Dracula's Ghost: Apocalypse - Chapter 12
Part II: And the Sea Gave Up Its Dead...
I.
Dracula
1893
Doolittle’s Wharf, London
He scatters his money about hastily, seeking the first ship bound for the Black Sea, and though the boater’s hat partly conceals his face and the eyes are obscured by tinted spectacles, the men in the office avoid his stare and flinch at the rancid odor that wafts from his clothes. They direct him to a ship named the Czarina Catherine, and he halts at the shore-end of the gangplank.
“Send the captain to me,” he says.
When the box, at last, is loaded onto the ship, he leaves. “Have your arse here in an hour,” the captain says, “or you can bloody well stay in London.” He smiles and nods, for the little man can bluster to his heart’s content – he already knows that the ship will remain in port until he is ready to leave. The fog is already rolling in as he walks away, seeming to float in the mist as he vanishes up a cobblestone street. As he walks, a rat darts from a nearby alley and follows.
The Czarina Catherine is sailing for Varna, but with enemies on his trail, he has made alternate plans through an agent named De Ville, an unscrupulous man who has arranged a series of dead-ends and false trails to throw off his pursuers, and he will disembark not in Varna, but in Galatz. He is tempted to pay a final visit to Mina Harker, for it would please him to leave her bloodless corpse as a memento of his departure, but Mina can wait – he is already planning his return, and he will deal with them all in his own good time. More rats follow as he turns a darkened corner, but he does not acknowledge their presence. The agent’s office is at the end of a dark alleyway, and he pushes the door open as he removes the hat and glasses. There is no need for an invitation, for he has crossed the threshold many times, and no further need of disguises.
There is, however, a loose thread to be snipped.
“Mr. De Ville.” He leaves the door open as he enters. Behind him, the street outside is teeming with rats.
II.
London
1986
In April, an accident at a nuclear reactor near the city of Pripyat causes a panic, for the meltdown threatens to contaminate a large swath of Europe, but when few deaths are reported, governments from Warsaw to London breathe a slow sigh of relief as the crisis recedes. The war in Afghanistan reaches a bloody climax, but the Soviet leader has already given the instruction to his generals – you have one year to win. The mujahadeen, bolstered by American money and American weapons, are no closer to defeat after seven years of fighting, and Moscow is growing weary of the dead and maimed who flow north from Central Asia. The same leader allows a degree of openness that his subjects have not known for seven decades and unwittingly lights a fuse that will detonate beneath the foundations of the Iron Curtain.
A Romanian defector, a former lawyer relegated to janitorial work for his sins against the regime, arrives in London at the end of summer and publishes a monograph on the conditions inside Romania’s orphanages. His writings will be ignored for another two years, but Quincy Morris follows his work with great interest. “The children live in appalling squalor,” he writes, “and sometimes they disappear, spirited away by the Securitate. Rumors abound that they are taken north to the foothills of the Carpathians, their fate unknown.” When the lawyer is murdered in his apartment, Special Branch suspects a pair of men employed by the Romanian embassy, likely agents of the Securitate, and when both men vanish, the police assume that they have fled the country to avoid prosecution. In reality, the pair have fallen into the hands of Quincy Morris, and at the end of a long interrogation, their bodies have been dumped into The Long Water at Kensington Gardens, drained of blood and weighed down by heavy stones. After years of waiting, he is reasonably confident of his enemy’s intentions, and the outlines of a plan take shape in his mind.
III.
Aboard the Ceres
1989
Penkovsky let Sergei take the lead as they descended into the hold; his own military training had been rudimentary, and clearing an interior structure was a deadly game best left to a professional. Sergei took the first few steps with a practiced mixture of speed and caution, checking the low angles for immediate threats and quickly withdrawing. No gunshots erupted from below, and they moved as a group onto the metal grate of the landing. Penkovsky’s heart thudded fearfully as they moved downward, for the initial descent was the most dangerous part of their assault – the staircase was a deadly funnel, and a few well-placed bullets could kill them all in seconds. Only we’re not hunting a shooter, he thought. He had the impression, half-formed but dreadful, of stalking a tiger through an empty forest, and despite their firepower, the tiger retained the advantage through speed and stealth. It would take no more than a springing leap, a quick rush, and the killer would be upon them with claws and teeth. I wonder if I’ll have time to scream before he tears out my throat. They halted as Sergei held up one hand, and Iosif played the beam of his torch down the metal staircase. Penkovsky saw it almost immediately, but it took a moment for his brain to catalog the sight – a pair of boots lying in the empty space below the staircase. Sergei aimed the rifle, then reconsidered, and caution was forgotten as they rapidly descended the remaining steps.
From the temperature of the skin, he guessed that Oleg had been dead at least twelve hours, but there were no visible injuries, and the condition of the body troubled Penkovsky more than the nearness of death itself. He had seen a great many dead men, their lives ripped away by shrapnel or leaking from a score of bullet wounds, but Oleg bore none of the usual pallor mortis, and his limbs, though cold, were supple. He could be sleeping, the captain thought uneasily. At the far end of the hold, a noise disrupted his reverie, and Penkovsky jumped as Sergei’s mouth curved downward into an angry scowl. Stupid. They had allowed their vigilance to flag, distracted by the dead man, and they were easy prey in the darkness.
Penkovsky took the lead as they resumed their advance, for the engine room lay beyond the hold, and he wanted no wild shots that would leave them stranded. Large bales of cotton fabric hemmed them to a narrow passageway, and he realized that the hold proper was far more dangerous than the staircase, for the stacked cargo provided innumerable ambush points – an assailant could shoot from a high angle or push a heavy bale onto the unsuspecting men – and he felt naked and exposed as they advanced down the narrow passageway, five steps, then ten, then fifteen. He took a careful sidestep, barely noticing the wooden box in the center of the aisle, and their tormentor revealed itself in wide eyes, a tangle of red hair, and a frightened expression.
A girl. Sergei raised his rifle, and Penkovsky sidestepped, blocking the killer’s field of fire as his own eyes bulged with amazement. How could a girl cause so much mayhem?
IV.
Bucharest
The phone rang, as he had known that it would, and Iulian Vlad picked up the receiver.
“Did you hear of the disaster at the Presidential Palace?” There was silence on the other end of the line. “This is your last chance to help yourself, lieutenant. Deliver him now, and I can see that you are rewarded – otherwise, from this moment forward, you can consider yourself a co-conspirator. What will it be?”
“I received a message yesterday.” Albert Bud’s voice was unsteady. “We never talk on the phone, and we rarely talk in person unless we are outside – less chance of being overheard that way.”
Very smart of him, the Director General thought. That information alone would be sufficient to have the colonel arrested, and once they had him in custody, interrogation would fill in the blanks. Conspiracy against Party and state, conspiracy against the President, conspiracy against the Securitate… The last was of primary importance, for it removed the taint of disgrace from his own person. “What did the message say?”
“Nothing specific other than the date and location of our next meeting… Are you sure this is necessary, sir?”
“It is vitally important, Albert, and when the truth is exposed, you will be a hero to the Romanian people. Now,” Iulian Vlad paused, searching for a pen and paper, “tell me where this meeting will take place.”
V.
Aboard the Ceres
“I say we cut her up and feed her to the fish.” Sergei’s eyes focused with the blank stare of a viper as the girl trembled in the glare of Penkovsky’s torch.
“Do you really think she could have killed the others?”
“Who cares?” The idea was ludicrous, but Sergei was at a loss for a better explanation, and he slung the rifle across one shoulder as he drew a knife. “She isn’t supposed to be here – and since she is here, we can’t let her off the boat. First, though, we question her.”
He switched to a new tongue, one that he had learned through hours of study in Moscow. “Do you speak English?”
“Nederlands.” The girl tapped her chest and spoke in an incomprehensible tangle of syllables. She doesn’t understand – or pretends not to, hoping to fool us.
“In my experience, the Dutch speak English quite fluently.” Sergei caressed the edge of the blade with one thumb. “I’ll give you five seconds to remember your English lessons, and then I’m going to begin cutting. Now… what the fuck are you doing on this boat?”
“All right, I can speak English!” The girl shouted with a quavering cry. “I ran away from home and stowed away on the ship to get out of Copenhagen, I didn’t know…”
“Ran away?” He studied her face carefully. “You haven’t eaten or bathed in a few days, but you’re far too well-fed for a transient. Perhaps the loss of a finger will change your story.”
He stepped forward with the knife and felt a strong grip on his upper arm. Sergei half-turned, ready to strike his attacker, but Alex Penkovsky did not flinch. He knows I can’t kill him, because someone needs to get us to land. The captain spoke, breaking the impasse.
“Ask her who else is aboard.”
“Four men have died since we left Copenhagen,” he said to the girl, “and as of this moment, my opinion is that you are responsible for their deaths. My companion seems to believe otherwise, so would you care to enlighten us if there is anyone else aboard who… ran away from home?”
Sergei watched carefully as her eyes flicked toward the wooden box. The German had insisted on the importance of sealing (the coffin?) it with metal bands but had revealed nothing of its contents, and Sergei, who did not ask what he did not need to know, had accepted Acwulf’s secrecy. Now, the sight of that wooden crate left him agitated and uncertain. Could it hold the secret to our mysterious intruder? He made up his mind immediately.
“Let’s open it and see what’s inside.”
The woman moved with surprising quickness, and Sergei had no more than half-turned when her hand connected with Penkovsky’s jaw. The blow was not especially powerful, but the big man rocked backward on his heels, taken by surprise, as the girl feinted, ducked, and shot past them toward the staircase. Sergei grabbed her wrist, and a pang of fear shot through him as she twisted free of his grasp. If she closes the door, we’ll be stuck here until sunset, he thought, then Iosif’s punch, delivered with a boxer’s precision, connected with her head. The girl stumbled, slammed into a heavy bale of denim, and fell to the ground, moaning. Sergei retrieved the knife. His fingers gripped the haft with white knuckles, but the eyes remained flat and expressionless.
“The box.” Penkovsky stood over the prostrate woman. “We need to open it, remember?”
“First, we kill her…”
“No. We keep her alive, and we continue to question her – she must know something.”
“All right.” Sergei swiped at his thinning hair with his free hand, and though a hint of a smile touched the face, his eyes remained locked upon the captain’s. “We open the box, and then we question her. And when we’re finished, she goes over the side.”
The lid was fixed in place with heavy nails, but they found a prybar in a toolkit beneath the stairs (Sergei winced as his foot nudged Oleg’s body) and worked the lever into the seam until one corner came free. The box was plain but well-constructed, and Sergei, whose appreciation for craftsmanship was mostly utilitarian, found himself impressed – someone had taken pains to ensure that the container remained closed. Then why the insistence on metal bands? The final nails came loose, and they lifted the lid. The box was perhaps three-quarters filled with old loam, and Sergei probed with the tip of his knife, unwilling to touch the soil with bare hands, as Penkovsky threw the prybar across the hold. There was nothing concealed within the soil, and Sergei’s eyes wandered over the bales of denim. Something is badly wrong, and we can’t figure it out.
“Forget it.” Sergei returned the knife to his belt and grabbed the girl’s arm. “Let’s get her upstairs and find out what she knows.”
VI.
They restarted the engines and marched her to the wheelhouse, and the captain adjusted the ship’s heading as Katrina stared through the window, studying the waves as the sea rose and fell. “Be grateful,” her grandfather’s shade whispered, and the voice was tinged with saturnine glee. “They’re going to kill you, but at least you’ll die in the open air.” The third man, a thin pockmarked figure with a heavy mustache, slouched at the door, uninterested in the proceedings. He made no overt threat, but Katrina noted the pistol tucked into the waistband of his trousers.
“You’re older than I thought.” Sergei’s voice was polite, but his eyes bored into her own. “Life is hard where I come from, and the peasants are old by thirty, but Westerners have such soft faces that I mistook you for a child. Would you care to tell me what you are doing aboard our ship?”
“I already told you what happened,” she said. The interrogator spoke to his companion in Russian, and the heavyset man became agitated as his eyes darted from Sergei’s face to her own.
“In the Soviet Union, assertions of innocence are considered unequivocal proof of guilt, and though I find it difficult to believe that you slipped from the hold and killed the crew, to accept that you know nothing at all? Impossible. So, tell me who else is aboard the ship.”
“You saw the hold,” she said. “You saw the empty box. No one else is down there, and I was locked inside.”
“But that would mean that someone else killed the crew, either our friend Penkovsky –” Sergei gestured toward the heavy man – “Iosif, or myself. I am certain of my own innocence, I trust Iosif, and our captain has been busy in the wheelhouse, and that can mean only one thing – you are lying. I would prefer to avoid further unpleasantness, so I will give you a final opportunity. Why don’t you tell us the truth?”
Why not indeed? Katrina could guess at the fate of the crew, and if she revealed everything – about Quincy Morris, her journey to Romania, about Dracula – perhaps her captors would let her live. She opened her mouth to speak, but her lips could not form the words; the truth was even less believable than a lie. Sergei, with his dead, reptilian eyes, would scoff at her tale, and a confession would not delay the inevitable. Unless… She glanced through the window at the darkening sky.
“You’re right,” she said, talking quickly. “There must be another person on board, because someone brought me food and water. I don’t know how he gets out of the hold, but he must wait until I’m asleep because I’ve never seen or heard him –”
“I believe you,” the interrogator said, cutting her off. Sergei nodded to Iosif, and though the thin man’s expression retained its listless ennui, she caught the lively sparkle around his eyes. This is what he’s been waiting for.
“The old ways are fading, and soon, the motherland will be like every western country – blue jeans, rock and roll music, and money – especially money.” Sergei moved to block the doorway as she stumbled to her feet, her legs shaking. “I am not immune to the charms of western decadence, and I was paid a hefty sum to steal this ship – a bounty that I cannot enjoy if a witness survives to identify my face. I do hope you will understand.”
Katrina Van Helsing looked for a means of escape as Penkovsky stared at them in shock. Five minutes, she thought, no more than five minutes until sunset. She staggered backward – five minutes were an eternity when she had only seconds left.
She cringed against the metal wall as Iosif raised his pistol.