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Eight

Asher remained on the Prater until nearly four, to give the hue and cry time to subside. He had a late lunch at one of the rustic cafes that lined the Volksprater's bridle paths, consuming Czech sausage and buchty with one eye on the broad, graveled way that led from the organ grinders and carousels around the great Ferris wheel off into the gray and rust fastnesses of the old Imperial hunting park. Once he caught a glimpse of the brilliant cobalt jackets of the Imperial- and-Royal contingent of his pursuers among the thin trees and heard their faint hallooing as they searched.

England, when war comes, I think you'll be safe on the Austrian front at any rate.

But his inner smile faded at the thought of Ernchester, no longer now entirely a volunteer. If there were any stipulations in the deal he'd made with Karolyi, any acts he wouldn't perform at the nobleman's behest, the rules had changed. Or would change, when they told him they held Anthea prisoner.

He shivered in his rag-fair coat.

How long had Fairport been a double? he wondered. According to Karolyi, as far back as the flap over the smuggled Russian guns. It wasn't as unusual as it might seem to outsiders that Fairport hadn't blown him to Karolyi then. The fact that Fairport was passing the odd fact along to the Kundschafts Stelle from time to time didn't mean he was entirely their man. Doubles- particularly men like Fairport- were frequently masters of self-deception, as Asher knew from having dealt with them. They always kept things back, from either side, sometimes for the most bizarre and absurd reasons: He remembered an American missionary in China who hadn't warned him of an impending rebel attack because he didn't want a Chinese patron of the mission to learn that his-the patron's-son had a mistress in the quarter of Tientsin through which the rebels were expected to come.

And perhaps Karolyi hadn't asked it of him, judging the matter too small to waste a trump on information he could learn some other way. Even in retrospect, however, the thought of how close he'd come to dying as his Czech mountain guide had died made Asher shudder.

Fairport's research was already an obsession back in the nineties. Top quality materials, facilities, research journeys were always expensive, and Fairport was not a wealthy man. The best agents, Asher reflected, were those without any weak points, any handles upon which an enemy could grip.

Like Karolyi. Smooth, hollow men for whom the Job was all.

He glanced back at the self-consciously rustic kiosk where the waitresses huddled out of the cold, and wondered if Halliwell could be trusted.

Fairport might not be the only one in Karolyi's pay. Better, certainly, to wait until six and leave a message at Donizetti's, arranging a meeting. If he could stay out of sight until then...

But after six it wouldn't matter.

Not to Karolyi.

Though Asher was already fairly certain what he'd find, he strolled to the kiosk and bought that day's Neue Freie Presse. On the back page he found a small lead line: lacemaker's body found in wienerwald Scanning the brief copy, his eye picked out the words "drained of blood." The name of the vineyard near which she'd been found was familiar, a quarter hour's drive from Fruhlingzeit. So. He stared blankly in the direction of the gay-colored midway, the shooting galleries and Punch and Judys, the panopticum where the murder of the Czar was on view in wax for the edification of schoolboys. A fleer of music blew from that direction, a distorted jingle of pipes and chimes, and then was gone. "The Waltz of the Flowers."

So.

A lacemaker. Like the prostitute in Paris, a woman no one would miss.

Of course Karolyi would pick a woman.

Ernchester would be there until sometime tonight.

Fairport was disposable. Even the knowledge of a scheme to use vampires was disposable. As Karolyi had said, most men in the Department weren't going to believe it anyway.

What could not be disposed of-what he himself could not relinquish-was Ernchester.

Today- now-Asher knew where the vampire earl was, where Anthea would be. Knowing Fairport- and Fruhlingzeit-were blown, they'd move tonight and, like true vampires, fade into the mists, leaving only a little blood and a muttering of rumor behind.

A fiacre drove by on the path, the coachman whistling briskly. The afternoon light had turned steely and cold. Asher shivered again and blew on his hands.

There was, of course, always the option of taking the first train back to Munich - cadging a ride in the baggage car, at this point, but Asher had done that in his time. If Burdon were still the head of the Munich branch-if there still was a Munich branch-he could at least get enough money to go back to England. Tell them Fairport was a traitor, Karolyi was in league with-well, a very dangerous man-and wash his hands of the business. Go home to Lydia, who might very well have sent him a wire at Fairport's... None of this was his affair anyway. He had done all he could be expected to do.

But that left Anthea in the hands of Karolyi.

And he knew where Ernchester was today. That was the crux of the matter.

There was a telephone in the kiosk. Undoubtedly the police could trace him through the exchange if he phoned Halliwell- he'd dealt with the endless polite chatter of Viennese telephone operators too often to think the transaction could be accomplished quickly. And the delay of a night in jail meant that Ernchester-and Anthea-would vanish untraceably.

When he'd taken a seat at this table, half screened from the path by a hedge, there had been two or three other brave souls sipping coffee and gazing contemplatively over the slaty waters of the canal. Now he was alone. Across the river the clock on St. Stephen's struck three.

Unwillingly Asher got to his feet, thrust his bare hands into his pockets, and after a cautious glance up and down the path for signs of pursuit, headed back along the Haupt Allee for the Praterstern, where with his last few pfennigs he could catch a tram at least partway to the Vienna Woods.

It was not long after the coming of full dark that Asher realized he was being followed.

He took the tram as far as Dobling, then climbed the winding road through thin rust- and-pewter woods past Grinzing. Moving kept him a little warm, though his side hurt at every step and he had to stop repeatedly to rest on the low rock walls that divided woods or vineyards from the road. He was sitting thus, trying to get his breath after a particularly steep patch of road, when he heard the church clock in that storybook village chime five.

Now and then a farm wagon passed, and once a motorcar full of homebound seekers after pastoral calm, but as the twilight clotted under the trees, such things became few. A small wind cleared the clouds; a shaved silver coin of moon floated in a halo of ice. By six it was utterly dark.

That mattered less than it might have, for Asher knew the road. Toiling upward with the ache of fatigue dragging at his bones, there were times when he felt he'd never been away. He didn't even have to look for the Fruhlmgzeit Sanitarium's gateposts of ivy-covered stone. The slope of the road told him exactly how far yet he had to go.

He listened for the sound of human pursuit. But that was not what he heard. He would have been hard put to say exactly what it was he did hear, or what he felt, that told him they were in the woods be-hind him. Perhaps, had he not come so close to death at their hands-or the hand of those like them in Paris -a year ago, he would not even have known he was being stalked.

But he knew. A touch of sleepiness at his mind, in spite of the wind eating through his holed coat and the ache of his wound. A sense that it wasn't really necessary to look behind him, or around him, at the woods. And then, when a single breath of moving air sighed from the cinder-colored darkness among the trees, the sweetish stink of blood.

He didn't slow his step, or quicken it, not daring to let them see he knew, but he did wonder what he was going to do. He was nearly at the drive that turned into Fruhlingzeit, and the drive, at least, would be watched by Karolyi's men. He'd have to leave the road then. The silver on his throat and wrists would buy him a few seconds, but they wouldn't save him from a broken neck. The road before him lay deserted.