Area 51: Nosferatu-8 (29 page)

"Everest," Namche said, not sure if the man even knew which of the peaks was their goal, given they were eighty miles away and the very top was cloud-covered. "Changtse there to the right along with Lho La. To the left, Nuptse.

All over 7,500 meters in altitude."

Tai remained silent.

"I have never climbed from the north," Namche said, getting that worry out in the open. "Always the south. The north is more difficult, more technical. The path we must take is even the more difficult of the two northern routes. Most take the West Ridge, via the Rongbuk Glacier. We will be taking the East Ridge.

Very steep. Very dangerous."

Tai broke his long silence. "How soon can we leave?"

"Dawn."

"And then how long?"

"To the first spot? Six hours. If the helicopter can get us as high as our employer says it can. The second—it would be very difficult to make it and back down before dark. We would most likely have to camp on the mountain and try the following morning."

"We shall see."

The Skeleton Coast

Nosferatu had not left the Haven in many years. He had spent the time plotting and preparing but now it was

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time for action. He'd pushed the others and now he had to push himself. He did not want to leave. Since the beginning, little good had come to him when he'd traveled out into the world.

He took one last trip down to the vault where Nekhbet lay. He put his hand on the front of the tube, in a place where the acid from his skin over the millennia had worn the imprint of his fingers and palm. "Soon. Very soon, my love. We will be together." He left the crypt and went up an elevator to where a helicopter waited on the cliff top.

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It had taken three phone calls for Petrov to get all the information he needed on Pashenka. Within an hour Petrov had managed to assemble a dossier complete with photos on the man. He was high-level FSB who made more money selling information to the Mafia than he did from the government. He'd even had dealings with some of Adrik's organization at midlevel.

The Mafia connection meant that Petrov could most likely get the information he needed from the FSB official with a bagful of money. However, while that would be the easiest way, Petrov decided not to take that path. Everything he had learned so far had gotten his mind working and he knew he was on the trail of something more valuable than cash.

Petrov was seated in a panel van across Lubyanka Square from the FSB

headquarters, waiting. According to his informants, Pashenka left work every day exactly at 1600 hours, crossed the square and went to a trendy bar next door to the Mir store. Such predictability indicated that Pashenka had long ago lost his tradecraft, something Petrov kept in mind as he watched the man exit the front doors of Lubyanka at 1602 and head across the square.

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Pashenka wore an expensive suit, far beyond the means of even a high-level FSB

official. The clothes, however, did little to hide the thuglike body they covered. The FSB man was built like a slab of beef, large, but softening around the edges. His face was red, indicative of heavy drinking, but the eyes were those of a man who enjoyed wielding power and inflicting pain.

"Go," Petrov said, the mike wrapped around his throat transmitting the sound to the driver in the front of the bulletproof van. There were two other men in the rear of the van with Petrov, his most trusted subordinates, both dressed in black fatigues, with body armor covering their backs and chests. They pulled black balaclavas down over their faces as the van moved across the square on an intercept course with the FSB agent.

Petrov leaned back in a captain's chair that was bolted to the floor, a pistol held loosely in one hand. They had done this many times and he anticipated no trouble, but it never hurt to be ready. The van slid next to Pashenka, the driver tapping the brakes lightly to slow it to about five miles an hour, slightly faster than walking pace, as the two men across from Petrov slid the side door open. One jabbed Pashenka with an upgraded cattle prod, sending an incapacitating jolt of electricity through the FSB man's body, while the other looped a length of thick rope over Pashenka's head, then jerked it tight as it settled just below his shoulders.

Both men hauled on the rope, lifting the flopping body off the cobblestones of the square and into the van in less than two seconds, sliding the door shut. The driver accelerated and they were moving along an alley off the square within ten seconds. Behind them a small cluster of pedestrians stared at the escaping van in shock, but by the time an alarm was raised, it was long gone.

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Petrov looked down at Pashenka as one of his assistants took a syringe and injected the FSB man with a very strong muscle relaxant that guaranteed the captive would be conscious but incapable of any action stronger than breathing, talking, shaking his head, and wincing with pain for several hours.

Pashenka blinked his eyes as the effect of the electric prod wore off and he tried to focus on his immediate surroundings. By the time they pulled into the warehouse that Petrov was working out of, Pashenka was fully conscious but the drug was also fully functional and he was unable to move his limbs.

"I am a senior member of the FSB," Pashenka sputtered. "You have made a very large mistake."

"If you answer the questions I pose truthfully, I will let you live," Petrov said. "One lie, no matter how small, and you will never be seen again."

He gestured to his subordinates and they grabbed the FSB agent, dragging him to a heavy wooden chair bolted to the floor. They threw Pashenka into it and secured him with leather straps around his chest, legs, and arms.

Pashenka's eyes shifted, moving about the warehouse, taking in the armed guards and their top-of-the-line equipment. "Who do you work for?"

Petrov shook his head. "I said I would be asking you questions, not the other way around."

"The FSB will be looking for me. I am due at a meeting in—"

Petrov rolled a stool to a spot five feet in front of Pashenka and sat on it.

"The FSB will miss you, but they have no idea where you are, and frankly, let us accept that they will not search that hard for you. Your only option if you want to live is to answer my questions."

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"What do you want to know?"

"What do you know of Adrik?"

Pashenka's red skin went pale. He began shaking his head ever so slightly, a movement Petrov mimicked. Pashenka stopped shaking his head and swallowed hard before answering. "Adrik is a very dangerous man. I have never seen him, but that is what I have heard. He runs many businesses and is also connected with organized crime."

"I can read the newspaper and know that," Petrov said. "I want to know what the classified FSB file on him says."

"That file was most likely destroyed."

"Why?"

"It was at Section IV."

Petrov had never heard of that agency and he had worked countless missions in concert with the KGB and FSB during his time in the service. "What is Section IV?"

"You mean what was Section IV," Pashenka said. "It was the branch of KGB, then FSB, that dealt with the alien issue."

Petrov felt a surge of excitement. He'd known this was big. "You said 'was.'

What happened to Section IV?"

"Its headquarters were in a large underground bunker on Novata Zemlya. It was attacked and severely damaged recently by one of the alien factions during the war."

"Why would Adrik's file be with Section IV?"

"It was suspected he was one of the Ones Who Wait. Half-human, half-Airlia clones who worked for Artad."

Petrov thought of the dark office in which he always met his boss. The white skin. The rumors. "You use the past tense—so he isn't?"

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"No. He's something different."

"What?"

"An Undead."

Petrov leaned forward. "And what is that exactly?"

"We don't know," Pashenka admitted. "All we know is he has been alive for a very long time thanks to access to some aspect of the alien technology or biological or chemical material of the aliens. Some say he actually is part Airlia. His file dates from the very beginning of Stalin's secret police—and there were notes in there that predate that, from the time of the tsars. There is even one report that speculates that he was a tsar—Ivan the Terrible, no less. The fact is that no one knows how old he is or who he has been over the years."

Petrov abruptly switched the subject. "The tunnels under Moscow. I was told you know much about them."

Pashenka blinked. "The archives are my responsibility and they lie under the city."

"Is there a place in the archives where blood is stored? Blood taken from the Germans at the end of the Great War."

Pashenka hesitated. Petrov pulled back the hammer on his pistol, the sound echoing across the hangar. "Yes," Pashenka said. "There is a room where blood is stored."

"You will take me there this evening."

Mount Everest

"I have never seen anything like this." The words were barely audible, ripped from Namche's mouth by the brutal wind and dashed apart over the deep gorge to their right. As soon as he finished speaking, Namche slipped the full face mask back on, leaving not a single speck of

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his skin exposed to the elements. He could tell Tai was laboring in the thin air. The Chinese was half-doubled over, staring down at the climbing garments frozen into the ridgeline. The fact that there was no sign of the body inside the garments had been the cause of Namche's comment.

Namche had seen many bodies on the mountain. It was virtually impossible to bring one back down, so the over two hundred who had died in the past century trying to reach the summit all lay where they had fallen, or, at best, covered with a cairn of rocks piled on by their climbing companions. The freezing temperatures preserved the dead, but here there was no sign of whoever had worn the clothes.

Namche looked up to the southwest, toward Everest. A plume of snow blew off the peak, but it wasn't bad, perhaps winds of twenty to thirty miles an hour.

Strong anywhere but there. They'd choppered up to 17,000 feet at first light.

The helicopter had labored in the thin air, but it had gotten them a good way toward this spot.

Tai stood and followed Namche's gaze upward. "We must go to the other two."

"And if they are the same as this?"

"Then we have failed."

Namche frowned. "I do not think you will be able to go any higher."

Tai reached inside his jacket and pulled out the carved flask. He unscrewed the lid, pulled aside his mark, and drank deeply, draining it. Namche was shocked to see the blood around his lips as Tai pulled the flask away. Tai blinked several times and his chest heaved for a few moments, then he nodded. "I can make it to the bodies."

Besides his conditioning, the other thing that concerned 262

Namche was the bulky pack on Tai's back. He didn't know what was in it, but it was large with a six-foot-long piece of eight-inch-thick PVC pipe secure on either side, not making for easy climbing. The pipe had already become entangled in the safety line several times.

It was not his problem. Namche turned into the wind and tugged on the rope connecting the two of them. "Follow me."

Airspace, Atlantic

Nosferatu was the only occupant in the cabin of the Gulfstream jet. He had all the shades pulled and the lights. off. Despite the darkness, he could easily read the latest report from the team he had hired in the United States. They were ready to move as soon as he landed.

The Americans had excavated a large part of the Dulce underground complex, but then work had ceased during the Third World War and had yet to be resumed.

According to the report there were guards, a platoon of infantry, working in shifts at the site; but other than that, nothing to stand in his way.

He also had reports from Tian Dao Lin and Adrik. The two were still in the process of accomplishing their tasks, but all seemed to be going according to plan.

Despite his well-honed capacity for patience, Nosferatu could not stop a small surge of adrenaline from coursing through his veins. After so many millennia of waiting, what he had dreamed about could become a reality in just a few short days. Nekhbet would be back at his side. And they would be immortal.

Nosferatu realized that the hand that was holding the

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reports was shaking. He blinked, feeling a stinging in his eyes, and when he brought his hand up to wipe his face, it came away with a faint red smear. He realized he was crying tears of blood.

Moscow

Petrov had his assault and recovery teams loaded into three vans marked with proper insignia indicating they were part of the SVD fleet. That would ensure that the police would ignore them no matter what they did and also precluded interference from the SVD as most agents would assume the vans belonged to another section and were on legitimate operations. Petrov loved turning bureaucracy against itself. They drove along the Moscow River until they reached the base of the hill on which the Kremlin crouched.

"Here," Pashenka said.

With a flick of a finger, Petrov indicated for the driver to stop the van. He looked about. The streets surrounding the Kremlin were practically deserted this late at night. Petrov put a small earpiece in and wrapped a mike around his throat. He did a comm check and was immediately rewarded by the sound of all twelve members of his teams succinctly checking their mikes in order as he had trained them.

He wore unmarked black fatigues, over which he had strapped black Kevlar body armor and on top of that was a combat vest. He had an AK-74, the upgrade of the venerable AK-47, but chambered with a higher velocity, smaller 5.45 mm round, for his primary weapon. He would have preferred something else, perhaps a German HK-95, but he knew they had to keep the appearance of

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being SVD as long as possible and the AK-74 was the armament of that organization.

"Let's go."

Shoving Pashenka ahead of him, he went out the side door of the van. Four of his men moved up the slope toward the wall of the Kremlin, spreading out, weapons at the ready. Two more covered each flank and the last four covered the rear. The drivers stayed with the vans, armed with proper papers to deflect anyone stupid enough to inquire why they were parked right outside the Kremlin so late at night.