“We have a long day and night ahead of us, so I have ordered food brought in,” Vivienne Sagadraco said. “We will continue our briefing while we eat.”

21

SPI was putting in a small onsite cafeteria complete with kitchen. While it was a few weeks away from completion, it was finished enough for Bill and Nancy from the Full Moon to put out one heck of a spread. Bill and Nancy were werewolves, and most of their staff were nocturnals, so fueling SPI commandos with a pre-hunt meal wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. They’d done it before. The Full Moon staff had pulled a couple of tables together against one wall for the buffet line, and at the front of the room was a laptop on a table next to a wall-mounted, wide-screen TV, making our pre-mission briefing look more like an off-site corporate meeting complete with the requisite mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation.

Yasha had already cozied up at the far end of one table with the blonde Scandinavian werewolf. Nowadays, single werewolves had all of the social benefits of humans, including online dating sites. But in Yasha’s line of work, he had to be even more circumspect than a run-of-the-mill banker who went furry once a month. I didn’t blame him a bit for grabbing a little one-on-one time to socialize and talk shop with a like-minded and identically employed lady.

Ian and I were seated near the head of one of the tables near the boss, Roy, Sandra, and Lars Anderssen. Bill had served up plates of his famous jalapeño alligator bites down the length of both tables, and Roy was digging in with gusto. He’d told me once that he liked eating critters that could eat him—and said they tasted even better when he got to kill them himself.

Sandra stood and went to the laptop, clicked a couple of keys and a map of the lower half of Manhattan appeared on the screen. She gave a short whistle and the chatter died down.

“With intelligence gained from three of our agents who attempted to track the male grendel back to his lair, we’ve narrowed our search perimeter to a twenty-block section of Midtown that includes Times Square. Considering that we know the adversary’s plan is to release the grendels into the crowds at midnight tonight, we’ve now excluded the locations of the two known attacks in SoHo and Chinatown as the possible nest site.” Sandra moused over the map, connecting the dots in a glowing red triangle. “Based on intel provided by Director Anderssen, this area is the most likely nesting place for our grendels. It gets warm down there; and with all that water, it’s warm and humid. If our out-of-towners are looking for a dark and cozy place for their nest, one of nine locations within this area could be our winner. We’ve got watchers among the local paranormal community. They’ve reported signs of ghoul activity on the surface that correlates to our nine potential sites. So that’s where we’ll start. Good news for us is that these areas aren’t highly trafficked, either by city maintenance workers or the homeless population. That also increases the likelihood that the grendels are nesting there. They wouldn’t want their nest to be disturbed, even by potential food.”

Sandra clicked a few more keys and a green rectangle appeared over Times Square, overlapping the red triangle in places.

“This is the seventeen-block security perimeter for New Year’s Eve,” she said. “Even before nine eleven, security has always been tight. Now the NYPD and the feds prepare as if Times Square is one, big terrorist bull’s-eye. There are thousands of police on foot patrol, admittance checkpoints, mounted police, bomb-sniffing dogs, helicopters with infrared, and counter-snipers on strategic rooftops. All manhole covers in the protected zone are sealed. Underground security includes the addition of five hundred security cameras to the subway stops at Times Square, Grand Central Station, and Penn Station. Plus there’s a new network of about three thousand closed-circuit security cameras in Lower and Midtown Manhattan. For crowd control, there are sixty-five metal pens to limit where the people stand, letting the NYPD keep a path clear for emergency vehicles. Add to that plainclothes police officers in the pens blending in with the crowd. The federal, state, and local boys and girls have the place covered tight. We have agents in with the local law enforcement. They know what to look for and will report if they find anything suspicious.”

The boss lady stood. “We must assume that since the adversary and many in her organization are ex-CIA that she could have people in place among the federal authorities, which makes it even more imperative that our presence not be detected by any outside law enforcement and security personnel. She knows that we will be coming after the grendels, and she will be ready for us. Our adversary needs only one grendel to surface tonight in front of one television camera. The damage will be done. If over fifty succeed . . . people will die and what we have dreaded for so long will begin.” Vivienne Sagadraco was silent for a moment. “Tonight there will be the noise of a million of those people, the scent of a million bodies. It will be torment for the creatures. Their reaction to disagreeable auditory stimuli is extremely aggressive. There will be no controlling them regardless of what means is now being used. The grendels will strike out at the source of that torment. And once blood is flowing . . . though at that point, I expect our adversary won’t be interested in controlling them anymore. They will have served their purpose and would be expendable. Our goal tonight is for us to eliminate them first.”

Director Anderssen nodded. “Anyone who went to all the trouble to import a pregnant grendel has arranged protection for those eggs. Count on having more to contend with than just grendels.”

Ian raised his hand.

“Agent Byrne?”

“She’s got at least one team of ghouls working for her. Professionals.”

“And they’re veiled,” I added. “At least veiled enough to pass for human.”

Silence.

With a human you just had to worry about being shot or stabbed. A ghoul was fast and strong enough to just yank you into a dark corner and start eating you, and probably no one in this room knew that better than Ian.

“If we don’t find them, when the time comes to move, these grendels don’t need a connecting tunnel to where they want to go,” Anderssen said. “They’re perfectly capable of making their own. I’ve seen a grendel claw through steel plate. So regardless of what is blocked off or sealed, these things can get into your Times Square any damned way they want to.”

“We will deploy in three teams,” Sandra said, “each taking a slice of the search area and three of the potential nest sites. We’ll be concentrating our search in the deepest parts of the tunnels. If you encounter a grendel of any age, kill it. If you find the nest, call for backup before beginning extermination.” She stepped back, yielding the floor to the Scandinavian director.

“There will be three of my people with each team. We know what grendels leave behind and can show you what to look for: territorial clawing on walls, footprints, scent, droppings, urine, saliva. Grendels are droolers, especially when they’re eating. Our ideal killing zone will minimize the space the grendels have to maneuver. Preferably a dead end—a solid one. Hit them with high-intensity light, immediately followed by spears. Our spears are specially equipped with a firing mechanism for twelve-gauge shells peppered with silver. They’ve proven effective at penetrating a grendel’s armored torso and blowing them up from the inside.” Anderssen paused. “However, the point of penetration must be beneath one of the armored scales. They are overlapped and tightly spaced. Speed and accuracy are critical to success—and survival. It’s imperative that we find them first. Grendels can move in almost complete silence when they’re hunting. You don’t know it’s there until it hits you, and you’ll probably bleed out before your brain knows you’ve even been hit. Grendels are killing machines, with the intelligence of a human being.” He paused with a small smile and sidelong glance at the boss lady. “At least on our better days. And the strength of . . . well, you’ve seen what it can do. As to their speed, a grendel can do sixty-five kilometers an hour out in the open. That would be forty miles per hour for you Americans. They’re sprinters rather than long-distance runners, but when they can move that fast, a sprint is all they need to do. They have much the same olfactory senses as a shark, and a similar dental structure with three to five rows of teeth. Their hearing is acutely sensitive. We have reason to believe they can hear a human heart beating.”

“No wonder loud noises piss them off,” someone muttered.

“And NVGs will be useful for getting around down there, but thermal imaging won’t do us a damned bit of good,” Anderssen continued. “Grendels are whatever temperature their surroundings are, as are ghouls. So other than the rats, chances are we’ll be the only warm-blooded things down there. As to their reproductive habits, grendels lay eggs only once every fifty years. SPI Scandinavia has a policy of destroying any nests we find, but it only takes one successful hatching to keep them going. Since their reproduction cycle occurs so seldom, grendels are extremely protective of their young. And we know for a fact that mated pairs can communicate telepathically; this ability is especially strong while hunting or protecting their young.”

“We know three things for sure, ladies and gentlemen,” Anderssen concluded. “We will encounter armed and trained opposition. The adult grendels know we will be coming.” He paused. “And unless we find that lair and nest before the last clutch hatches, we will be the closest food source.”

Someone’s stomach growled.

There were chuckles and sputters of laughter all around, at least from those who had enough experience to routinely go looking in the dark for hungry monsters.

“What’s the significance of the mummified head and arm?” Ian asked.

“Fortunately, even at the height of their population, grendels have never been plentiful,” Anderssen replied. “Their life expectancies are in the five- to seven-hundred-year range. The grendel of the Beowulf legend could very well have been the grandfather of one or even both of those here.”