She had heard of Croft from Charles and poor dear Katie. He didn't look much of a threat, but Penny understood he signed a dozen death warrants before every meal. He never bled without killing.

'Y'all heard of Star Wars, I guess,' said Jedburgh. 'Not the kiddie movie, the Strategic Defense Initiative. The High Frontier. Lord God knows how many billions the Prez has flushed down that latrine. Big bucks, but so far no Buck Rogers. Ronnie loves rockets. Spooks the shit out of the Soviets. They're spendin' themselves silly to keep up. One of the few advantages of a space weapons system that don't work is that there ain't no limit to the mazooma your mortal foe has to waste tryin' to duplicate it. But it still ain't gettin' the Job done. You know the Job: the eradication of the mental disorder known as Soviet Communism. The Kremlin gremlins have had it their own way in Eastern Europe since the Big One. They take it slow and steady, invadin' somewhere every twelve years or so. We're all set to toe-to-toe the bastards over Poland, and they sneak into Afghanistan instead. So, while they're looking East, we shit in their front yard. The game plan is to turn the Transylvania Movement from a talkshow joke into a real alternative for the Warsaw Pact satellites. Heard about the domino theory? Well, this time, we're knockin' and they're fallin'. They're all shakin' like Elvis with a burger jones. CzechoSlovakia, Poland, Yugo-Slavia and, our mostest bestest special favourite, Nicolae Ceauescu's Romania. Graduates of this Program will take out the puppet apparatchiks and restore the, ah, rightful rulers. Can you dig it? We're puttin' the Counts in the castles and the Barons in the back of the blood bank.'

'Sir,' said Gardner, 'isn't that dangerous? Many elders have bad human rights records. Mightn't they prove worse in the long run than the Reds?'

Jedburgh waved his hat and grinned.

'We thought of that, Captain. You're right. Most of 'em ain't just bloodsuckers, they're scumsuckers. Each and every one out for their own damned self. As soon as we set 'em up, they'll give us the finger. Your vampire elder is no friend of democracy and liberty. No offence, Caleb - I know you're with the Program, all the way to Memphis. That's why we've been mixin' our own bloodline, soldier. That's why FDR had you made way back when. We're trainin' up Carpathia Group to be good, but we have to train America Group to be better. Tragically, however, it would be a morale disaster if Carpathia got its ass kicked in the exercise, so y'all are goin' to have our bright boys and girls lose tomorrow night. They ain't gonna like it but that's the way it is. Anyone who wants to kick up a fuss will just have to cry themselves to sleep.'

Penny knew one pledge who was going to hate this policy decision.

8.

Late in the afternoon, three black helicopters came in low out of the desert and landed on the parade ground. Jedburgh introduced Penelope, Gardner and Dr Beecher to the VIPs: Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council, with his svelte aide Fawn Hall, and Vice-President Bush, accompanied by a CIA analyst named Ryan. George Bush conveyed a message of support from Rocket Ronnie. Ryan gave Jedburgh a golf bag full of bottles of Gentleman Jack, compliments of the boys in Langley.

Out of the third chopper came two vampires she recognised at once: Baron Meinster, figurehead of the Transylvania Movement, and Graf von Orlok, a known extremist. Meinster was small, dapper and boyish. Orlok slank behind him, a hideous spectre. The Vice-President could not disguise his sour grimace of distaste whenever Orlok's spider-fingered shadow neared him. She was uncomfortable. If prodded, prejudice so naked would extend to far more human-seeming vampires... like her.

Jedburgh was in an expansive mood for the visitors.

Penny knew America Group, fully briefed on the bad news, were less cheerful. Being ordered to put on a good show but take a dive sat badly with their fundamental programming. Jedburgh had told them they were the Best There Was, which meant they ought to be the Best Losers in the World. That hadn't made it any better. Only Iceman showed no outrage.

At sunset, America Group and Carpathia Group filed out of their respective barracks. They had started even, with twelve pledges in each group. Carpathia - experienced vampires all - suffered no wash-outs or casualties, and remained at full strength, while America was five down. Czuczron turned out, face still a ruin but otherwise in fighting form. He was in better shape than Nikita, who was still shaky but insisted on being on the team. To make the imbalance less obvious, Gardner was taking to the field with America.

The objective was Ghost Town. The teams were competing to take and hold the position. Gardner had outlined a gameplan, by which America took the town first then yielded it when Carpathia caught up. That would give America an achievement as a consolation for eating desert dirt.

Penny was with the observers. Bush, Jedburgh and Orlok took a Jeep out into the desert, to take up position in the old saloon on Main Street. Ryan, Fawn Hall and Beecher would remain at the base in the op centre, monitoring communications. She'd be in a helicopter, with North and Meinster. Other interested parties were scattered across the countryside.

War was to start at midnight.

9.

Oliver North complained that he couldn't see anything out of the open door. Andrews, the gaunt pilot, looked back without sympathy, red points shining in his vampire eyes. Penelope and Meinster had night-sight too. This exercise would be carried out in human darkness.

'I'll give a running commentary, Colonel,' she offered.

The little soldier nodded a simulation of gratitude. He was strapped down and buttoned up tight. The pulses in his neck and temples ticked like a Swiss watch.

Meinster hadn't deigned to speak to her yet.

The Baron was one of those slightly too pretty, slightly too dressy fellows she'd once been impressed by. Having inherited one of the great fortunes of Europe, he'd squandered it on shirts and chocolate while he was alive. She remembered him crawling around Palazzo Otranto, trying to wheedle favours. Dracula - no fan of nancy boys - had never taken him seriously. His ex-boyfriend Herbert von Krolock, openly an exquisite invert, got more respect. Always nakedly ambitious, Meinster was cast out of the inner circle when Princess Asa came on the scene. She rid the court of old guard hangers-on to make room for her own largely useless entourage.

Shapes flew below. Banshee and Iceman, wing to wing, coping with bladewash. Showing off. It would have been wiser to stay out of the helicopter's draught.

'America is in the air, Colonel,' she said.

Meinster snarled, showing a dainty fang.

They were over Ghost Town. Down below bonfires burned around the site, almost in a pentagram. She saw old streets, some buildings almost buried under drifting sands. Jedburgh's Jeep was parked by the hitching rail outside the saloon.

Banshee and Iceman touched down and folded their wings.

The two fliers had carried compact loads. Nikita and Desire. The America Group vampires took up positions around the saloon and checked for traps. Banshee, grin visible from space, kicked in the batwing doors and ducked out of the way of any fire. Nothing.

Jedburgh came out, hat clamped to his head, and shook hands with Banshee. Orlok crept in the deepest shadows, well away from the firelight.

In formation, the rest of America Group - Gardner, the Confessor, Velcro - jogged down Main Street. Gardner took point.

'America has taken the saloon,' she said.

North smiled, tightly. Meinster glared.

Shadows came alive. She had good night eyes, but hadn't noticed Carpathia Group's arrival. They moved like ghosts, silently overwhelming their targets, pressing claws to throats. Gardner dodged his shadow and Banshee hid behind Jedburgh. But the rest of America Group went down. Easily.

Meinster smiled and primped.

'Inform Colonel North what has happened,' he ordered.

'America has fallen,' she said, flatly. North blinked.

She didn't even know if America Group had taken their dive. They might just have been taught a lesson about the capabilities of vampire elders.

There was a ruckus.

Nikita was on her feet, the front of her jump-suit torn open, throat bloody. She kicked a Carpathian with smart martial arts moves, jabbing her foot at his stomach and face. Her boot wiped off his blacking. Penny recognised Alex Ziska.

'America won't lie down,' she said.

'This is futile,' declared Meinster. 'The exercise is over. This goes beyond what was agreed.'

'The exercise isn't over until it's over,' said North. 'By now, you Europeans ought to have learned that.'

Ziska dodged Nikita and stepped behind her, mouth open like a shark's. He took a bite out of the America girl and spat it out.

Now, Nikita was down, bone flashing in her neck wound.

Banshee was on Ziska, stabbing his torso with gathered, sharpened dagger-fingers.

Jedburgh waved his hat.

Carpathians rallied to Ziska, which freed up other Americans to get back in the game. Velcro picked up a length of rotten wood to use as a club (a stake?). Orlok - who wasn't even in Carpathia Group - took him down from behind with a deadly hug.

Banshee, wings stretched, rose into the sky, trailing Ziska by one leg. Carpathians, shifting in a heartbeat, took to the air after him. The American flier dropped the flailing Ziska, who fell onto the boardwalk and cracked rotten wood.

'That viper'll have an assful of splinters,' said the pilot, chortling.

North signalled Andrews to keep height with the bat-fight.

On the ground, the Carpathian elders were masters, but in the air, Banshee flew loops around them. Bony barbs protruded like horns from his heels, spiking through his boots. He tore holes in the wings of the elders harrying him. He whooped and howled, an aural attack on anyone with oversensitive hearing.

First one, then another, fell out of the sky, wind tearing through ripped wings.

Banshee was one-on-one with a Carpathian, Czuczron.

They wrestled, eyes and arms locked, huge wings beating the air. Then Banshee shapeshifted, losing the wings and becoming a deadweight, wrenching Czuczron out of the sky, dislocating the elder's wing-shoulders. The combatants came apart and Czuczron smashed into the dirt. Banshee - winged again - barely skimmed the ground before dancing upwards with a victory yell. Showoff.

Meinster was not happy.

On the ground, the exercise dissolved into an old-fashioned barroom brawl. Jedburgh punched out Orlok, who kept bouncing back as if on a board.

This was a fiasco.

'Why can't we all get along?' she asked Meinster.

PART FOUR.

'YOU'LL NEVER DRINK BLOOD IN THIS TOWN AGAIN'

ANNO DRACULA 1990.

1.

Prom the top deck of his castle, John Alucard looked over Beverly Hills as the arclight in the sky wrought dawn on the downhill properties. Uncovered swimming pools glinted like sapphires on green baize. He wore Foster-Grant 'Nightshades' ($999.95) and a face-film of sun block, but had developed a tolerance to all but the blaze of California noon. In the Old Country even pre-dawn haze would send him shrieking for shadow, greasy smoke boiling from his pores. Now, in this far edge of the world, he was almost a daywalker.

He leaned against battlements transplanted from a Transylvanian castle, took a hit of Los Angeles's smog-and-orange-blossom air, and listened to freeway traffic, already enlivened by the odd angry gunshot. His mouth watered and his fangs sharpened. This place was delicious. The Father approved.

The Father was with him, constantly. Through Alucard, Dracula's will was done on Earth.

His visitors, three Romanian vampires, were less comfortable with the rising sun. Transylvania Movement hacks were in love with useless tradition. They liked to waste their days locked inside easy-seal travel coffins, wriggling on itchy carpets of native soil.

'Coffin-sleep is for wimps,' he declared. 'Know how many deals you miss, scurrying for the crypt at cock-crow?'

None of the visitors answered him. Their eyes were on the shadows shrinking around their feet.

'Have you heard the story about the vampire who went mad?' Alucard asked. 'His native land, from which he was in permanent exile, was a tiny European province endlessly passed back and forth between the great powers. Each colour change on the map invalidated the soil in his lair and he had to scramble for a fresh supply of dirt.'

Alucard laughed. Only one of the three even tried to join in: the pasty new-born, Feraru.

This last year would have been a nightmare for that apocryphal elder. Maps got redrawn every week, if not every day.

'The post-Communist flag industry can't keep up with the demand,' said Alucard. 'Many countries fly old banners with holes where the hammer and sickle used to be. Makes a bad impression. Looks like a cannonball was shot through the flag. When you tear out the symbol you keep the remnant handy in case you have to sew it back in.'

In the long view, Romania was as it had always been. After the revolutions of 1989, it was no longer under the Ceauescus and within Soviet hegemony, but someone or something would come along to master the land. Before the Reds, it had been Nazis, domestic and foreign; and before that, before Alucard was born or turned, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. For a proudly independent nation, a Latin-Romance enclave in a Slav sea, the Old Country was the whore of Europe, sold over and over again to the highest bidder, taken by force and rapine by the most convenient strongman. Transylvania, sacred soil of the nosferatu, was the whore's get, traded back and forth between Romania and Hungary at the behest of whichever foreigners were on the up in Bucharest or Budapest.

Alucard looked at the trio Baron Meinster had despatched on this mission. Crainic, gaunt from slow-incubating blood disease, currently Meinster's Number Two in the movement. Feraru, who spoke with an upper-class English accent, a new-born of ancient bloodline. Striescu, ruddy from a recent (unauthorised) feeding; his well-cut black suit marked him as ex-Securitate.

Visser, the warm private detective he kept on a retainer, had assembled dossiers on them. Alucard knew the names of the four people Striescu had killed in the United States, three on earlier state visits and one two nights ago. From the creature's colour, the tally might be up to five.

Striescu was the muscle and Feraru the money; senior academician Crainic was a thinker. Under Ceauescu, he'd toiled as a haematologist. Competent, but no Sarah Roberts or Michael Morbius. Last Christmas, as revolution - sparked by a general strike in Timioara - spread throughout Romania, he was pushed into taking a stand. Token vampire on a committee of dissidents, churchmen and out-of-favour army officers. Less strident than Meinster about nosferatu supremacy, Crainic also argued that Transylvania should be a state separate from Romania - with a sliver of Hungary claimed to fatten the shape on the map - and that the new country be given over to the undead.

If this happened and Meinster assumed the position to which he felt entitled, the Baron would become the first vampire sovereign since Dracula. The trick would only work if he kept men like Crainic about him. The velvet dandy's idea of rule was sitting on a throne in superb clothes issuing proclamations to scurrying minions. The senior academician had the nit-picking concentration necessary to stay on top of the night-to-night running of even a small government. But Crainic's hard work and cleverness would not be enough. He'd survived so far by keeping his head down. He didn't have the political savvy that had kept Lord Ruthven in or near the office of British Prime Minister for over a hundred years.

Feraru was from money and in it for the money. Raised in Britain, he'd returned to his ancestral castle when the red dominoes tumbled. The Feraru bloodline was founded by a now-enfeebled elder - a revered, mindless patriarch whose blood was siphoned to turn each rising generation of remote descendants. Feraru was one of many pre-Soviet landowners, warm and nosferatu, flooding to the Carpathians to reclaim estates formerly appropriated by now-collapsed governments. Hailing themselves the saviours of oppressed peoples, but nakedly intent on bleeding the peasants dry again. Crainic wore a shabby greatcoat and peaked cap like a middle-aged student, but Feraru was City of London yuppie style on the hoof: Savile Row suit-jacket open to show red trader's braces, cowhide Filofax chained to the hip, red-framed round spectacles, skinny tie with a $$$ pin. He also affected the red-lined black opera cape tradition associated with Count Dracula. Alucard didn't believe the Father had worn such a thing except when visiting the opera, but the cloak was an essential accessory for a certain breed of showily militant vampire.

Crainic would try to persuade, Feraru would try to bribe. Striescu was another matter.

Even when he turned away, Alucard knew exactly where Striescu was standing. A wall of burning light lay between the ex-Securitate man and his own back. Not an accident. Striescu was a kick-in-the-door-at-four-in-the-morning murder merchant. A habitual turncoat, he'd killed for the fascist Iron Guard in the 1930s and the communist Gheorgiu-Dej in the '40s and '50s, then settled in under Nicolae and Elena for thirty years of brutal grind. Striescu's speciality was taking care of 'counter-revolutionary elements', assassinating dissidents at home and abroad. Late last year, he'd scented blood in the changing winds. Now he murdered on the QT for the strange coalition between President Ion Iliescu's National Salvation Front and Baron Meinster's United Nosferatu Party.

Last Boxing Day, the Ceauescus were hustled into the snowy courtyard of a Targovite barracks to be executed. They were puzzled and furious at their conviction by a drumhead court on charges of 'acts of genocide, subordination of state power in actions against the state and the sabotage of the national economy'. Striescu was among the armed spectators who fired from the crowd, competing with a Parachute Regiment firing squad to put bullets into his former bosses.

Alucard dimly recalled a time when Meinster and Nicolae were best buds. His mind skittered away from that past. To him, it was a prehistory, a dream. If he thought of Dinu Pass, he remembered Dracula, not the partisans. In the Keep, an elder vampire turned a warm boy. The Father found a prospective son. Which of these had he been? Now, at heart, he was both.

These three were the supplicants. And he was the elder.

Feraru shaded his face, finding at last a use for his cloak, raising it like a parasol. He was tanning unevenly, freckle-blotches on his bone-white forehead and under his screwed-shut eyes. The others knew better than to look at the light.

Crainic held out a cream envelope, bearing the Meinster seal. Alucard reached into the shadow and took the letter. He opened it one-handed and eased out a stiff sheet of paper. The letterhead was elaborate, in gold and red; the message was conventional. If Meinster connected John Alucard with a boy he'd once sacrificed to the Father, he didn't mention it.

'The Baron recognises you as influential in the international nosferatu community,' said Crainic.

'They do say that,' said Alucard. And more.'

Ah y-yes,' got out Feraru, '"King of the Cats".'