Книга - Battle Lines

Battle Lines
Will Hill


Book 3 from the talent behind the bestselling hardback YA debut of 2011. Dracula is on the verge of coming into his full power. Department 19 is on the back foot. Ladies and gentlemen: welcome to war. The stakes? Mankind’s very survival…As the clock ticks remorselessly towards Zero Hour and the return of Dracula, the devastated remnants of Department 19 try to hold back the rising darkness.Jamie Carpenter is training new recruits, trying to prepare them for a fight that appears increasingly futile. Kate Randall is pouring her grief into trying to plug the Department's final leaks, as Matt Browning races against time to find a cure for vampirism. And on the other side of the world, Larissa Kinley has found a place she feels at home, yet where she makes a startling discovery.Uneasy truces are struck, new dangers emerge on all sides, and relationships are pushed to breaking point. And in the midst of it all, Department 19 faces a new and potentially deadly threat, born out of one of the darkest moments of its own long and bloody history.Zero Hour is coming. And the Battle Lines have been drawn.


















For Sarah,

who knew what writers were like, but managed to look past it


The earth had a single light afar,

A flickering, human pathetic light,

That was maintained against the night,

It seemed to me, by the people there,

With a Godforsaken brute despair.

Robert Frost

We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and dreadful things.

Jonathan Harker


Table of Contents

Title Page (#udf3beaa0-d113-5b46-8601-ef3ecf8ac750)

Dedication (#u8c5f3a78-1700-505e-bc07-c60ceaebc0b0)

Epigraph (#ue74129e0-08cc-598e-8acc-f28cbdaf6fd3)

Memorandum (#u6275d24b-5c5c-5971-9567-35fbed52165f)

Prologue (#u62b550ac-9922-51df-9cb9-a46d33b2cfed)

52 Days Till Zero Hour (#ud8d4e159-dd91-545a-8e4b-598cd5f4cb39)

1. The Next Generation (#u58dd361c-1156-5cef-a25c-cf8f2ead2718)

2. Lazarus Revamped (#uca4a7511-ce2d-5efb-a8c4-10ef60bef319)

3. Slow News Day (#u5ce28fe0-92f4-53ba-aa97-365861c6edc8)

4. The Desert Should Be No Place for a Vampire (#uea95b1dd-8c08-5a08-9a64-bdd46bfff554)

5. Everything Heals, in Time (#ucff683db-8aa4-556e-917e-4fdad67a3dc9)

6. Civilised Men (#ua4c0886a-087d-5fdb-ae16-aae631fa2561)

7. Sink or Swim (#ua4485c50-39d8-56b4-bce1-085faeb37d19)

8. The Lost Harker (#ua1126d3f-fb79-562b-9522-f5933b61991c)

9. The Shock of the New (#u21440b56-379f-5cc1-b240-872c1e518930)

10. In Conversation (#ua07a9d6f-f8f9-50d2-83f5-dd29e316386e)

11. Time to Go Home (#u987ed1cb-08af-58ef-861f-ee0f7442579b)

12. Ready to Roll (#u196eb398-6c6a-5be5-a52f-84052440df1c)

13. Social Networking (#u5858abd1-d3f6-5d3c-a2eb-31102034dda0)

14. Girls vs Boys (#litres_trial_promo)

51 Days Till Zero Hour (#litres_trial_promo)

15. One of Our Own (#litres_trial_promo)

16. Classified Means Classified (#litres_trial_promo)

17. Old Scores (#litres_trial_promo)

18. The Most Important Meal of the Day (#litres_trial_promo)

19. The War on Drugs, Part One (#litres_trial_promo)

20. The Sleep of The Just (#litres_trial_promo)

21. The War on Drugs, Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

22. On The Trail of the Dead (#litres_trial_promo)

23. Truth or Consequences (#litres_trial_promo)

24. The War on Drugs, Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)

25. From Beyond the Grave (#litres_trial_promo)

26. Too Close to Home (#litres_trial_promo)

27. Dormant for Too Long (#litres_trial_promo)

28. Where It Hurts (#litres_trial_promo)

29. Drowning Out (#litres_trial_promo)

30. Preliminary Conclusions (#litres_trial_promo)

31. From Ancient Grudge Break to New Mutiny (#litres_trial_promo)

50 Days Till Zero Hour (#litres_trial_promo)

32. Closing the Net (#litres_trial_promo)

33. Playing with Fire (#litres_trial_promo)

34. The Sum of Our Parts (#litres_trial_promo)

35. Going Underground (#litres_trial_promo)

36. Sin City (#litres_trial_promo)

37. By a Thread (#litres_trial_promo)

38. Joining Up the Dots (#litres_trial_promo)

39. Prime Suspect (#litres_trial_promo)

40. Paved with Good Intentions (#litres_trial_promo)

41. Undercurrents (#litres_trial_promo)

42. Fathers4Truth (#litres_trial_promo)

49 Days Till Zero Hour (#litres_trial_promo)

43. The Dark Horizon (#litres_trial_promo)

44. Three Musketeers (#litres_trial_promo)

45. Final Edition (#litres_trial_promo)

46. It Never Rains… (#litres_trial_promo)

47. Time Waits for No Man (#litres_trial_promo)

48. Behind the Curtain (#litres_trial_promo)

49. Pieces of the Puzzle (#litres_trial_promo)

50. Deadline (#litres_trial_promo)

51. … It Pours (#litres_trial_promo)

52. Headlong (#litres_trial_promo)

53. Leaving on a Jet Plane (#litres_trial_promo)

54. Guilty Parties (#litres_trial_promo)

55. Hold the Front Page (#litres_trial_promo)

56. We Take Care of Our Own (#litres_trial_promo)

57. Hot Off the Press (#litres_trial_promo)

58. After the Horse Has Bolted (#litres_trial_promo)

59. What Might Have Been Lost (#litres_trial_promo)

60. Homecoming (#litres_trial_promo)

Two Days Later (#litres_trial_promo)

61. Post-Mortem (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue: Three Farewells (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue: Two Prisoners (#litres_trial_promo)

46 Days Till Zero Hour (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




MEMORANDUM


From: Office of the Director of the Joint Intelligence Committee

Subject: Revised classifications of the British governmental departments

Security: TOP SECRET







PROLOGUE

CROWTHORNE, BERKSHIRE


In the village of Crowthorne is an alarm.

A direct copy of a World War Two air-raid siren, it is bright red, and sits atop a pole two metres above the ground.

The alarm is connected by an underground network of wires to Broadmoor Hospital, the sprawling estate of red-brick buildings that sits above the village, and which is home to almost three hundred of the United Kingdom’s most dangerous, damaged citizens.

It is designed to alert anyone within a twenty-five-mile radius to an escape from the hospital, and has been sounded only five times in earnest in more than fifty years.

Ben Dawson had been asleep for about forty-five minutes when the siren burst into life. He jerked up from a dream about sleep, the kind of long, deep, uninterrupted sleep that had been impossible in the six weeks since Isla was born, and felt his wife raise her head slowly from her pillow.

“The baby OK?” she slurred.

“It’s not Isla,” he replied. “It’s the siren.”

“Siren?”

“The bloody Broadmoor siren,” he snapped. It was deafening, a two-tone scream that made his chest tighten with anger.

“What time is it?” asked Maggie, forcing her eyes open and looking at him.

Ben flicked on his bedside lamp, wincing as the light hit his eyes, and checked the clock.

“Quarter to four,” he groaned.

Not fair, he thought. It’s just not fair.

Then he heard a second sound, in between the peals of the alarm; a high, determined crying from the room above their bedroom. Ben swore and swung his legs out from under the duvet.

“Stay there,” said Maggie, pushing herself to the edge of the bed. “It’s my turn.”

Ben slid his feet into his trainers and pulled a jumper over his head. “You see to Isla. I’m going outside, see if anyone else is awake.”

“OK,” said Maggie, stumbling through the bedroom door. She was barely awake, moving with the robotic lurch of new parents everywhere. Ben heard her footsteps on the stairs, heard her begin to gently shush their daughter.

Ben felt no fear at the sound of the siren. He had been up to the hospital several times, had seen the electric fences and the gateposts and the sturdy buildings themselves, and was not the slightest bit concerned about the possibility of a breakout. There had been several, over the years; the escape of John Straffen in 1952, who had climbed over the wall while on cleaning duties in the yard and murdered a young girl from Farley Hill, was the reason the siren system had been built. But the last time anyone had made it out had been almost twenty years ago, and security had been increased and expanded since then. Instead, as he stomped down the stairs towards the front door, knowing the baby was already awake so it didn’t matter, what Ben was mainly feeling was frustration.

The last six weeks had been nothing like the parenting books had suggested, or as their friends had described. He had expected to be tired, expected to be grumpy and stressed, but nothing had prepared him for how he actually felt.

He was utterly, physically, exhausted.

Isla was beautiful, and he felt things he had never felt before when he looked at her; that part was exactly as advertised, he had been glad to realise. But she cried, loudly and endlessly. He and Maggie took it in turns to go and check on her, to warm bottles or burp her or just rock her in their arms. Eventually, her eyes would flutter closed, and they would place her back in her cot, and creep back to their own bed. If they were lucky, they might get two hours of uninterrupted sleep before the crying began again.

Ben shoved open the front door. The night air was warm and still, and the siren was much louder outside. He walked out on to the narrow cobbled street and saw lights on in the majority of his neighbours’ homes. As he lit a cigarette from the pack he kept for emergencies, like when he had been woken up for the third time before it was even four o’clock, doors began to open and pale figures in pyjamas and dressing gowns began to appear.

“What on earth is going on?” demanded one of the figures, a large, broad man with a huge, bald dome of a head that gleamed in the light. “Why doesn’t someone turn it off?”

Charlie Walsh lived next door to Ben and Maggie. Ben glanced at him as he made his way over, then returned his gaze to the hill above the village. The hulking shape of the hospital was visible as a distant black outline in the centre of a faint yellow glow.

“I don’t think you can,” Ben replied. “I’m pretty sure you can only turn it off at the hospital.”

“Then maybe someone should go up there and see what’s happening?”

“Maybe someone should,” replied Ben.

“All right then,” said Charlie. “I’ll come with you.”

Ben stared at his neighbour. He wanted nothing more than to go back upstairs, wrap his pillow round his head, and wait for the terrible ringing to stop. But that was now no longer an option.

“Fine,” he snapped, and strode back into his house to grab the car keys from the table in the hall.

A minute later the two men were speeding out of what passed for central Crowthorne in Ben’s silver Range Rover, heading up the hill towards the hospital.

Behind the desk in Crowthorne’s tiny police station, Andy Myers was trying to hear the voice on the other end of the phone over the deafening howl of the siren.

Crowthorne police station was rated Tier 1 by the Thames Valley Police, which meant that its front desk was staffed entirely by volunteers. There were twelve of them, mostly retirees, who took turns to field the small number of enquiries that came in from local residents – everything from minor incidents of graffiti and vandalism, to requests for advice on traffic accidents. The station was not manned overnight, but one of the volunteers was always on call. Tonight, Andy Myers had drawn the short straw.

He had dragged himself from the warmth of his bed when the siren burst into life, grumbling, stretching, and feeling every single one of his sixty-eight years. The space in the bed beside him was cold and empty; his wife, Glenda, had occupied it for more than thirty years before cancer had claimed her the previous summer. Since then Andy, who had spent his working years in the brokerage houses of the City of London, had been looking for ways to fill the hole in his life that she had left behind. Volunteering at the police station was just one of the ways he tried to do so; he was also on the board of the local Rotary Club, an active member of the Village Green Association and secretary of Crowthorne Cricket Club.

He dressed quickly and made the five-minute walk to the station. He did not hurry; he was no more concerned about the possibility of an escape than Ben Dawson was. But there were protocols in the event of the siren sounding, and Andy Myers was a great believer in protocol.

He walked into the station’s car park, wincing at the bellowing noise from the siren that stood behind the building. It was little more than a converted house, sitting at the end of a row of terraces. He unlocked the door and went inside, flopped down into the worn leather chair behind the desk, reached for the phone, and dialled a number.

The official response to a suspected escape from Broadmoor was twofold: it required all local schools to keep children inside and under direct supervision of staff until parents could arrive to take them home, and it called for the establishment of a ring of roadblocks at a ten-mile radius from the hospital. Crowthorne station had a single police car, an ageing Ford Focus that was sitting outside, so Andy’s only duty was to call the Major Incident Response Team in Reading and request instructions.

“Say again, sir?” he shouted, over the din of the siren. “You want me to do what?”

“Drive up there,” yelled the voice on the other end of the phone. “Go and see what the hell is going on. We’re sending units out to set up the roadblocks, but we can call them back if this is a false alarm.”

“What are they saying up on the hill?” shouted Andy.

“No answer,” replied the officer. “We think their system’s crashed, or gone daft, or something. Get up there, talk to the duty nurse, then radio in and tell us what’s happening. Clear?”

“Yes, sir,” shouted Andy Myers, and hung up the phone.

He swore heartily, the way that had always made Glenda widen her eyes at him in warning, and grabbed the Ford’s keys from the hook above the desk. He locked up the station, climbed into the car, and pulled out of the car park. As he reached the edge of Crowthorne, he flicked on the lights and the siren, even though it would be impossible to hear over the blare of the alarms. Then he pressed down on the accelerator and pointed the little Ford along the same road that Ben Dawson’s Range Rover had taken, less than five minutes earlier.

Charlie Walsh fiddled with the radio as Ben drove, flicking from one station to the next until Ben gave him a sharp sideways look and he turned it off. They drove on in silence, climbing the wide, shallow hill that dominated the countryside for miles around, until the Range Rover sped smoothly round the final bend and Broadmoor lay before them.

It had been opened in 1863 as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, terminology long since considered offensive. In the modern era it had been expanded to the size of a small village, a sprawl of low concrete buildings and trailers, of metal sheds and covered walkways. But the main buildings, where the inmates were housed and treated, were the same now as they had been more than a hundred and fifty years earlier: squat, Gothic structures of orange-red brick and grey tiled roofs that revealed their original purpose. The buildings looked, in every way, like those of a prison.

Ben slowed the car as they approached the outer fence. The tall metal mesh, easily seven metres high, topped with razor wire and electrified along its entire length, marked the edge of the exclusion zone that surrounded the hospital; inside it, tall brick walls, security patrols, deadlock doors and barred windows were designed to make sure that no inmate got anywhere near the fence. If they did, there was a sharp, unpleasant shock waiting for them.

The gate in the middle of the fence was standing open.

It ran on wheels, dividing in the middle, powered by an automated system operated from the security control room. There was a small box beside the gate containing a telephone, but it was rarely needed; very few people arrived at Broadmoor unannounced.

Ben pointed the Range Rover between the open gates and drove slowly forward.

“I don’t like this,” said Charlie Walsh. “We should go back. Let’s let the police deal with it.”

“We’re here now,” said Ben. “We might as well take a look.”

Beyond the electrical fence the road rose slightly to the main entrance of the hospital. The gatehouse resembled a medieval keep: two towers flanking a vast black gate, above which was set a severe-looking clock, fashioned in black and gold. The outer buildings of the hospital extended away from the gatehouse on both sides, merging into the looming ward buildings and the towering inner wall. The gatehouse gave the impression of being impregnable.

Unless the gate was open, as it was now.

Ben drove slowly through it, unease crawling in his stomach. The gates to Broadmoor were never open, and even if there had been a malfunction in the electric fence, they should never have been able to get this close to the gatehouse without being intercepted. That both gates should be standing open was unthinkable. And Ben noticed something else. He pressed the button on the door handle that lowered his window, felt the mild night air flood into the car, and listened.

The siren screamed into the car, rising and falling. But beyond it, in the gaps, there was no sound.

The hospital was usually a hive of activity and noise, even this early in the morning. There should have been the sounds of footsteps, the barking of the security guards’ dogs, the chatter of the nightshift employees.

But there was nothing.

“What are you listening to?” shouted Charlie Walsh, making himself heard over the alarm. “What can you hear?”

“Nothing,” shouted Ben. “Nothing at all.”

He wound the window back up and gently pressed the accelerator. The big car crept through the gate; beyond it were two small guard posts, plastic boxes like the kind that stand at the entrance to toll roads. He peered into the one on his side as the car rolled slowly past. It was empty. There was no sign of movement, although there was a dark shape on the rear wall, like a tin of paint had been thrown against it.

“What about your side?” he asked. “Anyone there?”

“No one,” replied Charlie and, for the first time, Ben heard the fear in his neighbour’s voice. “There’s no one here, Ben. Where the hell are they all?”

“I don’t know.”

They drove silently into the courtyard beyond the gatehouse. Modern administrative units stood on either side, but rising in front of them was the original Broadmoor building, a towering, imposing structure of dark orange bricks. There was a wide set of steps leading up to an ornate front door, and it was on these steps that Ben saw something out of place.

He stamped on the brakes of the Range Rover, throwing Charlie Walsh forward against his seat belt, causing him to yell out in alarm.

“What the hell—”

“Quiet,” interrupted Ben. He flicked the car’s headlights to full beam, illuminating the courtyard.

Lying on the stone steps was a man wearing a white hospital gown, much of which was soaked crimson.

“Oh God,” whispered Charlie. “Oh God, Ben, I don’t want to be here any more. Let’s get out of here.”

Ben didn’t reply. He was leaning towards the windscreen, craning his neck upwards, awfully sure of what he was going to see. He heard his muscles creak, then saw it.

On the fourth floor, directly above where the man was lying, one of the windows was open to the night, its reinforced glass missing.

“He jumped,” whispered Ben. “You can see the broken window. He jumped out.”

Walsh leant forward, but his shoulders and neck were too wide to see where Ben was pointing. He slumped back in his seat, breathing hard.

“He’s dead, Ben,” he said, his voice wavering. “There’s nothing we can do for him. We go home and we call the police and they can send an ambulance up here. Please, Ben, let’s go. Please.”

“Why is he just lying there?” wondered Ben aloud. “Why didn’t anyone try to help him? Where are all the nurses?”

“I don’t know!” screeched Charlie. “I want to go home, Ben, I want to go right now!”

Ben looked at his neighbour. The man appeared to be on the verge of a panic attack, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and bulging. And he was right, there was nothing they could do for the man: the puddle of blood beneath him was shockingly large. But everything about the hospital felt wrong to Ben. It wasn’t just the open gates; it was too quiet, too empty, and now one of its patients was lying dead in the courtyard and no one seemed to have even noticed.

He unfastened his seat belt, reached out, and opened the door beside him.

Charlie let out a yelp. “What are you doing?” he shouted, over the deafening siren.

Ben ignored him. He stepped out of the car in something close to a trance, his mind racing with what he was seeing all around him, turning it over and over like a puzzle whose solution was dancing just out of reach. Distantly, he heard the passenger door open and Charlie Walsh step nervously on to the cobblestones.

“Get back in the car, Ben,” he yelled. “Please.”

The pleading in the man’s voice brought Ben to his senses and he shook his head, as if to clear it.

“OK,” he shouted, and saw Charlie Walsh’s face crumple with relief. “Sorry, mate. Let’s go.”

He climbed back into the driver’s seat and was pulling the door shut when the dead body stood up and looked at them.

It was a man in his late twenties or early thirties. His gown looked as though it had been dipped in dark red paint, and his left arm was pointing away from his body at an unnatural angle, but his face wore a wide, hungry smile and his eyes glowed the colour of lava.

Charlie Walsh let out a high, trembling scream, and pressed his hands against the dashboard as though trying to push himself backwards, away from the nightmare thing before him. Ben just stared, his eyes bulging, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Then the blood-soaked figure ran forward, leapt on to the bonnet of the Range Rover, and smashed its fist through the glass of the windscreen.

Ben’s paralysis broke as Walsh screamed again. The noise of the siren burst into the car through the broken windscreen, deafening them both. The man with the red eyes shoved his arm through the glass, tearing his skin to ribbons; blood splashed into the air as the man’s fingers slid across Ben’s throat, then lunged for Walsh’s face. The man was yelling so loudly that he was audible over the din of the alarm, shouting words that were unintelligible to Ben’s ears, his mouth working furiously, spit and blood pattering down on to the glass as he fought to reach the two men inside the car.

Then his grasping, searching fingers closed on Charlie Walsh’s lower lip. With a primal roar, the crimson, glowing monstrosity tore it from the man’s face with a sound like ripping paper. Blood burst from the wound, spraying on to the dashboard and windscreen, and Walsh’s screams reached a terrible new pitch.

Ben shoved the Range Rover’s gear stick into reverse and floored the accelerator. Walsh was thrown forward in his seat and for a terrible second the patient’s fingers closed on his throat. Then momentum hauled him back, and he fell heavily on to the cobblestones of the courtyard. He was on his feet again instantly, bathed in the blinding gleam of the car’s headlights as it hurtled backwards. Ben looked over his shoulder and saw the open gate approaching, dangerously fast. There was no time to correct their course; he could only hope that he had not turned the steering wheel since driving them into this terrible place.

There was a screech of metal as the car shot between the gateposts and a huge shower of sparks on the passenger’s side as the panels tore along the brick wall. Charlie Walsh, who was sobbing between screams, wearing the look of a man who expects to wake up from a nightmare at any moment, leapt in his seat and almost fell on to Ben, who shoved him roughly back. Then the screeching stopped, and they were through the gate. Ben slammed on the brakes and hauled the steering wheel around. The tyres smoked and squealed, until the big car was facing the right way down the road they had driven up, only minutes earlier. There was a thud behind them, and Ben glanced into the rear-view mirror as he shoved the car back into drive and floored the accelerator again.

The blood-soaked patient, who had torn Ben’s neighbour’s lip from his face as though it was nothing, had run headlong into the back of the car. There was a bright spray of blood across the rear window at the point of impact. The car leapt forward and Ben saw the man lying in the road; he seemed to have knocked himself out. But, as he looked at the fallen patient, he caught sight of something else that almost stopped his heart.

Dark shapes were dropping steadily into the courtyard, before moving quickly towards the gate. Ben pressed the window’s button again and, over the howl of the siren, he could hear, very faintly, the crunch of breaking glass and a low, swelling roar, like the noise made by a pack of animals. He was still looking in the rear-view mirror as the car accelerated through the outer gate and down the hill; as a result, he didn’t see the glow of blue and red emerging from around the sharp bend in front of them.

Andy Myers gritted his teeth and pressed his foot down more firmly on the accelerator. The siren was deafening, even from inside the car; the old vehicle’s windows and doors were not as airtight as they had once been, and the sound was so loud the windows might as well have been rolled down. He was looking forward to finding out from the duty nurse exactly what was going on, radioing it in, and getting back to bed. There was a cricket match at noon and he was already glumly aware that very few of the club’s players were going to be rested and at their best.

He turned the wheel gently, sending the car neatly round the bend that would take him on to the final approach to the hospital. Then everything in front of him was blinding light, and he had the briefest of moments to wonder where it was coming from before the Range Rover slammed into his car head-on.

“Look out!” screamed Charlie Walsh, the words mangled by his missing lower lip.

Ben dragged his gaze away from the rear-view mirror, aware that something had moved at the edges of his vision. Then red and blue light filled the windscreen, there was a sickening crunch of metal, and everything went black.

Ben emerged into a world of chaos.

His eyes flickered open and pain shot through his head as the siren pounded into it. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned to look at Charlie Walsh.

His neighbour hung in his seat belt, his head lowered, his eyes closed. His face was covered in blood and a ridge of swelling was already beginning to rise across his forehead. As Ben watched, a small bubble of blood inflated and popped in Charlie’s ruined mouth, followed by a second, and a third.

He’s alive, he thought. Thank God.

Ben looked down at himself and felt relief wash over him; the big car’s roll cage had held. There was a bulge behind the pedals where the engine block had been forced back by the collision, but it had not broken through; it would have crushed the lower half of his body to jelly if it had. Blood was falling steadily from his nose and he could see the dent in the dashboard where he must have been thrown against it. His head thumped with pain and he found he couldn’t think straight; he tried, but the thoughts drifted away from him, as insubstantial as smoke on the wind. He reached out with a shaking hand and opened the car door. He made to get out, but a sheet of agony bloomed up from his left ankle, and he screamed. Ben looked down, and saw that his foot was twisted almost ninety degrees to one side. The sight was so alien, so terrible, that he vomited into his lap, unable to stop himself.

Ben fumbled his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialled Maggie’s number. He knew he should phone the police, but for some reason he felt unwilling to do so. Something had happened before the crash, although he wasn’t sure what it was. Had there been another car? Had he hit another car? He held the phone to his ear as he peered through the broken windscreen. There were pieces of metal strewn across the road. He leant further forward, dimly aware that the car seemed to be higher than usual, that his view of the road was different, and saw a twisted hunk of metal lying beneath his front wheels. Ben stared at it blankly, until his eyes picked out a smashed pair of lights sticking out of the wreckage, one red, one blue, and everything flooded back to him.

The hospital, the man, Charlie Walsh’s lip, the police car and—

He froze.

Oh God. The patients. The breaking glass. Behind me.

The siren screamed and roared, and he could hear Maggie’s voice shouting down the phone, but could not make his mouth work to answer her. He forced himself to look into the rear-view mirror and saw a red glow descending the hill towards him, a pulsing, shifting mass of crimson that seemed to originate from a hundred pairs of glowing points of light.

“Run,” he croaked into the phone. “Take Isla and run.”



52 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR




1

THE NEXT GENERATION


Jamie Carpenter was so focused on the violence playing out before him that he didn’t notice his console’s message tone until the third beep.

“Take five,” he called, pulling the metal rectangle from its loop on his belt, and heard two simultaneous groans of relief. Jamie thumbed READ on the console’s touch screen, and read the short message that appeared.

NS303-67-J/LIVE_BRIEFING/OR/ASAP

The message was simple, but it still caused Jamie a momentary pang of sorrow. It was an order for him to immediately attend a briefing in the Ops Room, similar to dozens of other orders that had appeared on his console’s screen in the months since he had arrived in the Loop, the classified base that was the heart of Department 19. But this one had been sent only to him; his Operator number was there on the screen in black and white. The previous orders had almost all been sent with the prefix G-17, the Operational Squad that he had led until a month or so ago, the squad that had comprised himself, Larissa Kinley and Kate Randall.

Their squad had been disbanded in the aftermath of Valeri Rusmanov’s attack on the Loop, so that their combined experience could be put to wider use helping the Department heal and rebuild. It had been one of Interim Director Cal Holmwood’s first commands, and although it was one that Jamie understood, it had still felt like the three of them were being punished for being good at what they did. Holmwood had assured them that that was not the case, but how they felt was ultimately of little importance: it was an order and they would follow it.

“Sir?”

The voice trembled, and Jamie looked up from his console. He was sitting on a bench at the edge of the Playground, the wide circular room on Level F of the Loop in which generations of Operators had been trained, sweating and bleeding on its hard shiny floor. For the last fifteen years or so, the room had been the domain of Terry, the tall, barrel-chested instructor who was standing in the middle of the gleaming floor with his hands folded across his chest. But it was not he who had spoken; the voice belonged to John Morton, who was slumped on the ground and looking over at Jamie with wide eyes.

Morton was breathing heavily and bleeding from half a dozen places, most seriously from where the instructor’s weathered knuckles had split his bottom lip open. He was sat on the floor, his legs crossed, his arms resting on his knees, his face so pale that Jamie thought he might be on the verge of throwing up. The blood from his lip was dripping steadily, pooling between his legs.

“Nothing for you to worry about,” replied Jamie. “I have to head upstairs for a bit.”

“Everything OK, sir?” asked a second voice, and Jamie turned his head towards its source. Sitting apart from Morton was a dark-haired woman whose name was Lizzy Ellison. She was almost as pale as Morton and she too was bleeding, from a wide cut above her left eye and from somewhere inside her mouth, but her voice was steady.

“Fine,” said Jamie, giving them both a quick, narrow smile. “At least, as far as I know it is. Terry?”

“Yes, sir?” replied the instructor. The huge man had taken advantage of the momentary pause in the training to give his mind a moment to clear, and a small smile of pride had emerged on his face as he looked at Jamie Carpenter. It seemed to Terry as though it had been mere days since the boy had arrived in the Playground, nervous and skinny and completely disoriented, but with a streak of bitter determination that had been immediately obvious to Terry, a veteran reader of people. Now he emerged from his thoughts, pushing the smile away as he answered the calm, deadly Operator the boy had so quickly become.

“CQD, please,” said Jamie. “Again.”

Both Morton and Ellison let out low groans, their eyes flickering wildly from Jamie to each other, then up to the imposing figure of the instructor.

“Of course, sir,” replied Terry, and turned towards the two trainees, a wide smile of anticipation on his face.

Jamie strode along the corridor towards the lift that would take him up through the base to the Ops Room.

He felt a momentary pang of guilt as he thought about the brutal physical programme Terry was putting Morton and Ellison through; Close Quarters Defence was a regime of violence and exhaustion that he would in all likelihood remember until the end of his days. But he quickly pushed the feeling aside. Recruits were broken down and rebuilt: that was the way it was done, the way it had always been done, and he knew that the understanding his two new provisional squad members would gain from their ordeal would serve them well out in the world, where violence and danger beyond anything they had known lurked around what often seemed like every corner. The darkness that Blacklight had kept at bay for so long was now threatening to overwhelm them, and there was no time to be wasted on the hurt feelings and bloodied bodies of the new intake of recruits.

Jamie was cautiously hopeful about the two potential Operators who had been thrust into his care, a situation that never ceased to amuse him. Both were older than him and far more experienced in the outside world. Inside the Loop, however, their experience counted for nothing and Jamie was an almost legendary figure; they both looked at him with barely concealed awe.

John Morton was twenty-one years old and had been recruited personally by Major Paul Turner. He had been about to be transferred to the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, and had already been marked out as a soldier likely to one day undergo the gruelling selection process that would see him join the SAS, the British Army’s elite special forces unit. Turner had become aware of him through his old colleagues at Hereford and had stepped in quickly to derail the young man’s career path. Less than a day later, Morton had arrived at the Loop with a look of wonder similar to the one that had been a fixture on Jamie’s own face barely six months earlier.

Lizzy Ellison was twenty-three, two years older than her training mate and more than five years older than Jamie. She had been an agent in SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service that had previously been known as MI6, and what she had done there was classified at a level accessible only by the Director General of the SIS and the Chief of the General Staff. Jamie had not asked her, although the time would come when he would do so; he had learnt from personal experience that secrets within a squad could be dangerous. But for the time being, he was content to let her past remain a secret for a single reason: Angela Darcy, the beautiful, fearsome Operator who had accompanied Jamie on his desperate rescue mission to Paris only a month or so earlier, who had also once been SIS and was, he thought, the most deadly and calmly predatory human being he had ever known, knew who Ellison was. He didn’t know how, but it was enough; if she had appeared on the radar of Angela Darcy, who had spent her pre-Blacklight career wading through blood that was often elbow-deep, then he would not push her to reveal her secrets.

Not yet, at least.

The lift doors slid open and Jamie stepped inside, pressing the button marked 0. As the lift began to ascend, he wondered what Cal Holmwood might want this time.

It often felt as though he spent more time in the Ops Room than in the small quarters where he occasionally found the opportunity to sleep. It was an oval room in the centre of the only above-ground level of the Loop, and it was where the Priority Level missions were briefed and despatched. In the month that had followed the attack on the Loop and the abduction of Henry Seward, the Department’s veteran Director, it had become the hub of the entire base, as every mission had become Priority Level. It was exceedingly rare to find good news waiting there.

Jamie leant against the cool metal wall of the lift and let his mind drift; as was so often the case, his thoughts were quickly full of his friends. The catastrophic attack on the Loop by Valeri and his vampire army had affected them all profoundly; Kate was still struggling to come to terms with the death of Shaun, the young Operator who had been her boyfriend, and had made a decision in recent days that Jamie had pleaded with her to reconsider. Matt was buried deep in the bowels of the Loop, spending every waking second staring at a computer screen. And Larissa, the vampire girl who had become the most important thing in the world to Jamie, was gone.

The lift door slid open again, and he walked slowly down the Level 0 corridor. He paused outside the door to the Ops Room, took a deep breath, then stepped inside.

Gathered round the long row of tables in the centre of the room was a group of dark figures.

Cal Holmwood stood at the head, with Jack Williams at his side. Arrayed along the sides of the table, their attention focused on the Interim Director, stood Patrick Williams, Dominique Saint-Jacques, Jacob Scott, Andrew Jarvis, Richard Brennan and a Communications Division Operator called Amy Andrews. She had been recently added to the Task Force, along with Dominique and Angela Darcy, who appeared to be absent; in the aftermath of Valeri’s attack, it had been expanded to include at least one representative from every Division in the Department.

As Jamie sat down, he noted that Paul Turner was also missing, although this no longer qualified as surprising.

“Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Cal Holmwood. “How are your recruits coming along?”

“Pretty well, sir,” replied Jamie. “Terry’s making sure they realise what they’ve signed up for.”

Cal Holmwood smiled grimly. “I’m glad to hear it. They’re going to see for themselves in a few hours.”

Jamie frowned. The Blacklight training programme had once taken thirteen months to complete, on top of the elite-level training that the majority of recruits had already undertaken before they were even made aware of the Department’s existence. But circumstances had made this impossible, and what was being carried out in the Playground now was the very definition of a crash course. It was far from ideal, from anyone’s perspective, but it was unavoidable: the Department had been hurt, and hurt badly.

There were rooms on the residential levels that had been occupied by Operators who were never going to return to them, unused desks in the Surveillance, Security and Intelligence Divisions, Operational Squads that had lost one, two, or in some awful cases, all three of their members. These empty spaces, these holes in the fabric of the Department, would not be filled easily, even by the new men and women who were being recruited specifically to do so. Friends, colleagues, even family members had been lost, and rookies would not take their places, even though they were vital: restoring the Department to something approaching full strength was of paramount importance.

The countdown to Zero Hour would not wait for them to be ready.

Nonetheless, Jamie did not believe the members of his new squad were; he had not been intending to take them out for another week, at least.

“Why, sir?” he asked, looking at the Interim Director. “What’s happened?”

Holmwood glanced over at Jack Williams. “Jack?”

Jamie’s friend nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “In the Security Officer’s absence, I’ve been asked to brief you all on the events of last night.” He tapped a series of commands into the console in front of him, and the Operators turned their attention to the screen set high on the wall. A window opened and grainy CCTV images filled the screen: running figures in white coats, leaping, grasping shapes moving among them, tearing and rending. Blood sprayed on to walls and ceilings, and the panicked, pleading eyes of the victims were wide, even in the low-resolution footage.

“This,” said Jack, “is D ward of Broadmoor Hospital, one of three secure hospitals that house the most dangerously ill men and women in the country. At 1:47 this morning, a group of vampires broke into the facility, killing every member of staff and releasing every patient from their rooms. We’ve confronted twenty-nine of them so far and managed to bring two into custody. Every single one has been turned.”

There was a sharp communal intake of breath.

“All of them?” asked Patrick Williams, his voice low.

“That’s correct,” replied his brother.

“This was an attack on us, not on the patients,” said Dominique Saint-Jacques. “They turned them all and let them out, didn’t they?”

“That appears to be the case,” replied Jack. “However, this was not the only incident of its type to take place last night. Vampires also attacked the Florence Supermax facility in Colorado, the Black Dolphin prison in Sol-Iletsk, the C Max in Pretoria, al-Ha’ir prison in Riyadh, Kamunting Detention Centre in Malaysia, Goulburn Correctional Centre in New South Wales, and the Penitenciária Federal de Catanduvas in southern Brazil. There are now more than four thousand maximum-security prisoners unaccounted for, and in every country, those who have been recovered have all been turned. This appears to have been nothing less than a deliberate, coordinated attack on the supernatural Departments of the world.”

There was silence as the Operators attempted to absorb the scale of what they were hearing. Jamie looked round the table; Patrick Williams and Dominique Saint-Jacques were staring steadily at Jack, their expressions calm and neutral, and he felt admiration rise through his chest.

Nothing fazes them, he thought. Absolutely nothing.

He was about to return his attention to Jack when he caught sight of Jacob Scott; the Australian Colonel was staring down at the desk, his eyes wide, his face deathly pale. The outspoken veteran Operator looked, to Jamie’s untrained eye, as though he was about to have a heart attack; his fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles had turned bright white.

“This is now this Department’s number-one priority,” said Cal Holmwood. Jamie dragged his gaze away from Colonel Scott, a frown furrowing his brow, and turned back to the Interim Director. “I’m sure you can see that the potential for public exposure and loss of life is extremely significant. I’m calling back the Field Teams—”

“All of them?” interrupted Jamie. “Even the ones that are looking for Admiral Seward? And Dracula?”

“Major Landis’s team will continue to search for Admiral Seward,” replied Holmwood, fixing him with a glacial stare. “The rest are coming home until this situation is resolved.”

“Dracula is gathering strength,” said Jamie. “Right now, while we’re sitting here. Surely he’s the priority.”

“This is about Dracula,” said Holmwood. “Jack, bring up the gatehouse.”

The CCTV footage changed to a view of the arched entry to Broadmoor. Jamie winced. Daubed across the arch, in dripping blood, were two words.

HE RISES

“Even so,” he persisted. “If Dracula and Valeri released the prisoners, then we’re playing right into their hands.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Holmwood drily. “We hadn’t been able to figure that out for ourselves.”

“So why are you doing it then?”

Holmwood looked over at Jack. “Lieutenant Williams? Play the Crowthorne footage, please.”

Jack nodded and pressed a series of keys. A new window opened on the wall screen, filled with a stationary image of a picturesque village street. He pressed PLAY and the image began to move, the black and white footage scrolling smoothly. A row of terraced houses was visible, the gardens neat, the pavement beyond the low walls clean and tidy. A small car was parked in the middle of the frame; its windscreen reflected the light of the street lamp that stood above it.

After a few seconds, there was movement. A middle-aged man ran down the centre of the street, his arms flailing, his feet pounding the tarmac. He reached the car and slid into a crouch beside its radiator, facing the way he had come. Moments later a second man strolled into the shot; he wore a long white hospital gown, his feet were bare, and his eyes glowed ferociously. As he approached the parked car, he appeared to be smiling.

The vampire stopped, and for a long moment nothing happened; the two men seemed to be in conversation, regarding each other from opposite ends of the vehicle. Then the vampire reached down and casually flipped the car across the road. It skidded over the tarmac, sending up showers of sparks, before crashing into a garden wall on the other side and coming to a halt.

Gasps filled the air of the Ops Room; Jamie glanced round the table and saw expressions of shock on the faces of his colleagues. On the screen, the helpless man stood up, entirely exposed, and raised his hands in a futile plea for mercy. The vampire took half a step forward, then blurred across the screen, lifting the man into the air and carrying him out of the frame.

Jack pressed a button and the footage paused, freezing the upturned car where it now lay. The Interim Director turned back to face the Zero Hour Task Force.

“The vampire in that footage had been turned for a maximum of forty-five minutes,” he said. “Does anyone want to tell me what’s wrong with that picture?”

“Jesus,” said Patrick Williams. “He was strong.”

“And fast,” said Dominique. “Too fast.”

“Correct,” said Holmwood. “The vampires who have been destroyed so far all exhibited strength and speed far beyond what would normally be expected of the newly-turned.”

“How come?” asked Amy Andrews.

“We don’t know. Science Division is examining the two inmates we’ve recovered, but they’ve found nothing so far. But there is obviously something different about these vamps, and there are about three hundred of them out there right now. That’s why this is our number-one priority, Lieutenant Carpenter, because this Department’s mission is to protect the public from the supernatural. Do you understand?”

“I do, sir,” said Jamie. “How come the Science Division is examining the captives? Shouldn’t that be a Lazarus Project thing?”

Holmwood shook his head. “I don’t want Lazarus diverted from its primary task. Dr Cooper is liaising with Professor Karlsson and, if he genuinely needs their help, I’ve authorised him to ask for it.”

“OK,” said Jamie.

“Good,” said Holmwood. “Anything else?”

“Where’s Angela, sir?” asked Jack Williams. “She should be here for this.”

“Lieutenant Darcy and her squad are in the field,” replied Holmwood. “They were active when the first calls started to come in. They’re due back within the hour.”

Jack nodded, unable to keep his obvious concern from his face.

“All right,” said Holmwood. “Anything else? No? In which case—”

“What about Zero Hour?” said Jamie. “How are we going to protect the public if Dracula is allowed to rise?”

Holmwood fixed Jamie with a cold stare. “The men who escaped from Broadmoor had been removed from society, Lieutenant Carpenter. Many of them suffer from the most severe personality disorders, a large number have long histories of violent and unpredictable behaviour, and the majority are dependent on pharmaceutical assistance. They have been turned in such a way as to make them unusually powerful, something that is worrying and new in itself, and in the next few hours every one of them is going to become insatiably hungry for running blood. If we don’t take them down, there might not be a public to protect.”

Jamie dropped his gaze.

“So what’s the plan, sir?” asked Patrick Williams, his voice steady, his jaw set firm.

Cal Holmwood looked at him. “Search and destroy,” he replied, softly. “As quickly as possible. It’s as simple as that.”

Jamie looked at the overturned car on the screen.

Right, he thought. Simple.




2

LAZARUS REVAMPED


Matt Browning pushed open the heavy door in the centre of the Level F corridor, as excited as a child on Christmas morning, and saw that, despite the early hour, he was not the first member of the Lazarus Project to arrive for work. Professor Karlsson looked up as he entered, gave him a smile and a brief nod, then returned his attention to a page of text resting on his desk.

He is the boss, thought Matt, smiling to himself. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

The reconstruction of the Lazarus Project had been undertaken with great urgency in the aftermath of the loss of Admiral Henry Seward. Cal Holmwood had given Matt, its only surviving member, carte blanche to make recommendations; he had done so, putting his natural shyness aside once he came to realise that he was not going to get into trouble for saying what he thought. His very first suggestion was that Blacklight make every possible effort to persuade Professor Robert Karlsson, the Director of the Swedish Institute for Genetic Research, to become the new head of the project. He had been aware of Karlsson’s work for some time, and considered him one of the cleverest people on the planet, a towering intellect whose area of specialisation was the manipulation of replicator enzymes within DNA, making him the perfect candidate to advance the search for a cure for vampirism.

Holmwood had nodded with polite incomprehension. Four days later Karlsson had arrived at the Loop with a small suitcase and a leather satchel full of portable hard drives. He had been introduced to Matt, listened politely as the teenager gushed at him like an adolescent girl meeting her favourite pop star, then suggested they got to work.

Today was to be the first day of the fully staffed, fully equipped, fully functional second incarnation of the Lazarus Project. Karlsson and Matt had spent the last month recruiting the finest minds from around the globe, rebuilding and expanding the laboratories, and overseeing the installation of the most powerful local computer network in Europe.

Every minute of time that was not consumed by the practicalities of rebuilding was devoted to analysing the data on the hard drive that had been salvaged from Professor Richard Talbot, the former head of the Lazarus Project and a servant of Valeri Rusmanov whose real name they now believed had been Christopher Reynolds. The hard drive had been recovered when Jamie Carpenter shot the treacherous Professor in the head, as Matt lay unconscious on the floor between them. Reynolds had murdered the Project’s entire staff, and had been about to kill Matt and make good his escape when Jamie intervened. It was thanks to Reynolds that it had taken a month to re-staff the Project; the background checks carried out on every potential recruit had been thorough to the point of being overtly invasive, as a repeat of the Professor’s treachery simply could not be permitted.

Reynolds had been working on vampire genetics for more than a decade, and had acquired the bulk of his data via methods that were as immoral as they were criminal: vivisection, live experimentation, torture. His work, in particular his mapping of the vampire genome and his analysis of the physical effects of vampirism on a turned human being, was proving invaluable to everything the new Lazarus Project was doing. Without it, the scale of the task might well have seemed insurmountable.

With it, there was hope: if nothing else, there was a place to begin.

The process of analysing and building upon the recovered data was already under way; each new member of the Project that arrived had immediately got started. But this morning was to be the official beginning, as it were, and Matt knew full well that the page of text that Karlsson was poring over was the speech he was about to give. He left his boss to it and made his way to one of the desks by the far wall of the wide room. He logged in to the Lazarus Project’s secure server, opened the analysis he had been working on until only a few hours earlier, and lost himself in the incredible complexity of the building blocks of the human body.

By ten past seven, all thirty-two members of the Lazarus Project were at their desks. There was a hum of intensity, the buzz of great intellects bent to a single purpose, a purpose as noble as any in the history of scientific research. Matt’s gaze was drawn, as it often was, to the narrow, pretty face of Natalia Lenski, the almost superhumanly clever eighteen-year-old Russian who sat five desks away from him. She had been recruited by the SPC, the Russian Supernatural Protection Commissariat, out of the University of Leningrad, where she had been studying for her doctorate, having attained her Master’s degree four years earlier, when she was fourteen. Her skin was as pale as Siberian snow, her blonde hair only a shade or two darker. She glanced up from her screen and smiled at him as Matt felt heat roar into his cheeks; his eyes widened and he jerked his head back towards his monitor, mortified.

Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.

Slowly, millimetre by agonising millimetre, Matt turned his head back in her direction, using the very edges of his peripheral vision, and saw, to his utter horror, that she was still looking at him, the smile on her face unchanged. He was rescued from these terrible, seemingly endless seconds by Professor Karlsson, who chose that precise moment to get to his feet, walk quickly to the front of the room and bang on the nearest desk with his hand. Instantly, the spell was broken; every man and woman in the room, including Natalia, turned their attention towards their Director, who looked distinctly uncomfortable as their gazes settled on him.

“Good morning,” he said, his voice unsteady. “It’s good to see us all together for the first time. Very good indeed.”

There was a murmur of approval from the watching scientists.

“Mr Browning,” continued Karlsson, locking eyes with the teenager. “Matt. Could you come up here, please?”

Matt’s colleagues turned to him, smiles and expressions of encouragement on their faces, and assumed the crimson hue of his face was the result of being singled out by the Director; only Natalia knew differently. Matt pushed his chair back and got nervously to his feet. He walked slowly to the front of the room and stood stiffly next to Professor Karlsson; his Director was looking at him with an expression of great pride, and Matt felt a smile rise on his face as the heat in his cheeks began to recede. He was suddenly incredibly happy; he felt full of purpose, full of righteous determination.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Karlsson, looking out across the ranks of the Lazarus Project. “We have in our hands an opportunity to do great good. To save thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and to eradicate a disease more deadly than that being worked on in any laboratory in the world. This Project represents the furthest frontier of scientific research, and each and every one of us should be proud at having been given the chance to be a part of it.”

Karlsson continued to talk, but Matt was no longer listening. Instead, his thoughts had turned to his mother, to how proud she would be if she could see him and what he was doing, and to the last month, which had been without doubt the happiest of his life.

For the first time in his life, he felt like he belonged. It was a dizzying sensation for Matt, a boy who had spent the majority of his life alone, ashamed of himself and unwilling to put anything more than the absolute minimum of himself forward; long experience had taught him that the more you allowed the world to know about you, the more it would use that information to hurt you. But he no longer believed that. Here, in this strange, unlikely place beneath the forests of eastern England, he had found true friendship, created under the most intense pressure, and a cause to which he was quite prepared to dedicate the rest of his life, if that was what was required.

“Get to work,” said Karlsson, and the round of applause that met the end of the Director’s speech roused Matt from his thoughts. He joined in, quickly enough that he was sure no one would notice he had been daydreaming, and as the men and women of the Lazarus Project began to return to their work, to the undertaking that each and every one of them had sacrificed the prospect of a normal existence for, Matt saw Natalia Lenski glance in his direction before she turned to her console, her pale cheeks flushed a beautiful, delicate pink.




3

SLOW NEWS DAY

WAPPING, LONDON

THREE MONTHS EARLIER


Kevin McKenna dropped the last of his cigarette into the warm can of lager on his desk and checked his watch.

It was almost nine thirty and he was the only member of The Globe’s editorial team still in the office. England were playing Portugal in Oporto and everyone else was either across the road in The Ten Bells, cheering and drinking and swearing, or on their way home, grateful for an excuse to leave the office at a reasonable time without appearing lazy. McKenna wanted to be in the pub with his colleagues, but the phone call he had received an hour earlier had been simply too intriguing to ignore. So, instead, he was sitting in his office with the door shut and the smoke detector unplugged, waiting for a courier to bring him a package from a dead man.

The call had come from a lawyer McKenna didn’t know; it wasn’t one of the many to whom he regularly passed white envelopes of cash in return for five minutes alone with the case files of celebrity lawsuits and super-injunctions. The man had been polite, and had solemnly informed McKenna that his firm was discharging the estate of the late Mr John Bathurst. There had been a long pause, which McKenna had clearly been expected to fill with gratitude, or sorrow, or both. But he had not known what to say: the name was utterly meaningless.

Then a flash of realisation had hit him, and he had laughed loudly down the phone.

The lawyer’s voice, when it reappeared, had a hint of reproach in it, but the man remained smoothly professional. He told McKenna that he had been left an item in Mr Bathurst’s will, an envelope, and asked whether he would like it couriered to him. In any other circumstance, McKenna would have told the man to put it in the post and made his way to the pub. Instead, he gave the lawyer The Globe’saddress and told him he would wait to sign for it.

You’re dead and you’re still causing me grief, he thought, lighting another cigarette. Mr John bloody Bathurst.

There was a simple reason why it had taken him a moment to realise he knew the name of the man who had remembered him in his will: he had only ever heard it spoken aloud a single time, and there was a reason for that as well.

It was Johnny Supernova’s real name, and his most closely guarded secret.

There had been a time when Kevin McKenna would have spat in the face of anyone who had dared to suggest that he might one day spend his time writing stories about minor celebrities for a publication as morally bankrupt and pro-establishment as The Globe.

This younger, slimmer, angrier version of himself had arrived in London in 1995 at the age of nineteen, his ears ringing with guitar bands and house music and his veins full of working-class fire, to start work as a journalist for legendary left-wing style bible The Gutter. He strolled into the magazine’s offices off Pentonville Road to be greeted by a receptionist more beautiful than any girl he had ever seen in his nineteen years in Manchester. She held open the door to the editor’s office and gave him a ridiculously provocative smile as he walked through it.

Sitting behind a huge glass desk, on which were arranged glossy colour spreads of the latest issue, was Jeremy Black. He wore a charcoal-grey suit, which McKenna knew without asking would be either Paul Smith or Ozwald Boateng, over a faded tour T-shirt for the Beatles. He glanced up as McKenna stopped in front of his desk.

“Beer?” he asked.

“Sure,” replied McKenna. It was barely eleven thirty in the morning, but he had no intention of looking like a lightweight in front of his new boss.

Black reached down and pulled two cans from a fridge that McKenna couldn’t see. He handed one over, then leant back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “I don’t want to see you in here more than a couple of times a week,” he said. “If you’re in the office, you’re not doing your job. Yeah? The stories are out there.”

“Got it,” replied McKenna, opening his beer and taking a long swig that he hoped was full of casual bravado.

“Leave your copy at reception. I’ll give you a call if it’s good enough.”

“All right.”

“I got someone to agree to show you the ropes. He’s going to hate you, and he’s going to treat you like shit, but he owes me about ten thousand words I’ve already paid him for, so that’s his bad luck. Yours too, probably.”

“Who is it?” asked McKenna, as a smile crept on to his boss’s face.

Jeremy Black was right: Johnny Supernova did indeed treat him like shit. But McKenna didn’t care.

Supernova was a legend, a freewheeling, anarchic genius who roared through the London night like a drug-fuelled hurricane. His writing was a reflection of the man, a furious avalanche of beautifully written invective, shot through with language and imagery that would have embarrassed Caligula: despatches from the bleeding edge of popular culture which served to define the time almost as much as the events they described.

The man himself was small and wiry, with pallid skin and a shock of black hair. He was older than McKenna, almost forty, maybe more. His eyes were narrow and piercing, and his appetites, for drink, drugs and debauchery, were famously prodigious. He greeted McKenna with obvious suspicion when they met for the first time, but allowed him to join him at his table in the Groucho Club, clearly still sufficiently connected to reality that he had no desire to be sued by The Gutter for breach of contract.

Back then, at that brief moment of cultural awakening, Johnny Supernova had been king. Pop stars, artists, actors, actresses and directors: they all flowed to his table and fawned over him. Kevin sat at his side, night after night, in the tall building in Soho, basking in his mentor’s reflected glory. He was older, and cleverer, and harsher than them all, and as a result, they worshipped him.

But it couldn’t last, and it didn’t.

The drugs, the booze, the endless girls and boys: all were fuel for the vicious self-loathing that burned inside Johnny Supernova, that drove him to examine the worst depths of human behaviour. What had been fun became hard to watch as Supernova’s edge began to slip, taking with it the hold over the glitterati he had once had. His table became a little more empty, his writing a little more soft, lacking the razor-sharp precision with which it had once slashed at its readers. Excess takes its toll eventually and, when it does, it either happens gradually, slowly, almost imperceptibly, or all at once, like an avalanche. For Johnny Supernova, it was the former. His star faded, rather than burning out.

McKenna was hanging on by his last fingernail by then; the craziness had ceased to be fun and had begun to feel like work. Johnny appeared to be shrinking before his eyes, week on week, month on month. Eventually, in late 2006, McKenna bought him dinner, told him that he was tired, that he wanted a little bit of stability, a little bit of normality, and that he had taken a job at The Globe.

The explosion he had expected didn’t come.

Instead, Supernova gave him a red-eyed look of disappointment that was infinitely more painful. “You’re the worst of them all,” he said, his eyes fixed on McKenna’s. “You could have been good. You could have mattered. But you’re just a whore like the rest of them.”

They never spoke again.

The phone on McKenna’s desk rang, making him jump. He had been lost in the past, drifting through the memories of a man he realised he had almost forgotten.

He reached out and picked up the receiver.

“Courier for you,” said the receptionist.

“Send him up,” said McKenna.

The courier arrived a minute later. Kevin signed for the package, thanked the man, and settled back in his chair to open it. He tore through the tape and the bubble wrap until he was looking at what Johnny Supernova had left him: an audio cassette, a thin folder and a sheet of thick creamy paper. McKenna placed the tape and the folder on his desk, lifted the sheet of paper, and read the short message that had been typed on it.

Kevin,

If there is still some tiny worm of integrity in that black void you call a soul, maybe this will give it something to chew on.

Johnny

McKenna couldn’t help but smile, despite the insult.

As he read the words, he heard them spoken in Johnny Supernova’s thick Mancunian accent, spat out as if they tasted bitter. He realised it had been four years since he had last heard that voice, seen the gaunt, narrow face from which it emerged. Supernova had died three months ago, from a heroin overdose that had surprised precisely no one.

McKenna had been too ashamed to go to the funeral.

He put the note down on his desk, considered the cassette, then decided it would be too much trouble to find a player at this time of night and picked up the folder instead. Inside was a small sheaf of copier paper, almost transparent, with faded black ink punched almost all the way through it. McKenna lifted the first sheet and read the header.

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH ALBERT HARKER. JUNE 12 2002

Barely a decade ago, thought Kevin. Jesus Christ, it seems so much longer.

In 2002 Johnny Supernova was past his prime: still famous, still infamous, still relevant, but fading fast, starting to realise, with disappointed bile in his heart, that his angry brand of burn-it-all-down cynicism was becoming a tougher and tougher sell in the New Labour wonderland. McKenna read the header again.

Albert Harker. Never heard of him.

He lifted another can of lager out of the bottom drawer of his desk, lit a new cigarette with the smouldering end of the last one, and began to read.

A minute later he paused, his drink forgotten.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

Five minutes later his cigarette burned down to the filter and hung, dead, in the corner of his mouth, spilling ash on to his lap.

McKenna didn’t even notice.




4

THE DESERT SHOULD BE NO PLACE FOR A VAMPIRE

LINCOLN COUNTY, NEVADA, USA,

YESTERDAY


Donny Beltran leant back in his chair and stared up into the dark desert sky. Stars hung above his head, an infinite vista of flickering yellow and milky white that he could have watched for hours had Walt not announced that the burgers were ready, jerking him out of his awe and eliciting a loud rumble from his ample stomach.

Donny picked his chair up, lumbered to his feet and made his way over to where Walt Beauford was plucking burgers from a metal grill and placing them on a plastic plate beside white buns and sachets of ketchup and mustard. He fished another beer out of the cool box as his friend approached; Donny took it, twisted off the cap, and took a long swallow. He belched loudly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grinned at his friend. The two men settled into their chairs and began to eat their supper; they were completely at ease in each other’s company, the result of two and a half decades of friendship that had started at college in California, and had survived the pleasant, unavoidable diversions of marriages and children.

This weekend, though, was sacred.

It was the anniversary of the strange, surreal day in 1997 when they had sold five per cent of their shares in the search engine they had helped found to a private investment group in San Francisco, and realised with genuine bemusement that they had both become millionaires. They had celebrated by taking Donny’s old van out to Joshua Tree, where they drank whisky and smoked grass and reminisced, and it was now traditional for them to head into the desert for two days every year.

Donny wolfed his burger down in three bites. Walt ate slowly, savouring each mouthful, and was still finishing his first as his friend was attacking his third. They ate in companionable silence, their eyes fixed on the skies to the west, above the low hills that shielded Area 51 from unwelcome eyes. Their little clockwork radio sat on the desert floor between them; they had found a Las Vegas classic rock station at the edge of the dial and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Highway Patrolman’ was crackling softly out of the speakers.

Donny finished the last of his burgers, felt his stomach rumble appreciatively, and settled himself in his chair. The two friends would stay like this until they fell asleep. Eventually, one of them would wake up and rouse the other, and they would stumble into their tent to see out the rest of the rapidly cooling night. It was a familiar routine, and one they enjoyed immensely.

“What’s that?” asked Walt.

Donny grinned. The first time they had come up here, almost a decade earlier, they had spent most of their first night claiming to see something in the distance, trying to make each other jump. But they had never seen anything in the famous Area 51 skies apart from regular military jets and helicopters, and Donny had no intention of falling for this old routine.

“Nothing,” he said, without even turning his head. “Just like it was nothing last year, like it’s always been nothing. Don’t even try it, Walt.”

“I’m serious.”

Something in Walt’s voice made Donny look round. It wasn’t fear, or even unease; it sounded more like incredulity. He turned his head slowly and saw Walt pointing towards the northern horizon. He followed his friend’s finger and looked.

In the distance, a tiny red light was moving smoothly through the night sky. It was perhaps half a mile away, little more than a pinprick in the darkness, but it was darting quickly through the air, seeming to change direction rapidly. Then Donny realised something else.

It was moving in their direction.

“What the hell is that?” he said.

“No idea,” replied Walt, his gaze fixed on the approaching light. “It’s small, whatever it is.”

“No sound either,” said Donny. “No engine. Listen.”

The two friends fell silent. Out on the highway, a car rumbled quickly past. But from the north, the direction the glowing dot was coming from, there was no sound of any kind.

The light swirled and swooped through the sky with dizzying speed. It accelerated in one direction for a second or two, appeared to stop dead and hover, then zoomed away in another direction entirely. It flickered, as though it was rapidly turning on and off, then shot towards the ground, so low that it seemed to scrape the desert floor, before rocketing back into the sky. And it was getting closer, second by second, to the two watching men.

“Can’t be a plane,” said Donny. “Too quiet. Too quick.”

“Maybe a drone?” said Walt. “Some new model?”

“Maybe,” replied Donny, but he didn’t think so. The speed and the angles of the light’s movement were too fast, too sudden, for even the smallest remote aircraft. He stared at the dancing light, fascinated, then felt the breath catch in his throat as it accelerated directly towards them. It swooped low, and now, for the first time, Donny could hear something: the rattling of desert sand as whatever it was passed above it at incredible speed. He opened his mouth to say something to Walt, but didn’t get the chance.

The glowing red light hurtled through their campsite, barely two metres above their heads. Their barbecue thudded to the ground and their tent fluttered heavily in the rushing air, its canvas sides rattling out a suddenly deafening drumbeat. Plates and cups and empty beer cans leapt into the air and Donny raised a protective arm across his eyes, feeling his weight shift as he did so. His gaze was still fixed on the patch of sky through which the light had passed at incredible, unbelievable speed, and he overbalanced, hearing the plastic of his chair rip as he thudded to the ground. Walt was beside him immediately, dragging him to his feet, then shushing him before he uttered a single word. The two men stood in the middle of their scattered campsite, listening intently, scanning the skies for the red light.

There was no sign of it in any direction.

It was gone.

“What. The. Hell. Was. That?” asked Donny.

“I don’t know,” replied Walt, his eyes shining with excitement. “I’ve never seen anything move like that. Never. And I…” He trailed off, still staring up into the sky.

“You what?” asked Donny. He was beginning to smile at the incredible weirdness of the moment, glad that he had shared it with his friend.

“I thought I… heard something,” said Walt. “When it passed through, just for a second. Something crazy.”

“What was it?”

“Laughter,” said Walt, a smile of embarrassment rising on his face. “It sounded like a girl, laughing.”

Fifty metres above their heads, Larissa Kinley floated in the cool air, a smile of unbridled pleasure on her pale, beautiful face.

It had been reckless to swoop through the little campsite, and it was almost certainly a breach of regulations, but she didn’t care; she knew full well that neither of the men had been able to see her at the speed she had been moving, just as she knew they wouldn’t be able to see her now, even if they happened to look directly at her. The matt-black material of her Blacklight uniform disappeared completely into the darkness of the desert sky. And neither man was looking, in any case; they were chatting excitedly to each other, their words perfectly audible to her supernatural ears. She savoured their conversation for a few moments, then spun elegantly in the air and flew slowly back towards the wide white expanse of the dry bed of Groom Lake.

Larissa loved the desert.

Its vast expanse made her feel tiny; made her feel free. She would obviously have been forbidden from flying during the hours of daylight even if doing so wouldn’t have caused her to burst into flames, but once the sun was down, she was allowed to take to the skies. Such freedom was wonderful after more than three months in Department 19, where her every movement was scrutinised and subject to seemingly dozens of rules and regulations. Part of it was simple geography: the Loop was hidden away in the middle of one of the most densely populated countries in the world, whereas NS9 sat at the centre of several hundred square miles of land that belonged to the US government, land that no member of the public was permitted to enter. Everyone knew Area 51 existed, but no one knew what really happened there, and the military were quite happy to let the UFO conspiracies run and run; they worked as a fantastically efficient red herring.

She had been in the desert for almost three weeks. When Cal Holmwood had told her that she was being sent on secondment to NS9, she had immediately assumed she was being punished for something. It had seemed unthinkably cruel that the Interim Director, who was fully aware of the situation that had developed between herself and Jamie Carpenter, would send her halfway around the world to do a job that any number of Operators could do just as well. But she was beginning to revise her opinion of his motives.

Larissa missed Jamie and Kate and Matt; her friends made her happy, and Jamie made her positively blissful at times. But they were often the only things inside Blacklight that did. She was a vampire member of an organisation whose sole reason for existing was to destroy vampires, and although she had proved herself time and again since being allowed to join, there were plenty of Operators inside the Loop who still looked at her with barely concealed disgust. Part of it was the fact that she had spent her first days there in a cell on the detention level, part of it was the perception that she had endangered the life of Jamie’s mother to serve her own needs, but mostly it was the mere fact of who, and what, she was. She was surrounded by hostility, and suspicion, with no indication that either was going to end any time soon.

At NS9 she had instantly been given a fresh start, the clean slate she knew she would never be granted at the Loop. She had been made to feel welcome and valued, and had made friends, so quickly and naturally that it had surprised her: men and women whose company she enjoyed, who made her feel normal and gave her energetic self-loathing a rest. As she drifted over Papoose Lake, descending slowly towards the wide-open doors of the NS9 hangar, she saw one of them waiting for her in the long rectangle of yellow light. She slipped easily to the ground and smiled at Tim Albertsson, who grinned back at her with his perfectly straight, perfectly white, all-American teeth.

The tall, broad former Navy SEAL was Larissa’s handler during her secondment in the desert. He was of Scandinavian descent, as his blond hair and blue eyes would readily attest, and a member of NS9’s elite Special Operator programme.

“Nice flight?” he asked.

“Very nice,” she replied. “Beautiful in fact. It felt like I could see all the way to the ocean.”

“With your eyes, you probably could,” said Tim.

Larissa laughed. “Maybe.”

“Dinner?” asked Tim. “I’m meeting everyone in the diner.”

“I can’t right now,” replied Larissa. “I’ve got a meeting with the Director, and I’m going to try to call home in a few hours. But I’ll come round if I get time in between.”

Tim nodded. “Say hello to Jamie for me if you don’t make it,” he said.

“I will,” said Larissa, knowing that she wouldn’t.

“Cool,” he said, and smiled widely. “I might see you later then.”

“Maybe,” she said, and walked into the hangar, her heart thumping in her chest.

*

Larissa waited until the lift began to descend, then leant heavily against the metal wall.

Her heart was refusing to slow down. Part of the reason, she knew, was Tim, with his handsome face and his hair and his casual, easy-going confidence, but it was mostly because of the realisation that had been steadily building inside her for the last week or so. It intensified whenever she was about to speak to Jamie, because it was the one thing she couldn’t tell him; the one thing she knew he wouldn’t want to hear.

She got out of the lift on Level 1 and floated along the corridor. She never thought twice about flying inside the NS9 base, never felt self-conscious or worried that the next person she saw would give her the look of contempt she had become all too used to. Inside the base that everyone called Dreamland, the only emotion her vampire abilities provoked with any regularity was good-natured jealousy from Operators who wished they had her strength and speed.

Larissa knocked on the door of the Director’s quarters and felt it swing slightly open. The door was rarely closed, let alone locked, and she had never seen a single guard stationed outside it; it was just one of the many ways that NS9 differed from Blacklight. She pushed it open, calling General Allen’s name as she did so.

“Come on in,” shouted a voice.

Larissa floated through the door. The room beyond was square with a wide desk standing to one side. On the wall opposite a vast black screen had been hung, reaching almost from floor to ceiling, and at the back of the room stood a wooden table on which was arranged a silver tray full of bottles: whisky, brandy, vodka, gin. Beneath the table was a small grey fridge that Larissa knew was always full. The table stood between two doors that led into the rest of the General’s quarters; above it, the wall was covered with pennants and banners and scarves in the black and gold colours of the West Point football team.

Larissa had spent a number of evenings in this friendly, comfortable room since arriving at NS9. General Allen was a warm, garrulous conversationalist and she enjoyed his company immensely. He regaled her with stories of the men and women she had met during her secondment and the ones she had left behind in England, stories of adventure and daring and blood and death. Last time, he had told tales of Henry Seward and Julian Carpenter, two men for whom the General had enormous affection. She had listened intently as he described the three of them, all young and full of fire, determined to destroy every vampire on the planet; they had fought alongside each other countless times, their paths crossing often enough for the two Englishmen and the American to become friends. They had remained close, even as geography separated them, and it was obvious to Larissa that the loss of Henry Seward had hit General Allen hard, coming as it did less than three years after the death of Julian Carpenter.

Their first conversation had turned into a subtle interrogation of Department 19’s ability to find Admiral Seward and bring him home; Larissa got the distinct impression that only protocol was preventing General Allen from shipping the entire NS9 roster to Europe to aid in the search for his lost friend. She had reminded him that he knew Cal Holmwood and Paul Turner were good men, and reassured him that they were doing everything they could; her presence in Nevada was proof that they were keen to restore Blacklight to full strength as quickly as possible so they might better hunt for their lost Director, and Allen had appeared satisfied, at least outwardly.

Larissa floated to the pair of sofas that dominated the centre of the room. They were angled towards the screen with a long wooden coffee table before them; she took a seat and waited for the Director to appear. She was hopeful that General Allen might continue his tales of Jamie’s father; she loved hearing them, and had taken to writing them down in a small notebook she kept in her quarters. Her plan was to give the notebook to Jamie when she got home; she hoped it might help him to know the real man his father had been.

A minute or so later one of the doors at the back of the living room opened and General Allen emerged. He was a large man, tall and broad through the shoulders, and carried himself with the upright ease of a lifelong soldier. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and combat trousers and was towelling the last remnants of shaving foam from his ears and chin as he strolled into the room. He saw the vampire girl sitting on the sofa and grinned broadly.

“Larissa,” he said. “Good to see you. Drink?”

“Diet Coke, please, sir.”

Allen nodded, and took a can from his fridge. He selected a beer for himself, then handed the can and a glass full of ice to Larissa. She thanked him, and poured her drink as the General twisted the cap off his own. He flopped down on to the sofa opposite her and took a long pull from his bottle.

“Tim says you’re scaring the hell out of the trainees,” he said. “Apparently, a couple of them asked to be transferred back to their units.”

“Oh God,” said Larissa, her face flushing pink. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the Director, smiling broadly. “They’ve all been turned down. You opened their eyes, that’s all. They’ll get over it. And if they can’t, they’re no use to us.”

Larissa nodded. “I suppose not, sir.”

“Your Operational reports have also been excellent. Uniformly so.”

“That’s good to hear, sir.”

Allen nodded. “Have you talked to Jamie?”

“Not for a couple of days, sir. I’m going to call him tonight.”

“That’s good,” said General Allen. “It still blows my mind to think about what he did to Alexandru Rusmanov. A kid his age? Unbelievable.”

Larissa felt pride explode through her chest. “He doesn’t think it was that big a deal, sir,” she replied. “He thinks he did what he had to do. I’ve tried to tell him he’s wrong, but he won’t hear it.”

“He is wrong,” said General Allen. “Do you know how many Operators have lost their lives to Alexandru over the years? Older, far more experienced men and women than him? Too many to count, Larissa, and every one of them was trying to do what needed doing. Only he actually did it.”

Larissa beamed. She loved the awe with which her boyfriend was regarded on this side of the Atlantic, from rookie Operators all the way up to the Director himself. Jamie was nothing short of a legend: the teenager who had destroyed Alexandru Rusmanov, who had taken a squad of men and women into the lair of the oldest vampire in Paris and rescued Victor Frankenstein, who had earned the trust of Henry Seward and the grudging respect of Paul Turner. She felt no jealousy when people asked her about him, just pride, and love.

“I know, sir,” she said. “You should tell him.”

“I will,” said General Allen. “One day, I definitely will.”

“He’ll appreciate it, sir.”

“Do you miss him?” asked the Director. “Are you looking forward to going home?”

Larissa considered this: two different questions, with two different answers.

“I miss him,” she said.

General Allen nodded. “I’m hearing nothing but great things about you,” he said. “Tim’s just about ready to adopt you. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“That’s nice to hear, sir.”

“We probably could, you know,” said Allen, his grey eyes suddenly fixed on hers. “Arrange a permanent transfer, I mean. What would you think about something like that?”

Larissa felt her stomach churn with desire. She pictured herself flying through the great open spaces surrounding Dreamland, eating and drinking and laughing with her friends in the diner at the edge of the runway, training recruits and helping NS9 on Operations throughout the length and breadth of this vast, unfamiliar country.

“What about Jamie?” she asked. “Could you have him transferred too?”

General Allen laughed. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Larissa, I can assure you of that. But I think the chances of Cal Holmwood letting that happen are somewhere very close to zero.”

Bob Allen watched as Larissa closed the door behind her, then got up and reached into his fridge for another beer. As he removed the cap, the sense of conflict that always arose in the aftermath of talking to Larissa made its presence known in his stomach, where it twisted gently. His excitement at discussing Blacklight’s new generation with the vampire girl was tempered by a sense of guilt, of having betrayed the man who was currently locked in a cell eight floors below his feet.

He had told Larissa the truth: one day he would meet Jamie Carpenter and, when he did, he intended to shake him by the hand and congratulate him. That wouldn’t be enough, but there were no words that were sufficient for what Jamie had done, no way to do it justice. Bob Allen would never have permitted a lone Operator to face a Priority Level 1 vampire, especially not one as old and dangerous as Alexandru Rusmanov; he doubted, in fact, whether he would have sent less than fifty of his finest Operators to face him. But Jamie had faced him alone, with minimal weapons and training, and prevailed.

Yet, despite his genuine admiration, Bob Allen feared Jamie Carpenter. Specifically, he feared how the boy might react if he ever found out the truth: that on both sides of the Atlantic, men he was expected to trust with his life were keeping his father’s survival a secret from him.

The Director drained his second beer and headed for the door. At the end of the corridor stood the elevator that would take him down to the detention level, where the man he had described to Larissa as one of his closest friends would be waiting for him, alone in the darkness.




5

EVERYTHING HEALS, IN TIME


Kate Randall wiped her eyes and splashed water on her face. It was the first time she had cried in almost two and a half days, a new personal best since the night a month earlier when she had watched her boyfriend die.

She was standing in the bathroom within the small suite of rooms that had been commandeered by ISAT, the Internal Security Assessment Team. In the centre was the interview room, containing a seat flanked by two metal cabinets of monitoring equipment, a desk and two plastic chairs. Outside the entrance to the interview room was a small lobby, separated from the rest of the Intelligence Division by a heavy steel door, which was accessed by a nine-digit code known only to three people. To the left of the lobby stood a door, leading into a small living room and kitchen. The thin plaster wall of the living room contained two further doors; one led into the small quarters that the ISAT Director had taken to sleeping in, the other into the bathroom where Kate had just stopped crying.

There was a gentle knock on the door behind her.

“One minute,” she called.

“Are you all right?” asked a male voice, full of concern.

“I’m fine,” she replied. “Just… give me a minute, OK?”

“OK,” replied the voice. “We’re ready when you are. Take your time.”

Kate wiped her eyes a final time.

Get it together, she told herself, sharply. He needs you.

She stared at herself for a long moment in the mirror above the sink; she took a deep breath, held it, let it out, then turned and opened the bathroom door. Major Paul Turner was standing in the small ISAT living room, his arms folded across his chest. He smiled at her, almost, but not quite, managing to hide the expression of concern she had seen on his face as she emerged from the bathroom.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” she replied.

Turner clapped her on the shoulder, his hand pausing momentarily before falling away, then led her out into the lobby and through the door to the interview room.

ISAT had been formed in the aftermath of Valeri Rusmanov’s attack on the Loop, in response to a claim made by his brother Valentin during the interrogation that had followed his defection to Blacklight.

Paul Turner had asked the ancient vampire whether he had any information regarding the existence of double agents inside the Department. The sad case of Thomas Morris, the former Operator who had betrayed them to Valentin’s brother Alexandru and had been responsible for the death of Julian Carpenter, had been assumed to be an isolated incident. Valentin’s answer had immediately cast doubt over that assumption; he had claimed to know with absolute certainty that Valeri had maintained at least one agent inside the Department since its expansion in the 1920s.

Valentin had been able to offer no support for this claim, no names, no dates, no incriminating evidence, and the thought that it may have been intended to sow distrust within Blacklight had immediately occurred to everyone. But then the Loop had been attacked, by a vampire army that had made its way undetected beneath the radar arrays and through the motion detectors and laser nets, and the double life of Professor Christopher Reynolds had been uncovered; he had been in the employ of Valeri Rusmanov his entire life. As Cal Holmwood tried to piece the wounded, reeling Department back together, Paul Turner had approached him and quietly explained that they needed to clean house, as a matter of urgency. Holmwood had agreed and instructed Turner, the Department’s Security Officer, to create a team to carry out the task.

“They’re going to hate you for this, Paul,” warned Holmwood. “But you’re right, it needs doing. When you’re ready to start interviewing, come and tell me. I’ll go first.”

Turner agreed, then set about the creation of ISAT, the first internal affairs team in the long, proud history of Blacklight.

Holmwood was right: they hated him for it. The knowledge that he was creating a team to investigate Operators leaked quickly through the Loop, and proved incredibly unpopular; it seemed cruel to subject men and women who had just fought for their lives, who had watched friends and colleagues fall at their sides, to new suspicion. The survivors felt they had proved themselves, that their loyalty had been shown beyond question. Paul Turner understood their position, but didn’t care. And the whispered consensus within the Loop was that why he didn’t care was obvious: as far as Turner was concerned, ISAT was a personal crusade. One of the Operators who died during the attack on the Loop was Shaun Turner, Paul’s twenty-one-year-old son, who had also been Kate Randall’s boyfriend.

As a result, the first dozen Operators that Turner approached about joining ISAT turned him down flat. They were too scared of the Security Officer, whose glacial grey eyes could turn even the boldest Operator’s insides to water, to tell him exactly what they thought of his project, but not to reject his offer. Turner didn’t hold it against them; he merely moved on to the next person on his list. He needed only a single Operator to share the ISAT burden, someone who could ensure his actions were above suspicion, and he would ask every single man and woman in the base if necessary. If they all said no, he would go back to the top of his list and ask them all again. But in the end, this proved unnecessary.

Kate told Jamie she was going to volunteer for ISAT before she did so; she wasn’t asking his permission, but she didn’t want him to find out from someone else. His response had been entirely as she expected.

“You’re kidding,” he said. “Why the hell would you do that?”

“I have my reasons,” she replied, looking him directly in the eye. “I’m sure you can work out what they are.”

“Of course I can,” he snapped. “Obviously I can. But have you thought this through, Kate? Like, really thought it through? Everyone’s going to hate you if you do this. Everyone.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “Let them hate me.”

He had tried to talk her out of it for a further half an hour, but once it became clear that she was not going to be persuaded to change her mind, he had done the second thing she had expected: told her that he would stick up for her, no matter what anyone else said or thought. She had thanked him, and given him a long hug that had brought tears to her eyes and a lump to her throat.

Larissa and Matt had both been amazing in the aftermath of Shaun’s death, and could empathise with her, up to a point; both were living without the people they loved, in Matt’s case voluntarily, in Larissa’s as a result of what had been done to her by Grey, the ancient vampire who had turned her. They understood loneliness, and what it meant to miss someone, but they couldn’t fully appreciate what she was going through. Jamie was the only one who could, having watched his father die less than three years earlier.

Kate would never have dreamt of suggesting that her loss in any way compared to his. She had only been with Shaun for a couple of months, barely any time at all, even given the hyper-reality of life inside Blacklight. She knew the loss of her boyfriend didn’t come close to the loss of his father, and never tried to claim otherwise. But what it did mean was that Jamie understood the thing that she was struggling to find a way past, the same thing that had tormented him in the months that followed Julian Carpenter’s death: the fact that Shaun was gone, that everything he had ever been, everything he might one day have become, had disappeared into nothing. She was never going to see him again, and neither was anyone else. He wasn’t somewhere else, separated from her by distance or protocol or orders.

He was dead and he was never coming back.

Paul Turner’s eyes had lit up when Kate entered his office and volunteered for ISAT.

She had spent a lot of time with the Security Officer since Shaun had died, a mutual support system that had been observed with utter bewilderment by the Operators of Blacklight, many of whom had never genuinely allowed for the possibility that Paul Turner might have human emotions. And, in all honesty, Kate had answered his request to see her the day after Shaun’s death with a significant amount of trepidation; unlike Jamie, she had never spoken privately with the Security Officer and was not afraid to admit that she was scared of him. But he had welcomed her into his office that dark, terrible day with a warmth that she could never have expected or prepared herself for. He made her tea and asked her about his son; she told him about her boyfriend, and felt unsteady common ground form beneath them.

Kate had, in fact, become immensely fond of Major Turner, and she was increasingly sure the feeling was mutual. The last time she had gone to visit him, he had mentioned the prospect of her coming to meet Shaun’s mother once all this horror was over. Caroline Turner, who was Henry Seward’s sister as well as Paul’s wife, and who therefore must be going through a hell that Kate couldn’t even begin to imagine, with her son dead and her brother in the hands of the enemy, had apparently asked repeatedly to meet her. She had accepted gladly, and Turner told her they would arrange it when the time was right. As a result, her appearance at his door on the day she volunteered for ISAT was not a surprise. He had welcomed her in, and listened as she explained why she was there.

“Are you sure?” he asked, when she had finished.

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” he said, and hugged her. The sensation was so strange that for a long moment she stood stiffly in his arms, before gradually bringing her own up and wrapping them round his broad shoulders.

With Kate on board, ISAT was ready to go in less than a week. The rooms were equipped, the Intelligence Division briefed, and preliminary interviews carried out on the men and women who would be working for the team; this included Kate and Paul Turner, who insisted on going first. By this point, the Intelligence Division had been carrying out the most invasive background checks in the history of the British Intelligence Services for almost a month; they had been Turner’s first order as soon as ISAT was authorised by Cal Holmwood. Turner’s was complete and had come back spotless. But the revised checks were only half of the process; the other half was an interview, with the subject attached to a lie-detector machine more sensitive than any available to the public.

The ISAT machines measured the same variables as regular lie detectors – heartrate, breathing patterns, perspiration etc. – but did so with a precision that was unmatched. They returned results that were 99.9 per cent accurate; from a mathematical perspective, they were as close to infallible as it was possible to be. The Intelligence Division staff had attached pads and wires to Paul Turner’s body, and Kate had asked him the questions they had devised together; he passed, as no one had ever doubted for a second. Then Kate had taken her turn, followed by the eight members of the Intelligence Division that had been assigned to ISAT. All passed, and Major Turner had sent a message to Interim Director Holmwood, telling him they were ready for him.

That had been yesterday.

Cal Holmwood had also passed, to the surprise of precisely no one, and had given them the final order to begin. To avoid any possible accusations of agenda, they were taking the Operators in computer-randomised order; the first of them, Lieutenant Stephen Marshall, looked up as Kate and Turner entered the interview room. The pads and wires were already attached to his body, and his face bore an expression of outright contempt as they took their seats opposite him.

“Lieutenant Marshall,” said Paul Turner. “Do you need anything before we begin?”

Marshall’s face curdled with disgust. “Just get on with it,” he spat.

“As you wish,” replied Turner, and glanced over at Kate. She nodded, then opened her folder of questions to the first page.

“This is ISAT interview 012,” she said. “Conducted by Lieutenant Kate Randall, NS303, 78-J in the presence of Major Paul Turner, NS303, 36-A. State your name, please.”

“Lieutenant Stephen Marshall.”

Kate looked down at the table; set into its surface was a small screen, angled in such a way that it could not be seen by the interviewee. Two grey boxes filled it; these displayed the results of the two sets of monitoring equipment that were humming quietly away on either side of Lieutenant Marshall’s chair. After a millisecond or two, both boxes turned bright green. She nodded.

“Please answer the following incorrectly,” said Kate. “State your gender.”

Marshall smiled, slightly. “Female.”

Both grey boxes turned red.

“OK,” said Kate. “Let’s get started. Are you a member of Department 19?”

“Yes.”

Green.

“Do you currently hold the rank of Lieutenant?”

“Yes.”

Green.

“Are you currently assigned to the Surveillance Division of said Department?”

“Yes.”

Green.

“Do you understand that your position involves the acquisition and analysis of data that is classified above Top Secret?”

“Yes.”

Green.

“Have you ever used your position for any purpose other than directly specified in your orders?”

Marshall tensed with anger. “No,” he said.

Red.

“I would ask you to think very carefully about your last answer,” said Paul Turner. “Lieutenant Randall is going to ask you the question again.”

Marshall’s face began to colour a deep crimson. “This is absolutely—”

“Lieutenant Marshall,” interrupted Kate. “Have you ever used your position for any purpose other than directly specified in your orders?”

“Yes,” spat Marshall. “You obviously know I have.”

Green.

“Please explain the circumstances that led to your last answer,” said Kate.

“My girlfriend and I were having problems,” said Marshall, his face burning red, his voice like ice. “She was acting weird, being secretive, lying about stuff. So I listened in on a couple of her phone calls.”

Green.

“When did this incident take place?” asked Turner, taking over the questioning as Kate sat back in her chair. Marshall stared at her with eyes full of hatred, then turned his attention to the Security Officer.

The first interview, thought Kate. The very first one and I’ve already made an enemy. Jamie told me they were going to want my head if I did this.

She had no idea how right he was.




6

CIVILISED MEN

CHÂTEAU DAUNCY AQUITAINE, SOUTH-WESTERN FRANCE


“More wine?” The voice was smooth and full of quiet authority.

Admiral Henry Seward nodded, raising his glass with one slightly trembling hand. A servant in immaculate black and white eveningwear, his eyes glowing a faint, respectful red, appeared beside him and filled his glass with wine that was a purple so dark it was almost black. The chateau’s cellar contained treasures that would have widened the eyes of even the most experienced sommelier, and bottle after stunning bottle was brought up and decanted every evening in anticipation of dinner, even though the diners never numbered more than three, and usually only two.

Such was again the case this evening.

Henry Seward sat at one end of a long table that could easily have seated twenty, while his dinner companion sat at the other. A small team of vampire servants attended to his every request, looks of devoted terror on their supernatural faces, although Seward knew full well it was not him they were scared of.

The source of their fear was sitting at the other end of the table, a gentle smile on his narrow face.

Vlad Tepes, who had later been known throughout Europe as Vlad Dracul and Vlad the Impaler, and who had eventually come to call himself Count Dracula, sat easily in his chair and regarded his guest. Valeri Rusmanov, who could not be faulted for his loyalty or his diligence, but often left much to be desired when it came to manners and etiquette, referred to Seward only as ‘the prisoner’, which was unacceptable to Vlad. It was factually accurate, but it created an atmosphere he considered unbecoming of civilised men, men who had commanded armies and fought for what they believed in. So he referred to Henry Seward as his guest, and treated him accordingly during the dinners they shared. The treatment the Director of Department 19 received in the long hours of darkness after the meals were finished was far less civilised, but was a regrettable necessity of the situation. Regrettable from a perspective of manners, that was. From a personal perspective, Vlad found the nightly torture of Henry Seward utterly delightful.

The first vampire looked down the length of the long table at his guest. Seward was clad in a beautiful dark blue suit that Vlad had ordered made for him by one of the finest boutiques in Paris. He had sent one of Valeri’s servants north to collect it two days earlier, and had been pleased to see that it fitted his guest like a glove. He had not been sure that it would; Seward was losing weight rapidly, a result of the deprivations and torments that had been inflicted upon him in the last month. And, despite the elegant shimmer of the suit and the soft lines of the shirt and tie beneath it, the damage inflicted during the long nights could not be completely hidden.

Two fingers were now missing from Henry Seward’s left hand; they had been broken with hammers and torn off at the end of the day the Blacklight Director had been delivered to the chateau by Valeri, who had worn a grin of immense satisfaction on his craggy, mountainous face as he presented his prize to his master. The stumps were bandaged neatly, and the dressings were changed every day by a vampire servant who had once been a doctor. More bandages, small caps of bright white, covered the tips of five of Seward’s remaining fingers, hiding the ragged pink flesh that had been uncovered as his fingernails had been pulled out. It was an ancient torture, one of the very oldest, and although it could not be expected to break a man with as much determination and experience as Henry Seward, it still produced a pitch of scream that was music to Vlad’s ears. It was also a good place to start, an early benchmark to establish, from where things would only get worse the longer the victim held out. And, indeed, they had got much, much worse.

Beneath his suit, the Director’s body was a horror of bruises, burns and wounds: marks left by simple beatings, by lead pipes and plastic cables, and by pairs of metal clips attached to a car battery. As was appropriate for a man of his standing, Vlad had not inflicted any of this damage himself; instead, he had stood and watched Valeri and two of his servants as they worked, maintaining an air of detached professionalism as the torture was administered. But, beneath his veneer of disinterest, his mind raced with possibilities and his stomach churned with a longing so powerful it was almost physical: a desire to push the others aside, to spill blood and inflict pain with his own bare hands.

Throughout it all, Seward had told them nothing beyond his name and his Blacklight identification number. Vlad was impressed by the man’s fortitude, though he knew full well there were things he could order done to his guest that he would have no chance of withstanding. But he was in no hurry; there would come a time when he would need to know everything Seward knew, in case there was something of which Valeri was unaware, but it could wait. His recuperation was progressing well, fuelled by a constant stream of warm running blood. He was now draining three or four human beings every day, each drop of their blood contributing to his gradual return to what he had once been. Valeri sent his servants out each night, and each morning they returned before dawn with victims taken from the surrounding towns and villages. Vlad had ordered them to make sure they spread their hunts far and wide; he had no interest in creating a panic or attracting unnecessary attention to this isolated corner of the world, not when he was so close to regaining the power he had once taken so recklessly for granted. He was not there yet, not by any means, but he was getting closer with each passing day, with each swallowed mouthful of blood. And the exquisite reality of the matter was this: there was, in truth, almost nothing Henry Seward could tell him that he didn’t already know.

The Operational frequencies of the various Departments, the access codes to their bases and computer systems, these were things that could have one day been extremely useful to Vlad and Valeri. However, both vampires knew full well that they would all have been changed the minute Henry Seward was taken, rendering his knowledge of them useless.

He must know that too, thought Dracula, his gaze locked on his guest. Surely he must. Yet he refuses to tell us, regardless. Admirable.

Until his recovery was complete and he was ready to take direct action, Vlad was content to let Seward believe he was successfully resisting. When that time came, Seward would tell him everything, whether he wanted to or not, at which point Vlad would kill whatever was left of the man and send his head to Blacklight on a spike. But for now, he was content to play Seward’s game. They would continue attempting to get the Director to give up the information he didn’t want to reveal, using what he would allow Seward to believe were his most persuasive methods, and his guest would continue to refuse. It afforded Seward a measure of dignity, and it helped to pierce the boredom that Vlad had felt so keenly since he had been reborn, boredom that was slowly beginning to abate as the recovery of his mind and body gathered pace. It also afforded him an agreeable dinner companion, sparing him the stoic silence of Valeri’s company or the embarrassment of dining alone.

At the other end of the table, the servant had finished refilling Seward’s glass. Vlad raised his own and waited until his guest did likewise.

“Noroc,” said the ancient vampire.

“Noroc,” replied Henry Seward. He had spoken the Romanian toast many times over the last month, evening after evening, glass after glass; it was now almost second nature.

He drained half his wine, looking forward to the numbing effect of the alcohol, feeling his arm tremble as he raised the glass to his lips. It was one of a number of shakes and tremors that had appeared over the last month, one result of the tortures inflicted upon him every night. Another was his inability to sleep, even when the torment was over: his body was always wracked with pain and thrumming with adrenaline, and when sleep did eventually come, it was fitful, full of bad dreams and echoed agony.

Seward was exhausted, in constant pain, and knew his body was beginning to fail him. It wasn’t the result of any one particular torture, but the cumulative effect of them all; he had begun to cough up blood in the mornings and see spots of red in the toilet bowl after he urinated. He coughed steadily, and struggled for breath after climbing only a handful of stairs. It was now clear that he didn’t have long to live, as he knew very well that Dracula was never going to let him leave this place; he had come to terms with the realisation that he would never see his family and friends again. He also knew, although he didn’t think Dracula realised that he did, that he was resisting telling them information that was worthless.

He knew that Dracula believed he was playing with him, letting him be brave and resilient while waiting for the right moment to prise whatever Seward was hiding from his head. But the ancient vampire was wrong: he was holding no secrets, no information that would be of use to them. When the monster unleashed whatever agonies he was holding back, he would tell him everything; when the vampire realised that none of it was useful, Seward would spit blood in his face before he died. In the meantime, he would grit his teeth and take what they gave him, and join his captor in this bizarre facsimile of normality each evening, as though they were two old school friends having dinner at their club.

“What are we having?” he asked, glancing at the hovering vampire servants.

“Wood pigeon, I believe,” replied Dracula. “Is that agreeable to you?”

“I’m sure it will be,” replied Seward. The food and wine he had eaten and drunk since he had been taken by Valeri, dragged kicking and screaming into the sky as men and women he had once commanded fought for their lives beneath him, had been uniformly excellent. He supposed he should not be surprised: Dracula had been a Prince when he was a man, then a Transylvanian Count as a vampire, and had been used to the very best of everything, throughout both of his lives.

The man and the vampire sat in silence as the servants suddenly burst into action, delivering silver trays to the table and placing them before the two diners. The lids were withdrawn to reveal a delicate foie gras parfait and home-made brioche that made Seward’s mouth water despite the steady throbs of pain that coursed through his body. He attacked the food, aware of Dracula’s faintly reproachful expression, and demolished the plate within a minute. He sat back in his chair, feeling the energy being released by the food in his stomach and the endorphins radiating out from his pituitary gland.

Eating emboldened him. He had allowed the previous dinners to be filled with small talk, with mindless chatter about the modern world, with stories and tales of their pasts; nothing that had any edge, nothing that might cause offence. It was time for that to change.

“You’re still weak,” he said.

Dracula tilted his head slightly to one side. “I beg your pardon?”

“It was a straightforward statement. You’re still weak. Your powers have not fully returned to you.”

“What makes you say so?”

Seward looked round the room. “The evidence of my own eyes,” he said. “Why else would you be hiding here, surrounded by servants to protect you?”

Dracula frowned. “To protect me?” he said. “They are honoured that I permit them to serve me. It is the highlight of their tiny lives.”

Seward smiled. “I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself. It must be hard for you to admit that even the weakest vampire in this building could kill you with one hand if he chose to.”

Dark red started to bubble in the corners of the first vampire’s eyes, and Seward felt a surge of satisfaction in his chest. Then the ancient eyes cleared and Dracula began to laugh, an awful sound that started small, but went on and on, getting louder and louder.

“Wonderful,” he said, as his laughter finally stopped. “I understand now. You hoped to annoy me with your comment, yes? You believed that I would consider it impertinent. I am extremely sorry to have disappointed you, my dear Admiral.”

Seward swallowed hard. “They’ll find you,” he said, willing his words to be true. “Blacklight will find you and stop you. Your rise will fail.”

“You are like a child,” said Dracula, his voice warm and friendly. “You understand nothing. My rise has already begun, my dear Admiral. I am out there in the darkness, as we speak. I am everywhere. I am legion.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Seward, cold fingers working their way up his spine.

Dracula shook his head. “You will find out soon enough,” he said.

The servants scuttled back into the room, removing the plates and placing new cutlery before the vampire and his guest. Then they were gone, as a second team delivered new plates of food.

Dracula lifted the silver lid from the plate before him and favoured Seward with a wide, contented smile.

“As I thought,” he said. “Wood pigeon. Bon appétit.”




7

SINK OR SWIM


“So where do we start?” asked Patrick Williams.

“Intelligence is putting together probable location lists,” replied Holmwood. “We’ve had every available satellite working outwards from the hospital since early this morning, and we’ve tracked over a hundred heat blooms. They’re where we start.”

“OK,” said Dominique Saint-Jacques. “Let’s get going.”

Holmwood nodded. “I’m sending squads out with lists of five likely target locations. I’m authorising daylight operations, so destroy them before the sun goes down if you can. All usual containment protocols remain in place, and I want it made clear to all Operators that these targets are significantly more dangerous than the vampires they usually encounter. I’m putting in place a hard window of eight hours, after which you come home. I don’t care whether you’ve destroyed all five of your targets, or two of them, or none of them. Eight hours, then return to base. Having what’s left of this Department exhausted and careless is not an option. Clear?”

“Clear, sir,” replied Dominique.

“Excellent. I’m officially activating all Operational Squads that include rookies until this threat has been eliminated, then they go back to training. Look after them out there and bring them back safe. Clear?”

“Yes, sir,” chorused the Zero Hour Task Force.

“Good. Dismissed.”

Jamie stepped out of the lift and strode along the central corridor of Level B.

Search and destroy, he thought. Just like that. Search and destroy three hundred super-powerful vampires. No problem at all.

He had left the Ops Room with his stomach churning uneasily. There was no doubt in his mind that the mass escapes of the previous night had been orchestrated by Dracula, or at the very least by Valeri, and that they had the potential to cause widespread carnage. There was a positive aspect to the move: such a large action, designed so clearly to occupy Department 19 and its counterparts around the world for a significant amount of time, strongly suggested that Dracula was not far in advance of their Zero Hour timeline, if at all. But that was going to be of little comfort to the men and women who were by now already heading out to hunt down the escapee vampires.

Jamie pulled the console from his belt and typed as he walked.

M-3/OP_EXT_L1/LIVEBRIEFING/BR4/ASAP

He pressed SEND and knew that, far below him, in the circular confines of the Playground, the consoles belonging to John Morton and Lizzy Ellison would now be vibrating into life. He wondered how long it would take them to make their way up to Briefing Room 4 on Level 0, and guessed at ten minutes.

It’ll probably take them five minutes to find the right room, he thought, smiling to himself. It used to for me.

Jamie reached his quarters, pressed his ID against the keypad set into the wall, and pushed his door open when the red light turned green. He flopped down on his bed, grateful for a few minutes’ rest; given the situation that Cal Holmwood had described, he doubted there were going to be many similar opportunities in the next few days. Not that there ever really were; life inside Department 19 was physically and mentally exhausting, a result of the high stakes that were constantly in play. If Jamie and his colleagues failed to do their jobs well, people died; it was as simple as that. Every Operator understood this, found a way to process it and carry on, but it was not always easy.

Jamie felt his eyes begin to close, even though he had only woken up three hours earlier, to find a box in the middle of his console’s screen telling him that he had a message waiting from Larissa. He had pressed OPEN and read the lines of text that appeared.

Hey! Hope you’re OK? Will be awake for the next hour or so if you’re around and fancy giving me a call… x

Jamie had checked the time stamp on the message. It had arrived at 7:30am, when he had apparently been so soundly asleep that he hadn’t even heard it beep. He had quickly done the time-zone maths in his head.

Half past eleven in Nevada. Late.

He had considered calling her anyway – he didn’t think she would be too annoyed if he woke her up – but had decided to let her sleep. Now, as he contemplated the scale and horror of what he had just been told in the Ops Room, he wished he had made the call; it would have been good to hear a genuinely friendly voice. For a second, he considered walking round and knocking on the door to the quarters next to his own, the quarters occupied, technically at least, by one of his best friends, but knew it would be a waste of time.

Matt Browning was almost never in his room these days, unless he was asleep. Jamie knew he had turned down the chance to move into one of the larger quarters inside the Lazarus security perimeter, and while he admired the reasoning behind his friend’s refusal, a spirited attempt to avoid devoting his every waking moment to his work, he thought it had, in fact, been largely pointless. Matt’s life now revolved entirely around the Lazarus Project, and that was that. Jamie missed his friend, but wasn’t annoyed with him; how could he be, when what Matt had devoted himself to was arguably the most important project being carried out in the whole of Blacklight? However, he did think he should try to press Matt into having a drink in the officers’ mess, or at least into sharing a table at lunch; it had been a while since they had talked for longer than a minute or two in a corridor, when both were on their way somewhere else.

On the other hand, it had been barely seventy-two hours since he had talked to Larissa, but he still missed her terribly. They had spoken for almost an hour over a secure video connection, Jamie battered and bloodied by the operation he had just returned from, Larissa bright and smiling, eight hours behind him, her day just getting under way. The pleasure and excitement in her voice as she told him about Dreamland, the NS9 base, and the men and women who inhabited it, was bittersweet to his ears. He knew she had been furious with Holmwood for selecting her for the NS9 secondment, and he knew she missed him as much as he missed her, but she now had a levity about her that he both relished and feared.

He was happy that she was happy: God knows she deserved it after what had happened to her over the last few years, and what had been done to her during the attack on the Loop, when she had been burned down to little more than bones. But he was also jealous of her temporary new life, away from the darkness that surrounded Blacklight, that seemed to follow him wherever he went; jealous that she was meeting new people and experiencing new places, new things. And a tiny piece of him, the vicious, self-loathing part that had been birthed by his father’s death and nourished by years of bullying and loneliness, kept asking the same two questions, whispering them in the darkest recesses of his mind.

What if she forgets about me? What if she doesn’t want to come back?

He pushed such miserable thoughts aside and climbed off his bed. He pulled a bottle of water out of the small fridge beneath his desk and headed out into the corridor, pulling the door to his quarters closed behind him, trying to focus on nothing more than the task at hand.

Jamie logged in to the terminal at the front of Briefing Room 4 and found his squad’s target list waiting for him. He moved it up on to the wall screen behind him, and waited for the rest of his newly activated squad to arrive.

They kept him waiting for less than two minutes. Morton and Ellison burst through the door, clad in their dark blue training uniforms, red-faced from what Jamie knew would have been several minutes of running along the curving corridors of Level 0 in search of the right room. They were caked in sweat and drying blood, but their faces wore identical expressions of determined enthusiasm.

“Good to see you both,” said Jamie. “Get lost on the way up here?”

Morton looked about to deny it, but Ellison opened her mouth first. “Yes, sir,” she said. “The corridors all look the same, sir.”

“You’ll get used to it,” said Jamie, and smiled at his squad mates. “Trust me.”

The two rookies nodded, clearly relieved.

“Take a seat,” Jamie said, motioning towards the empty plastic chairs that surrounded the long table in the middle of the room. Morton and Ellison did as they were told as Jamie watched them, wondering if he had been so nervous and eager to please when he first arrived at the Loop.

I don’t think I was, he thought. I didn’t give a damn about anything apart from my mum. I acted like I owned the place.

He flushed at the memory, but only slightly. He had done what he needed to do to get his mother back, and that was all that had mattered. He knew he had annoyed plenty of Operators in the process, and that not all of them had forgiven him for what they had perceived as arrogance and a disrespectful attitude.

“Operators,” he said, his voice even. “This morning, Interim Director Holmwood authorised MOVING SHADOWS, a Priority Level 1 operation being carried out by the entire active roster of this Department. What you can see on the screen behind me is our little piece of it.” He tapped a series of keys on the console’s touch screen and the first name on the target list was replaced by a digital scan of a hospital admission record. “Last night,” he continued, “an unknown vampire force conducted a mass escape from Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire. Surveillance footage and satellite thermal imaging suggest that all released patients have been intentionally turned, and Science Division analysis indicates that they are significantly more powerful than usual newly-turned vampires. All of which means we now have almost three hundred potentially highly dangerous vampires on the loose. MOVING SHADOWS is a search and destroy mission, intended to eliminate this new threat in as short a timeframe as possible. Any questions so far?”

Morton raised his hand and Jamie nodded. “Why are you telling us this, sir?” he asked.

“Your training has been suspended,” replied Jamie. “As of right now, you are active Operators in Department 19, until such time as this operation is concluded. When it is, you go back to the Playground. But not until then. Do you understand?”

Morton nodded, the colour draining from his face. Ellison looked at him with wide eyes as she raised her hand.

“Yes?” said Jamie.

“You said search and destroy, sir,” said Ellison. “Right?”

“That’s right.”

“How is that going to work?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, people are going to expect the patients to be found, sir. The media is going to go absolutely crazy, and the families of the escapees are going to demand to know what happened. We’re talking about vulnerable people here, sir, people with severe psychiatric issues.”

“Not any more,” said Morton. “Now we’re talking about vampires.”

Ellison shot her squad mate an extremely sharp glance, then returned her attention to Jamie.

“The media doesn’t know anything yet,” he said. “When it leaks, which we have to assume it will, we’ll make sure they don’t run it. Anyone who lives near the hospital is being handled, and when it becomes necessary to tell the public about what happened to the patients of Broadmoor, the Security Division will devise a cover story. I’ve no idea what that will be, before you ask, and it’s not something you need to worry about. What you do need to worry about are the five vampires we’ve been ordered to destroy.”

“OK, sir,” said Ellison, although unease had clearly settled over her. Morton gave her a furious look, then whispered something Jamie didn’t catch. Ellison turned on him, her eyes blazing with anger, and opened her mouth to reply.

“Operators!” barked Jamie, causing them both to jump in their seats. “This is not a training exercise. This is the real thing. You will give me your complete attention right now or I’ll assume that you aren’t ready for this and send you back downstairs. Is that what you want?”

“No, sir,” they chorused.

“Good,” replied Jamie. “That’s good. Because this is a Priority Level 1 operation, the kind that Operators die on. The footage demonstrating the power of these escaped vampires is extremely disconcerting, so let’s focus, shall we? I want us armed and triple-checked and ready to go in one hour, so it might be useful for us to know who the hell we’re looking for.”

Morton and Ellison leant forward, their attention fully focused on their squad leader. Jamie forced a tension-breaking smile and began to brief them on what was waiting for them beyond the walls of the Loop, knowing even as he did so that nothing he said could truly prepare them.

I’ll just be pleased if I bring them both back alive.




8

THE LOST HARKER

THREE MONTHS EARLIER


TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH ALBERT HARKER. JUNE 12 2002

(tape begins)

JOHNNY SUPERNOVA: Right, it’s on.

ALBERT HARKER: What’s on?

JS: The tape recorder. It’s recording.

AH: Oh. Fine.

JS: Please say your name for the tape.

AH: Albert Harker.

JS: OK. I’m going to call you Albert, if that’s cool?

AH: That’s fine.

JS: So. Albert. You approached me and offered me this interview. Why don’t you start by telling me why.

AH: Thank you. I wanted to give this interview so that people know the truth.

JS: The truth about what?

AH: About vampires, Mr Supernova. About Blacklight. About my family.

JS: Now you see, my bullshit detector just went off straight away. Because you just said the word vampires.

AH: That’s right. I did.

JS: Well, let’s get this out there then. Your position, what you’re saying to me, is that vampires are real? They exist, right now, in the real world.

AH: That’s correct.

JS: And why would you expect me to believe something so ridiculous?

AH: Because it’s the truth.

JS: Do you have any proof? Anything to back up your claim?

AH: Just my word.

JS: I sent a car to collect you for this interview from a homeless shelter, Albert. I can see needle tracks on both your arms. And you think I should take your word for something like this?

AH: That’s entirely up to you, Mr Supernova. I can’t make that decision for you.

JS: Oh, I’ll make it for myself, don’t you worry about that. So. Before we get on to the supposed existence of these vampires, tell me something else. Tell me how you would be in a position to know about them, if they were real. Because it seems to me like everyone else thinks they’re fiction, and I’ve got to tell you, you’re off to a pretty bad start when it comes to being convincing.

AH: You are aware of my surname?

JS: I am.

AH: And, as a journalist, I would presume that you are a well-read man?

JS: I suppose so. Reasonably.

AH: And you don’t see the connection?

(pause)

JS: Dracula. You’re talking about Dracula?

AH: Very good, Mr Supernova. Dracula, yes. My great-grandfather was Jonathan Harker, the hero of Stoker’s story. Which, in truth, was a work of historical fact, rather than the fiction it has been portrayed as.

JS: You take a lot of heroin, don’t you, Albert?

AH: That is immaterial.

JS: So Dracula wasn’t a story. It really happened. Am I understanding you here?

AH: You are. It happened much as Stoker wrote it down. He overheard the tale from Abraham Van Helsing, who he crossed paths with here in London.

JS: Van Helsing was real too?

AH: Obviously. The sooner you get your head around these simple facts, the quicker and less painful this process will become.

JS: Don’t get snippy with me, mate. Remember who’s paying who.

AH: I apologise. Yes, Mr Supernova, Van Helsing was real, as was John Seward, and Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood, whose great-grandson sits in the House of Lords as we speak. And so was my great-grandfather. They were all as real as you and I.

JS: Meaning Dracula was real too.

AH: Correct. He was real, and he died, as Stoker described. And my ancestor and his friends came home. But Dracula was not the only vampire in the world, merely the first. Others followed, in time.

JS: And?

AH: And my great-grandfather and his friends were given the authority to deal with them. On behalf of the Empire.

JS: By who?

AH: By Prime Minister William Gladstone. In 1892.

(pause)

JS: You’re serious, aren’t you? This isn’t a wind-up.

AH: I am deadly serious, Mr Supernova. This is the biggest secret in the world, a secret that my family and others have kept for more than a century. And I’m telling it to you.

JS: Why? I mean, apart from the money.

AH: My family and I are… not close.

JS: So you’re doing this out of spite? I mean, if this is all real, if you’re not crazy, then my guess is you’re going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble if I find someone to run this.

AH: That’s my problem. But yes, I imagine they won’t be thrilled.

JS: Are you in danger? More importantly, am I?

AH: Not as far as I know. But I offer no guarantees, Mr Supernova. Blacklight operates entirely outside the laws that govern you and I.

JS: Blacklight?

AH: The organisation that hunts vampires and keeps them secret. That’s not its real name, but is what it has always been called. It evolved from the four men who survived the encounter with Dracula.

JS: What is it?

AH: I’ve never seen the inside of it. But it’s something like a special forces unit for the supernatural.

JS: Whoa, whoa. You’ve never seen it?

AH: Not from the inside, Mr Supernova. It is the most highly classified organisation in the country. But there are traditions that concern the descendants of the original members, the founders. We are automatically given the chance to join when we turn twenty-one.

JS: And I presume you said no?

AH: I did.

JS: Why?

AH: Because I had no desire to spend my life chasing monsters. And because there are few things I have ever wanted less than to be anything like my father.

(pause)

JS: Why’s that, Albert?

AH: Because he was a bully, a sadist and a fraud, who played favourites. He loved my brother while he tolerated me, and made it abundantly clear to everyone.

JS: But when the time came, he still asked you to join this Blacklight?

AH: I have no doubt that it broke his heart to do so. But he was bound by the rules, by the traditions of the organisation he gave his life to. I’ve come to believe it was the only thing he ever truly cared about. So, yes, when I turned twenty-one, he asked me. I’ve never seen him happier than when I turned him down.

JS: So how does it work? You wake up on your birthday and your dad comes into your room and says ‘Hi, son, by the way, vampires are real, I’m part of a secret organisation that fights them and now you get the chance to be too’?

(Harker laughs)

AH: Pretty much. He used a lot more words than that, most of which were honour, and duty, and sacrifice. But yes, that’s about it.

JS: And so you said no. How did he react?

AH: He looked like the cat that got the cream. Then he shouted at me for about an hour, called me a coward and a baby, and told me he was embarrassed that I was his son. It went perfectly for him.

JS: How so?

AH: Because he was allowed to openly hate me, Mr Supernova. I finally gave him a good enough reason, by turning down his life’s work. And he didn’t have to have me there with him every day. I don’t know what he’d have done if I had said yes.

(pause)

JS: But you didn’t. So what happened then? He tells you this massive secret, and everyone normally says yes, but you say no. How does that work?

AH: He warned me not to tell anyone what I’d heard, said that they’d lock me up if I did, and that no one would believe me anyway. A couple of days later he brought me a form to sign, some version of the Official Secrets Act. And that was that. We never talked about it again.

JS: You mentioned your brother. He joined?

AH: Of course. Of course he did. He was my father in miniature. He couldn’t wait.

JS: So what did you do instead?

AH: Finished university. Moved to London. Discovered drugs. Became very, very fond of them.

JS: How did your family react to that?

AH: They cut me off the first chance they got. Said I was a stain on the family name, that I was no longer welcome at home. They turned their back on me, Mr Supernova.

JS: Bastards.

(pause)

AH: On several occasions I would be at a party, or in a bar, and I would catch someone staring at me, someone who didn’t look like they belonged with me and my friends. And a couple of times I got home and knew someone had been in my flat. Nothing was missing or out of place. It was professional work. But I knew. So I suppose they kept an eye on me, in their own way.

JS: Because they were worried you might talk?

AH: I don’t know. I imagine so.

JS: But you never did. Until now, at least. Why not?

AH: I wanted to forget everything. I didn’t care about their stupid little department, and I doubted anyone would believe me. So I tried to let it go.

JS: Why now then?

AH: Spite, Mr Supernova, as you said. And justice. And because I’m sick of carrying this around with me. I want to be rid of it.

(pause)

JS: This is good stuff, you know? The black sheep son of a noble family cut off and left to rot, heroin, homelessness, people following you, going through your stuff. It’s juicy, mate. Very juicy. But there’s still one problem.

AH: Which is?

JS: Vampires. Blacklight. I just… I can’t see a way that anything you’re telling me is the truth.

AH: I understand your position, Mr Supernova. Better than you realise, believe me. But it is the truth. I can tell you what my father told me, and that’s all. Beyond that, you’re on your own.

JS: Tell me.

AH: I’m afraid I can’t duplicate the pathetic awe in my father’s voice, but I can still remember most of what he said. I’ve already told you that Blacklight was founded in the late nineteenth century. Well, in the hundred or so years since, it’s changed rather a lot. My father told me it started out as four men in a house on Piccadilly, but now it’s more like the SAS, a classified special forces unit that polices the supernatural. I doubt you’ll find it mentioned officially anywhere, but you’re welcome to try and prove me wrong. As for the vampires? Nobody knows what made Dracula more than human, but what is known is that he was the first. After he died, he left a handful of vampires behind, vampires that he had personally turned. They turned others, and so on, and so on. The rise in vampire numbers is what prompted the expansion of Blacklight.

JS: What about the vampires themselves? Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying that word, but what are they about? They, what, swoop around in the night, changing into bats and wolves?

AH: No, Mr Supernova. The shape-changing was added by Bram Stoker for the entertainment of his readers, as was the susceptibility to crosses and holy water. They don’t work. Nor does garlic or running water. The rest of it, though, is true. They’re strong, and fast, and vulnerable to sunlight. Their eyes glow red. And they need to drink blood to survive.

JS: What kind of blood?

AH: Any, as far as I am aware.

JS: Human?

AH: Yes. Of course.

JS: So they bite people?

AH: They do. They bite people, and if their victim doesn’t die, they turn into a vampire as well.

JS: So why aren’t there thousands of them? Why don’t I see them on every street corner?

AH: As far as I understand, it’s because very few of their victims survive. And because Blacklight works very hard to keep them secret.

(pause)

JS: What do you want me to do with all this, Albert?

AH: I don’t understand the question.

JS: You’re a smart man. You know every editor in the country is going to laugh me out of their office if I write this up and submit it. Nobody is going to believe it. I’m sitting here looking at you and I believe you mean every word you’ve said, but even I can’t accept it as the truth. I just don’t see how it can be. How come nobody has ever broken ranks before? Why has no vampire ever come forward? Why aren’t the papers full of missing persons and bodies found drained of blood? You see what I’m saying?

AH: You are a journalist, aren’t you?

JS: Yeah.

AH: Then do your job. Everything I’ve told you is the truth. So dig, Mr Supernova. Find out what you can. If you can’t find anything to back up what I’m saying, then forget it, with my blessing. But if you can, if you can find any tiny little thing that corroborates what I’ve told you, you will find yourself in possession of the biggest exclusive in the history of humanity. Surely that’s worth a few days of your time, even if all it does is confirm that you were right about me all along. As for why nobody has ever broken ranks? I would imagine that the members of Blacklight would find it very difficult to speak to anyone without being monitored, and even if they did, I’m sure they would swiftly find themselves facing a court-martial. And the vampires? Why would they make themselves known? So that all their potential victims know they exist, so that the government can declare open war on them? And finally, Mr Supernova, I’m sorry to have to tell you that the papers are full of missing persons, and people who have had terrible things done to them. And that’s not even allowing for the hundreds of dead and disappeared who never make the pages of the tabloids.

(pause)

JS: I think we’re done here, Albert.

AH: I think so too.

JS: Where can I find you? If I need to follow up on any of this.

AH: You can’t. If I’m still alive in a few months’ time, if neither the vampires nor Blacklight get me, I’ll find you.

JS: This is ridiculous. You know that, don’t you? It’s nuts.

AH: Just do your job, Mr Supernova. That’s the only advice I have for you. Treat it like any other story and see what you can turn up. I wish you the very best of luck, I honestly do.

JS: Cheers. I think.

(tape ends)

Kevin McKenna dropped the transcript on to his desk and exhaled heavily; it felt like he had been holding his breath the entire time he had been reading. The dead cigarette fell from his lips, making him jump; he had forgotten all about it.

Jesus, Johnny,he thought. How desperate were you?

The transcript was nonsense, so much so that McKenna felt almost embarrassed for his former mentor. This kind of tattling, tabloid silliness was so far beneath the Johnny Supernova he had once known that it made him genuinely sad.

Things must have been so much worse than I realised. The Johnny I used to know would have laughed this guy out of his flat.

McKenna got up from his chair and flicked through the rest of the folder. It contained four or five pages of notes, written in Johnny Supernova’s distinctive sloping scrawl. He gathered them up, held them over the wire rubbish bin that sat beside his desk, then paused.

He left you this in his will. It’s disrespectful just to throw it out.

He put the folder back on his desk, grabbed his jacket, and walked quickly out of his office. A minute later he was in the elevator, checking his watch.

Should still be able to catch the second half,he thought.

Then a pang of sadness gripped his heart. He had not really thought about Johnny Supernova in a long time, not even when the obituaries ran in the newspapers and magazines. By then, they had long since ceased to live in the same world.

Goodbye, Johnny. Sleep well, you crazy bastard.




9

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

STEVENAGE, HERTFORDSHIRE


“I’ve lost him!” shouted Alex Jacobs. “Next level up!”

Angela Darcy swore and ran for the concrete ramp, John Carlisle keeping pace at her side.

Operational Squad F-5 had been about to head back to the Loop when the call had come through from the Surveillance Division, informing them of a new target. Squad Leader Angela Darcy had asked no questions; she had merely told their driver to head for the new coordinates, as fast as possible.

She was tired, and knew her squad felt the same. They had taken down a vampire in the north London suburbs, a routine operation that had been perfect for Carlisle. The rookie had been with the SBS in Portsmouth until barely a month earlier, when recruitment to replace the men and women lost during Valeri’s attack had begun in earnest, and he had been summoned to Blacklight to begin his training. He was doing well under Angela’s tutelage; she had been encouraged by the poise and calm he had displayed on his two missions so far, characteristics that she had long since come to take for granted from Alex Jacobs. The quiet, experienced Operator had spent long spells in the Intelligence and Security Divisions, but had requested reinstatement to the active roster immediately after the attack that had hurt the Department so badly. Angela had watched him closely for the first few days, looking for signs of Operational rust, but quickly realised she had nothing to worry about; Jacobs had slipped into the black Operator’s uniform as though he had never taken it off.

They had found their target, a disoriented, raving vampire in his early twenties wearing the tattered remains of a white hospital gown, exactly where the Surveillance Division had told them they would: in a rail freight yard outside Stevenage station. Angela had led her squad towards him with their weapons drawn, ready to put one more vampire out of its misery before heading for home and the warm comfort of their beds. The target had backed away from them, his eyes glowing red, twitching and twisting like a cornered animal. Angela had been about to give the order to fire when the vampire, its eyes wide with confused panic, turned, sprinted across the metal rails, and leapt over a brick wall into the second level of the multi-storey car park that served the station.

Angela gasped. The vampire had been little more than a blur, a streak of white that had been gone before she could even tighten her finger on her T-Bone’s trigger.

“Jesus,” said Carlisle. The rookie was staring up at the looming concrete structure of the car park. “I’ve never seen anything move that fast.”

Jacobs said nothing; he simply turned, raised his visor and gave Angela a look whose meaning was clear.

Neither have I.

Angela felt the faintest flicker of unease in her stomach and pushed it down. “Follow me,” she said.

She led them back along the deserted platforms and out of the empty station. The car park rose tall against the night sky, an ugly lump of concrete, lit weakly from within by flickering yellow light.

“Do you think he’s still in there?” asked Jacobs.

“I don’t know,” she replied, her gaze fixed on the towering building. “Let’s find out.”

Angela’s boots thudded on the concrete as she ran up on to the car park’s uppermost level. They had chased the vampire up through the structure, getting little more than a glimpse of him on each floor, and she felt a surge of relief as she crested the ramp and surveyed the wide-open area.

No more levels, she thought. Nowhere for you to go.

Carlisle and Jacobs arrived beside her, weapons drawn, visors down. There were only a handful of cars parked on this level, spread out between the thick concrete pillars that supported the dilapidated structure. Water dripped steadily from numerous cracks in the ceiling, and the smell of petrol and grease was thick in the air.

“Where is he?” asked Jacobs.

“On this level somewhere,” said Angela. “Spread out and find him.”

The three black-clad figures moved slowly towards the centre of the car park, spacing out as they walked. Angela was on the left, her T-Bone resting against her shoulder, her breathing shallow and steady. Through the thermographic filter on her visor the car park was a landscape of grey and blue, cold and uninviting.

“Stay alert,” she said, via the comms system that linked them together. “Let’s take him down clean and easy.”

Three pairs of boots clicked quietly across the concrete. In the distance, Angela could hear cars making their way along the bypass, but the car park itself was silent. She felt a chill run up her spine as she remembered the speed the vampire had shown in the train yard, but tried to ignore it.

Nothing to worry about. Just a routine kill.

She looked across the wide concrete space and checked her squad mates. Jacobs was five metres to her right, moving steadily, with Carlisle the same distance again beyond him. A grim smile rose on her face as she watched them, an expression that froze in place as a voice suddenly echoed around them.

“Leave me alone,” it growled. “I just want to be left alone.”

Angela stopped dead. “Hold,” she said, then flicked her visor up as her squad mates did as they were ordered. She surveyed the empty space, looking for the source of the voice, suddenly acutely aware that the structural pillars were more than wide enough for someone to hide behind.

She reached down and twisted the control dial on her belt. “Why don’t you come out?” she asked, her amplified voice booming through the car park. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid!” screamed the vampire. His voice was shrill, reverberating against the flat concrete walls. “I’m not I’m not I’m not! Leave me alone!”

“We can’t do that,” she replied, her voice steady. “Just come out.”

There was no reply.

Angela scanned the area slowly, looking for any sign of their target. There was nothing: no shadow, no movement, nothing to give away his position. She looked at Jacobs, his T-Bone resting in his hands, then at Carlisle, standing easily between two pillars with his MP5 at his shoulder.

Then something white moved. Her eyes widened and she opened her mouth to speak, but it was already too late.

The vampire emerged from behind one of the concrete pillars, so suddenly it was as though he materialised from thin air. Carlisle began to turn, bringing his gun around, but was far too slow; one of the vampire’s fists crashed into his visor with a noise like a clap of thunder. The purple plastic shattered beneath the force of the blow, sending jagged shards into the Operator’s face and neck, drawing pulsing blood from innumerable cuts. Carlisle crashed unconscious to the concrete floor, his body spasming, his legs drumming involuntarily on the ground.

The vampire howled, an ear-splitting bellow of triumph, and turned its crimson gaze on Jacobs as the veteran Operator raised his T-Bone.

Alex Jacobs pushed down the fear that was pressing on his heart and slid his finger inside the trigger guard, his attention focused completely on the monster before him. The vampire was almost naked, his modesty spared by the fluttering scraps of what had once been his hospital gown. The man was skinny, almost malnourished, and his shaven head was covered in whirls and loops of pink scar tissue. His eyes blazed red and his mouth hung open, revealing gleaming white fangs.

The T-Bone settled against Jacobs’s shoulder; he aimed down the barrel, sighting the centre of the vampire’s chest. He began to tighten his finger on the trigger, but before he could exert enough pressure to fire the weapon, he found himself aiming at nothing as the vampire crouched low and came for him.

It surged across the concrete floor and seized his left hand, pushing it up and back. His finger convulsed against the T-Bone’s trigger, sending the metal stake slamming into the ceiling before it bounced back down and skittered away. The vampire’s grip was impossibly strong, and Jacobs screamed as he felt the bones in his wrist grind together; he beat at the monster with his free hand, but nothing happened. The vampire’s face rose up before his own, glowing red and twisted with madness, and Jacobs felt terror explode through him as his hands were gathered together in the crushing, vice-like grip and pulled forward, his body bending involuntarily at the waist as his feet scrabbled against the ground.

Angela Darcy fought back a momentary wave of panic and forced herself to stay calm, to do her job. Her squad had been decimated in what seemed like the blink of an eye; John Carlisle was twitching on the ground, blood pouring from his ruined face, while Alex Jacobs was being manhandled by the vampire like a squirming, protesting puppet.

This isn’t right, she had time to think. Not right at all.

Too strong.

Too fast.

She raised her T-Bone and saw immediately that she had no clear shot; there was no way to fire the metal stake into the vampire’s body without hitting Jacobs. She slammed the T-Bone back into its holster, drew her UV beam gun, aimed it at the vampire and thumbed the button in one fluid motion. A beam of bright purple light burst across the car park and engulfed him; he had no time to react before his body erupted into flames.

Purple fire licked across the vampire’s skin, scouring it black, and blood began to spill from a spider’s web of cracks. He howled in agony, but did not release his grip on Jacobs’s hands; the Operator was protected from the flames by his uniform, but they billowed over and around him, and his screams matched the monster’s. Angela watched, her eyes wide with horror beneath her visor, as the burning, howling vampire dragged Jacobs forward until his body was at a right angle, then brought his burning arm down across both of the Operator’s. Jacobs’s arms broke with a terrible crunch; his screams reached an inhuman pitch as the vampire threw him aside and turned to face her.

Angela risked a glance at her fallen squad mate; his arms were both snapped mid-forearm, his hands pointing uselessly upwards at a grotesque angle. Then she returned her attention to the flaming monstrosity that was shambling towards her. Burning lumps of the vampire’s body were falling to the concrete floor as he moved, hissing and steaming, on the cold ground. Angela backed slowly away, keeping a wide distance between them; she had seen the vampire’s speed twice now, and would not take any chances. Without taking her eyes from the disintegrating face, she drew her MP5 and emptied it into the vampire’s legs, blowing out his knees and shattering the long, thick bones. He slumped to the ground, no longer making any sound, and swayed on his ravaged knees, his arms wide, his mouth open and full of fire.

Jesus Christ, she thought. Oh Jesus Christ.

Angela Darcy had seen a great many terrible things in the course of her highly classified career, but this was one of the very worst. She took a deep breath, dropped the MP5, and drew her T-Bone again. The vampire appeared to look at her, but there were purple flames where his eyes had been, so she couldn’t be sure. Her T-Bone felt heavy as she aimed it at the heart of the twitching, burning thing and pulled the trigger.

What was left of the vampire exploded in a thud of boiling blood, splattering across the dirty concrete floor. Angela was already moving, sprinting across the car park and yelling into her helmet microphone, demanding emergency medical evacuation for her fallen squad mates.




10

IN CONVERSATION


Jamie Carpenter stood outside a door on Level C and took a deep breath, trying to slow his racing heart.

He had left Ellison and Morton absorbing the detail of their briefing, what little there was. Of the five vampire targets they had been given, only one had so far been identified: Eric Bingham, a paranoid schizophrenic who had been caught attempting to strangle his infant niece, had wandered past a police station in Peterborough and been captured on CCTV. The Surveillance Division’s facial recognition system had instantly identified him, logged his location into their system, and tracked him as he moved slowly south. The other four targets were mysteries, nothing more than heat blooms on satellite screens. Every effort would continue to be made to identify them before Jamie’s squad moved against them; knowing whether they had been violent men before their turnings could prove vital.

They were scheduled to depart in just over an hour and a half, so Jamie had ordered his squad mates to meet him in the hangar in seventy-five minutes. He had been about to head down to the dining hall to grab a late breakfast when Jack Williams called and told him the news.

Angela Darcy’s squad mates were both in the infirmary, being tended to by the Blacklight medical staff; Jacobs’s arms had been set and splinted, and Carlisle’s wounds had been treated and stitched. They were both going to recover, but Jacobs was going to be inactive for several months, and Carlisle had required surgery to remove a shard of plastic that had stopped a millimetre short of his left eyeball.

“One vamp put them both down,” said Jack. “Angela said she’d never seen anything like it.”

Jamie thanked him for passing on the news, and warned him to be careful out there. Jack told him to do the same and cut their connection.

The door in front of him was no different from any of the hundreds of others on B and C, the residential levels of the Loop; what lay behind it was why his heart was accelerating so sharply. He reached out a gloved hand, noted with anger its visible tremble, and knocked heavily on the door.

Silence.

Jamie knocked again, and was about to turn and walk away when he heard a deep voice emerge from inside the room.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” he replied. “Jamie.”

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the door unlocked with a series of smooth clicks and swung open a fraction. Jamie reached out and pushed it inwards, revealing a spacious room, far larger than his own quarters. It was sparse and scrupulously neat; the surface of the desk was clear, the bed was neatly made, the floor was clean and polished. A pair of armchairs sat opposite the desk. One was empty; the other was straining under the weight of its occupant.

The monster, now once again going by the name Victor Frankenstein, looked up as Jamie walked into his room. He was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck, and black trousers and boots; a thick multi-coloured beard sprouted from his cheeks and chin, and his hair fell carelessly across his forehead and below his ears. His appearance was not against regulations – Blacklight operated a far looser dress code than the regular military, just as the special forces did – but it worried Jamie nonetheless. On a small table beside the armchair stood a glass, a bottle of whisky and a bowl of ice, and these items worried him too, given that it was barely noon.

“Hey,” said Jamie, settling into the empty armchair.

“Good evening,” replied Frankenstein.

“It’s afternoon,” said Jamie, forcing a smile. “Early afternoon.”

“I don’t care,” replied Frankenstein. He reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. “How are you, Jamie? Looking after yourself?”

“I’m trying,” he replied. “It was easier with you looking after me as well.” He smiled again, trying to encourage the monster, to flatter him. “A lot easier.”

“I’m sure it was,” said Frankenstein. “It’s a shame you’ve had to grow up so fast. You didn’t deserve it.”

“I know,” said Jamie. “But that’s the world, isn’t it? Bad things happen.”

Frankenstein nodded. “Bad things happen.”

The monster’s free hand slid to the middle of his chest and rested there. Beneath the material of his shirt was a long pattern of scars, far more recent than the many others that covered his uneven flesh. They had been carved into him with a scalpel by Dante Valeriano, the self-styled vampire king of Paris, whom Frankenstein had injured terribly almost a century earlier, and who had spent the subsequent decades focusing on nothing except his insatiable desire for vengeance. In truth, he had been a fraud, a working-class boy from Saint-Denis called Pierre Depuis who had asserted dominance over the Parisian vampires with little more than bravado and a compellingly fictional history. Jamie and a small squad of Operators had destroyed the vampire king in the theatre where he lived, and brought the captive Frankenstein home, but not before Valeriano had begun to exact his revenge.

He doesn’t know he’s doing it, thought Jamie. Doesn’t realise how often he touches his scars.

Jamie felt his own hand twitch towards his neck, where an ugly red patch of skin stretched from his jaw to his shoulder, a memento of the search for his mother, what now felt like years ago.

You’re not the only one,he thought. We’ve all got scars.

“How’s your girlfriend?” asked Frankenstein. “What’s her name? The vampire?”

“Larissa,” said Jamie, through a suddenly clenched jaw. “She’s fine. Thanks.”

Frankenstein nodded. “Is she still in America?”

“Yes,” said Jamie.

“Best place for her,” grunted the monster.

Jamie bore down on the fury that was rising up through him with all his strength and somehow managed to push it back.

Be calm, he told himself. It’s not his fault. Be calm.

Frankenstein’s hatred of vampires was long-standing and potent. He had made his feelings on them as a species clear to Jamie the very first time they had gone out on an operation together; he believed them to be aberrations, creatures that had no right to exist in the world. His encounter with Lord Dante had not improved his opinion of them, and he had still not forgiven Larissa for wasting their time during the search for Marie Carpenter, despite Jamie’s repeated pleas for him to do so.

“She seems happy,” he said, as brightly as he was able. “So maybe it is.”

Frankenstein stared at Jamie with his misshapen, multicoloured eyes, his gaze heavy and unblinking, and momentarily full of warning. “What about your other friend?” he asked. “The girl from Lindisfarne? Kate, was it?”

“She’s fine,” said Jamie, grateful for the new topic of conversation. “She’s getting stuck into this new project she’s running with Paul Turner. I hardly see her at the moment.”

“That’s life inside the Department,” said Frankenstein. “There’s always something going on.”

“Tell me about it,” said Jamie. “I’ve just come from a Zero Hour briefing. You’re not going to believe what—”

“I don’t want to know,” interrupted the monster.

“I know, but—”

“Jamie,” said Frankenstein, his voice like thunder. “We’ve been through this before. Cal offered me a place on the Zero Hour Task Force and I turned it down. You know that. I don’t understand why you find it so difficult to respect my decision.”

They looked at one another for a long, silent moment.

“You’re still on the inactive list,” said Jamie, eventually. It was a statement rather than a question.

“That’s correct,” replied Frankenstein.

“Why?”

“I would have thought that was obvious. I’m dangerous. I’m of no Operational use to anyone.”

“You’re dangerous three days of the month,” said Jamie. “And I’m obviously not suggesting you go out during them. But the rest of the time—”

“I’m sorry,” interrupted Frankenstein. “As always, I’m curious as to why you think this is any of your business?”

Jamie felt his face fill with angry heat. “I’ll tell you why it’s my business,” he said. “It’s my business because I risked my life, and the lives of four other people, to drag you out of that theatre in Paris and bring you home safe. That’s why.”

“Why did you do it, though?” asked Frankenstein. “Why did you risk so much to rescue me?”

“Why?” asked Jamie, leaning forward in his chair. “What the hell do you mean, why? Because we’re on the same side. Because I thought we were friends. Because I didn’t want you to die. Take your pick from any of those. Dante would have killed you if we hadn’t got there when we did, and now all you can do is drink whisky and ask me stupid questions? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“You’re lying to yourself, Jamie,” said Frankenstein. The monster’s tone was even, maddeningly so. “Why did you rescue me?”

“Because what happened to you was my fault,” shouted Jamie. “If I hadn’t listened to Tom Morris, then everything on Lindisfarne would have happened differently. You wouldn’t have fallen, or been bitten, or lost your memory. So when we found out you were still alive, I couldn’t let you die, OK? I had to find you and bring you home. Do you understand? I had to.”

Frankenstein smiled at him, an open expression that seemed full of genuine warmth. “I know, Jamie,” he said, his voice low. “And if you think I don’t appreciate what you did, then you’re sorely mistaken, I promise you. I owe you my life, truly I do. But we both know why you did what you did. Because you felt guilty, because you believed that rescuing me would atone for the mistake you believe you made last year. Which, as I’ve tried to tell you a thousand times, was never your fault in the first place. Bad things happen, Jamie. They do. You trusted a senior Operator that you had no reason not to and things went wrong. You blamed yourself and I understand that. But you rescued me, you brought me home, and now you can put down that weight you’ve been carrying around with you since I fell. I meant it when I said I owed you my life, Jamie. But that doesn’t mean you get to tell me how to live the rest of it.”

Jamie felt his anger dissipate, and slumped back into his chair.

“I get it,” he said. “I get how bad Paris was. I mean, I don’t really, but I can guess.”

“It’s not just Paris,” said Frankenstein. “Dante, Latour, they’re only part of it.”

“So what is it?” asked Jamie.

“It’s impossible for you to understand,” said Frankenstein. “I’d buried so many of the things I’ve done, buried them so deeply that I’d been able to convince myself that maybe I wasn’t the monster everyone claimed, that maybe the good I’ve done could outweigh the bad. But it can’t. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why not?” said Jamie. “Why shouldn’t it?”

“Because it doesn’t. You can never truly bury the past. I thought I had and, when it all came back to me, it was like experiencing it all again for the first time. It was like having my soul torn to pieces in front of me. I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me, Jamie, or pity me. But I need you to understand that I can’t go back out there. I just can’t.”

Jamie felt his heart go out to the huge grey-green man, who had once sworn a solemn oath to protect the Carpenter family. It was obvious to him what the missing word in Frankenstein’s explanation had been.

He’s ashamed. Of the things he did. Of himself.

“The thing you don’t want to know about is big,” Jamie said. “There’s a new type of vamp out there. Really strong. Really fast. Angela Darcy’s squad took one down last night and two of them ended up in the infirmary, so I’m going to say this for the last time. We could really use your help out there.”

“I’m sorry,” replied Frankenstein. “I can’t. What about you? Are you going out?”

Jamie checked his console. “In just over an hour,” he replied. “The entire active roster is going out today or tonight.”

“You’re taking your rookies?”

He nodded. “Holmwood has temporarily activated all the trainees. They go back to the Playground as soon as this is dealt with, but as of right now, they’re officially Operators.”

Frankenstein poured himself another glass of whisky. “Are they ready?” he asked.

“No,” said Jamie, honestly. “But I think they’ll do OK. And, to be honest, they’re going to have to. This is pretty much the definition of in at the deep end.”

The monster took a sip of his drink. “Keep a close eye on them.”

Jamie forced a laugh. “Both of them are older than me; one was some kind of SIS assassin and the other was a Para on the verge of SAS selection. I’m hoping they’re going to keep an eye on me.”

Frankenstein put his drink down and leant forward.

“I’m serious,” he said, his voice rumbling like an earthquake. “I don’t care what they did, where they did it, or for how long. They’ve never seen the things that you and I have seen. So I’ll say it again: keep a close eye on them. Do you hear me?”

“Yeah,” replied Jamie. “OK, sure, I hear you. I’ll be careful.”

Frankenstein sat back. “I’m sure you’ll try,” he said. For a brief moment, his eyes seemed to sparkle with laughter and Jamie felt the atmosphere in the room lift. “Now let’s talk about something less gloomy. How is Matt enjoying being asked to save the world?”

Jamie opened his mouth to answer, then felt his console vibrate once in its loop in his belt. It was the alarm he had set for himself, to make sure he had enough time to do everything he wanted to do before meeting up with his squad.

“Matt’s fine,” he replied, standing up. “I’ll tell you next time, I promise.”

“You have to leave?”

“I do,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I thought you weren’t heading out for an hour?”

“I’m sorry,” repeated Jamie, noting the expression of sadness that had flickered across the monster’s face. “I’ll come down tomorrow, OK?”

“All right,” replied Frankenstein. “Good luck with the op. Be careful. And remember what you promised me. Stay away—”

“I know,” interrupted Jamie, a smile breaking out across his face. “I know what I promised you. You remind me every time I see you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“All right,” said Frankenstein, the sad ghost of a smile on his face. “Tomorrow.”

“Really?” asked Valentin Rusmanov, placing two cups of tea on the low table that sat in the middle of his cell. “That’s really what he made you promise?”

“Stay away from Valentin,” said Jamie, grinning. “He reminds me every time I see him.”

“How perfectly lovely,” replied Valentin, settling easily on to the chaise longue that stood against one of cell’s bare concrete walls. “Under normal circumstances I would not consider myself easily flattered, but I must confess it gives me a rather warm feeling to know that the monster considers me worthy of such warnings. Has he explained why you should stay away from me?”

“He says you can’t be trusted,” replied Jamie, sipping his tea. “He doesn’t believe your reasons for being here.”

“Well, I suppose I can’t really blame him for that,” said Valentin. “Although I am glad you choose to ignore his warnings. And I do rather resent his hypocrisy.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jamie, glancing round the cell as he spoke.

Lamberton, Valentin’s long-serving butler, was in his own cell next door, but was liable to appear at any moment. The ancient vampires could pass through the UV walls that were supposed to contain them with casual ease, and did so whenever they chose to. Jamie assumed that Lamberton was providing the illusion of privacy while his master spoke with his guest, although he knew full well that the servant would have been able to hear every word from a far greater distance than the neighbouring cell.

Several items had been added to the room since Valentin had arrived at the Loop, offering to help Blacklight defeat both his former master and his older brother. The elegant chaise longue, the rosewood coffee table, the matching pair of green leather chairs: all were new additions. Jamie didn’t know where they had come from; they were presumably the result of discussions between Valentin and Cal Holmwood, discussions that Jamie would have loved the opportunity to listen in on.

The vampire was still a deeply polarising figure within the Department, even after his actions during his brother’s attack on the Loop. He had fought Valeri to a standstill in front of everyone, and had given his own blood to help Larissa in the moments before the base’s final defence mechanism, a ring of incredibly powerful ultraviolet bombs, had reduced them both to little more than burnt husks.

But to many Operators, he was still nothing more than a vampire, an old and incredibly dangerous one; he had been turned by Dracula himself and they simply could not bring themselves to believe that he was truly on their side. Some act of betrayal was widely expected, and the prospect contributed greatly to the oppressive air of anxiety within the Department for a very good reason: no one inside Blacklight was remotely confident of stopping Valentin if he decided to turn on them.

Jamie was unsure of his own feelings regarding the ancient vampire. Valentin was unquestionably a provocateur, and it was not in his nature to provide reassurance; he had refused all requests for some form of collateral to back up his words, whether it be wearing a limiter belt, allowing the insertion of a locator chip, or anything else. He maintained that his word should be sufficient, taking great delight, Jamie was quite sure, in the knowledge that there was no good reason for it to be. But he had fed Larissa his own blood after Valeri pulled her throat out, and for that Jamie would always be grateful. He wasn’t stupid; he knew it was highly likely that Valentin had merely seen an opportunity to increase his standing within the Department. But there were so many potential levels of bluff, double bluff and counter bluff that it would never be possible to know why he had done what he did with any degree of certainty. Jamie had decided simply to take Valentin at face value, while never lowering his guard for a second or letting his hand drift too far from the grip of his T-Bone.

Doing so had proved easier than expected, because above and behind and beyond all the rational analysis of the situation lay a simple truth, a truth that it would have broken Frankenstein’s heart to hear.

Jamie liked Valentin.

He liked him a lot.

The vampire was supernaturally full of life: cheerful, arrogant, funny, and endlessly charming. His appetite for the world around him was infectious, even though it had led him to commit atrocities that turned Jamie’s stomach, and he found his spirits lifted merely by being in the vampire’s presence. The same, he noted with a mixture of sadness or guilt, could not be said of Frankenstein.

“The monster has done things over the course of his long life that even I would have thought twice about,” replied Valentin. “I know he’s a loyal little Blacklight puppy now, but he wasn’t always so tediously wholesome. So for him to judge me seems rather hypocritical. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I don’t know,” replied Jamie. “He regrets the things he did. You don’t. Isn’t that a pretty big difference?”

Valentin smiled broadly. “Touché, Mr Carpenter. But answer me this. Do his regrets undo any of the pain he caused?”

Jamie shook his head.

“Quite right,” said Valentin. “Regrets and guilt and self-flagellation are all well and good, but they cannot change what has already happened. A murderer may find God in prison, or undergo therapy and come to regret his crimes. It may well mean he never kills again. But it won’t bring his victims back to life.”

“True,” said Jamie. “But it’s better than the alternative.”

“The alternative, in this case, being me?”

“That’s right.”

“I suppose from your perspective that’s true,” said Valentin. “From mine, there is nothing more cowardly than pretending to be something you are not. If the day comes when someone puts a stake through my heart to punish me for the things I’ve done, I will bear them no ill will. By the standards of what passes for morality in this day and age, I’ll deserve it, for having lived my life as I chose. Which is why it frustrates me to know that your superiors still cannot bring themselves to trust me. I have never claimed to be anything other than that which I am, and I have no intention of starting now. Can you see why it annoys me so?”

“I can,” said Jamie. “But if it surprises you, then you’re nowhere near as clever as you think you are.”

There was a moment’s silence, before the ancient vampire burst out laughing and Jamie joined in. The joke had been risky, but he believed he had acquired a pretty good feel for Valentin’s boundaries, such as they were, and had been reasonably confident of getting away with it.

“I do enjoy talking to you, Mr Carpenter,” said Valentin, once their laughter had faded. “There is more life in you than in a dozen of your black-suited friends.”

“Thanks,” said Jamie, smiling broadly.

I like talking to you too. I look forward to coming down here.

“You’re most welcome,” said Valentin. “So. What’s currently occupying your time, Mr Carpenter?”

“You know I can’t tell you,” replied Jamie. “Although I’m sure you know.”

Valentin smiled. “I do hear the occasional murmur, even all the way down here. Emptying the jails was a clever move on my former master’s part. Very clever indeed.”

“You think it came from Dracula?” asked Jamie. “Not Valeri?”

Valentin snorted. “Please,” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “Although getting others to fight instead of him does indeed sound like the work of my dear brother, this is too bold, too smart a move for his tiny little brain to have devised. This is Dracula beginning to assert himself, I’m sorry to say.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Jamie, and sighed, deeply.

“I hear the escaped vampires are unusually powerful. How perplexing.”

Jamie narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about it?” he said.

“Nothing,” said the ancient vampire, with a glint in his eye that Jamie didn’t like. “Absolutely nothing. I assume you and your colleagues are no closer to locating my former master?”

“You know I—”

“Can’t tell me, yes, of course,” interrupted Valentin. “So I will just assume that’s the case, and you need neither confirm nor deny. Which is a shame, especially given that I’ve told your superiors on a great many occasions that there is a solution to your problem.”

Jamie sat forward in his chair. “What solution?”

“Me, Mr Carpenter,” said Valentin. “Sorry, I rather assumed that would have been obvious. I can find them.”

“How?”

“I know the dark corners where my brother hides. I know the men and women with whom he associates. I can extract information from people who would not even tell you their names. And more than that, I can feel them. We’re linked, by blood. I can find them, but I am not allowed to do so.”

“Why not?” asked Jamie.

“Your superiors do not trust me, Mr Carpenter, as I have lamented so many times. They believe that my being here is a ruse, a sham of some kind, and that if they allow me to leave, I will return to my brother and my former master and tell them everything I know about this place and its inhabitants.”

“That’s stupid,” said Jamie. “What could you tell them that they haven’t already got from Valeri’s spies? We barely survived his attack as it is.”

Valentin raised his hands and spread them wide. “I’ve made that point quite vociferously,” he replied. “Unfortunately, they are less capable than you of seeing the simple logic of the matter. So here I remain, unable to help, and getting more and more bored with each day that passes.”

Jamie considered the stupidity of the situation that had just been described to him. “Can’t you just go?” he said, eventually. “Do you really need their permission to leave?”

“My dear Mr Carpenter,” replied Valentin. “I’m flattered by your faith in my abilities, I truly am. And yes, I probably could make my way out, if it became necessary to do so. But once out of this cell, there are only two options: break through the airlock and fight my way to the surface, or dig through several hundred metres of concrete and earth. Either one would likely involve killing the majority of the men and women in this base, which is not a prospect that particularly appeals to me.”

“I’ll talk to them,” said Jamie.

“I’m sure you will, Mr Carpenter. As always, you have my gratitude.”

“Cool,” said Jamie. He was dimly aware of the fact that Valentin had not actually asked him to do anything, that he had, in fact, volunteered to speak to his superiors on the vampire’s behalf, but he pushed the thought aside. What he had said made sense, surely anyone could see that?

His console vibrated against his hip; he reached down and dismissed the alarm again.

“Time for work?” asked Valentin.

“Almost,” said Jamie, standing up and stretching his arms over his head.

“Those newly-turned vampires aren’t going to destroy themselves, are they?”

“I doubt it,” replied Jamie, a smile rising on to his face.

“That’s a real shame,” said Valentin, and stood up. “It’s been a pleasure to see you, Jamie, as always.” The vampire extended his hand and he shook it with a thick band of confusion rippling through his head. It was how he always felt when he left Valentin’s cell, as though he had somehow only heard half of the conversation, that what was actually important had taken place without him noticing.

“You too,” he said.

Valentin smiled a final time, then floated back on to the chaise longue and opened the battered paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo that had been lying on the coffee table.

Jamie watched him for a second or two, then walked through the UV wall, feeling the familiar tingle on his skin. He turned to his right and walked quickly towards the cell at the end of the block.

It was always a strange moment for Jamie when he stepped out in front of the UV wall that enclosed the square room his mother now called home.

The warm, comfortable space she had made was in such stark contrast to the austere grey concrete of the other cells that it always made him want to laugh. Marie Carpenter was standing in the middle of the spotlessly neat room, smiling nervously at him as he appeared. He walked through the ultraviolet barrier, hugged her, and felt her reach carefully around him and link her arms at his back. This too made him want to laugh; his mother was so worried about accidentally hurting him with her vampire strength that she held him as though he was made of glass.

“How are you, Mum?” he said, pulling back. “Everything OK?”

“Everything’s fine,” she said. As they always did, her eyes flicked to the scar on his neck. “How are you, love?”

“Surviving,” replied Jamie, smiling at her. She frowned, and he instantly regretted the small joke. “I’m fine, Mum,” he said. “I’m all right.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s good.”

They stood, looking at each other, for a long moment.

“I might sit down, Mum,” said Jamie, eventually. “What do you think?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, sit down. Definitely. Would you like tea?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” he replied, and flopped down on to the brown leather sofa that had stood for years in the living room of their house in Kent.

“Sorry,” said Marie. “I forgot you just had one.”

Jamie looked confused for a moment, then laughed. “You heard me talking to Valentin.”

“I wasn’t listening,” she said, quickly. “Not on purpose. I couldn’t help overhearing.”

“It’s OK, Mum,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

“Do you want something else?” she asked, eagerly. “I’ve got some biscuits.”

“I’m fine, Mum, honestly. I can’t stay long.”

Her face fell. “Are you going on a mission?” she asked.

Yet again, Jamie fought back the urge to laugh. It was ludicrous to hear his mother talking about missions, although no more ludicrous than the fact that she was now a vampire, the result of Alexandru Rusmanov’s last attempt to hurt the Carpenter family, or the fact that she had fought against Valeri’s army during the attack on the Loop, committing acts of violence that were so out of keeping with her gentle nature.

“I am,” he replied. “I can’t tell you what it is, though.”

“Is it dangerous?” she asked, nervously, holding a packet of Rich Tea biscuits in her hand.

“They all are, Mum,” he replied. “Forget the biscuits. Come and sit down.”

She nodded, replaced the packet on the table that had once stood in their kitchen, and sat down next to him on the sofa.

“Are you OK?” he asked. “Have you got everything you need?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay,” he said. “I’ll come down and see you tomorrow, OK? I promise.”

“You said that two days ago,” she replied. “And the day before that too.”

Jamie felt heat rise in his cheeks. But this was not the anger that had filled him as he talked to Frankenstein; this was the dull bloom of shame. He had promised his mum he would come and see her two days ago, and the day before that, and a great many days before that as well. Somehow it always slipped his mind; things happened, and he forgot. She never complained, or made him feel bad about it; she had never even mentioned it, until now.

“I know,” he said, softly. “And I’m sorry. It just… gets a bit crazy up there sometimes.”

There was a long moment of silence. The expression on his mother’s face made Jamie want to cry; it was so full of unconditional love.

No matter how often I let her down, he thought. She always forgives me. I don’t deserve her.

“Do you ever get scared?” asked Marie, her tone gentle. “It’s OK if you don’t want to tell me.”

The question cut right through him. He considered lying to his mother, but quickly decided against it; he had promised himself that he wouldn’t, regardless of what it might mean he had to tell her.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not usually. But right now…”

Marie frowned. “I heard you and Valentin talking about some new vampires. Are they worse than the usual ones?”

“I haven’t seen them in the flesh,” replied Jamie. “But yes, it sounds like they’re pretty bad.”

“Do you have to go?” she asked.

Jamie nodded.

“Can’t somebody else deal with them? Why does it always have to be you?”

“It’s not just me, Mum. Everybody is going out.”

“It really must be serious,” said Marie. “Promise me you’ll be extra careful?”

Jamie smiled. “Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll come down tomorrow so you can see I’m OK. I promise.”

She smiled at him, and he suddenly felt as though his heart might break. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, love,” she said. “I’m not trying to make your life harder, I’m honestly not. It would just be nice to see you now and again. That’s all.”

“I’m sorry, Mum,” he repeated. “I really am. I’ll come down tomorrow.”

“OK,” she said, squeezing his hand briefly. “I’m sure you will.”

He felt a lump rise in his throat and got to his feet. She floated up with him and he hugged his mother again; she gave him a tight squeeze, then floated off across the cell and began to make tea for herself. Jamie watched her for a moment, his heart aching, then walked away down the corridor.

Marie Carpenter listened as her son’s footsteps echoed away.

When he reached the airlock, she let out the breath she had been holding, a tremulous expulsion of air that was close to a sob. It hurt her to know that Jamie was in danger every day, but what hurt her even more was that she saw him so rarely; she had thought that the only upside to the terrible series of events that had befallen their family would be that she got to spend time with her son, the way they had before Julian had died, leaving her a widow and Jamie a fatherless teenage boy. But he was always busy, and he never came to see her when he said he would, and she tried so hard not to show him how much it hurt her, to not be a burden, or give him anything else to worry about when all he should be concentrating on was keeping himself safe. Sometimes she got so angry with herself; she tried to focus on the fact that he had bigger concerns than coming to see his mum, tried to just be proud of him and support him, but she couldn’t help it.

She missed her son.

“Am I interrupting?”

Marie spun round and saw a tall, strikingly handsome man standing casually on the other side of the ultraviolet barrier. He was dressed in a beautiful dark blue suit and his skin was incredibly pale, almost translucent; it seemed to shimmer beneath the fluorescent lights.

“Of course not, Valentin,” she said, with a wide smile. “It’s lovely to see you, as always.”

The ancient vampire smiled back at her, then slid through the UV barrier as though it was the easiest thing in the world. Marie had tried to do it herself, after the first time Valentin had come to see her, and burned her arm an agonising black. She was quicker now, however, gaining speed and strength with the assistance of her new friend, and she thought the day that she could step safely out of her cell might not be too far away. He appeared at her side, and his proximity made her feel like it always did; as though someone had turned her internal thermostat up by a couple of degrees without warning her.

“Did I hear you mention tea?” he asked, his smile dizzying.

“You did,” she managed. “Go and sit down.”

He stayed where he was for a long moment, then floated gracefully across the cell and settled on to the sofa.

“How was Jamie?” he asked.

Marie smiled at the mention of her son’s name, and started to talk as she set about making the tea.




11

TIME TO GO HOME

EIGHT YEARS EARLIER


Johnny Supernova closed the door of his flat behind Albert Harker, then slid the chain into place and turned the deadlock.

He had been in the company of madness before, of all kinds. He had once helped talk a pop star down from the roof of her house in St John’s Wood when she was threatening to jump with her two-year-old niece in her arms, had been one of the first into the bathroom of a party in Camden in which a teenage boy had carved most of the skin from his arms with a razor blade, babbling about the spiders that were crawling beneath his skin. He had seen paranoia fuelled by drugs and fame, violence and horror and abuse of all kinds, sadism, viciousness and, on one occasion that still chilled him to remember it, the blank, empty eyes of a psychopath as she stood beside him at a hotel bar and talked in a dead monotone about the weather.

But he had never, in all his travels through the dark underbelly of the world, seen madness as plausible and self-contained as he had in the face and voice of Albert Harker. What the man had told him was nothing short of lunacy, the fantasies of a child or a conspiracy fanatic, but there had been absolutely nothing crazy about the man’s delivery. He had, in fact, been horribly convincing.

A shiver ran through Johnny as he walked slowly back into his living room and looked at the tape recorder lying on his coffee table. The small black machine seemed disconcerting, almost dangerous, and, for a moment, he considered smashing it to pieces, ridding himself of it, and the story it contained, forever. But something made him hesitate. His last commission had come in almost three months earlier, and the money he had been paid for it was long spent. He doubted anyone would take Albert Harker’s clearly delusional story seriously, but he had learnt never to say never; maybe he could work it up into something about fathers and sons, about brothers and the upper-class obsession with family and tradition.

Johnny picked up the tape recorder and ejected the tiny cassette. He placed it in one of the two slots on the recording deck that stood on a shelf beside the window, inserted a blank tape into the other, and pressed record. His friends and acquaintances were often surprised to discover that Johnny Supernova was extremely diligent where his interviews were concerned; paper notes were scanned and backed up on his laptop, and tapes were duplicated and labelled with his own code, meaningless to anyone else.

The tapes whirred inside the high-speed deck, until a loud beep announced that the copy was complete. Johnny ejected the new tape, scrawled an apparently random combination of letters and numbers on its label, and placed it on to a shelf below the deck containing several hundred identical-looking cassettes. He put the original back into his portable recorder, then made his way to his flat’s small kitchen. He brewed a pot of tea and was carrying it back into the living room, intending to listen to the interview again, when his doorbell rang.

Johnny frowned. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and made a point of keeping his home address a closely guarded secret. There had been too many crazy fans over the years, people who turned up on his doorstep at the end of some weird pilgrimage, wanting to party with him, or in many cases just be in his presence. In the early days, he had invited these men and women in, given them beer and wine, occasionally drugs, and let them hang out for as long as they liked. In later years, he had given them a cup of tea, let them get warm for a few minutes, then sent them on their way. Now he simply told them they had the wrong address and closed the door in their faces.

He set his tea aside, walked down the stairs and out into the communal corridor that served the whole house. Johnny suddenly wished, not for the first time, that he had an entry-phone system; he could have checked who was outside from behind the safety of two heavy locks. But he didn’t. He reached the front door and leant his face close up against the wood.

“Who is it?” he shouted, and felt a stab of shame as he heard the tremor in his own voice. “Who’s there?”

“Metropolitan Police, sir,” replied a flat, metallic voice. “Open the door, please.”

Johnny paused. It was far from the first time the police had been at his door.

“How can I help you?” he shouted.

“We need to talk to you regarding a matter of national security, sir,” replied the voice. “You can help by opening your door.”

National security?

Still Johnny hesitated; something didn’t feel quite right. He wracked his brains, trying to identify the source of his unease; when he failed to do so, he took a deep breath and opened the door.

It was barely clear of its frame before it burst open, sending Johnny stumbling backwards. He lost his balance, twisted round, and planted one hand on the worn carpet of the hallway. By the time he had pushed himself back to his feet, the front door was closed and locked, and two figures in black uniforms were standing in front of him. Their faces were hidden by purple visors that emerged from the black helmets they were wearing; Johnny couldn’t see a single millimetre of exposed skin. One of them stepped forward, raising a gloved hand, and terror exploded through him. He turned and ran for the open door of his flat.

He didn’t make it.

As Johnny stretched for the door frame, intending to fling himself through the gap between it and the door, fingers closed in the hair at the back of his head, then whipped him sharply to the right. His balance left him and his head thudded into the wall. He saw stars and fought to stay upright, his brain screaming a single coherent thought.

Have to get away. Have to get away. Have to get away.

He threw himself forward, feeling an explosion of pain as a handful of his hair and scalp tore loose, and staggered through the door. He pushed weakly at it, but a heavy black boot had already been wedged against the frame, and it wouldn’t close. He turned and stumbled up the stairs towards his kitchen, his mind reeling with panic. Footsteps thudded on the stairs behind him, horribly slow and calm, and Johnny realised there was nowhere to go. Then hands grabbed at him again; he was pushed through the kitchen and into the living room, where he was thrown on to his battered sofa. He stared up at the black figures. One of them appeared to be looking down at him from behind its impenetrable purple visor, while the other had picked up his tape recorder and pressed play. Albert Harker’s voice instantly emerged from the small speaker.

“… is the biggest secret in the world, a secret that my family and others have kept for more than a century. And I’m telling it…”

The figure clicked the stop button, opened the recorder and took out the tape. It passed it to its colleague, who held it up in front of Johnny’s face.

“This is the recording of your interview with Albert Harker?” it said, in the same empty voice he had heard through the front door.

Johnny nodded. He was literally too frightened to speak.

The figure slid the tape into a pouch on the side of its uniform.

“Where are your notes?” it asked.

He pointed with a trembling finger. His notebook was lying where he had left it, on the arm of his chair. The second figure picked it up, leafed through it, then pocketed it.

Johnny managed to find his voice. “Hey,” he shouted. “There’s other stuff in there.”

“Other stuff?” asked the figure.

“Normal stuff,” replied Johnny. “Work stuff. The Harker notes are only the last two pages. Let me keep the rest. Please?”

There was a long pause. Then the dark figure pulled out the notebook, tore out the last written pages and threw the rest down on to the coffee table.

Johnny was about to crawl across the floor and grab it when a black gloved hand gripped his face and turned his head. The purple visor was millimetres away from his face and he fought back a new torrent of panic.

“Mr Supernova,” said the black figure, and the flatness of its voice made him want to scream. “It would be extremely inadvisable to attempt to publish what you heard today. The unsubstantiated ramblings of a man with both a long-standing substance addiction and a well-known grudge against his family will be of little interest to anyone, and cannot possibly be claimed to be in the public interest. To publish such a story would in all likelihood result in the death of your career, a career that is already ailing badly. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

Johnny nodded rapidly. For a long moment, the visor didn’t move; he could see his own terrified face reflected in the purple surface. Then the figure released its grip and stood up.

“We’re done here,” it said. The second figure nodded, strode back into the kitchen, and opened the door.

A second later they were gone.

He stared after them for a long moment, then burst up from the sofa. He ran across the room, his steps short and unsteady, and clattered down the stairs.

The corridor was empty.

The front door was shut.

Johnny let out a high, childlike sob and slammed his door shut, locking it and sliding the chain into place. He ran back up the stairs, scrabbled at the shelf of tapes beside the window and clutched the copy of the Harker interview in his shaking hands. Gripping it tightly, he slid to the floor, turning his back against the wall. He drew his knees up to his chin and began to weep.

A mile away, Albert Harker walked up on to London Bridge wondering why he had lied to the journalist.

No, that wasn’t right.

He hadn’t lied; everything he had told Supernova was the truth. But he had omitted something from his account of his refusal to join Department 19.

*

On New Year’s Day 1980, Albert’s twin brother Robert had taken him aside, sworn him to secrecy, and told him about Blacklight.

He was as animated as Albert had ever seen him, bursting with excitement at what the New Year had in store for them both. Albert listened, then asked him how he had come to know about the organisation he was describing. Robert frowned; it was the look of someone who has got carried away with something and hasn’t thought the potential consequences through.

“Dad told me,” he said, eventually. “On our birthday, when he was drunk. He said it was only one more year until we could start our real lives. I asked him what he meant and he told me.”

“Where was I?” asked Albert. A familiar sensation had begun to creep into his chest, as though his heart was being packed in ice.

“It was late,” said Robert. “You were asleep.”

“So how come you’re only telling me now?”

Robert’s gaze flicked momentarily to the floor and Albert knew the answer before his brother spoke it aloud.

“He told me not to tell you,” said Robert, with the decency to at least look apologetic. “The next morning. He said he shouldn’t have told me and that I wasn’t to tell you. So I told him I wouldn’t. I’m sorry, Bert.”

Albert pushed the hurt aside, something he was vastly experienced at doing, and tried instead to focus on what his brother had said; there was a future in which they would be together, would do something incredible, and exciting, and dangerous. The New Year, which usually brought him nothing but gloom, suddenly seemed bright and full of possibility.

“Don’t worry about it,” he replied, and smiled. “Although it sounds like you’re going to have to get a lot better at keeping secrets.”

Robert grinned. “So should Dad. You know who he told me works for Blacklight?”

“Who?”

“Frankenstein.”

“Piss off. Doctor Frankenstein is real?”

Robert shook his head. “Not the doctor, the monster. Apparently, he took his creator’s name. Some sort of honour thing.”

“Frankenstein’s monster is real and works with our dad? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Yep,” replied Robert. “And in a year’s time, so will we. Try and get your head round that.”

“I need a drink,” said Albert, then grinned at his brother. “A big one.”

Robert laughed, a noise that was high and loud and full of happiness. The two brothers threw their arms round each other’s shoulders and rejoined the party as the crowd began their joyous countdown to midnight.

For eight long months, Albert looked forward to his birthday with an excitement he hadn’t felt since he was a little boy. Spring and summer passed with agonising slowness, until finally, at long last, the day arrived. He journeyed from his halls in Cambridge to his parents’ home the afternoon before, enjoyed the atmosphere of palpable anticipation that surrounded the table as they ate dinner, then bade his family goodnight.

It took him a long time to get to sleep.

When he awoke the next morning, he made his way excitedly down the stairs, and found his parents and brother in the midst of breakfast; he joined them, in what he would come to remember as the last moment of genuine happiness they experienced together. After the plates were cleared and the champagne was drunk and the presents were opened, Albert’s father asked Robert if he could see him in his study. Robert agreed, tipping his brother a wink as he followed their father out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

The two men returned fifteen minutes later. Robert wore a remarkably smug expression, while their father looked as though he might burst with pride. Both men appeared to have been crying, and Albert felt a surge of love rush into his chest as they retook their seats at the kitchen table.

My turn, Albert thought, excitedly. Any second. My turn next.

But nothing happened.

The usual chatter resumed and Albert realised, with slowly dawning horror, that his turn wasn’t coming. He tried desperately to catch his brother’s eye, but Robert studiously avoided his gaze, looking in every other possible direction. When breakfast was over, the family went their separate ways, heading into the living room or out into the garden.

Albert remained where he was, unable to believe that this was really happening to him, to believe that anyone, even David Harker, could be quite so cruel. Eventually, he heard his father call for Robert. A moment later he heard the jeep’s engine roar into life, heard the rattle of tyres across gravel, and knew it was real. He got up from the table, packed his bags, and left the house without saying a word to anyone.

Back in Cambridge, he got drunk for three days, and on the fourth he called his brother. Robert told him he didn’t know what was happening, and that he couldn’t talk about it even if he did. He was playing under a new set of rules, he said, and Albert wasn’t to ask him about the organisation they had discussed on New Year’s Eve. It would be for the best, Robert said, if he forgot about what he had been told.

Albert fought back the urge to shriek down the phone.

This isn’t fair! This isn’t fair! You get everything and now you get this too and I get nothing! IT’S NOT FAIR!

Instead, he told Robert he never wanted to see him again and hung up on the first syllables of his brother’s protest. Then he opened a bottle of vodka and waited to see whether or not his father would put him out of his misery.

Weeks passed without word from home until, one baking hot afternoon in late August, Albert returned from a drunken stroll in the park to find his father standing outside the door to his room. His face curdled with obvious distaste as he took in his son’s dishevelled, unshaven appearance, but he said nothing. He merely waited for his son to open the door and followed him through it.

Albert sat in the chair beneath the window, while his father remained standing. He didn’t offer to make tea, or coffee, or anything else; he was only interested in what they both knew his father was there to say, which he proceeded to deliver in a flat, emotionless tone of voice that made Albert want to cry. David Harker explained quickly that there was an organisation called Blacklight, which every male member of the Harker family had been a member of, all the way back to his great-grandfather, who had helped found it. He, Albert, was entitled to join, if he wanted to.

And that was it.

Albert stared up at him for a long moment, realising with sudden certainty what had happened: his father had not wanted to invite him to join, had clearly had no intention of ever doing so, but had been told by someone, presumably his superiors, that it was mandatory. So he had driven to Cambridge and made the offer to his son in the least enthusiastic way possible, hoping against hope that he would say no. For a moment, Albert thought about saying yes, out of nothing more than pure, hateful spite. But the thought quickly passed.

“I don’t want to join,” he said, looking his father directly in the eye and seeing exactly what he was expecting: a momentary bloom of uncontrollable relief. He felt something break in his chest and told his father that he could see himself out. Without waiting to see if he did so, Albert walked stiffly into his bedroom and lay down on his bed.

He lay there for a long time. Eventually, he heard the click as his father pulled the door shut behind him.

The wind whipped up from the river below and Albert pulled his coat tightly round him as he made his way across the bridge.

He had let Johnny Supernova believe that he had never wanted to join Blacklight, that he had rejected his father’s offer out of calculated malice. In truth, his twenty-first birthday had been the day his heart had closed to the rest of the world. It had been cold confirmation of all his deepest fears about himself: that he was no good, that he was inferior to his brother, that his father had never wanted or loved him. The reality was simple, and endlessly painful: he had rejected his father’s offer because he couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the disappointment in his eyes every day.

Albert was halfway across the bridge when a black car pulled to a halt beside him. He stopped and looked at it; the windows were the same impenetrable black as its body and the number plate on the front bore the legend DIPLOMATIC VEHICLE. The passenger door swung open and he leant down to look inside. A man in a black suit stared out at him, his eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses.

“Took you long enough,” said Albert. “I didn’t think I’d get this far, to be honest. Standards must be slipping.”

“Will you come with us, please, Mr Harker?” asked the man. He gave no indication of having heard Albert speak.

“Come where?” he asked.

“There is someone who wants to speak to you, Mr Harker,” replied the man. He shifted slightly in his seat and his suit jacket slid open far enough for Albert to see the black pistol hanging beneath the man’s armpit.

“I can’t imagine who that might be,” said Harker, with a gentle smile.

He took a quick look around. The grey mass of the Thames moved sluggishly beneath him, as sunlight gleamed off the stone and glass and metal of the buildings on either side of the river. The sky was bright blue overhead, the clouds the purest white. It was a fine day, the kind that you hope for every morning when you force yourself out of bed. Albert Harker took a sweet, lingering breath and climbed into the back of the car.

They accelerated smoothly north, leaving the river behind.

Albert watched the passing city with an odd sensation of grief filling him; he felt like he was never going to see it again. The fact that the man in the sunglasses had not felt the need to blindfold him suggested that the journey was one-way; they clearly didn’t care if he saw where they were taking him.

The car ploughed through the thick traffic at the Aldwych, crawled up Kingsway and Woburn Place, and emerged on to Euston Road. Beyond the filthy, litter-strewn streets that surrounded King’s Cross Station, an area of London that Albert remembered being far, far worse as little as a decade earlier, they turned north on to York Way, past the goods yards and the sticky, almost stationary canal. The car’s big engine purred as it made its way on to Camden Road, where it pulled into the driveway of a tall, narrow house.

The man in the sunglasses told Albert to stay where he was, then climbed out of the car. A second later the door beside him opened, to reveal the man holding it with such stolid politeness that Albert fought back the urge to laugh. He eased himself out of the car and looked up at the house. The door stood at the top of five stone steps, open to the warm afternoon air. Albert looked at the man in the sunglasses, who didn’t move.

“Aren’t you coming?” he asked.

The man didn’t respond. Albert stared at him for a moment that seemed to last forever, then crossed the drive and slowly climbed the steps, one at a time. Beyond the door, he saw a man standing in a long, narrow hallway. His black suit was identical to the one worn by his colleague outside, and he gave no indication of having seen Albert Harker; he stood perfectly still, his hands clasped before his groin, the plastic earpiece behind his ear clearly visible. On the opposite side of the corridor was an open door. Albert approached it slowly, trying to slow his racing heart, and stepped through it.

The room was long and tall, with a semi-circular set of bay windows beneath which sat an empty sofa. Standing in front of it was Albert’s father.

“Hello, son,” said David Harker. He was wearing his Blacklight uniform, his hands dangling loosely at his sides, his face expressionless. Albert opened his mouth to reply, but then a second voice spoke from behind him, a voice that froze him where he stood.

“Hello, Bert.”

Albert turned slowly and saw his brother standing at the far end of the room. He too was all in black, and standing beside him was a man that Albert didn’t recognise.

“Robert,” he said. “What are you—”

“Look at me, Albert,” said David, sharply. “Your brother asked to be here, but it’s me you’re dealing with.”

He forced himself back round. To Albert’s well-practised eyes, two thin patches of pale pink were clearly visible high up on his father’s cheeks. He had come to know them very well as a child; they were a clear warning that his father’s patience was nearing an end, and that his temper, a great and terrible thing, was very close to the surface.

“Hello, Father,” he said, as calmly as he was able. He suddenly felt incredibly alone among these three men, whose loyalty to each other, he knew, far superseded the loyalty that either of the members of his family felt towards him. “What can I do for you?”

David took a step forward. “What did you tell him, Albert?” he asked, his voice low and cold.

“Tell who?”

“The journalist. What did you tell him?”

Albert shrugged. “Everything,” he said.

“Why?” growled David Harker. “For God’s sake, why?”

“Because I knew it would make your life difficult,” replied Albert, and smiled at his father.

David crossed the distance between them in the blink of an eye. There was a blur of black, before his fist crashed into his son’s mouth, driving him to the ground. Albert felt pain explode through his head, felt his lip tear and his mouth fill up with blood. His stomach churned and he put his hands on the floor, trying to steady himself. He spat blood on to the wooden floorboards of the living room, then rocked back on his knees, staring up at his father. Behind him, from some great distance, he heard a vaguely familiar voice shout for someone to control themself, but paid it little attention. His gaze was fixed on the twisted crimson of his father’s face, at the expression of pure hatred that blazed there.

“You stupid boy,” breathed David Harker. “You stupid, pathetic little boy. He’ll never print a word of what you told him. So all that you’ve done is embarrass your family, yet again. Why couldn’t you just have stayed in that rathole in Southwark, with your junkie friends? Or just died, like most of your kind already have? It would have saved us all so much trouble.”

“I’m… happy,” said Albert, grinning through teeth smeared with blood, “to have… disappointed you… Father.”

David Harker raised his fist again, but this time Albert’s brother was there, grabbing his arm and holding it in place.

“No more,” said Robert, casting a brief, disgusted glance down at his kneeling twin. “Not like this, Dad. This isn’t how we do things.”

David glared at Robert for a long moment, then his face softened into a look of such obvious pride that Albert felt it as a stabbing pain in the middle of his chest, like an icicle skewering his heart.

“You’re right, of course,” said David. “Thank you.” He clapped his son on the back, then the two men looked down at Albert. An enormous quantity of blood had run from his mouth, soaking the front of his shirt red. He stared back at them with fear and loathing in his eyes.

“This is long overdue,” said David. “I should have done this more than a decade ago. Your mother persuaded me to let you be, convinced me that you might eventually work out what it means to be a man, to be a Harker. Letting her do so was my mistake, and I see it now.” He looked up towards the door and gave a nod. “Get him out of my sight,” he said. “I don’t ever want to see his face again.”

Albert’s mind was suddenly overcome with terror.

They’re going to kill me, he thought. They’re going to kill me, oh God, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t think they’d really do it, oh God, I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

Hands grabbed his arms and he began to scream, thrashing wildly in the grips of the men who held him. He screamed for his brother, for his father, screamed that he was sorry, screamed for another chance, one last, final chance. But Robert and David merely watched, their expressions calm, as Albert was dragged out of the room.

He fought them all the way to the front door, kicking and bucking and howling his head off, and when one of the hands released its grip on his arm, he redoubled his efforts. Then something huge and heavy crashed into his lower back and all the fight went out of him. The pain was monstrous, indescribable, and he vomited helplessly as his suddenly limp body was dragged from the house and towards the idling car.

The man in the sunglasses was waiting for him, leaning against the wide black boot with something in his hand. As they approached, Albert saw that it was a hypodermic needle, half full of a clear liquid. He tried to force his reeling limbs to move, to propel him away from the man and the syringe, but nothing happened; the combination of the blows to his face and kidneys had rendered his body unresponsive. He was hauled upright as the man in the sunglasses stepped forward, the faintest flicker of a smile on his face.

“Don’t…” managed Albert, his voice little more than a plaintive croak. “Please… don’t…”

The man didn’t respond and, as the needle slid into his neck, a single thought filled Albert’s mind.

This isn’t real. None of this is real.

His eyes closed and his body went limp as he was bundled into the back of the car.

When he awoke, it was dark outside.

As his eyes fluttered open, Albert tried to lift his arms and found that nothing happened. His mind was thick and fuzzy, a state of being he knew very well from years of heroin addiction, but this was something else. Something unfamiliar. He concentrated hard and managed to slowly bring his shaking hands up to his face. His mouth was swollen and covered with blood that had dried to powder. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and looked around. He was alone in the back of the car, which was stationary. In the front, the driver stared rigidly forward; beside him, the passenger seat was empty. Albert shuffled across the seat to his left and peered through the windscreen.

A large building loomed in the distance, lit by circles of yellow light set into brick walls. In front of the car, the man with the sunglasses was standing beside a chain-link gate, talking to a woman in a white coat. As Albert watched, the woman gestured animatedly, waving her hands and shaking her head vehemently back and forth. The man in the sunglasses appeared to let her finish, then leant in close and talked for almost a minute. When he pulled away, the woman looked utterly deflated, her face pale, her shoulders slumped. The man pulled a sheaf of paper from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to her; she gave it a cursory scan, took a pen from one of the pockets of her white coat, and signed each page. She handed them back, turned, and walked away without a backward glance. The man in the sunglasses watched her leave, then walked briskly back towards the car. He opened the passenger door, slid in next to Albert, and gave him a wide smile.

“Welcome to your new home, Mr Harker,” he said, his tone smooth and oily. “Driver, carry on.”

They crept forward and, as Albert watched, the chain-link gate slid open. The big car passed through the widening gap and, as it did so, Albert saw a white rectangle moving slowly past his window. He slid away from the man in the sunglasses, fear and misery clawing at his drifting, reeling mind, pressed his face against the glass, and read the two words that were printed on the sign in bold blue letters.

BROADMOOR HOSPITAL




12

READY TO ROLL


As Jamie expected, Morton and Ellison were waiting for him in the hangar.

On time, he thought. That’s a good start, at least.

The two freshly commissioned Operators were standing at the rear of the black van that had been assigned to Operational Squad M-3. He walked over to them, his boots thudding on the concrete floor, readying himself to say what he needed to say. He had spent the journey up to the hangar trying to decide whether to tell his rookies what had happened to Angela Darcy’s squad; he was far from sure that the extra pressure would be helpful, but was also reluctant for them to start their first mission in the dark about what they were really facing.

“Operators,” said Jamie, stopping in front of them.

“Lieutenant,” they replied.

“Weapons and kit prep complete?” asked Jamie, eyeing their uniforms. He could already see that they were perfect, the result, no doubt, of dozens of checks and re-checks in the dormitory on Level C, but there were protocols to be followed.

“Yes, sir.”

“Intelligence analysis complete?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Operational parameters clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Operator Morton, who is our target?”

“Eric Bingham, sir.”

“Operator Ellison,” said Jamie, turning to face her. “What intelligence has the target’s identification provided?”

“A long history of violence, sir,” replied Ellison. “Paranoid schizophrenia, diagnosed more than ten years ago. One conviction for attempted murder, numerous previous incidences of assault.”

“All of which means?”

“Shoot first, sir. And keep shooting.”

“That’s exactly right. Listen to me, do what I tell you, don’t waste time trying to talk to him or bring him in alive. We track him down, destroy him, and move on. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now listen carefully. An experienced squad, led by one of the finest Operators in this Department, returned to the Loop this morning with two seriously injured members. They were both hurt by a single vampire, one of the escapees from Broadmoor. The squad in question were not in possession of the full facts and paid the price. We will not make the same mistake. Is that clear?”

Neither Ellison nor Morton replied. Their faces had paled slightly and their mouths were set in thin lines.

This is it, thought Jamie. They can handle this or they can’t. They’re ready or they’re not. Time to find out.

“OK,” he said, hauling open the rear door of the van. “Let’s move out.”

The van sped through the thick forest that lay beyond the perimeter of the Loop, its powerful engine humming beneath its passengers’ feet.

Operational Squad M-3 were strapped into three of the moulded seats in the vehicle’s rear, their weapons and kit stowed safely in the slots between them. Jamie sat upright in his seat, his feet flat on the floor; he had been in this position dozens of times, and under normal circumstances his faith in the van’s tracking and weapon systems meant that he was almost able to relax. But these were far from normal circumstances; he found himself concentrating on projecting calm to his new squad mates, even though his mind was still reeling at what had been done to Alex Jacobs and John Carlisle.

He had tried several times to start a conversation with his rookies, but had received only one-word answers; he had eventually given up, leaving them to their thoughts. As a result, the atmosphere inside the van was tense, dangerously so for the early stages of an operation; his new squad mates were obviously wound too tight, but Jamie thought drawing attention to the fact was only likely to make it worse. Instead, he had lowered the van’s control screen and called up a map of eastern England, marked with two moving dots. The black dot was them as they accelerated south.

The red dot was Eric Bingham, their target.

He was still in Peterborough and appeared to have gone to ground in the hours since his escape from Broadmoor. He was moving, but within an exceedingly small range, and the Surveillance Division had pinned his location down to a warehouse on a long-derelict industrial estate on the edge of town, a warehouse that he had now not left for more than six hours. This was the first bit of genuinely good news that Jamie had heard all day; a disused warehouse meant no civilians, no potential hostages, and almost no risk of collateral damage. As squad leader, he had been given a clearance of five for the mission at hand, a concept that he would never, ever get used to.

If we get the vampires on our list and no more than five innocent people die, then everything’s cool. That’s the equation. One of ours for every one of them. Maths, written in blood and human lives.

The collateral damage allowance was one thing Jamie had felt no guilt about keeping from his rookies; he figured they had more than enough to worry about. Instead, he watched the screen, feeling an unsettling sensation of inevitability as they approached their target.

An hour later their driver’s voice emerged from the intercom that linked the cab to the body of the vehicle.

“We’re a mile out, sir. Do you want me to proceed?”

“Roger that,” replied Jamie. “Go silent and get us one hundred metres out.”

“Roger,” replied the driver.

The rumble of the van’s engine died away, leaving silence behind. It sounded as though the vehicle’s power had been cut, but the lights and the screen remained bright, and it continued to move steadily forward.

“Weapons prep,” said Jamie, looking at his squad mates. Calm appeared to have settled over them both, a state of being that he wanted to believe was genuine. Away from the Loop, in the real world with weapons to fire, a mission to carry out and a target to destroy, he was hopeful that Morton and Ellison had reverted to what they were: highly trained men and women who had been in situations where their lives were in danger dozens of times before. This was the moment of truth, where training and experience would hopefully overwhelm trepidation, where they would realise that they could do what was being asked of them.

As one, Morton and Ellison began to clip their weapons and kit into place. Jamie did the same, keeping his gaze fixed on them; there were cold looks in both of their eyes that he liked. When the squad was fully equipped, he forced a smile.

“This is it,” he said. “We stay calm, we do our job, and we go home. It’s as simple as that. Clear?”

“Clear, sir,” they replied.

Operational Squad M-3 ran across the cracked tarmac in a five-metre spread with Jamie in the middle.

The van had pulled away as soon as their boots hit the ground; even in a place as desolate as this, the vehicle was likely to draw unwanted attention, so their driver would move it to a less visible location until he was called back to collect them.

They were on their own.

The industrial estate was as bleak and lifeless as the surface of the moon. The roads and pavements were strewn with litter, and empty offices, factories and warehouses stood dark and brooding on all sides. There was broken glass in several of the windows, but the buildings were not falling down; they simply looked abandoned. Jamie wondered what had brought about the exodus that had clearly taken place here; had the companies that had once inhabited these buildings gone out of business? Downsized? Sent their operations abroad? The place felt sad and pointless, built for a purpose that was now gone and would likely never return.

Looming before the squad was the two-storey factory that was their destination; the sign on the approach to the building announced it as the home of MCM FROZEN FOODS. The front doors, through which workers had presumably once streamed in and out in the mornings and evenings, had been locked with a sturdy length of chain and a shiny steel padlock, both of which were now lying on the ground, bent and twisted. The doors themselves were standing slightly open as the three Operators reached them.

“Christ,” breathed Morton. “Takes a lot of strength to do that.”

“That’s right,” said Jamie. “It does. Stay calm.”

“Not too subtle,” said Ellison. “Doesn’t look like he cares if he gets caught.”

“I doubt he’s thinking that clearly,” said Jamie. “If he didn’t feed in time, the hunger has probably driven him mad. If he did, if he’s still himself, he has a long history of mental instability. I’m not expecting predictable behaviour from any of our targets, and you shouldn’t either.”

“So what’s the plan?” asked Morton.

“We find him,” said Jamie. “Which shouldn’t be hard. Thermal imaging will make him look like a firework. Then we destroy him.”

“OK,” said Morton.

“Good,” said Jamie. “Follow me.”

He reached out, pushed open the doors, then slipped through, disappearing into the darkness. Morton and Ellison followed, their T-Bones drawn and resting steadily in their hands.

The reception that had once welcomed visitors to MCM FROZEN FOODS was no longer welcoming. The desk was empty apart from a small cluster of wires that had been left behind, and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling above it were dark. To the right of the desk stood a single door that presumably led into the warehouse itself. It too was standing open.

Jamie moved quietly across the reception and peered through the door. A cavernous black space stretched up and away from him. There was no movement, no sound of any kind. The warehouse, which would have once been piled from floor to ceiling with pallets of food awaiting despatch, appeared to be empty.

“Thermals,” whispered Jamie. “He’s in there somewhere. Ready One.”

The phrase was Blacklight code that authorised the use of weaponry. Morton and Ellison set their T-Bones against their shoulders, as Jamie drew his from his belt and led his squad into the warehouse. In an ideal world, it would not be him that ended Eric Bingham; it was vital that his new squad mates got used to destroying vampires as soon as possible. But this was far from an ideal world, and he was not prepared to take any chances, not after what he had seen in the Zero Hour Task Force briefing; if the opportunity to make the killing shot came his way, he would take it without hesitation.

Jamie turned the dial on his belt that controlled his helmet’s visual modes and watched as the cold concrete walls and floor of the warehouse disappeared in a great wash of dark blue and black. An instant later he saw that he had told Morton the truth.

Eric Bingham wasn’t hard to find.

At the far end of the warehouse, a tight ball of bright yellow and orange was curled into the corner where the walls met the ceiling.

“There,” said Ellison, the word appearing directly into his and Morton’s ears.

“Got him,” confirmed Jamie. “Ellison, take point. Morton, next to me.”

Ellison moved past him and walked slowly towards the vampire. Morton fell into position beside him and they followed their squad mate, stepping quietly through the empty building. When they were still five metres away from their target, a strange noise began to be picked up by the speakers in Jamie’s helmet, a low, rattling sound that he suddenly recognised.

Eric Bingham was growling.

“What the hell?” asked Ellison.

Jamie opened his mouth to answer her, but then the yellow and orange ball moved, bursting out of the corner and rushing down towards them.

“I see you!” screamed Bingham as he hurtled through the air, the heat from his body blinding them. Jamie recoiled, fumbling for the dial on his belt, shouting for his squad to open fire.

“Jesus,” yelled Ellison, and fired her T-Bone. The projectile rocketed past the onrushing vampire and hit the wall with a metallic crunch. Morton did nothing; Jamie could hear his panting breath over their comms link and knew he had frozen.

Jamie yanked the barrel of his T-Bone round to where the vampire should have been and pulled the trigger. The metal stake burst from the barrel, but disappeared away into the darkness. Jamie swore, reached up and shoved his visor out of the way. The darkness of the warehouse pressed in on him, and his vision filled with expanding dots of grey and black. With a loud whir and a heavy thud, the metal stake flew back into the barrel of his T-Bone and locked into place.

“Where is he?” yelled Ellison. “I’ve lost him.”

“Regroup,” shouted Jamie, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to clear them. “On me, now.”

The ghostly faces of his squad mates seemed to materialise as they pushed their own visors clear. They arrived beside him, their eyes wide, their skin pale.

“Where is he?” repeated Ellison, her voice low. “I can’t see him.”

“Quiet,” whispered Jamie. “Both of you.” He flicked his visor down and swore again; the blazing heat that had been emanating from Bingham had blown out his helmet’s sensors. His visor was clearing, but slowly, ever so slowly; he shoved it back out of the way and drew his torch from its loop on his belt. A wide beam of white light burst from the LED; he swept it quickly across the wide dark space of the warehouse.

Nothing moved.

Ellison and Morton turned on their torches and two more beams appeared; they swooped and crossed, illuminating small circles of the huge room. Jamie could hear both his squad mates, the fear in their breathing, the rapid in and out.

“Easy,” he whispered. “Take it easy.”

“Is he still here?” asked Morton. He swung his torch as he spoke, aiming it into the distant corners.

“I don’t know,” hissed Jamie. “I can’t see any better than you can.” He flicked down his visor, desperate for it to be clear, then pushed it back up. His torch picked out a flash of something that skittered away from the beam, a long pink tail trailing behind it. He circled slowly, trying to keep his torch steady, trying not to let his hand shake.

“What do we do?” whispered Ellison. “Sir? What do we—”

Jamie felt the air shift behind him, a millisecond before Eric Bingham thundered through the middle of his squad, sending the three of them crashing to the ground; he hit the concrete hard and saw the vampire disappear away into the darkness. He leapt back to his feet, ignoring the pain that was shooting through his shoulders, and shone his torch in the direction Bingham had flown, heart pounding in his chest, blood roaring in his head. He saw something move, tried to follow it with his beam of light, but lost it.

Ellison and Morton climbed to their feet and closed in around him.

“We’re sitting ducks,” hissed Morton. “He can see us, but we can’t see him. We need to pull back.”

“Calm down, Operator,” said Jamie. “Just find the target.”

“We need to pull back,” repeated Morton, his voice low and unsteady.

“You heard him, John,” said Ellison. “Let’s do our job.”

“I see you!” screamed Eric Bingham. His voice echoed round the warehouse, seeming to come from everywhere at once. “I see you very well!”

Jamie tried to ignore the adrenaline that was pulsing through him, to push away the terrible screeching voice of the vampire and focus on the task at hand. He took a long step in the direction he had seen Bingham disappear, controlling his breathing, letting the darkness flow over him, willing it to reveal its contents.

“We need to pull back,” said Morton again, but Jamie ignored him. He was waiting for the telltale shift in the air that meant the vampire was moving. He pulled the MP5 from his belt, pressed his torch against its barrel and stopped, listening to the silent warehouse, feeling the air on the skin of his face.

Movement.

Behind him.

Jamie spun on the balls of his feet, raising the MP5 and pulling its trigger as he turned. Fire licked from the barrel as deafening reports crashed through the enclosed space of the warehouse. His torch beam illuminated his squad mates as they threw themselves to the ground, then picked out something moving at head height, twisting and fluttering, trailing sprays of gleaming red blood behind it. He heard a guttural scream, then silence.

Morton was first to his feet, his eyes blazing, his torch beam blinding as he pointed it at Jamie’s face. “What the hell are you—”

Jamie reached out and knocked the torch aside. “Look,” he said, and shone his own light on to the warehouse floor, where splashes of crimson appeared in the beam. Jamie followed them towards a dark patch of the warehouse floor, the contents of which became horribly clear in the bright beam of the torch.

“Christ,” breathed Ellison.

Eric Bingham was lying in a rapidly spreading pool of blood, staring up at them with wide, frightened eyes. He was middle-aged, probably nearer to fifty than forty, and looked remarkably small on the wide expanse of concrete. His chest was a ruin of bullet holes and his right arm lay shattered at his side.

“Please,” he said, the words sending blood cascading down his chin. “I don’t know. I told them. Please.”

Beams from Morton’s and Ellison’s torches joined Jamie’s own, illuminating the sorry sight before them.

“I missed,” said Ellison. “When he charged us. I missed my shot.”

“So did I,” said Jamie. “It happened fast. It nearly always does.”

“Jamie—” began Morton.

“Don’t worry about it,” interrupted Jamie. “It’s done. Ellison?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Finish it.”

“Yes, sir,” repeated Ellison. She stepped forward, drawing her stake.

Bingham watched her with uncomprehending eyes. “Please,” he repeated. “I told them. I promise. Please.”

Ellison paused for a moment, beyond the reach of his one functioning arm. Then she darted forward and planted the stake in the vampire’s chest. There was a loud crunching noise, before Eric Bingham exploded in an eruption of flying blood. Ellison leapt backwards, avoiding the worst of the mess, and placed the stake back in its loop on her belt.

*

“That was all wrong,” said Morton.

The three Operators were back in their van, strapped in and ready to move on. Jamie had ordered the driver to wait while he requested an Operational update from the Surveillance Division, hoping that one of their remaining targets might have been identified since they had departed from the Loop. The connection had been established and he was waiting for any new information to be transmitted to them.

“What was?” asked Jamie. He had been staring at the touch screen, but something in his squad mate’s voice made him turn his head.

“That,” replied Morton. His face was pale, almost grey, and his eyes were glassy. “The vampire. Bingham. It… wasn’t right.”

“We did what we needed to do,” said Ellison. “Nothing went wrong.”

“I’m not saying it did,” said Morton.

“Why did it feel wrong?” asked Jamie.

“I’m a soldier,” said Morton. “Or at least I was. I’ve fought enemies in every corner of the world, but nothing like that. That wasn’t human.”

“It was,” said Jamie. “Don’t let yourself start to think otherwise. It was a human being with a disease, a disease that gave him unnatural power. It wasn’t a monster, or a demon, or anything like that.”

“It was all wrong,” repeated Morton. He stared at Jamie, who didn’t look away; he believed he knew what his squad mate was really saying.

He was scared. I think he’d forgotten what it feels like.

“I’m not a soldier,” said Ellison. “I never have been. But I’d be willing to bet I’ve killed more living things than the two of you put together. Was Bingham stronger and faster than them? Yes. Was he more frightening? Definitely. But he was still just a target, one that needed taking down. Think of it that way, John. Trust me, it helps.”

Jamie glanced over at Ellison, whose attention was fixed on her squad mate.

I got lucky here, he thought. With her. Very lucky.

On the control screen, a grey download bar was replaced by a window containing two lines of text. He glanced up and read them.

M-3/FIELD UPDATE RESPONSE

NO NEW INFORMATION AVAILABLE

Jamie returned his gaze to John Morton, and made a decision. “I’m pulling the rest of this operation,” he said. “We’re going back to the Loop.”

Ellison frowned. “We’ve got five and a half hours until our window closes, sir.”

“I understand that,” said Jamie. “But I’m not going after unidentified targets with a newly commissioned Operator who is having trouble. It isn’t safe.”

“I’ll be all right,” said Morton, instantly. “Really. I just need to get my head round it.”

“I know what you’re going through,” said Jamie. “And believe me when I tell you this doesn’t have to be a big deal. But we’re going home.”

“Don’t do this,” said Morton. “Please. We’ll be a laughing stock before we even finish our first operation.”

“That’s enough, John,” said Ellison, shooting him a sharp sideways glance. “If he says we’re done, we’re done.”

“It’s all right,” said Jamie. “This is on me, I promise you.”

I hope that sounded convincing, he thought. Because I’m really not sure it is.

Jamie addressed his squad as soon as they stepped down on to the concrete floor of the Loop’s hangar.

“Good work,” he said. “Honestly. There’s one less vampire out there and we came home in one piece. That’s a good day around here, trust me. Go and get some rest and I’ll message you as soon as I have tomorrow’s schedule. Dismissed.”

His new squad mates faced him. Ellison’s skin was pale, but her eyes were sharp, and Jamie already found himself full of admiration for her; she nodded, gave him a quick smile, and headed for the elevators. Morton lingered a moment longer; his face was tight with anger, his jaw clenched, his mouth squeezed shut.

“Something you want to say, Operator?” Jamie asked.

Morton held Jamie’s gaze for a long moment, then shook his head. “No, sir,” he said, then turned and strode away across the hangar.

Jamie watched him go, guilt churning in his stomach.

He had lied to Morton, lied to them both; what their squad had done was far from good work. They had destroyed the first of their targets, but cancelling an operation once it was under way was going to mean questions from his superiors. He had turned it over and over in his head on the way back to the Loop, and was already second-guessing the decision he had made.

Maybe Morton had been right, and the rookie Operator had just needed some time to get his head round what had happened with Bingham, to face his fear and deal with it. Maybe he had overreacted, panicked at the first sign of potential trouble. But in the short time Jamie had been a member of Blacklight, he had seen too many people hurt, too many people killed, to take chances; the stakes were simply too high.

He had told the truth about one thing; he would make sure any negative fallout from the aborted mission fell squarely on him. He would not let Morton or Ellison take the blame for his decision.

Jamie scanned the hangar for the Duty Officer and signalled him over.

“Is there a debrief?” he asked.

“No, sir,” replied the Officer. “Written reports only, sir.”

“OK. Thanks.”

The man nodded and went back to what he was doing. Jamie set off in the other direction, heading towards the lift at the end of the Level 0 corridor. He was relieved that he was not required to brief the Interim Director; he had no desire to explain what had happened now.

It could wait until the morning.

Two minutes later Jamie was standing outside the door to his quarters, almost exactly halfway along the long, curving corridor on Level B. He pulled his ID card from its pouch in his uniform, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. A pile of divisional reports teetered on the surface of his small desk, but he didn’t so much as glance at them. Instead, he dragged his uniform from his body, hung it on the hooks behind his door and flopped down on to his bed. His eyes closed, and thirty seconds later he was asleep.

Thud.

Jamie’s eyes fluttered and an involuntary groan emerged from his lips. His brain swam slowly into action, feeling thick and heavy.

Thud.Thud thud.

The noise reverberated through his tired skull as he forced his eyes open. He reached for his console and read the white numbers at the top of the screen.

02:32:56

Thud thud thud thud thud.

He swore loudly, swung his legs down from his bed, and made his way across his quarters. He pulled his uniform back on, then opened the door.

Standing outside in the corridor was Jacob Scott, the veteran Australian Colonel. Behind him, their faces pale, were the members of the Zero Hour Task Force.

“Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Colonel Scott. His usually warm tone was curt and businesslike. “You need to come with us.”

“Am I in trouble?” asked Jamie. He couldn’t think of anything he had done that would warrant such heavyweight attention, but nor could he think of any other reason why most of the senior Operators in the Department would be knocking on his door in the middle of the night.

“Nothing like that,” replied Colonel Scott. “There’s a situation that requires our attention.”

Jamie groaned. “You couldn’t have messaged me?”

“Not while ISAT is ongoing,” replied Scott. “Until they’re finished, we can’t assume electronic communications are secure.”

Jamie glanced at Paul Turner. “This is serious, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Colonel Scott. “It’s serious.”




13

SOCIAL NETWORKING

STAVELEY, NORTH DERBYSHIRE

ONE WEEK EARLIER


Greg Browning put on his headset and prepared to talk to a man he had never met.

He was sitting at the desk that had been his son’s, in the room where Matt had slept until he was taken away by the government and their faceless, terrifying men in black. It was now almost a month since Matt had disappeared for the second time, and three weeks since his wife had taken his daughter and left him. If their son returned, he supposed there was a chance that she might come back, but he didn’t really care, one way or the other; something had broken inside his wife when her son went missing for the second time, and he no longer recognised the woman she had become. In truth, Greg had been relieved when she finally packed her bags. With her gone, there was nothing to distract him from the only thing that still interested him: making the government pay for what they had done to his family.

His boss had tried several times to talk to him about what he referred to as his obsession, but Greg had refused to discuss it. When he had eventually been called into the office and told that he was being let go, he had not been surprised; his work had been slipping for months, since the first time Matt had been taken. He bore his boss no ill will; the man was incapable of seeing the truth of the world around him.

A mental-health worker from the local authority had visited him several days later, presumably at his former employer’s suggestion, and he had answered her questions with unfailing politeness. Shortly afterwards, a Disability Living Allowance cheque had arrived, followed by another a month later. The cheques were proof that the council had categorised him as mentally ill, but he saw no need to correct them; there was a pleasing symmetry to local government financing his crusade against the government.

It was like a snake volunteering to eat its own tail.

Three days after the government had stolen his son away in the night for the second time, Greg had defied his wife’s hysterical protests and started a systematic search through the history on Matt’s computer. He had immediately found a long list of sites about vampires and the supernatural, but nothing he considered out of the ordinary; it was mostly kid’s stuff, about blood and fangs and things that went bump in the night. But, as he had been about to close the machine down, an instant message had appeared in the corner of the screen. He had followed the instructions it contained, not really knowing why he was doing so, and found himself looking at a website that felt like the first genuinely real thing he had ever seen.

The site, which had no name and a URL that was a seemingly random string of numbers and letters, was devoted to a simple concept: that vampires were real, that the government was aware of their existence and maintained a top-secret force to police them. It contained written accounts, blurry photographs, snippets of crackly audio recording; nothing that would have convinced the casual observer. But Greg Browning was far from a casual observer; he had watched an unmarked helicopter land in the middle of his quiet suburban street, stood aside as men dressed all in black forced their way through his house, pointing submachine guns at him and his son. And in his garden, he had seen a girl whose body was so severely injured that she could not possibly have been alive rear up to bite a man wearing a biohazard suit, before tearing his son’s throat out in front of his eyes.





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