She and O'Rourke sat on a padded bench in the rear of the Jet Ranger cabin, their wrists still tied uncomfortably behind them. No one had tightened their seat belts, and the updrafts, thermals, crosswinds, and other vagaries of small aircraft travel jostled them and left them lurching uncomfortably. Kate especially hated the nauseating feeling when the helicopter dropped suddenly and she lifted a bit off her seat. She had always hated roller coasters.
They did not talk. The sound of the jet engine and rotors was simply too loud to carry on a conversation even if anyone had wanted to. Radu Fortuna sat in the front right seat where a copilot would normally sit, Lucian was belted into a jump seat behind the pilot, facing backward, and the dark man whom Kate thought of only as the intruder sat between O'Rourke and her. The man was firmly strapped in. Lucian was looking out the window to his right with a calm, almost distracted expression. Kate tried not to look at him. Her mind was rushing but it found no answers, no clever plans, and very few branches of hope to cling to.
The helicopter banked left, Kate gasped as she slid helplessly against the strigoi intruderhe smelled of musk and sweatand then they were rushing down a narrower valley with higher peaks on either side. A thin ribbon of highway ran along another river below. The roar of the engine and rotors made Kate's headache almost intolerable. Her left arm, still bandaged and aching, throbbed in unison with her migraine.
Radu Fortuna was wearing a communications headphone, and now he slid one of his earphones off, put his hand over the mike, twisted in his seat, and shouted, “Sighisoara.”
Kate looked out and ahead with dull eyes.
The town was like a fairy tale city: perched on a small mountain between taller ones, bound about with high stone walls and battlements, its steep hillsides pocked with crenellated towers, steep slate roofs, cobblestone streets, covered walkways, and tall tan and yellow homes that had been built almost a thousand years earlier.
Then the chopper banked and Kate caught a glimpse of the socialist reality of “new Sighisoara. “ Industry on the out skirts of town, a single highway lined with cheap cinderblock structures, and a few Nomenclature estates sitting fat and arrogant on opposing hillsides. But unlike so much else in Romania, this intrusion of postwar ugliness made no real dent in the atmosphere of the medieval city proper. The highest hill was all Old City, and the Old City must appear much as it had when Vlad Tepes' father first rode into it and established his headquarters there in 1431.
The helicopter banked again and this time Kate saw the military vehicles along the roads, the police cars at the roadblocks, and the almost total absence of vehicles within the city.
“You see, it would not have been too easy for uninvited peoples to visit us tonight,” shouted Radu Fortuna. “Yes?” Kate did not answer and he put the earphones back on and said something to the pilot.
They came in over the Old City on the hill, and the towers, red tile roofs, narrow streets, tiny courtyards, and steep stairways became larger and more real. Kate saw that Sighisoara proper had been laid out within its protective walls, and although steps and a few winding roads connected it to the larger village below, both the wall and the Old City remained intact. They flew over the wall, banked sharply around a tower with a large clock face, slowed with a suddenness that almost sent Kate lurching off the bench, and then settled with a jar, a slight rising again, and then a solid thump as the machine lost its ability to fly. The pilot threw switches while Lucian and Radu Fortuna were out of the machine and moving away in a crouching run. The second helicopter, the strange little bubblecockpitted black machine, buzzed angrily overhead and disappeared behind the tower.
The strigoi in the middle shoved Kate out and then O'Rourke. Kate almost tripped and landed face first on the sharp cobblestones, but the man's strong hand seized her roughly by the upper arm and pulled her upright.
They had landed in a grassy area near the edge of the fortifications, a small square looking down on the Old City walls which offered a view of the New City below, a river, and the wooded hills across the valley. Behind them, ancient Sighisoara stacked its steeproofed homes up the mountainside. Kate saw a church spire through the trees above them. She tried to see everything, to get her bearings now, in case she escaped and needed to know which way to run.
She did not know which way to run.
Lucian took a step in her direction as if he were going to say something. If he had come any closer, she would have kicked him, but he paused and then turned away, walking to a waiting car and talking to the swarthy man. Radu Fortuna came up to her, saw the direction and intensity of her gaze, and said, “Oh, you think that your friend is a part of our Family, eh? No, no, no. “ He shook his head and showed his broad grin. “The young student works for money, just as so many do in our country. He has served his purpose.”
Fortuna snapped his fingers and the dark man handed Lucian a thick wad of Romanian bills.
He sold Joshua and me out for lei, thought Kate. She felt physically ill.
The waiting car was neither Dacia nor Mercedes, but some intermediate level of German car. Lucian took the money, got in the backseat, and did not look out again as the driver started the car and drove out of sight under the courtyard arch.
“Come,” said Radu Fortuna. There were several of the security guards in black in the square now and they took Kate and O'Rourke by the arm and led them after the briskly striding Fortuna.
They came out of the square into a smaller open area, a sort of corner park, and then strode down the cobblestoned hill only a hundred feet or so to the massive clock tower Kate had seen from the air. The hands on the clock face sixty feet above them were frozen.
Fortuna led them past the small main door that had a tiny sign which said MUSEUM, down some stone stairs, through a thick door which was opened as he approached, through a narrower second door, down another flight of worn stone steps, and into a cellar lit only by two naked 20watt bulbs.
“Ion!” snapped Fortuna.
The intruderHe and his men killed Tom and Julie! He threw me off a cliff!stepped forward and lifted a heavy woodandiron trapdoor set in the stone floor. The opening was a square into blackness.
Radu Fortuna smiled and beckoned Kate forward. “Come, come. You have traveled a long way in search of our hospitality. Now enjoy it.” He nodded and the guards pushed her forward and lowered her into the darkness, her arms still tied behind her and protesting in pain.
There was an almost vertical stairway of wooden steps, but her foot missed it and she dropped three or four feet to a stone floor. The impact knocked the wind out of her and she could do nothing but roll to one side as O'Rourke was tossed in after her.
Radu Fortuna stood above them, his face and shoulders a silhouette in the open trapdoor. “Our tower has a wonderful view, our modest museum a fascinating collection. But I think you will not, perhaps, have time to enjoy these things, yes? But do make the most of your final moments together.”
He stepped back and the trapdoor slammed down with a noise that Kate would not have believed if she had not heard it. There came the sound of a bolt sliding and clicking above.
The darkness was not quite absolute: there was the dimmest of dim glows, a light so faint as to be almost illusory, around the edge of the trapdoor. She fought her way to a sitting position and raised her face to the promise of light.
There were voices and laughter above. Heavy boots trod on the trapdoor itself and then scuffed across stone. A laugh came from farther away and for several minutes there was no sound at all, although Kate sensed someone up there, waiting, guarding. She twisted toward a slight stirring near her. “Mike?”