For perhaps a second, he remained crouched down behind another of the tombs, weighing his options and figuring the angles. He couldn’t run, not even if he’d dodged and weaved from side to side, because nobody can outrun a bullet. And he couldn’t hide, either, because the other men knew where he was.
He had exactly one chance, and it all depended on the unconscious man lying on the ground a few feet behind him. Keeping as low as he could, he scuttled over to the unmoving figure, and crouched down beside him. He
pulled open the man’s jacket, searching desperately for a shoulder holster and a weapon he could use to save his life. But there was nothing, no sign of a pistol under either arm.
Bronson looked over to the tomb of the twin angels. The two men seemed to have separated: one had ducked back behind the tomb, and was keeping low, but Bronson couldn’t see the second man, the one who’d fired the pistol.
Then another shot rang out, the bullet again missing Bronson, but only barely. The second man had moved around to the east, to get a better shot at him, and was standing only about fifteen yards away in the classic target-shooting stance: feet apart, the pistol held in his right hand, and his left hand supporting his right wrist.
The next shot, Bronson knew, would probably be the last thing he would know in this world, because from that range the man couldn’t possibly miss him.
Almost despite herself, Angela was finding the task she’d been given quite fascinating. The dictionary was very comprehensive, and she had no difficulty in rendering the Latin expressions and sentences into modern English, albeit sometimes lengthy and rather convoluted modern English.
She knew that the grave on the Isola di San Michele dated from the early nineteenth century, and she still believed that the diary had been written by the woman who was buried there, and that the book had been interred with her by her family as a mark of respect. Indeed, the sections of the diary that she’d already translated back in the hotel room showed the unmistakable cadences of the kind of Latin she would expect to have been written by a well-educated person—male or female—of that period.
But the section at the back of the book, the text she was now being forced to translate, was very different. Although Angela was fairly sure that it had been written by
the same person who had authored the diary sections—the handwriting was quite distinctive—apart from the first few sentences, which seemed to act as a kind of introduction, the remainder of the text shared none of the characteristics of the earlier pages.
The more she read and worked on, the more sure she was that this Latin had been copied from a much older source, which would confirm what Marco had told her—most of it was a copy of a far more ancient document, interspersed with comments and additional material presumably supplied by Carmelita. Some of the language was medieval, she thought, maybe even older than that. She could find no explanation anywhere in the text to suggest what exactly the source book had been, but there was something faintly familiar to her about some of the phrases and expressions the unknown author had used, and Angela began to wonder if what she was looking at was a passage taken from a medieval grimoire. That might actually tie up with Marco’s apparent belief that the source document dated from the twelfth century.
Whatever the source, the Latin text made for grim but fascinating reading. The passage began with a long paragraph, almost messianic in its fervor, which baldly asserted that vampires were a reality, and that they had existed since the dawn of time. These creatures were older than the rocks and the stones that formed the continents.
They had, the text claimed, been known to all the great writers of antiquity; and it even listed the names of
a handful of ancient Greek philosophers who had explicitly mentioned them.
Angela had snorted under her breath when she translated that particular section. She was reasonably familiar with the works of two of the philosophers named in the book, and couldn’t recall either of them ever mentioning anything quite as bizarre as vampires. And, she noticed, the author of the text had conspicuously failed to mention where these explicit references might be found, which was a sure sign that the references were simply a product of the writer’s imagination.
Having established, to the author’s satisfaction, at least, that vampires existed, the text continued with the unsurprising claim that these creatures were not human in the usual sense of the word. They looked human, the writer stated, and were extremely difficult to identify, but they were actually superhuman because of their immortality, their great physical beauty, and the enormous depth of knowledge gleaned over the ages that they had walked the earth.
Angela could see that, if this belief had become accepted by the general population in the days when it had been written, almost any reasonably attractive and well-educated man or woman could have been suspected of being a vampire. And, at the height of the various antivampire crazes that had swept Europe at intervals during the late Middle Ages, it was likely that many people would have suffered the consequences.
In the final section of what Angela was mentally calling
“the introduction,” the writer set out the ultimate purpose of the treatise. In the following paragraphs, it was stated, fully detailed instructions would be provided so that mere mortals,
if seized with a true and honest wish and desire to achieve a state of sublime perfection
, might be elevated to a higher plane and actually join the legions of the undead.
She’d been right: what she was translating was a do-it-yourself vampire kit. Angela finished the introduction, read the Latin text and her English translation once more, then placed the page on one side of the desk.
Marco, who’d been sitting in a chair a few feet away from Angela while she worked on the text, stood up and walked over to the desk. He picked up the English translation she’d prepared, and nodded to her to continue working.
The next section of the text provided a stark reminder of the life of Carmelita Paganini, and of what she had tried to achieve. One sentence in particular served as a hideous confirmation of her apparent attempts to join the ranks of the undead, and even offered other people the opportunity of trying to join her. It also served as a further confirmation of Marco’s contention that there was, indeed, an older source document that Carmelita must have seen.
This sentence read:
I now know the truth of the deeper realities that have governed the actions and conduct of my ancestors, and of the gift of eternal life that only the most dedicated adepts can enjoy, and I have had sight of the rules
governing the conduct of those sacred rituals and measures which will enable seekers after this most exquisite of gifts to benefit to the fullest possible extent, to achieve immortality through the mingling of new blood with sacred relics, to become a sister of the night, a member of the holy brotherhood and sisterhood of blood, as I have done.
Angela read the sentence again a couple of times, changed a few of the phrases to make it read better, and then put the page aside. The meaning seemed absolutely clear to her. Clear, but senseless. The woman who’d kept the journal and written those words had believed that she’d found the secret of eternal life, by becoming a vampire. Granted, the actual word “vampire” didn’t appear in the sentence, but the last few phrases seemed to be clear enough. Carmelita Paganini had believed she was going to live forever, by feasting on a diet of blood and sacred relics—whatever they were.
There were only two problems with her belief, as far as Angela could see. First, vampires don’t exist. They are a myth, a premedieval legend, with no basis in reality whatsoever. Second, Angela had found the woman’s diary in a grave on the Isola di San Michele, lying underneath what was left of a wooden coffin, which contained the bones of the woman herself, the presumed author of the book, and she’d looked pretty dead to her.
Belief was one thing, reality quite another.
Angela turned round in her seat and looked across the room at where Marco was sitting in a comfortable easy chair. She knew what she was reading was rubbish and
then she made the mistake of telling Marco precisely what she thought.
“I know exactly what this is,” Angela said. “This book is some kind of do-it-yourself vampire kit. It’s bullshit.”
The slight smile left the Italian’s face and he stared at her in a hostile manner. “I’m not interested in your opinion,” he snapped, “only in your skill as a translator.”
Angela tried again. “Look,” she said, “the bones of the woman who wrote this are lying in a two-hundred-year-old tomb on the Isola di San Michele, crumbling away to dust. I think that’s a fairly compelling argument to suggest that she didn’t live forever.”
“How do you know she wrote it?”
The possibility that the book had actually been authored by somebody other than the occupant of the old grave hadn’t occurred to Angela. But it didn’t change anything.
“I don’t, but it was a reasonable assumption. But whether she did or not, I know—and I hope you do too—that vampires don’t exist. They’re a myth, nothing more.”
Marco didn’t respond for a moment; then he shook his head. “I already told you,” he said coldly, “I’m not interested in your opinion, ill informed though it obviously is. Just get on with that translation.”
He stood up and walked across to where Angela was sitting. “Have you found any references to the source yet?” he asked.
Angela nodded and pointed at the last sentence she’d
translated. “This says that she’d seen some other document, but I haven’t found any mention of when she saw it or whereabout it was.”
Marco scanned her translation swiftly and nodded. “Good. Keep going. Let me know as soon as you find a mention of where the source might be hidden.”
In fact, the very next section of the Latin text seemed to provide a clue. An obscure clue, granted, but the first indication she had seen of where the other document, the mysterious “source,” might be concealed.
Carmelita had again referred to the ancient dead and the screaming dead, neither of which made very much sense to Angela, but the next sentence did provide what looked like a location. Once she’d translated it and rendered the words into readable English, it read:
Our revered guide and master has graced us with his sacred presence, and has instructed us in the ancient procedures and rituals, these being recorded by him for all time and for all acolytes in the Scroll of Amadeus, and then secreted beside the guardian in the new place where the legions of the dead reign supreme
.
She didn’t like that last expression, though it could obviously just refer to a graveyard somewhere; and the idea of a “guardian” really troubled her. But, despite her unshakable conviction that vampires were nothing more than a premedieval myth, it was the first part of that sentence that sent a chill down Angela’s back.
It suggested that Carmelita had actually met, or at least seen, the person—Amadeus?—who had authored
the source document. But that made no sense. Carmelita had died in the third decade of the nineteenth century. Whoever had written the source document must have died some seven hundred years earlier. Maybe she meant that there had been a succession of “masters” through the ages, each acting as the head of the “Vampire Society” or whatever name had been given to the group that Carmelita had been a member of.
But that wasn’t what the Latin said. And Latin was a peculiarly precise language.
Behind the tomb on the island of San Michele, Bronson spotted a glint of metal from one side of the unconscious man’s belt. Risking a closer look, he saw a dull black shape: the lower end of the magazine for a semiautomatic pistol, tucked into a quick-release leather pouch. There was no reason why a man would carry a magazine unless he also had a pistol, which meant he must be wearing a belt holster, not a shoulder rig.
Bronson looked up again at the man with the pistol. He was taking a couple of steps closer to him—shortening the range to ensure that his next shot would be the last he would have to fire.
The unconscious man was lying faceup, which meant the weapon had to be tucked into the small of his back; otherwise Bronson would already have seen it. Jerking him over onto his side, he rammed his other hand behind the man’s back, inside the Windbreaker he was wearing.
His fingers closed around a familiar shape and, as the
approaching man stopped and took aim, Bronson rolled sideways behind a vertical gravestone. As he moved, he racked back the slide of the automatic pistol with his left hand to chamber a round.
His movement took him just beyond the gravestone and, as he emerged from that fragile shelter, he aimed the pistol straight at the approaching figure, who swung his pistol toward him and fired two rapid shots.
Bronson flinched as a copper-jacketed nine-millimeter bullet slammed into the gravestone right beside him, but he held his aim and squeezed the trigger.
During his short career as an army officer, Bronson had become quite proficient with the Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistol, then the standard officer’s sidearm, but he also knew how inaccurate such weapons were at anything other than very close range. So he wasn’t surprised when his shot went wide.
But his target was clearly shocked to be under attack himself. He turned and ran, dodging around the gravestones as he fled.
Bronson rose cautiously to his feet, the pistol he’d grabbed—which he now saw actually was a nine-millimeter Browning, the weapon he’d gotten so used to firing in the army—still pointing toward the fleeing figure. The second man had also taken to his heels, and was a few yards ahead of his accomplice, a bulky bag clutched in his left hand.
Bronson glanced down at the man lying on the ground. He was obviously unconscious, and no doubt
would remain that way for some time. The noise of the shots had echoed around the island, and Bronson knew that people would start heading toward the area very soon, which would add to the confusion. He looked over at the tomb, at the two fleeing men, and made a decision.