A Subtle Agency

by Graeme Rodaughan

  She had contemplated the idea of bringing James fully into the Vampire Dominion, but that would require the approval of Cornelius Crane. An approval that was unlikely to be granted, Crane was rigorous in keeping total vampire numbers below his “magic” limit of one thousand. Crane had never provided a reason for why he limited vampire numbers to less than one thousand, and Chloe had lost interest in trying to find out why.

  She deemed it a quirk.

  Chloe turned to the Papyrus; it had been sitting next to her on the back seat of the limousine. She lifted it up, unrolling it and reading it again. She replayed in her mind the act of reading it for the first time in the Slayne lounge, nothing had changed, every detail of the Papyrus was identical with her memory.

  An eidetic memory is as rare amongst humans as amongst vampires. It was one of the skills that had attracted the Order of Thoth to induct her before her eighteenth birthday. It was an ability that she had kept secret from Cornelius Crane.

  She put down the Papyrus; leaning back, she closed her eyes, savoring it within her own mind. She remembered the position of individual fibers, of slight variations in pigment where Hakron had needed to renew an ink pot. She easily recalled every detail, every image, delighting in what she saw. She could hand the prize of the Papyrus of Hakron the Scribe to her master, and retain a perfect copy for herself.

  Chloe’s eyes shone with pleasure and she smiled broadly, as the limousine pulled to a halt within a hanger owned by R.I.S.C at Boston’s Logan airport. She watched as Marcus transferred the bound and gagged, but now awake William Slayne to a sleek, black helicopter.

  The Nightfalcon was an advanced evolution of the Blackhawk helicopter, the new design commissioned and funded by the Vampire Dominion. This particular helicopter had been assigned to her own personal use, the pilot was a vampire, a member of her own personal staff. The helicopter began to spool up as great doors in the roof of the hanger started to open. Chloe boarded her Nightfalcon, taking a seat in the cabin.

  She addressed the pilot, ‘to the Citadel.’

  ‘Yes, General Armitage,’ the pilot replied.

  Marcus joined her in the cabin, closing the door as the helicopter took off. It rapidly cleared the hanger and sped off toward New York City.

  * * *

  A terrorist escaped - well that’s never happened before.

  James Haley worked his smartphone, inserting the three photos that he had just received from General Armitage into the Panopticon system. He swapped to his computer terminal, logging into the Panopticon he punched up the search program. He selected the photos and set the search program running with a high priority flag.

  The Panopticon responded immediately with a three dimensional plot of the world; a spreading web of red markers, which indicated where searches had been completed with a negative result. The markers were so finely grained at this resolution that it was like watching a set of red waves spreading out from nodes located in all the world’s major cities. Boston showed an orange rash where the Panopticon found hits on the target in records older than an hour. There were no yellow or green markers. Anton Smith had not been registered by a camera linked to the Panopticon within the last hour or last minute respectively.

  James ran his cursor over several options, clicking as he went.

  The system responded by expanding the Boston view so that the perimeter of hits in the last twenty-four hours filled the screen while cross-referencing of clusters of hits were used to establish a target profile. In seconds, James had a name, a student number, a social security number, a smartphone number, email accounts, bank accounts, Facebook and other social media accounts. The system even began estimating the target’s characteristics and personality type based on usage of all other systems.

  James rapidly scanned the profile.

  Well, Anton Smith, you’re a little young to be playing in the big league. I wonder what you did to attract all this attention.

  He looked around his office, occupying the walls were a set of large hi-def multi-screen monitors. One of them showed current satellite tracks and James smiled to himself.

  ‘That’s convenient.’

  He opened a new program, vectoring a camera on a satellite that was passing over the northeast corner of the United States. He fed in the GPS co-ordinates of the Smith residence and the satellite camera zoomed in on Anton’s home.

  He flicked on a filter to get an infra-red view. There was nothing alive inside the house. James stared intently at the screen for about five seconds, and then his fingers rapidly flowed over the keyboard before he paused for a moment waiting for a response. The satellite camera swapped in a new filter and the telephone network rang the smartphone number on Anton Smith’s profile. In the center of his monitor, a small red star came into existence and started flashing over a room at the top of the house. He flicked the camera back to its standard operations, leaning back in his chair.

  The phone is home; the boy is not. Who leaves home without their phone? Someone is in a hurry.

  James had been with Shadowstone for eight years. He had seen a lot of things in that time, not all of which made sense. His initial induction had emphasized the need to maintain stability in the world, and to combat those forces that would bring chaos and death. A true fight between good and evil. He had found the message a little too cute, but had kept that to himself. He had pursued a life that would make a difference, first with the US Army Green Berets, and then with the CIA. At thirty years of age, he had been tapped on the shoulder by the man who had previously held his current role. He had pursued the opportunity and within six months he had been interviewed by General Armitage and accepted into the ranks of Shadowstone. In the last eight years, he had worked to keep the world hanging together, to ensure stability and order, to keep governments operational and the little guy safe.

  However, there were so many operations like this current one, sanitation ops, the cleansing of all evidence of the operation of a group of operatives that reported directly to General Armitage. There was an echelon of agents that operated at a layer above where he was, who were definitely outside his chain of command, and who participated in all the real operations.

  She said that the enemy has special training and combat techniques and that only her elite agents and Special Forces could effectively combat them.

  That’s where I belong, as a member of those elite combat teams.

  OPSEC, Operational Security was his primary purpose. Information suppression. He had been briefed on the Order of Thoth and the Red Empire. Terrorist organizations that made Al Qaeda and ISIS seem like amateurs. Revolutionary organizations that would bathe the world in blood to achieve their objectives of the overthrow of the current world order. They were a clear and present danger, but he had never met a single operative from these groups - and that was not what he had signed up for.

  James was a man of action, but instead of confronting the enemy he found himself riding herd on a stunningly effective surveillance system and a set of cleanup crews.

  And now a terrorist has escaped, what an opportunity.

  Enough with the wool gathering, focus on the task at hand.

  James did not need to look up who was available to assign to this operation. The closest spectrum team was Green-4, sixteen highly skilled operatives organized into four man squads led by Louise Wesson. He rang her smartphone, all the Shadowstone operatives carried smartphones equipped with quantum encryption, the call was completely secure.

  Louise Wesson immediately answered her phone, ‘yes, Sir. What are your orders?’

  ‘We have another clean up op, it’s Boston, I’m sending site and target profiles. If you happen to come across the target, do not engage; instead, standoff, track only and await further orders. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, perfectly Sir. I will get the team in motion. We’re at Fort Dix at the moment, it will take us a minimum of four and a half hours to get the sanitation vans and my available staff to Boston ... that gives us an ETA of 03:00
hours.’

  ‘Get moving, I will meet you on site,’ James ordered.

  ‘Already moving, Sir.’

  ‘Outstanding.’

  James hung up. He fetched his jacket from a coat rack next to the door of his office. He went to the nearest lift and descended to the building’s garage, he would need his car’s specialized set of equipment.

  It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  Chloe’s Nightfalcon helicopter descended smoothly through the open hanger doors on the roof of a massive Manhattan skyscraper.

  Top end military grade weapon systems had tracked the helicopter for the last five miles as it approached the building. Sophisticated sensor arrays that no city officials were aware of identified her helicopter as a friend, disengaging the missile and rail gun systems that allowed her helicopter to pass safely. The building, at number 350 on Fifth Avenue, had 108 floors above ground level. The hanger and building defense systems took up floors 107 and 108 as combined space.

  All the floors above the hundredth floor were dedicated to the operations of the Vampire Dominion and included the personal quarters of Cornelius Crane, King of the Vampires.

  This was his Citadel.

  As the helicopter landed, Chloe turned to Marcus and ordered quietly, ‘take Slayne to our containment facility on Rikers Island, get him set up and wait for me to arrive.’

  Marcus nodded and said, ‘yes, Chloe.’

  Chloe exited the helicopter, walking to the lift, the Papyrus carried in a tubular case under her arm.

  The building was guarded by Crane’s praetorians. They were elite vampire warriors dressed in modern matte black combat armor, carrying long curved swords, and M249 light machine guns. A pair of them saluted her, stepping aside as Chloe reached the lift doors.

  She ignored them, deference was a one-way street in the Vampire Dominion.

  Inside the lift, she leaned forward, looking into a biometric eye scanner, a small green light came on above it.

  She pressed the button for the 103rd floor - the Operations Center.

  In moments, she strode into the tactical heart of her operational domain. She was surrounded by forty stations and screens, a dozen vampires were at work in the room, a skeleton staff for the current low threat environment.

  The cold war detente in full swing, I remember when this room was fully staffed by vampires working in shifts.

  They stood up, saluting her as she came out of the lift. She walked briskly past them, indifferent to their actions, and they returned to their duties. She strode to the end of the room where a single set of stairs gave access to the floor above - Crane’s personal quarters.

  She shared access to the 104th floor with the other four generals and Crane’s personal secretary. All of them had been subjected to the curse of the Haitian voodoo priest, Jean Philippe Allemande, that had eliminated the ability to harm Crane.

  As she took her first step on the stairs, another biometric scanner took in her body shape and style of movement. At the first landing of the stairs, a GAU-17/A minigun tracked the center of her body mass. The gun, equipped with 7.62mm depleted uranium rounds and six barrels that could deliver four thousand rounds per minute, disengaged tracking her as she was recognized by the system.

  It would be a nasty accident if that system ever made a mistake.

  She stepped past the wicked looking barrels of the minigun.

  At the top of the second flight of stairs, she approached a formidable door of polished steel. It could only be opened from the inside. She waited a moment and a nearly invisible seam opened vertically in the reflective surface. The two sides, thick enough to stop a shaped explosive charge, silently pulled back into the walls.

  Cornelius Crane, king of the vampires, had just granted her access to his personal quarters.

  Chloe stepped into the inner sanctum of Cornelius Crane’s Citadel. The whole floor was an extended suite done exclusively in the high style of the 18th-century French aristocracy. She walked calmly along a broad entry hall, the walls had shallow nooks that held exquisite pieces of art. Crane favored the European Renaissance masters. The halls and rooms displayed a collection of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Hieronymus Bosch, and the woodcuts by Albrecht Durer - all authentic, and many famous.

  The fakes and copies littered the walls of the museums of the world - the originals were here.

  Crane was a collector; it was one of his many passions. Chloe noted as she walked past the art that she had been collected, and for a time, she had been his passion.

  She entered into his library. He had been collecting books since the 11th century, the walls were lined with shelves and volumes, some works were kept in climate controlled cases to preserve them. The great minds of the last five thousand years were represented in this room. More than a dozen languages were required to read what was written here, and Crane had mastered them all.

  After Cornelius Crane had personally converted her into a vampire, Chloe had spent her early decades as his lover, confidant, and protégé. She had spent many years in this library when it was still in London during the 19th century.

  Glancing down at an elegant French 17th-century table as she walked through the main room, she noticed an original copy from the first print run of “Dell'arte Della Guerra,” also known as “On the Art of War” by Niccolo Machiavelli, resting on the table.

  She had read that very volume, written in the original Italian within the first year of her relationship with Crane. Her mind grasped the open page at a glance; she almost stopped walking as one of Machiavelli’s quotes from the page came to her mind.

  “No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.”

  How apropos.

  She halted in front of Cornelius Crane.

  But why does he have this very page open for me to see as I pass by - does he suspect me?

  Cornelius Crane sat behind a polished wooden desk, dressed simply, in fine robes and slippers.

  He smiled, ‘General Chloe Armitage, I see that you have brought me a gift. Let me see it.’

  Chloe took the Papyrus from the case, unrolling it across the breadth of his desk.

  Cornelius laughed, standing up to his full six feet six-inch height, his long arms reaching out, he pinned the scroll at each end.

  He leaned over the Papyrus, peering intently at it, ‘it is marvelous, both intricate and unknowable without the Codex. Hakron was a genius, the equal of his brother.’

  ‘Two of the three are now together, Cornelius,’ Chloe remarked, using Crane’s first name which he allowed when they were alone together.

  ‘Yes. I have been searching for nearly a millennium, and now we have two artifacts in less than forty years. If I believed in it, I would say the hand of fate was at work ... no, these are the fruits of persistence, hard work, and to a great degree - your own skills.’

  Cornelius rolled the Papyrus up again, placing it within a golden tube, he rested it on his desk.

  ‘You must name a reward,’ he offered with a smile.

  ‘You know what I want, and it cannot be given.’

  ‘Well, yes ... Liberty. But of course - you must choose something else.’

  Chloe tilted her head slightly, smiling innocently, ‘I am sure that one day I will think of something worthy of my service.’

  Cornelius stared at her, his brown eyes filled with intent, ‘I am sure that you will.’

  Chloe stood quietly in silence, forcing him to continue.

  ‘Turning to other matters,’ Cornelius said, frowning, ‘you had your personal helicopter transport a human to Rikers Island. It looks like you have more work to do tonight.’

  ‘Yes indeed. He is the son of Arthur Slayne.’

  Cornelius raised an eyebrow in surprise, ‘I expected you to kill them both.’

  ‘I made a sacred blood oath during the interrogation - he violated it. I am merely completing the punishme
nt.’

  ‘So be it, such operational matters are your prerogative.’

  Chloe nodded.

  ‘Is there anything else to report?’

  ‘Nothing of any import.’

  ‘You have done very well, you are dismissed.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir,’ Chloe said deferentially.

  Chloe inclined her head, taking three steps back, she turned and walked away. She exited Crane’s chambers through the polished steel doors, a slight smile curling the edge of her mouth.

  He has no idea of the existence of Anton Slayne. I will have to ensure that he never finds out the truth - until it is too late.

  * * *

  Cornelius Crane watched Chloe Armitage leave his library, he waited until he heard her exit the floor, then he remotely closed the main door behind her.

  With the Papyrus tube in hand, he turned around, gazing at the art piece that hung directly behind his desk, it was the triptych, Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. Cornelius had been the unknown patron who had commissioned both this work in 1491 and a deliberately imperfect copy that was completed in 1493. The copy now resided in the Museo del Prado in Madrid and had done so since 1939. The interwoven images spoke to his soul; it was his favorite masterpiece.

  Together, the three panels of the triptych stood over seven feet high and thirteen feet wide. He approached the middle panel; the largest of the three, it depicted scenes of lost innocence. He touched an almost imperceptible stud on the bottom of the panel, it swung free, revealing a hidden doorway.