Eph was aghast. "In all this time...why haven't you shown this to anyone? A medical school. The evening news?"
"Were it that easy, Doctor, the secret would have become known years ago. There are forces aligned against us. This is an ancient secret, and it reaches deep. Touches many. The truth would never be allowed to reach a mass audience, but would be suppressed, and myself with it. Why I've been hiding here-hiding in plain sight-all these years. Waiting."
This kind of talk raised the hair on the back of Eph's neck. The truth was right there, right in front of him: the human heart in a jar, housing a worm that thirsted for the old man's blood.
"I'm not very good with secrets that imperil the future of the human race. No one else knows about this?"
"Oh, someone does. Yes. Someone powerful. The Master-he could not have traveled unaided. A human ally must have arranged for his safeguarding and transportation. You see-vampires cannot cross bodies of flowing water unless aided by a human. A human inviting them in. And now the seal-the truce-has been broken. By an alliance between strigoi and human. That is why this incursion is so shocking. And so fantastically threatening."
Nora turned to Setrakian. "How much time do we have?"
The old man had already run the numbers. "It will take this thing less than one week to finish off all of Manhattan, and less than a month to overtake the country. In two months-the world."
"No way," said Eph. "Not going to happen."
"I admire your determination," said Setrakian. "But you still don't quite know what it is you are up against."
"Okay," Eph said. "Then tell me-where do we start?"
Park Place, Tribeca
VASILIY FET pulled up in his city-marked van outside an apartment building down in Lower Manhattan. It didn't look like much from the outside, but had an awning and a doorman, and this was Tribeca after all. He would have double-checked the address were it not for the health department van parked illegally out in front, yellow dash light twirling. Ironically, in most buildings and homes in most parts of the city, exterminators were welcomed with open arms, like police arriving at the scene of a crime. Vasiliy didn't think that would be the case here.
His own van said BPCS-CNY on the back, standing for Bureau of Pest Control Services, City of New York. The health department inspector, Bill Furber, met him on the stairs inside. Billy had a sloping blond mustache that rode out the face waves caused by his constant jawing of nicotine-replacement gum. "Vaz," he called him, which was short for Vasya, the familiar diminutive form of his given Russian name. Vaz, or, simply, V, as he was often called, second-generation Russian, his gruff voice all Brooklyn. He was a big man, filling most of the stairway.
Billy clapped him on the arm, thanked him for coming. "My cousin's niece here, got bit on the mouth. I know-not my kinda building, but what can I do, they married into real estate money. Just so you know-it's family. I told them I was bringing in the best rat man in the five boroughs."
Vasiliy nodded with the quiet pride characteristic of exterminators. An exterminator succeeds in silence. Success means leaving behind no indication of his success, no trace that a problem ever existed, that a pest had ever been present or a single trap laid. It means that order has been preserved.
He pulled his wheeled case behind him like a computer repairman's tool kit. The interior of the loft opened to high ceilings and wide rooms, an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo that cost three million easily in New York real estate dollars. Seated on a short, firm, basketball-orange sofa inside a high-tech room done in glass, teak, and chrome, a young girl clutched a doll and her mother. A large bandage covered the girl's upper lip and cheek. The mother wore her hair buzzed short; eyeglasses with narrow, rectangular frames; and a nubby, green knee-length wool skirt. She looked to Vasiliy like a visitor from a very hip, androgynous future. The girl was young, maybe five or six, and still frightened. Vasiliy would have attempted a smile, but his was the sort of face that rarely put children at ease. He had a jaw like the flat back of an ax blade and widely spaced eyes.
A panel television hung on the wall like a wide, glass-framed painting. On it, the mayor was speaking into a bouquet of microphones. He was trying to answer questions about the missing dead from the airplane, the bodies that had disappeared from the city's morgues. The NYPD was on high alert, and actively stopping all refrigerated trucks at bridges and tunnels. A TIPS line had been set up. The victims' families were outraged, and funerals had been put on hold.
Bill led Vasiliy to the girl's bedroom. A canopy bed, a gem-encrusted Bratz television and matching laptop, and an animatronic butterscotch pony in the corner. Vasiliy's eyes went immediately to a food wrapper near the bed. Toasted crackers with peanut butter inside. He liked those himself.
"She was in here taking a nap," said Billy. "Woke up feeling something gnawing on her lip. The thing was up on her pillow, Vaz. A rat in her bed. Kid won't sleep for a month. You ever heard of this?"
Vasiliy shook his head. There were rats in and around every building in Manhattan-no matter what landlords say or tenants think-but they didn't like to make their presence known, especially in the middle of the day. Rat attacks generally involve children, most often around the mouth, because that's where the food smell is. Norway rats-Rattus norvegicus, city rats-have a highly defined sense of smell and taste. Their front incisors are long and sharp, stronger than aluminum, copper, lead, and iron. Gnawing rats are responsible for one-quarter of all electric-cable breaks in the city, and the likely culprit behind the same percentage of fires of unknown origin. Their teeth are comparable in pure hardness to steel, and the alligator-like structure of their jaw allows for thousands of pounds of biting pressure. They can chew through cement and even stone.
Vasiliy said, "Did she see the rat?"
"She didn't know what it was. She screamed and flailed and it ran off. The emergency room told them it was a rat."
Vasiliy went to the window that was open a few inches to let in a breeze. He pushed it open farther and looked down three stories to a narrow cobblestone alley. The fire escape was ten or twelve feet from the window, but the centuries-old brick facing was uneven and craggy. People think of rats as squat and waddling, when in fact they move with squirrel-like agility. Especially when motivated by food or by fear.
Vasiliy pulled the girl's bed away from the wall and shed its bedding. He moved a dollhouse, a bureau, and a bookcase in order to look behind them, but he did not expect to find the rat still in the bedroom. He was merely eliminating the obvious.