The old professor said, “You gentlemen are pawns in a scheme well beyond your comprehension. Doctor, take this dagger.”
Eph took the weapon’s handle, holding the point at his boss’s throat.
Barnes said, breathlessly, “Good
“Everett, this is bigger than you can know. This goes beyond the CDC — beyond regular law enforcement even. There is a catastrophic disease outbreak in this city, the likes of which we have never seen. And that’s just the half of it.”
Nora came up beside him, reclaiming hers and Ephraim’s laptops from the other FBI agent. She said, “I got everything else we need from the office. Looks like we won’t be coming back.”
Barnes said, “For God’s sake, Ephraim, come to your senses.”
“This is the job you hired me to do, Everett. To sound the alarm when a public health crisis warrants. We are on the verge of a worldwide pandemic. An extinction event. And somebody somewhere is pulling out all the stops to make damn sure it succeeds.”
Eldritch Palmer switched on a bank of monitors, showing six television news channels. The one in the lower- left-hand box interested him most. He angled his chair up a few degrees and isolated the channel, raising its volume.
The reporter was posted outside the 17th Precinct headquarters on East Fifty-first Street, getting a “No comment” from a police official concerning a rash of missing persons reports being filed throughout the New York area in the past few days. They showed the line of people waiting outside the precinct house, too many to be allowed inside, filling out forms on the sidewalk. The reporter noted that other seemingly unexplained incidents, such as house break-ins in which nothing appeared to have been stolen and no one appeared to be home, were being reported also. Strangest of all was the fact of the failure of modern technology to assist in the search for the missing persons: mobile phones, almost all of which contain traceable GPS technology, had apparently gone missing with their owners. This led some to speculate that people were perhaps willfully abandoning families and jobs, and noted that the spike in disappearances seemed to have coincided with the recent lunar occultation, suggesting a link between the two occurrences. A psychologist then commented on the potential for low-grade mass hysteria in the wake of certain startling celestial events. The story ended with the reporter giving airtime to a teary woman holding up a JCPenney portrait of a missing mother of two.
The program then went to a commercial for an “age-defying” cream designed to “help you live longer and better.”
The congenitally ill tycoon then switched off the audio, so that the only sound, other than the dialysis machine, was the humming behind his avaricious smile.
On another screen was a graphic showing the financial markets declining while the dollar continued its fall. Palmer himself was moving the markets, steadily divesting himself of equities and buying into metals: gold, silver, palladium, and platinum bullion.
The commentator went on to suggest that the recent recession represented opportunities in futures trading. Palmer strongly disagreed. He was shorting futures. Everybody’s except his own.
A telephone call was forwarded to his chair through Mr. Fitzwilliam. A sympathetic member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, calling to inform him that the epidemiologist with the Canary project, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, had escaped.
“Escaped?” said Palmer. “How is that possible?”
“He had an elderly man with him who apparently was more wily than he’d seemed. He carried a long silver sword.”
Palmer was silent for one full respiration. Then, slowly, he smiled.
Forces were aligning against him. All well and good. Let them come together. It would be easier to clear them all away.
“Sir?” said the caller.
“Oh — nothing,” said Palmer. “I was just thinking of an old friend.”
Eph and Nora stood with Setrakian behind the locked doors of his pawnshop, the two epidemiologists still shaken up.
“I gave them your name,” said Eph, looking outside the window.
“The building is in my late wife’s name. We should be safe here for the moment.”
Setrakian was anxious to get downstairs to his basement armory, but the two doctors were still rattled. “They are coming after us,” said Eph.
“Clearing the way for infection,” said Setrakian. “The strain will move faster through an orderly society than one on high alert.”
“Whoever had the influence to get that coffin loaded onto a transatlantic flight in this age of terrorism,” said Setrakian.
Eph said, pacing, “They’re framing us. Sending someone in there to steal Redfern’s remains…who
“As you said, you are the lead authority to sound the general alarm for disease control. Be thankful they only tried to discredit you.”
Nora said, “Without the CDC behind us, we have no authority.”
Setrakian said, “We must continue on our own now. This is disease control at its most elemental.”
Nora looked over at him. “You mean — murder.”
“What would you want? To become like that…or to have someone release you?”
Eph said, “It’s still a polite euphemism for murder. And easier said than done. How many heads do we have to cut off? There are three of us here.”
Setrakian said, “There are ways other than severing the spinal column. Sunlight, for example. Our most powerful ally.”
Eph’s phone trembled inside his pocket. He pulled it out, wary, checking the display.
An Atlanta exchange. CDC headquarters. “Pete O’Connell,” he said to Nora, and took the call.
Nora turned to Setrakian. “So where are they all right now, during the day?”
“Underground. Cellars and sewers. The dark bowels of buildings, such as maintenance rooms, in the heating and cooling systems. In the walls sometimes. But usually in dirt. That is where they prefer to make their nests.”
“So — they sleep during the day, right?”
“That would be most convenient, wouldn’t it? A handful of coffins in a basement, full of dozing vampires. But no, they don’t sleep at all. Not as we understand it. They will shut down for a while if they are sated. Too much blood digestion fatigues them. But never for long. They go underground during daylight hours solely to escape the killing rays of the sun.”
Nora appeared quite pale and overwhelmed, like a little girl who’d been told that dead people do not in fact grow wings and fly straight up to heaven to be angels, but instead stay on earth and grow stingers under their tongues and turn into vampires.
“That thing you said,” she said. “Before you cut them down. Something in another language. Like a pronouncement, or a kind of curse.”
The old man winced. “Something I say only to calm myself. To steady my hand for the final blow.”
Nora waited to hear what it was. Setrakian saw that, for whatever reason, she needed to know.
“I say, ‘
Nora saw that this old vampire killer was essentially a modest man. “Silver,” she said.
“Only silver,” he said. “Renowned throughout the ages for its antiseptic and germicidal properties. You can cut them with steel or shoot them with lead, but only silver really
