I remember the dayI was sixteenwhen word of my father's death reached us at the Sultan's court. It was in the late autumn of 1447. Cazan, my father's most faithful chancellor, had ridden five days to Adrianople with the news. The details were few but painful. The boyars and citizens of Tirgoviste had revolted, urged on by Hungary's rapacious King Hunyadi and his Wallachian ally, the boyar Vladislav ll. Mircea, my full brother, had been captured in Tirgoviste and buried alive. Vlad Dracul, my father, had been hunted down and murdered in the marshes of Balteni, near Bucharest. Cazan informed us that Father's body had been returned to a hidden chapel near Tirgoviste.'

Cazan, his old man's rheumy eyes moistening more than usual, then presented me with two objects Father had asked himasked as they fled toward the Danube with the assassins on their trailto give to me as my legacy. This legacy consisted of a beautiful Toledo forged sword presented to Father by Emperor Sigismund in Nuremberg on the year that I was born, and also the gold Dragon Pendant that my father had received upon entering the Order of the Dragon.

Setting the Dragon Pendant about my neck and holding the sword high above my head; the bright blade catching the torchlight, I swore my oath in front of Cazan and Cazan alone. “I swear upon the Blood of Christ and the Blood of the Chalice,” I cried, my voice not breaking, “that Vlad Dracul will be avenged, that I will personally drain and drink the blood of Vladislav, and that those who planned and committed this treachery will lament the day when they murdered Vlad Dracul and earned the enmity of Vlad Dracula, Son of the Dragon. They have not known true terror until this day. So I swear upon the Blood of Christ and the Blood of the Chalice, and may all the forces of Heaven or Hell come to my aid in this solemn purpose.”

I sheathed the sword, patted the weeping chancellor on his shoulder, and returned to my quarters to lie awake and plot my escape from the Sultan, my vengeance on Vladislav and Hunyadi.

I lie awake now, realizing that as blades of Toledo steel are forged in the furnaces and crucibles of flame, so are men forged in the crucibles of such pain, loss, and fear. And, as with a fine sword, such human blades take centuries to lose their terrible edge.

The light has failed. I will pretend to sleep.

Chapter Thirteen

The Colorado extension of the Centers for Disease Control occupied a structure set in the foothills above Boulder on the greenbelt just below the geological formation known as the Flatirons. Locals still referred to the complex as NCAR, pronounced EnCar, because of its twenty-five-year stint as the National Center for Atmospheric Research. When NCAR had finally outgrown the complex the year before and moved into its new headquarters in the town below, CDC had been quick to recycle the center for its own use.

The building had been designed by I. M. Pei out of the same dark red Pennsylvanian and Permian conglomerates that had formed the great, titled slabs of the Flatirons which dominated the foothills above Boulder. His theory had been that the sandstonelike material of the structure would weather at the same rate as the Flatirons themselves, thus allowing the building to “disappear” into the environment. For the most part, Pei's theory had worked. Although the lights of the CDC were quite visible at night against the dark mass of the greenbelt forest and foothills, in the daytime a casual glance often left tourists thinking that the building was just another strange sandstone outcropping along this dramatic stretch of the Front Range.

Kate Neuman loved her office at CDC Boulder, and her return from Bucharest made her appreciate the aesthetics of the place almost as if she had never seen it before. Her office was on the northwest comer of the modern structurePei had designed it as a series of vertical slabs and overhanging shaleandsandstone boxes with large windowsand from her desk she could see the great wall of the first three Flatirons to the north, the undulating meadows and pine forests at the foot of the Flatirons, the hogback ridges of Fountain sandstone formations poking up through the thin soil of the meadows like a stegosaur's plates, and even the plains themselves, starting at Boulder and stretching away to the north and east as far as the eye could see. Her exhusband, Tom, had taught her that the Flatirons had once been layers of sediment beneath an ancient inland sea, up-thrust some sixty million years ago by the ferocious mountainbuilding going on in the Rockies to the west. Now Kate could never look at the Flatirons without thinking of cement sidewalk slabs upended by roots.

A trail began immediately outside the back door of the CDC, the larger Mesa Trail was visible beyond the next ridge, deer came down to graze immediately below her window, and her coworkers had informed Kate that a mountain lion had been seen that summer in the trees not a hundred feet from the building.

Kate was thinking of none of this. She ignored the stacks of papers on her desk and the blinking cursor on her computer screen, and she thought about her son. She thought about Joshua.

Unable to sleep that last night in Bucharest, she had taken all her bags, found a cab in the dark and rainy streets, and gone to the hospital to sit by Joshua's side until it was time to go to the airport. The elevator was out of order at the hospital and she had run up the stairs, suddenly sure that the crib in Isolation Ward Three would be empty.

Joshua was sleeping. The final unit of whole blood Kate had ordered for him the day before had brought him back to the appearance of rigorous health. Kate had sat on the cold radiator, her fist under her chin, and watched her adopted son sleep until the first light of dawn seeped through the dirty windows.

Lucian picked them up at the hospital. The lastvolley of paperwork there was less than Kate had feared. Father O'Rourke met them as promised. As she and the priest were shaking hands on the front steps, Kate surrendered to impulse and kissed him on the cheek. O'Rourke smiled, held her face in his hands for a long moment, and thenbefore Kate could think or protestblessed Joshua with a gentle touch of his thumb to the baby's forehead and a quick sign of the cross.

“I'll be thinking about you,” O'Rourke said softly and held the front door of the Dacia open for Kate and the baby. The priest looked at Lucian. “You drive carefully, hear?” Lucian had only smiled.

The highway to the airport was almost empty. Joshua woke during the drive but did not cry, merely stared up from the cradle of Kate's arms with his large, dark, questioning eyes. Lucian seemed to sense Kate's uneasiness. “Would you like to hear another Ceausescu joke I used to tell?”

Kate smiled wanly. The dilapidated wipers scraped tiredly at the rain. “Aren't you afraid there are microphones in your car?” she asked.

Lucian grinned. “They wouldn't work any better than the rest of this junkheap,” he said. “Besides, the National Salvation Front doesn't mind Ceausescu jokes. They just shit bricks when we tell NSF jokes.”

“Okay,” said Kate, tucking the baby deeper in his light blanket. “Let's hear your old Ceausescu joke.”

“Okay. Well, not long before the revolution, the Big C wakes one morning in a good mood and goes out on his balcony to greet the sun. `Good morning, sun,' he says. Imagine his surprise when the sun says. `Good morning, Mr. President.' Ceausescu rushes back inside and wakes up Elena. `Wake up!' he says. `Even the sun respects me now.' `That's nice,' says the wife of our Supreme Leader. And she goes back to sleep. Ceausescu thinks maybe he's going a little crazy, so at noon he goes out on the balcony again. `Good day, sun,' he says. Again the sun answers in a respectful voice. `Good day, Mr. President . . .' “