Visser hawked up a nervous laugh, then a grin grew. He began a shrug.

Alucard brought the Thalberg down on Visser's head, scraping skin from skull. A blurt of blood splattered across the polished tabletop. Shocked and instantly high, Frost licked his lips and restrained himself from lunging. Alucard picked the twitching private eye up one-handed and hefted his considerable bulk onto the table, dragging him feet-first along its length. Others stood up, knocked over chairs, and got out of his way. Visser's kicking cowboy boot smashed a jug of sanguinello, which slicked the table under him. Alucard let go of Visser's damp shirt-front and smashed his face with the now-messy award, raining three precise blows to obliterate nose and eyes.

Alucard bent over and chewed a hole in Visser's wattles. He drank the blood of the dying man and stood aside, nose and chin red. The others stood, red in their hungry eyes and sharp white in their humourless smiles. He was proud of his monsters.

'Be vampires again,' he ordered.

They fell on the warm man, and drained him.

4.

'Come to me, my Patty-Pat,' said the apparently youthful fellow on the heart-shaped bed, extending a lacquer-nailed hand. 'My babies have missed you ever so lots. We were ready to curl up and diedy-die, were we not, preciouses? Yes, we were.'

Baron Meinster was propped up on a dozen red satin pillows. They looked like cherry chocolates from Land of the Giants. The vampire poodles were attached to his quilted violet bed-jacket, one as an epaulette nuzzling his ear with a fat worm of crimson tongue, the other a brooch hung on his chest with paw-hooks. The Baron's elaborate hair was set with papers and pins. On his forehead, giving him a four-eyed look, was a pink velvet sleep-mask with Audrey Hepburn eyelashes.

Patricia Rice, the tiniest guiding spark of Holly inside her mind, kicked off court shoes and padded across the deep pile pink carpet. The Baron always insisted on hotel rooms reserved for visiting royalty, but the Chateau Marmont had palmed off their 'Honeymoon Princess' suite on him. If the gesture was supposed to be an insult, it sailed right under his radar. He adored the riot of pink and gilt, the red and white flower arrangements, the heart-shaped Charles and Diana portrait. The would-be King of the Cats was besotted with the Princess of Wales and read every magazine that put a picture of her on the cover. Patricia would cheerfully have chewed through Di's windpipe.

She slipped onto the bed and close to the Baron, who kissed her cheek and nipped her neck. A poodle got in the way and squealed.

'Did-ums hurt ums-self?' he cooed, kissing the rat-sized dog and petting it gently, licking through its soft fur with a long tongue and gazing with love into its huge, watery eyes. The dogs were fed only on golden, a damfool expense.

If it came to it, Penny advised Holly to lie back and think of Transylvania, but it wouldn't. The Meinster marriage was traditional European politics, more an alliance than a passion. Each time she wore the Baroness's self-shell, Holly was surprised by how much of Meinster's business he entrusted the woman with. The Baron's talent was persuading other people, usually women, to do things he found tedious.

It was a mistake to think of Meinster as dumb. Foolish, perhaps, but not dumb. He'd lived for decades underground, surviving Puritans, Nazis and commies. He had come through a cluster-massacre of vampire elders in 1923 and not been put off his political ambitions. He'd been raked over by the scandal sheets for men's room arrests. He'd shrugged off the waspish witticisms of his ex-lover, Herbert von Krolock, who had a Vegas nightclub act built on gossip about him. Not so long ago, American news media had called Meinster a terrorist - he'd occupied an embassy and taken hostages. Only a concerted press campaign had reformed him into a freedom fighter.

When Dracula died, the Poodle Prince was best prepared to step up and become King of the Cats. Even now, Meinster knew he was in an undeclared contest with John Alucard for the title, and that moves were being made against him. Patricia was supposed to have been his eyes and ears in the enemy camp.

'Have they got Crainic, Patty-Pat?'

'Yes,' she allowed.

'I knew it. When they had Feraru killed, it was obvious. The Englishman was the only one who'd have stayed loyal to the Cause. We can buy back Striescu if we want to. But Crainic will have to be convinced. Be careful around him, liebling.'

'I'm not afraid. Not with you to protect me.'

'So you shouldn't be. But be cautious. I am inside these people, all of them. I know what they're like. Waverers in the wind. Out for themselves above all. No sense of the worth of the Cause. To them, Transylvania is just a place name on a map. The soil isn't in their veins. They'll serve us, but only if we are strongest.'

The poodle at his chest chewed his jacket. He stroked its ears flat.

'And who's King of the Cats?' he asked the dog.

The poodle yelped a sound that might have been 'You are!'

'Yes I are, aren't I? Isn't that clever, Patty-Pat. I've been training my babies to speak. When I am King, I shall declare them first ministers just to see the looks on the sour faces of Crainic and his cronies. And you shall be my Queen.'

Patricia was excited by the prospect.

Once, long ago, she'd been dead set against queens and kings. Now she was on the point of becoming royalty. It was an inevitability of history. She'd been wrestling with that even in her Marxist days. This was just a logical outcome of her thinking.

Her coronation robe would be a stunner. She would make Meinster forget Princess Di.

'This John Alucard? What is he like?'

The name cut through Patricia like a code-word and woke up Holly. She looked at the big vampire baby in the bed with her and picked her words carefully.

'Powerful,' she said. 'Not old, like Orlok or Iorga, but of good bloodline. He reminds me of you. Some say he is Dracula's get. Like you.'

Baron Meinster's face was a paper mask. He claimed he'd been personally turned by the Count, but details changed with each telling.

'But he is an American? Dracula never set foot here.'

'He seems American. Perhaps in the War?'

'Ah yes, the War. So much goes back to that.'

'You should meet him.'

Meinster wasn't hot for it. Holly had known he wouldn't be. The Baron was torn between dealing with Alucard through unreliable tools and risking a face-to-face which might end up with him forced to back down.

'He likes you, though, Patty-Pat. And you'll never go the way of Crainic. I made you, and I alone care for you. We are equal partners in our future.'

She stroked a poodle's head.

The thing bit her, leaving two red marks in her hand. It had pinprick fangs. The bite stung.

She almost shifted, almost showed Holly's face.

'Naughty beast,' chided Meinster, indulgently, wiping the dog's bloodied mouth. 'Mustn't snack off Patty-Pat. She's ours to play with, not yours.'

She laughed, Patricia's high-pitched (annoying) laugh.

'What is it, my darling?'

'Nothing,' she said. 'The bite tickled.'

The poodle, alone of all creatures, saw through Patricia to the Holly beneath.

5.

The Rock cell-block set filled the Monroe Stahr Stage, largest soundstage on the Miracle lot, like a black cathedral: slab after slab of fibreglass granite, tier after tier of plastic silver-barred doors, a steady glisten of wet-look gel. Batteries of coloured lights came on, casting atmos shadows throughout the vaulted space. Massed smoke machines choked out dragon-breath clouds of oily grit.

Alucard and Gorse stood on the studio floor.

Christopher Neville, this week's career limbo director, was up on the camera crane arguing with his operator. Lucky Cameron, Sylvester Stallone's 'unbreakable' stunt double, walked through a fight rehearsal with Brion James, Brian Thompson and Jenette Goldstein. The villain actors were hampered in action by the futurist Nazi body-armour the wardrobe department decided looked better on prison screws than the bland blues Alcatraz guards actually wore. Caine, the combat advisor, showed the players how to make quarterstaff- and sword-moves with lengths of pipe or electrified night-sticks.

Stallone, in his Rocky robe, sat to one side in a canvas chair with his name stencilled on the back, paying attention. After Cameron took a few hours of solid beating in long-shot, the star would be needed to step in for bloodied, determined facial close-ups. Cross-legged on the concrete beside Stallone was a writer on a dog-leash, scribbling on a note-pad and passing torn-off pages up to his master. The 'additional dialogue' merchant had been ordered to come up with five possible laugh-lines for Sly to snarl after killing the corrupt chief guard. So far, none of his zingers had zung.

'Does this take you back?' asked Alucard.

'My cell was a white room,' said Gorse. 'Not very gothic. Not like this at all. The real punishment is the boredom.'

The Father had spent centuries in his castle, doing nothing. And that was how he had ended up.

'This is the movies,' said Alucard. 'We make it better than it is.'

'Less boring, I hope.'

The rough-cut had previewed in Sherman Oaks. The test audience got fidgety in the third act. Stallone had insisted on a scene where the hero tells Sharon Stone about his dead family. The kids in the valley shouted 'fast forward fast forward' as Sly sobbed through a speech he'd written himself. He read dialogue as if chewing raw hamburger. They'd rather see bad guys buying it than listen to an Oscar clip, so Brion James was getting a more elaborate death scene.

'In Alcatraz, the convicts are separated and doped,' said Gorse. 'Buried in their coffins and fed hygienic rat-blood dosed with god-knows-what. It's depressing, more than anything else. Not many punch-ups or escape attempts. In ten years, I didn't see any of the women prisoners. And nobody ever, ever calls the place "the Rock".'

'Quibbles, Ernest. They won't show this movie in prisons, so we have latitude about the details.'

'Whatever you say, Johnny.'

'That's right. Whatever I say.'

Gorse coughed and lowered his voice as if someone was listening.

'Holly called in last night from a secure payphone. The Baron's on his way back to bat-land, happy as a sandboy. She arranged for him to meet Josie Hart, a trick I'd love to have seen. Our soi-disant King of the Cats was star-struck and delirious to learn that Josie and her girls would be reforming for "his" concert. He's requested that they cover "He's a Rebel", apparently a favoured pop pick in his circles. I like ska, myself. Our Girl Friday has a few more Patty Rice meetings to take, then she'll be back in her own self. The coup is shaping up nicely. All the right people here and in Romania have been oiled with baksheesh. I say, Johnny, are you really going to let that little pouffe take over a country?'

'Why not? I don't live there.'

'Good point.'

'It's just dirt, Ernest. Not even real estate. You could exchange a square mile of Beverly Hills for all of Transylvania, have Moldavia thrown in as a freebie, and still feel cheated.'

'I'm sure you know what you're doing.'

'So am I.'

An assistant director looked at Alucard for approval, received the nod, and called quiet on the set. Neville called action and Brion James whanged his cattle-prod down on Cameron's pipe. The electrical effect didn't work properly first time, so they tried it again. There was a satisfying shower of sparks. After four more takes for luck, they went on to the next set-up. A make-up crew came in and fixed short ends of pipe to James's forehead and the back of his skull, for the pay-off shot of the guard's death.

'"You need that like a hole in the head",' read Stallone. After a pause, everybody laughed. 'There's something familiar about that.'

Alucard knew what it was.

'That was in Adam Simon's script,' he said. 'Cut it out. Say "I told you there was one thing you'd have to get through your thick skull!"'

Stallone laughed and wrote it down.

'Why don't you ever have ideas like that?' he said to the writer, kicking him.

'I hesitate to bring up the subject,' began Gorse, 'but...'

'She'll be seen to, Ernest. Don't worry. For the moment, I want her alive and around. So few people will appreciate what it is we're going to do. Your friend Genevieve is one of them. This is show business, my friend. Above all else, we need an audience.'

6.

Through Kurt Barlow, Alucard sub-contracted travel arrangements to the Shop. As a precaution, he had Newcastle set up a Church of Immortology fall-back for every leg of the long journey from Beverly Hills to Castle Dracula. Commodore Winton maintained a private fleet of ships and planes, crewed by 'fully-ascended nyctlapts' in uniforms copied from 1950s kink erotica and Disneyland, Bettie Page short shorts and Donald Duck sailor hats.

On December 20th, the day before the concert, Alucard flew in an unmarked private jet - with Gorse, Iorga and Crainic - from Los Angeles to a government proving facility in Florida. There, the party transferred to an 'experimental' naval transport rocket-plane and made a sub-orbital swoop across the Atlantic, touching down on the USS Philip Francis Queeg, a carrier with the US Sixth Fleet, at sea off Cyprus. Alucard, as a personal quirk, preferred his pilots to be warm professionals who didn't think they were immortal.

The Queeg was a Shop cover, the only ship in the Mediterranean paying more attention to Central Europe than the developing situation in the Persian Gulf. Alucard's deal with the Shop was that his venture should be over before George Bush's deadline for Saddam's withdrawal from Kuwait came at the end of the year. It ought to be a nice little work-out before the allies took on Iraq.

He was able to run a spot-inspection of the Bat-Soldier Corps. As producer of Bat-21, he was an honorary member of the elite cadre. He found the flyboys (and girls) below-decks in an oak-lined cabin the size of a ballroom, playing ping-pong faster than the human eye could track or composing letters home to families who couldn't know how much their kids had changed in the service.

Captain Gardner, an old World War II hand who'd personally bested the last of the Bat-Staffel mutants Hitler inherited from Dracula, was quietly prepared for action. Alucard said it was unlikely to come to much. The idea was that the Bat-Soldiers were a contingency in case coup and counter-coup got out of hand. Banshee, Penny's sometime 'friend', was gung-ho for US intervention and a rematch with 'Meinster's Monsters'. Czuczron, an old Carpathian Guard blade, had assumed command of the Transylvania Movement Bat-Soldiers - he was Meinster's paid-for poodle and needed to be watched. Banshee asked after Penny and Alucard told the flyboy she was already at Castle Dracula, working behind the scenes to keep the performers out of each other's throats. Actually, he had Penny in Romania to keep Holly grounded. The shapeshifter was juggling the identities of Patricia Rice and Josie Hart, both of whom had a lot to do during the concert.

The President, intent on Saddam Hussein, still hadn't signed off on any military action that might be necessary, but Jedburgh was primed to invoke the Shop's secret protocols and go right ahead with World War III - or, at least, World War II, Part II - anyway. The man from the Shop was swanning around the deck in rumpled naval whites and a cowboy hat, scanning the horizon.

'Fool Georgie Bush thinks he's runnin' the country, Johnny-Boy,' Jedburgh told Alucard. 'This Iraq situation is his chance to be Gary Cooper. He ain't lettin' that slip, not after four years of sidekickin' Ronnie like some preppy Gabby Hayes. He ain't gonna let no pore little innocent Kuwaiti squillionaires suffer under any invader's yoke, even if they are neo-mediaeval tyrants in Gucci robes who'd sell their own grandmammies for a buck-fifty and all the camel-dung they can smoke. Georgie is watchin' out for Saddamite patrols, Johnny-Boy, and hearin' Tex Ritter sing "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'" through his deaf aid. He's Company from way back, so he ought to know goddamn better. They all forget, once they get in that oval office, what their job really is. Think they got a mandate from the American people to go their own way and the hell with the big picture. Except for darlin' Ronnie. He stood up and read his lines like he was supposed to, even when the script said he had to take a bullet. I purely do miss Ronnie the Ray-Gun, Johnny-Boy. After the nightmares we had keepin' Lyndon Blow-Job and Slippery Dick in line, not to mention Jimmy-Earl Moron, Ronnie was the Prez who knew his goddamn place.'

At midnight, Alucard's Huey, a CH-46 Sea Knight, took off, circled the Queeg, and set a course for Romania. Within sight of the Queeg, the helicopter was brushed by two large bat-shapes, wavered a little in the air, and blew up.

Jedburgh covered his eyes with his hat.

Alucard stared straight at the explosion, seeing the flame-blossom as a pixillated series of still-images, each lingering seconds in his eyes, overlaying the next. Fire and metal rained into the sea. The sun-bright white burst of exploding fuel highlighted the bat-men who hovered like kites at a safe distance.

'Carpathians,' said Jedburgh, as if swearing. 'Usin' goddamn limpet mines. We taught 'em how to do it, too. It's Lesson Two of Elementary Airborne Personnel Strategies, all the way back to Eisenhower's Rocket-Man Program.'

Alucard signalled Gardner and Banshee to scramble after the enemy fliers. They popped wings and took to the air, rising high in seconds, then swooping down. Two more Bat-Soldiers, Iceman and Nikita, stepped into place and spread wings, ready to be deployed at a nod.

'That took bare face,' said Gorse.