along the river banks of Budapest and had literally walked into Alexandru Rusmanov and his wife, Ilyana.
Ninety minutes later, Carpenter’s team were in the air, heading east. They were strapped onto benches inside an EC725 Cougar that had been stripped down and essentially rebuilt. The improvements that most pleased Julian Carpenter had been to the rotors and the engines, which now delivered a cruising speed of just over 300 miles per hour. This was significantly faster than the publicly acknowledged world-record speed for a helicopter, and it meant that the flight to Budapest would take little more than an hour. The Mina, the supersonic Blacklight jet that could have covered the distance to Budapest in less than twenty minutes, was in Tokyo, and he could not afford to wait for the Harker brothers to bring her home.
Julian pressed a button in the console next to his seat, and a screen folded down from the ceiling. The most recent photo of Alexandru filled the frame, and he told the four men on the benches to study it carefully.
“This is Alexandru Rusmanov,” he said, raising his voice slightly above the steady pulse of the helicopter’s engines. “Turner, Frankenstein, I know you don’t need reminding of just how dangerous this target is. So Connor, Miller, I say this for your benefit; nothing in your training has prepared you for dealing with a vampire as old and powerful as Alexandru. Nothing.” He contemplated the eager, nervous faces of the two privates.
“You’re looking at the second oldest vampire in the world. He was turned by Dracula himself, along with his brothers, Valeri and Valentin, more than four hundred years ago. He is powerful in a way that distorts the scales; he can knock down buildings, he can move faster than your eyes can follow, he can fly indefinitely. And more than that, he is clever, and he is vicious. He views humanity as nothing more than a herd of cattle from which to draw his sustenance. If he chooses to, he will kill you without a millisecond’s hesitation.”
Carpenter pressed the button again, and the image changed to a black and white photo of a stunningly beautiful woman with dark hair and sharp features. “This is Ilyana, Alexandru’s wife. She is almost as old as he is; he turned her himself, with Dracula’s permission. She has stood at his side for more than four centuries and is every bit as dangerous as her husband. In modern psychological terminology, Ilyana is a pure sociopath, without empathy for others, without feelings for anyone apart from her husband. She is unpredictable-and she is deadly.”
A final press of the button sent the screen folding back into the ceiling. Carpenter looked at his team and saw fear in the faces of Connor and Miller.
Good, he thought. They need to be scared.
“Both these individuals are high-value targets, rated A1 by every Department in the world. Our orders are to eliminate them both. If that proves impossible, if the opportunity only arrives to make one kill, then Alexandru is the priority. Understood?”
The four men on the benches shouted that they did, and Julian nodded.
I hope you do, he thought. I really hope you do.
The helicopter touched down at a Hungarian Air Force Base on the outskirts of Budapest. The aircraft’s call sign meant it did not appear on civilian radar, and only a handful of military air traffic controllers in the world would have recognized the unique combination of letters and numbers that signified a Department 19 vehicle.
Working quietly and inconspicuously through the bars and restaurants of Budapest, the team picked up Alexandru’s trail. They followed an elderly vampire to his small apartment below the castle, and he told them about a bar called the Ramparts that had been much busier than usual in recent weeks, busy with the kind of creatures the old man stiffly informed them he had no wish to socialize with. When Turner pressed him, he confessed that he felt no kinship with young vampires, found their lust for violence abhorrent and avoided them wherever possible. Carpenter thanked him, and they moved on.
From the Ramparts, they trailed a vampire bartender to a warehouse rave in Budapest’s rundown industrial district. They dragged him out to the parking lot at the rear of the building, the bartender’s eyes wide and rolling, his teeth grinding as Bliss pumped through his system, and he told them that a huge man with a child’s face had dropped a card as he left the Ramparts four nights ago. The card was for a vampire club near Matthias Church, a place the bartender had only ever heard whispered about. When he claimed not to remember the address, Turner applied a UV torch to the vampire’s hand. It burst into flame, jogging his memory.
Outside a beautiful Gothic town house on Balta Koz, the five men sat in a jet-black car, watching. Anderson, the huge child-faced vampire who served as Alexandru’s right-hand man, had entered the building two hours earlier, apparently unaware that anyone was watching. A small gold plate by the door of the town house had been engraved with the words TABULA RASA, which Carpenter thought appropriate for a club frequented by vampires.
A blank slate is exactly what it gives them, he thought. The freedom to leave behind the people they were before they were turned and start again.
“Colonel,” said Paul Turner, in a low voice. Carpenter looked round and saw Anderson emerging from the carved stone doorway. The tall, hunched vampire cast a quick look up and down the quiet street, then stepped casually into the air and disappeared.
Carpenter turned to Private Miller, who was seated in the back of the vehicle, cradling a sleek black laptop that was connected to a spy satellite in geo-synchronous orbit above them.
“Do you have the heat trail?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” responded the young operator. “He’s heading north by northwest, sir.”
Six minutes after dawn the following morning, Julian ordered their car brought to a halt in front of the Molnar estate. Two ornate metal gates stood open, the first rays of sunlight glimmering on the wrought iron. The five men had strapped and clipped their body armor into place during the drive, and there was a heavy sense of anticipation inside the vehicle. Carpenter looked at his team and decided against saying anything more to them. If they weren’t ready, then nothing he could say at this late stage would correct that. And if they were, he didn’t want to give them anything extra to think about. They would soon have more than enough to deal with; of that he was quite sure.
The estate’s main building, an enormous seventeenth-century country house, squatted on top of a long, shallow rise, its upper floors visible from the gate. The road that led from the open entrance wound left then right, through dense lines of neatly clipped trees, then led straight up the hill toward a wide graveled driveway in front of the house. The trees fell away on both sides, and the five Blacklight operators were confronted with a hundred yards of immaculate, featureless lawn, a vast open space that would have filled Carpenter with dread were it not for the pale yellow sunlight reflecting off the morning dew.
They crossed the lawns quickly, moving in a tight X-shaped formation; Carpenter in the middle, Turner and Frankenstein leading the way, the two privates bringing up the rear. Their boots crunched across the gravel as they approached the home of the Molnar family, and then Turner pushed open the towering front door, and the five men slipped silently into the house.
The smell was the first thing that hit them as they stepped onto the tiled marble floor of the atrium; a stench of rot so thick it felt as though you could have bitten into it. A dark haze of flies looped lazily in an open doorway at the rear of the room, and Carpenter led them toward it. Beyond the door was a large, spotlessly modern kitchen, big enough to have serviced a medium-sized restaurant. The smell intensified as they entered, waving the swarming flies away with their gloved hands. On a counter above one of the ovens, in a steel baking tray, was a leg of roast lamb. It was a virulent purple color and had swollen to almost double its size as the rot set in. The meat was leaking a milky fluid that was collecting in a thick pool in the tray, and maggots were swarming in wide crevices that had split open in the decaying flesh. Flies buzzed in a dense cloud above it, landing and taking off in a swirling pattern of shiny black bodies and translucent wings. Beside the tray stood bowls of black, liquidizing potatoes and vegetables, and a tray of crystal champagne flutes, their contents now long since flat.
Private Miller gagged, as quietly as he could.
“How long?” asked Turner, his voice as calm as ever.
“This time of year?” replied Carpenter. “A week, at least.”
The five men stood in silence, regarding the spoiled food. The likely implications for those who had been intending to eat it did not need vocalizing.
“Let’s keep moving,” said Carpenter.
The team moved into the lobby, a beautiful, cavernous space, with wooden walls and gleaming black-and- white marble tiles. Above them, a domed window let in the morning sun, lending the place a sense of peace and calm that couldn’t have been further from what the men were feeling.
In the dining room, they found the bodies.
