The Last American Vampire

“The government might have something to say about it,” said Henry. “A private citizen, tinkering with the building blocks of human life—”

  “The government?” Hughes laughed. “The government is my biggest investor!11 ‘Imagine,’ I told them, ‘whole battalions of American super-soldiers—faster, stronger, quick healing, able to see in near total darkness, and with a limitless shelf life. And all without the unfortunate side effects of sun sickness and drinking blood.’ You should’ve seen them. They practically fell over each other trying to write me the check! Forget hydrogen bombs, Mr. Sturges—this is the real arms race.”

  “Why me?” asked Henry.

  “Because… you are, to my knowledge, the oldest vampire in the United States. If I can convince you to join our board of directors and sign up for treatment when the time comes, then I can convince others. That… and I need your money. Seats on the board start at a million dollars.”

  The whole thing made me nervous. The hubris of meddling with nature. The danger of getting it wrong.

  Still… it’s hard to describe how intrigued I was. If there was even a grain of truth to what Hughes was saying—if I could be done with killing, done with dark glasses and cold handshakes… if I could fall in love with a woman without having to watch her wither and die, if we could have a child… if I could sit down in a restaurant and have a fucking steak…

  If there was even one atom of possibility…

  In March of 1976, a refrigerated case arrived at the penthouse of the Fairmont Princess Hotel in Acapulco, Mexico, accompanied by armed couriers. In it were twenty vials of clear liquid labeled Compound 16. These inauspicious vials were the result of two decades of intense work by the world’s leading scientists operating at the razor-edge of molecular biology. Compounds 1 through 15 had never made it past the Petri dish. But Compound 16’s initial test results had been encouraging, if inconclusive.

  “Encouraging” was enough for Howard Hughes.

  He’d long since sold RKO and retreated from the world, buying up hotels in Las Vegas, London, the Bahamas, and now Mexico—living in their penthouses, shunning visitors, and obsessively pursuing his dream of a cure from afar, via a dedicated phone and fax line that could connect him to someone at the institute at any hour, any day of the year.

  Against the advice of everyone on his payroll, Hughes began self-administering a course of Compound 16 injections on March 30, 1976.

  Usually, it would have taken years of clinical trials on animals before a human—or in this case, a vampire—would’ve been subjected to the risk. But this was Howard Hughes. Even after the adverse side effects started to kick in, he stuck with the treatment, stubbornly—as if he could pull his body out of a nosedive, like a plane that had lost an engine.

  Within days, he began aging rapidly. His hair and his fingernails grew almost an inch a day. His muscles began to atrophy and he started dropping weight. He tried to eat regular food, believing that he could fight off the weight loss by force-feeding. But his fragile stomach, out of use for thirty years, rejected everything he put in it. All his subordinates could do was watch as he wasted away. [Hughes] was so desperate to be done with blacked-out windows and dialysis machines that he ignored the pain.

  On April 5th, 1976, Howard Hughes died on a private jet en route to a Texas hospital. X-rays of his corpse revealed broken needles embedded in his arms.12

  Toward the end of his life, he’d taken to having his every waking moment recorded on audiotape, protection against the schemers and backstabbers he perceived to be lurking all around him, waiting for him to slip up so they could sue him for his billions. The recorder built into the cabin of his jet captured his mumbled last words for posterity:

  “No one dreams bigger than Howard Hughes…”

  [Hughes had] been too desperate, too impatient. But he was right about one thing—’53 was the year everything changed. It was, looking back, the year that gave birth to the future… just not the one that Hughes had imagined.

  It was the year Stalin died and Khrushchev began ratcheting up the Cold War; the year America propped up the shah in Iran and began making a mess of things in the Middle East. And it was the year Hughes and Henry started looking for the cure.

  All of it would come back to haunt us, one way or another… and all of it can be traced back to 1953. But of all the things that happened that year, the one that would haunt me the most was something I took no notice of at the time. The swearing in of a young senator…

  His name was Jack Kennedy.

  TWELVE

  Two Presidents

  Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham?

  Can you tell me where he’s gone?

  He freed a lot of people,

  But it seems the good, they die young.

  I just looked around, and he was gone.

  —Dion, “Abraham, Martin and John”

  October had always been special to the marine.

  He’d been born on the eighteenth day of that month, 1939—two months after his father died of a heart attack and twenty-two years after Russia’s October Revolution had given rise to the Soviet Union. These two seemingly unrelated events—the birth of a fatherless boy in New Orleans and the birth of a communist superpower in Russia—would, in fact, conspire to shock the world and forever change America’s destiny.

  The marine had been what they called a “troubled” child. Lashing out at his mother, schoolmates, and teachers. He was scrawny. Fragile. But for as long as he could remember, there’d been a giant living inside him. A giant with red, leathery skin. Muscles and veins bulging just under the surface. It had wild red hair, the clear, comb-like teeth of a deep-sea fish, and solid red eyes—the same kind of eyes the marine had seen on the white mice they fed to snakes at the pet store. The giant called itself “Redhead,” and it lived deep, deep in a cave, in a secret part of the marine’s mind. The marine liked to imagine Redhead luring people into his cave—parents, teachers, schoolchildren—the same people who teased him or made him do things he didn’t want to do. He liked to picture Redhead luring them in, then gnashing them apart with its terrible fish teeth—a teacher screaming as her body was torn in half, spilling her foul, shit-stuffed guts onto the cave floor. A schoolboy crying as his arms were pulled out of their sockets, skin and sinew hanging at his sides like red tassels off bicycle handlebars.

  In this cave, along with the strewn bones of the marine’s enemies, sat a rotary telephone (it looked positively tiny in Redhead’s hand—tiny enough to make the marine giggle at the sight of it). When Redhead had something important to tell him, the phone would ring in the marine’s ear, and he would answer. Sometimes, he and Redhead would stay up half the night, telling secrets to each other.

  Otherwise, the marine had few friends. He avoided interaction, preferring to bury his face in paperback novels—spy adventures, Westerns, and detective pulp. Stories about big men with big guns. When he was a little older, he discovered books about altogether different types of men. Men like Karl Marx and Henri de Saint-Simon. The marine became fascinated by the idea of a system in which everyone was important. In which no man could look down his nose at another man. An idyllic world in which a slight, fatherless boy was just as important as a president. He wrote letters to the Young People’s Socialist League and the Socialist Party of America requesting more information but told no one of his interests. He knew these were dangerous pursuits for an American boy.

  In seventh grade, the marine was sent to a juvenile psychiatric ward after striking his mother during an argument. There, on a cot, in the silence of his white-walled room, he’d fantasized about what it would be like to be one of the characters in those paperback adventures. A lone gunman in the Old West. A private eye. A big man with the power to mete out life and death as he pleased. Redhead told him not to share these thoughts with the court-appointed psychiatrists (who wrote nasty words about him in their notebooks and tried to trick him into saying the wrong things).

  In October of 1956, he?
??d dropped out of high school, left his mother in Texas, and joined the marines. There, at last, he found the structure and family he’d craved his whole life and found something he truly excelled at: shooting a rifle. He loved his rifle, as all marines did. And like all marines, he knew the Rifleman’s Creed by heart:

  This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

  My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

  Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me.

  High scores on the gun range earned him the designation “sharpshooter,” and his aptitude tests earned him a security clearance. It seemed that here, within the yelling and rules and straight lines of the Marine Corps, he’d finally become the man he was always destined to be. A big man who could dispense death at will.

  But Redhead didn’t like the marines. It didn’t like the yelling or the rules or the straight lines. It didn’t like being told what to do or when to rise or when it could and couldn’t dispense death. Redhead’s phone calls grew more frequent. Its whispers turned to shouts. The marine began to lose focus. He accidentally shot himself with his service pistol. He was sent to the brig after threatening an officer. But his biggest mistake—the one that made his life a living hell—was talking about the ideas. Ideas like socialism, communism… visions of a world in which all men were created equal.

  Now, instead of psychiatrists writing nasty words about him in their notebooks, it was other marines giving him nasty looks in the mess. Shunning him in the barracks, calling him a “traitor” or giving him nicknames, like “Ivan” and “Red.”

  Red…

  Late at night, in the secret sharing time, Redhead would pester him with questions: Why should we have to salute the officers who do nothing but belittle us? Why should we risk our life for a country that doesn’t appreciate us? What’s America ever done for us, anyway?

  Redhead told him to remember the mice. The helpless red-eyed mice they used to feed to snakes in the pet store. The marine had always liked watching them die. He found it fascinating, the way they scurried around the terrarium, searching frantically for a way out. They way they gasped for breath as the snakes coiled around their bodies, crushing them. Redhead made him watch the mice die over and over in his mind, all the while asking the same question:

  Are you the mouse, or are you the snake?

  In October of 1959, just shy of his twentieth birthday, the marine did something unthinkable for a U.S. serviceman: he packed up his meager belongings, withdrew his $1,500 life savings, and defected to the Soviet Union.

  Upon his arrival in Moscow, Soviet officials were instantly suspicious. They found it incomprehensible that a U.S. Marine would want to defect. He was accused of being a spy. He was followed by the KGB. After a week of pleading his case to a parade of bureaucrats and having every door slammed in his face, the marine’s visa was revoked and he was ordered to leave the country.

  Desperate, the marine went back to his hotel, slipped into a hot bath, and took the blade out of his razor. He wasn’t going back. He couldn’t. The phone started ringing in his ear (Redhead, no doubt, calling to talk some sense into him). But the marine didn’t answer. This was his decision. If he couldn’t live in the Soviet Union, at least he could die there. He pressed the corner of the blade down on his left wrist until it broke through, then dragged the blade up his forearm, opening a large vein and spilling his blood. He did the same to his right wrist, then set the blade gently on the edge of the tub and relaxed into the warmth of the water. As the red clouds spiraled outward from his wrists, he closed his eyes, sad that it had to end like this but proud of himself for having the courage to see it though. But rather than peacefully drifting away to sleep, the marine was suddenly overcome by the feeling of a powerful presence in the room with him. Something with him in the dark. He opened his eyes one last time and saw a woman—an angel—standing over the tub, smiling down at him. A beautiful woman with wavy red hair.

  Redhead…

  She was the last thing he remembered before the darkness crept in from the corners of his eyes and took him. And she was the first thing he saw when he woke—sitting beside his hospital bed, keeping him company as the Soviet doctors bandaged his wrists and pumped him full of fluids. She spoke to him in perfect English, her demeanor warm and caring. She asked about his life. What he thought of the United States. Why he’d defected. Why he’d tried to kill himself. The marine answered her questions honestly. He felt a strange, instant connection with her. As if she understood exactly how he felt.

  When her questions had been answered, the woman told the marine that there was indeed a place for him in the Soviet Union. An important place. He was overjoyed. That night, as he lay alone in the hospital bed, he picked up the phone and dialed Redhead. He wanted to tell his oldest friend about the woman and what she’d said. But Redhead didn’t answer. It didn’t want to talk about the woman.

  It was afraid of her.

  For the next two years, the marine lived the ideal Soviet life. He was given a furnished apartment in Minsk and a monthly stipend. He was assigned a Russian language tutor. He met a young Russian girl, married her, and got her pregnant. All of these things pleased the marine. But none pleased him so much as his time at the Factory.

  Every morning, six days a week, a car driven by two nameless, silent men picked him up in front of his building and took him to what looked like an ordinary factory—a vast brick building with three smokestacks protruding from its top, seeping white smoke into the atmosphere. But inside, beyond the guard posts and layers of barbed-wire fence, was a space that looked more like an amusement park than a factory floor. There was an obstacle course. A gun range. A mockup of a multistory house, and a row of office windows overlooking it all, like the press boxes in a stadium.

  Here, in the Factory, the marine was slowly disassembled and rebuilt. Already a sharpshooter, he was drilled until he could hit a moving target at five hundred yards. He was taught evasion tactics. Hand-to-hand combat. The rapid assembly and disassembly of different weapons. He was trained in the basics of bomb building, surveillance, and countersurveillance. Every so often, he would glance up at the office windows and see a familiar shock of red hair behind the glare of the glass.

  Two years later, when he emerged from the Factory, he wasn’t the marine anymore. He was the Asset. He liked the name. It suggested value.

  In 1962, the Asset walked into the American embassy in Moscow and announced that he wanted to return to the United States. His defection had been a mistake, he told them. He was ready to go home and spread the word of the evils of communism, so long as his bride and infant daughter could join him. The Americans, always eager to slander the Soviets with their propaganda, could hardly stamp his passport fast enough. They even paid for his ticket.

  The Asset and his family settled in Texas, where he used the skills he’d been taught to blend in. He joined the Anti-Communist League (it was all he could do to keep his mouth shut in the meetings, as the bloated Americans called for witch hunts and demanded loyalty oaths and whipped themselves into an outright paranoid frenzy over the likelihood of “red spies” in their midst). They weren’t back in the States long before October came around again. The month of his birth and every important change in his life since. It was the month he’d joined the marines and the month he’d arrived in the Soviet Union. Once again, October delivered on its promise of renewal.

  That month, the Asset got a job working in the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas.

  Henry prepared to kick the door in.

  The evidence had led them here, to a third-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen—a neighborhood synonymous with crime, home to dope peddlers, streetwalkers, and gangsters who callously blew each other’s brains out in front of family restaurants. A neighborhood where children played in t
rash-strewn alleys and traveled in packs.

  It was here, in New York’s roughest neighborhood, that Virginia Dare’s trail had gone cold. Here, in a tenement building on Eleventh Avenue—once called “Death Avenue” for the number of pedestrians trampled under its horse-drawn carriages. They had been investigating for two months, interviewing those few vampires who remained on American soil, following a trail of fake names and false leads, and cobbling together a picture of a conspiracy both vague and vast. They’d worked tirelessly for weeks on end, yet what they’d learned barely filled a single page of a reporter’s notebook:

  1. The woman Henry had known as “Virginia Dare” was still alive and had been in the Soviet Union since at least 1950, splitting her time between Moscow and Minsk.

  2. There was a facility in Minsk, commonly called “Zavod” (the Factory), where the KGB trained assets for service in foreign countries.

  3. An unknown number of Soviet sleeper agents were currently in the United States.

  4. Increased chatter on coded Soviet spy networks indicated that “something big” was coming.

  5. Someone matching Virginia Dare’s description had recently been photographed leaving a meeting of the Young Communist League in Philadelphia.

  Dare was adept at covering her tracks, and for two months, Abe and Henry had chased one dead end after another, always a step behind. But recently, she’d made a critical mistake: she’d underestimated the paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover.

  Hoover had tapped the phone of practically every Russian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean expatriate in the United States.1 Three days before Abe and Henry found themselves in that Hell’s Kitchen apartment building, a low-level analyst had been poring over a backlog of phone transcripts, when he’d stumbled on a brief exchange—translated from the original Spanish—between a Cuban exile named Ernesto Mosqueda Ramos, suspected leader of a pro–Fidel Castro group, and an unidentified female: