OPS, the operations center located on the top floor of the building, was both a lab and a communications hub. It was a large room with a thirty-foot high ceiling. There were many monitors mounted on the walls, but most of the attention was paid to the twenty-foot screen in the center of the room. This is where they watched the feed from the patrol vehicle in the alley on 6^th Street. A slightly smaller screen right next to it displayed a map of the city with yellow dots showing the positions of all the patrol vehicles in the field and red dots indicating the locations of the vampires that had been detected by the AGS, the Aura Generating System.

In a conference room one floor below OPS, Eric Steiger waited impatiently for a videoconference call with Hanson Whitley, the man who financed VAMP. Eric's wiry thirty-year old frame was hunched over in an old chair. He repeatedly stabbed the top of the table with a pocketknife while he watched the feed from the patrol vehicle with very little interest. A small picture-in-picture image appeared in the lower left corner of the wall monitor. It was Hanson Whitley's secretary.

"Hello, Mr. Steiger," Beatrice Lane said.

"Yeah."

"Mr. Whitley is terribly sorry to keep you waiting. He'll be with you in about ten minutes."

"No problem. Tell him I'll be right here."

"Thank you, Mr. Steiger."

He stabbed the table a little harder.

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