Vampire "Unseen" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 2) (11 page)

It was part of the project to hurt Nisha.

He had a few other components for her. Electronic reed switches, neodymium magnets, dark brown glass bottles, industrial bleach, heavy duty padlocks and long lengths of chain. He almost couldn’t wait to see the reaction on her face when she saw what he was going to do to her with all of this stuff. She would scream and scream and scream; and nobody would be able to hear her.

----- X -----

Latis arrived back at his apartment in Brasov. His eyes were red and his throat hoarse from a journey that swung from yelling at the top of his voice to quietly crying. He closed the door and leaned against it. He felt empty. As though every last ounce of feeling had drained from his body. He was a shell. It took him forty minutes to pluck up the courage to make the phone call.

“Chief Lupescu please, it’s Corneliu Latis.”

The phone made a slow dull beeping noise to remind him he was on hold. He didn’t expect Lupescu to respond but after a while the beeping changed to a ringing sound and was answered.

“Cornel, it’s Ion. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve just got back from visiting Doctor Lucian Noica.” He wanted to be firm but knew he sounded broken. “Noica said I’m transferred to him, to his... place, his thing whatever it is, and that it was arranged by you. Is this true?”

“It is true, Cornel. Congratulations on your new assignment.”

“But... but... I don’t want it. Don’t you think you should check with me first?”

“I don’t have to check with you, Cornel. I tell you how things are, that’s the way it works. You’re with Noica from now on. Did he tell you about your pay raise?”

“No?”

“Well, congratulations, you’re getting a serious upgrade of about ten percent... And you should be happy?”

Cornelius cleared his throat. “Am I still a policeman?”

Lupescu audibly sighed. “Cornel, you haven’t been a policeman for more than two years.”

“I fucking knew you would do this one day. This stinks Ion, you’ve fucked me over and...”

“Hey!” Lupescu interrupted. “I just did you a huge favour. You are a disgrace as a detective, Cornel, and you know that.” Lupescu softened his tone to be more sympathetic. “Cornel, you compromised your last investigations by being so strung out. Your days were already numbered here and, I suppose I can tell you this now, but you were up for a fitness review in the next few months that you would not have passed. You would have lost your job, you would have been dismissed. You were only months away from losing everything. When this thing came up I moved a fucking mountain to swing it for you. I’ve just got you a lateral transfer to a cushy government job with a big pay raise, so don’t make out like I’ve fucked you over. You are not fit for duty and I’ve just handed you a lifeline. Oh, and the reason I didn’t tell you in advance was things moved fast and I didn’t have a chance. By doing this you keep your pension, your benefits, in fact you’re still legally a police officer.”

“But you didn’t give me a choice.” Latis almost screeched the words.

“You want a choice? Here’s your choice. You can either turn up for work here and be a non-policeman for the next few months and lose your job at the fitness evaluation, or you can go and be a vampire hunter with Noica for a big pay raise.”

Latis went silent.

Lupescu went silent.

“Cornelius,” Lupescu said after a delay. “This is a good deal for you. You’ll get a letter in the next few days explaining the terms of your transfer. Read it. Think it over.”

Cornel sniffed a little, he tried to hum or make some sound of acknowledgement but little sound came out. Tears formed in his eyes.

“I don’t even know what this Noica wants of me.”

“Vampire hunting, I just told you. Did he not say?”

“No, really, what does he want?”

“That is what he wants. Apparently he is the go-to guy for unexplained violent crimes and he needs an experienced investigator.”

“I don’t believe in vampires,” Cornel said. He sounded defeated. Half of him had just been knocked out and lay unconscious, the other half had given up in resignation. His fight, his spirit had just now, right at that moment, broken into pieces.

The call ended.

He opened a bottle of whisky. He drank from it. He didn’t need a glass.

Fuck this place.

It had all gone wrong in Brasov. He had no friends here. He used to have friends, but then he was working around Europe, living in hotels, away for months at a time and when he finally returned home he was so changed by the experience he wanted nothing to do with anyone. More importantly, nobody wanted anything to do with him. He was so locked in his own world of misery he alienated everybody he spoke to.

Fuck the job.

It had all gone wrong with Europol. The girls in Albania had been the final straw. Rotting corpses in the boot of a car abandoned by the side of a road. No attempt had been made to hide them. It was all part of a story that nobody cared to understand. The girls’ chest cavities had been opened and emptied, their naked breasts hung on the outside of wide open ribcages. All their eyes were missing, the corneas taken for transplantation. They looked like meat carcasses in a butcher’s window except for the details, the cheap earrings, the chipped nail polish, the rose tattoo on an ankle, the bruises on their inner thighs from rough trade. Four dead girls piled up like rotting meat in the boot of a car with dark red holes where their eyes should have been.

He felt now much as he had when he’d returned that time from Albania. He’d come home to Brasov with the images of four dead girls painted on his inner eyelids and found nobody to talk to about it. He prayed in church, he cried, he got drunk and went to a topless bar. He paid to fuck one of the dancers. He’d never paid for sex before in his life and it left him with a crushing lack of self worth. Why had he done it? A prostitute? He hated this world and he hated the sex for money business more than anything. Yet when he’d been at his lowest point he’d gone to a prostitute and drank himself into oblivion.

He spent much time in prayer but he never went into a church again. He spent much time watching pornography but never had sex again. Porn and prayer and alcohol had become his life. It was hardly surprising that Lupescu didn’t want him anymore.

Fuck everything.

He wandered into the lounge and slumped into an armchair several years passed its replacement date. He chugged on the bottle of whisky and turned on the television. Sex movies on cable TV. Twenty four hours a day of filth.

“I don’t care,” he slurred. “I just don’t fucking care anymore.”

There was a low budget lesbian scene on TV. An older woman was using a pink dildo on a younger girl. Handheld camera. Russian language. No set, costumes or lighting. He fucking hated it. Yet he watched, and he drank as he watched.

Girls who fucked for money in porn films tormented him because they didn’t know they would end up gutted in a car boot. They laughed and moaned and begged for more, for harder, for on their tits, for in their ass... stupid women who ended up enslaved and destroyed at the hands of ruthless men, begging for their lives, screaming in pain, addicted to drugs, forced to degrade themselves for basic needs. That was how it ended. Corneliu knew it because he’d lived it.

Porn and prayer and alcohol. Uppers and downers. Stimulation and suppression. Sex films made his heart pound and alcohol numbed him towards unconsciousness.

He didn’t watch sex films because he was a pervert. No. That wasn’t true. It was research and preparation. In his head it was his job to rescue these poor girls from traffickers and pimps and whorehouses. He had to watch. It was a noble act to watch, because he was doing it for the good of these women; he was doing it to armour himself and to know his enemy and boost his courage. He did it to know the wants and desires of an industry. A powerhouse meat grinder that sucked in poor defenceless girls and spat them out ground up in the boot of a car in Albania with flies buzzing around their corpses.

That was what he’d convinced himself. Watching porn was a noble act; but now he wasn’t going to be doing that job he no longer had an excuse to watch.

Tears over his cheeks. They didn’t want him. The police, his job, his career, nobody wanted him. “Please God,” he whispered in a prayer that was so weak he couldn’t even bring his hands together in worship. “Please help me. I don’t know how to do this anymore.”

----- X -----

The library of University College London was protected behind barriers and under constant security. As one of the world’s best medical schools, the library of UCL was literally a goldmine of medical texts and research. Paul had prowled the grounds a few times finding it easy to access the campus but impossible to get into the research areas without being a student or staff.

That was when he had spotted the job vacancy on a notice board.

“Are you Joseph Frady?” The girl asked with the thickest Spanish accent. “I am Doctor Isabel Ventosa.” She was young and slender with thick rimmed geeky glasses.

Paul smiled and shook her hand. “I am,” he said proudly. “I am Joseph Frady.”

They walked from the library to her laboratory in the genetics department. He had expected it to be space-age and high-tech, instead it was made up of wooden benches with floor to ceiling wooden shelf units overflowing with glass bottles and vials. There was a haphazardness to it. Tape of different colours fixed to flasks and bottles with hand written details on them. Nothing was new. It all looked old and worn. Not what he expected for cutting edge genetic research.

“So you have much experience of tropical fish it says,” she was reading the letter he’d sent.

“I do. My family had a pet store in Vancouver. I’m British, I was born here, but all of my life I’ve been tending fish. Like I said in my letter, for the past four years I was employed by Peter Van Oostrum who is quite a famous hedge fund manager, he’s mega rich, a billionaire... and he had this huge fish collection. I was employed to take care of it. But he has legal troubles and has returned to Zurich. He sold his house including the fish collection but the new owners don’t want the fish...” he dipped his head a little. “I’m suddenly unemployed.”

Isabel Ventosa smiled at him. “Well. What we do here is probably very boring for you. Come with me, I show you our fish. We have fifty thousand of them.”

She led Paul down some stairs and into a clean area that required him to wear a lab coat, overshoes and a hairnet. From there she pulled open a sliding door to reveal a staggering sight. Tens of thousands of bio-luminescent zebra fish swam in small plastic tanks. Genetically engineered to glow in the dark. Fifty thousand little glow-sticks flowed and darted and sparkled in row after row from floor to ceiling.

“This is what we do,” she said. “We insert a jellyfish gene into the fish in different places on the genome, then breed them for research.”

“What kind of research?”

“Brain development mostly. How we do this is we splice the HPF into a gene for a brain cell, then watch as a fertilized egg begins to divide. When one of the cells starts to glow we know it is a brain cell. We can identify it the moment the stem cell becomes a brain cell.”

“Ah ha,” Joseph Frady commented whilst examining the inflow and outflow pipes to the tanks. “But tell me, I’m judging that these small tanks are three litres but there’s no gravel. For fifty thousand fish I was expecting reverse flow filtration through gravel to maintain a healthy bacterial count in the water. Obviously you’re using external filtration, but your waste absorption needs must be huge if it all goes to a central unit.”

Ventosa smiled broadly. “You know this is a very undemanding role. We normally hire only students to do it and normally they aren’t scientists. It’s so nice to hear someone interested in the job.”

Joseph Frady smiled. “I’m a fish keeper, Doctor Ventosa.” He turned back and rested his fingertips on one of the tanks. “I love fish.”

----- X -----

Corneliu arrived in London finding himself taking smaller and smaller steps until he’d practically ground to a halt. He was still inside Heathrow airport listening to inane announcements over the public address. He didn’t want to be here. His masters didn’t care how he felt. He was of such little importance to them that his career could be casually tossed aside without a second thought. Uncaring people who didn’t have the courtesy to tell him, let alone ask him. He was the last one to know he was being transferred to... to what?

Throughout the flight he had wondered whether he should have stayed at the police and refused to transfer. Future be damned. Go to the fitness review, fail, lose the job and blow your brains out.

Fuck ‘em all.

Blow their brains out too.

This is how office shootings begin; with little men pushed too far until one day they snap, turn up at their workplace and kill their boss. Their last opportunity to get even before they were ground out by life.

If only he had the courage to do that instead of being a little man who did what he was told. He had already been drinking on the plane but took another shot in the bar before riding a taxi to his hotel in Victoria. A four star dump for tourists and cheap business travellers. The room was clean and the amenities agreeable but the area was dirty. Litter blew in the street. Tourist coaches stood end to end picking up and taking away visitors as their idling engines coughed out noxious fumes. Checking in to the hotel meant standing in a miserable line with sixty Japanese sightseers, all adorned with tourist maps and cameras around their necks. They were full of smiles at the beginning of their holiday. Corneliu couldn’t even raise his head. They had gotten rid of him.

He packed his clothes away into a few drawers and hung his suit in the wardrobe. He set up his laptop on the small desk at the foot of the bed and then went out to buy alcohol. A bottle of bourbon was priority but to add insult to his already injured self-esteem he wouldn’t be able to drink it as he was booked to meet with a Europol representative at Scotland Yard a few hundred yards from the hotel, then later he was to have a live video call with Noica. No getting drunk just yet. The bastards even controlled his life enough to force a timetable on when he could drink himself into a stupor.