Chapter 28: Tony Stark Has Gone Missing
Meanwhile.
Jones finally understood where the smell was coming from.
The answer was the thing holding her.
Vampires had a finely calibrated sensitivity to blood and the scent of living tissue. That sensitivity was, at this particular moment, working entirely against her. The Tyrant's body gave off the specific rot that came from flesh contaminated by the T-Virus, and to Jones's nose it was like being held by something that had been left in a drain.
She had more immediate concerns than the smell.
Jones, face compressed to a degree that was doing her no favors, managed a thin smile and used both hands to work at the Tyrant's fingers.
The fingers did not move. The grip was the kind that hydraulic equipment produced, consistent and indifferent.
She changed approach. Her voice shifted into something soft and appealing.
"Come on. Let go of me. You're hurting me, and I'd really rather you didn't..."
"If you let me go, I promise I'll do whatever you—"
The jaw went.
A sharp crack, and whatever Jones had been about to offer ended mid-sentence. The Tyrant had simply applied additional pressure to the relevant bones.
The sound of it cut through the sleet.
From the shadows, Matthew stepped over the wreckage of the doorframe and came out into the light. He was carrying something in his hand.
A collar. Custom-built.
"Bring her down a bit," he said, looking up at the Tyrant, which had Jones at approximately ceiling height. "You're holding her too high."
The Tyrant glanced at him with its usual lack of expression, then lowered its arm by about thirty centimeters.
"Better."
Matthew pulled back the loose hair from Jones's neck with a gloved hand, making room, and explained the device in a conversational tone as he worked.
"I know you're frightened. Try not to be, for a moment."
"This is something we put together specifically for individuals in your situation. The collar replaces what would normally be an explosive charge with a high-intensity UV beam. Against vampires it has a very specific effect: it severs at the neck and suppresses regeneration simultaneously. Fatal. Instantly."
"So. Behave yourself going forward."
The collar locked into place with a quiet click, snug against her throat.
To prevent any struggling during transport, Matthew produced a syringe from inside his jacket and administered it before Jones could form an objection.
One injection. One second.
Jones went from a struggling, terrified vampire to a dead weight, and the Tyrant deposited her into the back of the waiting truck with the same effort it would have taken to put down a bag.
The truck's cargo doors were open. Inside, along the walls, a dozen vampires were stacked like freight. All of them breathing evenly. All of them unconscious.
The night's operation had gone almost without incident.
The FBI cover had held. The vampires were not in the habit of creating public scenes, which worked in everyone's favor. Apprehension had been clean across nearly every location on the list.
With a full set of specimens, Birkin had been able to stop holding himself back. The test plans he had been waiting to run were now running. The lab's soundproofing was, fortunately, exceptional. The sounds coming from that level would otherwise have been audible from two blocks away.
Top-floor office.
With everything handed to Ada, Matthew had returned to the management style he had maintained when Eleanor was around: minimal direct involvement, maximum delegation. Ada had, in the early days of this arrangement, made attempts to encourage him toward a more engaged approach to his workload. He had responded to each of these attempts with the same two points: the salary he was paying her, and the precedent Eleanor had set. Ada had eventually stopped raising the subject.
He was paying too much for her to argue with him. And the department had nothing urgent going on.
The weeks passed. The daily welfare runs continued. Cigarettes, drinks, the occasional umbrella.
In his office one evening, Matthew looked at his System balance with the expression of someone doing a satisfying inventory.
Over the accumulated period, total System points received had reached five thousand, two hundred. The Pass rewards had come in steadily: the warehouse now held three T-103 Tyrants rather than one. After subtracting two thousand, six hundred and eighty points spent on recent T-Virus optimizations, his current balance sat at two thousand, five hundred and twenty.
Cigarettes and drinks for the homeless accounted for a portion of this. The larger portion came from somewhere else.
The vampires.
Once the specimens were in Birkin's lab, Matthew had employed what he thought of as a proven method. False promises of release. The hope that produced. The System points that followed.
What he hadn't fully anticipated was how intensely vampires wanted to survive. The moment he offered them their freedom, the System counter moved with a speed he hadn't seen before. The gratitude that came off them when he made the promise was so overwhelming that, in Matthew's private assessment, they would have knelt at his feet and called him whatever he asked if they thought it would help.
The problem was the reset process.
After harvesting the points, he needed the vampires to not remember the previous cycle. Birkin had produced a compound that erased the most recent several days of memory. It worked. It also caused cumulative neurological damage that, in ordinary humans, produced complete cognitive collapse after three applications. In vampires, the timeline was longer, but repeated doses led reliably toward Alzheimer's progression or schizophrenic episodes.
Neither outcome was useful for ongoing research.
Matthew ran the cycle a few times, recognized the diminishing returns, and stopped.
If he hadn't stopped, the balance would have been considerably higher.
He was sitting in his chair in the late afternoon, running through the System panel and thinking about welfare operations, when his phone lit up.
One notification. Then two. Then several at once.
[BREAKING: Stark Industries CEO Tony Stark attacked without warning in Afghanistan. Whereabouts currently unknown. Stark Industries board member Obadiah Stane has announced a personal reward of twenty million dollars for any confirmed information on Stark's location.]
[DEVELOPING: Tony Stark reported missing following apparent attack. Fate unknown.]
[BREAKING: Tony Stark disappears in Afghanistan. Reports suggest targeted assassination attempt by business rivals.]
The notifications kept coming. Matthew looked at his phone for a moment.
"Tony Stark has gone missing."
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