A Subtle Agency

by Graeme Rodaughan

  ‘It is rare that I have my two best Generals in the same room at the same time,’ Cornelius said, pouring three drinks from a decanter on a low table between them. ‘This is Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 whiskey - surprisingly, it is both Japanese and excellent.’

  Haras smiled, ‘perhaps we should have Shen Zhen here, it’s from his region.’ He reached forward taking the glass; he sniffed it, closing his eyes before sipping it, ‘delicious.’

  It is remarkable that alcohol and nicotine have an impact on vampire physiology, and yet most drugs are simply ineffective.

  Cornelius had projects running in a network of secret labs to explore the boundaries of the vampire condition. When needed, it was a simple matter to create new test subjects. He was fascinated by the exploration of what was possible.

  Science is a wonderful thing.

  Chloe and Cornelius both took a glass each and sipped the whiskey. The alcohol provided zero nutrition, only human blood could sustain a vampire, but the flavors of alcohol and tobacco remained to be enjoyed and savored.

  When you have been alive for nearly a thousand years, simple pleasures matter.

  Cornelius put the empty glass back on the table and said, ‘I have a mission for you both.’

  Chloe and Haras looked at each other.

  They will hate this, but the competition between them will motivate them.

  Cornelius continued, ‘we now have the Papyrus of Hakron the Scribe.’

  ‘What!’ Haras said.

  Chloe gave a slight smile.

  ‘Indeed,’ Cornelius said, raising an eyebrow. ‘We now have two of the three Metaframe artifacts. It is time to claim the third.’

  ‘But no one knows where the Interpretive Codex is!’ Haras said.

  ‘The Papyrus provides a clue, right at the start before it drifts into outright madness, it declares that the Red Ghost will be able to interpret the hieroglyphics of the Papyrus.’

  ‘So that’s why you called me here. “Shabbah al Ahmar,” “The Red Ghost” is the hereditary title of the head of my former colleagues. But his identity and location are secret. How do you propose to find him?’

  The family line of the Red Ghost has always held the Interpretive Codex, from before the establishment of the Red Empire twenty-four centuries ago. Just like the Slayne family with the Papyrus.

  ‘That’s where the two of you come in. The Red Empire’s activities against us consistently track back to the Middle East. I’m sending both of you by drone to a Shadowstone facility outside of Jerusalem. That will be your base of operations. You will have two of my praetorian guards with you and substantial Shadowstone resources.’

  Chloe’s eyes widened, ‘we have ongoing critical operations against elements of the Order of Thoth in North America, disturbing those operations buys risk for us all.’

  ‘This is a priority,’ Cornelius declared, ‘that is the end of it.’

  ‘Of course, Sir. We will discharge our duty.’ Chloe said, her voice betraying a faint trace of sarcasm.

  Cornelius tilted his head slightly, and spoke with the edge of a threat in his voice, ‘I’m sure that you will do your duty with the enthusiasm that it deserves.’

  Increasingly she holds something back. Well, my praetorians can keep an eye on her as the mission unfolds.

  Cornelius addressed his generals, ‘let us be clear. I am sending you to Jerusalem to find the head of the Red Empire, to take the Interpretive Codex from him and return it here. That is the only mission. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ Haras said.

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ Chloe said a moment later.

  Cornelius refilled the glasses, ‘then let us drink,’ he raised his glass, ‘to the Vampire Dominion!’

  ‘To the Vampire Dominion!’ Haras and Chloe said in unison.

  All three vampires downed their drinks.

  ‘Sir. If we leave now, we will get to Jerusalem three hours after sunrise,’ Haras said.

  ‘Have you both recently fed?’ Cornelius asked, and both his Generals nodded. ‘Then fly now, you can wait in the drone at the Shadowstone site outside Jerusalem. That way you do not waste half of tomorrow night on travel.’

  Cornelius watched his Generals leave the library.

  They would ascend to the hanger deck where a helicopter would fly them out to the airfield at Fort Dix, in less than three hours they would be transported to Jerusalem by a hypersonic Shadowstone drone.

  Success or failure in this mission? In either event I will learn more about her loyalty - or lack thereof.

  * * *

  Anton started to wake up, his head resting on a pillow with a faint odor of laundry detergent.

  He winced, as sunlight was coming through the window, striking him in the face. Rolling over onto his side to get away from it - he suddenly bolted upright, cracking his head hard on the bottom of the bunk above him.

  ‘Arhhhh,’ Anton yowled, looking frantically around the room.

  ‘Where’s my backpack?’

  His memory of the previous evening came rushing back. He distinctly remembered swapping the pillow for his backpack - to keep its contents safe. He didn’t have far to look, finding his backpack under the end of his bunk. He snatched it close, it came easily, it was so light.

  He looked inside, groaning, ‘some bastard has cleaned me out.’

  His spare clothes, wallet, cash, food, and silver were all missing. He threw the empty backpack against the wall. He looked up to the ceiling, slumping back down onto his bunk. He leaned forward, putting his head in his hands.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he moaned.

  For a long moment, he felt the energy drain from his body, and the empty dorm closed in around him. A claustrophobic pressure exploded from the base of his spine, he dry retched, a sickly bile filling his mouth. Filled with disgust, he spat it out onto a used bath towel that he found lying on the bunk opposite.

  God knows what was on that towel.

  He threw the towel back onto the opposite bunk, wiping his hands on his jeans. He sat back, the light in the room dimming as a cloud shielded the window from the sunlight.

  It suddenly got darker and a lot colder, shivering, his hands started to tremble. He could see his own breath condensing in front of him.

  That’s weird.

  He felt it in his guts first, a tightness that exploded into a dreadful foreboding as an overwhelming sense of presence filled the room.

  There is something horrible here, what is it?

  The light outside the room evaporated as if the sun had completely disappeared. The single naked globe dangling from the ceiling provided the only illumination. The window blew in with an icy blast of air, showering the room with fragments of glass, wood, and stone. A flash of darkness jagged like black lightning across the room in front of him.

  He turned his head to follow it and there she was - standing at the entrance of the room - Chloe Armitage.

  He couldn’t move, he could barely breathe. She wore a diaphanous black gown, off the shoulder and split high on the thigh. She carried a golden goblet in her left hand and her right rested casually on her hip. Her dark hair was long and pulled back through a delicate golden crown. He could feel his heart thumping in his chest, but he remained frozen, like a fly tightly caught in a spider’s web. He blinked, and she was in front of him. Her face barely inches from his own, he could hear her breathing slowly. Her magnificent blue eyes stared into his and his mind screamed in a silent room.

  With her fangs bared, she lifted the goblet to his lips, whispering, ‘drink Anton, for this is my blood.’

  He was a helpless witness as he started to drink the contents of the goblet. It felt like liquid fire, fanning a need beyond desire. In moments, the goblet was empty and it fell loosely from her hand.

  She reached forward with a finger, stroking his chest from the notch of his throat to the top of his jeans, his shirt fell away neatly cut in two by the edge of her fingernail. She reversed the stroke, her fingers now spread wide,
hungrily pushing up over the hard muscles of his stomach and across his chest. Her touch was electric, with both hands she pushed him back onto the bunk, as the contents of the goblet sang through his veins. She reached down, ripping away the front of his jeans with her bare hands before sitting astride him.

  He was galvanized by an overwhelming desire. His hands came free of the force that had trapped them but he didn’t push her away, he pulled her closer, thrusting his hips and entering her. He arched forward and she went with him - two equals in union.

  She wrapped herself around him, drawing him in as close as possible, murmuring into his ear, ‘eat Anton, for this is my body.’

  A drumbeat thudded through his soul, lightning flashed and crackled, and then she was gone.

  Anton’s heart was racing; he was breathless as he picked himself up from the floor. The window stood intact, there was no broken glass, splintered wood or shattered stone. The sunlight was streaming through the window, and he could see dust motes lazily floating in the room.

  What was that? A vision? Was it madness?

  He felt a terrible need for a shower.

  Will I ever be clean again?

  Twenty minutes later he was striding away from the Lighthouse Center Homeless Shelter as fast as he could without actually running. Around him, the fine folk of Boston sat down to breakfast in stylish cafes, drinking soy lattes and discussing topics that had nothing to do with being pursued by a demon.

  * * *

  Chloe completed strapping herself into a self-contained life pod within the hypersonic drone aircraft.

  Beside her, in his own pod, Haras Mosule did the same. Behind them sat Crane’s two praetorians, Peter Dench, and Washington Jones. If the drone suffered a catastrophic failure, the life pods would become escape capsules.

  The voice of their pilot, operating out of a Shadowstone command center at Fort Dix came through their headsets, ‘the drone will launch in five minutes. Flight time to Jerusalem will be eighty six minutes. Our target altitude is eighty two thousand feet, with a cruising speed of four thousand two hundred miles per hour. ETA in Jerusalem is 09:05 local time, Sunday the 30th of April.’

  Ninety-one minutes, then nearly fourteen hours waiting in this drone for sunset.

  She turned her mind to the mission at hand as she felt the drone’s liquid hydrogen fueled, Scimitar engines begin to spool up, and the drone began to taxi out of the hanger. Two feet in front of her face was a twenty-four-inch, high definition monitor linked to cameras in the skin of the aircraft. In the windowless drone, she could easily see the progress of the flight.

  She switched the monitor to network mode, opening her Shadowstone email account. She sent James Haley an email requesting daily status reports on the progress of tracking Anton Smith. She looked at her inbox, there was nothing urgent or important, she never received email from the other Generals. She knew that Cornelius Crane was well versed in modern technology but rarely used it himself. The other generals were a mixed bag ranging from Clayton Maze and Haras Mosule, both of whom were skilled users, but seemed to view technology as a necessary evil; to Dieter Franz and Shen Zhen, who both avoided the trappings of the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

  She sometimes wondered why Cornelius Crane had picked these people to be his Generals. He had never explained why. The only other person who might know, the Haitian voodoo priest Jean Philippe Allemande who had provided the curses that bound the Generals to never harm Cornelius Crane was dead. For his services, Allemande had been rewarded with vampirism by Crane in the 1850s. He had gone back to his native Haiti and lived the life of a ghoul lord for nearly fifty years before Chloe had purged him from the vampire community. She had extracted a final curse before she had executed him, a binding curse on a young US Naval Lieutenant, Marcus Drake.

  She switched the monitor off.

  She needed to plan, assisted by the quiet solitude of the life pod. She closed her eyes, and relaxed, the objective was clear. She needed to meet “Shabbah al Ahmar”, the aptly named Red Ghost, the head of the Red Empire. Crane was sure that he was in possession of the Interpretive Codex, the second document written by Hakron the Scribe, which could be used to correctly interpret the insane gibberish of the Papyrus. The two documents together would enable mastery of the Key of Ahknaton and, therefore, access to the powers of the Metaframe. She did not need to retrieve the Codex for herself, she only needed to read it, her eidetic memory would provide her with a perfect copy.

  She was the only person alive who knew the power of her memory. It was one of three special abilities that she kept as closely guarded secrets. She believed that if Cornelius Crane knew about those powers, he would not hesitate to slaughter her on the spot to remove the risk that she would one day usurp his throne.

  I will need to mislead Haras Mosule, and Cornelius’s henchmen if I am to again meet secretly with the Red Ghost. Perhaps it is time for Haras to be taken off the chessboard. He is too clever to leave as a loyal servant of Cornelius Crane.

  Her eyes closed and she smiled.

  Perhaps a little private purging of the ranks, it had happened before, why not again?

  She opened her eyes, staring at the dull gray of the monitor, her mind spinning far away.

  Or something subtler? Could he be turned to my purpose? Yes, especially if he was kept unaware of the ultimate goal.

  The drone took off, the powerful acceleration pushing Chloe back into her seat. Her lips curled into a slight smile as she explored the implications and contingencies of her plans, there would be plenty of time to determine the specifics of what needed to be done.

  * * *

  Anton had spent the last three nights sleeping on the streets.

  He still had a couple of hundred dollars left in his savings account, but he didn’t want to use his debit card, as he expected that the secret keepers would find him. He maintained a low profile, cap on, hood up. He kept an eye out for cameras and avoided public spaces. He was losing weight, and growing increasingly desperate.

  It was almost midnight, the mid-week trade in Chinatown had finished for the night.

  Anton hissed, ‘shhhhhh,’ pushing a cat off the top of a garbage can.

  A moment later, he was fishing around in the can outside the back door of a restaurant - it was slim pickings.

  The food must be good here, almost nothing is being thrown out.

  Anton barked a single disappointed laugh, as he realized that he had reached the point where he could feel upset by not finding something to eat in a garbage bin.

  He heard a click and looked up. The back door of the restaurant had opened and a man was silhouetted in the doorway.

  ‘Hey, you shouldn’t ... Anton? Anton Slayne?’ He said, taking a step forward.

  He knows my real name.

  ‘Damn it,’ Anton said, backing away.

  The man walked forward into the shadows of the alleyway and said, ‘Anton, what are you doing here? What has happened?’

  Anton turned, running back up the alleyway. He put on the speed that had won medals at state level four-hundred-meter track events, he got about ten feet when the man went past him like he was standing still.

  He slid to a stop.

  The man stood in front of him, speaking calmly, ‘I am a friend of your family. You do not have to fear me.’

  If he’s a vampire I’m done. I’m going to die in this stupid alleyway.

  ‘Let me introduce myself, I am Gang Wu,’ he waved his hand toward the end of the alleyway, ‘and this is the Noodle House. Let’s go back inside and get something nice to eat.’

  Friend or foe? If he’s a vampire, then he would more likely kill me rather than talk to me.

  Anton took a deep breath, ‘okay.’

  He followed Gang into the back of the restaurant.

  ‘Li ... Li,’ Gang called out as they arrived in the kitchen. ‘Bring some towels, we have a guest, and make some nice hot tea.’

  Gang guided Anton to a stool, ‘sit here, there’s no
need to hunt in the garbage. I have excellent dumplings. The best in Chinatown.’

  The delicious smells of the kitchen convinced Anton, ‘I’m starving.’

  Gang started cooking, ‘this won’t take long, shrimp dumpling, pork dumpling, sautéed Shanghai greens. Li! Where is the Tea?’

  ‘Father!?’ Called a voice with more than a hint of exasperation.

  A young woman came through the archway from the restaurant, she was carrying an armload of white towels. Rolling her eyes at her father, she dropped the towels onto a spare bench.

  She looked at Anton, frowning, and said something in rapid Chinese.

  ‘Li!’ Gang said, ‘he is not a stray dog, he is Anton Slayne.’

  Li sniffed, ‘really? I thought a Slayne would be cleaner and not so scruffy looking.’

  ‘He’ll scrub up okay. Now, please, some tea for us all,’ Gang spooned half a dozen dumplings onto a plate, handing them to Anton with a fork. ‘I don’t know if you can use chopsticks. Try these shrimp dumplings, they’re delicious.’

  Anton blew on the steaming dumplings before he began eating them.

  ‘Ummmm,’ his eyes closed. Then he looked at Gang and grinned, ‘oh, they’re so good!’

  He then started into the rest of the plate, and in a minute, they were all gone.

  Li placed a teapot and three cups with saucers on a nearby bench, ‘the tea will be ready soon.’

  ‘Now for the pork dumplings,’ Gang gave Anton the second plate, following with a third plate with the sautéed Shanghai greens. He then sat back, waiting for Anton to finish eating.

  Anton ate the pork dumplings and started to weep, tears rolling down his cheeks, ‘this is ... just ... so good of you.’ He sobbed, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ Gang said, taking the plate away and putting his hand on Anton’s shoulder, ‘long, deep breaths young man, slow it down.’

  Putting his head in his hands, Anton cried, rocking slowly back and forth as other feelings held back for days came forth in a rush.