Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (68 page)

He wondered if he maybe
was
the bad guy.
 

Having a vampire-enhanced brain gave Reginald plenty of computing power, but that big brain sometimes got restless, and sometimes it needed an idea to mull in the way his belly sometimes needed food. So, once, when his brain had been restless, Reginald had found himself pondering the ideas of sanity versus insanity. During that session, he’d decided that what was considered “sane” was nothing more than the majority opinion. Right now, most people didn’t believe that ghosts plagued them at night… but if eighty percent of the population decided that ghosts were everywhere, it would be the skeptic who would find himself locked up and considered nuts. If you were in the majority, you were sane. If you were in the majority, you were normal. It was nothing more than percentages.

Reginald, Nikki, Maurice, and Karl had attempted to rig the election because they were convinced that the world was going to hell. It made sense to them, but most of the world thought the world was going in the correct direction. So in this instance, how were
they
not the insane ones?
 

People don’t know the truth about Timken and Claude
, Reginald thought.
If they knew the truth, they’d see that we were doing the right thing.
 

But that was probably what a man who kills his neighbor because he thinks he’s Satan would say, too.
 

Reginald alone was being transported back to America. The Chateau was being occupied and watched — a kind of wholesale house arrest, during which none of them would be allowed to leave — but only Reginald had been speed-extradited. And why not? He was the only one that Tim had an arrest warrant for. Maurice had even held his wrists up for the cuffs, but Tim had waved him away, saying, “You are not under arrest here, Deacon Toussant.” Nikki had begged to go. She’d given an impromptu confession. She’d offered to pay for her own plane ticket on the red-eye to New York. But short of attacking the soldiers, there was nothing she could do to convince them. So Reginald had said his goodbyes and they’d led him away, leaving shocked, defeated faces behind him.
 

The flight staff thought that Rolf and Tim were CIA agents. Both carried human firearms and badges. The human authorities, with permission going all the way up to Erickson’s office, had given them the guns and stars.
 

Rolf didn’t speak English very well, but once his armor and Boom Stick had been put away (either one of the faux agents could easily subdue Reginald without a weapon), Tim had turned out to be very talkative. He’d been quite cordial to Reginald. Their business had been concluded for the time being; Reginald was in cuffs and, before sunrise, would be in a cell in New York. The next night he’d be transferred to the formal Council cells at the new and improved facility under the Asbury Club in Columbus. Tim seemed to have decided that there was no reason for further acrimony. Tim had won; the Council had won; Timken had won; Reginald and his rebel cause had lost. They’d been discovered and the election would be held again. So Tim and Rolf and Reginald could play out the whole coppers-with-a-grudge-and-angry-prisoner thing, or they could be three people on a plane with 24 hours or more together in front of them.
 

Reginald, who wasn’t a spiteful type anyway, was happy to pretend he wasn’t wearing cuffs and that the soldiers wouldn’t be tasked with killing him (and quite able to do so) if he tried to escape. And so they talked, like men.
 

Reginald was curious how the troops had found him and discovered their ruse. There was no reason for secrecy, so Tim told him what he knew. Because the election process was so new and because Timken wanted it to go as fairly as possible and be conducted in the way that gave the public as much faith in it as possible, twelve independent watchdogs in twelve different locations and representing twelve different groups had been watching aggregate election data as it came in. They couldn’t watch the vote tallies or see who was leading and they couldn’t watch demographics, but they could see the trends — which party was rallying and which was flagging, what the relative ratios between any two candidates’ votes were over time. Watchdogs were isolated and were not allowed to communicate with the outside world during the day of the election and were required to submit their own votes in advance.
 

When every one of the watchdogs reported a sudden spike in one candidate’s votes and a corresponding dip in the other’s votes, word had quickly been sent up the chain of command.
 

Reginald shook his head when Tim told him this part. It made sense that they’d be able to see a dramatic spike corresponding to a certain time. In hindsight, it was obvious that he should have had Claire change votes slowly, throughout the course of the day. It would have required much more work in order to make it convincing, but what they’d done had been a very obvious mistake. He was supposed to be a mastermind. It was all his fault.
 

Timken, Tim said, had warned his corporals about Reginald from the very beginning. Reginald, sitting in the plane, couldn’t help but feel flattered. He’d only met Timken briefly that one time on Skype, but apparently Reginald’s reputation preceded him. Maurice was considered a physical threat and a disruptive influence, but word about Reginald’s incredible mental prowess had become legend.
Was it true he’d hacked the old Council relocation algorithm?
Tim had asked him.
Yes
, Reginald had replied. And Tim had actually whistled and smiled, impressed.
 

So from the beginning and through the election process, Timken had considered Reginald to be a threat to the democratic process of the Vampire Nation as sure as a vulnerability in the election system itself would be a threat. Timken’s men had watched key areas for evidence of corruption. They’d distributed early access to the election software to independent authorities who would verify and monitor its fairness. And they’d kept an eye on Reginald Baskin. They’d known exactly where he was. Reginald had been none too choosy about where he used his credit card, and Timken, unlike Charles, had the intelligence and the wherewithal to use it to track him.
 

“Apparently you were logging into Fangbook from a local Luxembourg ISP, too,” said Tim, chucking him on the arm. “Probably should have spoofed it, huh?” And he laughed.
 

But of course, it
had
been spoofed, because Claire had been the one using Reginald’s Fangbook login most of the time. She’d spoofed it to look like the mistake that had gotten him caught. But just the same as with Reginald’s credit card, there had been no real need to be careful at first. They’d fled from Charles, whose regime was immersed in chaos and unable to track such things, and Timken wasn’t a threat until it was too late.
 

From there, it was easy. There was one and only one obvious place in Luxembourg that Reginald and Maurice could be, Tim said.
 

“You knew I’d be with Karl Stromm, who was apparently a big enough threat for Timken to kill,” said Reginald. It was his way of simultaneously drawing attention to the fact that he wasn’t the wrong one here and also asking why the troops hadn’t stormed the Chateau weeks ago.
 

Tim’s eyebrows drew together. “What?”
 

“He tried to kill Karl once already. So if I was such a threat, why not burst in and kill us all, getting Karl in the bargain?”
 

“When did Timken try to kill Stromm?”
 

“The TGV disaster.” And then Reginald, because there was no point in holding back, told Tim about what he’d seen and what he’d deduced.
 

“I know Claude,” said Tim, his eyes darkening.
 

“And?”
 

“He’s a bastard. You should tell Timken what you just told me when you see him.”
 

“Tell Timken?” said Reginald. And then he realized what Tim was saying: Reginald needed to inform Timken that the his running mate had crashed the TGVs and ended untold numbers of human lives and the life of at least one vampire Deacon.
 

“Timken was
behind
it,” Reginald said.
 

Tim laughed. “You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”
 

But the difference between Reginald and a wacko conspiracy theorist was that, in this case, the conspiracy was real. Although, that was exactly what all of the wacko conspiracy theorists said, too.

There had been three TGVs that had crashed. A second vampire leader had been killed afterward. That couldn’t all have been Claude and the Annihilists, could it? The TGVs had been on their way to the Paris summit. The disruption of the summit and the loss of all those leaders had benefited Timken, hadn’t it?

“Even if Claude
was
behind it, and even if it wasn’t just his men and his money, which it easily could have been, that crash benefitted any vampire leader who survived it,” said Tim. “
Including
your man Karl.”
 

But the implication that Karl could be to blame was absurd. Claude had walked through the train looking for Karl so that he could kill him. Reginald had heard it himself. It had been almost serendipitous, the way that sweep squad, led by Claude himself, had talked about killing Karl right under where Reginald was trapped. Right where the passenger manifest placed him. Right where Claude found him later, when Reginald had glamoured him.
 

Reginald shook the thought away.
 

“Besides,” said Tim, “we’re not executioners. That’s for the courts to decide.”

His mind was suddenly full of unwelcome doubts. It had seemed so painfully, obviously clear that Timken was in league with Claude in the TGV incident, but now he was having trouble putting the pieces together. Did he know of any direct and damning connection between Claude and Timken? He knew of a connection between Claude and Maurice, and he knew of a connection between Timken and Karl, but other than the fact that Timken had chosen Claude as his running mate, he didn’t have any proof that they’d been in league when the trains had derailed.
 

But
Timken
was the man with the gun.
Timken
was the man who’d staged a coup.
Timken
was the one who commanded six hundred troops that had swelled to over a thousand.
Timken
was the one who was siphoning new vampires straight out of orientation and into the Young Seditionists. It was all so obvious.
 

Reginald looked out the window into the night, then down at the silver handcuffs around his wrists.
 

Anyway, Tim had explained, the very fact that Reginald’s ID had been so active on Fangbook had in itself been curious. Reginald used to never use Fangbook, and now he was all over it. So when the watchdogs had reported the spike to Timken, Timken had made a phone call. The man on the other end of the phone had already been prepared, was already ready. And the rest was history.
 

The plane landed in New York and, thanks to a bit more human/vampire cooperation (proceeding swimmingly these days, that was), Reginald found himself spending the day in a holding cell in JFK airport while the sound of tens of thousands of human airline passengers marched by outside, disrupting his sleep. Tim didn’t sleep either, and neither did Rolf.
 

Instead, they opened a laptop and logged in to a vampire news site. Reginald, unable to sleep across the room, was able to see the screen, and watched himself being caught red-handed during the raid as filmed through Tim’s helmet camera, the fat vampire’s hands up and his face ugly with guilt.

V
AMPIRE
S
POCK

REGINALD SAT IN THE STARK white holding cell, feeling deja vu.
 

The now-permanent holding area of the Council structure hadn’t changed during Timken’s remodeling project. Reginald felt a flash back to a year ago, seeing himself as he was back when he was first turned, facing execution for being an inferior representative of his race. The white walls were the same. The silver bars were the same. The disorientation — the feeling that he didn’t know which way was up because everything was smooth and white and featureless — was the same.
 

Again, Reginald was the prisoner. The only change was that this time, it almost felt as if he’d done something wrong, and perhaps even deserved to be here.
 

The one addition to the holding area was a television, which had been mounted in a corner near the ceiling. It couldn’t be a true television, of course, because it was broadcasting vampire news, so it had to actually be a fullscreen feed off of a vampire news site. It seemed to repeat on an hour-long cycle. Stories had changed a few times throughout the eight cycles Reginald had seen — breaking news added as older news filtered out. The election scandal hadn’t moved and had been featured in full each cycle, with new bits added each time as new events came to light.
 

The American Vampire Nation election had been disrupted by a group of sophisticated hackers. The method that this insurgent group had used to hack the supposedly unhackable system was, as of now, still unclear. However, the population should be assured by the fact that secondary safeguards had detected the fraud in time, though authorities were not divulging the methods through which they’d determined that the results were being tampered with. The group was led by Reginald Baskin, who became famous as an aide to Maurice Toussant, the former Deacon who’d seized power in a coup when…
 

The sights and sounds droned through Reginald’s mind in a neverending haze. The loop repeated, and it was like going back in time. Again he was arrested, his hands in the air, a damning hacker’s laptop on the desk in front of him. Again he was escorted from the Chateau de Differdange in the quaint European country of Luxembourg, which was home to the European Union’s Vampire Council. Others — such as former Deacon Maurice Toussant and EU Deacon Karl Stromm — had not been implicated in the crime and were, as yet, considered innocent of wrongdoing.