by Will Hill
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 h
ad 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
CHTEAU 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.