Department 19: Battle Lines (22 page)

“Fine,” said Holmwood. “Do whatever you need to. But the next time you go out, he goes with you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jamie, through gritted teeth. “Thank you, sir.”

Jamie pulled the door to the Interim Director’s quarters shut behind him and saw Jack Williams leaning against the opposite wall, an expression of mild concern on his face.

“Everything OK?” asked Jack.

“Fine,” he replied, forcing a smile. “It was just the Morton thing. No big deal.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” said Jamie, and started to walk down the corridor. “Don’t worry about it, seriously. Especially right now. Can you believe Jacob? It’s incredible.”

Jack widened his eyes exaggeratedly as he fell in beside his friend. “No shit,” he replied. “I don’t think this has ever happened before.”

“A descendant being turned?” asked Jamie. Jack had joined the Department in more peaceful times and had completed the entire thirteen-month-long training programme that all Operators were supposed to pass; as a result, his knowledge of Blacklight’s history was usually far greater than Jamie’s.

“I’m pretty sure,” said Jack. “And no active descendant has ever been turned, I’m absolutely sure of that. A lot of them have died, but none have been turned.”

A lot of them have died
, thought Jamie, himself a descendant of the founders.
Thanks for that, Jack. Seriously.

“It’s big,” he said. “Holmwood sending you after him. That’s big.”

“I guess so,” replied Jack. “It shouldn’t be any different really. He’s an escapee like any other. I just have to keep my mouth shut about it.”

“Still,” persisted Jamie. “Of all the people in the room, Cal picked you to take care of it. You should feel great about that, mate. Really you should.”

Jack smiled. “I am pretty pleased,” he said. “It must mean I’ve been doing something right these last few months.”

Jamie, who knew exactly how highly regarded Jack Williams was by every single member of the Department, refused to dignify his friend’s comment with a verbal response; he merely tilted his head and raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah, all right,” said Jack, a wide grin on his face. “My squad are super-cool vampire-destroying ninjas and Holmwood would have been crazy to pick anyone else. Better?”

“Better,” said Jamie, returning his friend’s smile. They walked on until they reached the lift at the end of the Level 0 corridor. Jack pushed the button and they waited in comfortable silence for it to arrive.

“We don’t see each other very often, Jack,” said Jamie, suddenly. “It’s not surprising, given everything that’s going on around here, but still. It’s a shame.”

“It is,” said Jack. The lift arrived, and the two Operators stepped inside. “I don’t feel like I see anyone apart from my squad these days. It’s hard.”

“I know,” said Jamie. “I get back from operations and all I ever want to do is sleep.”

“Do you miss Larissa?” asked Jack.

“Of course I do,” said Jamie. “But even when she was here, it was getting harder and harder to find time to see her. And now she’s on the other side of the world. I get why she’s there and I’m happy she seems to be having a good time. But yeah, I miss her.”

“She’ll be home soon, though, right?” asked Jack. “And in the meantime, we need to hang out. Let’s make it happen. Breakfast, or lunch, or something. Maybe tomorrow?”

Jamie nodded. “Definitely. Tomorrow.”

The lift slowed to a stop and opened its doors on Level B. Jamie considered giving Jack a brief hug, but decided against it. “See you later,” he said instead, and headed for his quarters.

“See you, Jamie,” shouted Jack, as the lift doors closed.

As the members of the Zero Hour Task Force headed for the lifts that would take them back to their quarters, Paul Turner strode away in the opposite direction.

He had been asleep when Jacob Scott knocked on the door to his quarters, but now he was wide awake: the sad, sordid business of Albert Harker had banished the last of his tiredness. Turner found it hard to sleep at the best of times, more so than ever following the death of his son; where he had once taken advantage of every furlough to drive home and spend the night with Caroline, he now refused to leave the Loop except on Blacklight business. There were too many things that required his attention, too much to do if he was to make sure that what had happened to Shaun never happened to anyone else’s child.

Caroline was bearing up as well as could be expected, given the catastrophic double loss she had suffered during that one terrible night, and was beginning to slowly resemble her former self. She was a Seward and had known more than her share of hardships, although losing both her son and her brother had tested the limits of her endurance. Paul knew that neither of them were truly dealing with Shaun’s death; their grief was still too fresh, too vast. But they were united by a shared sense of duty that got them through each day.

There was work to be done. Mourning would have to wait.

Paul Turner loved his wife more deeply and completely than any Operator in the Department would have believed, and had loved his son exactly the same way. The loss of Shaun was a yawning hole in the very centre of his being, one that continually threatened to pull him down; only his remarkable reserves of willpower kept him moving, kept him putting one foot in front of the other, as he was doing now.

The Security Officer strode through the noisy, bustling Intelligence Division and keyed open the door that led into ISAT. The reception desk was manned, as always, and he nodded at the Operator behind it; the man straightened up in his chair and nodded in return. Turner walked across the small reception area and pushed open the door to the lounge, intending to spend the quiet hours until the day’s interviews commenced drinking coffee, reading over the previous day’s reports, and avoiding thinking about his wife and son. As a result, he was surprised to find Kate Randall lying on the lounge’s sofa when he pushed open the door. She put down the folder she was reading and smiled broadly at him.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

“I was, actually,” he replied. “Jacob Scott woke me up.”

Kate frowned. “What did he do that for?”

Turner considered the implications of her question. If he told her it was classified, he knew she wouldn’t complain; the nature of Blacklight meant that some Operators always knew things that others didn’t. But he had no desire to lie to her. He knew exactly what she had risked by volunteering for ISAT, and knew exactly why she had done it: because she had cared about his son and wanted to honour his memory. He opened his mouth to answer her question and realised he was about to break one of the Department’s most fundamental rules, one that he, as the Security Officer, should have treated as nothing less than sacred; he was going to tell her what had just happened in Cal Holmwood’s quarters, in a meeting that was Zero Hour classified, the highest security level the Department possessed.

“We don’t lie to each other, Kate,” he said. “Am I right about that?”

“Yes,” said Kate, instantly. “That’s right.”

“Good. Do you remember the speech Interim Director Holmwood gave after the Loop was attacked?”

“Of course.”

“Do you remember him saying that he would be setting up a Task Force to dictate strategy for dealing with the rise of Dracula?”

“The Zero Hour Task Force?” asked Kate.

Turner blinked, then allowed a small smile to creep on to his face. “I should have known you would already know,” he said. “Can I assume that Lieutenant Carpenter told you about it?”

A worried expression appeared on Kate’s face.

“It’s OK,” said Turner. “I’m not going to discipline him for doing what I was about to do myself. Jamie told you, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Kate. “Before Valeri’s attack, when everything was going bad, we promised each other no more secrets. So he told us.”

“Us?”

“Matt and Larissa and me.”

Paul Turner’s smile widened. He knew full well that Jamie Carpenter believed that he hated him, was unfair to him and singled him out, and it satisfied him to let the young Operator think so. The truth was very different; there were few Operators in the entire Department that he admired more than the youngest Carpenter, a boy whose stubbornness, temper, and absolute loyalty to his friends reminded him so much of his younger self that it was almost painful. Of course Jamie had told his friends about the Zero Hour Task Force; he knew exactly what the boy’s thought process would have been.

He knew something that he thought his friends needed to know
.
Something he thought they would be safer knowing. So he told them. Simple as that.

“That’s why Jacob woke me up,” said Turner. “He’s on the Task Force, or at least he was until about ten minutes ago. He had something he wanted to show us.”

“What?” asked Kate.

“Footage from the Broadmoor escape. It turns out that Albert Harker, one of the very few descendants ever to turn down the chance to join us, had been locked up in there for almost a decade. And now he’s out there somewhere, turned into a vampire like all the others.”

“Jesus,” said Kate. “That’s awful.”

Turner nodded. “I knew Albert’s brother, Robert. And I
worshipped
his father. When I came in, David was the Operator everyone wanted to be, me included. Yet, according to Jacob, it was David who had Albert committed to Broadmoor, while Robert stood by and did nothing.”

“Why?” asked Kate. “What did he do?”

Turner shrugged. “Gave an interview to a journalist. About the Department. Seems like he was angry at his dad, or his brother, or maybe both of them. I don’t know. A breach that a Security Operator could clean up in ten minutes on his first day in the Department. But Albert’s father clearly thought it was serious.”

He walked across the room, lowered himself into the chair that stood by the small desk, and rubbed his face with his hands. He felt empty, like he had nothing left.

“Thank you for telling me,” said Kate.

“You’re welcome,” replied Turner, then started to laugh, low grunts without any humour in them whatsoever; if anything they sounded, to Kate’s ears at least, as though they were dangerously close to sobs.

“Go and get some sleep, sir,” she said. “There’s still time. Our first interview’s five hours away.”

“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about,” said Turner, lowering his hands and looking at her. “You’ve seen the schedule, right?”

“I’ve seen it,” said Kate.

“Are you going to be OK?”

“I’ll be fine,” she replied. “It was going to happen sooner or later. Weird they both came up for this morning, but I’ll be glad to get them out of the way, to be honest with you.”

“Good,” said Turner. “And you’re not going to be doing them on your own. I’ll be right there.”

“I know that,” said Kate. “So I’ll see you here at seven thirty, yes? After you get some sleep.”

Turner laughed. “That really isn’t necessary.”

Kate put the folder aside and got up from the sofa. She walked across the lounge and held the door open, a wide smile on her face.

“I insist, sir,” she said.

Albert Harker strode through the streets of Clerkenwell, marvelling at the power he could feel coursing through his body. Every ten steps or so, he lifted himself into the air and floated above the cracked squares of pavement, relishing the indescribable sensation of no longer being tethered to the earth.

The streets around him were empty. The sun would be coming up in less than ninety minutes, and the men and women who had packed the local bars and restaurants had long since wandered off in search of taxis and night buses, blissfully unaware of the monster in their midst. They would not be so innocent for long, if Harker had his way; they would not thank him for what he was planning, he knew that much, but he believed that, in time, they would come to see that he had only their best interests at heart.

Forewarned is forearmed
, he thought, as he pushed open the gate that led to Johnny Supernova’s front door. It had been almost a decade since he had last visited this place, on his final evening as a free man. During his years in Broadmoor they had tried to convince him that the things he knew were nothing more than delusions, and when he refused to show even the slightest inclination to believe them, or work with them, they had tried to drive them out with every means at their disposal. They had tried hypnosis, cognitive therapy, and course after course of electro-shock treatment as they attempted to erase his own memories from his head. He had clung to them as tightly as a drowning man clutches a lifebelt; his memories were all he had left and he knew they were real, no matter how many times he was told the opposite.

The house before him was dark and silent. Harker peered up at the windows of the flat on the first floor and saw empty squares of glass, without curtains or blinds. He pushed himself into the air, marvelling at how easy it was to do so, how utterly natural it felt, and floated outside the windows.

The room beyond them was empty. The jumble of furniture and books and records that he had once tiptoed round was gone, the walls and floorboards were bare, and a thick layer of dust lay on every surface. Harker let gravity exert its pull on him and descended slowly to the ground, his mind racing. He had allowed for the possibility that Supernova might no longer live at the same address; the journalist was flighty and unpredictable at the best of times. Harker was disappointed, as he would have liked this first part of his quest to have gone smoothly, but not undeterred. After glancing quickly around to make sure there were no witnesses to his presence, he swung a leg that felt as powerful as a steam piston and kicked the front door clean off its hinges. It broke as it flew into the dim corridor beyond, shattering into pieces that spread across the threadbare carpet. He stepped inside and looked around.

The hallway was clean and almost empty. But on a shelf beside the door, as is the case in most shared houses, there stood a thick stack of unopened post. Harker leafed through it and found what he was looking for immediately: three thick cream envelopes, stamped with the logo of
CHESNEY, CLARKE, ABEL & WATT
and addressed to
The Executor of the Estate of Mr J. Bathurst, Esq
.