“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
A
fter 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 nervous. “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?”
“Never mind. Is it just you and me here?”
“You’re the first person I’ve heard since they moved me here. The others are all on a different cell block. This corridor is reserved for the disciplinary problems. The ones who don’t obey.”
“That’s just you and me?”
“Most people don’t live long enough to disobey.”
“Super. What’s your name?”
“It doesn’t really matter now, does it?”
“Why would you say that?”
“We are both going to die. Unless we are already dead, and this is Hell.”
Zach sighed. “That’s the spirit.”
THIRTY
1925—Red Hook, New York—Authorities investigate a series of child disappearances and murders. The crimes stop suddenly after an old lodge building is demolished.
—BRIEFING BOOK: CODE NAME: NIGHTMARE PET
T
he jet engines were a constant, comforting thrum as the aircraft cruised at a fraction over Mach 2.
Cade had not quite believed it until he’d seen it, but decided it made perfect sense. Who else but the top agent of the Space Age would have access to this craft, sitting in a private hangar, waiting for a chance to fly again?
The Concorde he and Tania now rode in was supposed to be decommissioned like the others of its kind, a casualty of the world economy and higher fuel prices. But Flint couldn’t let it go. It represented something grander than a fast airplane to him. It was a piece of a time when a ninety-minute commute from New York to Paris was supposed to be a regular occurrence.
Flint took the plane so many times he was finally able to convince his agency to buy one out of confiscated funds. It came in handy when he had to haul large weapons across the world. And it fit his lifestyle: champagne on every flight, nineteen-year-old stewardesses in microskirts serving New York steak grilled medium rare, the end of the world waiting on arrival. When Flint was put out to pasture, he managed to keep the jet and all the memories it contained from his glory days.
But for once, Cade didn’t mind the human tendency toward nostalgia. Not when it was going to get him to the Black Site an hour after sundown, local time.
Tania wasn’t complaining either. Cade recalled that the Concorde would have been the height of cool when she was human. She seemed to be enjoying it. She held a flute of champagne, even though she couldn’t drink it.
“Can we keep this, Nathaniel?” she said. “It’s better than the cattle car Zach provided.”
Cade looked at her.
“Oops,” she said, not at all convincingly. “I might have spilled a secret. What a terrible spy I am.”
“Zach recruited you to backstop me.”
“Surprised?”
“Not by him. By you. You’re not bound like I am.”
“I’m working as an independent operator. Your boy Zachary decided it might be a good idea to have another vampire on the job, just in case. Turned out he was right, wasn’t he?”
“Do you really think this is the way we can be together? You are still a killer. I have my duty. Eventually—”
“Not everything is about you,” she sniffed. “I thought it might be interesting to see the world from your position for a while. I get bored easily.” She tossed the champagne to the floor. “Speaking of which. We have nearly five hours left.”
Cade’s lip curled slightly. “I think there’s a movie.”
“
The Towering Inferno
,” she said. “Saw it. In the theater. There is, however, a bed in the back.”
“I saw. I believe he used it to relieve tension between missions.”
She stood and, surprisingly, took his hand. It was an uncharacteristically tender gesture. He grasped her fingers, feeling the cool, bloodless skin.
He let her lead him back down the aisle.
“This won’t end well,” he warned her.
“Nothing ever does,” she said.
THE CONCORDE LANDED at Offutt Air Force Base, where Flint still had a few contacts from the old days in the Strategic Air Command. The plane was quickly hidden, and an old Sikorsky MH-53J was made available to ferry them back the hundred and fifty miles they’d overshot Liberty.
It was already well past sunset. Cade was growing anxious, although no human would have seen it.
Tania, standing by him in the open bay of the helicopter, felt like slapping him.
He showed far too much worry about his humans. It really left no question about where his loyalty would be, if—no,
when
—it came down to her or them.
She wondered if this would work, or if she should just cut her losses now.
She was not doing this just to be close to him. Maybe it started that way, although she had trouble admitting that. But there were other ways to be near Cade, and despite what he said, he wanted to be with her. They would have found each other. Tania did not need Zach’s assistance. She didn’t have to be a recruit. She certainly didn’t have to help Cade on his pointless missions.
Now, however, she had to know: Why did he do this? What drove him? It wasn’t just the oath. She was sure of it. What was inside him that was so hollow inside her?
Tania believed she might glimpse his secret if she only stayed close enough. She could learn the source of his strength. Once she knew that, she could decide whether or not to stay with him, willingly, as an equal—or whether to use it to kill him before he could kill her.
Every relationship has its trade-offs, she thought again.
She looked at Cade, practically on point, leaning into the wind, ready to fight.
It stirred something strong and unusual. She couldn’t name what he evoked in her, not anymore. When it gripped her, she could almost remember what it was to feel warm.
THIRTY-ONE
I know this will cause you some embarrassment, and for that I must apologize, but I cannot remain any longer. Ghastly things are afoot and I fear I shall be caught up in the wrath of your president’s bloodhound, if not by the other hounds on my trail. Perhaps, for my sins, I’m to be denied any peace or the golden evening of my years. But you and I know that it is always for the greater good.
Yours,
Kim
—Intercepted letter from Kim Philby to CIA head of counterintelligence, 1963, the year of Philby’s defection to the Soviet Union (classified)