City Under the Moon (34 page)

“Negative, November, the street is too narrow. Stand by for alternate PZ.”

Fucking driver stopped for another civilian!

“Run them over!”

“November, fall back 30 meters to 57
th
and Broadway.”

That was back the way they came, the previous intersection. She cursed herself for not abandoning this tack an hour ago. “Copy that, Desperation. Wilco. Out.”

“Hold on!” called the driver—

Tildascow was thrown against the back door.

A car had rammed them from behind, a black lux Caddy that looked less like an accordion a minute ago. A fifty-year-old grease job in a tracksuit stumbled from behind the airbag and checked his collection of necklaces before reaching back for a pair of .357 S&W Magnums (he must’ve left his grenade launcher at home). A teenager, probably his son, stepped out of the passenger side with an MP5 submachine gun. It was a serious piece of business, but he was holding it in a ridiculous side-armed manner that would probably break his arm if he fired.

“Alright youse, get the fuck out of there, this is a hijacking,” yelled the grease job. The mob cheered as he twirled one of his Magnums, damn near dropping it, then fired a couple of resounding shots into the air.

“Can’t go forward!” yelled the driver.

“Then go back!”

“Over them?”

Thought I made that clear, asshole.
Fucking reserves knew how to move metal but they couldn’t make decisions. She worked the PA mic, her voice booming over the crowd outside: “MOVE AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE OR WE WILL NOT HESITATE TO RUN YOU OVER!”

It just emboldened them. The hoagie shop gunslinger fired his Magnums at the Cougar. Might as well have been a loud toothpick.

Warnings, posturing, reasoning… none of them were going to work, and all of them would take time they couldn’t afford.

She slid the rack on her .45 and unlocked the gunport. She took aim, ignoring heavy gazes from Lon, Ilecko, Jaguar, and Mantle.

And then she shot the grease job through his forehead. A clap of thunder, a nickel-sized hole, a spritz of blood, and he was dead before he hit the ground.

The mob couldn’t flee fast enough.

“Now go!” she yelled, and the driver finally took heed. The Cougar flattened the Cadillac like a soda can and reversed toward the pick-up zone.

The grease job’s kid stood by as the Cougar crossed between him and his dead father. Tildascow watched his shock ebb into grief until she could see him no more.

“Desperation, this is November. We are on the move to PZ.”

She sat down, uninterested in opinions. Including her own.

A few minutes later, they reached the intersection and transferred into the Black Hawk. Civilian resistance had evaporated.

As they lifted off and headed southeast, Tildascow tried to force that kid’s image from her mind.

That kid whose father she’d just killed, right in front of him.

Ten

Manhattan

1:29 p.m.

After they had completed their procedures, DARPA’s psychologists asked Brianna Tildascow if she felt like she was losing her identity.

When she asked them to elaborate, they explained that there were concerns that she might disassociate her new “enhanced” self from her former identity and come to resent the government for the irrevocable changes they’d made to her body and mind.

And so they asked, “Do you feel like you’re losing your identity?”

She laughed at the question. That had terrified them.

Some of DARPA’s theophilisophical whatsitwhos feared that the magnetic alterations to her frontotemporal lobe might produce a superior being, one whose enhanced mental capabilities could interpret the world in a way their feeble minds had been unable to predict or imagine. Maybe they thought she’d be able to manipulate matter or control their thoughts. Or bring disco back.

Her laughter wasn’t intended to seem condescending or wicked. It was the question itself that she found funny.

Had she lost her identity?

“You’re goddamn right I lost my identity,” she answered. “When I was sixteen. It’s in your records. Now let’s go get some bad guys.”

When she was finally approved to go and do just that, the results were disappointing. DARPA’s mad scientists had enhanced her perception of patterns. She could see the tempo of music, and complex mathematical equations just fell into place. Civilizations, governments, and urban sprawl might fall into patterns, but individual people aren’t predictable in the same terms.

And so she went about studying. Her every social exchange became an experiment in behavior patterns.

She began eavesdropping and people watching in common environments. Soon she got involved with her subjects, observing reactions when she broke social mores, like facing people on elevators, standing in movie theaters, or wearing her Sunday best and sitting with homeless people.

Next it was simple suggestion. Tender manipulation. Life coaching.

Testing boundaries. Challenging convictions. Finding limits.

Emotional trauma.

Physical torture.

Poker. Lots and lots of poker.

And yet, she still hadn’t found reliable patterns in any individual’s behavior, particularly if her prey knew they were being watched and especially if she’d never met them. There was no way to truly know what someone was thinking.

But she could
guess
better than anyone on Earth.

Like every FBI agent, she would begin with a profile of her quarry, reviewing all of the available data on a subject and diagnosing broad classifications: Was he organized? Intelligent? Educated? Resolute?

How did he think?

—He was a product of superior education.

The main library in Castle Valenkov, she remembered, spanned the history of the written word, from archaic volumes of history and philosophy to science and medical journals from this decade. Recent selections on his reading table included
Istoria critică a românilor,
a history of Wallachia;
Skazanie o Drakule voevode, “The Tale of the Warlord Dracula,
” a fifteenth-century book of folktales about Vlad the Impaler; and, of course,
Harry Potter şi Ordinul Phoenix
. In the display cases were Chinese texts inscribed on bamboo slips. The quality of their ink suggested they were less than five hundred years old, but they reminded her of the second-century Yinqueshan Han Slips recently discovered in a Chinese tomb, which included lost sections of
The Art of War
.

In the laboratory below, Valenkov had studied hundreds or maybe even thousands of his ancestors’ personal journals. The oldest were inscribed on hand-scraped sheepskin parchment, with iron gall ink treated with eggshells to temper acidity. She placed them in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Some of them might’ve been Vlad the Impaler’s personal writings.

Most of the journals were concerned with poetic descriptions of the werewolf experience, but Demetrius Valenkov’s notes were preoccupied with his experiments.

—He was organized and intelligent.

The long table stretching through the laboratory was covered with stacks of research material. At first glance, the haphazard piles and overlapping open books appeared compulsive and scattered, but in fact their arrangement flowed smoothly through topics and ideologies.

The close end of the table was covered with heaps of twenty-first-century science and medical texts. They’d been left open to subjects like antiviral proteins, gene therapy and lethal mutagenesis. He’d most recently read a dense report from the CDC to the US Department of Health and Human Services, a primer on spontaneous epigenesis. The notes he’d scribbled in the margins suggested that he didn’t think much of their theories.

Those materials gave way to studies of mathematics and harmonics. Valenkov seemed taken by Pythagoras’ concept of the Harmony of the Spheres, a metaphysical theory proposing that everything in the universe interrelates through vibrations and sounds. He was experimenting with a massive handmade monochord, which he was recording with everything from wax records to reel-to-reel to digital tape. Sadly, all of his samples were gone.

The far side of Valenkov’s table was packed with dusty, arcane tomes of the supernatural and the occult. Pages were marked to werewolf encounters, Gypsy folklore, curses, and witchcraft (notably, not a single reference to the fictional Count Dracula or his vampires). Among the titles:
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-malin the Mage,
an ancient French grimoire;
The Picatrix,
an eleventh-century compilation of magical and astrological intersections; a handwritten copy of Liber luratus, a black magic compendium;
Pseudomonarchia Daemonum,
a sixteenth century encyclopedia of demons; and
Liber Al Vel Legis, “The Book of the Law,”
which Aleister Crowley claimed to have written while he was possessed by a mystical guardian. She also noticed a folded document written in a cipher, which made cryptic reference to something called the “Society of Eight.” Cheery reading.

The juxtaposition on Valenkov’s table matched the drawings and charts on the chamber’s walls, the arrangements of the bookcases, and the placement of his instruments: science versus folklore.

—He was self-aware.

In the center of the table, Valenkov bridged the gap between theorized fact and supposed fiction with a subject that was neither and both: philosophical studies of the body and mind. He’d collected
Tattva-vāicāradī
and Sanskrit Yoga texts, a modern Romanian translation of
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,
and a dozen books on the Chinese internal martial arts
Nèi jiā
and
Wǔdāngquán
.

This was the gravest revelation in Castle Valenkov. Tildascow was a longtime student of
Nèi jiā
and yoga herself, and well aware of its benefits. If Valenkov was practicing, he probably had a considerable degree of control over his emotions. That meant he’d be far more elusive.

Emotions are what lead people to fall back on habits or comforts: contact with a loved one, attending a sporting event, seeking out their favorite cigar.

Their
patterns
.

Free of emotional distractions, intelligent minds could always chaotically zig or zag, leaving their trail cold. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, lived in a shed in the middle of nowhere and avoided people and technology. He traveled hundreds of miles to send a package, consistently altered his techniques, and waited years between strikes. No patterns. In fact, they only caught Kaczynski because his brother turned him in. It was sheer, dumb luck.

Obviously, it wasn’t Valenkov’s intention to zig or zag. He wanted to be seen, and he had a message.

Find a cure.

The psych profile on Demetrius Valenkov wouldn’t make for a happy read. He’d be a snipe hunt, a case that rotted at the bottom of inboxes until an agent ran into some of that sheer, dumb luck. He certainly couldn’t be found on any timetable.

***

Tildascow looked out from the Black Hawk as they flew southeast, following the path set by Ilecko’s blood test. New Jersey was on their right, sitting there with front-row seats to Valenkov’s morbid game.

How would it end? How
could
it end?

He’d prepared with such patience, executed with such precision. He must have an endgame. He had to know that finding a cure wouldn’t take longer than three days, and that they wouldn’t be able to cure him before the werewolves spread. Even Ilecko said the army couldn’t—

—couldn’t—

“Even though the Ottomans outnumbered Vlad five-to-one, they couldn’t walk through his army of the dead.”
Lon’s words fluttered through her mind.

Just like Vlad the Impaler, Demetrius Valenkov had been tortured and betrayed. His beloved murdered, his home pillaged.

She knew the sensation. You’re goddamn right I lost my identity.

“Twenty. Thousand. Men. Impaled. Turkish prisoners. The sultan’s own men. The stakes encircled the town.”

Valenkov meant to turn back our army by pitting us against our own. He would occupy Manhattan with his werewolves, his army of the dead, until we found his cure. After all, the werewolves should have escaped by now. It was inconceivable that they hadn’t. And they’d contained the spread in Atlanta.

Because spreading wasn’t Valenkov’s plan.

He’d come to claim his identity.

The Dracula King.

So where does a king put his throne? Where would he go, this man who came from a castle straight out of a fairytale nightmare?

Tildascow’s stomach shifted as the helicopter banked. They were passing through a cloud of smoke, their wind shear wiping the sky clean to reveal—

Holy shit.

The Chrysler Building was directly in their path. A 77-story architectural wonder, towering above the rest of the city, topped by a crown—a
crown!
—of overlapping hubcaps, tapering into a spire that reaches the clouds.

Her muscles went tight.

The Empire State Building wasn’t too far on their right, and neither was the gigantic
New York Times
Building. But they didn’t fit the pattern. It was the Chrysler.

They took a slow bank around the crown, gazing into the blackness of the triangular windows. Mantle whistled from the rear cargo seats behind them. “Ain’t she a beaut.”

“We’re landing here,” Tildascow exclaimed. “Right here.”

“Say again?” responded their Black Hawk’s new pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Paul Kim.

“He’s in the Chrysler Building. We’re landing right here, right now.” Kim turned back to see if she was joking. “Now!”

“We’re out of playtime, ma’am,” said Kim’s co-pilot. “Fuel critical. Same with the
Silver Bullet
. If drop you, your air cover will be gone for up to an hour.”

Tildascow didn’t hesitate. “Put us down.”

“SEC, this is Desperation One,” Kim radioed to Southeastern Command. “Be advised, we are putting November down at 8333-3234. Reason to believe HPT is in the Chrysler Building.”