Descendant Page 7

  The officer in the eyeglasses said, “It’s not a bug, though, Captain. All of the victims were cut open and the blood drained out of them. Exact same scenario as Operation Screecher, during the war.”

  Louise came in with a tray of coffee and gingersnaps, which she passed around with a tight, shiny smile. “Gingersnap? They’re homemade. Not by me, I’m afraid, my mother.” While she did so, none of us said anything, except, “Thank you.”

  When she had finished pouring coffee, Louise waited for a while, and all three of us looked at each other in uncomfortable silence. At last she said, “Maybe I’ll go outside and cut some roses.”

  “Sure, good idea,” I told her. She hesitated a moment longer, but the officer in the eyeglasses raised his eyebrows at her expectantly, and she left. I could see her through the French windows, snipping away at the rose bushes as if she were giving all three of us vasectomies.

  “Before we tell you any more, Captain, we have to remind you that you are still bound by the same rules of confidentiality that you were during Operation Screecher.”

  “Maybe I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell me any more. We’re not at war now, are we?”

  “Well, yes, Captain. I’m afraid we are. It may not be an all-out fighting war, but it’s still a war, and your country needs your help.”

  “What if I decline to give it?”

  “We don’t actually think that you will, Captain.”

  “I see,” I told him. I wasn’t stupid. However callow these officers looked, they worked for one of the most secret and highly specialized counterintelligence units in the Western world, and I could tell when I was being seriously threatened.

  The officer in the eyeglasses said, “According to our records, you were in Antwerp, Belgium, in the winter of 1944, searching for a Romanian national by the name of Dorin Duca.”

  “That’s right. I never found him, though. Or it, I should say. I always assumed that he was killed by a V-2.”

  “In actual fact, sir, Duca escaped to the Netherlands. He was located by another operative from Operation Screecher and detained.”

  I frowned at him. “I didn’t know there were any other operatives in Operation Screecher. I thought that I was the only one.”

  “No, Captain, not exactly. Other operatives were occasionally brought in as and when the situation called for it.”

  “Well, that’s news to me. Besides, what do you mean by ‘detained’? You can’t ‘detain’ Screechers. All you can do is eliminate them. Knock nails into their eyes and cut their heads off.”

  “This particular operative had special abilities which allowed her to take Duca into detention.”

  “This was a woman?”

  The officer nodded. “She confined Duca to a casket and the plan was to fly him to England and then ship him back here to the United States to see if we could learn anything useful from him as regards counterintelligence operations.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe this. We were going to bring a Screecher to America? Deliberately? Didn’t anybody have the first idea how dangerous those creatures can be?”

  “Oh, I think so, sir. After all, Screechers wiped out practically the entire resistance movements in Bessarabia and Bulgaria during the war, and they did some major damage to the French and Dutch underground movements. The Nazis even used them in Warsaw, during the Uprising—sent them down the sewers to hunt down members of the Home Army.”

  “But what possible use could a Screecher be to us, once the war was over?”

  The officer took off his eyeglasses. “The opinion was that we needed to maintain our edge over the Russkies, Captain. It was all part of Operation Paperclip.”

  “I don’t know what Operation Paperclip was.”

  “That was the code name we used for bringing Nazi scientists and intelligence experts to the United States after the war. Not even the State Department knew about it, to begin with. None of them had visas, and most of them had their files altered to conceal the fact that they were hundred percent Nazi sympathizers, or worse.”

  “You’re talking about people like Wernher von Braun?”

  “Exactly. Von Braun developed the V-2 for Hitler, and now he’s developing rockets for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Then there’s Hans von Ohain, who used to design jet engines for Heinkel—he’s Director of the US Air Force Aeronautical Laboratory—and Alexander Lippisch, who did the same for Messerschmitt—he’s in Cedar Rapids, designing jet fighters for Convair. Reinhard Gehlen used to be in charge of intelligence for the Wehrmacht, and he’s set us up with the most effective counter-espionage network that we’ve ever had. Kurt Blome—he used to test plague vaccines on concentration-camp victims. Now he works for the US Army Chemical Corps.”

  “There were seven hundred sixty of them altogether,” put in the sandy-haired officer.

  “But Duca? Duca isn’t even human!”

  “We’re aware of that, Captain, but it made good military sense to bring him over here, too. If the Russkies got hold of him, think of the damage that they could do to our intelligence-gathering.”

  Louise was standing in the sunshine, not clipping roses any more, but raising her face to the sky, with her eyes closed, as if she were enjoying the warmth of the sun, or praying. I had a terrible sinking feeling that I was about to let her down, and very badly, but not through any fault of my own. I stood up and walked to the French windows and lifted my hand up, pressing it against the glass. But her eyes were still closed and she didn’t see me.

  “You’d better tell me what happened,” I said.

  Lost and Found

  “Duca was sealed into a casket and flown out of Holland on the night of December 17, 1944, along with two marines, a lieutenant from the counterintelligence detachment and the operative who had managed to detain him.”

  “Do you know how Duca was caught?” I asked him. “We looked all over northern Belgium and Holland for him, for weeks, and we didn’t even get a sniff of him.” I called Duca “him” because these officers did, but I always thought of any strigoi as an “it,” especially a strigoi mort. They weren’t people. They weren’t even ghosts of people. They were things. They could be deeply sentimental, but they only looked like people.

  The sandy-haired officer unbuckled his briefcase. “From all the reports I’ve read, Captain, they caught him mostly by sheer chance. He was hiding in the cellar of a house in Breda when it was shelled by British artillery, and he was trapped. The Dutch resistance had been looking for him, and they had the good sense not to let him out of that cellar but to give his location to US counterintelligence.”

  “So why the hell didn’t they tell me? I was the one who was hunting for Duca.”

  “They didn’t tell you, Captain, because they knew what you would do to him, and they wanted him—well, alive isn’t quite the word for it, is it? But they didn’t want him destroyed.”

  “So this female operative somehow managed to seal Duca up in a box? I can’t imagine how she did it but I’m very impressed. What happened to him after we flew him to England?”

  “That’s the problem, Captain. When they took off from Holland it was snowing very hard—blizzard conditions. They were supposed to fly to Biggin Hill airfield in Kent but their plane never arrived. The Royal Navy sent out air-sea rescue boats to search for it, but they couldn’t find any trace at all, nothing.”

  He took a photograph out of his briefcase and passed it over to me. It showed the muddy fuselage of a DC3 on the back of a trailer.

  “Last May, though, a dredger was clearing the Thames Estuary near a place called Leigh-on-Sea, and it struck one of the plane’s propellers. The aircraft must have hit the water at full speed and buried itself in the mud. That British air ace—what was her name, Amy Johnson—she disappeared in almost the same place in 1941, and they still haven’t found her plane, either.”

  “So they dug the plane up and found Duca’s casket?” I asked him.

  “That’s right.”

  “
And nobody realized what was in the casket, so they opened it?”

  “Right again.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “MI6 are very, very anxious to get this situation under control as quick as possible,” said the officer.

  “I’ll bet they are.”

  “It’s not just a question of innocent lives being lost, Captain. It’s a question of national security. Think of what could happen if the Russkies get wind of this and track Duca down before we do. British intelligence has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese, so it’s a distinct possibility. If we lose Duca to the communist bloc—well, to put it bluntly, we’re in very deep doo-doo.”

  “Oh, you bet we are,” I told him. “And if the press find out that US counterintelligence were covertly trying to smuggle a strigoi into the country at the end of the war, without the knowledge or approval of the State Department, and in complete disregard of the very obvious dangers to public safety, some pretty important heads are going to be rolling, don’t you think?”

  “You can’t tell anybody about this,” said the officer. “Not even your wife. Nobody.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “You’re booked already on a TWA Starliner from Idlewild to London. You leave tomorrow evening at nineteen-forty-five.”

  “What about a man-trailer?”

  “A dog? British quarantine laws won’t allow you to take a dog with you. You’ll be met in London by somebody from MI6 who will brief you more fully and provide you with a tracker dog and a trained handler.”

  I sat down again and I didn’t say anything for a long time. The two officers watched me tensely, almost as if they expected me to make a run for the door.

  At length, I said, “Supposing I say no?”

  “Saying ‘no’ is not actually one of your options,” said the sandy-haired officer.

  “What am I going to tell my company? I can’t just disappear without telling them where I’m going, or how long I’m going to be away.”

  “We’ll take care of that, Captain.”

  “OK—but I’ll have to get some stuff together. Silver mirror, compass, Bible, all that kind of thing. And I need the nails they used to crucify Christ. Where am I going to find those?”

  “We have your Kit already, Captain,” said the officer with the eyeglasses. “Everything’s in there, just the way it was when you handed it in, including the nails. All you need is some fresh garlic”

  “You think this is funny?”

  “No, Captain. Not in the slightest.”

  “So you want me to eliminate Duca, if I can find it. You don’t want me to bring it back here to the States?”

  “I’m afraid you don’t have the expertise to detain him, Captain. Nobody does. Nobody that we can find, anyhow.”

  “So—this female operative who did detain it? Do you have any idea who she was?”

  The sandy-haired officer said, “Yes, Captain, actually we do. That was one of the things I was instructed to tell you about. You were bound to find out, sooner or later.”

  I looked from one officer to the other. Both of them looked highly embarrassed.

  “It was your mother, Captain. Maricica Falcon, née Loveinescu.”

  “My mother? What the hell are you talking about? My mother died of a heart attack at home in California.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, no she didn’t. When you were being trained to hunt strigoi, you told your instructors that you learned most of your basic information about vampires from your mother. The counterintelligence detachment sent some people to talk to her, and they found out that she knew almost as much about the strigoi as you did. Not only that, she had some practical knowledge, too. Like, how to seal strigoi mortii into lead caskets, in such a way that they couldn’t escape.”

  I was stunned. My mother had been sent to capture Duca? I had never thought that she believed in the strigoi. In fact, she had always said that they were only stories, to frighten naughty children into behaving themselves.

  I thought of my father, sitting on the veranda, his eyes glistening with tears. “She had a problem with her heart,” he had told me, hoarsely. “And now I have a problem with mine.” He must have known what had happened to her, and yet he had never said a word. He had even emptied her ashes into the sea at Bodega Bay, which used to be one of her favorite places. Except that they couldn’t have been her ashes at all.

  London, 1957

  They had reserved me a sleeping berth on the TWA flight to London so that I would be rested and ready to start work as soon as I arrived, but shortly after I dozed off I started having terrifying nightmares. The droning of the airliner’s turboprop engines gradually turned into the noise of a huge, dark factory crammed with strange machines for crushing people’s bones, and I found myself running past dripping pipes and greasy electric cables, with a dark figure running just ahead of me. I knew that I was supposed to catch up with this figure, but I was frightened to run too fast, in case I did.

  After less than four hours, however, it began to grow light, and the flight attendant brought me a cup of coffee. “Are you all right, sir?” she smiled. “You were shouting in your sleep.” She had very blue eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  “Oh, yes? What was I shouting?”

  “I don’t know. Something about teachers, I think. You were telling them to get off you.”

  “Teachers? If only.”

  It was surprisingly hot when we landed in England, well over eighty degrees, and the sky was cloudless. As I came down the steps of the plane, I was greeted by a young man with wavy Brylcreemed hair and sunglasses. The only concession he had made to the heat was to take off his tweed coat and hang it over his arm, and roll up his shirtsleeves.

  “Captain Falcon? How do you do, I’m Terence Mitchell.”

  “How are you?” I asked him, and shook his hand, which was soft and sweaty.

  “Hope you had a comfortable flight, sir?”

  “Well, it was certainly a darn sight faster than the last time I did it.”

  “They’ll be bringing in jets next year, and that’ll make it even quicker. Six hours to New York, or so I believe. Amazing when you think it takes six days by boat. This way, sir. I’ve got a car waiting outside.”

  I hadn’t been back to England since the end of the war, but it hadn’t changed much. The same flat smell of English cigarettes and body odor. The same dinky little cars and red double-decker buses. The same clipped accents, as if everybody had been to elocution school.

  “Don’t worry about your things,” said Terence. “I’ve arranged to have them sent straight round to your hotel.”

  A beige Humber Hawk was parked by the curb outside the terminal, with a uniformed bobby standing beside it. The bobby gave Terence a nod as we approached, and strolled off. Terence opened the door for me and then climbed in himself. “Gasper?” he said, taking out a box of Player’s cigarettes.

  “No thanks. I gave up two years ago. Had a cough I couldn’t get rid of.”

  “You won’t mind if I do?”

  We drove out of the terminal and along the Great West Road toward the center of the city.

  “Good book?” asked Terence, nodding at the blue-bound volume I had brought to read on the flight.

  “Comparative Folk Mythologies of Dobrudja,” I told him, holding it up.

  “Oh. I’m more of a Nevile Shute man myself.”

  It always surprised me how green London was. The narrow streets were bursting with trees, and every little front yard had its bushes and its neatly trimmed hedge. Among the rows of houses stood the tranquil spires of Victorian churches, which gave the suburbs the appearance of order and respectability and enduring faith.

  “Very nasty business this, sir,” said Terence, with his cigarette waggling between his lips. “Seven more fatalities yesterday morning, in Croydon.”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ all the time, really. Jim will be fine.”

  “Right-oh. Jim it is.” He
pronounced it as though it had inverted commas. He looked ridiculously young to be an SIS operative, but he was probably the same age as I was when I was hunting the strigoi during the war. He was pale and round-shouldered, and he reminded me of one of those young English pilots you see clustered around Spitfires in wartime photographs, all smiling and most of them doomed to be incinerated alive before their twenty-first birthdays.

  “How are you managing to keep this out of the news?” I asked him.

  “It’s been jolly difficult, to tell you the truth. Fortunately there’s been some Korean influenza going around, so most of the time we can blame it on that.”

  “These seven . . . in where did you say?”

  “Croydon. It’s a borough, about ten miles south of London. Not the most attractive spot on earth. Pretty grotty, as a matter of fact.”

  “Were they all in the same room when they were killed?”

  “Yes, apart from one lad. They found his body upstairs. Only eleven years old. Very nasty business. They all belonged to the same family, except for one of them, an elderly lady who was a friend of theirs. It was a birthday party. Shocking. There was blood all over the food.”

  “You haven’t touched anything?”

  “The bodies have been taken away, but that’s all. Everything else is just as we found it.”

  “OK . . . but I’ll need to take a look at the bodies, later.”

  We were coming into West Kensington now, past the Natural History Museum and the Brompton Oratory, and the traffic was beginning to build up. As we reached Harrods store in Knightsbridge, Terence tossed his cigarette out of the window and took out a fresh one, tapping it on the steering wheel to tamp down the loose tobacco. “The first murders were on the 23rd of May, at the Selsdon Park Hotel. Eleven men and two women at a business conference.”

  “I read the police reports. I saw the photographs, too. Property developers, weren’t they?”