Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (31 page)

W
hat. In. Hell. Are. You. Saying!” Paul had roared, his voice resounding with the rage of somebody who’s just lost big.

She had cried, choking her sobs past a throat almost closed by fear.

Agony. No other word for it. You try his cell and try it and try it. You get onto the FAA, you scream for the plane’s flight plan—which terminates in the dead middle of the Atlantic. Best guess—a Caribbean destination. Or hey, Europe. Or the Middle East. And what about Latin America—yeah, there’s that, too. In a long-range Gulfer like that, they could be in goddamn Ulan Bator by now.

Agony. You wake up sick with fear and dragging from the worst dreams a human being can know, that your beautiful son is being force fed red blood and gagging and gobbling and, oh, God,
loving it!

You start drinking early, and you smoke like Satan at a sermon. You pull in every damn marker you’ve got, you who are an outcast, the wife of an outcast, and you get just exactly friggin’ nowhere, baby.

Tick tock, the hours are passing, and your dear beloved innocent heart is being damn well corrupted and polluted beyond all belief and knowledge.

And you know that the silent man at your side is being tortured by a more horrible torture than even you know, which is the knowledge that if his own son, child of the body and the heart, is corrupted, then he will have to put him to death as if his brilliant angel of a boy was a rabid cur.

They had plotted, planned, worked, performed miracles on their communications equipment. Now, three days after they had started tracking, they were at a sleek Upper East Side highrise, on their way up to the thirty-fifth-floor apartment of one George D’Alessio, Leo Patterson’s very well concealed chief of staff.

The names of Leo’s staff were a skillfully kept secret, and George had proved infuriatingly—and surprisingly—hard to find. But Becky had used her search skills well, and her access to various intelligence databases, and she had identified him.

They came out into a long, ill-lit hallway with a gray carpet and walls. A faint smell of something frying lingered in the air. This building was essential Upper East Side—a lobby that glittered with chandeliers and mirrors, but upstairs the place was as pretty as a prison. Apartment 3541 was a two-bedroom unit. He rented it for $3,700 a month, and lived in it alone.

But when you are breaking in on somebody, you never assume that they are unarmed, asleep, or alone. You assume that they have a nervous dog, a number of supporters, and are wide awake and know you are coming. And they are very, very well armed.

They stopped at the door. It was three-fifteen in the morning, the favorite time for an action of this kind. They carried small pistols and full official fake identification. Also lock picks. They already knew precisely what kind of locks they were up against, and had wax patterns of the keys. Becky had come yesterday to do that prep. She’d also determined that there was no alarm system on the unit. George relied on anonymity to shield him from intruders, foolish boy. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Commercial alarms relied on magnets. Piece of cake.

He was gay, George was, but very private about it.
Salon
had even speculated that he was Leo’s secret lover. A secret lover was involved, but it wasn’t her. His secret lover was a twenty-two-year-old kid called Bobby Parr. Somebody had spent a lot of money on Bobby to make him look about fourteen. It was legal, though, all of it. Becky had looked hard for a way to haul George in, maybe before the same bored (but now slightly confused) judge who had kindly dropped charges both on Ian and Paul.

“Don’t tear him apart,” Paul said.

He watched her slip a plastic key into the first lock. It was a little stiff—these plastic babies made from wax impressions almost always were—but it turned over the lock with a loud click.

“Goddammit!”
she hissed, feeling like a damn fool.

“Congratulations,” he whispered, his voice dripping sarcasm. Pros did not click.

She went for the second lock, which was much more complex, and had to file the skeleton a few times before she got a positive result. She opened the door a bare inch, then stuck a wire through. A moment later, the safety chain was hanging free, and the door was wide.

Paul stepped in. Becky came behind him, closed the door. Both standing absolutely still, they methodically surveyed their surroundings. Nothing moving—very well. Next step: Paul put on his night-vision lenses and made the same survey, this time looking carefully for things like tripwires, or somebody sleeping on the living room couch, anything unexpected.

The living space was an L, with a dinette and small kitchen off to the right. To the left was a corridor that led to the two bedrooms.

You would have thought that somebody like this—a professional organizer—would have a spotless apartment, or at least a clean one, but this place was filthy, every surface piled high with dishes, ashtrays, old newspapers, you name it. The only movement was the scuttling of roaches. At night here in
chez
George, they ruled. Paul took a step toward the corridor, looked into the first bedroom.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he was dealing with, but then he understood. This was a dungeon, something used in S&M sex play. He saw a wooden frame, obviously homemade, with wrist and ankle straps nailed to it. There was an open massage table with more straps. On an old desk were two or three dildos, an enema bag in a puddle, and various implements—pliers, razors, a box of salt, and a paddle.

“Jesus wept,” Becky said, her voice barely a whisper.

“An active fantasy life.”

“Maybe we can use it on him.”

“You aren’t gonna get anything out of this scum with torture.”

“I believe it.”

They went toward the second bedroom, hanging back in the hall until they had completely surveyed the space. On the rickety bed lay George and his boy toy, both sound asleep. The difference between them was that George was chained to the bed, and boy toy was as free as the wind and as naked as a plump little piglet.

“Looks like Georgie is the bottom,” Paul breathed.

“You think the chains are real?”

“They’re fastened to the bedframe.”

“Ready to rock and roll?”

“Let’s do it, sweet.”

She took her syringe out of her bag and lifted it to the faint light that drifted in from between the slats of the closed blinds. She stepped silently to the boy’s bedside, found some free space on his upper arm, and swabbed it. The boy sighed a little, as if he thought he had been kissed. Well, he had been, but by a powerful anesthetic. She inserted the needle into the deadened skin, then withdrew it. She stood gazing down at him, listening for his breathing to change. He would wake up tomorrow afternoon with no awareness of any of this, none at all.

She made a hand signal to Paul, who came into the room. Georgie wouldn’t have it so easy. Georgie was about to wake up eating a gun.

Paul stood over him. He looked down at the stark, handsome features of the professional assistant. Beside him, his friend’s pudgy face was now as slack as a dead hog’s. His breath, which had been rattling, seemed all but gone.

“Coma’s a ten,” he murmured to Becky. Then he pulled out his police special, went down beside Georgie, and shoved it in between his half-parted lips hard enough to chip a few pearlies. The eyes came open, the head tried to turn away. Paul shoved harder, and Georgie went,
“Gwulllggg!”

Becky came in with a complicated collection of straps from the dungeon and proceeded to start trussing up boy toy, who resisted her the same way a dead fish resists being lifted out of a creel.

“Okay,” Paul said to Georgie, his voice booming, “we’re feds, but we don’t play by the rules. We’re looking for your lady fair. We know she left the country in her plane. Where did she go, Georgie?” He withdrew the gun a few inches, just far enough to enable him to talk.

“What the fuck—”

The gun went back, taking chunks of tooth with it, causing groaning and much gobbling against the barrel. “I told you we don’t play by the rules. So I’m gonna pull out the gun again, and this time you’re gonna tell me what I want to know.” Again, he withdrew the barrel.

“Please! Jesus! I’m hurt!” He spat, and Paul slapped him.

“Swallow it. Where is she?”

“What is this about?”

Translation: he knew. Paul pistol-whipped him hard enough to cause a cry, but not hard enough to grant him the brief respite of unconsciousness.

“Jesus, Paul,” Becky said.

“Take it easy,” Georgie gasped. “Gimme a chance.”

Paul swung the pistol back.

“Gimme a chance to talk! Jesus fucking Christ, you hurt me!”

“So talk.”

“They went somewhere in Europe or the Middle East. They refueled in the Azores. I know because I wire-transferred more funds to one of her credit cards. Oh, Christ, what is this about?”

“You’re gonna go to your grave never knowing the answer to that question. Now, I am gonna ask you again. We know she refueled in the Azores. We know she took off headed for the Middle East, which is where we lost her. Where did she go, Georgie, boy?”

“I haven’t heard from her.”

Paul had hit him the first time with cool method and not a whole lot of power. If he did it again, though, it was really going to hurt the guy, and Paul didn’t like that. He’d hurt too damn many people in his long career. He said, “Your buddy’s not in too good shape.”

George’s eyes started darting around frantically when he realized that his friend was comatose. Becky raised the now-empty syringe into his view. Paul said, “One more dose, and he’s off to meet his maker.”

“Oh, no, don’t. Don’t, please!”

She turned the syringe, moved it toward the boy’s neck.

“He’s a wonderful, special person!”

“Mr. Wonderful’s gotta die so El Bitch can keep on keeping on. That’s a damn shame.”

Becky sank the needle into Mr. Wonderful’s neck.

“Talk.”

“No! Please!”

“She go to Libya? Iraq?”

Becky prepared to push the plunger that would send exactly nothing into boy toy’s bloodstream. “Okay,” Paul said. “Kill him.”

“No! No, wait! Oh, for God’s sake. Listen, I think she went to Egypt.”

“We checked Egypt. No cigar.”

“The plane didn’t land in Egypt.”

“It did.”

“Hold up,” Paul said to Becky.

From his years of experience, Paul was reasonably sure that George wasn’t lying. If they lied, they relaxed. They always believed the lie would work. It was the truth that they distrusted, that made them prepare for another blow.

The problem was, they had checked every airport in Europe and the Middle East, and had not found Leo’s Gulfstream registered as either landed or having passed through. It had not been tracked by either European or Israeli ground control, nor by the Israeli military, which watched every plane that crossed north of a line from Algiers to Bahrain—assuming that the information CIA had gotten from them was genuine and complete. Given the tormented and complex relationship between American and Israeli intelligence, one could never be sure.

Could the plane have gone down? Anything was possible.

Unless—“Did Leo have her passport?”

He nodded.

“What about her friend?”

“I don’t even know her name.”

Paul pulled back. “We’re done,” he said to Becky.

“Done?”

“We’re done!” He began to leave.

“We don’t—”

“Yes, we do.”

She followed him out. From the bedroom behind them came a rattle of chains and a loud cry, as Georgie realized that they were both tied up.

“You forgot something,” she said.

“Sorry,” Paul said as he hurried back into the bedroom.

“Jesus! I thought you were gonna leave us like this!”

“Why, Georgie, I’d never do that.” He taped up the creep’s mouth. Only when his boyfriend woke up, which would be a good ten hours from now, would they be able to raise anything approaching an alarm. They’d have to attract the attention of somebody going down this sound-deadened corridor. Fine.

“What’s the story?” Becky asked as they entered the service elevator they’d come up in.

“Egypt.”

“Egypt says no.”

“Somebody was bribed.”

“So, we go to Egypt.”

They returned to Ian’s apartment and booked a flight to Cairo on Air France, with a stop in Paris to meet Jean Bocage. They would fly together from there to Cairo, where they would be met by the head of the Egyptian Special Environmental Police, General Adel Karas, universally known as Kari. Paul had never worked with him. They didn’t take their guns, only what electronics they’d managed to pry out of Briggsie. He couldn’t absolutely flat turn down a mission to recover their own son, not even Briggsie. Bocage and Kari had to provide the weapons, though.

Paul and Becky sat side by side in business class, silently waiting out the long midatlantic hours between JFK and Paris.