City Under the Moon (12 page)

Woah… Was he going to become a cabinet member?

“Can we get some popcorn?” Weston asked a duty officer, trying to disarm the tension. “And champagne? Anybody want champagne?”

A few people shrugged or nodded. The officer hurried off.

“Mister President,” said Greenberg, “We’ve distributed silver bullets among the New York police in the JTTF. It was the best way to single out a number of officers.”

“And the quarantine scenario?” Weston was far more relaxed than the others.

“We’re readying checkpoints at all of the bridges and tunnels. We’ll be reinforcing all night long. We should be able to close everything down.” And then he added, softly: “If necessary.”

“Here’s hoping it won’t be necessary,” said Weston. He turned his attention toward one of the TVs, where Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve had just returned from a commercial. The other screens were showing New Year’s Eve programming from CNN, Fox News, the Fox network, Comedy Central, and MTV, all with closed captions.

“Thirteen minutes until moonrise,” said Luft.

Wait.
What?

Weston turned Lon’s way. “Well, we’ve got a few minutes and popcorn is on the way, so why don’t you tell us about werewolves?”

The entire Situation Room turned toward him. The taunting ring of
Under Pressure
by David Bowie and Queen danced through his head.
Ding ding ding di-di-ding ding. Ding ding ding di-di—

“Lon?”

“Well, uh... sir, there are hundreds of different versions of the legend.”

“Let’s start from the beginning.”

“Well, the first true werewolf story was written in the year 8 AD, by a Roman called Ovid. It was in Book One of his fifteen-volume narrative poem,
Metamorphoses
. This was a history of the world from creation to Julius Caesar, in mythological terms, of course. Ovid wrote of the notorious cannibal Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, who tested Zeus’ power by serving him a meal of stewed children. In response, Zeus transformed him into a wolf. The better translation from Ovid’s Latin reads as follows:

“Lycaon ran in terror, and reaching the silent fields howled aloud, frustrated of speech. Foaming at the mouth, and greedy as ever for killing, he turned against the sheep, still delighting in blood. His clothes became bristling hair, his arms became legs. He was a wolf, but kept some vestige of his former shape. There were the same grey hairs, the same violent face, the same glittering eyes, the same savage image.

“Now, the first mention of the mortal werewolf came from
The Satyricon
, a satire novel by Petronius, from the court of Nero later in the first century. This was really the only other surviving novel from the Roman Empire, so it’s interesting that they both mentioned werewolves. But
The Satyricon
is much more lighthearted, like a relationship misadventure sitcom for the bathhouse set. In chapter sixty-two of Volume Two, the narrator has attended an extravagant dinner at the lavish estate of—“

“Lon,” President Weston interrupted.

That was when Lon realized that everyone was frowning at him like he was an infected pustule. Oh, how he knew that look.

“I’m sorry,” Lon said.

“That’s okay. I hope you’ll write down all of that for us later. In the meantime, let’s keep it succinct.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he repeated. “Now how does one become a werewolf?”

“In pop culture—in the movies—it’s usually from the bite of another werewolf. In
The Wolf Man
, Lawrence Talbot, Lon Chaney Jr.’s character, is bitten by a werewolf who turns out to be the son of a Gypsy fortuneteller. Other legends claim that you can become a lycanthrope, a person who transforms into a werewolf, by donning a belt made of wolf skin during a full moon, or drinking rainwater from the footprint of a wolf, or drinking or bathing in the blood of a werewolf. And those are just the stories indigenous to America; there are really weird ones from—”

“Which one is the truth?”

“It certainly comes from a bite. But many accounts suggest that the attacks aren’t random. Very often, the lycanthrope will know their victim. It’s usually someone they love. The important distinction is that lycanthropy isn’t a disease; it’s a curse, a metaphor for atonement, punishment for sin.”

“So who does the cursing?” asked General Truesdale. “Who created the first werewolf?”

“That’s up for conjecture. Modern occult writings refer to witches or warlocks or shamans or, again, Gypsy mystics. But anthropologists have tracked legends of shapeshifters through the folklore of virtually every culture in history. Native Americans had their skinwalkers, like the Navajo
yee naaldlooshii
, or ‘he who runs on all fours.’ If you’re looking at pure shapeshifting, I mean that goes all the way back to Homer—“

“Let’s stick with werewolves,” Weston said. Some of the others squirmed with impatience. “Traditional werewolf legend. The moon and silver, right?”

“Yeah. The most ‘traditional’ version says that when there’s a full moon, a man cursed with lycanthropy will transform into a werewolf.”

“Tonight’s not a full moon,” said Luft.

“Neither was last night,” added the president, gesturing at Lon to continue.

“Well, the full moon thing has been under contention forever. It probably started with Petronius, who wrote that when he first saw a man turn into a werewolf, I quote, ‘the moon was bright as day.’ But, I mean, if you think about it, it’s really stupid—why would it only work under a full moon? It’s transmogrification, not PMS.” Lon paused for the proverbial rimshot, but nobody laughed, so he continued: “There’s no reason to expect that a lycanthrope wouldn’t transform whenever he or she is exposed to moonlight.”

“Interesting,” Weston said, throwing a glance toward Luft.

“And silver is the only thing that will kill them?” Luft asked.

“Some say holy water or fire will do it, but they’re confusing them with vampires. And I mean, I assume with modern weapons—if you blow a werewolf up, he’s probably gonna die, y’know? Also, they’re repulsed by wolfsbane, like vampires with garlic.”

“Wolfsbane is a flower?”

“
Aconitum napellus.
There’s debate about which specific subspecies the lore refers to, but I believe it to be
Aconitum tauricum Wulfen
, simply because of its endemism to the Southern Carpathians, in and about Romania. It’s a tall, romantic purple flower—“

“Why Romania?” interjected Luft.

“Oh, man, well, lycanthropy lore—all of the classic monster lore, really—is distinctly European. Horror literature reached its golden age when London was the world’s capital of society, and Romania was best known for the morbid reign of Vlad the Impaler, who served as Bram Stoker’s template for Count Dracula.”

“But Dracula was a
vampire
,” said the president.

“A lot of the fiction is tied together. See, it’s all drawn from primal fears. The vampire is the violator. The werewolf is the betrayer. I’ve already done a first draft of my doctoral thesis on this.”

“We’re looking for fact, not fiction.”

“Werewolves are fact. Vampires are fiction.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Because Lord George Gordon Byron essentially made vampires up for a story he created during the same writing exercise in which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus
, in the volcanic summer of 1816, commonly referred to as the ‘Year Without a Summer,’ but he abandoned his so-called
Fragment of a Novel
, and that influenced his physician, John William Polidori, to write
The Vampyre,
which defined the creature as we know it.”

Everyone in the room stared at him in silent dismay. He wondered if perhaps he should repeat that last part more clearly, but—

“Answer me this, young man,” said Truesdale. “If this man becomes a wolf, and whomever he bites becomes a wolf, where does it end? Why haven’t they overrun the world?”

“I…” That one gave him pause. “They just don’t spread that way. People don’t usually survive a werewolf attack. And some of the legends say that when you kill the originator of the bloodline—the first werewolf—everyone he infected, and everyone down the line, gets cured.”

“The originator of the bloodline,” repeated Weston.

“The first werewolf,” Lon confirmed.

“So we have a target,” said Truesdale, and people started moving.

A target?

“We’ll get our men this information, sir,” said Michael Shinick, the Attorney General. Shinick’s aide had already stepped into a futuristic phone booth. When he closed the curved door, its transparent glass turned milky white. So cool!

“Anything else, Lon?”

Lon shook his head, still on the phone booth thing. “If I think of something, I’ll let you know.”

“Anything might be valuable. Please speak up.”

The president’s aide returned with hot buttered popcorn. Weston grabbed a handful before it was on the table. “Thank you, Tommy. One last thing: Could you send my wife a bouquet of roses and tell her I’m sorry I had to work?”

“Yes sir.”

“And get me a DVD of the 1939
Of Mice and Men.
” He winked at Lon.

“The moon rises in five minutes,” Luft said.

“Let’s see what happens,” Weston said with a full mouth.

“What…
happens
?” Lon muttered, thoroughly confused. He followed their eyes to the television.

What
might
happen?

Eight

Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building

26 Federal Plaza, Manhattan

23rd Floor Research Library

9:53 p.m.

Tildascow checked the clock again. No matter how hard she tried to concentrate, her eyes kept sliding back to that goddamn clock.

9:54.

The FBI’s research library was so comprehensive that it defeated its own purpose. Post 9/11, they collected so much goddamn data that research was a constant fucking drowning in a “narrow this search” stupor. She never thought she’d miss the microfiche, but how could you find a needle in a haystack when the haystack kept getting bigger?

She’d commandeered twelve research assistants and assigned them to data mining in the FBI’s Sentinel database. The public (and, more importantly, the
enemy
) still thought Sentinel was a broken mess, but in truth it was a nice improvement over the old Automated Case Support system. Case files, leads, suspects, forensics, and intrabureau communications, all linked for cross-referencing. Her favorite Intelligence Analyst, Charlie Frank, had all quarters reporting to him while she free-swam through the database.

They sifted local and federal criminal case files, security tapes, plane manifests, passports, and driver’s licenses, trying to make a connection to a man they could barely see.

That wasn’t by
his
design, though. He’d stood right in front of the cameras at the UN and at Bellevue.

This guy wanted to be seen. And he got what he wanted.

Her BlackBerry buzzed with a text message from the Assistant to the Director of the FBI: “Concentrate on Romania / Transylvania.”

Nice. Had anyone thought to dig up Lon Chaney’s corpse?

Tildascow rubbed her temples. She’d reminded herself a hundred times that debating the likelihood of this thing would only slow her down. She’d seen it with her baby blues. And if there were werewolves, they might as well be from Transylvania.

9:56.

“Charlie, look at inbound transportation from Europe,” she called out. “Focus on Transylvania or Romania or nearby, including transfers.”

“Hear ya,” he hollered from one of the other cubicles in the maze. The sexiest thing about Charlie was that “hear ya” was all he ever said until he had pertinent and concise information. She didn’t give a shit about anyone’s family or their take on the weather.

She typed “Transylvania” into Sentinel’s aggregator field and cross-referenced it against her man’s image.

9:57.

The search would take a while and she’d go crazy staring at the clock. Was there somewhere around here to find a werewolf movie on DVD? Watch it in fast-forward?

Ping.

That fast?

As the data mining continued, she linked out the first hit to an adjacent monitor. It was a December 18th security tape from the Newark airport. Facial recognition scans of passengers from Lufthansa flight 412 from Munich, where several passengers had connected from Bucharest.

And there he was.

“Charlie, I need a manifest on Lufthansa flight 412 from Munich, December 18. Right now.”

“Hear ya.”

He was 6’ 1” and a lithe 175 pounds. Salt and pepper stubble, long and unkempt black hair. She linked to surveillance footage from the flight’s deplaning and spun the jog wheel to find him emerging from the jetway. Fucker glided right through the logjam of passengers, slippery slippery. His eyes—bright brown, practically yellow—carefully scanned the concourse before settling on the camera’s point of view.

He looked right at her.

That tee was already stretched over his shirt. It was cleaner and clearer eleven days prior to the footage from the UN. The message was awkwardly scrawled in lower-case letters. She thought from the previous images that it was written in marker, but here it seemed like some kind of brushed ink.