Janos laughed like a great baying hound. 'That time shall never come,' he said. 'But I too shall be fair: when this is done, and done to my liking, then I shall put you both down, and mingle your dust, and scatter it to the winds forever.'
"Then that must suffice,' said the other.
'So be it!' said Janos...
As the sun painted a crack of gold on the eastern horizon, Harry Keogh slept on. But in the Aegean Sea off Rhodes Darcy Clarke and his team were aboard a slightly larger, faster boat than last time, and already passing Tilos to port where they forged west for Sirna. Watching the sea slip by like blue silk sliced by the scissors prow, Darcy again went over the plans they'd made last night and looked for loopholes in their logic.
He remembered how David Chung had sat at a table in their hotel rooms, while the rest ringed him about and watched his performance. Chung's parents had been cocaine addicts; the drug had rotted their minds and bodies, killing both of them while he was still little more than a child. So that ever since joining the Branch he'd aimed his talent in that one specific direction: the destruction of everyone who trafficked in human misery. They had given the locator other tasks from time to time, but everyone in E-Branch knew that this was his forte.
Last night he'd employed a little of the very substance he loathed, crouching over the smallest amount of snow white cocaine. Upon the table a large map of the Dodecanese, and upon the map the merest trickle of poisonous dust, lying on a flimsy brown cigarette paper to give it definition.
Chung had called for silence, and for several minutes had sat there breathing deeply, occasionally wetting a finger to take up the white grains and touch them to his tongue. Then -
- With a single sharp puff of air from his mouth he'd blown the cigarette paper and its poison away, and in the next moment stabbed the map with his forefinger. 'There!' he'd said. 'And an awful lot of it!'
Manolis Papastamos and Jazz Simmons had applauded, but Zek, Darcy and Ben Trask had not seemed much surprised. They were impressed, of course, but ESP had been their business for many years. It wasn't so strange to them.
Then Manolis had looked more closely at the map, the place where Chung was pointing, and nodded. 'Lazarides's island,' he said. 'So now we know where the Lazarus is hiding. And aboard her, all the shit that the Vrykoulakas stole from the old Samothraki.'
After that, planning had been basic to minimal. Their aim: simply to get to the island in the hour after dawn, when the white ship's vampire crew should be less inclined to activity, and to destroy the Lazarus, vampires and all, right there where she was anchored.
David Chung was out of it now; his part had been played and the remainder of his time in the sun was his own; he wouldn't see the rest of the team until the job was finished. And now indeed they were on their way to finish it.
Manolis brought Darcy's mind back to the present: 'Another half-hour and we're there. Do you want to go over it again?'
Darcy shook his head. 'No, you all know your jobs. As for me: this time I'm just a passenger - at least until we get onto the island and into Janos's place.' He looked at his team.
Zek was unzipping herself from her lightweight one-piece suit. Underneath she wore a yellow bathing costume consisting of very little and leaving nothing at all to the imagination. She scarcely looked her age but was sleek, tanned and stunning. With her blue eyes, her blonde hair flashing gold, and a smile like a white blaze, there wouldn't be a man alive or undead who could keep his eyes off her!
Her husband looked at her and grinned. 'What's so amusing?' she asked him, tossing her head.
'I was thinking,' Jazz answered, 'that we'd like to sink these blokes along with their ship. The idea isn't that they should go diving in the water after you!'
'This is something I learned from the Lady Karen on Starside,' she told him. 'If I can distract them, then the rest of you will be able to do your jobs more safely and easily. Karen was an expert at distraction.'
'Oh, they'll be distracted, all right!' Manolis assured her.
Ben Trask had meanwhile opened up a small compartmented suitcase and taken out four of six gleaming metal discs some two inches thick by seven across. The back of each disc was black, magnetic, and the obverse fitted with a safety switch and timer. Manolis looked at the limpet mines where Trask began fitting them to a pair of diving belts in place of the usual lead weights, and shook his head. 'I still don't know how you got them out of England,' he said.
Trask shrugged. 'In a diplomatic bag. We may be silent partners, but we're still part of British Intelligence after all.'
There's a rock up ahead,' Zek shouted from where she now sat on a rubber mat on the narrow deck on top of the cabin and in front of the windshield. She pointed. 'Manolis, is that it?'
He nodded. 'That's it. Darcy, can you take the wheel?'
Darcy took control of the boat and throttled back a little. Manolis and Jazz stripped down to swimsuits, and went into the tiny cabin out of sight. In there, they tested aqualungs and checked their swimfins. Ben Trask took off his jacket and put on sunglasses and a straw hat. In his Hawaiian shirt he was just some rich tourist fool out for a day's pleasure-boating. Darcy might easily be his brother.
The island had swum up larger and Zek was seen to be right: it was little more than a big rock. There were a few shrubs, patches of thyme and coarse grass, and lots of rocks... and situated centrally, above coastal cliffs, a weathered yellow stack going up sheer for maybe one hundred and eighty feet.
Zek looked at it and put her hand to her brow. 'That's a pigmy of an aerie,' she said, 'but it gives me the shudders just the same. And there are men - no, vampires - on it. Two of them at least.'
The boat rounded the point of a promontory and Darcy saw what lay ahead. But even if he hadn't seen it, his talent had already forewarned him. 'Stay down,' he called out to Manolis and Jazz in the cabin. 'Draw those curtains. You two aren't here. There are just the three of us.'
They did as he told them.
Zek stretched herself out luxuriously on the cabin's roof and put on sunglasses; Trask lay back and hooked one leg idly over the boat's rail; Darcy headed the boat directly across the mouth of a small bay. And there, anchored in the bay ... the white ship, the Lazarus.
Trask knocked the cap off a bottle of beer and tilted his head back, merely wetting his lips but studying what he could see of the island intently. That was part of his job, while Darcy and Zek, in their various ways, studied the Lazarus.
The island consisted of a tiny beach inside a pair of bare spurs of rock extending oceanward, and an almost barren slope of rock climbing to the central stack. From this side, the top of the stack was seen to be a ruined fortification or pharos of some sort, with the remains of badly eroded steps still showing where they zig-zagged up to it. But half-way up the stack, a false, flat, extensive plateau seemed carved, as if in ages past the upper section had split down the centre and half had toppled over. With massive walls built around the plateau's perimeter from one side of the needle rock to the other, the place had obviously been a Crusader stronghold. The old walls had long since fallen away in places, but it was seen that new walls were now under construction, and scaffolding was plainly visible clinging to both the stump and the surviving upper section of the stack.
Darcy meanwhile considered the Lazarus. The white ship stood off from the beach in deep water central in the small bay. Her anchor-chain went down shimmering into the blue of the sea. On the deck under the black, scalloped awning, a man sat in one of several chairs. But as the motorboat came powering into view he stood up and took binoculars from around his neck. He wore a wide-brimmed floppy hat and sunglasses, and he kept fairly well to the shade as he put the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the motorboat.