'God, I feel so helpless!' Manolis complained as he parked the car and they all climbed out. 'Inside, a voice says, "arrest this monster aboard his ship!" But I know that this is impossible. I understand we must not alert him until we know all about him. Also, Ken is in his hands, and-'

'Save it, about Ken,' Harry cut in, heading for the departure lounge. 'There's nothing anyone can do for him.' He turned his haunted eyes on Manolis. 'Except destroy him, which would be a mercy. And even then don't expect him to thank you for it. Thank you? God, no! He'll have your heart out first!'

'Anyway,' Darcy told Manolis, 'you're absolutely right that we can't touch him yet. We've told you about Yulian Bodescu; he was an innocent, a child, by comparison with Lazarides. Harry thinks so, anyway. But once he knew we were onto him ... we each of us lived in fear of hell until he was finally dead!'

'Is all academic,' Manolis shrugged. 'What? I should go to the government and say, "send our gunboats to sink a vampire in his ship!" No, quite impossible. But when the Lazarus puts in to port again, I think I may be tempted to take out her crew one by one!'

'If you could isolate them, positively identify them as vampires, and had a good back-up team who knew what to do and weren't frightened to do it, yes,' said Harry. 'But again this might be to tip Lazarides's hand, which in turn might precipitate something you couldn't even hope to control.'

Guiding Harry and the others to the passenger control desk, Manolis answered: 'Don't worry about it. I do nothing until I get your go-ahead. Is frustrating, that's all...'

Harry had only fifteen minutes to wait before being called forward. At the last minute, Sandra said, 'If we'd thought of it, I could have gone on with you to Athens and flown home from there. But things have happened so quickly I ... I don't like seeing you go off like this, on your own, Harry.'

He held her very close and kissed her, then turned to Darcy and Manolis. 'Listen, I'm coming back, I promise you. But if I should be delayed, go ahead and finish things as best you can. And good luck!'

That's my middle name,' Darcy told him. 'Take care of yourself, Harry.'

Sandra hugged him again, and then he stood back, nodded, turned and followed the crowd out onto the dusty concourse, towards the landing strip.

Among the many people there to see friends off, a man in flip-flops, bright Bermuda shorts and an open-necked white shirt watched Harry's plane take off. He was a Greek who ran the occasional errand for the Russians. Now all he had to do was discover Harry's destination and pass it on.

Not too difficult. His brother worked at the passenger information desk.

Harry made his Athens connection and landed in Bucharest at 5:45. The airport and its perimeter were thick with lightly armed soldiers in grey-green shirts, drab olive trousers and scuffed boots; but their presence seemed pointless and the men themselves aimless. This was a duty of long standing, out of which nothing had ever come. They didn't expect anything to come out of it and in all honesty weren't much interested. They were there because they'd been told to be.

As Harry passed through customs, the official stamping passports scarcely looked at him; all eyes were turned towards the three or four members of some foreign delegation or other, who were being given red-carpet treatment through the airport and out into the 'freedom' of Romania. Harry reckoned he was lucky.

Manolis had fixed him up with one hundred and fifty American dollars, which he'd sworn were good as gold. He caught a taxi, dumped his holdall on the back seat and told the driver: 'Ploiesti, please.'

'Eh? Ploiesti?'

'Right.'

'You English?'

'No, Greek. But I don't speak your language.' And God, I hope you don't speak Greek/

'Hah! Is funny! We are both speaking English, yes?' The man was unkempt and his breath was bad, but he seemed amiable enough.

'Yes,' said Harry, 'it's funny. Er, do you take dollars? American?' He showed him some green.

'Eh? Eh? The dollars?' His eyes stood out. 'Sure, by gosh! I take it! Ploiesti is - I don't know - sixty kilometres? Is, er, ten dollars?'

'Are you asking?'

'Is ten dollars,' he grinned, shrugged.

'Fine!' Harry handed over the money. 'Now I sleep,' he said, leaning back and closing his eyes. He didn't intend to sleep, but neither did he want to talk...

The Romanian countryside was boring. Even in springtime merging with summer there wasn't anything much of green to be seen. Plenty of browns and greys: piles of sand and cement, cheap breeze-blocks and bricks. Enough building going on to rival all the coastal regions of Spain, Turkey and the Greek islands put together. Except that this had nothing to do with tourism, for there was plenty of wrecking, too. The grotesque, inhuman mechanics of Ceausescu's agro-industrial policy: save money by cramming more and more people under one roof, like cattle in pens. Goodbye to peasant autonomy, the picturesque settlements and village life; hello to the ugly, rearing tower blocks. And all the while the reins of political control drawn tighter.

Through eyes three-quarters shuttered, Harry scanned the land as it sped by beyond the windows of the car. The roadside en route from Bucharest to Ploiesti looked like a landscape in the aftermath of war. Bulldozers worked in teams in the poisonous blue haze of their rumbling exhausts, erasing small farming communities wholesale to fashion empty, muddy acres in their place; while other machines stood idle or exhausted alongside huge iron diggers with their bucket heads lifted and stretching forward, almost as if watching. And where once there were villages, now there was only earth and rubble and desolation.

'More than ten thousand villages in old Romania,' Harry's driver, perhaps sensing that he was still awake, told him out of the corner of his mouth. 'But old President Nicholae reckons that's about five thousand too many. What a madman! Why, he'd flatten the very mountains if someone would tell him how to go about it!'

Harry made no answer, continued to nod - but he wondered: and what of Faethor's place on the outskirts of Ploiesti? Will Ceausescu flatten that, too? Has he perhaps already flattened it?

If so, then how might Harry find it again? The last time he was here he'd come via the Möbius Continuum, homing in on Faethor's telepathic voice. (Or rather, his necroscopic voice, for it was only the dead Harry could speak to in this way; he wasn't a true telepath.) Faethor had spoken to him, and Harry had tracked him down. Now was different: he would only recognize Faethor's place, know it for sure, when he got there. As to its precise location: he knew only that the birds didn't sing there, and that the trees and bushes and brambles grew no flowers, developed no fruit. For the bees wouldn't go near them. The place was in itself Faethor's tombstone, bearing his epitaph which read:

This Creature was Death! His Very

existence was a Refutation

of Life;

wherefore he now lies Here,

where Life Itself refuses to

Acknowledge him.

As the taxi passed a signpost stating that Ploiesti lay ten kilometres ahead, Harry shook himself, yawned, and pretended to come more properly awake. He looked at his driver.

'There were some rich old houses once on the outskirts of Ploiesti. The homes of the old aristocracy. Do you know where I mean?'

'Old houses?' The man squinted at him. 'Aristocracy?'

'Then the war came and they were bombed,' Harry continued. 'Reduced to so much rubble. The authorities never touched the place; it was left as a sort of memorial - until now, anyway.'

'Ah! I know it - or used to. But not on this road, no. On the old road, where it bends. Now tell me quick - is that where you want to go?'