Redlaw - 01 (30 page)

“We’ll hold fire on that for the time being,” said Lambourne. “Wouldn’t want to overextend ourselves. Too much too soon is never good when you’re growing a new brand. Besides, you’ve got our Porphyrian initiative in the pipeline. It’ll suit the North American market better than Solarville, so we should try to avoid an overlap there. Same goes for you, Yukinobu, and your Shinobi Eternal. Horses for courses, eh?”

The trick to a good consortium was for each member to have his own discrete administrative sphere which he ran autonomously but with oversight from the other members. Then all felt in control, hands on the reins, while being mutually beholden, bound together by scrutiny as well as a share of the proceeds. J. Howard Farthingale III was in charge of operations in the Americas, Yukinobu Uona’s territory was the Far East, while Lambourne claimed the bit in the middle. They had divided the world three ways. It was their very own block of Neapolitan ice cream.

“In a spirit of candour,” Lambourne went on, “I feel bound to mention that a tiny fly has alighted in the ointment.”

Frowns from the other two of the triumvirate.

“Again, like Wax, it’s nothing serious,” he hurried on. “Measures have been put into effect to neutralise the problem.”

“What is it?” said Farthingale.

“Someone has twigged to the vasopressin augmentation. A SHADE officer, man name of John Redlaw. He developed suspicions about BovPlas and in the end stole a sample of blood to have it analysed.”

“Stole!”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. He knows enough to have figured out what we’ve been up to. Counter to that, he’s in no position to use that knowledge effectively against us. Latest reports have him being taken into custody by his own people. SHADE will hold him overnight, and by tomorrow it’ll be too late and he’ll be an irrelevance.”

“Why so?” asked Uona.

“Because we’ve already stopped adding the vasopressin. It’s done its job, achieved everything it was intended to. We don’t need it any longer. As of this evening, all blood leaving the Watford plant is as pure as when it was running through the cows’ veins.”

“But this Redlaw guy still knows what he knows,” Farthingale pointed out. “Surely we need to do something to fix that.”

“By all accounts, he’s become a loose cannon,” said Lambourne. “Used to be SHADE’s blue-eyed boy, but then had some kind of breakdown, failure of nerve, rush of blood to the head, something like that. Should he try and make life awkward for us—go to the media or some such—it shouldn’t be too difficult to portray him as a crackpot, a fantasist who’s put two and two together and come up with five. Dep Chem’s publicity department is skilled at smearing anyone who’s come gunning for the company. They’ve had years of experience discrediting healthcare quacks, investigative reporters, eco-mentalists and the like.”

“But if he’s with SHADE, won’t that give him credence if he starts accusing us?”

“He isn’t any more. He’s had his licence revoked or whatever it is they do to shadies—hang up their stakes? He’s a high flyer who’s fallen to earth with a bump, a loser in a game he can’t win, and I really don’t think he need detain us further.”

“Still,” said Uona, “it might be as well to dispose of
all
the evidence, Nathaniel, if you see my meaning. Just in case.”

“You’re referring to Subject V, I presume.”

“I am indeed. Surely he’s outlived his usefulness by now. Frankly I’m baffled why you’ve insisted on keeping him at all, so long after you finished with him.”

“I’m with Yukinobu,” said Farthingale. “What’s the point of hanging on to Subject V? He’s not doing anyone any good, just chained up there, mouldering away. Now’s the time.”

“Get rid of V?” mused Lambourne. It wasn’t that the thought had never occurred to him. He just disliked anything going to waste or throwing an asset away before he was absolutely certain he didn’t need it any more. “I could, I suppose.”

“No ‘could’ about it,” said Farthingale. “He’s got to go.”

“I agree,” said Uona. “I believe Howard would call it ‘covering our asses.’”

“Damn straight I would. That’s two votes for, Nathaniel, and being as this is a democracy, or as close to one as the three of us would ever care to get, that makes it a done deal. You have to terminate Subject V, no ifs, ands or buts, soon as you can.”

Lambourne, powerful rechargeable SureFire torch in hand, exited the house and crossed the grounds of his estate to the old observatory. He did not like anyone telling him what to do. Equally, he understood that his consortium partners’ recommendations made sense. Logic dictated that Subject V was surplus to requirements. So it must be.

The torch’s 2,300-lumen beam lit the mist coruscatingly, picking out the dewdrops spangling the grass and, just briefly, the flash of a rabbit’s eyes as the animal took fright and helter-skeltered into the shrubbery.

The observatory perched on a hilltop like a huge snub-nosed bullet, silhouetted against the dark brilliance of the sky. The previous owner of the mansion but one, a shipping tycoon, was a keen amateur astronomer who had discovered not one but two very distant objects, a moon and an asteroid, both now named after him. The subsequent owner was a prog rock god, a ’seventies icon, who’d also been into star-gazing. The observatory, in fact, had been a key reason for his purchasing the house. However, his interest in the wonders of the cosmos waned, along with his record sales and financial fortunes, and he was eventually forced to sell first the twenty-eight-inch refracting telescope, then the entire property, in order to meet a swingeing tax demand.

A desperate vendor is a biddable vendor, and Lambourne had purchased the mansion at a knockdown price from the maestro of the twenty-minute live keyboard solo. He hadn’t initially been able to find a use for the shell of the observatory and so had let the building crumble until it was little more than a hollow folly, its cracked stonemasonry shrouded with ivy. Then, two years back, he had had it shored up and renovated to new specifications.

The door was secured by a lock keyed to Lambourne’s biometric profile. Look, touch, speak, and he was in.

A pit had been excavated deep into the observatory’s foundations, and a monitoring gallery ran round the rim. Above, the hemispherical shape of the roof had been kept, but the original had been replaced by one composed of hexagonal panes of glass, a dwarf replica of the dome over Solarville. The construction workers responsible for these alterations had been told they were making a special hothouse intended for large, exotic specimens of rainforest plant life.

On entering, Lambourne quickly fitted a charcoal-filter mask over his nose and mouth to screen out the noxious stench from below. Extractor fans ran twenty-four-seven to clear the air in here, but their work was cut out for them. He went to the parapet at the centre of the gallery, on which four machine guns were mounted equidistantly, all aimed downwards and loaded with belt-fed Fraxinus rounds. Their firing mechanisms were hooked up to a motion sensor field located a metre below the parapet’s rim. If the field’s infrared meniscus was broken, the guns would be tripped. Once operational, each swivelled automatically, traversing back and forth through a forty-five-degree arc. When shooting began there would, for the occupant of the pit, be simply no escaping the crisscrossing streams of ash-wood bullets.

Down in the pit, something stirred.

“Vlad,” said Lambourne softly.

Heavy chains clanked.

“Vla-a-ad.”

A hoarse, grunting moan and a questing snuffle. From the shadows of the pit, two great red eyes suddenly shone.

Lambourne pressed a switch to disable the motion sensor field. Then he fetched a blood pouch from a fridge and tossed it over the gallery parapet. Barely had it landed before the creature in the pit dived on it, tore open the plastic and guzzled the contents.

A word came up, thickly uttered, scarcely recognisable.

“More.”

“More, Vlad? Oh well, don’t see why not.”

Lambourne threw down a second pouch and, for the hell of it, a third. The blood was pure, unadulterated. The time for dispensing the other kind of blood, blood with a generous lacing of vasopressin, was long past.

The thing called Vlad consumed each pouch in one go, with lip-smacking gusto. Then he sank back onto the floor of the pit, the links of the chains settling with low metallic thuds.

“Go?” Vlad asked, longingly, plaintively. “Vlad go now?”

“No,” Lambourne replied. He was used to this importuning. “No going. Vlad stay.”

“Vlad want... free. Want... out.”

“Not now. Maybe soon.”

“Maybe?”

“Maybe.”

Vlad heaved a sigh that Lambourne would have said came from the soul, if the undead had souls—if, for that matter, he’d believed in such things. He gazed down a little longer at the massive, misshapen figure hunkered amid his own filth, studying the hairless orb of skull, the body covered with swollen veins like vines, the musculature that spoke of a terrific, apelike strength. He had created this through feeding and nurturing. He had taken the raw clay of a Sunless and moulded it into something even more monstrous.

Vlad, as Subject V, had been the test bed for the results of the hormone on the Sunless metabolism and physiology. Long after it had been proven that vasopressin markedly increased aggression and fostered addiction, however, Lambourne had continued to dose the creature with it on a daily basis, at increasing levels of potency. He had wanted to see if there were long-term, even permanent effects. With the same cold, clinical curiosity that drives a child to dismember a beetle, he had extended the experiment, taking it to extremes, unhesitatingly.

The outcome was grotesque but satisfying. Amplified body mass, accompanied by a reduction in higher cerebral cortical functions. The outer Vlad grew while the inner Vlad shrank. Vlad had become both more and less.

Lambourne cast a glance up to the glass dome capping the observatory. It was dark and semi-opaque; the moon glimmered weakly through, but the stars were completely occluded. This was a second experiment that had been conducted on Vlad, in parallel with the first, a practical proof of the computer-model estimates of the levels of sunlight a vampire could withstand.

So, all this was to come to an end. Vlad’s purpose had been served. Tomorrow morning, Lambourne would carry out a swift euthanasia, leaving nothing to show for months of painstaking dedication and application but a pile of ashes.

He could trip the guns, although they were primarily there for defence and deterrence. Another means of disposing of Vlad was open to Lambourne, however, and this was the one he would use when the time came. It was altogether quieter and more elegant, and perhaps also more humane.

Humane?

Lambourne was surprised at himself. Was he getting sentimental in his old age? He knew that vivisectionists could grow fond of the macaques and rhesus monkeys in their laboratories, even as they inflicted all sorts of suffering and indignity on them. The little primates represented progress and discovery, as well as, of course, potential profit. Their pain benefited the people who performed their scientific inquisition on them. They were appealing little martyrs, fellow travellers on the journey towards enlightenment and revenue.

Perhaps, then, it was inevitable that he had developed a kind of mild affection for Vlad. He’d nicknamed the creature, hadn’t he? “Subject V” hadn’t been enough for him, so he’d come up, on a whim, with something more colloquial. Vlad himself now believed this to be his identity. Whatever he might have once been called, he had forgotten. “Vlad” was what he was. “Vlad” was as much as he needed to know about himself.

All was quiet down in the pit. The condemned Vlad had eaten a hearty meal and, full-bellied, fallen asleep. His breathing was slow and stertorous.

With dawn would come the hour of his execution. Perhaps he would still be asleep when it happened. Then he might not feel a thing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The night bus swaggered like some boozy overweight marchioness through the streets of west London, past icy Georgian townhouse façades and frowning Victorian terraces. It skirted the darkness of Hyde Park, circumnavigated Marble Arch, and trundled down Park Lane. Throughout its itinerary, it halted at scheduled stops, even though nobody was there to climb aboard.

As they travelled, Redlaw noticed Illyria becoming subdued beside him, her gaze introverting. Her skin seemed to have got paler, if that was possible, and he detected a slight tremor in her hands.

His own hand went stealthily to the handle of one of the stakes on his vest.

“Please don’t,” Illyria said. “You won’t be needing it.”

“You’re thirsty, aren’t you? When was the last time you fed?”

“I don’t know. Not long ago. I caught a rat in that pub cellar.”

“A rat. That’s not much.”

“I realise that. You’d be surprised how little a shtriga can survive on. I’m often surprised myself. Even so...”

“Can you control it?”

“The thirst? Am I going to start chomping on your neck, that’s what you’re asking?”

“I’m more concerned about the driver. I can look after myself.”

Illyria rolled her eyes. “Redlaw, you don’t seem to realise—or else you’re being deliberately thick-skulled—but I am not what you think I am. It’s not just that a shtriga is to a regular vampire as a wolf is to a hyena. I am more ethical, more human, than you give me credit for, or at least I’m trying to be. I’m somewhat offended that you haven’t noticed. Maybe you have but you can’t bring yourself to say so. Would it hurt you to show some appreciation sometime? You’ve not even thanked me for coming to your rescue. A woman could get the impression she’s being taken for granted.”