Chapter 4:

An Axis of Evil

Captain Riley Finn's wife, Samantha, was not unattractive, a brunette of medium build, with certain hints of a firm body beneath—firm as in "I can kick your ass with ease" capacity, as well as the "Yes, my husband's a lucky man" variety. Marco was able to see both, putting the emphasis on the one that could kill him easier.

"Riley!" Willow exclaimed. She jogged over and hugged the larger man firmly.

Finn smiled, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. "Hi, Willow. What—"

"Long story," Marco told him. "Let's just say we're all one big happy family around here. And I mean the Chinese takeout meal. That one's a witch, that one's a Slayer, that one's a Slayer, that's my future fiancée, Amanda, also a Slayer; that one—well, she's just my sister, and Spike you know, I'm sure to your regret, please ignore him, he's already died once lately."

Willow disengaged and said, "What are you doing here?"

"You might want to sit down, this could take awhile."

"Since 9/11," Riley began, "the US government, or at least the Human Research Initiative, was certain that something was wrong. Everyone thinks that the two 'faces' in the fire of the airplane impact of September 11th were merely computer generated images, hoaxes made later on; however, we knew better, because we used CGI to clean up the footage, removing both faces, 'proving' it a hoax. We didn't want to voice our ideas that it was the work of demons—or at least, a demon-aided attack. We know the attack was al-Qaeda, we just didn't know how deep the demon involvement was."

Sam picked up where her husband left off. "The thing is, we were able to identify one of two faces in the smoke as someone hanging around the United Nations—which is the advantage of having the US government run the security. We actually ran the faces through facial identification, and when Homeland Security connected the camera images, we found him. And we also found images of him scattered throughout the country in a direct line for California, but the trail stopped short of Sunnydale. Then he disappeared. We assumed that he had been taken out by Buffy, and nothing could be gotten out of him, so that was a dead end."

Riley continued. "We found out that he was a regular visitor to the Secretary General on a regular basis, but we could never figure out what it was about. We bugged his office, but it was too late to do anything about it."

"That part is, by the way, completely classified," she added. "We've had to bug a dozen different diplomats in order to get a hint of what was going on, and that your Russian was kind enough to explain on the roof."

Cassie looked at Marco. "The secret weapon was Mikhail's brother?"

He nodded. "Who knows magic, and who seems to be charged by the First, a la the Preacher man. Apparently, Bob was working to manipulate the UN to be an essentially useless body, using Saddam Hussein's oil-for-food program to bribe members of the French and Russian government, as well as Kofi Anon's son, which we can assume also means the Secretary General is involved."

"I heard that Kurds were complaining about such things for years," Amanda noted. "I guess they'll be taken seriously now…assuming the scam will be revealed in a timely manner."

"I think they're working on it as we speak," Sam added.

"The thing is," Marco added, "is that there's something bigger involved, like sending vampires to the political prisoners of Cuba, China, North Korea and Iran, so they can get an army they'll use to take out the Slayers yet to be collected, and then the Slayers Buffy's already got on her side."

Riley nodded. "And by the sound of it, they've brought some of the army here to New York, possibly even all of it—if I were them, I'd stay around the UN."

Sam nodded. "Right. After all, Turtle Bay used to be a slaughterhouse."

"Not to mention the fact that their boys are there, Anon and company," Spike added.

"One problem," Cassie noted, "where exactly would they be? It's not like you can hide a small army, or even a large one, around Turtle Bay. You'd at least need someplace to put these people in the daytime. And eventually, just any sewer isn't going to do."

Spike lit up a cigarette. "That's true. The cagey bastards aren't gonna just sit 'round the sewers hoping that some plumber isn't gonna come down and trip over 'em."

"Which means what?" Kennedy asked. "Vampires in Sunnydale at least hung around graves and cemeteries, what would be the equivalent here?"

Amanda laughed. "We'll send you to Queens; we have at least eleven major cemeteries, and the Jackie Robinson Expressway cuts through one of them—that's how big they are. However, none of them are near Turtle Bay that I know of."

Riley raised his hand. "There may be another way. The shipyards across the bay are the end point to an access tunnel in the UN. They could come and go through there."

Cassie laughed. "You mean the vampires could be hiding in Greenpoint?"

Marco leaned back in his chair. "Wouldn't it just be easier for the bastards to move in where Mikhail had his own place? From what I heard tell, they were concentrated over in Red Hook the last time—it's a large industrial area, replete with old warehouses, factories, and since the mob moved out, I'm certain a lot of those places closed down. We should probably start looking for unseemly body counts lately, just to narrow it down." He looked to his sister. "You might want to start coordinating with your local gangs, and make sure the lizards and the pussycats know that we're calling their reserve numbers again."

Riley nodded. "I can also make a phone call, have a team down here in an hour."

Spike scoffed. "With what, soldier boy? Machineguns and electro guns again?"

Finn glared at him. "Flamethrowers and napalm."

The cigarette dipped low. "Oh. That might work."

Melissa, who looked almost completely clueless, said "What's a Coffee Anon?"

Marco looked at his watch and said, "Cassie, Spike, I think it's time that Melissa should head to bed, her own bed, in her own house. Willow, you think you could transport her there? I would hate for my sister to get eaten on the way."

Willow nodded. "Right back." She looked down at Melissa. "Time to go for a ride, Sweety." They popped out of existence together.

Marco smiled. "At least there goes the peanut gallery."

Spike puffed on the cig to buy time to think. "Getting back to me point, just who's going to lead this attack? Willow? She'll do great for the magic bit against this guy, but the hand-to-hand'll be pretty hard. Kennedy's too new—no offense, luv. I barely survived a hand-to-hand with Nuala and she didn't know magic. Marco? You?" He scoffed. "Fire's good for handlin' the minions, but for the big bad, he'll prol'ly just wave his hand and make them disappear, or make his own little temporary shield."

Marco sighed. "My standard hatred of Spike aside, I'd like to suggest that we avoid any direct contact, or at least make as little as possible. The next direct confrontation with this schmuck had better be our last, so we should make the best of it. Personally, I'd like to be able to find where he and his little army are and blow the roof off the place—literally, and in broad daylight."

Kennedy cleared her throat. "And what makes you think that Willow can't counter the magic and I can't handle the fighting? You think Spike's right about that?"

He smiled, stood, and walked over to her before he threw his punch.

Kennedy blocked the punch, and automatically answered with a right jab to the ribs, only Marco's block was already in motion before she even swung. His arm came down like a pendulum and swept the fist aside, jabbing his elbow into her face. He then swept her legs out from under her, and dropped to one knee, holding a stake at her throat.

"You can't even beat me, and he thinks like I do, and is charged by the First, and knows magic. If anyone's going to tackle him, it's going to be me, Amanda and Willow—Spike, if you want to try arguing with me, I wouldn't."

Spike smiled, putting his cigarette down. "You know, I never really got a chance to have a go at you."

Marco ran his fingers through his hair, pausing at the nape of his neck, just above one of his wooden knives. "Hey, after you tried to rape Buffy, I wanted to ashtray you, pal. So I wouldn't—"

Marco hurled the knife, nailed Spike center mass, just to the left of his heart.

"—make any suggestions."

Willow popped back into existence, where she was a moment ago. "I'm back. Did I miss anything?" She looked at Spike's chest. "Oh, I guess I did."

Amanda cleared her throat. "Anyway, may I ask how you tracked the Russian here?"

Sam smiled. "We knew that there was a brief incident of vampires here, and that the Cattalanos had something to do with it. We just didn't know how deep they were in until now."

Amanda smiled, smart enough not to ask who "we" was. "I'd say about hip deep."

Marco slid next to her, gently combing his fingers through her hair. "Sounds like a good description."

"How?"

Cassie smiled. "Well, first we had a small infestation in the neighborhood: a master vampire called Mikhail the Bear apparently decided that New York looked like a proper nesting ground for him. He ran into us, and didn't like what happened—we're friends with the local street gang/vigilante groups around here, and we trained them how to take out vamps. One night they came here—apparently figuring out that we were involved in their undoing, and we finished them—me, Marco, and the gangs."

Willow nodded. "Then Marco came to Sunnydale and helped us kill a super demon named Bob, and Marco killed him darned near by himself, smacking him with liquid nitrogen. And then there was a super-vampire named Nuala, and he killed her too, by staking and beheading her."

Riley blinked. "This Nuala wouldn't happen to be a tall, redheaded vampire that occasionally speaks with a brogue?"

Marco smiled. "Ah, you've met her?"

He looked dead at Amanda. "We ran her face through the recognition program, and wound up with your friend here as the closet possible match. Kofi Anon met with this Nuala not long after the one you called Bob disappeared, made an arrangement to meet her through Wolfram and Hart in Los Angeles. What probably happened was that Anon sent a hit man out to get revenge on whoever killed Bob, and used Nuala to make it happen. I suppose when she didn't get back to him, he gave up."

Willow smiled. "It could be that Marco was merely out of the country for the better part of a year after. And the First certainly wasn't going to make any moves to help Bob; It was busy with Its own agenda."

"Like ending the world," Marco noted. "Again. What is it with these bastards and ending the world? They keep getting their ass kicked over and over again." He sighed. "Anyway, we've got a relative of Nuala here, let's say. And? Any relation is about a thousand years old, and Nuala was a tough old cookie, so what? Right now what we need is a Vampire Slayer Tac Team, and we need it now."

"Tack?" Willow queried.

"Tactical," Cassie replied. She'd spent way too much time around her brother.

"That's a nice try," Sam answered, "but the Slayers were unable to beat the Preacher without the use of a super-weapon, and he had practically no skill at all."

Kennedy, Willow and Spike blinked, shocked. "How did you know that?" Kennedy asked. "I mean, you didn't—"

"Know?" Sam smiled. "We knew after the fact, Kennedy. Did you think that all the Slayers were merely faces from the void? You remember the shy retiring redheaded Slayer who survived? Her father works with Coffer Black."

Marco and Amanda gasped as one, the others merely looked confused.

Amanda looked to the shocked ones. "Mr. Black is head of the CIA covert operations. Read Bob Woodward's Bush at War."

Spike shrugged. "So?"

"The Soviet Union knew he was so dangerous that they tried to kill him twice. He killed one of the assassins himself, had the other one taken out, and then their families mysteriously died soon after." Marco looked at the vampire with a long, meaningful look that only Spike would understand. "He scares me."

Spike shivered, raised the trembling cigarette to his lips, then slowly lowered it, snuffing the half-smoked cig in a dish.

Finn smiled. "Black is the CIA's top agent in all manner of covert activity, and I'd say his last name is appropriate, considering that the army unit I'm with is under his command."

Amanda nodded thoughtfully before raising her hand. "Point of order—how long has the government known about vampires?"

"1864," Sam replied. "Grant and Sherman had big problems with the vampires during the Civil War, but Sherman's March to the Sea damn near eradicated all the Southern Vampires as Lee's secret weapons. The Human Research Initiative was founded that year."

A moment of silence fell upon the group.

"Anyway," Cassie said. "What about your informant?"

"She sent us emails every so often to update us on the situation, in case it got out of hand," Riley answered. "We had monitors on the Hellmouth in case the vampires got loose, and if that happened, well, there would have been a very big hole where Sunnydale was, no matter what the outcome of the battle. We would have razed the high school, entered the Hellmouth, planted a nuke, and then run very, very fast, all in daylight."

Kennedy: "Why take out the high school, though?"

Riley smiled. "We would have planted the nuke in the middle of direct sunlight, to make sure none of the vampires could meddle with it. We would have had constant thermal scans to make sure no Bringers would be on approach to deal with the bomb instead, and then detonate."

The younger Cattalano nodded and leaned back on the couch. "Okay, so you do know what you're talking about. And yes, the Preacher man was an unskilled, second-rate hack with a talent for killing people."

"Actually," Sam noted, "he was a wanted serial killer who fell off the FBI's radar only a few months ago, right after Faith was broken out of a state prison. He was thrown out of the seminary for physically abusing women who came around the parish."

Spike, a one-time Anglican said, "Ah, the Papists didn't keep him because of that?"

Sam looked at him. "He beat up primarily on nuns."

"Oh."

Sam looked to Marco. "Last time he was seen, it was in a truck moving through California."

"Oh." He cleared his throat and continued. "So, he wasn't very skilled at fighting, just strong. The problem becomes you're right—our friend Igor is skilled, charged, and talented in witchcraft. All he needs is a low level shield like the one Willow gave me, and I'm toast in three moves. That's assuming he doesn't want to show off and kick the crap out of me for a while. We send in a Slayer SWAT team, they may last a little longer. If we can import Buffy and her super scythe, we might have a chance."

Riley shook his head. "From what we know of the deals going on in Iran, North Korea, China and Cuba, they're almost completely finished—we have a few contacts in the Wolfram and Hart world, and they're saying that the negotiations are almost done. We need to cut down all of them, soon. There are teams in place to remove the negotiating parties before the deals can be signed, but if the core army is still in place, that's not going to do much good. In fact, after the teams wipe out the Wolfram and Hart lawyers on scene, the First will probably just scatter its army to those countries anyway and make their new army, contract or no. We can only assume that much of the army is gathered here, in New York. And even if it isn't, Igor, as you called him, is."

Spike sighed. "And what's that going to do? Kill the army, they can breed another. Kill Igor only and you've still got the army."

"The same principle behind killing Osama," Amanda explained. "Kill off the more experienced, the system isn't able to function as well as when you have the experienced old timers in charge. It's why Israel kills only the top leaders before working their way down."

"Although in this case," Sam added, "killing Igor will be more like blowing up a mobile training camp. And we can, at the very least, assume he's got an inner core group that trains all the others somewhere close to him. Mikhail the Bear, from what we know, would nest, cluster a family, train a replacement to be his equal, and then move on to repeat the cycle. Estimates are a 50-man core group, followed by a twenty or fifty-vamp platoon behind each one of them."

Cassie balked at the numbers suddenly floating in her head. "You mean he's got somewhere between a thousand and twenty-five hundred vampires?"

"At a low estimate."