Anno Dracula (24 page)

Johnny was too weak to do anything more.

Andy, Warhola the Vampyre at last, floated around his hallway, relishing the new sensations. Did he miss being a magnificent fake?

Then, the seizures took him and he began to crumble. Shafts of light from the glass around the door pierced him, and he melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Andy Warhol was a vampire for only fifteen minutes.

Johnny would miss him. He had taken some of the man’s ghost, but it was a quiet spirit. It would never compete with the Father for mastery.

Johnny waited. In a far corner, something stirred.

Rudy could have been a powerful vampire. He rose, turned, full of
nosferatu
vigour, eager for his first feeding, brain a-buzz with plans of establishing a coven, a drac empire, a place in the night.

Johnny was waiting for him.

With the last of his strength, he took Rudy down and ripped him open in a dozen places, drinking his vampire blood. Finally, he ate the American boy’s heart. Rudy hadn’t thought it through. Johnny spat out his used-up ghost. Sad little man.

He exposed Rudy’s twice-dead corpse to sunlight, and it powdered. The remains of two vampires would be found in Andy’s house, the artist and the drac dealer. Johnny Pop would be officially dead. He had been just another stage in his constant turning.

It was time to quit this city. Hollywood beckoned. Andy would have liked that.

At nightfall, bones knit and face reforming, he left the house. He went to Grand Central Station. There was a cash stash in a locker there, enough to get him out of the city and set him up on the Coast.

The Father was proud of him. Now, he could acknowledge his bloodline in his name. He was no longer Ion Popescu, no longer Johnny Pop; he was Johnny Alucard.

And he had an empire to inherit.

P
alace Green was blocked, an armoured car emphasising a point she would have thought established sufficiently well by police vans. Uniformed coppers - the Special Patrol Group, of recent ill reputation - and camo-clad squaddies were kitted up for riot, and locals kept out of their homes and offices muttered themselves towards a resentful shade of disgruntled. To Kate Reed, this patch of Kensington felt too much like Belfast for comfort, though passing trade on Embassy Row - veiled woman-shapes with Harrods bags, indignant diplomats of all nations, captains of endangered industries - was of a different quality from the bottle-throwers and -dodgers of the Garvachy Road.

TV crews penned beyond the perimeter had to make do with stories about the crowds rather than the siege. Kate saw the TV reporter Anne Diamond, collar turned up and microphone thrust out, sorting through anxious faces at the barrier, thirsty for someone with a husband or girlfriend trapped inside the Embassy or, better yet, among the terrorists.

‘Evenin’ Miss Reed,’ said a vampire bobby she remembered from the Met’s old B Division, which used to handle vampire-related crime.

‘It’s been a funny old week at Palace Green...’

Sensing the imminence of an anecdote with a moral, Kate showed Sergeant Dixon her NUJ card and was let through.

‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ said the sergeant, with fatherly concern, lifting a plank from the barrier. ‘This is a rum old do and no mistake.’

Anne Diamond and a dozen other broadcast and print hopefuls were furious that one of the least significant of their number had a free ticket to the big carnival. It wasn’t even as if Kate were the only vampire hack on the street. She’d spotted Paxman, drifting incorporeally in mist-form through the crowds. She was, however, the only journo Baron Meinster would talk with.

For two years, she had been waiting for the Transylvanian to call in the favour he’d granted by spiriting her out of Romania via his underground railway. She knew he’d helped her to spite the Ceauşescus, with whom he had a long-standing personal feud, but his intervention still saved her life. This was not what she had expected, but the development didn’t surprise her either. Since Teheran, embassy sieges had become a preferred means of the powerless lording it over the powerful. Not that the Baron,
soi-disant
First Elder of the Transylvania Movement, would consider himself powerless.

A tall, moustached vampire in police uniform took a firm grip on Kate’s upper arm. Dixon retreated without offering the traditional cup of tea.

‘Daniel Dravot,’ she said, ‘it has been a long time.’

‘Yes, Miss Reed,’ said the vampire, unsmiling.

‘Still
Sergeant
Dravot, I see. Though not truly of the Metropolitan Police, I’ll wager.’

‘All in the service of the Queen, Miss Reed.’

‘Indeed.’

Dravot had been in the shadows as long as she could remember -in Whitechapel in 1888, in France in 1918. Last she’d heard, he’d been training and turning new generations of vampire secret agents. He was back in the field, apparently.

She was walked over to the command post, a large orange workman’s hut erected over a hole in the pavement. Dravot lifted a flap-door and ushered her inside.

* * *

She found herself among uncomfortable men of power.

A plainclothes copper sat on a stool, hunched over a field telephone whose wires were crocodile-clamped into an exposed circuit box. Down in the pit, ear-phones worn like a stethoscope under long hair, was a thin warm man of undetermined age. He wore New Romantic finery - full-skirted sky-blue highwayman’s coat, knee-boots and puffy mauve britches, three-cornered hat with a feather - and jotted notes on a pad in violet ink. Above them, literally and figuratively, hovered three vampires: a death-faced
eminence grise
in a gravemould-grubby Gannex mac, a human weapon in a black jump-suit and balaclava, and a willowy youth in elegant grey.

She recognised all of these people.

The policeman was Inspector Cherry, who often wound up with the cases involving vampires. A solid, if somewhat whimsical plod, he was an old B Division hand, trained by Bellaver. The dandy in the ditch was Richard Jeperson, chairman of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club, longest-lived and most independent branch of British Intelligence. He had inherited Dravot, not to mention Kate, from his late predecessors, both of whom she had been close to, Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop. It had been some time since she had last been called to Pall Mall and asked to look into something, but you were never dropped from the club’s lists. The vampires were: Caleb Croft, high up in whatever the United Kingdom called its Secret Police these days; Hamish Bond, a spy whose obituaries she never took seriously; and Lord Ruthven, the Home Secretary.

‘Katie Reed, good evening,’ said Ruthven. ‘How charming to see you again, though under somewhat trying circumstances. Very nice piece in the
Grauniad
about the royal fiancée. Gave us all the giggles.’

Ruthven, once a fixture as Prime Minister, was back in the cabinet after a generation out of government. Rumoured to be Margaret Thatcher’s favourite vampire, he was horribly likely to succeed her in Number Ten by the next ice age, reclaiming his old job. He brought a century of political experience to the ministerial post and a considerably longer lifetime of survival against the odds.

As Ruthven rose, so did Croft. The grey man had resigned his teaching position to return to secret public service. Kate’s skin crawled in his presence. He affected not to remember her. Among monsters, there were monsters - and Croft was the worst she knew. He had a high opinion of her, too... ‘Kate Reed was - is - a terrorist, space kidettes,’ he’d said when he last set eyes on her. Then, he was just an academic, though he’d used her to clear up one of his messes. Soon, he’d be in a position to tidy her away and no questions asked.

‘She’s here,’ said Cherry, into the phone.

The policeman passed her the set, hand over the mouthpiece.

‘Try to find out how many of them there are,’ said Jeperson in a stage-whisper. ‘But don’t be obvious about it.’

‘I don’t think we need teach Katie Reed anything,’ said the Home Secretary. ‘She has a wealth of varied experience.’

Unaccountably, that verdict made her self-conscious. She knew about all these men, but they also knew quite a bit about her. Like them all, she had wound in and out of the century, as often covered in blood as glory Ever since her turning, she had been close to the Great Game of power and intelligence.

Kate put the phone to her ear and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Katharine,’ purred Baron Meinster. His unretractable fangs gave him a vaguely slushy voice, as if he were speaking through a mouthful of blood.

‘I’m here, Baron.’

‘Excellent. I’m glad to hear it. Is Ruthven there?’

‘I’m fine, thank you, and how are you?’

‘He is. How delicious. Ten years of dignified petitions and protests, when all I needed to do to get attention was take over a single building. How do you like the banners? Do you think He would appreciate them?’

She knew who Meinster meant when he said ‘He’.

The flags of the Socialist Republic had been torn down, and two three-storey banners unfurled from the upper windows of the Embassy. They were blazoned with a tall black dragon, red-eyed and fanged.

‘It’s time to revive the Order of the Dragon,’ said Meinster. ‘It’s how He got His name.’

She knew that, of course.

‘People here want to know what you want, Baron.’

‘People there know what I want. I’ve been telling them for years. I want what is ours. I want a homeland for the undead. I want Transylvania.’

‘I think they mean immediately. Blankets? Food?’

‘I want Transylvania, immediately.’

She covered the mouthpiece and spoke.

‘He wants Transylvania, Home Secretary.’

‘Not in our gift, more’s the pity. Would he take, say, Wales? I’m sure I can swing Margaret on that. The taffs are all bloody Labour voters anyway, so we’d be glad to turn them over to that drac-head dandy. Or, I don’t know, what about the Falkland Islands? They’re far distant enough to get shot of without much squawking at home. The Baron could spend his declining years nipping sheep. That’s all they ever do up in the Carpathians, anyway.’

‘There might be a counter-offer, Baron,’ she told him. ‘In the South Atlantic.’

‘Good God, woman, I’m not serious,’ said Ruthven. ‘Tell him to be a nice little bat and give up. We’ll slap his wrist and condemn him for inconveniencing our old mucka Ceauşescu and his darling Elena, then let him do an hour-long interview with Michael Parkinson on the BBC, just before
Match of the Day.
He should know we like him a lot more than the bloody Reds.’

‘Is that an official offer?’

‘Not in my lifetime, Miss Reed. Will he talk to me?’

‘Would you talk with the Home Secretary?’

A pause. ‘Don’t think so. He’s an upstart. Not of the Dracula line.’

‘I heard that,’ said Ruthven. ‘I’ve been a vampire far longer than Vladdy-Come-Lately Meinster. He was turned in the 1870s and he’s basically little more than a Bucharest bum boy. I was already an elder when he was sucking off his first smelly barmaid.’

They might be of different bloodlines, but Ruthven and Meinster were of a similar type. Turned in their golden youth, they remained petulant boys forever, even as they amassed power and wealth. To them, the world would always be a giant train set. Engineering crashes was great fun.

‘Katharine,’ said Meinster, ‘you had better come visit.’

She really wasn’t keen. ‘He wants me to go inside.’

‘Out of the question,’ said Croft.

‘Not wise, Kate,’ said the spy. ‘Meinster’s a mad dog. A killer.’

‘Commander Bond, your concern is most touching. Are you with the SAS now? Or is everybody dressed up in the wrong uniform these days? What do they call it, “deniability”?’

Aren’t you supposed to be a
secret
agent, Bond,’ sniped the Home Secretary. ‘Does
everybody
know who you are?’

‘I met Miss Reed on an earlier mission, sir.’

‘That’s one way of putting it, Hamish Bond.’

‘Rome, 1959,’ said Jeperson, from the pit. ‘Not one of the club’s notable successes. The Crimson Executioner business. And the death of Dracula.’