He sat and stared up at the blank, sunlit wall of the office tower and listened to the water drip in the sink. He looked at his watch. “Ten-fifty,” he muttered to himself. “Damn and god damn.”

And he decided to use the time well. A situation like this could burst into flames at any second. He was as prepared as he could be for the Sûreté and the White House. What he needed to do was to get ready for the really hard ones—the vampires. And there was actually something he could do right now, something damn useful.

Becky had mentioned two areas of Paris: the Ninth and Thirteenth Arrondissements. He opened his laptop and went to the CIA’s database. The site didn’t offer any magical insights into the workings of the world, just some very good information and lots of detail. You could find practically anybody here, and at his level of clearance, he could input requests for Echelon searches on keywords of concern to any operation approved for the system. Echelon would then look for those keywords amid the billions of phone conversations, e-mails, radio transmissions, and faxes that it monitored.

Problem was, you had to be damn specific to get anything useful. What words might the traveler use on the telephone—what special, unique words? He didn’t know who she might call or where she might go, or even if Paris was her final destination.

The CIA database also had a wealth of maps, better ones than could be bought in any store, including maps of Paris that had been drawn by the German military during World War II. Originally intended to be used in house-to-house warfare, they included detailed floor plans and plans of the sewer system that offered information down to which tunnels and pipes were big enough to admit a man.

The Germans had done this for most of the large cities in Europe. Many of the maps were outmoded, of course, and many like Paul had knowledge that the disastrous bombing of the Chinese embassy during the Kosovo conflict in 1999 had been caused by reliance on an improperly updated Werhmacht street plan of Belgrade. Since then, all maps in the CIA database been clearly marked with the last year of update.

He saw that the Ninth Arrondissement had not been touched since 1944. The map legends and street names were still in German, which wasn’t very reassuring. By contrast, the Thirteenth had been revised by the French in 1998, and there were annotations that it had been updated yearly since.

He settled down to stare at the screen. He had to memorize every street, every sewer pipe, every building plan.

The vampire would know its world down to the tiniest corner. It would be able to pick every lock, use every shadow, climb all the walls and cross all the roofs. It would use the sewer system like a railroad. It would be able to navigate the ductwork, the window ledges, the eaves.