and neck. He felt ill, disoriented, and there was a maddening itch at a spot on his throat which he could not scratch. He felt nauseous and he had a fever. The sheets were damp with his sweat.
The bedroom door opened and a man dressed in a dark butler's suit entered, the same man who had answered the door of the sprawling Richmond Hill estate that Ransome had come to investigate. He had long, steel grey hair that hung down to his shoulders and he was powerfully built. He was swarthy looking, with sunken eyes, a high forehead and a prominent jaw. The mouth was wide, thin- lipped and cruel. He saw that Ransome was awake, turned and left the room before Ransome could say anything.
Ransome desperately tried to remember what had happened, but his mind
was a complete blank. He could not seem to concentrate. He knew he was in
trouble. Bad trouble. And that knowledge was confirmed when the door opened once again several moments later and a tall, dark, well-built, striking looking man with emerald green eyes and a long scar down the side of his face came in and stood over his bed, looking down at him.
"Drakov!" Ransome said.
"Good morning, Private Ransome," Nikolai Drakov said in a deep voice. He smiled. "How do you feel?"
"Sick as a dog,” said Ransome. "What did you do to me?" "A number of things," said Drakov pleasantly, as if they were merely discussing the weather.
"Nothing fatal, however,"
"But I assume that's coming, right?"
"Oh, on the contrary, I want you alive. I have some very special plans for you."
"What happened?" Ransome said. "How did I blow my cover? I don't remember anything.–
"You remember what happened before you came here, don't you?" Drakov said.
"Yes, but after that it's all a blank."
"Good."
"What did you do, damn you?"
"Well, you might say I've influenced you somewhat, in more ways than one," said Drakov. "You see. I was prepared for you people this time. I no longer take any chances. You were scanned when you approached this house and your cybernetic implants were detected. I'm really very well protected here. Just the same, it now appears that I shall have to leave this comfortable house. A pity, but if you found me, the other members of your team cannot be far behind."
"It won't work, Drakov," Ransome said. "I'm not going to tell you anything."
Drakov chuckled. "Spare me the esprit de corps heroics. Ransome. You may not know it, but you have already told me everything I wished to know. I am quite looking forward to another confrontation with my father's first string team. You were just an appetizer. It's Delaney, Cross and Steiger that I want. And you are going to help me.–
"The hell I will,” said Ransome. "I'll die first."
Drakov grinned. "In a manner of speaking, yes, you will," he said. "But never fear, you shall be reborn. Your rebirth is in progress even as we speak."
Ransome felt a knot forming in his stomach. "What have you done to me?"
"How does your throat feel, Ransome?"
"My—•" Involuntarily, Ransome tried to raise his hand to his throat, but the restraints wouldn't let him move. "Jesus," he said. "Oh, Jesus.”
His eyes went to the butler standing by the door, watching him silently.
Drakov followed his gaze. "No, it wasn't Janos," he said. Drakov beckoned the butler forward. "However, Janos is someone you've been looking for. I thought you might like to be properly introduced. Pvt. Paul Ransome, Janos Volkov. Janos is, in a manner of speaking, one of my children. I'm really very proud of him. Janos is the very first of his kind, a triumph of genetic engineering and biomodification. He is the werewolf you've been seeking. I'm sorry to say that you will not be able to see Janos in all his hirsute splendor, as he has reached the end of his monthly cycle, but take my word for it, it is an impressive sight."
He nodded to the butler, who turned and left without a word.
"My plans for you, however," Drakov said, "do not call for infection by lycanthmpic genes. No, for you, Ransome, I have something infinitely more interesting in mind.”
Ransome was breaking out in a fresh sweat and he started to shiver. He fought to keep his teeth from chattering. "Whatever you've infected me with, Drakov, it'll never work,I promise you. I'll kill myself.–
"Yes, I'm sure you would," said Drakov, "which is why I have conditioned you with a number of programmed imperatives. A relatively simple matter of neutralizing your cybernetic implants and installing some of my own in a
minor surgical procedure. When I have completed your programming, you will no
more be able to commit suicide than you will be able to discuss what's happened to you with the other members of your team. I had hoped that it would be Finn Delaney who fell into my hands; he would make a splendid werewolf, don't you think? Or Andre Cross, what a wonderfully seductive vampire she would make. But you'll do for the moment."
The door to the bedroom opened once again and a tall, slim, middle-aged man with a drooping moustache and jet black hair combed into a widow's peak entered. He was sharp featured, with an aquiline nose, a high forehead, sunken cheeks and thin red lips. He was dressed in dark evening clothes and a long black opera cape with a high collar. His dark eyes were those of a psychotic.
Drakov smiled. "I could never resist a touch of melodrama." he said. "Allow me to present Count Dracula."
7 _______
Sgt. Anthony Rizzo waited for his relief, warning his hands over the glowing coals in his pushcart. The sweet and musty aroma of roasting chestnuts rose from the cart, which had become a familiar feature to the residents of Bow Street over the past week. Each morning, he arrived at the corner with his pushcart, near the old Row Street Police Court, and many of the local residents had made a habit of buying a small bag of roasted chestnuts from him on their way to work. Dressed as an Italian immigrant, Rizzo addressed his customers in a sort of broken Cockney, a mangled dialect spiced with Italian phrases and delivered in a robust, gesticulatory manner. It was a "purloined letter” method of surveillance, based on the principle of being so completely obvious that one would be overlooked.
The streets of London were full of vendors and musicians. Around Covent Garden, it wasnot unusual
to see entire string quartets playing in the street, collecting money in the battered cases for their instruments, which they placed open before them on the sidewalks. The costermongers were a prominent fixture on the city streets. There were ice cream sellers: fruit vendors; men selling various wind-up toys for children; balladeers who performed songs of their own composition, often based on headlines in the newspapers, then sold the sheet music: muffin men ringing their bells and the ubiquitous flower girls, who were usually not girls at all. but mostly elderly women wrapped in shawls. selling hunches of flowers or fresh buttonholes for gentlemen to wear in their lapels. Sometimes these street vendors were regarded as a nuisance, but no one ever objected to Rizzo's presence on Bow Street, because Rizzo did not disturb the residents with any vendor's street cries. He depended instead on the anima of the roasting chestnuts to draw his customers. It worked well
enough and he usually did a nice bit of business in the morning, less throughout
the afternoon, and towards evening, as people started to return home from work, business picked up once more for several hours. Meanwhile, he kept his eye on Tony Hesketh's apartment just across the street. Surveillance work was often very boring and Rizzo's stakeout was especially ennervating. Anything that could have made the long watch more bearable, such as reading a book or newspaper, was out of the question since it would distract him from his duties, so there was nothing for Rizzo to do except stand on his feet all day and sell his chestnuts, all the while keeping alert for any sign of Hesketh. By the end of the day, he was worn out. Someone would show up in the evening to relieve him, someone who could take advantage of the darkness and the fog for concealment and did not require a pushcart. Then Rizzo would go back to the Hotel Metropole command post to soak his feet and get some sleep. But now it was getting late and his relief had not yet arrived. His feet were tired and his back was sore. Rizzo was not especially worried. lie knew the team was being spread thin and relief would arrive as soon as they could spare someone, but just the same, he hoped they would send someone soon. He was tired and it would start to look unusual if he remained too late on the corner with his pushcart.
He sold a hag of chestnuts to a grey-haired gentleman in a long tweed Inverness and a bowler hat, apparently on his way out for the evening.
"Working a bit late tonight?" the man said with a smile.
Rizzo shrugged elaborately. "Aah. eez the wife, she 'ave 'er seezter comma to visit. All night long, ya-ta-ta-to-ta, like cheekens." He made rapid gestures with his hands, fingers together and outstretched, thumb and index fingers coming together and apart quickly in a representative gesture of ceaseless chatter. "Aah," he said. waving his hand in derision. I stay late anda sell my cheznoots."
" Don 't bl a me yo u on e b it , old ma n, " s aid t he ma n , grinning. "Know just how you feel. My sister-in-law's a bloody horror herself."
"Grazi," said Rizzo, accepting the man's money and putting . it in the little
cash box on his cart. "Ciao, signori."
"Ciao to you, too, Sergeant Rizzo.”
Rizzo glanced up quickly. too late, his eyes focusing on the small plastic pistol held in the man's right hand. There was a faint chuffing sound, halfway between a cough and a hiss, and the tiny dart struck him in the chest. He
barely had time to realize he had been shot before he lost consciousness.
Pvt. Linda Craven crooned a Cockney song to herself while she sat on an overturned basket by the curb, making fresh buttonholes from some of her flowers. She wore a long dress made out of Connie black linsey-woolsey, lace- up ankle high boots with rundown heels, a black plush jacket, a long black shawl and a feathered hat. Every now and then, when someone would pass by, she would stretch out a handful of flowers and make a halfhearted, plaintive- sounding pitch, punctuated by a sniffle. and then she would return to her song, a song about how," loverly" it would be to have a room somewhere far away from the cold night air, with lots of chocolate to eat and an enormous chair to sit in. Sung in an ear-gratingly Cockney whine, it sounded perfectly in keeping with the time, even though it wouldn't be written for years to come.
There was still no sign of H. G. Wells. She felt utterly miserable about the whole thing. She blamed herself for having slipped up badly It did not occur to her that perhaps the mason Steiger hadn't given her hell was that there really wasn't anything she could have done about the situation. The odds of her having been able to prevent what happened would have been infinitesimal. Even if she had recognized Moreau, a man she had never seen before, it would have been necessary for her to notice him activating his warp disc, an action easily concealed, and move quickly enough to kill him before he could clock out with Wells.
It would have seemed rather incongruous, to say the least, if a Victorian woman had suddenly opened up on a man in a London teashop with a laser or a disruptor pistol, which was one of the reasons why she wasn't armed with one. If anyone in the teashop had wondered where the two men at the table by the window had suddenly gone, they would have been struck dumb by the sight of a man being killed by molecular disruption, briefly wreathed in the glowing blue mist of Cherenkov radiation and then disintegrating right before their eyes. Paranoia ran high at TAC-HQ. The warp discs they all wore were failsafed and, in ease of an emergency, there was an arms locker hack at the command post, likewise failsafed to self-destruct unless it was opened properly. To remain on the safe side, the team had been issued weapons more in keeping with the time. In her purse, Linda carried a Colt Single Action Army revolver, otherwise known as a .45 Peacemaker. It weighed almost 3 pounds and it packed a wallop. It was an 1873 design and, although it would have been regarded as highly unusual for a young woman in London to be carrying such a gun, as a visitor from America, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that she might have one.
She knew what she would have to do if Moreau showed up again with Wells. She would have to make certain she could get a clear shot at him without endangering Wells or anybody else, which meant she might have to place herself in a position of vulnerability. She'd have to move fast and get in close, kill Moreau as quickly as possible and then either prevail upon Wells to return with her to the command post or take him by force. Wells would have to be debriefed. She had no doubt that she could handle Wells and she felt reasonably certain that she could take care of Moreau. After all, the man was a scientist, not a soldier. Still, it would be wry risky. There was a good chance that Moreau
could return with Wells during someone else's shift on surveillance duty, but Linda hoped it would happen during her shift, so that she could redeem herself for having lost him in the first place. She didn't even want to think about what could happen if Wells never returned from wherever it was Moreau had taken hint.
She was only twenty-two years old, still a rookie, green and on her first mission. She was painfully aware of her lack of experience compared to the other members of the mission support team. She was thrilled to be working with the First Division's number one temporal adjustment team, but she also felt intimidated. Andre Cross was a legend in the service, as was Finn Delaney, already a veteran when she was still learning how to crawl. Steiger was Gen. Moses Forrester's second-in command and prior to that, he had been the TIA's senior field agent. She knew they couldn't have been happy to have a rookie assigned to their support team. None of them had said as much, but she was certain that on a mission of such importance, they would have preferred more experienced personnel.
Scott Neilson seemed to understand. Like her, he was a rookie, though he wasn't quite as green as she was and he seemed to think much faster on his feet.
"Look," he had told her one night while they were having dinner in a pub, "nobody's going to hold it against you that you're a rookie. They were all green themselves once. It's really very simple. You either learn fast or you don't make it."
"That's just what I'm afraid of," she had said. "It's not so much that I might not make it myself that worries me, but the idea that I might screw up due to my ine
xperience and it could mutt in temporal interference, a disruption or maybe even a timestream split. The idea of all that responsibility is simply staggering. The pressure's unbelievable. It gives me migraines:"
"And it makes you nauseous and upsets your stomach and you can't sleep and when you do sleep, you have recurring nightmares." Neilson said.
"I know, I've been there. They've all been there, except maybe Steiger. Nothing seems to bother him much, but then you've got to be pretty cold to be a TIA agent to begin with."
"So how do you handle it?” she said.
"You don't,” he said, "Believe it or not, after a while, it sort of handles itself. There's only so much pressure you can take before you either break or you just get used to it. You even become casual about it. You have to, otherwise you simply can't function. If you were the type who was liable to break, chances are it would have come out in your psych profile and you never would have made it this far. But almost everybody goes through what you're experiencing the first few times out to the Minus Side. Nobody expects a rookie to take it like a veteran. They're not going to cut you any slack, but they won't hold your inexperience against you, either. Anybody can mess up, even someone like Delaney, who's got more years in the service than both our ages combined."
