Читать книгу Blood Demons - Richard Jeffries - Страница 11

Chapter 4

“Cerberus was, and I guess still is, the multi-headed dog who guards the gates of the underworld,” Key told Daniels as they stepped off just one of Lancaster’s private jets. In this case, a Gulfstream G650.

“To keep angels from invading?” Daniels asked with feigned innocence.

“No,” Key answered with feigned patience. “That’s Judeo-Christian beliefs. This was Greek mythology.”

“Oh. And this watchdog did what?”

“Kept the dead from getting out.”

“So it is hell,” Daniels stubbornly replied.

“Not really, but that’s all beside the point.”

“So, we’re in league with the devil?” Daniels continued, glancing back to see if Lancaster had left the cockpit yet.

Key was unfazed. “Remember what the devil does for a living, Morty.”

“Tempt humans to do evil?” Nichols chimed in, bringing up the rear.

Key looked back at her knowingly. “Yes, maybe, but then punishes them in hellfire forever.”

“Hey,” Nichols realized, “that’s right.”

The trio did not bother looking for a limo to take them to Cerberus HQ. They had landed on Cerberus’s private runway, with their headquarters being no farther than a regulation airport terminal.

It, and they, were in Tashkurgan, Kashgar, Xinjiang, China—on the borders of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan. That was why Lancaster had chosen it. Long situated on a caravan route for the historical Silk Road, it was a market town for sheep, and therefore wool. And all went well until a disastrous decision by the founding fathers to construct one of China’s burgeoning “fake” cities—exacting replicas of romantic world capitals—as a tourist and real estate investor attraction.

But just like all the others dotted throughout China, the “copycat countries ”—which included “duplitecture” facades of Venice, Paris, London, and even Manhattan—served as neither, and remained eerily empty. Until, in this case, Charles Lancaster appeared and made the Tashkurgan town fathers an offer they didn’t refuse.

So Key led his hunters into a scaled-down replica of the Palace of Versailles, tucked between mountain ranges, sheepherders, and carpet weavers. They stepped into the famed Hall of Mirrors, which looked to have the same walls, floors, and design as the original, but without the statuary, furniture, chandeliers, and decorations. But it was far from empty. The tools of Cerberus’s trade were everywhere.

Daniels scowled, having still not gotten used to the incongruity of the new organization, or its new headquarters. “Nah,” he decided. “I think we’re the devil’s Whac-A-Mole. The monsters pop their heads up and we knock ’em down again. Right?”

Key smiled. “Okay, okay,” he surrendered. “But remember, we believe what Logan-types can’t or won’t.”

“Won’t?” Nichols echoed, coming up on Key’s other side.

He nodded to her, appreciating her technique of gleaning more information. “At least to anyone else,” he told her. “If he does, he might have to admit, at least to himself, that there’s more to life than just selfish little him and his power-money games—games which humans invented, by the way, to distract themselves.”

“Oh, I hate it when you get all hippy-dippy touchy-feely,” Daniels moaned.

Key immediately responded with a knowing grin. “Uh huh. But you love it when second louies do, don’t you?”

Daniels reacted to the Strenkofski reference as if Key had cut him to the quick. “Geez, Joe,” he whined, “you really know how to hurt a guy, don’t you?” He elbowed Nichols. “C’mon, Ter, I’ll show you my Maltese Falcon if you show me yours.”

Nichols shook her head like a confused puppy shaking off rainfall. “We’re seeing Star Wars?”

“Maltese Falcon, not Millennium Falcon!’ Daniels exclaimed. “Bogart, remember?”

Nichols sniffed. “I’d rather train.” She looked at Key. “Gotta learn how to fight smart, right?”

“And effective,” Daniels agreed. “Then come on, squirt, there’s room for both Falcons and fighting.” Especially when the gym and armory were set up in this mock Versailles’s version of the Galerie des Batailles.

“Have fun, kids,” Key said, heading west. But before they were completely out of earshot, Key remembered something. “Morty!” he called, waiting for the echo to reach Daniels’s ears. “You still in touch with Lailani?”

At the mention of the Filipino escort Daniels had taken advantage of in Oman, his eyes narrowed but widened again when he remembered she had repaid the favor by saving his life. “Yeah, maybe,” he admitted. “Why?”

“I want to talk to her about something.”

“Okay. Like what?”

Key was willing to say, but more pressing issues prevented him from going into detail right then. “Let’s just say it’s about some hits and myths.”

“Okay,” Daniels huffed. “Be cryptic. I’ll set up a chat. Say when.”

“ASAP,” Kay replied. “Thanks.”

With that, Key trudged toward the Chateau Neuf section. On the way, he gave thanks that Tashkurgan hadn’t enough money to build the entire palace, or he’d be walking all day. Even so, it was a bit of a hike until he stepped into a cavernous warehouse of fake red brick and fake white stone, with a fake black tile roof. Originally the space was to house the king’s hunting lodge, but now it was home to “The Hispanic Mechanic’s Workshop”—wholly brought in from the Thumrait Air Force Base, only with even more improvements.

“Speedy,” Key called without affectation, using the nickname of Manuel Gonzales, the most remarkable engineer, inventor, and all around synthesizer of stuff he had ever met. Just as he had when first stepping into the original workshop, Key marveled at the constructions either in process or completed around him. The injection of Lancaster cash had done even more wonders to the man’s practical imagination. Key wouldn’t have been surprised to see both the Maltese and the Millennium Falcon come to life in there.

“Joe,” he heard, then spotted Gonzales coming around the tail end of the F. B. Law, a cutting-edge helicopter he had fashioned back in the Middle East. With him, as always, was his assistant, Faisal Safar—one of Cerberus’s first agents and a man who both recruited and saved their asses multiple times.

As the Hispanic-American and Arab-American approached, Key held his phone out to them. “The photo app has multiple pictures of both a wizened naked guy and the child corpse we collected. I’d like to know who they both are.”

Gonzales didn’t ask how soon. Unlike Daniels, he already knew everything was needed right now. Instead he took a quick look, and whistled.

“The nude gentleman does not look happy,” Safar commented. “And unfocused. I gather these were candids.”

“About as candid as it gets,” Key admitted. “The stuff I asked for ready?”

“Just about,” Gonzales said, already heading for a wall of computers. “Think the others’ll be happy about it?” He plugged the phone in, and his fingers started dancing on a keyboard.

“I think Morty, at least, will be ecstatic,” Key estimated. “They’ll be his license to thrill shamelessly and fearlessly.”

“Like he didn’t have that already,” Safar cracked as he joined Gonzales by the monitors.

“You waiting for initial intel?” Gonzales asked without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Let me know if-and-when,” Key said, already backing away. “Next stop, the queen’s clinic.”

Gonzales and Safar were already so intent on their work that neither bothered with a parting quip. So Key marched to the appartement de la reine, otherwise known as the Queen’s Private Apartments. In reality, it was a suite of rooms that Cerberus had made into “The Rahal Clinic”—modeled after the wing where Eshe Rahal had served at the Oman Medical College. Only now it was a cutting-edge facility with patient wards, operating rooms, and laboratories that put Frankenstein’s Castle to shame.

Key found the attractive young Arab woman in the medical examination room, staring down at the child corpse they had taken from the Sujanpur morgue. She was wearing her usual uniform of scrubs and a lab coat. As soon as she saw Key, she embraced him with relief. After sending him into the nest of a Queen Arachnosaur in Shabhut, Yemen, she was always delighted he made it back to her in one piece.

They took a moment; then, as was Key’s wont, got back to business.

“I thought you’d be further along,” he admitted, noting that the child was still wholly intact.

“I,” Rahal began, obviously looking for a way to explain her delay. “I didn’t want to dissect her until I exhausted every other means of examination.” She blinked apologetically. “I mean, once they’re open, there’s really no closing them again, right?”

Key looked beyond her compassionate face to the little girl on the slab. Even from that distance she looked exactly the same as she had in Punjab: almost glowingly, preternaturally angelic. It stirred something in him, something that he found himself fighting against.

“Now don’t go all maternal on us,” he said slowly. “Whatever she was, she isn’t anymore. Think of her as an encyclopedia we have to learn. And we can’t without cracking the cover, right?” He found himself holding Rahal’s shoulders, remembering her warmth and tenderness.

Rahal nodded, with just a hint of embarrassed shame.

Key should have left it at that, but, for some reason, felt like nailing a tack with a sledge hammer. “Don’t get all moony about the pilot,” he said, wondering why he was saying it even as he was saying it. “She’s already left her ship, okay?”

“Understood,” Rahal assured him in a far more certain way than he deserved. They took another moment to observe the little girl on the table, each trying to comprehend the monstrosity of her fate in their own ways. Key looked away to find Rahal looking up at him with big eyes. “What do you think?”

“Better question is what do I fear?” he sighed. “Bloodless corpses. Creatures who are impossibly fast and strong. Creatures who don’t appear clearly on camera. Does that ring a bell?”

Rahal sniffed. “You aren’t seriously considering that, are you?”

Key looked down at her. “You know about vampires?”

Rahal shrugged and shook her head slightly. “My mother told me of the Ekimmu as a child. They could be walking corpses, winged demons, evil shadows, or even malevolent winds. But what they all had in common was a lust for life force and blood.” She looked back up at Key, her expression changing from childhood fear to adult reason. “But those were fables used to keep us safe and obedient.”

“What if she told you about giant spiders whose webs made men explode?” Key asked pointedly.

That didn’t faze the professor. “But at least prehistoric insects were real. We found fossils. They’re part of the natural world. Vampires? Vampires are supernatural. They’re not real.”

Key resisted the urge to grip her by the shoulders again. “Eshe,” he said reasonably. “I believe everything, everything, anyone believes has a basis in fact for some reason. Cerberus was created for those reasons.”

Again he should have shut up. But there was something about this child corpse’s energy that was unhinging his usual control. “I know you’re a scientist,” he heard himself almost pleading. “And for many so-called rational people, seeing is believing. But sometimes believing is seeing, too. We have to come at this with open minds. Fables might be science we don’t understand yet.”

Her look of almost pitiful sympathy finally stopped him. “Okay, okay,” he sighed. “I get it. I’m sorry. I’ll let you get back to work.”

She was already turning to the exam table and putting on a pair of rubber gloves. Her actions seemed almost dismissive. “Do you want to observe?” she asked as a sort of consolation prize.

“I would,” he confessed, “but I have to meet with great Caesar’s ghost.”

She nodded absently, turning further away, but he couldn’t help noticing her relief when he left for the appartement du roi—the King’s Quarters, which should have been adjoining, but given the reality of royal life just prior to the French Revolution, was all the way on the other side of the manor.

He also couldn’t help noticing his own relief, and the way his mind seemed to click back into shape the farther he got from the clinic. That troubled him more than almost anything else that had happened since he got the assignment.

Naturally, the King’s Quarters had become retired General Charles Lancaster’s offices. How big his desk was, and what it was made of, was rendered irrelevant by all the communication, information, and surveillance equipment that was surrounding, encroaching, and covering it. As with everything that touched Key’s life, which was everything, he had researched his new boss.

Lancaster’s life after retirement from the military was the stuff of legend. Starting with a security company, he had built a conglomerate with pragmatic common sense that spread to all areas of business—rewarding the best minds and ignoring the worst. And one of his favorite pastimes was rooting out genius inventions that corporations sought to suppress to protect their antiquated bottom lines, then using them exclusively for Cerberus.

Since everyone outside these walls thought he was crazy, they let him get away with it—especially since a crazy man might even fight back. And nobody wanted Charles Leonidas “Lionheart” Lancaster fighting back. History dictated that was a fight the attacker would lose.

“You looked pissed,” Lancaster commented, his eyes seemingly everywhere at once. “That’s not like you.”

Key stood in front of the desk, looking over a bank of three monitors. He was already used to the retired general’s seemingly fragmented, but actually laser-intense, focus.

“Got any thoughts on Aafir’s game? What’s his deal?”

Lancaster chuckled. “Oh stop it, Josiah,” he suggested. “Only I should be able to do the ‘elaborate’ trick. If I had the time I’d give you the same look you gave me back in Logan-ville when I used it on you for the others’ benefit. You know, the one that said ‘you know damn well.’”

Key nodded, lowering his head. He breathed deeply, then fessed up. “Eshe just read me the vampire riot act. I have to admit I’m not used to getting dressed down.”

Lancaster sighed, choosing to ignore the possible sexually oriented “dress-down” joke. “’Love makes fools of us all,’” he quoted. “’Big and little.’”

“Shakespeare?” Key guessed.

“Thackeray,” Lancaster corrected. “William Makepeace Thackeray. But close enough.” He leaned over to a monitor on his left. “What she thinks is not as important as what she does, and it would be good for you to know that your little talk at least got her back on track.” He motioned for Key—who was not at all surprised by, or resentful of, Lancaster’s intimate knowledge—to come around the desk, then pointed at the video feed that was coming from the medical examining room.

Key got there in time to see Rahal preparing her autopsy tools—just as the child on the table behind her sat up.