EMR: Hello?
UF: It’s time, Ernesto.
[:04 seconds of silence]
EMR: What’s our target?
UF: I’ll be there on Friday morning to discuss it in person. Eleven o’clock. Bring the others.
Ramos then immediately made a call to one of his top lieutenants, beginning with:
EMR: I just talked to the red-haired woman. She said it’s time.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough to send Abe and Henry racing to New York, and enough for the Secret Service to start round-the-clock surveillance on Ramos’s apartment. On Friday morning, with cameras clicking from adjacent rooftops, they’d watched two men—both members of Ramos’s pro-Castro group, and both Latinos—arrive together at his apartment. Ten minutes later, a white woman with wavy red hair had approached from the south, wearing sunglasses and a long coat. She, too, disappeared into Ramos’s building.
Minutes later, Abe and Henry had their bodies pressed against the wall on either side of the apartment door, preparing themselves for a fight to the death with Virginia Dare. Henry in a light brown jacket, a white T-shirt, and jeans; Abe in a long black coat and gray trousers. Neither man would change his clothes for the next seventy-two hours. Three Secret Service agents joined them, guns drawn. Five New York City policemen waited on the sidewalk outside, just in case anyone tried to climb down the fire escape.
Henry nodded to Abe. He kicked in the door.
Abe was sitting with his back to the door as Henry entered, writing in his journal by a window that looked out onto the South Lawn. The old friends hadn’t laid eyes on each other for more than a decade, and when Abe stood up and turned around, Henry burst into laughter.
[Abe] was sporting a huge, bushy beard and hair down to his shoulders.2 He’d taken to wearing a floppy-brimmed hat and little circular sunglasses with gold wire rims. I would’ve called him a “hippie,” but this was a good five years before anybody knew what a “hippie” was.
Abraham Lincoln had spent the 1950s raising cattle on his Illinois ranch. He hadn’t left the Springfield area in more than a decade, and he hardly ever left his property—preferring to spend his downtime reading, listening to the news on the radio, playing records (classical and jazz, mostly), and painting—a hobby that had grown into a passion.
But hermit or not, Abe couldn’t ignore the president’s invitation to the White House to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. On August 3rd, 1963, he and Henry joined a quarter million people on the National Mall, a black umbrella over their heads to ward off the midday sun as they listened to a thirty-four-year-old preacher deliver the keynote address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.”
Abe and Henry found themselves in the Oval Office that night, its windows dark, the corridors of the White House quiet around them. There’d been a reception for the leaders of the March on Washington earlier, including the young Dr. King, fresh from giving the speech of the century. But the festivities were over. The crowds had gone home, and now three men, two of them presidents, sat alone by the glow of two silver lanterns, a gift from the White House Correspondents’ Association, replicas of the lanterns that had signaled the British invasion on the night of Paul Revere’s ride—a night that Henry remembered well.
To his admirers, John F. Kennedy was a reinvigorating, transformative figure—a brilliant scholar and war hero. To his detractors, he was the product of old money and old political machinery—an arrogant playboy who never would’ve attained the presidency had he not won the birth lottery.
He was brilliant, and he was arrogant. You don’t have much business being president if you’re not both, to some degree. But if you judge a man by what he makes of his advantages, Kennedy surely made more than most. Like FDR, he could’ve chosen a life of leisure or business—but he chose combat. Boldness. Justice. And ultimately, he gave his life for his choices. Kennedy said something about his friend [the poet Robert] Frost once—something about how poets and politicians could both be judged by how they rose to the challenges of their lives.3 That, to me, summed up the spirit of Jack Kennedy. Not only did he rise to the challenges, he went looking for them.
Abe had always liked Kennedy. And like Abe, the young president had always had a fascination with death—namely, his own.
He and Kennedy had corresponded several times since the election. As president elect, Kennedy had sought Abe’s comments on a rough draft of his inaugural address.4 He’d been the first president elect to do that, by the way—which is amazing, when you consider that Abe wrote the two greatest inaugural addresses of all time.
[Kennedy] didn’t bother Abe with the questions most presidents did. You know, “Do you have any advice on current affairs?” “What was it like during the Civil War?” And so on. All Kennedy ever wanted to know about was Ford’s Theater. Namely, what Abe remembered and didn’t remember. And now that he finally had him in the Oval Office, that’s all he wanted to talk about. At the time it was nothing. Just conversation. Looking back, though, watching those two men talk about what it was like having a bullet shot through the back of your head…
There are few things in my long life that truly haunt me. That night is one of them.
“Did you see anything?” asked Kennedy. “Afterward, I mean?”
“You mean, did I see any sort of bright light,” said Abe, “or flights of angels coming to carry me to my rest?”
“Yes.”
“No,” said Abe. “I didn’t see anything.”
Kennedy’s face visibly fell. For all of his playboy confidence and marital shortcomings, he was a deeply religious man. He’d been hoping for some confirmation from Abe, some tiny hint that his lifelong devotion to the cross hadn’t been in vain.
Sensing his disappointment, Abe smiled warmly at the young president and said, “I didn’t see anything… I saw everything.”
Now it was Kennedy who smiled at Abe.
“But with all due respect, Mr. President—”
“Jack.”
“With all due respect, Jack… you haven’t called us here to discuss the mysteries of existence.”
Kennedy looked at Abe a moment, studying his eyes. For all the changes—the smooth skin, the long hair, the bushy beard—they were still the wizened eyes of Abraham Lincoln. Incredible. Kennedy reached into his jacket pocket and lit a cigarette. He took a puff, shook out the match, and threw it onto the glass table between them. Like all great politicians, Kennedy was a malleable man. He had made room in his belief system to accommodate vampires. If they existed, then God must have created them, and if God created them, then Kennedy could accept them.5
“I need you,” he said.
They were the three words I least wanted to hear. I’d been happily jetting back and forth between [upstate New York], where I was building a permanent home, and Florida, where the [Howard Hughes Medical] institute was headquartered. I was making a fortune in the market, and we were making real progress on a cure. The last thing I wanted was to drop everything and become the president’s errand boy again.
The Soviets were up to something, Kennedy told them. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but their people on the ground were sure they were gearing up for some kind of strike against the United States—retaliation for the embarrassment of the Cuban missile crisis. The president’s advisers had warned him about traveling overseas, and his personal Secret Service detail had been increased.
“You two,” Kennedy continued, “well… you’re the last of a dying breed. There are only a handful of vampires left, and of that handful, virtually none with any sense of allegian
ce to the United States.”
“Forgive me,” said Henry, “but why us? Can’t the CIA handle this?”
Kennedy pressed a button on the end table beside his chair. Abe and Henry looked up as a man walked into the Oval Office—a smartly dressed man of sixty or so, with neatly kept gray hair, wearing glasses on his pleasant face. Abe and Henry had never met this man, but they recognized him as John McCone, director of the CIA. His face had been a fixture in the papers during the Cuban missile crisis the previous year. It was, in fact, McCone’s deep mistrust of the Soviets that had led to the discovery of Russia’s nuclear designs on Cuba, and, along with the president’s steady hand, he had pulled the world back from the brink of a nuclear holocaust.
[McCone] introduced himself and sat on the sofa opposite Abe and me. He laid a manila folder on the table and slid it over to us.
Henry opened it. There were several eight-by-ten black-and-white photos inside. Long-lens pictures of a woman walking out of a building. Sunglasses and long wavy hair. They were grainy and slightly out of focus, but it was Virginia Dare. Unmistakable.
“I understand she’s an acquaintance of yours,” said Kennedy.
“Was,” said Henry. “She’s been dead for twenty-five years.”
“Are you sure?” asked Kennedy.
“I watched her burn to death in ’37,” said Henry. “We both did.”
McCone reached forward and tapped the top of one of the photographs with his index finger.
“These were taken less than a week ago,” he said.
It never occurred to me that she might’ve survived. She’d been so engulfed, so blackened and disfigured, drenched in diesel fuel. That image of her dragging herself along, being crushed beneath the hot metal skeleton of the Hindenburg… that image had been seared into my memory.
No, it can’t be her, thought Henry. Impossible. Impossible! No one could’ve survived that inferno, not even her.
But Virginia had always been a survivor. She’d survived the wilds of the New World. Survived a crossing to Europe. Survived with nothing but her wits and her hatred, whittling her fears away until all that remained was a sharp point. And it was Henry Sturges who’d set her on this path.
“Whatever they’re up to,” Kennedy said, “she’s the tip of the spear.”
McCone spoke up and told us what they knew: the Factory in Minsk. The sleeper agents, all of them seemingly recruited by the same woman. A woman who went by many names and was almost never seen in public.
“It’s my fault,” said Henry when McCone was done. “All of it.”
Kennedy looked surprised. “What do you mean?”
I hesitated. It wasn’t that I was afraid to admit it to the president. I was afraid of admitting it to myself. I got a taste of how the parent of a school shooter must feel—going down a list of things I could’ve done differently. Points at which I could’ve intervened. Was I the one who’d pulled the trigger? No. But I’d created the finger that did. It was my choice that set her down the path. My blood that ran in her veins.
“I created her,” said Henry. “I made her what she is… a long time ago.”
Kennedy turned this over in his mind for a while, silently.
“Well then,” he said at last, “you’ll just have to destroy her.”
Henry was first through the door. Abe was next, his beard obscuring his famous face, his long hair tied back with a rubber band; like Henry, he was wearing sunglasses. The Secret Service agents were behind them, pistols in hand, their bodies tense and trained, taking corners at precise angles and announcing themselves in shouts as they made their way into the cramped apartment, its walls covered in revolutionary sentiments and peeling paint, its curtains drawn. A short entry hall led into the living area, where Ramos and his two accomplices were meeting with the red-haired woman. They’d taken only a few steps inside before the shooting began.
I heard the first bullet whiz by my left ear. I’d guess it missed me by less than an inch. I spun in the direction of the shot and saw one of Ramos’s men aiming his revolver at me. The other was trying to pull a gun from his waistband, but the hammer had snagged on his shirt. Ramos had grabbed the red-haired woman, pulling her into an adjacent room. As the second shot went off, Abe pushed me out of its path. It hit the wall directly behind where my head had been a fraction of a second earlier, blowing a crater in the plaster. Before I could get my wits about me, there was a Pop! Pop! Pop! as the Secret Service men emptied their revolvers into the two accomplices. The agents around us had no idea we were vampires, and we were strictly prohibited from revealing ourselves. The red-haired woman started to scream in the next room. I remember thinking it strange that a woman like Virginia would scream.
Abe and Henry ran past the dead accomplices and into a bedroom, where Ramos was trying to pry open a window so he and the red-haired woman could climb down the fire escape. Why is she running away? Henry thought. Why doesn’t she turn around and tear us apart?
The heat of the radiator beneath the window had made its frame expand. Ramos couldn’t get it to budge. Cornered, he turned and fired a .38 revolver, hitting Henry in the chest—a minor annoyance that Henry responded to by swatting the gun from Ramos’s hand and pushing his head through the window, breaking the glass, splintering the wooden frame, and opening deep gashes on Ramos’s face and neck. Abe, meanwhile, had put a hand on the woman’s throat and pushed her up against the wall.
She was hysterical, hyperventilating. Abe grabbed her hair and pulled. Off came the wavy red wig. Under it, nothing but straight blond hair and a terrified human girl.
Minutes later, the apartment was filled with police, dusting surfaces for fingerprints, measuring bullet holes, and taking pictures of the two corpses in the living room—one with a hand still clinging to the stuck pistol in his waistband. Ramos sat handcuffed in the bedroom, surrounded by police and Secret Service men as a medic patched up his wounds. Abe and Henry sat alone with the blonde as she smoked a cigarette in the small kitchen.
“When?” asked Henry.
“A few days ago,” said the girl. “I’d seen her around a little, talking to some of the other girls. I figured she was working, but I never saw her get in any cars or go off with anybody. She was just there, and then she wasn’t.”
“And what did she say, exactly?”
“She told me she’d give me a hundred bucks if I showed up here at exactly eleven o’clock, wearing the wig and the sunglasses. I figured it was work, you know? Covering for her with one of her regulars. She gave me fifty up front and told me I’d get the rest after.”
The girl’s expression darkened suddenly.
“Wait…,” she said, “does this mean I don’t get the other fifty?”
“The woman,” said Abe. “Did she say anything else? Anything about where she might be staying or traveling?”
The girl thought for a moment.
“Yeah, actually. There was something else. She told me to say hello to somebody. ‘Denny’ or something. ‘Harry’ maybe. Shit, what was the name…”
“Henry?”
“Yeah! Henry! She told me, ‘Say hello to Henry.’ You guys know him?”
Abe and Henry shared a look. They thanked the girl for her time, excused themselves, and headed through the living room, toward the bedroom where Ramos was being kept. Maybe he would have the information they needed. But probably not. Virginia knew she was being followed, and she knew exactly who was doing the following. Once again, she was five steps ahead.
Abe and Henry were careful not to disturb the evidence as they stepped around the two corpses on the living room floor—no easy feat, since the vampires were half-blind from the constant popping of the police photographer’s flashbulbs. Henry reached for his sunglasses and put them on. His vision restored, he was able to make out the date on the blood-spattered calendar hanging on the living room wall:
November 22nd, 1963.
It had rained all morning in Dallas, but at ten a.m. the skies had begun to clear,
and by noon it had become an unseasonably warm and sunny autumn day. One hundred and fifty thousand people had skipped school or taken off from work to line the streets of downtown, hoping to catch a glimpse of the president of the United States. Cameras clicked Kodachrome stills and small children sat on their parents’ shoulders, some waving American flags, all cheering as the midnight-blue 1961 Lincoln Continental drove past at an average speed of eleven miles per hour, flanked by motorcycle escorts and followed closely by a Cadillac convertible, four Secret Service agents standing on its running boards, ready to jump off and deal with any threat from the crowds with their service revolvers or with the AR-15 rifle they carried in the car.
The president rides through downtown Dallas, just minutes before being shot. Abe and Henry were still fifteen hundred miles away in New York’s Hell Kitchen, having been lured by a decoy working for Virginia Dare.
But there’d been no cause for alarm. The motorcade had been winding its way along for more than forty minutes, the president and first lady waving all the while, occasionally stopping to shake hands or take pictures. Despite worries about a liberal northern president traveling in the Deep South, the people of Dallas had been welcoming and enthusiastic. The crowds began to thin out as the president’s limousine reached the end of the parade route and made a tight left turn onto Elm Street—where it would proceed for one final block of waving and smiling before turning onto the freeway and proceeding to a luncheon, five minutes away.
This is my rifle…
The Asset aimed out the sixth-floor window. This particular rifle was a 6.5 mm Italian model with a 4X scope, built in 1940. It was the exact rifle he’d trained with during his two years at the Factory, delivered to him by the KGB though a fake mail-order service. He’d taken it out for target practice and had been pleased to find he could still shoot the wings off a honeybee at two hundred yards. He and his rifle were one.
The Last American Vampire Page 35