'Right,' Trask grunted. This is what I want you to do. Temporarily immobilize the elevator, and make E-Branch secure. Put a man on the roof to watch for choppers. And others on the street, just watching. Also, I want you personally on the telephone to me from start to finish, continually, so we can talk each other through all Nathan's comings and goings, until he's got all of his stuff out of there. I know it's highly unlikely that CMI could get a team back in there before Nathan could get out, but I'm not going to take any chances. The merest hint of danger at your end, and we wait it out until he can start again.'
Nathan touched his elbow. 'You'll be wasting your time on the telephone,' he said quietly.
Trask looked at him. 'Eh?'
'Zek is still there, in London,' Nathan reminded him. 'Have her called in. She can be my early warning system. No need for the telephone. Phones can be put out of action.'
Trask thought, Yes, and so can Zek!
Nathan read it not only in his mind but his eyes, too. And he was quick to agree. 'You're right, of course. Use the telephone.'
On the other end of the line, Goodly had managed to catch a little of what was being discussed. Now he said, 'Zek walked in just a moment ago. She's been in town, making arrangements to fly home. She's with me right now and says she wants in on this.'
Trask uttered a disgusted, barely audible, 'Oh, fuck!'
And Goodly said, 'Zek asks me to say "and the same to you"!'
'Very well,' Trask knew he wouldn't get the best of it with Zek Foener. Having fallen in love with her, he didn't even want to. 'So break down the weapons into easily handled batches. The Ops room will be perfect; plenty of room for Nathan to work in. Zek can give him the okay as each batch is made ready. He'll home in on her and, well, do his thing.' Glancing at Nathan, he offered an apologetic shrug.
'Okay,' Goodly answered. 'Give me time to secure this place, and then Zek will get back to you - or rather to Nathan. Say, fifteen to twenty minutes?'
'Right,' Trask told him, and put the phone down. And turning to the others: 'We have maybe twenty minutes.' He looked at Anna Marie. 'Is that time enough for us to see your end of the operation?'
She nodded. 'Come on.'
The Refuge was a school, a hospice, a sprawling home in the woods for fifty Romanian kids aged sixteen to twenty. Following the collapse of the disastrous Ceausescu reign back in the late eighties, as Romania gradually opened herself up to Western influences, so E-Branch had worried certain Powers-That-Be into building a place here on the wooded banks of the Danube, not far from Radujevac. The siting of the Refuge had not been arbitrary: it stood guard over the mouth of a resurgence, where a subterranean river, a tributary of the Danube, surfaced after its dark journey from a source somewhere in the foothills of the Carpa(ii Meridiona/i, the Transylvanian Alps. And the resurgence itself was the source of all Earth's vampire myths and legends, indeed, of all vampiric infestation of this planet.
For it was here, some miles up the lightless borehole of the sump, that a second Gate opened into this world. And this Gate, too, connected with Nathan's parallel world of Sunside/Starside. Thus the Romanian Refuge served two purposes: it was a refuge for a handful of victims of Ceau-sescu's nightmarishly draconian policies, whose traumas had been such that, after all these years, they still required help; but more than that, it was a barrier against further incursions of the yet more nightmarish Wamphyri, and all the horrors of Starside.