Still, there was something very bad about all this. He could smell it, but he couldn’t quite see it. A place is wrapped up, finished. Then, suddenly, it ain’t finished.

Okay, think. Think it out, Paul: All of a sudden, they leave evidence in a hotel. The hotel is on a continent that has just been sterilized of their presence.

It was not like them to taunt you. They were too shy, too careful for that. Their lives were incredibly precious to them, because this life was all they had, at least in Paul’s opinion. In his opinion, nature had given them immortal lives—potentially, if they were very damn careful—but they had not been given souls. They were damn animals and they knew it.

So if this wasn’t a declaration or a taunt, then it must be something else. The thing was, when the National Security Administration had cracked the language in the Book of Names, the whole vampire world had been opened up to Paul and his crew. He returned to the States to become head of a whole new division that would be devoted to eradicating the menace. There were to be units operating on every continent, using the methods that Paul and his group had evolved.

One of the reasons that he was racing back to the States so soon after completing his work in Asia was to deal with a stupid but potentially serious problem: The director of the CIA had been asking legal questions. Specifically, were these creatures to be regarded as animal or human? If they were human, then they were committing crimes, not killing prey.

Declaring that the creatures were human meant that a whole different approach would be necessary. There would have to be due process and trials and prison sentences, and the vampire would like nothing better than this type of leverage. The vampire was powerful and quick and so damn smart. It could get away from prison.

They were almost unkillable. Something about their blood gave them extraordinary powers of recovery. You had to blow that head apart, then burn the creatures to ash, to be absolutely certain they were dead. Then the lair had to be washed in acid.

How could you ever call anything that lived in a filthy hole like a vampire lair human?

But he couldn’t stop the wheels of the bureaucracy from turning as they turned. “What is this bunch of agents doing out in Asia killing people?” “Who are these ‘vampires,’ a terrorist group? A secret society? What in hell is going on here?”

Some Thai were passing the car, banging gongs and chanting. Funerals made Paul physically ill. He had to drown out that sound, and not with a Thai radio station because the Asians, God love ’em, had not figured music out yet, not in any way whatsoever. “Are there any CDs in this car?”

“Destiny’s Child, Santana, Johnny Mathis. Some kind of opera.”