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“Hello? Sir?”

She could make out little detail, but he appeared to be dressed all in black. Pants, shirt, long, flowing coat. With dark hair and white skin. Very white skin that almost seemed to shine, as if lit from within. She took another step away from him.

“Sir? Could you help me? Please?” Was this some sort of bizarre sex game? she wondered. Was she supposed to do something? The man in the limousine hadn’t told her anything, and neither the doctor nor the pilot had spoken a word. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

The man held up a hand, indicating for her to remain still. The man came forward until he was less than five feet from her, just out of arm’s reach. She tried to smile and stood slightly straighter, thrusting her chest out. She would do anything to make it through this night, she told herself. And she silently promised to get the hell out of Seattle and go back to her hometown on the first thing moving as soon as she was back in civilization.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked once more. “Run.”

The voice as much as the word sent a chill up her spine. She had never heard such a cold voice.

“What?”

“Run or I will kill you here. You have a chance in the woods.” Then he laughed.

She turned and sprinted for the forest, losing a shoe in the first five feet and not even noticing.

The man remained in the clearing, watching as she disappeared among the thick tree trunks. He gave her a few minutes, knowing the running would get her heart pounding and the blood coursing through her veins.

He cocked his head, listening to her crash through the undergrowth. She was easy enough to track by sound, even without the benefit of his exaggerated night vision. He started after her. He silently made his way through the forest, passing her without being noticed, then moving to a point where she would come shortly.

The shock on her face when she bumped into him was exquisite. She gasped, staggered back, then dashed off in another direction. As she ran off, he put a hand to his jacket and touched where her sweat and tears had made a small wet spot. He rubbed it with the tip of a finger, then brought that finger to his nose, inhaling. He smiled at the familiar scent of human fear.

He intercepted her five more times over the course of the next three hours. Sending her blindly off into the forest each time, redirecting her. She was moving more and more slowly, but still moving. He’d had some just quit. Drop to the ground and curl in a ball whimpering. Such were almost not worth taking. Almost.

An hour before dawn, the girl came out of the forest, emerging onto a perfectly cut lawn. She fell to her knees as she looked about. The moon was finally up, and she could see a magnificent house about fifty meters ahead. A mansion stretching almost a hundred meters left and right, sitting on a promontory overlooking Puget Sound. She could see the lights of Seattle beyond the house, on the other side of the water. The Space Needle. Her hometown was beyond the city, in the mountains. It was a beautiful night, a clear sky, and she could see the white-topped peaks.

She scrambled to her feet, crying out for help. She ran toward a wooden door set at ground level and pounded on it, screaming, looking over her shoulder, afraid he would appear at the last minute.

The door swung open and she threw herself into the arms of the figure in the darkened hallway.

Then screamed as she recognized her momentary savior as her pursuer.

He held her tight as she fought to break free with the little energy she had left. He leaned his head close to hers, his breath on her neck as he whispered to her, like a lover would.

“I was made Vampyr, in the First Age of Egypt, during the reign of the Gods, when they walked openly upon the Earth, the son of the God Amun and a human High Consort. I bring you honor by taking you.”

And then he did just that.

Minutes later Vampyr looked down on her pale corpse.

With one arm he lifted her and carried her a short way down the tunnel to a two-foot-square iron door set at waist height. He opened the door and threw the body in, listening to it tumble as it fell down the old mine shaft for over three hundred feet before landing with a splash in a flooded cavern. He shut the door.

Then he made his way farther along the tunnel, stopping at a stainless-steel door. He placed his forehead against a rubber buffer, pressing his eyes against the scanners. His retinas were checked. Then he entered a code only he knew on a numeric keypad, his fingers flying over the keys faster than any human could ever hope to imitate, entering twenty-seven numbers in the appropriate sequence in less than four seconds. Last, but not least, he removed what appeared to be an old-fashioned key from a chain around his neck and inserted it in the keyhole. While the key looked old, it was state-of-the-art, sending the correct electrical impulse to the last hold on the door’s locks.

With muted clicks, the fourteen two-inch-thick steel bolts holding the door in place retracted and the door slowly swung open on powerful hydraulic arms. The chamber beyond was surrounded by twelve-foot-thick mixed metal/concrete walls. The builder had assured Vampyr that there was no technology short of a direct nuclear hit that could get through these walls. It was similar to what lined the presidential bunker under Blue Mountain in West Virginia. Vampyr had thanked the builder, then had him killed.

Vampyr walked into the chamber and turned on the low-level lights. The contents of the chamber were a madman’s — or a powerful country’s — arsenal. Eight backpack tactical nuclear weapons rested on a long table. Each was small enough to fit inside a medium-sized piece of luggage. The American government had never acknowledged their theft, nor did it have a clue who had stolen them.

Along one wall was the control console from a missile launch site that he had appropriated from one that had been shut down in Montana. Scattered around the island were twelve Peacemaker ICBM rockets in working condition stored in silos, harvested from the drawdown in the Cold War. The silos were on an old Navy base that had once existed on the island, and it had cost Vampyr half a billion dollars to get them into working condition and almost as much to ensure secrecy.

On each Peacemaker was a strategic nuclear warhead, each powerful enough to take out a city. He had had them recovered from American nuclear submarines that had gone down in the oceans, using one of his subsidiary salvage companies. Such was the bureaucracy of the Pentagon that the twelve weren’t even reported as missing. Located in Puget Sound, he could reach anywhere in the United States with the missiles. He had a similar compound, staffed with Russian warheads from their lost submarines, and Russian rockets from their disarming, located just south of Kiev, with the same capability for all of Russia and Europe. He could launch those from here.

Vampyr ran a hand along one of the tactical nuclear warhead’s metal housing, almost the caress of a lover.

In the middle of the room, however, was the centerpiece of his arsenal. A triple-enclosed biohazard container. Inside were three different viruses. One developed by the Russians, one American, and one Japanese. Because of their lethality, each had scared their creators so much that immediate orders had been issued for their destruction. By the time the orders were implemented, Vampyr’s far-flung organization had already gathered samples of each. The container was truly Pandora’s box. If opened, it would spread three distinct viruses, each 99.9 percent lethal and highly contagious. One such virus might be contained. There was the remote possibility two could be. But three? The world would be dead within two months.

Money was power, and Vampyr had plenty of that. But this was power also, in a much different form. The most important power, though, was the ability to be ruthless, to be able to make the hard decisions. To be able to use these weapons if necessary. And that was something Vampyr had more of than any creature that had ever walked the face of the planet.