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Fareed was staring at the material on his computer screen.

"I understand what you're saying," he said to Gregory. "You don't hands-on manage Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals. But there's a reason I'm asking about this particular project."

"I'm happy to tell you anything I know," said Gregory. "It's just that I'm not likely to know the slightest thing." He sat back in the gilded armchair and looked at the unyielding cards. "There must be a more amusing game than this," he said under his breath.

"It's the doctor involved--a woman."

"I wouldn't know a thing about her," said Gregory absently. "Others vetted her, hired her, approved her projects, not me." He turned up another card and looked at it with disappointment. "Maybe I should start devising our own card games, card games for us."

"Sounds like a stroke of genius," said Fareed, his eyes still on the screen. "Solitaire for blood drinkers. Perhaps you could devise a new deck of cards."

"Now that's a thought, or possibly an exquisite deck with face cards that have special meaning for us. Would our beloved Prince be the jack of diamonds? If so, who would be the king?"

"It's too early to be talking treason," Fareed murmured, eyes on the central monitor before him. There were three monitors, all the same size, and a couple of small monitors, dedicated to specific purposes, off to each side.

It was near 4:30 a.m. and there was little noise coming from the narrow streets that surrounded the immense nineteenth-century townhouse. The restaurants and cafes of the famous district were far away.

"Bear with me," said Fareed. "This doctor's reports to her superiors have been brilliant; but she's not who or what she claims to be. And her projects all have to do with cloning. You know this, of course."

"Cloning?" asked Gregory as he dealt out a new table of cards. "I know nothing about it, but it doesn't surprise me that people in my company are working on human cloning. It's illegal, isn't it? But I have never believed for a minute that the mortal doctors of the world could resist something so exciting as human cloning. There are times when I've encountered mortals in Geneva whom I suspected of having been genetically engineered. But then I know so little about it."

Fareed sat quietly absorbing all this.

"Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals has nothing official to do with cloning," said Gregory. "We have a policy against it. We have a policy against fetal tissue research."

"That's amusing," said Fareed. "Because your laboratories are engaged in a great deal of research involving fetal tissue."

"Hmmm..." Gregory was studying the cards closely. "I would love to design cards specifically for the Court. I think Lestat would have to be the king, though he eschews that title, and I think Gabrielle might be a magnificent queen. The jack could be Benjamin Mahmoud."

Fareed smiled.

"But then perhaps each suit could be different. Marius might be the king of clubs, and I might be the king of diamonds, and Seth might be the king of spades."

Fareed laughed. He said, "Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals has been working on the cloning of human beings covertly for twenty years."

Gregory sat back again and looked at Fareed. "Very well. This offends you in some way? You think it's dangerous? You think I should stop it?"

"You could stop it in your own company but could never stop it worldwide."

"So what do

you want of me here?"

"Just to listen to me for a little while," Fareed said.

Gregory smiled. "Of course." He went back to lining up the cards in suits.

What a charming, genial individual Gregory was, Fareed thought, and it was extremely difficult to realize that he was likely the oldest blood drinker now in existence. With Khayman and the twins gone, he was almost surely the oldest. He had been made before Akasha's son, Seth, Fareed's master, mentor, and lover, but not by much.

Everything about the tall, lean, and often silent person of Seth suggested great antiquity--including his eccentric mode of dress--a taste for sandals and custom-made floor-length robes of linen--and his slow and often unusual speech. That he now understood almost every current Indo-European language was plain enough, but he chose his words with extreme care and favored a stripped-down vocabulary which suggested a preference for concepts formed in his mind long before a plethora of adjectives and adverbs had been developed in any tongue to nuance them or sharpen them. And even the look in Seth's deep-set eyes was chilling and remote. Often his expression seemed to say: "Do not seek to understand me or the time from which I came. You cannot."

Seth had gone out hunting the dark corners of Paris tonight, a willowy white-clad wraith decked out in antique Egyptian bracelets and rings, likely to attract predatory mortals by his sheer peculiarity and seemingly defenseless reserve.

Gregory Duff Collingsworth on the other hand was thoroughly fortified by a modern demeanor in all respects. He moved with the easy grace of twenty-first-century men of power, comfortable on escalators and in elevators, in high-rise towers or cavernous shopping malls, and before television news cameras and human interrogators--an impeccably groomed and conservatively dressed "man of business," who spoke to one and all with an effortless courtesy that was both formal and warm.

Even here in this vast rococo drawing room, Gregory had the manicured gloss of a male of these times. He wore a "casual" belted gray suede jacket, with a pale-blue-checkered shirt under it and denim slacks. He wore his usual gold-banded wristwatch, and a pair of soft brown calf-leather pull-tab boots. All the immortals who took to the air wore boots.

Of course Gregory went to great lengths to "pass." He spent his comatose daylight hours in a glass rooftop chamber. Everybody knew this. At the Chateau he slept exposed atop the south tower. Here in Paris, he slept in a high-walled courtyard. This kept his skin always darkly tanned. And every evening on rising, he cut and trimmed his dark hair perfectly, so that few of his new immortal companions even guessed that it had been shoulder length when he'd been made.