TW08 The Dracula Caper NEW (16 page)

He nodded to the butler, who turned and left without a word.

"My plans for you, however," Drakov said, "do not call for infection by lycanthmpic genes. No, for you, Ransome, I have something infinitely more interesting in mind.”

Ransome was breaking out in a fresh sweat and he started to shiver. He fought to keep his teeth from chattering. "Whatever you've infected me with, Drakov, it'll never work, I promise you. I'll kill myself.”

"Yes, I'm sure you would," said Drakov, "which is why I have conditioned you with a number of programmed imperatives. A relatively simple matter of neutralizing your cybernetic implants and installing some of my own in a minor surgical procedure. When I have completed your programming, you will no more be able to commit suicide than you will be able to discuss what's happened to you with the other members of your team. I had hoped that it would be Finn Delaney who fell into my hands; he would make a splendid werewolf, don't you think? Or Andre Cross, what a wonderfully seductive vampire she would make. But you'll do for the moment."

The door to the bedroom opened once again and a tall, slim, middle-aged man with a drooping moustache and jet black hair combed into a widow's peak entered. He was sharp featured, with an aquiline nose, a high forehead, sunken cheeks and thin red lips. He was dressed in dark evening clothes and a long black opera cape with a high collar. His dark eyes were those of a psychotic.

Drakov smiled. "I could never resist a touch of melodrama." he said. "Allow me to present Count Dracula."

Sgt. Anthony Rizzo waited for his relief, warning his hands over the glowing coals in his pushcart. The sweet and musty aroma of roasting chestnuts rose from the cart, which had become a familiar feature to the residents of Bow Street over the past week. Each morning, he arrived at the corner with his pushcart, near the old Row Street Police Court, and many of the local residents had made a habit of buying a small bag of roasted chestnuts from him on their way to work.

Dressed as an Italian immigrant, Rizzo addressed his customers in a sort of broken Cockney, a mangled dialect spiced with Italian phrases and delivered in a robust, gesticulatory manner. It was a "purloined letter” method of surveillance, based on the principle of being so completely obvious that one would be overlooked.

The streets of London were full of vendors and musicians. Around Covent Garden, it was not unusual to
see
entire string quartets playing in the street, collecting money in the battered cases for their instruments, which they placed open before them on the sidewalks. The costermongers were a prominent fixture on the city streets. There were ice cream sellers: fruit vendors; men selling various wind-up toys for children; balladeers who performed songs of their own composition, often based on headlines in the newspapers, then sold the sheet music; muffin men ringing their bells and the ubiquitous flower girls, who were usually not girls at all but mostly elderly women wrapped in shawls, selling hunches of flowers or fresh buttonholes for gentlemen to wear in their lapels. Sometimes these street vendors were regarded as a nuisance, but no one ever objected to Rizzo's presence on
Bow Street, because Rizzo did not disturb the residents with any vendor's street cries. He depended instead on the aroma of the roasting chestnuts to draw his customers. It worked well enough and he usually did a nice bit of business in the morning, less throughout the afternoon, and towards evening, as people started to return home from work, business picked up once more for several hours. Meanwhile, he kept his eye on Tony Hesketh's apartment just across the street.

Surveillance work was often very boring and Rizzo's stakeout was especially ennervating. Anything that could have made the long watch more bearable, such as reading a book or newspaper, was out of the question since it would distract him from his duties, so there was nothing for Rizzo to do except stand on his feet all day and sell his chestnuts, all the while keeping alert for any sign of Hesketh. By the end of the day, he was worn out. Someone would show up in the evening to relieve him, someone who could take advantage of the darkness and the fog for concealment and did not require a pushcart. Then Rizzo would go back to the Hotel Metropole command post to soak his feet and get some sleep.

But now it was getting late and his relief had not yet arrived. His feet were tired and his back was sore. Rizzo was not especially worried. lie knew the team was being spread thin and relief would arrive as soon as they could spare someone, but just the same, he hoped they would send someone soon. He was tired and it would start to look unusual if he remained too late on the corner with his pushcart.

He sold a hag of chestnuts to a grey-haired gentleman in a long tweed Inverness and a bowler hat, apparently on his way
out for the evening.

"Working a bit late tonight?" the man said with a smile.

Rizzo shrugged elaborately. "Aah. eez the wife, she 'ave 'er seezter comma to visit. All night long, ya-ta-ta-to-ta, like cheekens." He made rapid gestures with his hands, fingers together and outstretched, thumb and index fingers coming together and apart quickly in a representative gesture of ceaseless chatter. "Aah," he said. waving his hand in derision. I stay late anda sell my cheznoots."

"Don’t blame you one bit, old man,” said the man, grinning. "Know just how you feel. My sister-in-law's a bloody horror herself."

"Grazi,"
said Rizzo, accepting the man's money and putting it
in the little cash box on his cart.
"Ciao, signori."

"Ciao
to you, too, Sergeant Rizzo.” Rizzo glanced up quickly. too late, his eyes focusing on the small plastic pistol held in the man's right hand. There was a faint chuffing sound, halfway between a cough and a hiss, and the tiny dart struck him in the chest. He barely had time to realize he had been shot before he lost consciousness.

Pvt. Linda Craven crooned a Cockney song to herself while she sat on an overturned basket by the curb, making fresh buttonholes from some of her flowers. She wore a long dress made out of Connie black linsey-woolsey, lace-up ankle high boots with rundown heels, a black plush jacket, a long black shawl and
a
feathered hat. Every now and then, when someone would pass by, she would stretch out a handful of flowers and make a halfhearted, plaintive-sounding pitch, punctuated by a sniffle. and then she would return to her song, a song about how," loverly" it would be to have a room somewhere far away from the cold night air, with lots of chocolate to eat and an enormous chair to sit in. Sung in an ear-gratingly Cockney whine, it sounded perfectly in keeping with the time, even though it wouldn't be written for years to come.

There was still no sign of H. G. Wells. She felt utterly miserable about the whole thing. She blamed herself for having slipped up badly. It did not occur to her that perhaps the reason Steiger hadn't given her hell was that there really wasn't anything she could have done about the situation. The odds of her having been able to prevent what happened would have been infinitesimal. Even if she had recognized Moreau, a man she had never seen before, it would have been necessary for her to notice him activating his warp disc, an action easily concealed, and move quickly enough to kill him before he could clock out with Wells.

It would have seemed rather incongruous, to say the least, if a Victorian woman had suddenly opened up on a man in a London teashop with a laser or a disruptor pistol, which was one of the reasons why she wasn't armed with one. If anyone in the teashop had wondered where the two men at the table by the window had suddenly gone, they would have been struck dumb by the sight of a man being killed by molecular disruption, briefly wreathed in the glowing blue mist of Cherenkov radiation and then disintegrating right before their eyes.

Paranoia ran high at TAC-HQ. The warp discs they all wore were failsafed and, in ease of an emergency, there was an arms locker hack at the command post, likewise failsafed to self-destruct unless it was opened properly. To remain on the safe side, the team had been issued weapons more in keeping with the time. In her purse, Linda carried a Colt Single Action Army revolver, otherwise known as a .45 Peacemaker. It weighed almost 3 pounds and it packed a wallop. It was an 1873 design and, although it would have been regarded as highly unusual for a young woman in London to be carrying such a gun, as a visitor from America, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that she might have one.

She knew what she would have to do if Moreau showed up again with Wells. She would have to make certain she could get
a clear shot at him without endangering Wells or anybody else, which meant she might have to place herself in a position of vulnerability. She'd have to move fast and get in close, kill Moreau as quickly as possible and then either prevail upon Wells to return with her to the command post or take him by force. Wells would have to be debriefed. She had no doubt that she could handle Wells and she felt reasonably certain that she could take care of Moreau. After all, the man was a scientist, not a
soldier. Still, it would be very risky. There was a good chance that Moreau could return with Wells during someone else's shift on surveillance duty, but Linda hoped it would happen during her shift, so that she could redeem herself for having lost him in the first place. She didn't even want to think about what could happen if Wells never returned from wherever it was Moreau had taken hint.

She was only twenty-two years old, still a rookie, green and on her first mission. She was painfully aware of her lack of experience compared to the other members of the mission support team. She was thrilled to be working with the First Division's number one temporal adjustment team, but she also felt intimidated. Andre Cross was a legend in the service, as was Finn Delaney, already a veteran when she was still learning how to crawl. Steiger was Gen. Moses Forrester's second-in command and prior to that, he had been the TIA's senior field agent. She knew they couldn't have been happy to have a rookie assigned to their support team. None of them had said as much, but she was certain that on a mission of such importance, they would have preferred more experienced personnel.

Scott Neilson seemed to understand. Like her, he was a rookie, though he wasn't quite as green as she was and he seemed to think much faster on his feet.

"Look," he had told her one night while they were having dinner in a pub, "nobody's going to hold it against you that you're a rookie. They were all green themselves once. It's really very simple. You either learn fast or you don't make it."

"That's just what I'm afraid of," she had said. "It's not so much that I might not make it myself that worries me, but the idea that I might screw up due to my inexperience and it could result in temporal interference, a disruption or maybe even a timestream split. The idea of all that responsibility is simply staggering. The pressure's unbelievable. It gives me migraines:"

"And it makes you nauseous and upsets your stomach and you can't sleep and when you do sleep, you have recurring nightmares." Neilson said. "I know, I've been there. They've
all
been there, except maybe Steiger. Nothing seems to bother him much, but then you've got to be pretty cold to be a
TIA agent to begin with."

"So how do you handle it?” she said.

"You don't,” he said, "Believe it or not, after a while, it sort of handles itself. There's only so much pressure you can take before you either break or you just get used to it. You even become casual about it. You have to, otherwise you simply can't function. If you were the type who was liable to break, chances are it would have come out in your psych profile and you never would have made it this far. But almost everybody goes through what you're experiencing the first few times out to the Minus Side. Nobody expects a rookie to take it like a veteran. They're not going to cut you any slack, but they won't hold your inexperience against you, either. Anybody can mess up, even someone like Delaney, who's got more years in the service than both our ages combined."

“How long did it take before you learned to handle the
pressure?" she said.

Neilson had laughed. "Are you kidding? I still have nightmares. Almost every night, except when I'm so exhausted that I don't even dream. And I'll tell you a secret—I don't really believe that anyone ever learns to handle it. They just learn to live with it. It's no accident that the First Division has a reputation for being such a bunch of hellraisers in Plus Time. You get drunk; you fight; you fuck; you get into high risk sports; whatever it takes to give you an outlet for the pressure."

"What do you do?" she said.

"Well. I don't drink and I'm afraid I'm not much of a. fighter." Neilson had said. "I barely made it through combat training."

She had smiled. "So what does that leave?"

Neilson grinned self-consciously. "Well, actually, not what you might think. I get into a lot of hand-eye coordination things.”

"Like what?"

"Quick-draw target practice with antique revolvers and semiautomatic pistols. Knife throwing, Darts. Sleight-of-hand.”

"What's that?"

"It used to be called close-up magic. Tricks with cards and coins and such." He had demonstrated by "walking" a coin across his lingers. "It requires lots of practice and concentration." he had said. "It takes your mind off other things and it sharpens your reflexes. Helps you think fast. Maybe you should give it a try."

"Well, antique firearms are noisy. I don't have any knives or darts. I'm not really in the mood for any magic tricks and I don't much feel like getting drunk and waking up with a hangover." She smiled. "What does that leave? You want to run down that list again'?"

They had spent the night together and their lovemaking had been frenzied and intense. Afterwards, they went to sleep holding each other and, for a change, there had been no nightmares. But then Moreau had abducted H. G. Wells and now the pressure was hack on, savage and relentless. It felt as if her every nerve synapse were charged with adrenaline-induced, hair-trigger sensitivity. She was scared, yet at the same time, there was an intoxicating rush associated with it, almost an orgasmic high, the intense, heightened perceptions of a sword dancer. She didn't realize just how intense it was until someone came up behind her and addressed her in a deep voice. "Excuse me; Miss, how much for a buttonhole?"