Operation Read Free Page A

someone is watching me? You bet. Smith’s lurking around here somewhere. I haven’t seen him yet, but I know he’s here.”
    “So what are we to do?” asked Barkley.
    “Just do your job. We give them what they want and they’ll be happy.”
    “This is getting uglier than I first thought it was going to be,” Barkley said as he stood and turned toward the door. “I’m going to check out the lab facilities here and see what kind of shape they’re in.”
    Reese rose and walked with him. When Barkley was halfway out of the room, Reese said to him softly, “It’s only going to get uglier.”
    “Hmm, going ugly early,” Barkley said. His voice tried to sound light and amused but it came across stiff and forced; the humor was obviously meant to lighten the mood. “Isn’t that a Navy thing? You guys have been known for your, how would you say, lack of discretion in picking women.”
    Reese smiled weakly and said, “Let’s hope that our discretion saves our asses this time.”
    Barkley nodded but said nothing. Reese saw the fear in his eyes.
     

C HAPTER T HREE
    The irony of Crema’s book choice made Dimitri’s head spin. The book was Dracula. In the book the vampire promised revenge and yet in real life, it was the vampire, he, who suffered from the revenge that one human being had brought upon another. Where would it all end?
    Dimitri sat down on the bed and for a brief moment, thought he felt a nagging pain course through his body. He knew and understood that as a vampire, he could not feel the passing of time. He’d remained unchanged the past ninety-three years or so and he was still physically twenty-three. He understood the physical effects that aging brought to humans and thought that what he was feeling right now similar to that. His mind grew fatigued as he thought about the girls forced to become vampires. They were so young. He cursed Josip under his breath for the cruelty of what he had done in seeking out his revenge against Idriz Laupki and the senselessness of the generational feud. But Dimitri also could not let General Stone and his military accomplices off the hook for their lack of compassion. They could have ended it all but instead they nurtured this craziness to fulfillment by bringing the girls into the picture.
    All Dimitri and his two friends, Andre and Iliga, wanted, was to go home.
    They had broken free of the captivity that they had been borne into by Commander Reese. Ironically it was Reese’s own guilt that allowed them the opportunity to escape. Their past year of freedom had been spent amassing money and various assets in order to purchase a secure way to get them all back to Kosovo. The plan was relatively simple but secrecy was always expensive and bribes best paid in cash. In the interim, they had secured a safe place to feed in this area of Virginia and things were progressing as planned. That was until they had discovered the dead body. The traces of a vampire kill led them back to the compound, their former prison, and the discovery of the young vampire girls.
    Breaking the girls out had been the right thing to do. That they did not debate. But learning that one of their closest friends, Josip, had changed them was too much even for Dimitri to comprehend. The ferocity behind such an action left his mind in a state of disarray that he had not known for a very long time. He yearned for the quiet times in the mountains of the Balkans before they were captured by the American forces. The time spent in old libraries with even older books had been relaxing and peaceful. Life went by and they were left alone. Things were as they should be. There were advantages to being a myth. People tended to fear them and thought it best to just leave them buried in the layers of dust.
    “Dimitri?” a voice called.
    Dimitri kept his eyes downcast but answered, “Yes, Iliga, what is it?”
    “We were waiting. Is there a problem?”
    “At times it seems like there is always a problem,”