by J. R. Rain
So, here I am at a hotel in Munich, a smaller, older edifice that I don’t imagine many international tourists even know about. Given the area, it’s probably used mostly for business travelers... or by spies.
A long, hot shower washes ‘airplane’ off me. After, I wrap myself in a white bathrobe and stretch out on the bed with the mission files. A coral orange-pink laminated page on the nightstand catches my eye. The room service menu lists ‘blood’ as an orderable meal.
Curious, I pluck the sheet out of its little holder and give it a look. Evidently, their blood is 100% naturally sourced from willing donors and guaranteed free of pesticides, drugs, or diseases. Vampires have been ‘out’ to the public for about two decades, but it still feels so bizarre to see obvious signs like this of society accommodating us. Some vampires—like my mother—had been freaked out at the notion of ‘going public,’ expecting the humans would call for our extermination. I don’t think any of us planned on what actually happened: commercialism. Humans didn’t go ‘eek, vampires, kill!’ they went ‘ooh! New demographic, sell!’
It’s tempting, but if the Dominion has their feelers out, the last thing I need to do is announce that I’m a vampire by ordering blood on room service. That’s about as rookie a mistake as one could make. Ordering normal food might serve as a nice cover, though knowing my luck, there’ll be garlic in it. Wait, I’m in Germany… do they even use garlic here?
No, garlic doesn’t kill us. We just have an allergic reaction. You know how some people are deathly allergic to peanuts or onions? Similar situation with garlic. Alas, as with most things related to my kind, some human saw something they couldn’t explain centuries ago and that became ‘garlic kills vampires.’
The whole ‘undead’ thing makes more sense as night walkers are technically undead. Night walkers, of course, are former humans who have been changed. They’re probably responsible for most of the folklore about vampires, since there are more of them. However, they’re not quite as potent as ‘born’ vampires, or Origins as they call us. Though, to be more accurate, they’re about as ‘undead’ as a human who technically died on the operating table for twenty seconds and came back. My kind were never human, and we are very much alive. Nothing undead about me. Human folklore never drew that distinction between my kind and night walkers. As for the holy water and crosses, no idea. Someone got into the good drugs. Or hell, maybe vampires were responsible for making up stories, too. It worked for a long damn time, convincing humans that we didn’t really exist. But the cat is out of the bag now.
I shrug, not much caring one way or another. Sure, the world has its share of rabid humans out there with pitchforks and torches, but my kind tends to take care of our own... and to take care of threats. Humans learned early on to leave us alone. Not all vamps have come out, either. Some stick to the shadows, where they’ve lurked for centuries. Truth be known, that’s probably best. Those vamps don’t play nice with others.
Anyway, I decide to order a bratwurst dish. We can eat standard food, but we’re only capable of digesting meat. If we suffer a major injury, like losing a limb, we won’t regenerate it until we consume enough meat for ‘spare parts’ so to speak. And before you ask, many of my kind consider themselves above humans the same way humans consider themselves above pigs or chickens. So, infer what you will there.
Me, I find them cute. Humans, that is. I mean, I have no qualms whatsoever feeding on them, but I generally don’t look down on them, and my interest in consuming human meat is nil, even if I might have to regenerate a hand or foot—that can wait ’til I find a McDonalds or something. They’re just too close to us for me to feel comfortable about going past blood drinking. For the most part, I don’t see humans as being too different from us. They have the same fully-developed personalities, comparable intelligence, and so on. The only things separating us are tragically short lifespans and how delicate they are. It really doesn’t take much to kill humans. That and the whole blood diet thing.
The doorbell rings and a male voice announces room service in German before repeating it in English.
I slip off the bed and open my bathrobe a little to offer a strategic view that should keep his attention off my face and away from my unusual eye color. Predictably, the maybe-twenty-year-old stares straight at my cleavage the whole time I sign the tablet. He won’t even remember what color hair I have. Perfect.
That’s another thing I pity humans for… having to cope with that body hair mess. All that shaving and waxing they do. I mean, I fell out of a damn crashing airplane and yet the thought of ripping hair out in clumps makes me squirm... especially down below. I suppose it’s a holdover from their primate origin or some such thing. At one point in the past, humans—or their ancestors—had been more apelike with fur everywhere. Some people theorize that body hair concentrates at certain parts of the body to hold sweat for pheromones, as if humans still loped around on all fours finding mates with their noses and sniffing each other’s nether bits to say hello. It wouldn’t surprise me if another hundred generations from now, humans lost that vestigial body hair.
Many stories exist about where my kind came from, but it’s quite clear we are not descended from primates. While we have hair on our heads and eyebrows, only like one in five men can grow beards, and none of us exhibit hair below the neck. I imagine we had it at some point, but we’ve already evolved past the need for it. Which suggests... we’re a far older species.
I adjust my robe while walking over to the table, and enjoy my dinner while reading. The food is surprisingly good considering it’s room service from a middling hotel. Eating it makes me think of this thing I saw on Facebook a couple months back. Some wingnut vampire ‘health guru’ made a case that we still needed to eat food to make up for what blood doesn’t provide. It doesn’t harm us to eat, though too much starch can cause… issues. We’re obligate carnivores, or true carnivores, so overdoing it on the potatoes or the bread can have gaseous consequences.
Maybe that’s where the undead thing came from.
In all seriousness though, night walkers technically are undead, at least to humans’ understanding. Now that night walkers and vampires are out in the open, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before scientists start referring to converted humans as ‘alternatively alive.’ They even had this woman in the news awhile back saying that ‘bloodsucker’ was offensive and shouldn’t be used. Not sure who it offended, certainly not me. I’m a vampire. I suck blood. Calling me a bloodsucker is like referring to a car as a ‘drivey thing.’
While eating, I pore over the dossier for the mission, the entire reason I’m sitting here in Munich instead of being at home with my kid. Speaking of kid, sometimes bureaucracy pisses me off. Julian’s sending her to a fancy academy type private school, but they’re not advancing her out of second grade even though her marks were almost perfect. Since she still looks like a seven-year-old, they’re going to make her repeat the year four times. Argh. They won’t let her take a long vacation and then go to the next grade since the law requires all ‘school age’ children attend classes. Seriously, they need to update the law. My parents home-schooled me, and I’d basically had the equivalent of a high-school education with a little college by forty. So, yeah, I was effectively an eight-year-old who could discuss trig and physics with adults, but also might run off giggling to chase imaginary faeries.
Anyway… Jake Bishop, huh?
According to the information in the dossier, he’s been undercover as Andreas Klein for the past three years, working IT support at Landau-Neumann, a defense contractor. I’ve got photos of him from his Langley training days as well as his false German ID, passport, and employee badge. Andreas was supposedly born in Dresden, parents both working-class types. It’s pretty impressive they got him past the screening process. Landau-Neumann manufactures a lot of tech used by the military here, mostly electronics like encrypted communications. They’re supposedly working on a portable laser weapon, active stealth technology, and
other stuff that sounds like science fiction, though it’s all theoretical or early prototypical as far as I can tell.
The next several pages have aerial photos of the location we’re supposed to do the handoff, Schlosspark Nymphenburg, a park on the grounds of Nymphenburg palace two-point-four miles away from my hotel. We’re supposed to meet on a footpath northwest of a pagoda. The meeting location is reasonably close to a residential area, plenty of places to slip into and disappear if things go south.
It’s about two in the morning here, but I’m not tired despite a nine-hour flight that left at 6:02 a.m. We landed a little after midnight Munich time. It would be around eight back home or seven in Nicaragua, which I’m still mostly adjusted to. No idea how humans cope with jumping time zones. I only need about four hours of sleep and it still messes with me. And no, my kind aren’t compelled to sleep at sundown. Just like humans, we can sleep whenever—except that we only need about four hours of shuteye.
Might as well go check the place out and get a feel for it.
I change into a reasonably unassuming outfit: navy long-sleeve top, jeans, boots I can run in, and my 9mm Beretta (which was waiting for me in my hotel safe, courtesy of one our field operatives), the underarm holster neatly hidden with a light jacket. Once I’ve packed up the dossier and stashed it in the room’s safe, I head out, leaving the dinner cart in the hallway.
There is something to be said for night time. While the reality of vampires bears little resemblance to the Hollywood trope of sunlight causing spontaneous conflagration to a pile of ashes, I do prefer the dark. My senses become more acute, I can see as well as humans in the day, and I don’t have this constant feeling like I’m a cat with someone stroking my fur in the wrong direction.
Sometimes, like right now, I find myself wishing that some of the movie vampire stuff worked for real. Like flying. A two-ish mile walk isn’t that bad. It’s relatively difficult to get lost, especially with a new, working cell phone, even if it is a burner. Spies go through more phones...
I don’t run into too many people out and about this early, and eventually wind up following a road named Gaßnerstraße past the palace grounds. Not sure why they called this place a castle as it’s more of a mansion, really. Naturally, it’s closed now, so I keep going onto another road that leads along the edge of the park, the end of the residential area abutting it.
A fence of narrow metal poles runs the length of the street to a secluded corner with two gates. The nearer one is shorter and blocks a grassy dirt road into the park, while the gate straight ahead of me is much taller, nested between a pair of stone columns. The fence closer to me is easy enough to hop over. Once inside, I follow the road into the park, looking around at the dense tree cover. The trail eventually leads across a swath of grass, to more trees, then a sizable canal with calm, greenish water. Other than swimming, the only way across without detouring like 500 feet to either side appears to be a utilitarian wooden plank bridge with metal handrails. That puts me on the opposite side of the lake near the meeting point. Despite it being nearly three in the morning, and the park closed, I still walk with the gait of a tourist and proceed along the trail into more thick forest.
The meeting location turns out to be an eighteenth-century stone bridge, dappled with moss. During the day, I imagine it would have a fair number of visitors standing on it trying to catch a glimpse of fish or ducks or whatever in the water. Should be relatively easy to do a handoff here.
From the midpoint of the bridge, I look around at the trees, estimating where any hostile actors would most likely position themselves. The forest and undergrowth are quite thick, limiting possible engagement distance, so any sort of ambush would need to happen at close range. Probably why they chose this place. While I sat on a plane, someone else in Langley posed as Hannah Strauss—that’s my fake identity—a twenty-one-year-old who made contact with Andreas Klein—that’s Jake—by way of a dating site. If anyone is monitoring him, our meeting will look like an online hook up.
Hmm. I don’t like this. Something about this place, this bridge, the whole setup feels wrong… like a, well, setup. Too perfect. Too supposedly safe. Almost as if the whole area is designed to make me feel too at ease. Well, I don’t. The more I stand here looking around, the more I feel like tomorrow’s going to be a mess.
I tap my fingers on the bridge railing, trying to sort out what my psychic side is attempting to tell me. These feelings of imminent danger are notoriously inexact and could mean anything from a random mugger targeting me to a car bomb going off nearby. If tomorrow will seriously threaten my life, the feeling would be stronger, or so I think… but that’s the problem. This feeling could mean that the event could be a dire threat but I have a good chance of outmaneuvering it. There’s no way for me to differentiate between a triviality that I can’t avoid and a deadly circumstance I’ll probably get away from.
However, it is enough to make me want to alter the parameters of my circumstances. Okay, that’s fancy speak for find an escape route.
The fastest way out would be north, following the bike/hiking trail into the residential district on the opposite side of the park from where I went in. If I need to get out in a hurry, that beats running around the woods.
I could log into the dating site and suggest we meet somewhere else, like at a restaurant, but Jake might not check the site and a sudden change like that could tip off the Dominion that we’re on to them. That could be bad, especially if they’ve been watching him for a while. If he shows up here without me, and stands there waiting, he’s a sitting duck. Not like they couldn’t take him out whenever they want, though. Jake is, after all, human. The park offers the pretext of a random mugging, a way to get rid of him that would keep the local police from looking too deeply into it. Only the CIA would understand the truth, and pushing too hard for a change in venue runs the risk of exposing that we’ve had a mole in a German defense contractor for the past year.
That would set off a shitstorm of inquiries and hearings. I’d rather jump out of another Learjet. At least that only hurt for a few hours.
So yeah, I need to alter the parameters of this meeting somehow… or maybe not. Admittedly, the unease that hit me before getting on Garza’s airplane had been stronger, and look how that turned out. I’d survived.
Meh, screw it. I should at least try to get a little sleep tonight.
Chapter Four
Lure
I wake up a little after six the next morning.
Three-ish hours of sleep is less than I’m used to, but I did close my eyes on the plane ride here. Our sleep isn’t exactly the same as humans. It’s closer to a deep meditative state. Loud enough noises, physical motion, or a psychic alarm bell can cause us to snap awake in an instant like a cat. Rather a good quality to have in a spy, mind you.
Jake’s photo is still in my hand. Not sure what came over me, but after trying to commit him to memory on my way to sleep, I wound up having quite the interesting dream about him. It involved a strange house in a desert oasis with no walls and a waterfall shower. A beautiful jade green lake surrounded the place, along with miles of open sand in all directions.
Not that I’m even close to a prude, but there’s something about making love to a guy in an open-walled shower next to a lake… I’m still blushing and it had only been a dream. Perhaps I’m afraid-slash-hoping it might happen for real someday, though I couldn’t place the location. Had to be somewhere in Africa or the Arabian Peninsula—or purely in my head.
I roll on my side and trace my fingers over his picture while smiling. He is cute… for a human. With only a picture in front of me, it’s easy to disregard that and imagine him a vampire. These thoughts amuse me as I haven’t really experienced anything of the sort since the first time I met Julian Blackburn. As people today say, he’s my ‘baby daddy.’ Neither of us went into that relationship expecting more than great sex from each other; we weren’t disappointed. Even when Chloe happened, that didn’t change anything. We bo
th love her and get along with each other. She lives with him due to my job sending me away for long stretches of time, though I suspect he might prefer it if I had primary custody. Not in a legal sense, I already have that… I mean he’d prefer it if Chloe spent the bulk of her time with me.
At least he has servants to help watch her.
Yeah, Julian’s rich. He’s been collecting wealth for most of his life… not the most difficult thing for my kind to do here. Although, with vampires revealing themselves to the world, it did become a little trickier to mentally manipulate our way around financial matters.
But back to Jake. It’s not healthy for me to have a crush on an asset. However, it is harmless as long as I keep it all in my head. Innocent fantasies never hurt anyone, right?
And with that thought, a stronger sense of ‘something’s not right’ hits me. Not so much about meeting Jake, but this entire scenario in Munich is starting to rub me the wrong way. The feeling is too persistent to ignore, but still doesn’t feel like I’m heading into my death. A chance exists that I may be experiencing normal nerves, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense as I’m not a new agent, nor is this an especially dangerous—at least on the surface—assignment. Whenever my ‘gut’ gives me a hint, I usually take it.
All right then. Time to change the parameters.
The meeting isn’t scheduled until 6 p.m., after ‘Andreas’ has put in a full day at the office. I grab my cell phone and check the dating site. My proxy back at Langley has been trading chat messages on and off with him to simulate the sort of conversation that goes on between two people leading up to the first date with a complete stranger. I read it over a few times so I don’t sound clueless when we meet. He’s been talking about his fake ID’s siblings, Sofia and Dieter, as well as hobbies, music, movies, fairly generic stuff.