Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

[Author’s Note:] This chapter comes from about the center of my forthcoming vampire novel, which I plan to finish in a few days. Except for "Grenville", every character in it was in the first blood-hunter book, Sweeter Than Wine, so the best way to catch up is to buy that and make my publisher and bill-collectors happy. There’s a beautiful picture of Surica on the cover. Anton Varick, who is absent but mentioned, is J. Gifford’s best friend, a small town police detective.

 

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

“Offer the man what he wants,” suggested Surica, referring to our new enemy, the former King of Peru. “When he reaches for it, saw his arm off.”

Quinn Kowalski, the physicist looked somewhat taken aback. (Do people say that anymore?) His Vietnamese girlfriend, sweet and gentle Quyen laughed out loud, startling everybody. I guess I prefer my women like I prefer my cats: a bit bloody-minded. More than that, I wanted to do the sawing.

But what I said was, “That’s a metaphor. In legal and ethical reality, we are obliged to wait for Atahualpa to make the first move before we act, and that could be risky. Besides, he’d just grow it back.” Some people—historically celebrated generals, for example—get handsomely big and brave where other people’s lives are concerned. Some—loving parents—get small C conservative. With beautiful Surica in the mix, I found I was of the latter persuasion, although my feelings toward her were far from parental. She was old enough to be my grandmother nine times over. Put that in your perspective and smoke it.

“So we wait for the dude to attack?” Quinn flipped his revolver’s loading gate open and closed, open and closed, as if checking that his artillery piece was loaded. He knew it was—six shots that could each stop an elk, a moose, a buffalo—or a truck. I’d cast and loaded silver bullets for him, too. Tricky. You have to use oversized molds.Even with a leavening of antimony to prevent fouling, silver shrinks more than lead when it cools and hardens. And the fumes can be deadlier to us than lead vapor to ordinary mortals. Quinn didn’t seem any more satisfied waiting around than I was. Despite his weight, he was turning out to be a man of action.

An extremely large man of action.

“In general,” I reassured him. “I like the idea of forcing His Majesty to make his opening move on our terms. The question remains, however, how the hell do we go about doing that?” Nervous, I reached for my belt. I knew that what I carried, there and in my shoulder holster, were next to useless in the present context, but I had my trusty old .45 auto on my hip, cocked and locked as they say, and my little old Colt .38 under my arm. The Remington 12 gauge was vertical, leaning between a pair of couch cushions. My rods and my staff they comforted me—git off my lawn.

Quyen’s lilting voice observed, “From what you said, J., it sounds like A. and his crew are just living large on his little airplane out there at DIA. What is it, a Gulfstream? Pretty cushy, I’ll bet. How about we just go set fire to the damn thing?” She grinned her Madame LaFarge grin at me, although she’d never struck me as a knitter.

I gave it about twice as much thought as it deserved. “Ethics, my dear Quyen. Putting firefighters’ and others’ lives at risk. Plus, it’s in the middle of an extreme security zone. We’d have Homeland Security, TSA, and maybe the FBI down our necks.”

“What the hell does any of it mean?” Quinn demanded angrily. “You blood guys can all do pretty much whatever you like. You’re fucking masters of the old Obi Wan Kenobi routine: ‘These aren’t the ’droids you’re looking for ... they can move along.’”

Laughter all around. I thought somebody had mentioned that already.

Quinn knew exactly what Surica and I were capable of. He was the physicist who’d figured out most of it. My enamorata had had plenty of experience dodging commies and Nazis and Mounties and Border Patrol types over the past decades. During the Late Unpleasantness, any number of lonely swastika-bearing sentinels had found their throats swiftly, painlessly, and silently cut under her lovely hands. It’s how she’d gotten from her plane-wreck to the wine cellar in France

But for many reasons I would have preferred Anton along on a caper like that. What Quinn said was perfectly true, as far as it goes. I can bend the undefended human mind easily, even make it think I’m invisible. Tricking a minimum wage security guard is one thing. Tricking a security camera or a properly-programmed computer is something else. I carefully explained that to my friend, who’d known it all along.

Quyen sat up suddenly and chirped, “How about just making him think we’ve set fire to his airplane? Then we could make use of the distraction.”

I shook my head, “Good idea, but I don’t think I can Mesmerize another individual like me.”

“No. I meant simply fool him.”

“Oh. I’ll have to cogitate that.”

Abruptly, the possibility occurred to me that we had been anticipated; the fight had been brought to us. Open flame is our enemy. My kitchen is entirely electric. So is my heat and water heater. But I was smelling gas—very little gas: I can smell a woman’s perfume a mile away. Fiddlestring the cat, whose sense of smell is almost as good as mine, was beginning to act strangely, too. He suddenly wanted out the front door—and Fiddlestring never goes outside.

“Don’t panic, folks,” I said with a quiet calm I didn’t feel, “I think the house is filling with LP gas—”

“I smell it, too,” Surica’s sense of smell is better than mine.

“Let’s exit the front door gently. Nobody touches any light-switches. Quyen, you want to take Fiddlestring?

She nodded. holstering her Glock.

Quinn slid the enormous Ruger into its shoulder holster under his coat.

“Let’s go,” I said, grabbing the shotgun. So we did.

We emptied ourselves onto my front lawn. The smell never got worse—I think it was just mercaptan, what they put in LP gas to make it smell scary and what they put in bad breath to make it smell disgusting.

The point of the exercise became apparent when a hot muscle car came roaring along right to left in front of the house, on the wrong side of the street, carrying somebody with a submachine gun in the back left-hand seat. Pretty clumsy, I thought, as he indiscriminately murdered pottery gnomes, pink plastic flamingos, handmade miniature windmills, garden-hose tractors, and assorted potted geraniums.

People like me are fast. Hand me a semi-automatic AR-15, I can make it sound and shoot just like a fully automatic M-16. The limit is the mechanical speed of the gun. We’re strong, too, and have exceptionally good eyes, which makes us deadly shots. As the gun-punk stitched his way across the neighbors’ grass. I drew my .45 with the speed of my kind, thumbed the safety lever down, and shot the gunner three times in the face, following up on the driver with a double-tap. The windshield turned to confetti. The vehicle, a 1960s teenage velocipede of some kind, bright yellow with a fat black racing-stripe, swerved, climbed the curb and hit an elm tree, rupturing the radiator. I walked up on the steaming vehicle carefully. Naturally, its occupants, driver and shooter, were stone, cold dead.

I had fired a total of five rounds. I swapped to a full magazine (it’s called a “tactical reload”), put the safety back up, reholstered, pulled out my cell phone, and called Anton Varick. With occasional exceptions, New Prospect is a quiet town where nothing ever really happens. These jerks had spoiled all that. I was seriously pissed. Anton understood that and promised to be right over, neatly illustrating the fact that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

Quinn was holding onto a bleeding right arm. I thought he had been in the path of a bullet—but it turned out it was only tree bark from a near miss. Country boys kill squirrels that way, with high-powered deer rifles. I’ve done it, myself. It’s called “barking”. Quyen was tending to him, rather than dialing 911, so it couldn’t have been serious, just messy. The cat had evaporated, but I knew he’d be back around suppertime.

Surica, however, was gone. She was nowhere to be seen.

I realized, with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, that the drive-by had been a diversion, while they took Surica. Anton had already dispatched orders to DIA to keep any private planes from taking off. Some kind of DHS protocol. He’d put a BOLO or an APB or something out on Atahualpa’s big black limo. His forensics guy was going over every inch of the yellow car for evidence. Who had hired the shooter and his driver? The weapon was an old-fashioned S&W M76 9mm. It had been extremely foolish of me to kill the two before they could be made to sing—a simple thing for us. We just ask. The victim feels compelled to please us.

But how could I have known? I was just trying to keep us alive.

******

Words and numbers scrolling down the screens before his wizened face told an unmistakable story. “Someone previously unknown to us has apparently absconded with one of our ... subjects,” said the man in the plastic tube to no one in particular. No one in particular seemed to care. Each of his colleagues had his or her own private interests. (Few of them were female, not that it mattered much to anybody any more.) And for some, speaking too often represented an insurmountable physical chore.

He shifted attention from his dozens of morning attendants, struggling to keep him alive, to a computer following the movement of his eyes. “Find me somebody paramilitary, somebody reliably covert, somebody with good, appropriate weapons. Somebody absolutely ruthless and effective. Not like the ‘special forces’ we employ, or those Mossad buffoons from last year. Find him, then find out who he’s afraid of, and send me their leader, pronto.”

“But Sir,” protested a young woman in a crisp white coat and freshly-pressed surgical greens. She had made voluminous notes in her electronic tablet, Times and technology change, he thought, people don’t. “Such an individual would have to be thoroughly vetted, ideologically and mentally, not to overlook sanitarily. Please consider our security reg—”

“I wrote those regulations!” the man in the plastic tube told her. He could perceive, purely intellectually, that she was a pretty young thing in her late twenties or early thirties. Her hair was pulled back, exposing a long, graceful, white neck. Otherwise, to his endless regret, he regarded her as a piece of sculpture; she stirred nothing inside him. After 187 years, there was nothing left inside him to be stirred. Nothing and no one had stirred him in decades. He hated that, and wished, above all, to correct it.

“I don’t make a habit of arguing with underlings, young lady. But if these people I am theorizing about are any good, they already know all about us, where we are and who we are. I’m going to offer them a great deal of money, power, perhaps even their own small country, to do something for us that could mean life or death for everybody in this room over a hundred years of age.”

He almost smiled. That got everyone’s attention. A panel before him indicated that his contemporaries were all listening. “We can’t afford to allow some upstart to steal our resources.”

“Oh, that Nahuatl fellow, again,” murmured one of his colleagues from across the room in a thick, slurring British accent.

“Atahualpa. He’s not a damned Aztec, Winston.” An air conditioner came on. This was the most spirited discussion they’d had in years.

“This ’upstart’,” said a new voice, “is twice your age, Grenville. And, whatever he lacks in assets, he more than makes up for in experience and, as you put it, ruthlessness. He used to routinely put tens of thousands to death. As to where he might be found, you could see his home from here, if there were windows.”