by Will Hill
“What would you do?” asked Kate, her voice low. “If you couldn’t believe that any more?”
Turner looked at her, his face paler than ever, the translucent pallor of a ghost.
“I’d put my pistol in my mouth,” he said.
Kate frowned. “Don’t even joke about that.”
“I’m not.”
Silence settled uneasily on Kate’s office. She stared at the Security Officer, attempting to gauge whether he was serious, whether he meant what he said. She had never known him to lie, and she was trying her hardest not to let the awful image of him with a gun in his mouth take root in her mind.
“So what do we do?” she said, eventually, trying to keep her tone light. “Practically, I mean, about what’s going on out there. What’s the plan?”
Turner shrugged. “There isn’t much we can do,” he said. “The police are dealing with the incidents as they happen, and Surveillance is modelling new filters for Echelon to try and make sure we only send squads to genuine supernatural incidents. But there are going to be a lot of false and incomplete reports over the coming days, and we’re going to see a lot of time and energy wasted. We’ll continue to deal with it all as best we can, and cross our fingers.”
“And in the longer term?” asked Kate. “How long can we carry on without coming clean, without admitting who we are and what we do?”
“I don’t know,” said Turner. “Every journalist in the country is going to be digging now, so it’s going to get out eventually, maybe even quickly. Without official confirmation from the MOD, it will all be conjecture, no matter how convincing a case they manage to make, and we need to keep it that way, at least until Zero Hour. After that, maybe none of this will matter.”
“Maybe not,” said Kate. “I doubt it, though. This is pretty much the biggest story in history. I don’t think it’s going to just go away, no matter what Dracula does.”
“It will go away when people start dying,” said Turner, his grey eyes empty. “Especially in the numbers you read out yesterday. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Did you find him?” asked Julian Carpenter, as Cal Holmwood pushed open the door of his cell. “Did you find Adam?”
“Hello to you too, Julian,” said Cal. “NS9 are working on it. That’s all I can say.”
Julian nodded. “I told you everything I know, Cal. You believe me, don’t you?”
“I said I believed you,” said Cal. “I meant it.”
He watched carefully as his old friend nodded again. He had reinstated Julian’s privileges after he had finally, belatedly cooperated; as a result, his face was clean-shaven, and the photos of Marie and Jamie had been returned to pride of place on the small shelf above his bed. But there was something in Julian’s demeanour that made him uneasy; it was an eagerness that almost felt like desperation.
Cal had hated having to threaten him, in particular having to use the man’s family as the stick with which to beat him, even though he had never wavered in his conviction that it was the right thing to do. And part of him genuinely hoped, however naively, that his old friend might still manage to make a new life for himself, out there in the real world. But now, as he looked at Julian’s gaunt face and sunken, staring eyes, he was not so sure.
“I’m releasing you, Julian,” he said. “As I promised you I would, under the conditions I’ve explained previously. I need to know where you intend to go. We need to make amendments to it before you’re taken there, wherever it is.”
“Amendments?” asked Julian.
Holmwood sighed. “Don’t play innocent, Julian. Cameras, microphones, recorders, motion sensors. You have to disappear.”
“Don’t worry,” said Julian. “I’m good at that.”
Holmwood managed a half-smile. “So where to?”
“Do you remember my mother’s cottage, near Caister-on-Sea?” asked Julian. “You came for the weekend once, when Jamie was little. It had a red door and a walnut tree in the middle of the garden.”
“I remember. You and I went fishing off the sea wall.”
“That’s right,” said Julian. “When we got home, Marie had made lemon cake. It was my favourite and she’d made it as a surprise.”
“I said I remember,” said Cal, gently.
Julian nodded. “I’d like to go there,” he said. “To that cottage. I can’t go back to Brenchley. There are too many memories.”
“Fine,” said Cal. “I’ll make the arrangements. And for what it’s worth, Julian, I think it’s a good decision. I think a bit of peace and quiet might do you good. I’ll aim to have you moved—”
“Don’t do this,” said Julian, his eyes suddenly fixed on the Interim Director’s. “I did what you wanted, Cal. Please don’t do this to me.”
Cal felt pain stab at his heart. The look on his old friend’s face threatened to undo him; it was helplessness, awful and humiliating.
“I told you, Julian,” he said. “This is the only option.”
“I could still be useful, though,” said Julian, his voice a hoarse whisper. “I’m still me, Cal, still the man you knew. You could reinstate me and I could help. I could still do something …”
“No,” said Cal, as his friend’s words trailed off. “You can’t. I’m sorry.”
“This is it then?” asked Julian. His eyes were red-rimmed and full of tears. “This is how it ends for you and me?”
“It’s not the end of anything,” said Cal, trying to ignore the lump that had taken up residence in his throat. “It’s a new beginning for you, a new life. When this is over … I don’t know, maybe we can talk again. But for now, this is all I can do for you. I hope you can see that.”
Julian nodded, and dropped his eyes to his bed.
“There’s something you can do for me, though,” said Cal. “As one friend to another, completely off the record. A last favour, if you will.”
Julian looked up, resignation written all over his face. “What is it?”
Cal smiled. “The night you died,” he said. “You can tell me how the hell you did it. I’ve been trying to work it out for months.”
A smile rose on to Julian’s face; it was thin, but it was a smile nonetheless.
“Off the record?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Cal.
“You’d better sit down.”
He did as he was told, pulling the plastic chair over from beside the door and settling into it.
“Come closer,” said Julian.
Cal narrowed his eyes, but leant forward.
“Closer.”
His eyes narrowed even further, but he humoured his old friend.
“You will never, ever know,” whispered Julian, his smile widening into a grin that contained no humour whatsoever.
Cal sat bolt upright. “What?”
Julian shook his head. “You can stop me seeing my family. That’s fine. You can put me under house arrest, like some naughty kid. That’s fine too. But you can’t take everything from me, Cal. I won’t let you.”
“I was at your funeral,” said Cal, his face darkening with anger. “I saw the medical report on your body. Your dead body.”
“I know.”
“Tell me how you did it,” he said. “That’s an order.”
Julian shrugged. “I’m not an Operator any more. You’ve made that very clear. So you don’t get to give me orders.”
“Did Frankenstein help you? There’s no way you pulled it off on your own, and he was your closest friend. He was the only person who knew you had Jamie chipped when he was a baby. Did he help you do it, Julian? Tell me.”
“Why don’t you ask him?” said Julian.
“I will.”
“You should. Let me know what he says.”
Cal stared at his old friend for a long moment, then sighed. “This is petty, Julian.”
“I know.”
“Does it really give you that much satisfaction to know something I don’t?”
“Some,” said J
ulian. “It amuses me to think of you trying to work it out.”
Cal rolled his eyes, then got up and pushed the chair back across the cell with his foot. “For the record,” he said, “it’s not house arrest. It’s precautionary surveillance.”
“Semantics.”
“You’re still alive,” said Cal. “It could be a lot worse.”
“Right,” said Julian.
The Interim Director opened the cell door. “Someone will come and collect you tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll be here,” said Julian. Then he looked up, worry ghosting across his face. “The mission you told me about, Cal. The one Jamie volunteered for. Is he going?”
“He’s going.”
“Will he be coming back?”
Cal looked at his old friend, saw the desperation in his eyes, and realised that, on this one subject, he couldn’t lie to him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope so.”
Matt Browning’s first thought upon entering the Mina II was disappointment that it had no windows.
He had walked up the ramp and into the belly of the supersonic plane with butterflies swirling in his stomach. Part of it was the pressure he put on himself to do well at whatever was asked of him, a weight he had been carrying on his shoulders his whole life. This mission was no different, even though his role was only that of observer. Another part, far greater than his almost constant nervousness and need to please, was excitement. Matt had never been on a plane, nor left the country of his birth; family holidays in the Browning household had been week-long trips to Blackpool and Skegness. Now he was going all the way to America, and would be doing so in a plane that aviation enthusiasts would have gladly given one of their kidneys for the chance to look at, never mind fly in.
He had been accompanied into the Mina II’s hold by two members of the Science Division and a Security Operator. These men were the plane’s permanent crew, who oversaw her smooth running and protected her from prying eyes wherever she went in the world. As the pilot throttled up the huge engines, and the plane began to gather speed along the Loop’s long runway, Matt had gripped the arms of his seat and looked over at his travelling companions; veterans of supersonic travel, all three were already fast asleep.
As the wide, angular jet climbed steeply into the sky and accelerated west, Matt’s disappointment had been mollified by a pair of wide high-definition screens that lowered from the ceiling. One allowed the Mina II’s occupants to watch a vast selection of live satellite television channels. The second, brilliantly, was a continuous feed from a camera positioned in the plane’s belly, pointing directly downwards. By the time the screens lowered and hummed into life, they were already high over the Irish Sea and still accelerating; the screen showed a wide expanse of grey-blue water, punctuated by the white lines of rolling waves.
Now, as they neared their destination, the screen was showing a landscape that was as alien to Matt as the surface of the moon. Desert stretched out in every direction, an impossibly wide vista of orange and red studded with the occasional oasis of washed-out green. Roads and trails tracked through the barren landscape, straight lines of grey and twisting loops and whirls of pale brown, and every now and then Matt’s eyes were drawn to tiny clusters of white and grey, desert settlements of such isolation that he could not imagine any rational human choosing to live in them.
As the Mina II began to descend, its headlong blast across the Atlantic and the majority of the North American continent almost complete, her pilot banked her south, dipping the angular port wing to almost ninety degrees. The camera swung upwards and, in the distance, for a fleeting second, Matt saw an incongruous huddle of vast, gleaming buildings surrounded by wide urban sprawl.
“Ever been to Vegas?”
Matt looked round, and found the Security Operator smiling at him.
“No,” he said. “I’d love to, though.”
“You should,” said the Operator, shutting his eyes again as he spoke. “At least once. Do it before you’re too old.”
Matt stared at the distant city. Larissa had told him and Jamie and Kate stories about Las Vegas when she got back from her time at NS9, and not just about Chloe, the vampire girl who seemed to have profoundly changed her view of the world in which Blacklight existed; she had told them about the casinos, about vast floors of green-felted tables and flashing, rattling machines, about bars and restaurants that never closed, about roads that were eight lanes wide. Now he had briefly seen it for himself, from inside a plane that the public didn’t know existed.
He smiled as the Mina II levelled out and descended rapidly towards the ground. It was rare that he found himself with time to actually think about what his life had become, to marvel at how crazy, how dangerous, how remarkably weird it really was.
The plane touched down with a squeal of tyres and a roar that shook his bones. He was pressed back in his seat as the jet screamed along the runway, until the engines slowly began to wind down, and his companions unclipped themselves from their safety harnesses and began to gather their possessions. Matt did likewise, his stomach churning with sudden excitement. He felt the plane turn left, then roll to a complete stop; a second later the wide ramp at the rear of the hold rumbled into life, dropping steadily down and out towards the ground.
Heat beyond anything Matt had felt before swirled into the enclosed space. It felt as though the air was made of burning sandpaper, and the light that blazed into the hold was so bright it hurt his eyes.
“Welcome to Nevada,” said one of the Science Division Operators, and smiled. “Try not to get melanoma.”
Matt forced a smile in return and got up from his seat. He walked down the ramp on slightly unsteady legs, shielding his eyes with his hand, and stepped on to the soil of another country for the first time in his life. Before him, blindingly white and seemingly endless, was an enormous salt flat, the remains, he knew, of the long-dry Groom Lake. The runway they had landed on sliced across it and stretched away into the shimmering distance; he followed it until it disappeared, and saw a low collection of hangars and buildings nestling between two low ranges of mountains that rose to the east and west.
Area 51, he thought. I’m standing in the middle of Area 51. My God, the things people would do to swap places with me now, even just for a minute.
A black SUV was making its way towards them, kicking up a huge cloud of dust, partially obscuring a squat truck with huge wheels that was following it. Matt waited beside the two Science Division Operators and the Mina II’s flight crew, who had shut down the engines and disembarked. The Security Operator remained inside the hold; he would stay with the plane until she took off, even though she would be parked in a hangar belonging to Blacklight’s closest ally.
“Why didn’t we land at Papoose Lake?” asked Matt, squinting against the sun.
“Nowhere to put her under the mountain,” said one of the Science Operators. “Picking up and dropping off, we go right to NS9’s front door. But if we’re staying overnight we land here.”
Matt nodded, feeling sweat beginning to form on his forehead and beneath his arms. By the time the black SUV pulled up in front of them, he was already very, very hot, despite the climate-controlling fabric of his uniform.
The woman who got out of the vehicle was tall, dressed in similar all-black, and looked somewhat severe, at least to Matt’s eyes; she was in her late thirties, her face tanned and remarkably rectangular, as though straight lines and right angles had been all that were available when it was designed. Her dark hair was tied back in a short ponytail, and the expression on her face was one of studied professionalism.
“Good morning,” she said, staring directly at Matt. “I’m Captain Lindsey Hawkins, Groom Lake Security Detachment.” She looked at the two Science Division Operators and smiled. “Lieutenant Teller, Lieutenant Greenaway. Nice to have you back with us.”
“Thank you, Captain,” said one of the men. Matt had not asked any names, so didn’t know whether it was Telle
r or Greenaway who spoke; he belatedly wondered if that had been rude of him.
Hawkins nodded, and turned her attention to the flight crew. “Major Grant, Lieutenant Phillips. The four of you are in the same accommodation block as usual.”
“The one next to the bowling alley?” asked the man who Matt assumed was Major Grant, by virtue of his more advanced years; the man standing beside him, who was presumably Lieutenant Phillips, looked barely old enough to have started shaving.
Hawkins smiled. “You got it,” she said. “I hope you brought your wallet.”
Grant smiled. “I left it at the Loop,” he said. “I thought that would be safer.”
“Now why don’t I believe that?” asked Hawkins. “A jeep’ll be out to get the four of you in about five minutes. You good here till then? I have to take our VIP straight round the mountain.”
She’s talking about me, realised Matt. VIP. I’m a VIP.
“Sure,” said either Teller or Greenaway. “We’ll just hang out here in the shade.” He looked round, at the squat truck that was preparing to tow the Mina II towards the long row of hangars by a thick cable attached to her landing gear, and widened his eyes theatrically. “Oh, hang on …”
“Don’t be a baby,” said Hawkins. “It’s not even hot yet.”
“That’s demonstrably not true,” replied the Science Operator, smiling widely. “Go on, get out of here. We’ll be fine here on the burning tarmac.”
“All right,” said Hawkins, and pulled open the rear door of the SUV. “I’ll see you all this evening. I’ll be the one rolling strikes and taking your money. Lieutenant Browning, if you’re ready?”
“Thanks,” said Matt, and climbed up into the vehicle. The air-conditioned interior was glorious, the tan leather seat soft and comfortable. As Hawkins climbed behind the wheel and pressed her foot on to the accelerator, he was already fighting the urge to close his eyes.
“So you’re Blacklight?” said Hawkins, glancing at him through the rear-view mirror as they sped across the salt flat. “You look a little young, if you don’t mind me saying?”