Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  “Three doors. Looks like offices. Nothing hot in the corridor.”

  “Understood,” said Jamie. The smell came again, sharp and bitter, and he frowned behind his visor. “Can you smell something?”

  “No,” said Ellison. “Can you?”

  “I thought I could,” said Jamie, slowly. “It’s gone now.”

  He stepped out into the empty corridor and felt his heart sink.

  They’re gone, he thought. Dempsey ran, and Morton chased him, and now they could be anywhere.

  He twisted the dial on his belt that controlled the radio in his helmet and pressed the button that triggered a connection to the Loop. “NS303, 67-J, signing in,” he said. “Requesting a surveillance update on the locations of Morton, John, NS304, 07-B, and priority level target Dempsey, Alastair.”

  “Processing,” said the voice on the other end. “No update to report.”

  “Understood,” Jamie replied, and cut the connection.

  “He’s here?” asked Ellison. “They both are?”

  “I don’t think so,” replied Jamie. “Something’s gone wrong at Surveillance.” He walked forward and pushed open the first door, revealing an empty office. “I don’t think they have any idea where he is,” he continued. “Maybe he’s lost it completely and cut his chip out. I don’t know.”

  He opened the second door, revealing another empty room. The smell came again, floating on the air, but he ignored it. Anger was bubbling through him, alongside something else: a deep sense of helplessness. He had no idea where John Morton was and no way to help him.

  He’s gone, he thought. They’re gone. They could be anywhere.

  He reached the final door and kicked it angrily open. Then the world turned gray, and ceased to turn.

  The breath froze in his chest as his eyes widened behind the purple plastic of his visor. He opened his mouth to scream, but all that emerged from his mouth was a thin rush of air.

  “Jamie?” asked Ellison. Her voice was full of sudden concern, and she ran across the corridor toward him. “What’s the . . .”

  She trailed off as she looked into the office. Then she did scream, a deafening, head-splitting howl that pounded directly into Jamie’s ears and shook him from his paralysis. He looked into the office again and tried to process what he was seeing.

  Hanging in the center of the room, suspended from a web of thin white ropes, was John Morton. The ropes were looped around his arms and legs and had been tied to the metal beams that filled the triangular ceiling space, hauling him into the air.

  There was a single rope around his neck, pulling his head up and back so he was staring at the door. His face was pale and lifeless, his eyes wide and bulging, his mouth contorted in a gaping scream of eternal pain and terror. He had been sliced open from neck to groin, a wide, jagged incision that Jamie could not bear to look at.

  The knife that had been used was still lodged in the bone at the base of his throat. It reflected the awful white sheen cast by his flashlight. The acidic smell bloomed out of the last office, filling Jamie’s nostrils again, stronger than ever, but he didn’t even notice; he could not take his eyes away from the stricken, mutilated corpse that had been his squad mate.

  Jamie stepped slowly into the room. Behind him, Ellison stood in the doorway, seemingly paralyzed—she appeared unable to follow him inside. He circled around the hanging body, his heart racing in his chest, the contents of his stomach threatening to rise up and explode from his mouth.

  Too much, he thought. This is too much. Oh God, nobody deserves this.

  The smell intensified as he made his way slowly around the body, and his eyes began to water. Still he ignored it; it was probably some gas that Morton’s body had released. He was almost back at the doorway when movement caught his eye. He looked around, saw a dark shape looming behind Ellison, and opened his mouth to scream her name.

  Before the word left his lips, she shot forward as though she had been fired out of a cannon. Ellison lost her footing and crashed heavily into Morton’s corpse, sending it rocking backward. Somehow, Jamie didn’t know how, she managed to pivot in midair and throw her weight toward him, crashing to the ground at his feet. Her grunt of pain echoed in his ear.

  Jamie turned back to the door, raising his T-Bone. A white-hot fury was exploding through his body, a vengeful anger that buzzed and screamed and danced. There had been many occasions since he had joined Blacklight, and he had no doubt there would be many more to come, when the things that he and his colleagues did under cover of darkness had given him cause to wonder who really were the good guys, and whether terrible things done in the supposed service of good were still just terrible things.

  But this was not one of them. He had never felt more certain about what was expected of him. He would kill Alastair Dempsey, and he would do it with a smile on his face—the smile of the righteous, of the just.

  The dark shape was barely visible in the darkness of the corridor, but Jamie could see just enough of it to aim at. His finger was tightening on the trigger when the shape moved, like a shadow dissolving at dusk. A second later Alastair Dempsey’s voice echoed through the empty building, seeming to come from everywhere at once.

  “Stop following me,” he shouted. “This is the last time I’m going to tell you.”

  Ellison leaped to her feet beside him, pushing her visor back to reveal a face twisted with hatred. “Never!” she screamed. “You monster! You coward! Never!”

  “That’s a shame,” said Dempsey. There was a click in the corridor outside the office and a small yellow light flared in the darkness.

  Jamie was suddenly filled with terrible clarity. All at once, he knew what the smell was, and what it meant.

  “Out!” he bellowed. “Get out of—”

  The rest of his sentence was lost as a cigarette lighter flew through the open doorway, its flame flickering, and the gasoline that Alastair Dempsey had splashed across the walls and floor of the office caught fire in a roaring explosion of burning heat and blinding light.

  53

  LEAVING ON A JET PLANE

  Lincoln County, Nevada, USA

  Larissa had been about to head for the shower when someone knocked on her door.

  She swore under her breath; the dust seemed worse on the other side of the mountain, and she had been looking forward to thinking through what Lee Ashworth had told her as she washed it from her skin. She threw her towel down on her bed, crossed the small room, and opened the door. An operator she didn’t know nodded politely at her.

  “Lieutenant Kinley,” he said. “Director Allen wants to see you.”

  “Now?” she groaned. “Right now?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said the operator. “He’s waiting for you in his quarters.”

  “Do you know what he wants?” asked Larissa, stepping out into the corridor and pulling the door shut behind her. “Is there something wrong?”

  “I don’t have any further information,” said the operator. “I’m sorry.”

  Don’t shoot the messenger. Don’t shoot the messenger.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  She stepped around him, lifted herself effortlessly into the air, and flew toward the elevator at the end of the corridor.

  * * *

  The NS9 director’s quarters lay in the middle of Level 0. Larissa was floating outside the door in less than a minute, and she rapped on it hard with her knuckles.

  “Come in, Larissa,” called General Allen.

  She dropped back to the floor and did as she was told. General Allen was sitting on one of the two sofas. He nodded at her as she entered, and gestured toward the other one.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “Drink?”

  “Water, please,” she said, settling onto the sofa.

  Allen pulled a plastic bottle out of his
fridge and tossed it to her. She caught it out of the air, twisted off the cap, and drank half the contents.

  “How was Vegas?” asked Allen.

  “It was crazy,” she replied. “There’s nothing like it in England.”

  “Good place to be a vampire, I would think?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Larissa. “Not bad at all.”

  “That’s good,” said Allen. “Really good.”

  Larissa looked closely at the general. His face seemed slightly paler than usual, and he appeared somewhat preoccupied.

  “Did something happen while we were away?” she asked, setting the water bottle down on the coffee table. “Is everything all right?”

  General Allen shook his head. “Nothing happened while you were away,” he said. “But there is something I need to tell you.”

  “Okay,” said Larissa. “Am I in trouble, sir?”

  “Not at all,” Allen said, and sighed. “Larissa, I brought you here because I had a video call with Cal Holmwood about an hour ago. He’s sending the Mina II here tonight. It returns to the UK tomorrow morning, and he wants you to be on it.”

  For a long moment, she just stared. General Allen’s words seemed like nonsense, like they had been spoken in a foreign language.

  “I’m going home?” she said, eventually.

  “You’re going home,” said General Allen. There was a look of genuine disappointment on his face.

  “I’m supposed to have four more weeks,” she said, slowly. “What changed?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” said Allen. “Your friend Matt Browning has come up with a theory about the escapee vampires. Cal wouldn’t tell me exactly what, but apparently he needs your help to confirm it, and he wants you back at the Loop tomorrow.”

  “But . . . four more weeks,” said Larissa. She felt as though she was on the verge of tears.

  “I know,” said Allen. “I made that point to Cal, made it very strongly. I’m sorry, Larissa, I really am. If it’s any consolation at all, I’m incredibly sad to be losing you. But there’s nothing I can do.”

  A number of emotions jostled for position inside her chest. There was relief at the realization that resolving the Tim Albertsson problem had been taken out of her hands. But there was pain, sharp and bitter, at the thought of leaving her new friends and the place she had already come to love, and something that was close to panic at the thought of confining herself again to the gray corridors and suspicious, distrustful eyes of the Loop. Finally, a bright plume of excitement burned in the middle of her chest as she realized that it would be less than twenty-four hours until she would see Kate and Matt again.

  And Jamie.

  “Why didn’t he just ask me to fly home?” she asked. “If there’s such a hurry?”

  Allen tilted his head slightly to the right. “Could you do that?” he asked.

  “Do what, sir?”

  “Fly home,” said General Allen. “All the way across the country and the Atlantic.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “No problem.”

  “Remarkable,” said Allen, softly. “I assume he’s sending the Mina because he wants whoever you’re taking with you there as quickly as possible.”

  “That’s still happening, sir?” she asked. “I assumed this meant my mission was cancelled.”

  Allen shook his head. “Nothing’s been cancelled,” he said. “Cal told me he’s still expecting six of my operators. I know you thought you had more time, but you’re going to need to give me some names. Do you have anyone in mind yet?”

  That’s a good question. I thought I did. But do I?

  “Do you need them now?” she asked.

  “No,” said General Allen. “By 0700 tomorrow. Is that enough time?”

  Larissa nodded.

  “Good,” said Allen. He pulled a beer out of the fridge, flipped the cap off of it, and took a drink. “It’s going to be weird with you gone,” he said, smiling at her. “I’ve gotten used to you being here.”

  “Me, too, sir,” she said, feeling a lump rise in her throat.

  “A lot of people are going to miss you. I can tell you that much.”

  “That’s nice to know, sir.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  They sat in silence for a long while. General Allen sipped his beer, and Larissa wondered what Matt could have come up with that meant Cal Holmwood needed to call her home early.

  Then an idea struck her like a bolt from the blue.

  Could it be? Could that be what’s going on here?

  She looked at General Allen as he sipped his beer.

  Can I ask him? I’m going home tomorrow anyway. How angry could he be?

  Larissa sat forward and looked at the director. “Can I ask you something, sir?” she said. “Even if I’m not supposed to?”

  Allen frowned. “What is it?”

  “Me going home,” she said, carefully. “Matt coming up with some new theory, Cal sending the Mina. Is this really about the prisoner you’re keeping downstairs?”

  General Allen froze, his beer halfway to his mouth, his eyes widening. Then, ever so slowly, he lowered his beer to the coffee table and sat forward in his seat.

  “What do you know about that?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

  “I don’t know who he is,” said Larissa. “But I do know some things.”

  “What things?”

  “I know that’s he’s English,” she said, watching Allen’s face drain of color as she spoke. “I know he drove in out of the desert, used an old access code, and asked for you by name. I know that no one except you is allowed to see him.”

  “How?” asked Allen, his voice low. “How do you know all that?”

  “I asked questions,” she said. “I found the right people to answer them.”

  “Have you told anyone else what you’ve just told me?” he asked. “Tell the truth. It’s incredibly important.”

  “No, sir,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to cause trouble. I was just curious.”

  “Curious?”

  “Everyone knows there’s someone down there, sir. They all talk about it, but no one knows anything. I wanted to know, sir.”

  “Why? What does it matter to you who we keep in the cells?”

  Larissa shrugged. “Like I said, sir, I was curious.”

  General Allen appeared to have regained his composure. The color was returning to his face, and he lifted his beer back to his lips and drained the bottle.

  “I can’t tell you anything about the prisoner,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but it’s classified at director level only. So don’t ask me. You already know far more than you should.”

  “Do you think that’s it, though?” pressed Larissa. “Do you think that me being called home has something to do with him?”

  “I don’t think so,” said General Allen. “Cal was pretty clear that something new had come up. But the prisoner in question will also be leaving tomorrow, on the same plane as you, so you can draw your own conclusions. And that’s the end of our discussion of the matter. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Larissa, her head spinning with possibilities. “Absolutely clear.”

  54

  GUILTY PARTIES

  Paul Turner took a deep breath and knocked on the entrance to the interim director’s quarters.

  “Come in,” called Cal Holmwood.

  The locks disengaged, and Turner pushed the door. It swung open silently on its counterweight, revealing the interim director where he almost always was: behind the long wooden desk that groaned under the mountains of paper that were added to it each day. A glass of dark liquid sat on its surface.

  “Paul,” said Holmwood. “If you’ve got good news, get in here quickly. If you haven’t, I’m afraid you enter at your own risk. I c
an’t take much more today.”

  “I’m sorry, Cal,” said Turner. He pushed the door shut and walked into the room. “There’s something you need to see. Zero Hour level.”

  Holmwood’s face sagged. “Dracula?”

  Turner shook his head. “It’s Albert Harker,” he said, and held the Surveillance report out across the desk. Holmwood took it, then picked up a folder and handed it to the security officer. “In which case,” he said, “you need to read that.”

  Turner frowned and opened the folder. He read the summary of Andrew Jarvis’s report, feeling a chill rise up his spine as he did so.

  “Why didn’t I know about this?” he asked.

  “Excuse me, Major?”

  “I’m the security officer, Cal. I should have seen this as soon as it was written.”

  “This may be hard for you to hear, Paul,” said Holmwood, “but you are not actually in charge of this Department. I am. And when it comes to sensitive information, I decide who sees what. Is that clear?”

  “Of course, sir,” said Turner, his voice low and tight. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Paul,” said Cal. “I only got in a couple of hours ago. You haven’t seen it because until Surveillance finds them, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Read what I gave you, Cal. The situation has changed.”

  Holmwood opened the folder and scanned it quickly. When he looked back up at Turner, his face was pale.

  “What’s Intelligence’s take on this?” he asked. “Is it genuine?”

  “They’re still assessing credibility,” replied Turner. “I suggest we operate under the assumption that it is.”