NSA.
“We’d like you to come with us,” said the man. His voice was unemotional as his face. He had the kind of face Swann believed would bleed if forced to wear a genuine smile.
“Am I in trouble?” he asked.
The second agent stepped closer and to one side.
“Now, professor,” said the first agent. It was not a request.
— 2 —
“Ah, Professor Swann,” said a man Swann had never seen or heard of before, “thank you for coming here at such short notice. Have a seat.”
Swann felt a little numb as he lowered himself carefully into an expensive leather chair. He glanced around. At the blue rug with its American eagle embroidery. At the famous desk. At the curved walls. At the seal on the wall.
This was the Oval Office — a fact that made his head swim — but the man who sat down across from him was not the president.
“Is this about what happened at the hospital?” asked Swann.
The man waited until the NSA agents left the room and closed the door. He crossed his legs and took a thick blue folder from a side table, glanced at the contents for a moment, then closed it and placed it on his lap.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the man.
“No, sir. But those guys were National Security agents, so … does that make you their boss?”
“I’m Bill Gabriel, the White House Chief of Staff.”
Swann cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but I don’t really know much about national politics.”
Gabriel waved his hand. “Neither do most of the people who work in national politics.”
It was a small joke that went nowhere.
“Professor,” continued Gabriel, “just to get you up to speed, I’ve read the case file on Michael Fayne as well as the transcripts of your subsequent testimony.”
Swann nodded. He gripped the armrests of the chair.
Gabriel cocked his head to one side. “I know that Dr. Feldman called you regarding the incident in Los Angeles.”
“Yes, but I don’t know much about …”
“There’s been another.”
The statement, those three little words, slapped Swann to a shocked silence.
“In fact,” continued the Chief of Staff, “there have been three additional incidents.
“In L.A. — ?”
“No. One in Chicago, one in St. Martinville, Louisiana, and the most recent in Providence, Rhode Island.”
“My … God. All like Fayne …?”
Instead of answering, Gabriel asked, “How much do you know about the Los Angeles case?”
Swann cleared his throat. “Next to nothing. I tried to get some information, I even flew out there, but the police stonewalled me.”
“What do you know?”
“That there was another … another …”
Gabriel gave him a hard, cold smile of encouragement. “I think we’re past the point where we should be afraid of saying the world, professor. I think we all have to accept that what we are dealing with here are vampires.”
Even now, even after everything, it was hard for Swann to hear that word without flinching. However he nodded and repeated it. “Vampires. God.”
“Los Angeles,” prompted the Chief of Staff.
“Oh … the papers said that there were four murders, but I might not even have noticed it if not for Dr. Feldman’s call. She said that a woman who was in a coma apparently woke up, went crazy and killed some people. As far as I know the police haven’t caught the woman yet.” He paused. “The papers all said that the victims were drained of blood. That their throats were torn out and their bodies mutilated. After that reporter, Miss Nitobe, broke the whole Michael Fayne thing, the L.A. papers grabbed it and said that it was the same thing. Dr. Feldman believes it is, too.”
“And you?”
“I don’t know. People tend to sensationalize. I mean, have you seen the papers? Everything’s vampire, vampire, vampire. Some people are talking werewolves and zombies, too. It’s insane.”
Gabriel pursed his lips. “Here are the facts,” he said. “The subject of this case is one Anelia Stoeva, fifty-seven years old, unmarried. She worked for a company that cleaned office buildings. Forty-four days ago she called into work sick and was driving to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription for antibiotics when she was involved in a very bad three-car accident on Sepulveda Boulevard. One driver was killed in the accident, and Ms, Stoeva and the third driver were hospitalized. The third driver, by the way, was treated and released. He’s since been re-admitted, this time to a military hospital, and is under observation.”
“Observation? Is he … ?”
“So far he’s merely a very confused and frightened citizen, but he’ll remain our guest for now. As for Ms. Stoeva, she remained in the hospital for over a month following the accident. In a coma, apparently. She was close to clinical brain death and as she had no relatives the hospital administrators were seeking court approval to remove her from life support. However … four days ago Anelia Stoeva went missing from the hospital. The duty nurse was found dead in the patient’s room. And, yes, the papers were that much right in that her throat was torn out and her blood drained.”
“All of it?”
“Enough of it. Forensic examinations concluded that there was saliva in the wounds and DNA testing makes it a positive match to Ms. Stoeva. The same is true of the other victims.”
“The papers said that other victims had nothing in common?”
“So it seems. A real estate agent from Burbank, a UPS driver, and a little girl in a playground. There are no known connections, so it appears that Ms. Stoeva is killing out of need and opportunity rather than according to any agenda.”
“And they haven’t found her?”
“Not so far.”
Gabriel leaned forward. “Professor Swann, this was a woman who was very nearly killed in a traffic accident. She had multiple broken bones and internal injuries, not to mention head trauma. Granted, her bones were knitting and they’d done what they could in surgery, but in short she was a step away from being declared dead. She was meat. Even if she woke up, there’s no workable scenario to explain how she would have the physical strength to attack and kill four people. The UPS driver was a big man, six-two and two-twenty. Served a tour in Iraq early in the war. She ripped him apart. I mean that, Professor Swann … that brain dead, crippled woman tore his arms out of their sockets and nearly ripped his head off. A professional offensive tackle for the Cowboys couldn’t do that.” He leaned back. “So … we would like you to explain that to us.”
“I — can’t.”
Gabriel smiled. He was in his early sixties, with iron-gray hair and a precisely trimmed mustache. “Try,” he said.
Swann chewed a crumb of skin off of his thumb. He looked at the wall, at the ceiling. Gabriel waited him out. Finally he took a breath and turned to face the Chief of Staff.
“First … tell me about the others,” he said. “How similar are they to Swann and this woman —”
“Stoeva,” provided Gabriel.
“Stoeva. How similar are the other attacks? Have you managed to arrest any of the, um, perpetrators.”
“No, to that last question, though I am assured that we are close to making an arrest in two cases. Rhode Island and Chicago. As for the others, we don’t even have I.D.s on the killers. All we have are victims.”
“All the same? Dismembered and drained of blood?”
“Actually, no.” Gabriel flipped open the folder, selected high-resolution digital photo and handed it over.
Swann almost dropped it.
“Jesus Christ,” he gasped. The picture was horror show stuff. The thing displayed in the image could only vaguely be described as a human being. He could barely stand to look at the lumps of torn flesh and the ends of jagged bone. Swann handed the photo back, happy to be rid of it. “That’s not like Fayne’s victims. That looks like an animal attacked it.”
“Not far off,” admitted Gabriel, his face grim. “The body was mauled and partially devoured. Forensics tells me that the amount of blood at the scene closely approximates what you’d expect to find in a teenage girl.”
“That … that was a teenage girl?”
Gabriel showed him a second picture. A lovely face, clearly Native American, with straight black hair and almost Asian eyes. “A Navajo girl, age eighteen, named Madeline Tsotse. She worked at a burger stand in a fairly remote corner of the reservation. She went missing five days ago and was found yesterday morning.”
“Five days? That means it happened before Los Angeles …”
“Yes. That’s part of the problem, Professor Swann, we’re beginning to put together a pattern of attacks that span the country. The earliest known attacks are Michael Fayne’s first victims. However, the Chicago killings began only four days after Fayne’s first kill.”
“How come that’s not on the news?”
Gabriel nodded, approving of the question. He removed another picture. This one was a morgue photo that showed a disheveled and filthy man with long tangled hair and a ragged beard lying on a slab, a sheet pulled down to reveal his torn throat.
“We have five victims like this in Chicago,” said Gabriel. “All street people. The chief medical examiner made the connection between the murders because of similar reports that crossed his desk from five different hospitals. Chicago P.D. are working with our task force to keep this as far off the radar as possible.”
Swann looked up sharply. “Task force?”
“That’s why you’re here, professor. At the direction of the president Homeland Security has begun assembling a team to handle this crisis. And … we think it is a crisis. Even though there are differences in most of the cases, there are also very disturbing similarities.”
“What similarities? And how does this all involve me? I was brought in to interview Fayne and advise the New York police, but … I’m out of it now.” He paused. “Right?”