Nosferatu

10

The old monastery nestling amid the conifers was truly beautiful. Even in the summer, misty haze swam around it from the ferns and grass, saturated by mid-afternoon rain and now gleaming in the evening sunlight. The Rolls-Royce purred along the gravel drive, throwing up a splatter of stones. As the car came to a halt outside the building's arched rear doors, two men in blue suits stepped out of the shadows almost in synchrony. One of them, darker and smaller than the other, entered the monastery as the door opened before him. His fellow joined the peak-capped chauffeur busily making preparations to deal with the occupant of the auto's customized rear seat.

"His Grace will see you now," the butler said to the dark-haired man, who ignored him and stepped up to the library doors, where he knocked and waited for the familiar voice from within. The summons soon followed.

He entered and went over to stand before the figure seated at a desk in front of huge arched windows completely covered with heavy drapes. Luther sat browsing through a dusty tome in the candlelight he always favored here. His entirely bald head lifted almost imperceptibly. He stared at his returning servitor, as if silently bidding him make his report.

"It is done, Your Grace. Lothar will be making the preparations now. Everything went perfectly, sir."

"Good, Martin." Even just those two words betrayed the strangeness of his voice. The inflection of the name was subtly wrong, somehow, but any listener would have had difficulty pinpointing exactly how. The words came as if from some voicesynth that fell just short of perfect

only because its maker had deliberately not completed the final adjustments.

"I have missed you," Luther said, letting the book slip from his hands.

Martin Matthaus felt a wave of relief ripple through his body. In more than a century of serving this great man, these words were the closest to anything resembling sentiment he'd ever heard him utter. It was more than he deserved.

"There is much work to be done," Luther said simply. He stood up, running his hands with their crooked fingers back across his brow and pointed ears, smoothing his sleek skull. "You must take care of the downloading from the Nongoma field trials. I need the last of the data tomorrow. It is regrettable that I was forced to take such drastic measures."

Panic began to well up in Martin. As yet, Luther had not punished anyone for the bungled kidnapping. He must be biding his time. Martin hadn't been part of that, but he knew perfectly well that once Luther's icy rage had built to the point of physical action, he would delight in adding caprice to his sadism. And, after Heidelberg, Luther's anger would be growing. Two serious failures in a month would call for a victim, maybe more than one. The crucial moment would come when Luther had fed, when his energies were high and he burned. But then, surely, Martin would be at one with the computers and databases and Luther would not come looking for him.

"When you're done, return here," Luther said forbiddingly, his tone momentarily increasing Martin's anxiety. Fortunately, his next words allayed those fears.

"I think we shall have to monitor the Americans," Luther went on. "I doubt they will do anything out in the open yet. But they may well send some kind of spy. Most likely, they'll try to deck into our matrix systems. I wish to review the security with you."

"Yes, Your Grace," Martin replied gratefully. It would mean more work, but it would also keep him safe, not least because he would be able to lock himself into the computer laboratory and justify his seclusion on security grounds. The locks wouldn't stop Luther, of course, but if

he came after Martin in fury they might slow him down enough to cool his rage. Martin knew all the signs of a frenzy building in Luther, and he could see a mighty one coming over him this night.

"Will that be all for now, Your Grace?" he said hopefully. Luther dismissed him with a wave of a hand. Martin bowed as he left, then scuttled away down to the old crypts.

Luther coughed drily, smoothed his suit and adjusted his black tie. He had a funeral to go to, after all.

Michael came around, trolls hammering on the anvil that was his head, just as the door opened. Serrin and Tom found him on his knees, still trying to get to his feet. His eyes were bloodshot and his pallor deathly. Tom raced to help him, hauling the limp body up under the arms, lifting him with ridiculous ease.

"Don't make a song and dance about it, old boy," Michael joked weakly. He felt the healing hands of the shaman gripping him, power flowing through the troll. The weakness faded, and the pain in his head dulled to a throb rather than the violent pulsing with which he'd awakened. He took a deep breath and shook his head to clear his senses.

"I'm all right. My software for automatically taking me out of the circuit has to be the best on the planet," he said. "Crikey, but that system was running some serious 1C. There must be something they really didn't want me to find. Now let's see what that is."

"Wait a minute," Serrin said. "Take a rest. You've only just come around. Get some coffee down you first."

Michael shook his head. "I don't need to deck in again. All I have to do is use Norman through the I/O and download it." Serrin and Tom smiled at each other.

"Don't you think that giving names to your frames is a bit, um, eccentric?" Serrin chuckled. "It's not as if they were real people, you know."

"They've got more personality than some allegedly real ones I know," Michael snorted. "Especially in New York. Of course it's eccentric. I'm bloody English, after all. I'm supposed to be eccentric; it's in my contract." Sit

ting himself down, he began tapping in his instructions through an ordinary console, the wires from the Fairlights now unattached and dangling.

Printouts churned from the array of machinery as Serrin made his choice between Kenyan and Costa Rican. The African blend seemed more appropriate somehow. By the time he carried the tray into the room, Michael had generated yards of facts and figures. As he scanned through them eagerly, his face became more and more perplexed.

"I don't understand this. Half this drek is irrelevant. They beat my browse program! All I managed to collect was a pile of junk. Oh great, some Umfolozi schoolkid reported missing by concerned parents. What is this drek? And why would anyone want to go to such trouble to coat it in 1C?"

He sat back, eyes cast up toward the ceiling. Serrin could almost see the neurons firing.

"There has to be a buried codesort in this. No way would a database lump all this stuff together. There has to be some limbo coding or something," he muttered.

Tom shot Serrin a puzzled look by way of a question. Serrin gave him his best "I don't know what the frag he's talking about" look by way of a reply.

They couldn't stop the Englishman from jacking back in, distrusting his smart frames now, after their initial failure. Five minutes later, he jacked out with a big smile on his face. The printout churned out just three entries.

"Cunning little code. Uses a recursive " Seeing the looks on their faces, he stopped short. "Ah, sorry. Let's just say it's cute, as you seps would put it."

"Seps?" Tom asked, just the hint of annoyance rising in his ocean-deep voice. He was unfamiliar with the English slang term for Americans. Serrin, knowing the derivation, didn't think the troll would take it too well. It wasn't what anyone would call complimentary.

"It's not important right now," the elf muttered.

"Interesting. Two of these kidnappings date from 2054 and, according to Zulu intelligence reports, have clear corporate links. But I don't think that's what we're after. Corporate abductions of company men aren't what we're

dealing with. Which leaves us only one. Exactly, um, twenty-three days ago. An attempted kidnap of a mage named Shakala in the Umfolozi Domains. Crikey. That's serious business."

"What are the Umfolozi Domains?" Tom asked fretfully. He couldn't follow half of what Michael was saying, but the Englishman always seemed to enjoy giving the details when he asked.

"Natural environment. An old wildlife reserve. Ever since the Awakening, it's become largely undisturbed terrain occupied by paranimals and semi-nomadic tribes. A lot of metahumans among them. Thing is, the mages among those people are powerful. Trying to kidnap one of them seems an extraordinary risk. Far more dangerous than trying to snatch Serrin off the streets of Heidelberg."

"So why do it?" Serrin queried.

"Good question, but one I can't answer right now. For one thing, I want to see what else the frames may have dug out of the other databases. For another, there aren't any notes in this file which might account for it. The intelligence analysis says there's no evidence of corporate involvement. The attempted abduction was, apparently, filed as a report by a government mage who just happened to be conducting some astral surveillance in the right place at the right time. No profiles of the kidnappers, though. Curses."

"You shouldn't call them 'the frames'," Serrin whispered with a smirk. "The children might be listening."

Michael ignored him and made preparations for plowing through the rest of his data. A beep from something in Serrin's jacket pocket startled him, and he groped for the downloader. Depressing the display button, the elf read the message while Michael looked on expectantly.

"There's a fax for me back in Seattle," he said. "I have a message forwarding number. If there's something there, it lets me know."

"Expecting anything?" Michael asked.

"Not really. Let's look into it so I can read it off. I could do it line by line on the screen, but if it's a long message, that'd be really tedious."

Michael had the short message printed out in seconds.

He handed it to Serrin without looking. The elf read the words and turned even paler than usual. He passed the sheet back to Michael without comment.

The Englishman then read the message aloud for Tom's benefit. Not sure whether or not the troll could read, he didn't want to embarrass him into having to admit it. The shaman took note of that.

" 'I seen your name in a list from a computer owned by a slag got killed. Two other people on the list are already dead. I will call you at this time tomorrow and give you a telecom code to contact me.' No name, no ID. There's an incoming fax number, obviously."

"I'm getting rather paranoid about anonymous messages," Serrin said.

"Let's trace the incoming number," Michael said, repairing to his array of machinery to begin his trawling.

Serrin and Tom didn't talk much during the brief time Michael conducted his electronic search. They'd had enough time for that over coffee and Serrin's cigarettes in the restaurant. The elf knew Tom was unhappy in this strange city, disliking it greatly. He was no street shaman, and even if he had been, he wouldn't have liked the streets of Manhattan. His only comment was that the place lacked any heart or kindness.

"Rerouted, of course," Michael said with a gleam in his eye when he was done. 'The original message was sent from Cape Town. Now, that's a coincidence, isn't it? Two shots at the Confederated Azanian Nations inside ten minutes. I'm tracing the address and the owner now. Ah, here we are." He worked on as he talked, his frames doing the donkey labor. "Now, let's see what we can find out about Mr. Manoj Gavakar. Obviously, he's a Cape Indian, but is he a mage or is he amp; " His voice trailed away.

"What've you got?" Serrin asked quickly.

"The message was sent nine hours ago. Mr. Gavakar's premises were burned to the ground within an hour of that. His body, or rather a body assumed to be his since it's in such a state that ID is pending, was found inside. That's in the public newsnet, so it isn't classified information."

Serrin looked at the Englishman, horrified by the implications of this information. Tom was leaning forward, hunched, thinking. Up to now, the troll had been operating purely in response to Serrin's paranoia. He hadn't felt really involved. But this was closer to the bone. Being present through all these developments made him feel that something was surely going on after all.

"Makes me think of that old saying: Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not out to get you," the troll said.

"Or, like the saying goes now, anyone who ain't paranoid ain't paying enough attention," the Englishman said drily. "But this isn't paranoia. There's a charred corpse in Cape Town which definitely proves that. But all we've come to now is a dead end, literally. For the time being.

"We've got to search the databases for everything we can on Mr. Shakala, our Zulu mage, and anyone else we can turn up," he said, getting to his feet. "It's going to be a long night. Excuse me for a while. I need to get some rest. See you in half an hour." Michael retired to his bedroom, where he dropped into a well-upholstered armchair, closed his eyes and sank into the calm of meditation.

Kristen somehow dragged her bloodied and bruised body to Indra's back door. It was a miracle the police didn't pick her up on the way, what with all the blood on her clothes, but she kept to the dark back-alleys and secluded ways as she stumbled across town. She was badly shaken, and thought maybe a rib or two might be broken, but the blood was mostly from deep grazing than anything truly serious.

When the bouncer saw her, wild-eyed and bloody, he was about to throw her bodily back into the garbage-strewn alley until she screamed at him to fetch Indra, that this was family business, life and death. The ork hesitated and snarled a message into the intercom, keeping her at bay with some choice insults until the elegant Indian woman appeared in person. At that point he fell into sullen silence.

"Tsotsis killed Manoj," Kristen managed to say and then almost collapsed against the ork bouncer. He recoiled in disgust, but at a sharp word from Indra he dragged her into the back room.

While gulping down some harsh brandy, Kristen gave Indra the best description she could of the killers. She was aware that she was describing the Xhosa killers of an Indian to another Indian, and that she herself was half-Xhosa. It gave matters an edge she didn't like at all, but it was the same one she'd lived with for all her days. She just never got used to it. Kristen didn't know whether Indra would be grateful, since Manoj was one of her infinitude of cousins, or whether she'd beat the drek out of her.

"You can stay here. I'll get someone to see to you," Indra said emotionlessly. "Take her upstairs, Netzer. Put her in one of the girls' rooms."

"They're all busy," the ork said huffily.

"Then tell one of the customers his twenty minutes is up and kick him out," Indra said sharply. "I'll call Sunil," she told Kristen. "Go get cleaned up."

"Thank you," the girl said gratefully, forgetting that she actually had enough money to get a room where she could sleep safely tonight.

An hour later she had to be awakened when the soft-voiced old man arrived. She knew Sunil, though she could rarely afford his treatments. His gentle hands checked her over thoroughly, then he turned to Indra, standing impassively in the doorway of the garish whore's bedroom.

"The ribs are bruised but not broken," he said, adopting the traditional doctor's manner of talking about a patient as if she were somehow deaf or an imbecile. Even street docs still did that. "Everything else can be cleaned up with a little antiseptic. I think she might need a stitch or two in that torn earlobe."

Kristen hadn't even been particularly aware that her earring was missing until he mentioned it. Her hand went up automatically to feel it, but she managed to stop it before her fingers actually touched the open wound.

"I can pay," she said weakly. He nodded and looked at her expectantly. She reached into her bag and took out some dollars, but by the time he looked satisfied, her treasure had been reduced by more than half. The luck truly was beginning to turn sour. But the price was fair, and she knew, as he asked for hot water and took his own antiseptic from a tattered old bag, that she could count on being patched up and clean by the time he was finished. But all of a sudden she was angry about her torn earlobe; her ears were small, delicate, and perhaps the prettiest feature she had.

Then again, maybe things couldn't be all bad if she could afford to worry about her looks at a time like this. As she watched Sunil hook some gut into his needle, Kristen clenched her teeth and waited for the pain.