Red Eye - 02 (27 page)

“You can tell all that just from my voice?”

“Voice, mannerisms, vocabulary, haughty air... And your last response confirmed it. You didn’t deny anything, meaning I nailed you.”

“How smart you are,” said the other, a touch bitterly.

“Wasn’t difficult. I’ve met your type before. The breed is the same the world over. Billionaire bullyboys who go round kicking the little people out of the way or buying them up like commodities. You’re easy to spot.”

“Ooh, you wound me, Redlaw,” the man deadpanned. “I’m hurt. Really I am. ‘Billionaire bullyboy.’ You’ve hit my guilt button. In fact, I feel so bad about myself now, I’m going to give away all my material possessions and go work with underprivileged kids for the rest of my days.”

Redlaw rode over the sarcasm with a weary sigh. “I had a run-in with someone like you not so long ago. He came off worse. Maybe you’ve heard of him. You’re all members of the same special club, aren’t you? You all move in the same rarefied circles. The name was Lambourne. Nathaniel Lambourne. Ring any bells?”

“Nice, Redlaw,” said the other. “Well played. Waiting to see how I react when you mention him.”

“A colleague of yours, then. No. More than that. A friend.”

“We were close, you could say.”

“Ah. Now things are starting to make sense. Why you hate me so much. Why you’re gunning for me. So let me think. I’m not so conceited as to assume that these attacks on vampires have been a lure all along, designed specifically to get me across the Atlantic so that you could have me killed. That would be an unreliable and inefficient method of taking revenge. Why go to so much trouble when you could simply pay to have me bumped off in my homeland by a professional hitman? However, since I do happen to be over here and involved with the vampires you’re busily trying to exterminate, it’s a happy coincidence for you, isn’t it? Two birds with one stone. Serendipity.”

“‘Luck of the loaded’ is how I prefer to look at it. I’ve found that the more prosperous and influential you are, the more fate seems to go your way. It’s like some sort of immutable law of nature.”

“So come on, tell me your name,” Redlaw chided. “It’s not as if I can’t find out for myself. Given what I know about you now—status, place of birth, connection to Lambourne—I could trawl the internet and establish your identity within quarter of an hour. Save me the time and effort. Do me a favour.”

“The only favour I’m going to do you, Redlaw, is killing you,” came the reply. “I’ve got more soldiers. I can keep sending them at you until you’re well and truly dead.”

“Then do. Try. Maybe you’ll succeed. But shouldn’t I at least know who it is I’ve mortally offended? Don’t you want me to hear it from your own lips? Wouldn’t that be much more satisfying than leaving me to dig it up from some website?”

Thin-skinned. Narcissistic. Autocratic. Pride easily pricked. In a short space of time Redlaw had built up a fairly detailed impression of his interlocutor. If he’d gauged this right...

“J. Howard Farthingale the Third,” the man said.

Bingo.
There we are
.

“And know this, John Redlaw,” J. Howard Farthingale III went on. “You have less than twenty-four hours to live. I swear it. If one of my people can find you, so can others. Make your peace with God, because you’re going to be meeting Him very soon.”

“When God and I do meet,” Redlaw replied equably, “we’re going to have words, believe you me. And if it’s today, then so much the worse for Him, because I have several major bones to pick with Him. But I’m not counting on it, and if I were you I wouldn’t count on it either. I’m surprisingly hard to kill. The Lord, for reasons of His own, made me that way.”

“We’ll see about that, Mr Redlaw,” said Farthingale. “We’ll just see.”

The line went dead.

Redlaw’s first instinct was to destroy the phone, so that its GPS signal couldn’t be used to triangulate his whereabouts. There seemed little point, however, since Farthingale’s soldiers already seemed to have no difficulty locating vampires. Besides, it might be useful to have a hotline to the enemy. He closed the phone and stuffed it in his pocket, then set his mind to pondering his next move.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

W
E’LL SEE ABOUT
that, Mr Redlaw. We’ll just see.

Even as he broke the connection, Farthingale couldn’t tell if it was a strong parting shot or a weak one. He was rattled. Off his game. Who the hell did Redlaw think he was? Jumped-up little British turd. A no-account nonentity from a has-been nation. The nerve of him, to talk like that to J. Howard Farthingale III, an American titan, a master of the universe. The sheer fucking temerity.

Farthingale sat up, mulberry silk pyjamas whispering against 1,000-thread-count Egyptian cotton bed-linen. He hit a button on the nightstand to open the drapes. Snow was plummeting from a smudged-charcoal sky. Deep drifts had built up overnight against the sides of Far Tintagel. The house’s low-lying single-storey sections were almost entirely buried. Several of the pines were engulfed up to their topmost branches. The reach between the island and the mainland was a seamless tract of white.

Farthingale had been planning on travelling to New York today in order to supervise Team Red Eye’s operations first hand. His private helicopter, a Bell 222, was stationed at Boston’s City Heliport and could ferry him to the Midtown Skyport on Manhattan in under ninety minutes. But no sane pilot would fly in conditions like these.

He was housebound. Snowbound.

Frustrating though that might be, at least he wasn’t completely cut off. His office was the hub from which he conducted most of his business. Like a spider at the centre of its web, Farthingale didn’t have to move to know what was going on at any time in any corner of his empire. Strands of communication radiated out from his desk, his computer, his phone, and he was sensitively attuned to the data that came tingling along them. As long as he remained vigilant and in touch, nothing happened that he could not control or act upon.

His phone bleeped. Redlaw again?

No.

The call originated from
that
number, perhaps the most important of all the numbers logged in the phone’s memory.

“Farthingale,” said the President. “I’ll get straight to the point. This ends now.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me. Don’t act all innocent. This bullshit you’re pulling. Automatic weapons being discharged in residential Manhattan? In the heart of goddamn New York? No way, buster. It’s over. You pull the plug on the whole shebang, right now, today. That isn’t a suggestion, it’s an order. Straight from the Oval Office.”

“Sir, if I can just say—”

“No, you cannot ‘just say,’ Farthingale. Do you have any idea how angry I am? Can you hear it in my voice? You’ve been trying to provoke a response out of me. Well, here it is. I do not want your semi-vampiric soldiers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff do not want your semi-vampiric soldiers. The Pentagon and the DoD and Homeland Security and, I don’t know, probably the State Department for Agriculture too, do not want your semi-vampiric soldiers. No one does. Or ever will. Because, you see, you’ve pushed me and you’ve prodded me and you’ve goaded me, and I do not like being pushed, prodded and goaded. I do not care for it. I do not react kindly to it at all. You’ve pissed off the wrong man, you entitled, old-money prick.”

“But have you really thought about this, Mr President?” Farthingale said. “Thought it through? Never mind the potential for dealing with vampire immigration. What about the military applications of the Porphyrian Project? I’m offering you super-soldiers. Stronger, more resilient, less vulnerable to harm, with a broadened spectrum of senses... Surely that’s a commander-in-chief’s wet dream. Think if you had crack units of Porphyrian-enhanced operatives working undercover in hostile nations. Think of the antiterrorist coups you could pull off, the regime changes you could effect, the anti-American dictators you could topple. A whole battalion of treated troops would be unstoppable.”

“No, Farthingale,” the President said. “I’m not buying it. You are conducting criminal activities on US soil.”

“I’ve told you, they’re field-tests.”

“Your people shot up a church last night, for God’s sake.”

“A deconsecrated church full of vampires.”

“You’re off the rails and flouting at least a hundred federal laws. I could have you arrested and sent to Guantanamo. I should. But because I’m a lenient man at heart, and because I appreciate that all you’ve been doing is trying to impress me, which is sort of sweet, I’m going to let you have this one last hurrah. The church, I’m referring to. I will—reluctantly—put procedures in place to hush it up. We can get the FBI to claim it was infighting between rival vampire factions, like a gang-on-gang drive-by shooting. That should fly. People’ll rest a little easier in their beds knowing that vamps kill their own.”

He sounded very pleased with this piece of extemporising.

“But that’s it now,” he went on, stern again. “My last indulgence to you. No more. You shut the project down and you shut it down tight.”

“And what if there are foreign powers out there who’d be interested in my process?” said Farthingale. “Governments less scrupulous and sensitive? We live in a globalised economy. What’s to stop me tendering Porphyrian out to the highest bidder?”

“I would advise strongly against such a course of action,” said the President, deadly earnest. “Not unless you’re really keen to swap those bespoke Armani two-pieces for an orange jumpsuit—forever.”

“You’d infringe my right to trade freely on the international market?”

“Yes, as long as you’re infringing my right to drink my morning coffee without suffering acid reflux. I’ve made my feelings clear, Farthingale. I can’t put it any more plainly than this. Porphyrian is over. Go off and make a whole load more millions some other way. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mr President.”

“Oh, and Farthingale?”

“Yes?”

“Lose this number. You ever call me on it again, you’ll be on a plane to Cuba so fast your feet won’t even touch the ground.”

Farthingale stared at the phone’s screen, which read
Call Ended
. His knuckles whitened. He hurled the phone across the room. It collided with the walnut vanity unit, rebounded and fell to the floor. Somehow, miraculously, it remained intact. He went over to pick it up and try smashing it again.

Before he could, the door opened and in walked Clara. She was wearing her Felix Fanger pyjamas, which Farthingale had commissioned to be made specially for her, since the Transylvanian Families clothing line did not normally cater for the adult market. The fabric had repeating patterns of Felix Fanger himself interspersed with his catchphrase.

“Morning, Howie!” Clara cried merrily. “Have you seen how much snow there is outside? We can make the most massivest snowman ever! He could be a giant, like a hundred feet tall.”

A wave of blind fury overcame Farthingale. Rounding on Clara, he roared, “Get out! Get the fuck out!”

His sister recoiled as though he had slapped her. “Howie...?”

“What part of ‘get out’ do you not understand?”

Clara’s lower lip began to tremble.

“You fucking freak!” Spittle flew from Farthingale’s mouth. He swatted at her. “You monstrous obese Mongoloid! I’m not building any snowman with you, not even a ‘most massivest’ one. God, you’re such an imbecile you can’t even speak English properly. Go on, get the fuck out of my sight. I can’t bear to look at you. Makes me sick to think I’m even related to you.”

Tears spilled from Clara’s eyes. She retreated from the room, bent and sobbing, and fled down the corridor. After a moment’s hesitation, Farthingale went after her, flooded with remorse. Clara ran fast, but he had a fair idea where she would be heading. So did Rozetta, who had overheard the altercation from her bedroom and emerged in nightgown and slippers to see what she could do to assist. Together, Farthingale and the Filipina nurse chased after Clara to the safe room.

The safe room lay at almost the exact heart of the house, more or less equidistant from the furthermost point of every wing and floor. It had ventilation, phone lines, toilet facilities, enough food and water to last three people a week, and a secret compartment containing a million dollars’ worth of American Gold Eagle coins, just in case. The walls were foot-thick concrete and the door was Kevlar-impregnated with reinforced hinges and lock plate. The room could, the architect claimed, withstand hurricane, terrorist attack, and brute-force entry attempt by burglar.