Vampire "Unleashed" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 3) (19 page)

He took her blood. All of it. The warmth, the salinity, the viscosity of it. Her little heart no bigger than one of her clenched fists pounding away and pushing the fluids so fast into his mouth that it overflowed and spurted between his lips and her skin, running across her shoulder and breasts as red paint.

Paul supped deep, drinking as much as he could, all the while aware of the theatre. As pleasurable as Floriana was, he mustn’t forget he was creating a show.

He dropped the girl, her hands reaching for her neck. The scene flowed back in as though emerging from a dream. Aldo Gjokeja was screaming in his wheelchair, his one good hand squirming against the impossible duct tape bondage.

Paul licked his lips and wiped his hand across his mouth and chest, smearing Floriana’s blood against his skin. He stepped across the bleeding and immobilised girl to approach the camera. “You see this Miklos. I will do this to you. I will come for you and your men, I will do this to your families, your wives, your children. I know where you live. Don’t make me visit you, Miklos... I will contact you with where you can collect Aldo. Then you can pick him up, put him in your car, fuck off back to Albania and never come back.”

He stopped the video recording, his fingers streaking the phone in blood.

Gjokeja was still screaming as the video ended.

Floriana was conscious but barely moving other than to make little breaths and roll her eyes onto him. He would deal with her first. Paul put the karambit down and pulled the door to the hovel open. He gripped the girl by her hair and wrapped an arm around her waist to carry her. He took her into the overbearing sunshine. His eyes were adjusted to the gloom of the hovel and the outside world caused snow blindness it was so white and bright.

Floriana rasped a few words. Her feet with painted toenails dragged bloody lines in the snow. He dropped her by a small wooden frame that served no purpose that could be determined and scraped with his foot until finding a blue plastic sheet below ten inches of snow. It took effort but he managed to find the edge and kept sweeping away the snow until he could pull it back.

Underneath the sheet were two bodies.

Dead girls. Playthings. Women he had chosen to spend time with.

He returned to Floriana and lifted her by the waist whilst one of her hands still gripped at her throat. “The ground is too frozen to bury you,” he said to her. “I’ll have to bury you in the spring when it thaws.”

Under his grip he felt the dying girl suddenly spasm and shake as she saw where she was going. Her legs kicked as the realisation hit her. She was going under a plastic sheet beside two other dead girls.

Two others.

One was a woman of about twenty, the second a young girl perhaps no older than twelve. Both had their throats slit, both had their eyes open, both were iced solid.

Floriana was laid beside the young girl. Her skin was a delicate blue and her lips were dark purple. Floriana’s hand was still holding her neck. She was barely alive but had the mental will to run and flee, but with the tendons of her legs cut escape was impossible.

Paul stared down at her with blood smeared across his face and chest. “I’m sorry I lied,” he said without showing any expression.

Then he pulled the sheet back across the bodies and left her to die.

PART V

Lucian Noica unfastened his tie and allowed his shirt to hang open necked. Outside was growing dark and the ridge behind the building had cast the hospital into shadow. The view directly beyond his window was dark, but a few of the mountains on the distant horizon were still under the last rays of sunlight.

The telephone rang. A woman’s voice. “Doctor Noica, I have the Department of Justice on the line.”

“Put it through.”

There was a pause, then a voice on the other end said, “Good evening, I have Minister Vadescu on the line for you.” Then there was the wait. It was the conceit of a government minister. Once they became important, a government minister’s ego demanded a secretary make the call then keep you on the line until they had time to speak. The more self-importance they felt the longer they kept you waiting.

“Lucian?”

“Minister.”

“I have an update on Paul McGovern. It’s serious.”

“Go ahead, Minister.”

“We’ve been informed by the Albanian police force that McGovern turned up in the city of Skhodra yesterday evening at the residence of a known criminal called Aldo Gjokeja. Police discovered surveillance recordings of McGovern murdering two security guards and forcibly taking Gjokeja and his personal nurse away in a black Mercedes people carrier. The Albanians identified McGovern almost immediately. They put out requests to trace the vehicle and it’s logged heading into Macedonia first, then Bulgaria. It was tracked by toll-road cameras logging number plates. The trail was lost as it approached our borders but it would seem likely that he is heading to Romania. The last known position of the vehicle was close to our border about nine hours ago.”

There was a silence on the phone.

“What’s your take on this?” Vadescu asked.

“I know what is happening... Paul McGovern ambushed and stole money from Aldo Gjokeja. Within the last month, I discovered that Gjokeja had active operations to find him. They attempted to flush him out, but this sounds like blowback. McGovern has gone to the head of the snake and attacked them first.”

“The British police were already all over this,” the Minister said. “Now the Albanian, Macedonian and Bulgarian police forces are involved and asking questions. Yet we seem to be treading water without answers. This cannot end in embarrassment. The world is starting to look at us.”

“I understand, Minister.”

“Make sure you do understand. Make sure you do.”

----- X -----

Paul awakened at daybreak to a bad smell. The old man was still strapped in his wheelchair and facing the corner of the hovel. Paul breathed deep. It was shit. The old man had filled his diaper. “Oh, fuck you,” he mumbled. He opened the door to let fresh air in. “You’ve shit yourself.” he said to the back of Gjokeja’s head. The old man said nothing. Paul grabbed the wheelchair and turned it around. The old man’s head was down, his chin resting on his chest, his eyes reddened with tears. Gjokeja was broken and pathetic. Broken physically, mentally and spiritually. He had nothing left. An old man in a broken body who had sat in his own shit all night.

The cold air flowing through the open door was biting and Paul took the blanket from his bed to wrap around Aldo’s shoulders. “You stink. But I’m not cleaning you.” He checked the bindings around Gjokeja’s wrists and ankles. His one good arm was strapped to the chair with an overwhelming amount of tape. Even with two free hands and a pair of scissors, it would take time to cut him free.

Paul went to the van. It started with a light purr and blew warm air into the footwell. He drove carefully and surely, almost too cautiously so as not to attract the attention of any policemen looking for a bribe.

He approached Brasov and found his driving become even more stilted and unnaturally cautious. Like he was taking his driving test again. He drove right into the heart of the city that knew his name and face. He was English, he was Paul McGovern, he was wanted for murder in this small town. Hopefully his image had faded over the last two years.

He went to an internet cafe and began by searching for ‘saltpetre explosive’. It was a remnant of knowledge from writing magazine articles about tropical fish. The same substance used to make gunpowder was a common chemical for fish keepers. He found aweb page ranking homemade explosives. Saltpetre appeared at the bottom of the list as the least powerful. At the top was something called ANFO. He started reading. It was an acronym, Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil. Mix regular garden fertiliser with diesel and it becomes highly explosive. There was a warning on the website that ANFO was so easy to make that many countries had banned fertiliser or made it a restricted product. Did Romania follow suit? Fingers crossed he could buy it.

What else?

A detonator of some kind. ANFO has a high shock tolerance and the web pages said regular blasting caps wouldn’t work. Blasting caps? Paul searched in more detail. The high explosive needed a small explosive to trigger. He found instructions on how to make blasting caps from a substance called HMTD, short for hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. Paul chuckled as he read the recipe. “Hexamine,” he whispered with a smile. “I’ve already got it.” The prime ingredient was the same solid fuel used in his camping stove. He spoke the recipe quietly, “Dissolve hexamine in hydrogen peroxide and neutralise with bicarbonate of soda,” he traced the words with his finger as he read. “Jesus. Who would have guessed it was that easy? High explosives from fire-lighters and hair bleach.”

He found a simple trigger using an array of batteries and a filament fuse wire. Connect the filament to the battery array, the heat triggers the HMTD, triggers the ANFO and blows the fuck out of everything.

The research took less than an hour but he spent another hour watching tutorial videos online. People loved filming themselves making explosives on the kitchen table. Americans in particular loved blowing up refrigerators in the desert.

----- X -----

Cornel was nursing his morning coffee when the phone rang. The name on the screen was Lupescu. “Buna, Ion,” he said.

“Cornel. I’ve just had a call from Lucian Noica. McGovern is in play.” Lupescu recounted the story third hand from Noica whilst simultaneously reading an Interpol email being shared between police forces of Britain, Albania and Romania. Gjokeja was taken.

“I told them,” Cornel said of the Albanians. “I told them not to underestimate McGovern and that’s precisely what they did.”

“Do you know about the email?”

“Email? No, what email?”

“The Popescu girl. You were right, those pictures they took of her bloodied and tits out, they emailed to McGovern. The British say he accessed his mail and a day later he turned up in Albania and massacred them.”

“But he took Gjokeja, right? He didn’t kill him that we know?”

“He was taken alive.” Lupescu confirmed.

The wheels were turning in Cornel’s head. Why would McGovern kidnap Gjokeja? What could he want? Why was he supposedly heading to Romania?

“Okay, Ion, I’m going to put the Albanians here in Brasov under surveillance. I’ll stake them out and if anything happens I’ll call you.”

----- X -----

Fertiliser was easy to buy. Ammonium Nitrate. As much as you need, in ten kilogram sacks from the combined home and garden superstore. He bought one bag. He bought a pack of one thousand, three centimetre nails. He bought wire, batteries, fuse wire and hi-fi speaker cable. He moved on to another hypermarket to pick up hair bleach, bicarbonate of soda and marker pens and all the other accoutrements of his shopping list. By a little after noon he was back at the hovel and tinkering.

The HMTD was the only process that required time to settle so he did that first. He crushed the hexamine tablets and mixed them with hair bleach until it turned into a milky white solution; then strained that solution through a coffee filter and rinsed the resultant powder in bicarbonate of soda and water. That was it. Creating a high explosive was that simple.

Whilst the HMTD was left to dry, he pulled apart marker pens for the thin steel body and tried the filament trick. He tied a tiny thread of filament between two pieces of wire and connected a battery. The filament popped with a blue flash and a wisp of smoke. His blasting caps would be made by putting the filament inside the pen barrel and filling it with HMTD.

The caps were ready to assemble after an hour. He folded a sheet of paper to funnel the white powder into the pen barrels and made three identical blasting caps. He took one outside to test, pushing it deep into snow and earth so that if there was any real force it would direct the blast upwards. He unspooled his drum of speaker wire and connected one end to the buried cap and moved back ten yards.

He touched the contacts.

It went off like dynamite sending him into a stoop and turning his back. Chunks of earth and snow blasted skywards, a small but perfectly formed mushroom cloud billowed. Debris and earth flew past with the bang.

“Fuck me…” was all he could say as he stumbled back. Frozen earth was blown so high it continued falling for a few seconds. HMTD was badass and that was just the blasting cap. It was the size of a marker pen and it went off like a grenade.

Paul got to work on the next part, the ANFO. He would mix it and pack it into the pressure cooker along with the nails and would then pack two blasting caps into the mixture just to make sure.

----- X -----

Miklos was about to settle down for the afternoon when his phone beeped. He had a bottle of beer in one hand and the opener in the other. There was little else to do. They were locked in a waiting game.

The phone beeped again. He looked at the screen.

Message from Aldo Gjokeja.

A video message… Aldo had never sent a video message before.

Miklos opened the file. The video started to play.

He reached out to rest the beer on the table without taking his eyes from the screen, the bottle toppled over the side andthe sound of it smashing caught the attention of Agron and Ludovik. They saw Miklos staring slack jawed at the screen. They saw him pull his face away in revulsion. They saw the colour drain from him.

“Jesus, Fucking, Christ!” he said.

The message ended.

“What is it?” Ludovik asked.

“Get the van started,” he replied whilst searching for a contact in the phone. “Full weapons.”

Ludovik and Agron looked to one another then jumped to action, rushing outside to the van.

Miklos made a call. “Hi, it’s me, are you OK?”

A tiny woman’s voice from a distant country replied, “Yes, why?”

“I haven’t time to explain, but you might be in danger. I need you and Melina to get out of the house and go to your Mother’s. I need you to do that right now… Got that?”

“Yes, I’ve got that, but why, what’s wrong?”