“Fun? I’m not sure I’d call it that. Are you on your way back to the office?”
“Mais, non. I’m staying in Krakow another night.”
“Why? Is the photographer still shooting?”
“No, we got plenty last night and some today at a lunch show they put on. I have some unfinished business.”
“Oh, Francois, you’re not going after the Chechens again! Taras said they’re pissed.”
“No, this is my own unfinished business. You remember I saw someone at the bar?”
The lights went on, but how could I find out if it was a man for a woman?
None of my business, I finally decided.
“Have a good time, then! I hope I’ll see you soon,” and I signed off with a big air kiss as Jean-Louis came in.
“That better have been one of us,” he smiled.
God, it was good to see him! I moved from behind the desk to the living room where Elise had put my coffee, but had to sit down again. Just seeing him made my legs weak.
“Yep, that was Francois. He’s staying in Krakow another night. He’s found somebody he wants to pursue.”
Jean-Louis threw back his head and laughed. The good humor and safety of the castle brought back his glimmer and now his aura shimmered around him. “That boy, he needs to be careful. Hasn’t he seen what happens when he gets mixed up with a regular? I’d think that my example would be enough to scare him off.”
“What’s that crack supposed to mean? Have I been a drag on you?”
“Hah, I knew that’d get a rise out of you! Now that you’re stronger, stand up so I can hold you and welcome you home properly.”
Home?
I stood up, feeling short in my flats, and wound my arms around his neck. We’d deal with the “home” issue later. He leaned over me and gave me a kiss that took my breath away as his tongue probed my mouth and he gently sucked my bottom lip between his teeth.
“Stop, stop,” I managed to gasp.
He pulled back and looked at me, hurt beginning to grow in his eyes. “You want me to stop?”
“Just for now. If that keeps up, in one minute I’m going to strip my clothes off and ruin my hair and makeup that Elise slaved over.” Since he’d pulled back slightly, I was able to take a deep breath. “My love, I can’t keep you and business together in my head right now. This is not an area I can multi-task in. It’s either you or the Baron, dinner and the meeting. Just being in the same room with you tonight is going to be hard for me.”
The hurt faded from his eyes and was replaced with impish humor. “Ah ha, I have you in my power and later tonight I will have my way with you!”
“Is that a promise?”
“Oh, yes, yes it is, love. But for now, dinner and a command performance.” He opened the door with a flourish and a demon fell into the room.
“I am so sorry, Jean-Louis.” The demon was stammering in his embarrassment. “Sandor ordered me to come and get you. They are waiting dinner.”
“Well, tell Sandor that we’re on our way,” my glorious vampire said as he took my arm.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Dinner passed peacefully enough.
Afterward, we watched the L.A. show that included footage of the Ludvoc’s Spring Show. Francois had done a superb job assigning sites for the photographers, and Krakow’s medieval Main Market was a spectacular backdrop to the gauzy fashions. He even had a short video clip, a mini-tour of the city, which showed it off and anchored that it was a World Heritage Site in viewer’s minds.
By 11 p.m. we were ready for our guests, so Sandor and Jean-Louis headed down the tunnel. They were back shortly with Karoly, Alessandr, Bohdan and another, introduced as Volodymyr Antonovych, who was from Russia but had been turned in Georgia. He wasn’t a Chechen, but had spent time in Chechnya so understood the tribal patterns and loyalties.
This was going to be a little tricky with languages, so we had two simultaneous translators, demons who were fluent in many of the Eastern European languages. Jean-Louis would translate into English for me, as I seemed to be the lightning rod for the current unpleasantness.
We started with the kidnap attempt in Kiev. Jean-Louis gave a detailed account, including Nikoly’s bout with silver poisoning. I was surprised that he’d willingly let this information out, but he must have felt the Huszars could be trusted.
There was some brief talk about Leonid, who apparently was in the dog house with Matthais for letting us get away. Volodymyr said something in a spate of Russian that turned out to be a discourse on the fact that the Chechens wouldn’t let their soldiers die without retribution.
With that piece of cheery news, we segued into the incident in Krakow. The IT guys had pinged the fake email and the path led right back to a computer at Matthias’ castle, surprise, surprise.
“What does Matthais stand to gain with this?” Jean-Louis looked honestly puzzled. “He has to know that tracking an email back to its true point of origin is easy.”
“It’s not a ruse, it’s more of a...a...point of annoyance.” Karoly was speaking English for my benefit. “He figures if you get upset, you’ll spend time and effort on tracking it, a deflection from his primary plan.”
“And that is?” The Baron hadn’t said a word but now it seemed he needed to take the lead. “We have so many red herrings that finding our way through is getting tedious.”
Karoly sighed and dropped back in Hungarian. With Jean-Louis translating in my ear, the Huszar said, “Ultimately he wants to destroy you, all of you.” Karoly looked around the room and registered the Baron, Pen, Jean-Louis, Bela, Milos, me and Sandor, respectfully standing guard at the door. “Not only does he want what you have—the wealth, standing, clout—but all of you personally. Many of us don’t understand where his hatred comes from.”
“I do,” said Jean-Louis, then nodded at the Baron. “We do. And it’s not a tale we want to tell now.”
It must have been a deep and very dark secret. This was the second time Jean-Louis alluded to it, then refused to go there.
“Beyond that, where is he headed?”
The Huszars exchanged looks. Karoly began. “He had two plans, no, paths, to get to the same end. He’s going to throw up as many small incidents as he can, to keep you busy putting out small fires. He’s hoping that you’ll miss the big one. The big one is him taking over the management and ownership of SNAP.”
Jean-Louis choked on his sip of Bulls’ Blood. “Take over the management? He doesn’t know the first thing about running SNAP!”
“No, but you have how many employees? Twenty-thousand, 30,000 around the world.? And how many of them are regulars? And how many of them can do their jobs regardless of who the CEO is? All he needs to do, he thinks, is take some of your top management, replace it with Huszars who have some training, and SNAP goes on.”
He turned to me. “That’s why you’re so important to his plan. Most of the top management are Kandeskys; you’re one of the few regulars. You won’t have the strength that the vampires have to resist him. Even if you don’t agree to work with him, he can surmount your defenses and go into your mind, your memories, your knowledge. If he can suck your abilities, he, or someone he appoints, can do your job as well as you can.”
Now I was scared. I’d gone along thinking that even if one of the Huszars or their goons grabbed me, they still didn’t have my background. And naively, I’d thought I could keep it from them. Name, rank and serial number was all I was going to share.
Hah! I didn’t even have to open my mouth for them to pull out every atom of my being, throw away what they didn’t want and toddle off with the rest. I must have looked stricken. Jean-Louis leaned over and whispered, “That’s the business reason I get so concerned about you.”
These stakes were much higher than I’d thought. Sure, I was frightened when I’d been grabbed off the beach at Santa Monica. And I thought Jean-Louis overreacted when I’d been shipped off to the castle after that little incident.
Then,
Paris. My blood ran cold when I realized what my jaunt to see normal Paris could have cost and why Michele and Denis were so upset when they briefly lost me.
I had to admit, I was frightened by the violence in Kiev. And the aftermath, when I realized that Jean-Louis could be killed was hammered home seeing Nikoly suffering from silver poisoning.
And yes, Jean-Louis had called it war. And I knew there would be violence. Everybody knew that the rise of the oligarchs, the Chechens, the Russian Mafia, brought a new level of viciousness and fear.
I guess I still chose to look at it as a particularly rough-and-tumble business takeover. Certainly more than a proxy fight with buyout threats. But still, a war of commerce that left the participants alive to fight another day.
This, though, was scorched-earth warfare. Participants sucked of all their knowledge and unable to continue. People killed or left for dead. Leadership slain and the company left to live in a climate of fear.
If the Huszars managed to take down the Kandeskys, they would have an international bully pulpit that came into homes every night spewing their message of fear and hatred. The celebs followed by their cameras could be the international terrorists, the world bullies, the corrupt and venal.
They could have control over the information that a huge population around the world got every day. And they could do this without giving up any of their current ways. Simply because the Kandeskys had given up killing to find a more civilized way of feeding, didn’t mean that the Huszars must also.
“And they could sell this power, this pulpit, to the highest or strongest bidder.” Damn, even Karoly could read my mind! “You begin to see Ms. Maxie, why there are many of us who do not follow Matthais’ way. Yes, we like to have power, but we tire of all the violence. Matthais and his Council are always plotting, always sending out spies, always searching for ways to control others. They think that by providing a constant food source they will win the hearts of their followers. What they don’t see is that building a following based on fear is dangerous because followers can turn on you.”
This was the longest speech I’d ever heard from a Huszar. I thought of them as being vicious and uneducated, but there were some who went beyond that. I’d have to ask Jean-Louis if Karoly approached him or he sought Karoly out.
OK, so Matthais wanted some kind of world domination, maybe in concert with one of the rogue countries or terrorist leaders. That didn’t mean we had to deal with the current threats, the every-day attacks, their ongoing ties to kidnap me.
Jean-Louis turned to Volodymyr and asked for a rundown of the Chechen leaders and tribes. They were speaking Russian, and Jean-Louis was in the midst of the conversation, so I wasn’t getting instantaneous translation. One of the demons was trying to keep up in English, and I got the gist if not the nuance.
Volodymyr was describing an almost feudal society, run by the strongest. Who the strongest was, at any given time, could change, so there were shifting or overlapping loyalties. No one trusted anyone else, and a chieftain could have three or four pacts at once, always on the lookout for an alliance with a stronger or richer boss.
I shook my head, a gesture Jean-Louis noticed. “This is difficult. We don’t even know who the enemy is, besides the Huszars. How can you fight if you can’t see the enemy?”
“Yes, Maxie, you’re right, but you forget that we’ve been dealing with these kinds of shifting sands for centuries. We don’t recognize national borders because we’ve seen them switch so many times. The Ottoman Turks, the Habsburgs, the wars—we’ve been there. That’s one reason we went into business. Money doesn’t care who’s in charge, it flows to those who can control it. The Chechens, the oligarchs, the Russian Mafia, are transients. The constant is the Huszars and we can’t let them divide our energies taking on these recent threats. We have to go after the Hydra’s head.”
And for the next hour, they devised and debated a plan that left me speechless.
Chapter Thirty
I was going to disappear.
Chaz and Carola were preparing a campaign about my disappearance. I was traveling to Frankfurt, being driven. I never arrived. At first SNAP kept it quiet, but when I didn’t turn up the next day, they began a search.
Sightings of my limo on the autobahn, leaving the autobahn, at a rest stop just off the autobahn, poured in to SNAP offices all over Germany.
The next day, the police found my limo tucked into a grove of trees behind an autobahn rest stop about 80 km south of Frankfurt.
There were bullet holes in the windows and small spots of blood on the inside of the passenger compartment door. But I was gone, the driver and body guard were gone, my luggage was gone. Just the mute car as a testament that something bad had happened.
It was the lead story on every edition of SNAP, it was the cover of SNAP The Magazine, it was covered on every news cast in the U.S. and most of those in Europe. The police were interviewed and were stumped. The Baron had no comment beyond “We at SNAP are devastated that Ms. Gwenoch has disappeared. And we’re mourning the loss of the SNAP employees, as well.”
This went on for four days, until some enterprising paparazzi called the Paris office and offered to sell pictures of me and Jean-Louis walking along the Seine just at dusk. It was shot with a long lens and was slightly blurry, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was us.
The jig was up, and we returned to the daily grind, offering apologies all around and making retribution to the police forces of a couple of countries for all the extra manpower they’d had to bring on for the international search. Media outlets in the U.S. offered editorials and opinions on SNAP pulling such as shoddy trick to gain readers, but they in turn were yelled at for covering the coverage.
All in all, it was one big, fat, cluster-fuck with a lot of people walking away with egg on their faces.
What it had gained us, though, were four precious days with no imminent threats from the Huszars, the Chechens, the Russians or anyone else. And during this time, Jean-Louis put together the most compact, secretive, tightest network of informers—including another hundred or so disaffected Huszars—across Europe and into Asia.
He had trusted people, some vampires, some regulars, in Kiev, Warsaw, Krakow, Sofia, Vienna, Prague, Moscow and Baku. He’d sent a Kandesky demon to head up each branch, equipped everyone with untraceable communications devices and then they sat and waited for the Huszars to make a move.
And because we’d set the scene with a couple of bullet holes in the windshield and a smattering of donor blood, the baddies were in disarray, all wanting to get as far away from this as possible and willing to blame any of the others.
Certainly the Huszars didn’t want any of this, they’d spent centuries dodging the blame for anything. Certainly not the Chechens, they had enough trouble with the blowback from their legitimate business ventures and hits. And certainly not the terrorists from a variety of places in the Near East. Kidnapping a gossip journalist was not going to get them gravitas in the eyes of the world community.
The four days weren’t all work, though. I had time with him alone and was even allowed to sleep with him during part of the day.
Watching him in action, creating webs, making plans, interacting with other Kandesky family members and demons was like an aphrodisiac for me, not that I needed one where he was concerned.
He was controlled, direct, capable of handling many things at once, and it was clear that all the people he led revered him. And he was mine.
We made love, we talked, we took walks at night and watched Paris light up all her buildings and monuments. And we talked. He talked to me about Magda and told me that her death was when the abiding hatred of the Huszars began.
The families had been rivals for years before he’d met Magda and she hadn’t been killed by the Huszars. She’d been killed by a group of villagers who saw her fangs. They didn’t care what family she was from, she was a vampire.
And Jean-Louis blamed the Huszars for stirring up that
fear because, by then, the Kandeskys had created other ways to feed themselves and no longer attacked the peasants.
He was devastated. The Baron worried about his health. Pen took him to Europe’s grand cities and spas, hoping that finding another young, beautiful woman would help his healing. The only thing that helped his healing was time.
“I mourned for almost a hundred years. There was no joy in my life. No beauty. Gradually the fog thinned. I began to be aware of all the beautiful women there were. No one would ever replace Magda, and they were all regulars so I could only spend a little time with each of them but I started to realize that I had an eye for beauty. Many of the women I admired were painted and then as technology advanced, photographed. That’s why I’m the art director for SNAP.” He laughed. “Well, when I’m not being General, chief strategist, master spy and savior of Maxie.”
He ran his hand down the side of my face. I kissed his palm and it continued down my neck and onto the top of my breast. He sucked my earlobe as he gently pinched my nipple then leaned over to take it in his mouth. I was gone.
After being “discovered” in Paris, we had to explain why we’d taken off, so we announced our engagement. We were engaged all right, but it didn’t have anything to do with a wedding.
This romantic news though, gave us a bit more time to put some plans into place. There was a flurry of tabloid and gossip coverage of our “engagement” and the Huszars steered clear of us while we were in the limelight. It was one thing when we were covering the celebs, it was another when we were the celebs.
It was dangerous for the Huszars, the Chechens, other hangers-on, to attack such visible figures, so they laid low and bided their time.
We came home to the castle—I was actually beginning to think of it as “home” but Santa Monica still had a piece of my heart—and fell back into a work routine. I picked up the reins of SNAP again and spent time on the phone and Skype with Jazz.
She was alternately pissed; “Why’d you use me like that? Couldn’t you just tell me?” and dying of curiosity, “Have you set a date? Where are you going to be married? Has he given up hitting on other women?”
SNAP: New Talent (The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles) Page 13