“Dead how? What happened? Wasn’t a sex game gone wrong, was it? Orange in mouth, belt round neck? Bloody stupid way to go.”
“Close. Hanged himself.”
“No.”
“Yes. Dressing-gown cord tied to a light fixture. Poor little intern, he’s completely freaked out by it. I just bought him the latest in a succession of stiff drinks. The way he described it to me—your neck stretches, did you know that? Under the weight of your body. To about three times its normal length. Like a piece of chewing gum when you pull it out from your mouth. And the smell. Wax had shat his pants. And his eyeballs—”
“Yes, yes, it wasn’t a pretty sight, I get the picture.”
“There was a note, too,” Slocock said. “Word processed, not a single typo. Typical Wax, neat and tidy to the end. It said—I can’t quote it exactly—but something about how he couldn’t be a party to the Solarville project any more. His conscience wouldn’t take it. As a Jew, as the grandson of people who’d only just managed to avoid getting sent to the death camps, he felt that putting Sunless into a bell jar was unacceptable. He definitely used that term, bell jar. He said it was a step too far. I think there was also some stuff about the relatives of his who did die, Treblinka, Auschwitz, et cetera, how he never knew them but felt a debt of obligation to them, felt he’d failed their memory, their legacy... Fuck. He topped himself, Nathaniel. Over this stupid Sunless business.”
“Why are you so upset? You can’t pretend you liked the man. You couldn’t stand him.”
“No, I didn’t like him. It’s just... Fuck. I feel like... I feel like I did this to him. I’m the one who pushed him over the edge. Me.”
“How? With the threat of blackmail?”
“It couldn’t have helped, could it? Added to the pressure he was under.”
“He gave his reasons for suicide quite clearly enough. He thought he was complicit in some kind of new Final Solution. That was what was preying on his mind, what drove him to hang himself, not the fear of being exposed as an S and M fetishist.”
“But the blackmail forced him into persuading the Prime Minister to go with the Solarville option. He wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t... if you hadn’t made me make him.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault too, is it?”
“I think you need to be prepared to take some of the blame.”
“I never believed I’d hear this sort of thing from you, Giles,” Lambourne said, lowering his voice but upping the anger a notch. “I thought you were made of sterner stuff.”
“A man is dead, Nathaniel. A man whose wife is on her way down from Newcastle right now to view his corpse. Whose two kids are going to wake up tomorrow fatherless.”
“Don’t be so fucking maudlin. My father died when I was eleven and I couldn’t have been gladder. I didn’t have to run around scared all the time of him belting me. Stumbling drunkenly at the top of the stairs and cracking his head open at the bottom was the biggest favour he ever did me and my mother.”
Lambourne had lived with this version of events for so long that he had almost convinced himself it was the truth. His father had been drunk at the time of his death, yes, but hadn’t stumbled down the stairs so much as been shoved, with all the strength that the arms of a bruised and terrified eleven-year-old boy could muster.
“I’ve hurt people before,” Slocock said. “I’ve screwed people over. Plenty of times. But I’ve never been responsible for someone’s death.”
“Well, get over it. Shit happens. If you want to get ahead in the world, this is the sort of thing you have to be ready to accept.”
“I’m not sure I can accept it.”
“You’re going to have to try. Otherwise you’re of no further use to me.”
“I don’t know if I want to be of any use to you any more.”
“That’s up to you,” said Lambourne. “No skin off my nose. You won’t be impossible to replace. You’re not the only MP I have on a leash. What you have to consider is what you stand to lose by bailing out. Me, I stand to lose nothing if you do, but you, with all your debts, your outgoings, you could have a very rocky road ahead. You’re relying on that position with Dep Chem to secure your future. Throw it away, by all means. Just don’t come running to me when your finances fall apart and the bailiffs start knocking at the door. It can happen far more quickly than you realise, you know.”
He could hear, from the breathing on the other end of the line, how Slocock was turning it all over in his mind. He could hear how hard the younger man was thinking.
“Call me in an hour,” he said, “when you’ve had time to reflect and calm down a little. Then we’ll discuss this again. That’s if you still want in. If you don’t, don’t bother calling at all, and have a nice life.”
He cut the connection and returned indoors.
“All sorted,” he said into the webcam.
“Nothing serious, I hope?” said Tokyo.
“Nothing at all serious, Yukinobu. An employee with an item of information for me. There’s been a minor mishap, it shouldn’t inconvenience us in any way.”
“What kind of mishap?” Boston asked.
“Wax, the Sunless Affairs chap in Parliament, is dead.”
“A politician? No big deal, then.”
“Couldn’t have put it better myself, Howard. In a way it’s actually a bonus. He had been quite obstructive, ’til I leaned on him. Now he’s out of the way, that’s a loose end tied up. One less bleeding-heart liberal in the world. One less dandelion in the bowling green in need of uprooting.”
“I prefer to stamp on my dandelions,” said the Bostonian, grinning whitely.
“Weed killer for me,” said the Japanese with a surprisingly girlish titter.
All three men enjoyed a moment in which to dwell on their common ruthlessness and the impunity that their stratospheric wealth afforded them. It was like belonging to the most exclusive club in the world, whose only rule was that you could do exactly as you pleased.
“So anyway, back to business,” said Lambourne. “We have a Solarville deal in place, or as near as makes no difference. The PM’s raiding the public purse to bring all fifteen of them on-stream within in a space of three years. Baseline projection sees us netting between four and five hundred mill.”
“Dollars? Sterling?” said the Bostonian.
“Sterling. Each.”
“Cool.”
“Then, when they’re a proven success, we can start rolling out the system across mainland Europe. I’ve already had expressions of interest from Germany and Italy, and what sounds like an overture of partnership from Russia, though you can never quite tell with those damn oligarchs. Usually when they’re enquiring about a deal, they’re trying to figure out a way of ripping you off and cutting you out.”
“I thought the Russians didn’t have a Sunless problem,” said the Japanese.
“They’re worried they might. There’s been some overspill across the Caucasus and they’d like to be ready in case the trickle turns into a flood. It’s the same in the States, isn’t it, Howard?”
“Hell, yes. There’s not more than about four hundred vampires on our soil, that we know about, and the federal government’s squawking around like Chicken Little, thinking the sky’s falling on our heads. That’s Americans for you—and I speak as a proud patriot. We sure know how to stir ourselves up into a panic. Anything that looks like it’s going to impinge on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness gets us frothing at the chops and reaching for the muskets. I could talk the President into buying a hundred Solarvilles right now and nobody’d turn a hair.”
“We’ll hold fire on that for the time being,” said Lambourne. “Wouldn’t want to overextend ourselves. Too much too soon is never good when you’re growing a new brand. Besides, you’ve got our Porphyrian initiative in the pipeline. It’ll suit the North American market better than Solarville, so we should try to avoid an overlap there. Same goes for you, Yukinobu, and your Shinobi Eternal. Horses for course
s, eh?”
The trick to a good consortium was for each member to have his own discrete administrative sphere which he ran autonomously but with oversight from the other members. Then all felt in control, hands on the reins, while being mutually beholden, bound together by scrutiny as well as a share of the proceeds. J. Howard Farthingale III was in charge of operations in the Americas, Yukinobu Uona’s territory was the Far East, while Lambourne claimed the bit in the middle. They had divided the world three ways. It was their very own block of Neapolitan ice cream.
“In a spirit of candour,” Lambourne went on, “I feel bound to mention that a tiny fly has alighted in the ointment.”
Frowns from the other two of the triumvirate.
“Again, like Wax, it’s nothing serious,” he hurried on. “Measures have been put into effect to neutralise the problem.”
“What is it?” said Farthingale.
“Someone has twigged to the vasopressin augmentation. A SHADE officer, man name of John Redlaw. He developed suspicions about BovPlas and in the end stole a sample of blood to have it analysed.”
“Stole!”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. He knows enough to have figured out what we’ve been up to. Counter to that, he’s in no position to use that knowledge effectively against us. Latest reports have him being taken into custody by his own people. SHADE will hold him overnight, and by tomorrow it’ll be too late and he’ll be an irrelevance.”
“Why so?” asked Uona.
“Because we’ve already stopped adding the vasopressin. It’s done its job, achieved everything it was intended to. We don’t need it any longer. As of this evening, all blood leaving the Watford plant is as pure as when it was running through the cows’ veins.”
“But this Redlaw guy still knows what he knows,” Farthingale pointed out. “Surely we need to do something to fix that.”
“By all accounts, he’s become a loose cannon,” said Lambourne. “Used to be SHADE’s blue-eyed boy, but then had some kind of breakdown, failure of nerve, rush of blood to the head, something like that. Should he try and make life awkward for us—go to the media or some such—it shouldn’t be too difficult to portray him as a crackpot, a fantasist who’s put two and two together and come up with five. Dep Chem’s publicity department is skilled at smearing anyone who’s come gunning for the company. They’ve had years of experience discrediting healthcare quacks, investigative reporters, eco-mentalists and the like.”
“But if he’s with SHADE, won’t that give him credence if he starts accusing us?”
“He isn’t any more. He’s had his licence revoked or whatever it is they do to shadies—hang up their stakes? He’s a high flyer who’s fallen to earth with a bump, a loser in a game he can’t win, and I really don’t think he need detain us further.”
“Still,” said Uona, “it might be as well to dispose of all the evidence, Nathaniel, if you see my meaning. Just in case.”
“You’re referring to Subject V, I presume.”
“I am indeed. Surely he’s outlived his usefulness by now. Frankly I’m baffled why you’ve insisted on keeping him at all, so long after you finished with him.”
“I’m with Yukinobu,” said Farthingale. “What’s the point of hanging on to Subject V? He’s not doing anyone any good, just chained up there, mouldering away. Now’s the time.”
“Get rid of V?” mused Lambourne. It wasn’t that the thought had never occurred to him. He just disliked anything going to waste or throwing an asset away before he was absolutely certain he didn’t need it any more. “I could, I suppose.”
“No ‘could’ about it,” said Farthingale. “He’s got to go.”
“I agree,” said Uona. “I believe Howard would call it ‘covering our asses.’”
“Damn straight I would. That’s two votes for, Nathaniel, and being as this is a democracy, or as close to one as the three of us would ever care to get, that makes it a done deal. You have to terminate Subject V, no ifs, ands or buts, soon as you can.”
Lambourne, powerful rechargeable SureFire torch in hand, exited the house and crossed the grounds of his estate to the old observatory. He did not like anyone telling him what to do. Equally, he understood that his consortium partners’ recommendations made sense. Logic dictated that Subject V was surplus to requirements. So it must be.
The torch’s 2,300-lumen beam lit the mist coruscatingly, picking out the dewdrops spangling the grass and, just briefly, the flash of a rabbit’s eyes as the animal took fright and helter-skeltered into the shrubbery.
The observatory perched on a hilltop like a huge snub-nosed bullet, silhouetted against the dark brilliance of the sky. The previous owner of the mansion but one, a shipping tycoon, was a keen amateur astronomer who had discovered not one but two very distant objects, a moon and an asteroid, both now named after him. The subsequent owner was a prog rock god, a ’seventies icon, who’d also been into star-gazing. The observatory, in fact, had been a key reason for his purchasing the house. However, his interest in the wonders of the cosmos waned, along with his record sales and financial fortunes, and he was eventually forced to sell first the twenty-eight-inch refracting telescope, then the entire property, in order to meet a swingeing tax demand.
A desperate vendor is a biddable vendor, and Lambourne had purchased the mansion at a knockdown price from the maestro of the twenty-minute live keyboard solo. He hadn’t initially been able to find a use for the shell of the observatory and so had let the building crumble until it was little more than a hollow folly, its cracked stonemasonry shrouded with ivy. Then, two years back, he had had it shored up and renovated to new specifications.
The door was secured by a lock keyed to Lambourne’s biometric profile. Look, touch, speak, and he was in.
A pit had been excavated deep into the observatory’s foundations, and a monitoring gallery ran round the rim. Above, the hemispherical shape of the roof had been kept, but the original had been replaced by one composed of hexagonal panes of glass, a dwarf replica of the dome over Solarville. The construction workers responsible for these alterations had been told they were making a special hothouse intended for large, exotic specimens of rainforest plant life.
On entering, Lambourne quickly fitted a charcoal-filter mask over his nose and mouth to screen out the noxious stench from below. Extractor fans ran twenty-four-seven to clear the air in here, but their work was cut out for them. He went to the parapet at the centre of the gallery, on which four machine guns were mounted equidistantly, all aimed downwards and loaded with belt-fed Fraxinus rounds. Their firing mechanisms were hooked up to a motion sensor field located a metre below the parapet’s rim. If the field’s infrared meniscus was broken, the guns would be tripped. Once operational, each swivelled automatically, traversing back and forth through a forty-five-degree arc. When shooting began there would, for the occupant of the pit, be simply no escaping the crisscrossing streams of ash-wood bullets.
Down in the pit, something stirred.
“Vlad,” said Lambourne softly.
Heavy chains clanked.
“Vla-a-ad.”
A hoarse, grunting moan and a questing snuffle. From the shadows of the pit, two great red eyes suddenly shone.
Lambourne pressed a switch to disable the motion sensor field. Then he fetched a blood pouch from a fridge and tossed it over the gallery parapet. Barely had it landed before the creature in the pit dived on it, tore open the plastic and guzzled the contents.
A word came up, thickly uttered, scarcely recognisable.
“More.”
“More, Vlad? Oh well, don’t see why not.”
Lambourne threw down a second pouch and, for the hell of it, a third. The blood was pure, unadulterated. The time for dispensing the other kind of blood, blood with a generous lacing of vasopressin, was long past.
The thing called Vlad consumed each pouch in one go, with lip-smacking gusto. Then he sank back onto the floor of the pit, the links of the chains settling with low
metallic thuds.
“Go?” Vlad asked, longingly, plaintively. “Vlad go now?”
“No,” Lambourne replied. He was used to this importuning. “No going. Vlad stay.”
“Vlad want... free. Want... out.”
“Not now. Maybe soon.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe.”
Vlad heaved a sigh that Lambourne would have said came from the soul, if the undead had souls—if, for that matter, he’d believed in such things. He gazed down a little longer at the massive, misshapen figure hunkered amid his own filth, studying the hairless orb of skull, the body covered with swollen veins like vines, the musculature that spoke of a terrific, apelike strength. He had created this through feeding and nurturing. He had taken the raw clay of a Sunless and moulded it into something even more monstrous.
Vlad, as Subject V, had been the test bed for the results of the hormone on the Sunless metabolism and physiology. Long after it had been proven that vasopressin markedly increased aggression and fostered addiction, however, Lambourne had continued to dose the creature with it on a daily basis, at increasing levels of potency. He had wanted to see if there were long-term, even permanent effects. With the same cold, clinical curiosity that drives a child to dismember a beetle, he had extended the experiment, taking it to extremes, unhesitatingly.
The outcome was grotesque but satisfying. Amplified body mass, accompanied by a reduction in higher cerebral cortical functions. The outer Vlad grew while the inner Vlad shrank. Vlad had become both more and less.
Lambourne cast a glance up to the glass dome capping the observatory. It was dark and semi-opaque; the moon glimmered weakly through, but the stars were completely occluded. This was a second experiment that had been conducted on Vlad, in parallel with the first, a practical proof of the computer-model estimates of the levels of sunlight a vampire could withstand.
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