Read Online Descendant by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online Page A

‘Forty-seven, to be exact.’ You’re excellent! Look at you standing there, like you both have pool cues stuck up your asses!”
    Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover waited until I had finished. Then, as if I hadn’t said anything at all, he continued.
    “Since February last year, James, we’ve been receiving reports of some very unusual killings. They started in Romania. More than sixty members of the Red Knights resistance group were murdered, all within the space of a week. That immediately deprived us of vital intelligence and it drastically reduced our ability to sabotage the Nazi war effort from within.”
    I looked at him with my eyes narrowed. “Come on, now. This
is
a joke, isn’t it?”
    “Not for the victims. And not for the Allies, if this continues.”
    “Come on, admit it. If it wasn’t Stradlater, who was it? Not Dungan! Dungan wouldn’t have the brains!”
    “James,” said Major Harvey. “It wasn’t any of your friends and it isn’t a joke.”
    “All right,” I said, although I still believed that they were bullshitting me. “What does any of this have to do with me?”
    “Since the Red Knights were all murdered, we’ve been receiving more and more intelligence which suggests that the Nazis have been infiltrating local resistance groupsand literally wiping them out. It happened all across the Eastern Front, especially after they took Bessarabia and Bukovina back from the Russians. Now it’s happening in Holland and Belgium and France.
    “The reason why this has everything to do with you is that all of the victims had their chests cut open, their main arteries severed and the blood drained out of their bodies.”

Dinner with the Falcons
    That evening, my mother made
bors cu perisoare
, sour meatball soup, which was one of the specialities of her village in northeastern Romania. We sat and ate it in the kitchen, with the windows open, so that the last of the sun shone across the table.
    My mother Maricica was beautiful in a dark-haired, white-skinned way, like a Madonna in a church painting. She did everything gently and gracefully. She could even peel apples gracefully, their skins unwinding in spirals. She always spoke softly, too, although the quietness of her voice belied a very strong character.
    Dad was fuming. He didn’t like secrets and he didn’t like anything to do with authority. His father had been a biochemist and a violin player and had knitted his own sweaters, mostly green with orange zigzags. He had brought Dad up to believe that a man was answerable only to his own intellect, and God, in that order.
    “You can’t even give us a hint what they want you to do? Your own family?”
    I shook my head. “They said if I told anybody—even you—they’d shoot me.”
    “Oh my God,” said my mother. “They
threatened
you?They come here, uninvited, into my house, and threaten to shoot you, my son, in my yard?”
    “Hey, it’s my house, too,” my father protested. “And my son. And my yard, come to that.”
    “We should complain to the army,” said my mother.
    “They said I have to go to Washington next week,” I told her. “They’re going to pay my fare and everything.”
    “They can’t coerce you,” said my father. “Is this why we pay taxes? Tell them you don’t want to go to Washington.”
    I spooned a meatball out of my soup. “But I
do
want to go to Washington. I think this is going to be really, really interesting.”
    “I see. It’s so interesting you can’t tell us what it is?”
    “Dad—not only will they shoot me, they’ll probably shoot you, too.”
    “Pah!” said my father, pushing his chair back in disgust, the same way he did when I beat him at chess.
    But my mother was staring at me across the table and there was a look in her eyes which told me that she had guessed why the army had come looking for me. After all, what was the one thing that made me different from all of the rest of my college friends? I had a Romanian mother, who had told