by Dan Simmons
“How…” began the priest.
“Your job will be to get the sample and my note to the U.S. Embassy,” she said. “One of your Franciscan priest buddies in mufti, perhaps. I’m sure the strigoi are watching for us to appear at the embassy.”
“Yes,” said Lucian. “That is certain.”
“But all we have to do is get the sample in.” continued Kate. She pointed at O’Rourke. “You invoke Senator Harlen’s name in a note, or do whatever political magic you can, and the sample will be in a diplomatic pouch headed Stateside by tonight.”
The priest rubbed his beard. “It might work.”
“It will work,” said Kate. She was so tired that she sagged against the doorframe. “I didn’t need Joshua’s blood after all.”
“But that doesn’t make any difference in your going after him, does it, Kate?” said O’Rourke.
She blinked at him. “No. No difference at all.”
O’Rourke pulled his blanket up. “Then we might as well get a couple of hours’ sleep before we cure AIDS and cancer. It promises to be another long day.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
IT was all on fire.
Lucian stopped the Dacia half a block from the medical school and he and Kate watched as the ancient fire trucks drove up over the curb or blocked the street while firemen ran hose to a single hydrant and shouted at each other through the fence surrounding the university. Smoke climbed in thick columns through the brisk morning air. Kate could see flames in the shattered medical school windows, the orange glow mirroring the reflected sunrise in the office-building windows on the west side of the street.
“Stay here,” said Lucian and walked toward the barricade of fire trucks and official vehicles. Despite the early hour, a small crowd had gathered.
Kate stepped out of the Dacia and leaned dejectedly against the car door. She had wakened after only two hours’ sleep to find Lucian still asleep in the outer room and O’Rourke gone. There had been no note. She and Lucian had shared a cold breakfast, waited another twenty minutes for the priest, and then left a note saying only Gone to get the sample. Kate had thrown her single large carry-on bag in the back of the Dacia, leaving only her toothbrush at the basement apartment.
Another fire truck roared by as Lucian walked back to the car. “The fire started in the basement,” he said. “The morgue and medical labs are gone.” He settled behind the wheel, and Kate dropped into the passenger seat. The column of smoke was thicker now.
“Could it have been an accident?” she asked.
Lucian tapped the wheel. “We have to assume it’s not. The strigoi must have traced me to the school and found their man. I doubt if they went to the trouble of removing him before they set the fire.”
Kate shuddered at the thought of the thing in the tank writhing while flames filled the basement. “What do we do?” she said.
Lucian started the Dacia and drove back to the area of narrow streets west of Cişmigiu Gardens. He had pulled to a stop opposite their building when Kate said, “Keep moving!”
Lucian put the Dacia in gear and drove slowly down the street. “What?” he said without turning his head.
“The shade was down in my basement window when we left,” she said. “It’s up now.”
“Perhaps Father O’Rourke—” began Lucian and then said, “Shit.” He was looking at the rearview mirror. “There’s a car following us. It was parked in the alley near the corner.”
Kate resisted the urge to look back.
“It’s a black Mercedes,” whispered Lucian. “The Securitate like to use them.”
“They can’t be very inconspicuous tailing people in a Mercedes,” said Kate, keeping her voice light. Her heart was pounding and she felt a little sick.
“The Securitate don’t need to be inconspicuous,” said Lucian. He had turned right onto Strada Ştirbei Vodă and now had to wait as a streetcar lumbered out of a narrow sidestreet and took on passengers. Traffic coming the other way on the narrow brick street kept him from passing. “Damn,” he whispered. “There’s another one.”
Now Kate did turn and look. There were two Mercedes sedans behind the horse and wagon immediately behind them. The streetcar finally moved on and Lucian kept the Dacia close behind it, waiting for an opportunity to pass.
“I think there’s one ahead of us,” he said, his voice absolutely flat. “Yes, a black Mercedes in front of the trolley. Four men in it, just like the cars behind us.”
Kate tried to quell a rising panic in her breast. “Isn’t it good that it’s Securitate?” she said. “Not strigoi?”
Lucian chewed his lip. “These Securitate probably are strigoi. Or they work for them.” He glanced at sidestreets but did not turn. The wagon had turned off behind them and the Mercedes were close enough now that Kate could see the cigarettes of the men in the front seat.
“How did they find us?” whispered Kate. She was clutching her travel bag, thinking of the vials of serum in it. To have come so far for nothing.
Lucian’s voice was hard with tension. “Your priest maybe? Perhaps he ratted on us when we were close to sending the blood sample to the embassy. Maybe he’s been Securitate all along.”
“No,” said Kate, but her mind whirled with dark possibilities. Where are you, O’Rourke? “Can we get away?” she said.
Lucian had chewed his lip until it was bloody. “They’ve probably got the city sealed,” he said, glancing in his mirror. Suddenly the streetcar rumbled into a sidestreet and their Dacia was part of a convoy of black sedans. There were now two in front as well as the two immediately behind them.
“They’ll stop us in a minute,” said Lucian. “Somewhere they can shoot if they have to…not that they wouldn’t shoot in a crowd.” He quit chewing his lip and stared at nothing for a moment. “A crowd,” he whispered. “There was an anti-government rally this morning.” He grinned almost demonically. “Hang on, Kate.”
They were just coming up to Calea Victoriei when Lucian spun the wheel hard right and accelerated into the wide Piaţa Gheorghi-Dej opposite the bullet-riddled Art Museum and the Hall of the Palace of the Socialist Republic of Romania. Striped barricades blocked off the major part of the plaza, but Lucian accelerated again and smashed through the wooden barriers. Kate looked behind them in time to see all four Mercedes swing right, bounce across curbs, and come rushing after them. Pedestrians on Calea Victoriei leaped aside.
Kate turned to see the rally ahead of them—perhaps three hundred people with as many police surrounding them. Trucks full of miners in overalls glowered at both police and protesters. Various flags and posters flew above the peaceful congregation, but the assemblage parted with shouts and screams as Lucian drove straight into the fringes of the crowd, steering wildly to avoid hitting people. Police whistles shrilled as Lucian drove the Dacia in a half-circle, wheeling deeper into the confused mass of protesters and gray-coated police.
“Out!” he shouted, opening his own door while the car was still moving. He had grabbed a heavy textbook from the seat and now dropped it onto the accelerator before rolling out the door.
Kate clutched her purse and bag and jumped out the passenger side, hitting the bricks hard and losing her footing. She rolled and tumbled into the backs of people’s legs and at least one man and a woman went down with her. More people screamed as the Dacia cut its slow path through the crowd and the Mercedes screeched to a halt just beyond the fringes of the mob.
Getting shakily to her feet, Kate threw the strap of her duffel bag over her shoulder, checked to make sure she had her purse, and looked down at herself. Her coat was dusty and one knee was bleeding beneath her black polyester pants, but her clothes were not tom. Lucian had bought her local clothes upon arrival so that she could go out without attracting undue attention. Lucian.
She moved with the crowd now, craning to see him, but the crowd was ebbing back and forth like a single, panicked organism. The Dacia had gone up over the curb and rolled to a stop near the bullet-scarred Ath
enée Palace Hotel, and the Mercedes were moving through the plaza now like black sharks cruising among swimmers. But the source of the screams was behind her, and Kate wheeled to see the gray-overalled miners leaping down from their trucks and wading into the protesters with clubs and metal pipes. Kate saw flags dip and fall as the people dropped them and fled, then watched as a woman carrying a small child was clubbed by two miners. She could not see Lucian anywhere.
Police were blowing whistles, soldiers had appeared from nowhere and were leaping from trucks, but they ignored the miners and the miners ignored them as the brutality and panic spread across the plaza. Kate ran wildly with two women in black and a professional-looking man with gray hair. Two young men with long hair joined them in their mad dash for the shelter of Calea Victoriei and the hotels there, but shots suddenly rang out and one of the young men fell as if tripped by a wire. Kate paused, started back for him, thinking of the few medical supplies in her bag, but then glanced back at the rushing police and miners crossing the plaza toward her and looked at the bloody mass that had been the back of the college student’s head. She turned and ran with the screaming crowd again.
There were more police cars coming down Calea Victoriei, their sirens dopplering up and down the scale, lights flashing, Kate turned down Ştirbei Vodă and ran back the way she and Lucian had driven. Some of the people along the street here were pressing toward the plaza, but others were fleeing as they saw the miners out of control. Kate glanced back and saw one of the big men in gray overalls charging down the street toward an older woman trying to move quickly just behind Kate. The woman still clutched a placard to her chest that read FREEDOM in both English and Romanian.
Kate knew that the “miners” were often Securitate agents whom the new government used to terrorize the opposition just as Ceauşescu had; and many of the miners were actually miners, brutal thugs who still toed the Communist and neo-Fascist party lines and were brought into the city as shock troops. They obviously enjoyed their work.
The miner rushing behind Kate grasped the older woman by the collar, threw her up against an iron fence, and began beating her with a thick wooden dowel. The woman screamed. Kate paused, knew that it was insanity to intervene, and then crouched between two parked cars to fumble in her big bag. Frightened pedestrians rushed past on the sidewalk and street, but no one stopped to help the woman being beaten. She had slumped against the fence now, but the miner had set his legs wide and was methodically clubbing her to the pavement.
Kate removed two disposable syringes of Demerol from her medkit, tossed away the wrappings, walked straight to the miner and plunged both needles into the back of the man’s broad neck. She stepped back as the miner cursed, staggered back from the bleeding woman, and turned a shocked and infuriated face in Kate’s direction. He spat and shouted something at her, raising the club.
Kate was wearing thick-soled peasant shoes that Lucian had bought her. They were as heavy as combat boots. Kate balanced on her left leg and kicked the miner in the balls with the same full follow-through that Tom had taught her in their touch football games in Boulder. She imagined a kick that would have to clear the crossbar from thirty yards out and put that much energy into it.
The big miner made no noise at all as he went down and curled up on the pavement. He did not get up. There were more screams and police whistles from up the street toward the plaza. More miners were chasing down fleeing protesters, and one of the black Mercedes was trying to force its way through stalled traffic on Ştirbei Vodă.
Kate knelt by the bleeding woman and helped lift her to her feet. It looked as if the woman’s nose was broken, and there were teeth missing between pulped lips. Suddenly a man crossed the street and put his arm around the woman, speaking to her in encouraging tones. He was obviously a spouse or relative. Where were you when we needed you? Kate thought at the man and then left them, retrieving her bag and heading down the street in a fast walk.
When she glanced behind her, she saw the Mercedes only half a block away, police flashers behind it. Suddenly to her left there was an opening in the iron fence and she pushed in through curious onlookers, went down stone steps, and realized where she was.
Cişmigiu Gardens. The same entrance O’Rourke had brought her to that May day so many eternities ago.
Kate moved deeper into the gardens, taking the narrower sidewalks and less-traveled lanes. From the streets beyond there came the sound of sirens, receding screams, and at least one more shot. Kate realized that her leg was bleeding more seriously than she had thought; she found a stone bench set behind a hedge and away from the walks and used the last of her Kleenex to clean the wound as well as possible. Her skin was gashed from her knee to just above her ankle. Kate used a cotton handkerchief and a Tampax from her duffel bag as an improvised field dressing.
The bleeding contained for the moment, she sat there, aching and disoriented. A cold wind came up and sent leaves spiraling down around her. The flowerbeds were unkempt, the flowers lifeless after heavy frosts. Heavy footfalls echoed from the main sidewalk just beyond a thick hedge.
Kate began to weep then, unable to hold the burning down in her throat any longer. She lowered her face into her hands and just wept.
Kate did not know how long she sat there crying—it might have been a few minutes or half an hour—but she was suddenly aware that it was raining. Hurried footsteps sounded again on the unseen sidewalk as searchers or park-goers ran for cover. Kate simply sat there and lifted her face to the cold rain. Leaves dropped around her like wet paper as the rain turned to sleet. She lowered her face and let the icy pellets pound her head and shoulders.
Kate realized that she was laughing softly. As the sudden, icy rain let up, she raised her face again to the gray sky and said softly, “Do your worst, you bitch.” Misfortune had always been a female entity to Kate. But then so had the idea of God.
The sleet stopped at the same time as Kate’s laughter. She shivered—her cheap coat was soaked through—but ignored the cold as she focused the problem-solving part of her mind on the situation. The tears had helped—emptying her, calming her—and she approached the situation as if it were a difficult piece of hematological diagnosis.
She was an illegal alien in a hostile country where almost unimaginable resources were arrayed against her and the chances of finding Joshua had dwindled almost to zero. Even if she found the child, she had been able to put together no plan except to run with him for the border or the American Embassy. Meanwhile she was separated from both of her friends in the country, an American priest and a Romanian medical student, and sure of neither as a true friend. What if O’Rourke did tip the Securitate and the strigoi? What if Lucian were the strigoi equivalent of a double agent, setting her up to be used and then discarded?
Kate shook her head. She did not have enough data to assess either man’s loyalty, although O’Rourke’s disappearance just before the fire that destroyed their J-virus source seemed incriminating. It was all a moot point unless she could join forces with one or both of them again.
Do I really want to see them again?
Yes, she realized. Not just because she was cold, wet, scared, and unable to speak Romanian, but because she had complex feelings for each of them.
Deal with that later. What’s the next step?
It seemed that if the strigoi were actually on their tail to the point of staking out the apartment and burning the medical school lab, then there was no way that she could follow Radu Fortuna again. Security would be heightened. Whatever part of the strigoi Investiture Ceremony that was going on tonight would go on without her.
Where to find Lucian or O’Rourke?
All of the places she could think of to re-establish contact with Lucian would also be obvious to the strigoi: the medical school, District Hospital One, his or his parents’ old apartments. Kate shook her head.
O’Rourke. We never talked about a meeting place other than the basement apartment, but where…not the Franciscan center here
in Bucharest. O’Rourke said that it is watched by the government as a matter of course. He always calls his contacts there and arranges a meeting through some kind of code. Where, then?
Kate sat in silence for another twenty seconds, then rose and walked briskly toward the far end of the park, avoiding groups of people, shielding her face when she passed others hurrying for cover.
O’Rourke was sitting on the park bench near the lagoon where they had sat and talked in May. He was alone, his heavy wool coat collar turned up, but he glanced up when she stopped near the children’s playground and his smile was visible from thirty feet away.
“I was up before dawn and off to meet the head of the Franciscan monastery in Bucharest,” said O’Rourke. “I said I’d meet you at the medical school at nine. Didn’t you see my note?”
“No,” said Kate. “There was no note.” They were crossing the bridge over the narrow channel between park lagoons.
“I left one,” said O’Rourke. “Maybe Lucian picked it up and didn’t tell you about it.”
“Why would he do that?”
The priest made a gesture with his hands. “I don’t know. But then, there’s a lot we don’t know about Lucian, isn’t there?”
And about you, thought Kate, but said nothing.
“Anyway, I made the arrangement with Father Stoicescu to deliver the J-virus sample to the American Embassy later this morning. But when I got to the medical school, there were the police and firemen… I called Stoicescu and canceled the meeting, then went back to the apartment, but the police were there. I could see men going into the building and there were expensive automobiles up and down the street.”
“The Securitate drive Mercedes,” said Kate and explained about the insanity of the last hours.
O’Rourke shook his head. “I couldn’t think of what to do except come to the park and hope you would think of it as a rendezvous point.”
“I almost didn’t,” said Kate. They had reached one of the west entrances to the park. Kate hesitated and pulled back into the trees. “It’s not safe out there.”
