Red Eye - 02 (11 page)

When they had created a large enough gap, the two men leapt down into the container’s interior, and Child joined them. They unshipped MP5 submachine guns.

Crimson eyes glittered furiously in the container’s dark recesses. Guttural Polish curses were flung at the intruders, but this was all the vampires could do. They couldn’t go near them, not as long as the three men stood in the protective aura of the sun’s slanting beams. They could only cower and snarl.

“Fire at will,” Jacobsen ordered, and he and Red Eye Two and Red Eye Five let rip, unleashing salvos of Fraxinus rounds in scything arcs. The vampires were pinned down by the gunfire. Bullets whittled through their flimsy shelters and makeshift barricades. Ricochets whined in all directions. One by one, shots found their mark. Vampires erupted into dust, shrieking horribly.

“I’m out,” Giacoia announced, and Jacobsen and Child soon emptied their magazines as well. With the echoes of their holocaust still ringing in their ears, the three of them advanced towards the other end of the container.

A number of vampires lay wounded, writhing in agony. All had been winged by a Fraxinus, and the bullet’s ash-wood content was slowly poisoning them, eating away their flesh. The Red Eyes drew sidearms and heart-shot the vampires at point blank range.

Jacobsen surveyed their handiwork. A vampire kill was a hell of a lot neater and cleaner than the ordinary kind of kill, you could at least say that for it. No gore, very little mess. It was almost like not killing at all.

And for that reason, vaguely dissatisfying.

“Good work, men,” Jacobsen said. “Let’s bail.”

B
ACK IN THE
Hummer, trundling northward on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Jacobsen got on the phone to the money man.

“You catch that, sir?”

“Every second of it,” came the reply in a thick, nasal Boston accent that stretched certain vowels almost to breaking point. “Another textbook takedown. I’m as proud as can be of you fellows.”

“Just doing what we’re paid for,” said Jacobsen. The connection was good, but there was an unusually long delay on it. The price of dense, secure signal encryption. “How many more before we’ve built up a persuasive argument?”

“That’s for me to decide, soldier, not you.”

Jacobsen hated the way the money man called him
soldier
. Only soldiers got to call other soldiers that. It was condescending and disrespectful.

He bit back his irritation, thinking of the $50,000 completion fee that was being wired to his checking account probably right this minute and the slightly smaller but still considerable sums that were making their way into his teammates’ accounts. You did not lose your temper with the person employing you. That was the golden rule of mercenary work. You took whatever shit the boss dished out, and you smiled and asked for more. So, not much different from the army, then.

“Understood,” he said. “Just eager to be getting on with the job.”

“And that’s a very healthy attitude to have,” drawled the Bostonian. “Now, you and your unit toddle off back to base, get some rest, have yourselves some of that tasty human claret I lay on for you, and leave the forward planning and the strategising to me. How about that?”

Jacobsen snapped the phone shut and stared out at the East River and the sumptuous rise-and-fall span of the Brooklyn Bridge towering against the pristine blue sky. His jaw clenched and unclenched.

“How much do you hate that bastard?” said Red Eye Three beside him as she drove. Her name was Jeanette Berger, she had been a chief warrant officer in the Marine Corps, and she was as competent in the field as she was pretty—and she was exceptionally pretty. Even the bright scarlet of her eyes couldn’t detract from that.

“I’d hate him if I cared about him, and I don’t,” said Jacobsen. “As long as his money’s good, I have no feelings about him whatsoever. He doesn’t annoy me in the least bit.”

Berger tipped her head in amusement. “So you say.” She glanced in the rearview. The five other members of Team Red Eye were lost in their own thoughts, the usual post-successful-op reveries. Even Red Eye Seven’s usually ever-flapping yap was, for the time being, at rest.

Berger slipped a surreptitious hand across to the passenger seat and Jacobsen’s thigh. She squeezed, fingertips brushing the bulge of his crotch.

“Yes,” sighed Jacobsen, with the slightest of sly smiles. “You can try to ride Jim Jacobsen, you can try to get a rise out of him, but you won’t get anywhere. No, sir.”

What Berger’s hand was feeling gave the lie to his words. Her touch could get a rise out of Colonel Jacobsen any time.

L
ATER, BACK AT
base, Jacobsen came to her in her quarters.

They didn’t speak much. There wasn’t a lot that needed to be said. He stripped her, fell on her,
plundered
her.

“I have my period,” she told him breathlessly at one point, and Jacobsen grinned as if this was the best news ever, an invitation, not a prohibition, and shortly afterwards his head was between her legs, tongue lapping with gusto.

Etiquette and discipline dictated that teammates did not sleep together.

But Berger and Jacobsen paid no heed to that.

Appetite.

Appetite was all.

M
EANWHILE, THE MONEY
man was on the phone again, another secure line, this one connecting him to a private mobile number that an extraordinarily small number of people had access to. In fact, there were perhaps only a dozen individuals in all of America who had the privilege of knowing it and being able to use it.

The voice at the other end was measured and urbane, a voice that had seduced millions of voters, filled them with reassurance that their problems were shared, their complaints were listened to, their concerns were important and valid.

“Ah, my Boston Brahmin,” the voice said. “I can spare you five minutes.”

“Is that all? In that case, I don’t think I’m getting great value for my campaign contributions. Five million dollars a minute? Is that what your time’s really worth?”

“I’d give you more,” said the other man unflappably, “but then I’d be late for my meeting with the Chinese premier, who’s somewhat slightly higher up the totem pole than you. Or maybe
you
can come and discuss trade quotas with him, and I’ll go catch a movie in the White House screening room instead. Believe me, the way my schedule is these days, a couple of hours to myself with a Blu-Ray of
Citizen Kane
would be a blessing.”

“Could be that one day I
will
be in your shoes,” the Bostonian said.

“Nah. That’d mean you’d have to learn to be nice to people, and I can’t see that happening. Besides, you couldn’t handle the pay cut.”

“You have me there. Well, while I have this brief window, then, I’ll take the opportunity to give you a heads-up on the status of the Porphyrian Project.”

“And where are we at with it right now?”

“You’ve watched the helmet-cam footage I’ve been sending you?”

“Of course.”

“Then you know for yourself that it’s all going swimmingly. Our operatives have exceeded expectation. Their efficiency and prowess are remarkable. Next to them, vampires are like children, quite defenceless.”

The President of the United States let out one of his warm, patrician chuckles. “That’s all very well, but you’re still in the field-testing phase, aren’t you? How long have your people been out there, doing what they do? Less than a month. You yourself warned me there could be potential side effects from the treatments. You haven’t allowed enough time for those to come to the forefront, if they’re going to. The FDA spends years trialling new drugs before letting the pharmaceutical companies sell them on the open market. Same should apply to you. What if something goes wrong? What if, tomorrow, one of your guys suddenly sprouts fangs and starts chowing down on some poor, unsuspecting lab tech? You’re asking a lot from me, so early in the game. You need to be a little more patient.”

It took all the patience the Bostonian possessed to keep from blowing his top. “Mr President, sir,” he said, “you told me last July that a government contract for the Porphyrian process was guaranteed, on condition that I could prove it could be made to work. With all due respect, I think I’ve done that.”

“No, what I said was, I would look into securing you a government contract,” the President said, with the verbal exactitude of the attorney he used to be. “I never promised anything.”

“I was led to believe—”

The President cut in. “What you
chose
to believe is your lookout, Howard. I’m not responsible for how you interpreted our little informal chitchat in the Rose Garden. You seem to forget that the economy is down the toilet. We’ve got a fiscal debt the size of Mount Everest.”

“It ought to be half as big by now, the amount of tax you take off of me.”

“Stop grumbling. You billionaires are doing okay. I’m just saying that, in the current climate, I’d be hard pushed to find funding for you. Congress would need to be wooed like a Catholic virgin on prom night. And if something then went wrong, if it all blew up in my face, I’d lose all political credibility. I’d be dead in the water. I’ve got to tread carefully on this one.”

“I’m offering you a cast-iron solution for dealing with the vampire immigration problem.”

“The vampire immigration problem that we don’t have.”

“I know of a few senators and governors who’d disagree with you there.”

“The Van Helsing Party? Those bozos make a lot of noise but nobody pays any attention. Nobody ever does, with these breakaway factions.”

“Fox News does. Middle America does. You’ve always got to think about the fly-over states.”

“Please,” said the President. “You can’t jump-start me into making a decision. Your scare tactics won’t work. You should know better than that.”

“What exactly has my twenty-five mill bought me, then?” asked the Bostonian.

“It’s bought you this phone number. My ear.”

“Hardly seems a sound return on my investment.”

“Your donation,” the President corrected him.

“Whatever. It just strikes me that, with your term running out and you being up for re-election and all, I could take a similar sum and
invest
it in one of your rival candidates. Someone who’d place a higher priority on my needs. A Van Helsing, even. That guy from North Dakota, the Pentecostalist with the great hair and the cute charity worker wife, he’s looking like a frontrunner. He killed at the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary.”

“The man’s an idiot.”

“This is a nation that put George W. Bush in the Oval Office
twice
. We’ve got a track record with idiots. And the Van Helsing message is skewing pretty well with Middle American voters right now. With my cash behind him, Mr North Dakota could become quite the contender. And I know he’d be properly grateful. Unlike some.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. The Bostonian had scored a direct hit.

Then the President came back on. “Sorry, distracted, missed what you just said. I’ve got an advisor standing beside me tapping his foot and pointing at his watch. Looks like the honourable chairman and his equally honourable wife can’t wait any longer for me to come and break dim sum with them. We’ll carry on this discussion at a later date, eh, Howard? When you’ve got a bit more information under your belt. In the meantime, keep at it. I’m far from giving you an outright ‘no’. I just need more reassurance that this isn’t going to be a fiasco, like that Solarville thing your pal Lambourne was involved in over in the UK. The British prime minister’s career was left in tatters after that whole sorry affair. Don’t want the same happening to me, do I? See you around.”

And that was that, connection cut, conversation over.

The Bostonian, J. Howard Farthingale III, glared at the phone in his hand as though it, somehow, was to blame for the call not going the way he would have liked. The medium was at fault, not the message.

Very deliberately, he placed the phone on the writing surface of his vintage Art Deco desk, a massive block of macassar ebony with silver bands and Bakelite drawer handles, once the property of a Golden Age Hollywood producer. Then, just as deliberately, he picked up an ornament, a fist-sized chunk of moon rock, and smashed the phone to smithereens with it.

The act damaged both desktop and moon rock, in addition to destroying the phone. The cheap item of consumer electronics could be easily replaced. As for the other two, the desk could be repaired, the moon rock substituted, but only at immense cost in both instances. This was altogether more masochistically satisfying to Farthingale.

Fucking president. Fuck that weaselly fucking slimeball. Who the fuck does he think he is?

Farthingale opened a sliding window and stepped out onto a sun terrace that one of the caretakers had scrupulously shovelled clear of snow first thing that morning. He took in the view and tried to appreciate it, hoping this would calm the thoughts raging through his head. The downward sweep of hill, fringed by tall pines. The cliff, the beach, the jetty where his Sunseeker Predator 108 was moored, icebound, its decks sheathed in winter tarpaulins. The reach between his island and the mainland, a channel two nautical miles wide which currently looked like a stretch of the Arctic Ocean, all pack-ice and small bergs. The mainland itself, a bay, a Massachusetts fishing port town, summer homes speckled along the coastline.