His hearing was clearer. He approached one of the men with rifles. "Why are they all disguised as priests?" All pretence of his Langley charade had gone from him. He only wanted answers. "Why?"

The man looked concerned. "You're mistaken, Phoenix. They aren't disguised as priests. Those are the Jesuits. They are priests." Fifteen The yellow Emergency Task Force police van drove slowly down the middle of the dark street. Only its parking lights were on. The driver had been instructed to see as little as possible.

One of the men escorting Helman to the TV truck turned to the police van. The van stopped. The driver, not in uniform but in a plain suit, got out and walked away, still keeping to the middle of the road. Though the man with the rifle had said nothing, the driver left with his hands in a half-raised position. At the end of the street, he ran.

Helman watched in awe as the man ran away. Who were these people to control the police? He waited by the back doors of the TV truck. More figures with guns had emerged from the shadows. Three watched him, their weapons ready. Others dragged bodies, some from inside the townhouse, toward the police van. In the silence and the night, it was a nightmare image of ghouls invading a graveyard, carrying off their carrion plunder. The winter evening was cold. Helman shivered. 'Jesuits' was not a code word. They were the bodies of priests. Priests who fought gunfire with crossbows. Priests who walked into a Miami restaurant and sliced Max Telford's head from his body with a wire garrotte.

The door to the TV van swung open. Four men were inside, seated on a bench in front of a console of television screens and radio equipment. Helman had been right about the surveillance role of the van. He had also been right in his other assumption.

A man with a telephone company employee badge clipped to his open parka was bound hand and foot in front of the console. One sleeve of his parka was ripped away, exposing a bare arm. A rubber tubing tourniquet was wrapped around the arm above the elbow. The man sitting beside him held a hypodermic. The people in the telephone truck had been the losers.

A voice from the back of the truck spoke. Helman saw the barest outline of a face weakly lit by the green glow of the console. "Now give them the clearance for the first police van. Tell them to send an ambulance next."

The captive man spoke a string of code words into the microphone. Whoever the people in the telephone truck had been, they were the ones who had controlled the police. But now the men in the cable truck controlled the man with the code words. Command was too fragile a thing when placed in the hands of faceless men and whispered words which carried too many meanings. Leaders could change instantly, and the people beneath them would never know.

Helman knew it had happened before. It had happened again.

By the conversations crackling from the radio equipment, Helman realised the whole area of Leung's neighbourhood was under police cordon. Anything could happen in this area. Only after the evidence had been eradicated would the local authorities be allowed in to piece together some sanitised version of the truth. Anything could happen. Helman began to plan his escape.

The green-lit man spoke again. "Tell them they can move in when the ambulance and this van leave. The operation is terminated."

The captive man complied. The figure with the hypodermic waited till he was finished and an affirmative response came through the speakers. Then he plunged the steely tip of the hypodermic into the neck of the captive. He shuddered once. His already drug-glazed eyes gave no indication of the passing of life. Then he slumped forward.

The man with the hypodermic caught him and pushed him out to a guard waiting beside Helman.

"Put him in the police van. Keep the civilian for the ambulance."

The bound, lifeless body was dragged through the street to the yellow van. It seemed filled with bodies. The clean up was extensive. The battle had been savage. Helman felt trapped in another century. He mentally ran through his escape attempts. None were feasible against so many men with guns.

"Is that Phoenix?" said the green-lit man, pointing to Helman. His guard nodded. "Marker One's in the basement.

Hold Phoenix till he comes out. We'll have a police escort to the airport by then."

The door to the van swung shut. Most of the armed men were clustered around the police truck. An ambulance with only its parking lights on rolled silently down the street. The men by Helman were distracted and he reacted instantly.

His flattened palm drove splinters of the closest man's nose up into his forebrain. His heel caught the second above the kneecap with a dull crunching sound. The second man jerked forward and Helman's elbow drove into the top of his unprotected skull. The third man had time to realise what was happening and back stepped, swinging his rifle stock up in a killing blow. Helman pushed his hand along the whistling stock and diverted it from his chin. The man's arms swung up, leaving him open to Helman's crushing punch below the sternum. The man faltered backward again, the rifle spiralling from his hands. His breath had left him in an explosive rasp. Helman connected on the man's jaw with his foot. The man slammed against the side of the van and was down. Footsteps clattered behind him. Helman grabbed a rifle and ran to the front of the van. He fired a wild burst from the protection of the engine compartment, then zigzagged to the closest house. No shots rang out behind him. The footsteps stopped. He was free.

Back in the shadows of the darkened houses around the townhouse, Helman put down the rifle and freed his magnum from the shoulder holster gone awry.

He cut through the backyards. No one seemed in pursuit. Maybe the thought that he was from the CIA had scared off the followers. Maybe they thought he could not escape the police barricades. If they did, they were wrong.

Police were police. He had no trouble slipping by them. Their attention was focused on the wooden barricades and congestion of cars which had formed around the closed off streets. There were crowds of curious residents and passersby. Many had gathered around a film crew from a local television station. Helman moved into them, moved through them, and was gone.

The man on the driveway, the man whom arrows had first bounced off, then killed, had said that they knew all about Helman, thinking he was someone called Phoenix. If they knew about him but had not tried to locate him at his hotel room, then they did not know everything. There was one place in this city where he would be safe. He headed for his hotel. He did not reflect on what had happened. He could not bring himself to believe it.

Standing in the hotel corridor, peering through the darkened doorway, Helman could tell that his room had been altered from the way he had left it. It might have been the maids. It might have been a penetration. He did not reach up to turn on the lights. He slipped in quickly, holding his magnum exposed, and shut the door behind him so he would not be a backlit target in the doorframe.

There was no movement from the room.

He took two steps down the short hallway and pushed the bathroom door open with the barrel of his gun. The bathroom was empty.

Two more steps and he was around the corner. The curtain's to the balcony window were half open and let in enough city light for Helman to see that the room was clear. He walked warily into the middle of it, checking between beds and at the end of the long, low dresser. The room was secure.

He bolstered his magnum and slipped off his coat, throwing it to the middle of one of the beds. Slowly the events of that evening came to him. He had shut them out of his mind as he had returned to his hotel, concentrating on the telltale signs of a follower. He knew what would happen if he stopped to consider the confusion and the madness of the explosion in the lab and the fire fight in the residential street. Now, safe in his hotel room, sanctuary from the violence of the night, it happened to him. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring without sight at the floor, his mind reeling.

Nothing he could think of, no scenario he could imagine, could explain the conflict he was involved in. There was far more to it than a group in New York hiring him to commit a murder; far more than a woman with a tropical disease.

Somehow, someone believed him to be an operative of the CIA and accepted it, as if someone from the CIA should be involved. And the Jesuits. Priests with crossbows who killed. Nothing could explain it. He was desperate for answers; desperate for some grain of sanity for his impossible world. He would phone his sister. Hear her voice. Be transported to the reality of a farmhouse in New England, far from the madness of things which did not seem real.

Desperate for peace, desperate for answers, Helman reached for the phone on the night table between the beds. There was a movement on the balcony. The answer had arrived.

Hand on the phone, his head jerked up as the flicker of a shadow swept across the floor, and he saw her, Adrienne St. Clair. Her look of hatred was unimaginable. The sense of power in her eyes froze him. In that long, silent moment she pressed her blade-clad body tight to the glass balcony door. Her face de-formed against its flatness, her palms spread like dough against the glass. Her eyes seemed to grow, coming at him, coming for him. And the silence was broken by the first crystalline splinter of glass as a delicate web spread first from one hand, then from another, cracking through the length of the balcony door like jets of water. Then the door exploded in a blizzard of glass and she was in and coming for him. She whined, high pitched and angry. She came for him.

The crash of the glass freed Helman from his paralysis. His instincts took over. He threw himself backward off the bed, springing to his feet and drawing his magnum He held it on her.

"No more or I'll fire." His voice was almost inaudible. Terror constricted his throat.

Adrienne St. Clair still moved forward. Her whining stopped, replaced by a deep rattling wheeze. She was growling at him.

Helman fired. The magnum bucked violently, silently, in his hand. He saw the black cloth against her skin erupt and shred. He saw the drapes behind her billow out as the bullet's shock waves tore through them. He saw her white skin untouched.

Adrienne St. Clair still moved forward. He fired again and again till the hammer clicked empty and her black clothing hung in shreds. Still she came toward him.

He was backed against the wall. Her hand reached out and took him by the neck. Small and delicate he saw in the heightened awareness of time-slowing panic. She's just a girl, he thought. What harm can she do?

The small and delicate hand of the woman who had just taken six point blank hits of a weapon designed to deliver a fatality with each body impact closed around Helman's throat and slowly lifted him into the air, pushing him against the wall, his feet to dangle inches above the Carpet.

Black stars exploded at the edges of Helman's vision. His neck felt as if it would burst beneath his ears. His lungs burned for air but his struggles could not bend the thin arm an inch from its hold upon him. His movements slowed, a red haze filled the room. The woman spoke.

"I shall make this offer once. You will agree to tell me everything about what has brought you here to me or I shall continue holding you against the wall until you finally suffocate. It should take twenty minutes. And I shall see to it that it will be very unpleasant. Do you agree?"

Desperately Helman tried to signal his answer. Nothing would come from his throat. His head was immobile in her grip.

"Do you agree?" she spat at him, loosening her grip for an instant.

Helman bent his head forward, straining against the pressure of his hanging body. He gasped out the word yes as best he could. The woman released him. He slid to the floor, incapable of protecting himself.

He touched his own throat, gently massaging, trying to gauge the damage she had done to him. He stared up at her, his vision slowly swirling to normalcy. The hatred still burned in her eyes.

"You shall have a moment to compose yourself, and then you shall tell me everything I wish to know."

Helman nodded. His eyes moved to the fallen magnum. His instincts judged the distance.

Without looking she kicked it away from him, under a bed.

"Don't even consider it," she said. "You already know it is useless. Nothing you are capable of can harm me. I am already dead. Do you understand? I am yber. What you humans call vampire."

The answer had arrived. Part Two The Deal

One.

Vampire. The word rushed through Helman's mind until it became disjointed and meaningless syllables. The word that replaced it, the word that he wanted to use, was 'impossible'. But he didn't know if he meant it for the idea of Adrienne St. Clair being what she said she was, or for the idea of her being shot six times by bullets designed to tear ten-inch holes in people, and surviving untouched. He had seen the destroyed body of the doctor in the lab. He saw Adrienne St. Clair, unmarked. Helman didn't know if anything were impossible anymore.

He watched her intently as he got up from the floor. She stood so that the soft flashes of city light played against her face as the drapes billowed in the draft from the shattered glass door. Her face was pale and sunken. What he thought had been puffiness in the photograph that King had shown him was the smooth prominence of striking cheekbones. She looked as though she might be thirty as King had said, but the structure of her face was the kind that would not change throughout the years. She could be almost any age.

Her body offered no clues either. It was thin, but not fragile looking. One small breast was visible through the black sweater she wore; the sweater which had been torn apart by the bullets. He did not find it erotic. Adrienne St. Clair could kill him instantly.

Helman was alive now because she needed information. If only he knew which information it was.

She spoke to him as he sat down on the edge of the bed farther from the balcony door.

"Are you ready?" Her voice was drawn out. A whispered hiss, like the voice on the phone. Like the group in New York. Helman made the connection and the jumbled pieces worked together.

"Are there others like you?" he asked. He knew what the answer must be, but had to hear her say it.

She narrowed her eyes at him. She made no move to change her standing position in the middle of the room. He could tell that she as fighting a powerful urge to kill him immediately. But she needed information, and decided to co- operate, for the moment.

"Like me? No. Which is why I think you are here. But there are other yber most certainly. Thousands perhaps."

"Yber?" he asked. She had used the word before.

"It is our word. An old word. We are a people and that is our name. We kept it yber amongst our own. Humans took it and changed it. Today, in this language, it is vampire."

"Are King and Rice and the group in New York yber also?"

"I do not know those names. That is what I wish to find out. What is this group in New York?"

Helman told her about the meeting in New York; being taken, unconscious in the limousine, to the expensive, windowless room; the eleven people with voices like hers, and cloth masks to hide their faces.

She nodded as he described them.

"Were they yber?" he asked. Then he realised why they wore the masks, not to disguise their faces but to hide their mouths. He looked at St. Clair's mouth. Her teeth were flat, white, and perfect.

"You have no fangs." As soon as he said it, he felt like a fool. The concept she proposed was ludicrous. Why was he going along with it? He thought about the bullets.

"No, human, I don't have fangs. I cast shadows. I have a reflection. And Holy Water doesn't burn me. But the group in New York have fangs. And they will use them to rip out your throat when they find that you have foiled them. Tell me more. What did you demand as payment?"

"Nothing. They were blackmailing me."

"How? For what transgressions?"

"Another crime. A murder." He called the Delvecchio closing by its proper term. "They had evidence that they could turn over to people in authority. I had no choice."

St Clair considered Helman for a moment. "Were you guilty of the crime they had the evidence for?"

"Yes."

The woman, still standing in the position she took when she had walked away from Helman, said, "Tell me everything they said to you. Each word you can remember."

Helman complied, reciting the conversation with the masked group. Then he came to the point when King seemed to slip and almost call one of the masked people "Lord."

St. Clair broke in immediately. "You're quite certain? 'My Lord'?"

"That's what it sounded like. He corrected himself quickly. What does it mean?"

St. Clair turned to the balcony and looked out into the night. The sky was still a dark glow of low clouds.

"Listen carefully to what I am going to tell you," she said. "When I'm finished, you're going to have to make a decision which could mean your death. Whichever way you choose."

Helman nodded. Adrienne St. Clair began.

Helman was not in a unique position. Other people had been coerced into fulfilling certain roles in the same way as Helman had been. Likely individuals who might someday be of service to the yber were first located and observed.

Usually this observation netted information which would provide leverage for other actions.

In Sussex, England, in the late 1940's, an yber had broken from the Ways and become a maniac. The discrete killing and feeding patterns developed over the years were abandoned and humans whose blood had been drained were being discovered at a terrifying rate. Investigations intensified. The entire network of yber operating in England was threatened with disclosure. They had banded together and destroyed the offender. It was called the Final Death. But the investigations continued. A sacrifice had to be made, and it was.

A quite ordinary man named Sussex, one who had been noticed years before as fulfilling certain requirements, received visits in the night. Voices spoke to him. Yber came to his bedroom and enticed him, offering him the beauty and the life of blood. The man was John George Haigh. With the aid of the yber he committed two more murders of his own, drinking the blood of his victims though he was not yber himself and could derive no nourishment from it. Then he was given to the police. All the evidence implicated him. During the trial, he spoke of the voices which had come to him, but it was obvious to all that the man was insane and no one took notice. Gruesome, vampire-like murders had occurred. A murderer was provided whose mental state explained the nature of the crimes. The investigations were closed and the yber were free from exposure.

"High profile-low profile," said Helman. "When a crime has to be completed for an operation to be successful, a high-profile suspect is provided to draw suspicion from the real perpetrators. Politicians who don't comply with a couple of the big lobbies in Washington usually end up being beaten by 'muggers'. It's called a hi-lo."

"We call it survival," St. Clair replied. "We have called it survival for years."

The same thing had happened in Hanover in the mid 1920's. Fritz Haarman had been provided. He had been executed. The yber survived.

In Montparnasse, in 1849, the French Army had gone so far as to hide guards in graveyards and place armed men at all entrances. Disdainful yber had used all their powers and special knowledge to slip by them and raid the tombs of the newly dead. It was a scandal. Investigators from around the world were coming to learn the truth. Some had actually seen the yber at their work. Discovery was threatened. And then Sergeant Victor Bertrand was visited by the voices; visited by women who slipped through his barracks window; women who delighted him yet no others could see.

Sergeant Victor Bertrand was shot one night in a graveyard. He told the same stories at his trial as would Haigh and Haarman. It did no good. It never did. The investigations closed and the yber, once more, were safe.

"And I was to be like those men? A sacrifice? A cover-up for the murders you commit?"

"What murders?" St. Clair asked. "I don't murder. You were to kill me: the Final Death for one who has already died. Quite possibly it would result in the deaths of humans close to me. As it did. Undoubtedly you would be killed yourself, afterward. The evidence would point to you. They would have you. And no one would look any further. The same as all the other times. The yber would be protected."

Helman shifted his position on the edge of the bed, rubbing at his neck. The pain was dull and throbbing. "So I'm trapped in a plan set up over a hundred years ago, kept going by the same organisation."

"Not the same organisation, human. The same individuals."

"What do you mean the same people? The ones who set up the French Army sergeant are the same ones setting me up a hundred and thirty years later?"

The woman shouted at him. "You're not listening. You're not accepting any of this. We are yber. We are vampires.