THE BREED
Part 5
Pete? Pete, can I come in?”
“Rather you didn’t, Jeremy,” Peter replied, through the door. “Bit messy in here...”
Still, at least the wait was over. He could change his clothes; they were getting uncomfortable now. A Whyte had very strict rules about cleanliness and presentability.
There was blood on his shirt; he took it off and threw it on the pile for the laundry. Opening a drawer, he pulled a green T-shirt out and pulled it on. On the back of the T-shirt a white drawing of a kneeling, naked woman outlined with thick black lines could be seen, along with the legend CALL ME and a few symbols in some oriental, pictographic alphabet; he kept meaning to ask someone to translate it for him and forgetting. One of these days he’d just learn the language himself.
His chinos followed the shirt onto the pile. Peter pulled off his underwear and continued dressing. Eventually, in his old green T-shirt, legacy of a drunken afternoon in a surf shop and his dark blue jeans he opened the door. Jeremy Greene was still hanging around outside; Peter forestalled his first question. “Anyone seeing someone in one of the electronics courses?”
“I think Isaac is,” Jeremy replied. The implications of the question hit him. “You got someone on the list?”
“Yup.”
“Shit.” Jeremy stared at him. Then a sense of duty took over. “Right, you’ll need to be there all the way through. You get back in there and wait; I’ll deal with Isaac. We can get her to memorise the blueprints straight of the members area at the club site, right?”
“Absolutely.” Peter nodded. “Thank you, Jeremy. As always, you are an able friend. I’d appreciate it if you kept the volume low for the rest of the day, though.”
“Of course, I understand. Good luck.”
“Well,” Alex said, with some satisfaction. “I didn’t expect my son to find one of them.”
“No one did,” Smythe said. “There’s a reason we don’t bother chasing up these people. They’re too far removed to bother with unless we happen across them anyway. But if anyone was going to find one, I suppose we should have known it would be a Whyte.”
“Thank you for the compliment. Are we any further in identifying the members of the Bureau?”
“As far as I know, we are not.”
“Well, I may have something. Or, more accurately, someone. A woman’s been following me around for the past couple of days, both here in London and up in Cheshire.”
“Interesting. I’m sure you can deal with her?”
“None of the breed report coming up against anything like this before. I think it is safe to say that they will not have developed protection against us. If anything, blanket resistance enchantments can probably negate our power, but the cost of the raw materials involved in such enchantments...”
“Prohibitive,” Smythe agreed.
“In the extreme. So I think it likely that they apply only to the more important members of the bureau—and unless the bureau is smaller than indications suggest, that will not include agents in the field. In any case, if it does, Jonathan’s device will come in useful.”
Philip Smythe locked eyes with Alex. And he smiled. “I knew you had an ulterior motive for that.”
“Actually, I didn’t. We make slips just like everyone else. The possible benefits occured to me only after I had made arrangements.”
“Of course you did.”
Alex smiled at his friend’s disbelieving tone. The respect of one’s peers was, to a Whyte who knew with the certainty that he knew he still breathed that he had no superiors, the ultimate accolade.
Carver kept watching. He checked the hidden CCTV cameras at the other exits from time to time. He was as sure as he could be that Peter Whyte hadn’t ventured out of Trinity Hall all day. In fact, he hadn’t even seen the young student emerge onto the patio by the Cam. That was fucking weird. It was, he was prepared to concede, a beautiful day, and so he couldn’t complain too much about his obbo duty; but he was pretty sure 90% if not higher had emerged from Trinity Hall. So why hadn’t Whyte?
It didn’t make sense. He turned up the radio and distracted himself with thoughts of Britney Spears in red leather.
“Excuse me,” the voice came, quietly.
Erin Coke jumped, twisting round. No one stopped to ask you questions while you were staked out. It... well, there was no reason, it just didn’t happen. But this time it had. And the man asking was Whyte.
WHYTE????
How in God’s name had he left the building without her seeing? There wasn’t a rear exit; she’d checked.
If anyone had told her how, she’d have laughed at them.
“Y-yes?” she stuttered, then cursed inwardly. Showing this sort of nervousness purely because she’d been asked something by someone she didn’t know was improbable; she was just giving the game away, and it annoyed her. A lot.
“I was wondering,” Whyte said smoothly, “if—oh, bloody hell. Look up, please.”
In embarrassment she had been staring down at her fingers twisting together in her lap. Startled, she looked up, into eyes of infinite blackness.
A gasp escaped her lips before icy blue enveloped her, swarming in like a living liquid through her eyes to coat the entire interior or her body, so that this strange tingling, hot-cold sensation filtered across her, nestling just under her skin. Suddenly, her body wouldn’t move, wouldn’t respond to her commands. Nerve impulses seemed to get bored and stop out of pure apathy before they reached their destination.
That should be impossible, she vaguely thought. It didn’t have a chance to be anything but a vague thought; her thought processes didn’t seem to be working properly either.
“That’s better,” a voice said. Whyte’s voice, she corrected herself. She had to keep focussed, that was what the Bureau taught. If you didn’t stay focused on resistance, you were more likely to succumb. Not that she thought it’d do much good in the long run.
“It’s very difficult to exert control by eye contact if you don’t look at me, you know.” Panic vanished. Emotion vanished, swamped—drowned—by the strange blue liquid. Calmly, rationally, she still resisted. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Whyte continued.
Shame flared red in the blue ocean. She concluded, logically, that emotion had fallen to his control. Great. If he could move that fast and have that powerful an effect, this was going to get nasty. Or rather, it wasn’t. Unless he had some kind of thing for making people feel awful... his voice suggested that the instruction to feel shame was an accident. And from what she could remember of the file, their known subject hadn’t acted as if that was the case.
So there was no reason, logically, to worry. Because without emotion there was no way of objecting correctly to mental control. She couldn’t even find the idea distasteful, and she could feel no regret at even this.
Which wasn’t funny. But then, nothing was. No emotion, merely cold logic. This was, or should have been, or something—at any rate, psychology told her this ought to have been utterly infuriating, so much so that it cancelled out the terror. But she couldn’t help not feeling either.
Memory was going, she thought. But again, she couldn’t be sure. The process by which she was descending into what she confidently predicted would be mind slavery was, she thought, calculated to demoralise that part which still reacted to the vanished emotions it felt were appropriate; that part which... no, that was now lost to her also. She fought a retreating battle all the way, with cold passionless vigour that didn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever yet was the product of a brain now utterly oriented on logic and diminishing each moment in size. She fought it through the dense network of nerves, thrashing through the cells and pathways in a battle reminiscent of the thousand most spetacular siege battles of history played out one on top of the other and intersecting as each battle was won and forces drove up from below or down from above. She fought, and at each turn the Whyte forces drove her back. As, Alex thought, was only proper.
And throughout she continued evaluating the processes taking place with clinical detachment. She was convinced, though her mind held no evidence of it, that her memory was failing, was systematically being destroyed, or possibly the routes to it were falling and a restored control would see them returned to her. Intuition appeared to have lasted for longer than the other senses. Yet she knew that she would fall, and fall soon, and it no longer mattered. It had not mattered almost from the first.
Eventually, she didn’t know quite when, she could see again. She hadn’t noticed any difference, but the blue no longer swamped her consciousness. Clearly at some point following the time when she had disappeared utterly under the blue it had vanished, leaving her untouched. Actually... she studied Whyte... not untouched. Just still capable of conscious thought, which was either a blessing or a curse. She’d find out which, she thought, soon enough. Too soon if it was a curse.
Whyte smiled at her with that charismatic smile she had privately decided long before was far too good to be real, and yet still was.
“Your name, I believe, is Erin Coke.”
“Yes, master,” she said, without thinking, and then “did you ask me that while I...” she trailed off, not sure how to put it, but he shook his head.
“I looked at your driver’s license.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “Probably a lot more sensible, master.”
“Given the amount of responsiveness you had during your unconscious time, it’s a toss-up which is easier. But I just did it that way. Now, would you come with me, please?”
He opened the car door for her with the manners of a man who cut his teeth on etiquette books, and stood back to allow her to climb out. She did so, feeling proud to be deserving of such attention. Retrieving her purse and observation book, she slid her arm in his and they crossed the road into the clubhouse.
“So, what does the bureau know?”
“Not a lot,” Erin said, cheerfully. “We know you’re not vampires, angels, demons, or possessed of any of the other magical or mystical forms of mind control. We don’t know—well, we didn’t, and I suppose you don’t want me to tell the rest?”
“Not yet.”
“Very well, master. In any case, we don’t know for certain that you’re involved. But you’re the closest thing we have to a lead, so I was packed off to watch you and Dave Carver is watching your son.”
“Intelligent,” Smythe said. Erin nodded deprecating acknowledgement. “That’s Kirk for you.”
“Kirk?”
“Amos Kirk. Our beloved leader.”
“You didn’t really care for him to start with, did you?”
“No, master.”
“That’s good. You’ll be less likely to make any slips going back in.”
“I wouldn’t anyway,” Erin said hotly, then flushed still further, with embarrassment now. Being rude to her master... it wasn’t done. A servant, like the Whytes themselves, should almost never display any emotion. Only in bed. Failing to adhere to this was understandable, they hadn’t been brought up the way the breed was and in any case they weren’t of the breed, but it should be kept to a minimum. “I mean...”
Alex waved a hand languidly. “Please be quiet, Erin.” She broke off dead.
Jonathan, watching, smiled. Seemingly polite requests that had the force of law, and then some. That was the way to go. More... stylish, for one thing. And Jonathan could see the point of style now. You’ve got everything else; you can afford to do things with style. It’s fun; it can make things a challenge.
“How many operatives in the Bureau?”
“Thirty-nine, master. But only five of us are directly involved in Adrienne’s case; there’s too much other stuff going on.”
“Indeed? Does anyone warrant more operatives than we do?”
“Yes, master. It seems there’s a clique of vampires in the Welsh hills somewhere; ten of us are working on that.”
“Well, fair enough. We can’t have vampires running around.”
“Indeed not,” Smythe noted. “We’ll not take them out until this group is staked. It’ll save us having to do it.”
Alex nodded. “Here’s what happens, Erin. You can stop sitting around in your car and stay indoors with the girls and I—or have you got a carphone?”
“No, master. A cellphone; more sensible.”
“Good. You’ll stay indoors with me, but file reports as if sitting outside and watching. Until I want you to, you’ll come up with no evidence of my involvement. How long would you expect to be on obbo without results?”
“Two weeks at the most, master. I started today, as—”
“As I knew. Indeed. I must say, Erin, while your skills at observation may be supreme for all I know, your ability to conceal yourself while pursuing a subject is execrable.”
“I’d apologise, master, but under the circumstances...” She smiled as she let her voice trail off.
“I know the feeling.” Alex returned the smile. “As I say, you’ll stay indoors and file reports as if this is a simple obbo. You’ll also keep me posted. I won’t even require any further work of you. All right?”
Erin nodded. How could it not be?
“Good. Philip, do you mind if we borrow one of the rooms upstairs for an hour or so?”