On the screen the paths of anything that would come close to the mothership flashed, then disappeared as the computer determined that there would be no collision until the screen froze showing a green track intersecting with the red one of the mothership. Green indicated a future orbit for something not yet launched.
Vampyr ran the code for the orbit.
TL-SAT-7-7//MISSION-COMMERCIAL//GOSTAR//KOUROS
It was as he had expected. GoStar was a company that was under Nosferatu’s control through various other holdings. When he tried to find out more about the specific payload, he discovered that Space Command didn’t have that information. As Kouros was a privately run launch site, it had no obligation to provide it. Vampyr could guess well enough without it, having tracked Nosferatu’s development of the X–Craft for years. He’d even covertly steered a few scientists in his fellow Undead’s direction to aid in the research and development.
Satisfied that all was going as he’d projected in that area, Vampyr shifted his attention elsewhere. A contact in the Hong Kong police department who kept tabs on Tian Dao Lin for him had reported the arrival of the Sherpa and his departure on Tian Dao Lin’s personal jet with one of the Chinese Quarters. Destination: a staging area close to Mount Everest. Again, as expected.
Last, he decrypted the latest message from Adrik. The youngest Undead had only gone to the meeting at the Haven because Vampyr had told him to. Vampyr smiled coldly when he thought of the Russian. Another fool who fancied himself quite cunning. Adrik owed his very existence to Vampyr. After all, it was Vampyr who had rescued him from his stone coffin underneath the Kremlin so many years ago, less than a week after the palace guard had dumped him into the shaft.
What had apparently never occurred to Adrik was how Vampyr had been able to find him. The Russian had accepted Vampyr’s explanation, that he had heard of Adrik’s rule and wanted to join forces with him. The Russian had never entertained the idea that it had been Vampyr who had enticed the palace guard to revolt — not that they had needed much enticement — so that Vampyr could be lurking in the shadows to rescue him, and thus have him in his service.
Vampyr had let Adrik suffer in the stone coffin stuck in the shaft for a week, stopping by occasionally to hear his screams — enough time to make the gratitude for rescue that much stronger. Certain of Adrik’s secret loyalty, Vampyr had gone his own way, traveling to the West, first to England, then on to the New World to make his fortune, while Adrik had reincarnated himself once more in Moscow, now heeding Vampyr’s advice not to seek obvious power, but rather to gain it in the shadowy world of the criminal.
Vampyr read Adrik’s report. He was disappointed but not surprised that Adrik had delegated the mission into the tunnels under Moscow to recover the blood. After Adrik’s experience, not even the lure of eternal life could bring him to enter those tunnels again.
Vampyr sent a message back to Adrik with further instructions. Satisfied, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.
Nosferatu walked into observation room and looked through the one-way glass at the sterile blood lab. It was getting more and more difficult to obtain clean blood from the continent. The AIDS rate in South Africa was closing on 50 percent of the adult population, a number the rest of the Western world had yet to comprehend in its horrific totality. Elsewhere in Africa it fluctuated between 25 and 40 percent. The best scientists were projecting that at the current rate the continent would be close to being depopulated in two generations.
Nosferatu had to admit that Adrik did have a point. Left to their own devices, humans could be extremely destructive and horrific in their treatment of their fellow men.
Drug companies in America and Europe had the medicine needed to keep most of the infected people in Africa alive, but they made the cost so prohibitive that few could afford it. Profit over life. It was an equation that Nosferatu had seen many times before. On the other hand, though, he had also seen human behavior that defied such cold logic and showed the best of the species.
Inside the lab, the specialist that Nosferatu had hired at an extravagant wage was checking each bag of fresh blood flown in from Cape Town. Each pint cost Nosferatu over five thousand dollars and though it was supposed to have been screened at a hospital in South Africa, almost a third had to be discarded either because of the HIV virus or other infectious problems.
The equipment in the lab was the best available on the current medical market for screening blood, but Nosferatu knew from the data that it wasn’t good enough for what he needed to achieve once he acquired the Airlia virus.
There was one place where such equipment had been designed, based on Airlia machinery in the mothership: Dulce, New Mexico, where Majestic-12 had sent part of its classified programs, the ones having to do with biological and chemical operations. Dulce had also been pulverized by foo fighters. The Americans had begun excavating the rubble, but that effort had been sidetracked by World War III. Nosferatu’s informants had reported that excavation had been put on hold, while America focused on rebuilding and helping other countries devastated by the recent war, particularly South Korea.
Nosferatu stirred uneasily. When the other two fulfilled their parts and brought the blood to him, he needed to be ready. He was concerned about Vampyr. The second Eldest was angry — he had been angry as long as Nosferatu had known him. His actions throughout the ages had been horrific at times. Nosferatu still remembered the forest of impaled Turkish prisoners. That was the last time he had encountered his comrade from the cells along the Roads of Rostau. He had heard rumors of the others’ actions over the years; but Vampyr had faded into the shadows, becoming a legend among the humans, especially after one of the humans penned a book about their kind. Nosferatu had always suspected that some of the information about vampires was leaked by the Watchers, as within the myth there was quite a bit that was accurate.
Nosferatu picked up the secure satellite telephone and made two calls. One to Kouros, confirming the time and date of the launch. The second was to the United States to a contact he had used there before.
Nosferatu desperately needed the plan to succeed. Because it was the only way to bring back Nekhbet.
CHAPTER 14
Yellowing architectural plans covered the tables in the warehouse. Some dated back as far as a hundred years, when the tsars still ruled in the Kremlin. Many were from 1939 to 1945, when a flurry of digging for protection against the invading Nazis had occurred. The vast majority, though, dated from the beginning of the Cold War through the end, over forty years of burrowing deeper and deeper under the capital city in response to America’s development of increasingly powerful nuclear weapons targeting Moscow.
Petrov was wading through the plans, reading, making notes, and searching for a room that existed only in rumor so far — where the KGB had stored a large supply of blood taken from the SS at the end of the war and done its own blood work.
The warehouse was surrounded by guards under Petrov’s command, mostly ex-Spetsnatz men, enjoying the fruits of capitalism that the Mafia had to offer them. In addition to having large legitimate holdings, Adrik was one of the most powerful of the Mafia bosses in Russia. Petrov didn’t quite understand why his boss still dabbled in crime when so much money came in from the legitimate side of the house, but he knew better than to ask questions. Adrik was an enigma to start with, a man who had been on the scene as long as Petrov, and anyone he had met, could remember. Old-timers with white hair who had fought in the Great Patriotic War knew of Adrik and described him exactly as he appeared now. It was as if the man never aged.