Cade was dead. Odd, it didn’t feel more like a triumph to him. Perhaps it was because, as the female vampire said, he did not do it with his own hands. But that was ridiculous. He’d engineered Cade’s demise. He’d killed thousands over the years. He supposed his lack of joy was simply due to the fact that Cade was, in the end, no more of an obstacle than any of the others who’d come up against him.

He put a few of his best clothes into a garment bag, a treasured copy of Mein Kampf into his briefcase, along with a stack of cash in dollars and euros. So many things he had to leave behind. But he’d done it before. And there were plenty of shops in Europe where he could restock his closet and bookshelves. He’d left other homes with less preparation. At least this time, there were no peasants at the gate.

There was a heavy pounding at his front door. He sighed. Perhaps he’d spoken too soon.

The young man at the door didn’t wait to be invited in. No great surprise there. He looked like a typical product of the American system: muscled and overfed, healthy and attractive despite his obvious pig-eyed stupidity. He wore a sweatshirt with the name of some inferior university on it, in the same way that small children need notes pinned to their jackets.

“Where is she?” he demanded as he shoved his way past Konrad.

“Where’s who?”

“Don’t. Just fucking don’t,” he said, waving a warning finger at Konrad. “Where is Nikki?”

Nikki. How utterly predictable.

“And you would be . . . ?”

“Dude, I’m her boyfriend.”

“You had an open relationship, I take it.”

The young man stepped closer, into Konrad’s personal space. “You looking for an ass-kicking, pal?”

Konrad smiled. “I’m simply saying, she never mentioned a boyfriend.”

He smirked. “Oh, yeah. You thought she was in love with you? That she was getting all she needs here? Wake up, Gramps. You’ve been paying our rent for a while.”

“Ah,” Konrad said. “So you’re her pimp.”

The young man pushed him, hard. “Told you to watch your mouth, old man.”

“Yes. Yes, you did.”

“Now. Where is she?”

“I wish I could help you. But I haven’t seen her since I last fucked her.”

The boyfriend/pimp scowled at that. He stepped past Konrad, shoulder checking him out of the way.

“Asked you a question, dude. Where is she?”

“And I told you: I don’t know.”

“Bullshit. You called. She came. I come back to the apartment today, she’s not there.”

“Perhaps I’m not her only client.” A smile played on Konrad’s lips. “Or perhaps she’s not, as you put it, ‘getting all she needs’ at home?”

The pimp raised his fist, ready to strike Konrad, then stopped. It took him a moment, but he beamed when he figured it out.

“You did something to her, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said tightly.

Smugness oozed from the pimp. “Sure you don’t. And I bet that’s what you’d tell the cops, too.”

“Which is where you’re going, I assume,” Konrad said. “Because you’re so worried about your lady love.”

The pimp nodded. “Afraid so, dude. Unless . . .”

He let it hang there. Konrad winced at the ham-fistedness of it, the crassness of the approach. But the little hangnail was right: he couldn’t afford a visit from the police right now.

“How much?” Konrad asked.

“Ten grand,” the pimp blurted. When he saw that Konrad didn’t react to the figure, he added, “Just to start. Then we’ll see.”

Amateur, Konrad thought. Well. Whatever it took to get him out of the way.

Konrad gave him a curt nod, then headed into the main room. He opened a wall safe concealed behind an original watercolor from prewar Vienna.

He took out an envelope, made a show of checking the currency within and extended it to the pimp.

“Here you are,” he said. “I hope this quells your anxiety over Nikki.”

The pimp grabbed the envelope. “We’ll see,” he said, with the same smug look. He put his hand inside and began to count the money.

He dropped it suddenly, as if bitten.

“Ow! Damn, man, what the hell?”

He brought his fingers, bleeding, up to his mouth.

The bills had spilled on the floor. A small metal razor glinted from between them.

Konrad looked appropriately contrite. “Oh, I am sorry. Please. Do accept my apologies.”

The pimp was already breathing heavily. “Is that some kind of sick joke?”

“Are you feeling all right?” Konrad asked.

The pimp shook his head, unsteady on his feet. He reached under his shirt and pulled out a gun. He pointed it in Konrad’s direction, but his eyes were glassy and unfocused.

“What the hell did you do to me?”

“Try to calm down,” Konrad said, his voice soothing. “I can help. I’m a doctor.”

There were, of course, fast-acting chemical agents that would have stopped the man’s nervous system from sending or receiving any signals, causing his body to spasm and his skin to slough off. But Konrad rejected those. Something synthetic and inelegant about them. As always, he was more interested in seeing what the human body would provide.

Cade had mentioned the flu variant Konrad built during the war. Now it looked like a child’s plaything to him. The Führer had wanted to fill shells with it and fire them at England, but Konrad ultimately rejected the whole thing. It spread uncontrollably, and might have even turned back on its creator. Unacceptable.

He didn’t fault his own knowledge, of course. Konrad had been manipulating DNA for decades before Watson and Crick discovered the double helix, but the advances in the equipment in the past fifty years—scanning-tunneling microscopes, genetic sequencers, computers—gave him a new level of precision and finesse. With those tools, he could create a menu of infinite choice and novelty.

For the pimp, he’d decided on a new little variant he’d been toying with for a while. He’d seen a television program, of all things, about a very rare genetic defect that caused its sufferer to have no immunity whatsoever against the human papilloma virus. One cut, even a scratch, and the skin would begin piling up warts.

It was ugly, but not fatal. Konrad reviewed the literature. He decided he could fix that.

He prepared an emergency envelope, with a sharp blade secreted in a pile of bills, for demands like the pimp’s. The pathogen smeared on the blade only needed a small cut to enter the body, and once inside, spread quickly.

He checked his watch. Thirty seconds and counting.

The pimp’s gun started to shake. Tremors in the extremities.

“I said, what the hell did you do, you prick?” the pimp demanded. Eyes rolling now. Sweat running down his forehead. Konrad wondered if the man would have enough muscle control to pull the trigger.

The pimp gagged violently, dropping the pistol. No, apparently not.

Panic filled his eyes. “What did you—?”

That was all he got out before the eruptions began.

He clawed at his throat, trying to breathe. Konrad had a good view of the first growths on the man’s neck and chin. They spread like a nest of spiders, racing across his skin.

The pimp couldn’t see those, but he saw the ones on his hands. He stared at them as if they belonged to someone else, mouth open in mute horror.

The growths bubbled up, one after another, filling every patch of smooth skin, replacing it with hard, hornlike scales. (A boost in the keratin content of each cell, thanks to the virus.) Spirals of skin, twisting like snail shells, turning and growing out and upward.

When they had colonized the entire skin surface, they began to build on top of one another, extending feeding tubes downward below the subcutaneous level. Muscle, intestine and fat—all more fuel for the tiny viral engines, churning away.

Konrad imagined that was incredibly painful.

Not that the pimp could say anything about it. His mouth was filled with rootlike structures spitting out of his throat, as the growths filled any empty space they found.

He fell to the deep-pile carpet, alongside his gun. One hand tried to reach for it. His fingers were more or less gone, however, fused into something like a hoof.

One eye fixed on Konrad from a well of rioting flesh. The other was sealed up already.

The hair drew back inside the scalp as the viral loads consumed more and more skin cells, accumulating in layers like tree bark. Within a moment, the last strands were sucked into the swelling mass. The ears were now only tiny slits on the side of his skull.

The pimp’s shoes snapped at the laces as his feet ballooned. His body was just about used up. Inside, his bones would have been tapped and converted into more food for the growths.

He stopped twitching. The growths slowed, then stopped.

Konrad waited. Five seconds.

The pimp’s T-shirt ripped open, and the roots leaped out of the chest cavity, casting about for any new flesh, a last grasp for survival.

Nothing was within reach, however. The roots waved feebly about for another second and then drooped. Dead.

What was left on the floor looked more like a fungus than a man.

Konrad checked his watch again. Five minutes thirty-nine seconds.

Not bad at all. Almost totally useless as a weapon, of course. It required direct insertion into the subject’s bloodstream, and wouldn’t spread beyond a single carrier. But the process was fascinating, nonetheless. Complete conversion of the human biomass into a nonviable form, rebuilding the entire genetic structure in mere minutes.

This was what his patrons never understood, from the Führer to the Soviets, and now the Arabs. They always pestered him for bioweapons or anthrax or some kind of plague. What Konrad did was not science. It was alchemy. And alchemy was all about nonrepeatable results. It was what made him unique—irreplaceable. He wouldn’t give anyone a weapon they could easily duplicate without him.

Konrad smiled to himself. And to think, they called him mad.

But Zach saw it all. When Konrad’s victim began to change, to transform into that plantlike thing, he almost screamed. Instead, he lost his footing on the steep slope and slid about twenty feet into a chain-link fence below.

That sick son of a bitch, he thought. He was struggling to get up. The shock was gone. All he wanted now was to punish Konrad. He’d do it with his bare hands if he had to. That son of a bitch wouldn’t get away with this.

Zach started climbing the hill like he was a soldier running for enemy lines.

Five minutes later, he managed to clutch one of the struts supporting the house on the hill, sweating and panting. He’d made about ten feet. He was not in shape. Cade was right. He wasn’t prepared for this.

But Cade was. Cade would probably be overjoyed to hear that the good doctor had finally committed a crime punishable by death.

Zach fumbled his phone out of his jacket and hit Cade’s number on the speed dial.

It took a second to connect. He started talking right away.

“Cade, listen, I’m at Konrad’s place—”

That was as much as he got out when he realized two things.

The first was that he had dialed wrong. He was talking to Griff’s answering machine. Not even his mobile phone. He’d gotten the agent’s home number by mistake.

The second was that someone put an arm around his neck. It felt strong enough to twist his head right off his body. He couldn’t move.

Then, from behind, he heard the voice of the heavyset Latin guy from the night before. Laughing at him.

“You’re hilarious,” Reyes said. “I was almost willing to let you get inside for the laugh factor alone.”

Zach wanted to make some kind of witty remark to save his dignity, as Reyes’s hand reached out and took his phone away.

But he couldn’t breathe. Nothing came out of his mouth as the pressure around his neck increased. The darkness claimed him then, and the cold was all he felt.