Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (12 page)

As he stopped at the hangar, his cell rang. “Go on.”

“Honey, he needs you. He needs his dad.”

“Christ. Tell him I’ll be back by five.”

“He is up there packing, and he is leaving. He’s leaving, Paul!”

“You can handle that. He’s seventeen, you can make him stay.”

“You can make him stay by just treating him like a human being for three minutes. Now, you forget that damn meeting. You get back here, and you help him. This has gone far enough, and it’s over. It’s over, Paul!”

What was over? Was she over? Were they over? “Listen, I have to do this, and you know I have to. I have to do this!”

“Paul, it’s gonna be a failure. Face it, you’ll never get another chance with the agency. Ever since you won your board, they’ve hated you. Hated you! They are going to early retire you, and if you make too much disturbing noise, they might just haul off and kill you.”

“The agency doesn’t kill it’s own. For God’s sake, you know that. This isn’t the damn movies.”

“So I gather you’re not coming back.”

“I’ll be there by six, tops.”

“Ian will probably not be here at six, Paul. And if he isn’t, I have to warn you, I may not be, either.”

He listened to the silence that followed this remark. She was given to melodrama, it was one of her weaknesses.

“Wish me luck,” he said—asked, really.

“No.”

That made him mad. That was unfair. “Okay. Then I’ll wish you luck. Maybe I’ll crash, and you’ll get the insurance. Sound good?”

With that, he hung up. He waited for a ring, but there was no ring. He considered calling back. But he couldn’t, somehow.

It wasn’t pride—at least, so he told himself. He didn’t know what it was—his essence, he supposed, refusing to bow…or his heart, telling him to let his son go.

Maybe if Ian was becoming a vampire, he needed to hide.

And maybe—God’s truth—Paul wanted him to hide.

Suddenly he was crying, damn well
crying.
He had to pull the damn car over. Oh, shit, this was real asshole stuff. If Ian turned, then Paul had a job to do.

He sat there, his heart crashing, his temples pounding, feeling towering feelings of love and loyalty for his son. Tears were pouring down his cheeks.

Deep breaths finally controlled the ridiculous display, contained it, enabled him to stuff it back inside.

Okay. You are about to fly an airplane. You cannot do this if you are distraught.

He pushed it back, suppressed it, buried it alive. Then he pulled out into the road and started off again. In barely a minute, the turn to the airport raced up at him, and he had to brake to make it. “You’re running,” he said, realizing that his thoughts about Ian had caused him to accelerate the car to eighty. He’d done that in Manhattan yesterday. He had to watch that.

He turned into the parking lot and went over to the flightline, where his baby stood awaiting Poppa, a low, sleek BMW of an airplane, looking like a young god amid the flying Chevies and Fords that made their homes at little country airfields. Reg had gassed her up and rolled her out as ordered. Paul opened the gull-wing door and got in, enclosing himself in the black leather luxury of the cockpit.

Leather, a faint odor of aviation fuel, a general smell of newness, beautiful instruments ready to serve—this was a wonderful place to be. As if pushed by a hand from above, he bent over, his fingers closing around the stick, his body rolling forward until his forehead touched the soft nacelle that shielded the instrument panel from the sun. Behind his closed eyes, he saw Ian’s face as clearly as if he was standing somewhere in the dark of his mind.

Paul took a deep, ragged breath, sat up. Instinct made him look around, fearful that his moment of weakness had been observed. But no, the field was empty, just a lot of grass and old hangars, and a couple of tired old tie-downs a few feet away.

He fired up his engine and taxied across the bumpy apron. Then he did his engine test, ran through the rest of his checklist, and taxied again, this time to the runway. The airport didn’t have a tower, so he squawked Regional with his vector out and got a confirm. He was fully instrument rated, and the plane carried a transponder, so he could pretty much go where he wanted to, even into secured airspace, if he got Langley to clear him in advance.

Gone were the days of open navigation near Washington, D.C., though. He sat on the runway waiting for a response from Regional that his flight plan into tiny Potomac Airport was in the system. He didn’t want the embarrassment of being given a look-see by F-15s.

“Mooney 7821, you are cleared via airway 21 to airway 22-A into Potomac Regional Airport ETA 1140. Acknowledge.”

He repeated the clearance, word for word, got his okay, and let out his throttle. The engine’s hum rose to a deep, satisfying roar, and he took off. The airplane loved to fly, hopping off the runway like an eager gazelle. The sun shone hard on his face, and he took out his dark glasses. Below him, the long ridges of home slipped away to the north, and with them Ian and Becky and his mom and dad, and East Mill and the debris of the East Mill Vampire. He was almost tempted to go back and circle the house a couple of times, something that had been routine in better days.

Time passed, though, and he rose high enough to be picked up on FAA radars. He couldn’t depart from his flight plan now, not without setting a whole complicated chain of events into motion. He opened his cell phone to see if he’d missed any messages. He had not.

He started to dial home, then stopped himself. This would blow over. They’d be there when he got back.

He watched the sky almost constantly during the flight, wary about being put at six thousand feet with all the pleasure craft and flying jalopies. In the event, though, the air was clear, and he was soon sliding along the new runway at Potomac, then powering down and getting out.

He signed in and listed himself for departure at 3:40. He’d be home before six. The drive to Langley in a rented Taurus was uneventful, and he got into the facility without difficulty. Considering that he didn’t come here often, he was surprised at how efficient everything was at the gate. There had been a time in the past when he’d worried about getting out of this place without being arrested, or even alive.

Always, when he crossed the lobby, he glanced at the Wall of Honor, knowing that his team had contributed six plaques to it. Considering that his staffing level had called for fifteen front-line personnel and forty in the support group, that was a brutal attrition rate. In fact, it was so brutal that it had gotten him noticed all the way to State.

“Paul Ward,” he said to the secretary who sat outside Brigg’s office. He’d replaced crusty, cunning old Justin Turk as director of special operations. Justin had been an old-guard officer, working his way up through field ops. He’d had men under his command die, and done things that he regretted. To a degree, he actually understood Paul Ward.

“Hey, Paul,” the much younger Briggs said. “Glad you could make it.”

“I’ve got evidence to present, Henry.”

“Cici sends her regards. She can’t sit in, unfortunately.”

That was a good sign, at least. Paul’s private name for Cici was Miz No.

Briggs sat down. The office had been refurbished since Justin’s day. The desk was the kind of thing somebody who expected to be upwardly mobile would buy—a little too big for its present surroundings. But it broadcast one thing loud and clear: this particular bureaucrat was powerful enough to decorate his own digs. Another thing, less flattering, was also communicated: he wanted you to know that.

“What sort of evidence?”

“Two levels. First, there’s been a murder in Cairo that the French and the Egyptians have under intensive investigation. It looks like one of ours, and I want to send an observer, but I haven’t got an observer to send. Second, my target in New York is looking more and more believable. Basically, what I’m here to say is that I need more people.”

“Interesting.”

After that, silence fell. What was this supposed to mean? “Four agents and a comm unit would be what I’d need,” he added.

“This is the business about Leo Patterson, am I right?”

“Yeah.”

“The singer, Leo Patterson?”

He knew damn well who it was, and Paul had a mind to knock that supercilious tone right out of this soft little biscuit of a man. All he did was say, “I’ve been gathering evidence for years. She was blooded, in my opinion, by Miriam Blaylock shortly before she was killed.”

“This is when a vampire feeds blood to a human being and makes them a vampire, too? Wife of Dracula effect.”

“It happens, and we have the autopsy reports on Sarah Roberts to prove it.”

Briggs barked out a laugh, quickly suppressed. “I’m sorry. But this is just—it’s so
outré.
Your reports read like some kind of novel.”

“You’ve seen the scientific work. It’s all there. The vampire was real, may still be real, if the Cairo report is accurate.”

At this point, Justin would have paused to fill his pipe, smoking rules or no smoking rules. Briggsie didn’t need even that little bit of time, though. “Paul, we’re going to pull all personnel off this vampire business.” He smiled brightly. “You’ve done great!”

Paul had been down this road before, many times. He knew how to spar. “I have a dead child in Cairo, plus a string of murders in New York. And your response is, the hell with it? I’m not sure I understand.”

“You and Rebecca have the option of being reassigned. If you accept, you’ll both be working here at Langley.”

He had heard it all before, true enough. But this time, he realized, he was hearing it for the final time.

“And don’t go calling your former team on an ad hoc basis, Paul. We don’t want any more of that.”

“They’re private citizens.”

“If they carry guns illegally, if they commit acts of violence, if they use restricted radio frequencies, they are liable to end up with jail time.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Paul, this is over. Whatever happened in the past, we don’t know, and we don’t want to know. But this—if Congress gets wind of it—frankly, it’s going to end up with you and Rebecca and two or three others being charged with murder.”

The word hung on the air, and in Paul’s mind. There was something about the way the man said it—the air of indifference, the tone that said he relished what he was doing—that made Paul so mad he couldn’t talk, almost couldn’t move.

“Why is it,” he finally managed to say, “whenever I come here, I get gutted?”

“Paul, you’d be looking at a good assignment. East Asia Desk, doing liaison with field offices.”

“Get a file clerk.”

“The issue of early retirement’s come up before. If you don’t accept reassignment, I’m afraid it’s likely to be the only option.”

Paul was not used to failure. It took him a while to understand that he’d been not only stripped of the few operational assets he had left, but fired into the bargain. “The Patterson case is urgent!”

“An international superstar who lives in a fishbowl is secretly a serial killer. Paul, it’s just so spectacularly implausible. It’s even kind of funny. Don’t you see that?” He smiled again, his face twisting as if it was in some subtle, awful way paralyzed.

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“The humor is, you’re obviously nuts about this woman, and you’re fixated on her, and we’re getting these thirty-page e-mails about her that—I’ll give you this—occasionally make sense. But most often, no.”

He wanted to burn the ignorant mirth out of those eyes. At least Justin Turk had considered Paul Ward a player, had taken his work seriously.

“When I think of the people I lost—”

Briggs held up a hand. “That’s another issue, that particular fact. We don’t like to see people dying in this service.”

“But they do die.”

“This organization tries to keep its people alive. You do not, however, keep your people alive. A forty-percent casualty rate—well, it’s famous in management, would be the best way to put it.”

“I’m not accepting reassignment, and I’m not quitting.”

“Then you’re quitting being paid. And you’re well within early retirement parameters, if you’re considering going for another hearing.”

An honorable retirement at his age wasn’t subject to appeal, he knew that. “People are going to die because of this.”

“People die every day.”

Paul’s surprise had turned to anger, anger to rage. He found himself on his feet—whereupon Briggs stood up at once and began moving him toward the door. Paul went quietly, careful to control himself when Briggs drew near. His fists were a bad habit at a moment like this. There was no reason to turn a routine screwing into an assault charge.

Driving back to the airport, he found himself compulsively opening and closing his cell phone. But he would not call them. No, best not to worry it. Let it blow over.

He’d flown the plane down here, but on the way home he set the autopilot, throttled up to cruise max, and settled back to wait, keeping an eye out for traffic. He played a CD, a compendium of antique Broadway chestnuts from the twenties and thirties. “In Ole Virginia,” “Till the Clouds Roll By,”“Whoopee.”