Homecoming Masquerade, The (10 page)

The second time didn’t work
either. Neither did the third. Gia declared Nicky’s mind to be locked shut.

“We use hypnosis to get at your
subconscious, because that’s where the vampires put their commands,” Gia said.
“But your subconscious is completely inaccessible. That must be why Melissa’s
reprogramming didn’t work.”

Gia had an old man with white
stubble on his chin come to the house and look at Nicky. He too had her stare
at a spot on the ceiling and relax. He tried waving a watch in front of her
face. He turned out the lights and repeated short and simple phrases. He worked
with Nicky all day, and declared her a lost cause.

“The girl cannot by hypnotized,”
he said. “Either she has an unusually great distance between her conscious and
subconscious minds, making it impossible for anyone to get inside, or else
Melissa has done something to her.”

“Melissa didn’t do anything to
me,” Nicky said. “I remember every word of our conversation. She was trying to
get in my head but she couldn’t, just like you.”

“Oh child,” the man said,
“Melissa Mayhew is nothing like me. We humans have to take the long way to the
subconscious. The vampires don’t. If indeed you are unaffected, then Melissa
was being lazy and inattentive to her work. If she really wanted to get into
your head, she would.”

Nicky could tell that the man
thought she was trouble. But Gia didn’t. Gia liked Nicky. And after the man
left, Gia told Nicky not to worry about what he said.

“I’m with you,” Gia said. “I
think Melissa tried to reprogram you and it failed. I think there’s something
special going on in your head. I think you have a gift and we need to work
together to figure out the best way to use it.”

Nicky’s entry to the Network was
that simple, that accidental. Gia Rossi had been spying on the Farm. She saw
Nicky escape. She rescued her. She nursed her back to health. She took a liking
to her, and saw her as a future agent of the Network, a girl who was immune to
the mind control that was such a powerful weapon for the enemy.

Nicky, however, had other plans.
She had no interest in going off to save the world while Frankie and her father
might be enslaved. Gia proposed a compromise that met both their desires. Gia
would take Nicky on a search for her missing loved ones, and along the way, Gia
would teach Nicky what it meant to be a Network spy.

They started at the lookout post
in the Florida swamp where the Network watched the Farm from a safe distance,
the post where Gia had been when Nicky walked out the front door. With
binoculars in-hand, Nicky looked at the drab gray building where a vampire
named Melissa Mayhew had tried to brainwash her, and hoped that by some
miracle, Frankie and her father would show up.

They never did, of course. But
as Nicky sat on the platform in the tree and watched for them, Gia taught her
about the Farm, about the slave system that provided a constant source of food
for the vampires.

Gia told Nicky that every vampire
in the Samarin clan had a large “pantry” of slaves who did service work at the
mansions until such time as their master decided to eat them. She explained how
the Farm was where the slaves got their first dose of heavy brainwashing, and
how, under normal circumstances, a reprogramming session like the one Nicky
went through left the individual completely devoid of free will.

“The majority of slaves are born
and raised on the Farm,” Gia said. “Jackals like you and Frankie make up the
overflow population, stolen off the streets at night whenever there aren’t
enough farm-grown slaves to meet the demand in the various mansions across the
country.”

“And my dad?” Nicky asked.

“Your dad is someone they would
call ‘collateral,’” Gia said. “They don’t want to leave adults hanging around
after their children have been stolen. Parents whose children have been taken
would draw too much negative attention to the clan and their activities.”

“So what did they do with him?”

“I don’t know, Nicky. But I’m
not going to lie to you. Most of the adults who are taken off the streets are
killed on the Farm.”

“My dad wasn’t killed,” Nicky
said. “He’s too smart for that.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Gia.

For three days they went back to
that lookout post, and Nicky watched as lines of black vans came and went from
the Farm, dropping off jackals from the street, filling up with newly
reprogrammed slaves.

Nicky remembered becoming
enamored with Gia during those first days of spying. Here was a girl who was
maybe twenty years old, and she spoke with such authority about the enemy – it
was like she’d been doing this her entire life. Never once did Gia say or do
anything to suggest to Nicky that she feared the vampires they were spying on.
Never once did she seem put out in the slightest that she was now caring for an
eleven-year-old girl.

“The distribution system is
elaborate and enormous,” Gia told her on the third day. “Some slaves from the
Farm will go to Talahassee, some will go to Moscow. Sometimes vampires come to
choose their own slaves; sometimes they don’t. They leave here in vans that
take them to a trucking depot twenty miles north. That’s where we lose track of
them. Thousands of trucks go through that depot every day, and only one of them
carries the shipment of slaves. The slaves might go anywhere from that depot –
we’ve never found out. At some point they get dropped off and distributed via
smaller vehicles to the vampires all over the country and the world.”

Gia always referred to them
using the forbidden word. Vampires. Nicky liked that. She liked that the two of
them could say the word over and over again in defiance of the unwritten rule,
and nobody told them to stop.

“But we know that when the vans
roll out of here, they are full of slaves,” Nicky said. “Can we follow those
vans and ambush them on the highway?”

“That used to be part of the
Network’s strategy,” Gia said, “but the vampires came up with a solution. Every
one of those vans has a bomb underneath it. The drivers are programmed to
detonate the bomb if the van is threatened. The vampires know that we want to
save the people inside, so they’ve arranged for all of them to be killed
instantly if we try to intervene.”

“What about the Farm itself? Why
don’t we just run in there and get those people out?”

“Because the vampires have
protected the Farm in the same way. The supervisor is programmed to blow the
entire Farm to kingdom come, killing every innocent person inside, if the
Network or anyone else tries to break in. They don’t care if the slaves in
there die. They’ll just get more. That’s the difficulty we’ve run into. Even
when we have successfully freed a group of slaves, they just get replaced. The
vampires consume the same number of humans regardless. If they lose some from
their mansions or from the Farm, they just go get more off the streets that
day. That’s why we’re no longer focusing on liberation efforts. Now we’re
thinking about the big picture. We’re gathering intelligence and trying to
learn if the vampires have a weakness we can exploit.”

“There has to be something we
can do,” Nicky said. “What if Frankie and my dad are in there?”

“They aren’t in there,” said
Gia. “People off the streets never stay for more than a few days.”

“Then where can we look next?”

“There are hundreds of vampires
around the world,” said Gia. “We’d have to stake out every mansion, one by
one.”

“I’d like to do that,” Nicky
said.

Gia took a minute before
answering.

“Okay. We can go on a little
field trip,” she said. “But I can’t leave my post just yet.”

“Why not?”

“Melissa Mayhew runs a side
business out of the Farm,” said Gia. “The Network has intercepted some emails
suggesting that one of her clients is on the way, and he’s bringing guests. My
job is to be here when he shows up.”

That night, Gia saw who they
were looking for. Just as the sun was going down, a black town car pulled up at
the Farm and three men stepped out. Melissa Mayhew came out to greet them.

“This is where it gets
interesting,” Gia said. “The rest of the Samarin clan doesn’t know about these
nighttime visitors Melissa hosts on the Farm from time to time.”

The first man to step out of the
car was short and stout, with a face that glowed bright red in the compound’s
spotlights. The second had a long black beard and wore a white robe and
headpiece so that everything but his face was covered. The third was a beanpole
of a man in a blue suit.

“Those first two are Merv
Tremblay and Sultan Amir,” said Gia. “Merv is one of her best clients. The
Sultan is new. So is the tax accountant.”

“Tax accountant?”

“Don’t you think that man in the
blue suit looks like a tax accountant? Not at all like the others – it’s weird.
These men who do illegal business with Melissa, they have this look about them,
like they’re just waiting to find the next person they can crush, like they
don’t want to be rich so much as they want to be powerful. The tax accountant
doesn’t look like one of them. What do you bet he’s just some assistant for the
other two or...”

Gia didn’t finish her sentence,
for at that moment, Melissa came down on the tax accountant like an attacking
cobra, moving with such swiftness Nicky barely saw it happen. One minute
Melissa was shaking hands with the Sultan, the next she was on the tax
accountant, her fangs deep in his neck, his body going limp.

It was the first time Nicky had
ever seen someone die.

“Well, I guess that explains why
he didn’t look the part,” Gia said. “He wasn’t one of them. Probably someone
who was causing trouble and got brought along so he could be disposed of.”

Nicky watched in horror as a
team of children came out and lifted the dead body onto their shoulders,
carrying it into the compound like little pallbearers. Once the body was gone,
Melissa led the other two men inside.

“Merv Tremblay frequents
Melissa’s vampire fantasy camps in South America,” said Gia. “He’s probably
taking the Sultan along on his next trip. Together, they’ll pay her at least a
million bucks, money that she’ll pocket directly rather than give to Daciana
for dispersal among the clan. The vampire fantasy camps are one of her businesses.
Illegal human trade is the other.”

Gia went on to explain how the
Network had learned from years of watching the Farm that Melissa wasn’t just
giving her progeny to other vampires. Some of her slaves, particularly among
the population that was brought in off the streets, were brainwashed and then
sold to wealthy humans.

“Obedient wives for rich men who
don’t like their women to talk back,” Gia said. “A hard-working, compliant
labor pool for your sweatshop. Melissa brings them in, hypnotizes them for a specific
purpose, then sells them for a mint. The rest of the clan doesn’t know a thing
about this. Transactions like the one we’re seeing tonight are done in total
secrecy. They only happen at night, and there is a very small client list made
up of the wealthiest humans on earth.”

“Do you think it’s possible that
Frankie got sold off?” Nicky asked.

“No,” said Gia. “A boy his age
is someone they want in the mansions. They’ll get a couple good years of work
out of him before he’s ripe.”

It made Nicky sick that someone
would think of Frankie this way, that the vampires saw him not as a person, but
as a piece of meat.

When Merv Tremblay and the
Sultan left the Farm, Gia and Nicky left their post and drove after them,
trailing their black town car all the way to Tampa. The car drove into the
airport and the two men boarded a private jet. From the parking area outside
the concourse, Gia made note of the make and model of the plane, the departure
time, and the course heading, and sent that info to her superiors at the
Network. Then she started the car and took Nicky to their next destination,
Melissa Mayhew’s South Florida mansion.

They staked out Melissa’s
mansion for a week, trying to get a view of every slave in the place. Then they
moved on to another mansion, then another. Through the winter, into the spring
and summer, they went across the country, setting up shop at a safe distance
from every known vampire residence and looking to see who was being held
inside. Sometimes they got clear views through the windows. Sometimes they had
to wait until a slave came outside to take out the trash or tend to the
landscaping. They took pictures of every face they saw. Gia sent those pictures
to the Network who used facial recognition software to try and identify the slaves.

They stayed in safe houses with
Network sympathizers. Gia introduced Nicky as if she were already a Network
operative, as if the mission they were on was official Network business. Their
hosts not only provided shelter, they also provided food, clothing, gas money,
companionship. They had a Thanksgiving feast with their hosts in Boston. They
celebrated Christmas with their hosts in Philadelphia.

And all the while, Gia was
teaching Nicky how to be a spy. Nicky learned how to use line of sight to see
without being seen. She became hyper-aware of her surroundings, learning how to
take detailed mental photographs of everything and everyone in her vicinity at
all times. Already skilled at blending into a crowd from her years as a jackal,
with Gia’s help, Nicky learned how to become completely invisible.

In addition to the skills of a
spy, Gia taught Nicky the history of the conflict between vampires and humans.

“There was an uneasy balance
that existed for centuries,” Gia told her one night in Richmond, Virginia. They
were in the guest house of an estate owned by a wealthy patron of the Network,
sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace. “The vampires have always had
the power to enslave us all, but their own in-fighting and strange customs kept
them in check.”