by Will Hill
“I need you to do me one favour, Bob,” said Julian. “You can lock me up, I’ll go quietly, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know. But I need one favour.”
“Name it.”
“I need you to speak to Henry and ask him to let me see my son. I think he’s in danger.”
“Jamie?” asked Allen. “Christ, I saw the report on the termination of Alexandru Rusmanov. Absolutely incredible, a kid his age. You must be proud.”
A fierce look of love crossed Julian’s face. “I am.”
General Allen looked at the expression on Julian’s face, and his own crumpled with concern. “Oh God,” he said. “Julian – do you know—”
“I know what happened to my wife, Bob. She’s safe, for now. Jamie might not be.”
They reached the end of the corridor, past the long lines of empty-fronted cells with their shimmering UV walls. Allen keyed a code into a door as nondescript as all the others, and pushed it open. Julian stepped through it, and into the cellblock reserved for those prisoners who did not qualify as supernatural. There were no UV barriers here, just thick, sturdy-looking green metal doors set into concrete walls. Allen keyed his code in again, this time on to a pad beside the first of the cells. Its lock disengaged with a series of rumbling clunks and thuds, and it swung open.
“Where the hell have you been, Julian?” Allen asked, staring closely at his old friend. “Why didn’t you come in, after Lindisfarne? They cleared you of all charges.”
“I wasn’t ready to be an Operator again,” replied Julian. “And I had something I needed to do.”
“What was that?”
Julian took a deep breath. “Find a cure. For Marie, and for everyone else. I’ve been all over the country, tracking down Adam. You know the legend, right?”
“Sure. The one vampire who was cured.”
“That’s the one,” replied Julian. He paused, for a long moment. “I found him, Bob.”
Allen recoiled. “You found him?” he asked, incredulous. “What do you mean you found him? You mean he’s real?”
“As real as you and me,” replied Julian. “He lives out in the desert in California, miles from anywhere. He doesn’t know how he was cured, but he was. And I think I know where, if not how.”
“Where?”
“Here,” said Julian. “Right here, Bob.”
General Allen started, the look on his face one of confusion. “What do you mean here? We’ve never—”
“This was before you were Director,” interrupted Julian. “Probably fifteen years ago. He was taken in San Francisco, and woke up in a high-security lab, somewhere in the desert. Sound familiar?”
General Allen said nothing, so Julian continued. “He remembers a doctor, a scientist, who was running the show. He was youngish, but he had grey hair. Adam never knew his name.”
Allen flinched.
“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” asked Julian, and the General nodded. “Who was he, Bob? And what the hell were you letting him do?”
After a long pause, General Allen looked directly at Julian, and began to talk.
“It was the nineties. The Cold War was over, and the USSR had dissolved. All our missiles, our orbital defence platforms, they all became obsolete overnight. There were a hundred former Soviet factions that sprang up, all over the Caucasus. We were drowning in new intelligence, trying to formulate new strategies and tactics. The world had changed completely; our enemy was gone, and had been replaced by chaos. Then a rumour came out of Polyarny, from an informant in the SPC; a rumour that they were experimenting on vampires, trying to isolate the genetic strand that caused the condition.”
“So?” said Julian. “Abraham Van Helsing was working on that over a century ago, trying to find a cure.”
“You don’t understand,” said Allen. “They weren’t trying to cure vampirism; they were trying to weaponise it. Preserve the strengths, remove the weaknesses. Create a class of supersoldiers that were invulnerable, immortal.”
“So you did the same thing,” said Julian. It wasn’t a question.
General Allen nodded.
“Did you ever actually ask the SPC what they were doing?” asked Julian.
“No. The Joint Chiefs didn’t think we should show our hand.”
“That’s what happens when you have Joint Chiefs. There have always been too many people you have to answer to, Bob.”
“Two of the world’s largest continents are under our jurisdiction, Julian. You can afford to only have two or three people know about Department 19 because you only cover a little corner of Europe, and let the Germans and the Russians do all the heavy lifting.”
Allen smiled at Julian, who broke into a grin. This was an old conversation, so old that it was almost rehearsed by now.
“So this doctor,” said Julian. ‘Where did he come from?”
“His name was Reynolds,” replied Allen. “And I don’t know where he came from, I really don’t. He arrived from the Pentagon, security-cleared, background-checked, ready to work. The name was an alias of course. One of my staff thought he might have been a genetics professor from Harvard who was supposed to have died a few years earlier, but we didn’t know for sure. Orders came down for me to leave him alone, so I did. Was happy to do so, to be honest with you. His lab was… well. You and I have seen things we wish we could forget, right?”
Julian nodded.
“That lab was as bad as anything I’ve ever seen. It was a hi-tech torture chamber, nothing more. There were gene sequencers, and supercomputers, and teams of biologists and geneticists and doctors and surgeons, but there was no hiding what was going on down there; he was spending a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to cut vampires open and see how they worked.”
“Jesus,” said Julian, in a low voice.
“Six months in I got a call from Yuri Petrov, highest encryption, asking me why we were trying to make tame vampires. I told him, off the record, that we were responding to what we had been told they were doing. He flatly denied it, and I believed him. So I went to Washington and told the Joint Chiefs and the President that we were acting on false intelligence, that the SPC threat wasn’t real. The President, to his credit, ordered me to suspend Reynolds’ work, pending an intelligence review. But by the time I got back here, he was gone.”
“What do you mean he was gone?”
“I mean he was gone. We chipped him when he arrived, but it had stopped transmitting. His lab was stripped clean – he had run electromagnets over the hard drives – and no one in the whole facility had seen him leave. His staff were all dead from exposure to nerve gas, and all the vampire subjects had been destroyed.”
“Didn’t you look for him, Bob? Jesus, he could still be out there somewhere.”
“I know; he probably is. I ordered his Pentagon records declassified, but they were gone, stripped out by a remotely activated virus. No one knew anything about him, and there was no way to find him.”
Julian looked at Allen, a sudden realisation darkening his face. “He faked the intelligence from the SPC, didn’t he? So he could get government funding for his work.”
“I don’t have any proof of that,” replied Allen. “But I’m sure he did, yes.”
“It worked, though, Bob,” said Julian, urgency rising in his voice. “Whatever he was doing down there, it worked. Adam was cured. I saw it for myself with my own eyes. And now you’re telling me that the data that led to the most important scientific discovery of all time is gone, taken by some lunatic?”
Allen nodded, slowly. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
There was silence in the cellblock for a long moment, then General Allen nodded at the open door beside them.
“I’m going to need you to step into the cell, Julian,” he said, softly.
Julian nodded. “That’s all right, Bob,” he said. “I know the position I’m putting you in. Just do me that one favour, OK. Please?”
“I’m going to call Henry right
now,” said Allen. “I’ll send for you as soon as I have an answer.”
Julian nodded, and walked slowly into the cell. It was little more than a concrete box, with a narrow bed and a metal sink and toilet. He stood in the middle of the cell and watched General Allen swing the heavy door shut, sealing him in.
The Director of Department 19 was on his way to the Ops Room when his radio buzzed into life, and the Comms Officer told him he had an encrypted personal link from NS9 waiting for him. He thanked the Operator, swore heavily and reversed his direction, heading for his quarters on Level A, anger flooding through him at a distraction he could have done without.
Bloody Americans. Their timing couldn’t be worse, as usual.
The mission to rescue Colonel Frankenstein was minutes away from despatch, and the interrogation of Valentin Rusmanov was continuing on the detention level.
This better be important, Bob. It better be bloody vital.
Seward entered the code beside the door to his quarters, pushed it open and strode inside. He stepped round his desk, opened his terminal and hit the button that illuminated the wall screen opposite him. He entered his personal authorisation code, and hit ACCEPT on the MESSAGE WAITING box.
“What is it, Bob?” he asked, before the image had even fully loaded. “It’s really not a great time.”
The tanned, weathered face of General Allen appeared on the screen. The NS9 Director was sitting behind his own desk, five thousand miles away, with an expression on his face that Seward instantly didn’t like.
This isn’t a routine call, he thought, his heart sinking. Something’s wrong.
“I’m sorry, Henry,” Allen replied. “But you’re going to want to hear this. You’re not going to believe it, but you’re going to want to hear.”
“What’s going on?”
General Allen looked away from the camera for a second, as though he could not believe what he was about to say, then returned his attention to Henry Seward.
“I’ve just locked Julian Carpenter in one of my cells,” he said. “He’s alive, Henry. Julian’s alive.”
Seward’s breath froze in his lungs, and he felt a numbing cold spread through his body as he stared at his American counterpart.
Is this a joke? Some kind of stupid, awful joke?
“Say again, Bob?” he managed.
“I got a call from our gatehouse about fifteen minutes ago,” said Allen. “They stopped an intruder who made it past the guards and got to the gate. He jumped out of his car, shouting an old clearance code, asking for me. Asking for me by name, Henry.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Seward, softly. “You’re serious, aren’t you? This isn’t some kind of joke?”
Allen shook his head. “I’m serious. I had him brought in, and went up to see what the hell was happening. And out of the jeep, as casual as you like, steps Julian. He walks over to me, puts out his hand and says hello. It’s him, Henry. It really is.”
A terrible thought entered Seward’s scrambling brain.
“Is he human, Bob?” he asked, urgently. “Have you checked him?”
“He’s human,” replied Allen. “I took him through two UV grids without him knowing. He’s not turned, and he doesn’t seem to be anything else. He’s just Julian, alive and locked up downstairs.”
“How is this possible?” asked Seward, fighting hard to hold on to any sort of equilibrium. “If it’s him, where the hell has he been for the last three years?”
“He told me he didn’t feel safe to come in,” replied Allen. “He’s been here in the US, I think. He said he’s been looking for a cure.”
“A cure for what?”
“For vampirism,” said Allen. “I guess it’s pretty important to him, what with what happened to Marie.”
Seward froze. “He knows about that?” he asked, slowly. “He knows what happened to his wife? How the hell would he know that?”
“I don’t know,” replied General Allen, shaking his head. “But he does. Knows about Jamie too, about what he did on Lindisfarne. That’s partly why I’m calling you, Henry. Julian’s worried about Jamie.”
“Hold on,” barked Seward. “Just hold on a minute. Julian Carpenter is sitting alive and well in one of your cells at Dreamland, we’ve no idea where he’s been for the last three years, but somehow he knows about classified Blacklight Operations, and now he wants information about Jamie? What the hell am I supposed to make of all this?”
“I don’t know,” said General Allen. “I’ll hold him here until you can send a team to debrief him, and I’ll make sure no one else but me knows who he is. But he was insistent about being allowed to see Jamie. He says he thinks the boy is in danger.”
“Of course he’s in danger,” snapped Seward. “He’s an Operator. He’s in danger every day. Now just let me think for a moment.”
The Department 19 Director tried to calm his racing mind, and focus on the immediate problem in hand. Julian, if it was indeed him, was secure, which was the first thing. General Allen was right; he would need to send a team to Nevada to find out where Julian had been, and why he had resurfaced, but that would have to wait; there were simply too many demands on the Admiral’s attention at the moment for him to begin to address the potential ramifications of what General Allen was telling him.
Who the hell had known Julian was alive, and had been feeding him classified information? How had he faked his death, as surely he must have done? Seward groaned, as the scale of this new revelation began to suggest itself, and turned his attention back to the video screen.
“What did he ask about Jamie, Bob? Precisely.”
“He asked me to ask you to let him see his son,” replied General Allen. “In those words. I told him I would, and now I have. What do you want to do?”
“I can’t allow it,” said Seward. “Who knows what Julian’s agenda is? He can’t just walk in off the street and start acting like an Operator again. Jamie is about to embark on a Priority 1 mission to Paris, and I’m not going to distract him with this, certainly not until Julian has been debriefed and we are in the full possession of the facts. You can tell him that his son is fine, and that’s more than I ought to be letting him know. But I’m not going to let him see him, Bob. Not right now. You understand, right?”
“I understand,” replied Allen, and gave his old friend a warm smile. “But I’m pretty sure Julian isn’t going to.”
“Well, he’s going to have to,” said Seward. “I’ll send a team as soon as I can, Bob. In the meantime, if you could please do like you said. Keep him isolated, and keep access to him to zero.”
“Done,” replied Allen. “Let me know when you’re coming to get him. I’m going to be pretty interested to hear what he says to your team.”
“Me too, Bob,” said Seward, a grim smile on his face. “Me too. Out.”
The Department 19 Director cut the connection, and flopped into his chair. A hundred emotions were jostling for space inside his head; largest and most potent was an overwhelming, almost painful hope at the thought that one of his closest friends, a man he had never believed he would see again, and, more importantly, never get the chance to apologise to, could somehow still be alive. But there was confusion as well, over what this would mean for Jamie, and for himself.
And beyond that, a deep sense of being overwhelmed, of one more thing to carry around on his back, of this being almost the final straw, the point where he reached the limit of his ability to cope.
How can he be alive? It makes no sense. I saw his body before they cremated it.
“Admiral?”
The voice came from the door to the Director’s quarters, and Seward jumped. He whirled round in his seat, to see Jamie Carpenter standing in the open doorway. He realised he must have forgotten to close it behind him, such was the rush he had been in when the call came through. A flicker of guilt passed momentarily across Seward’s face when he saw Julian’s son, but if Jamie saw it, he gave no indication.
“What is it, Lieutenant
Carpenter?” asked Seward, his equilibrium returning.
“What did the Yanks want, sir?” Jamie asked, his face open and honest.
“Routine update. Typically bad timing. Nothing for you to worry about.”
Jamie nodded. “We’re ready, sir. We’re leaving for Paris.”
“Understood,” said Seward. “Bring him home, son. If he’s alive, bring him home.”
“I will, sir,” replied Jamie, forcefully. “You can count on it.”
43
THE TIES THAT BIND
ORLY AIRPORT NINE MILES SOUTH OF PARIS, FRANCE
At the western edge of Orly, the second busiest airport in France, lies a sprawl of low metal cabins and a series of wide hangars, the paint flaking from their sides. Away from the terminals where families depart for holidays in the Alps and the Riviera, where couples are reunited under the unforgiving glow of fluorescent lights, where businessmen wait for connections that will take them on to another airport almost identical to the one they are sitting in, the buildings represent the true beating heart of any airport.
Through these offices and the hangars that stand behind them, a timetable of cargo freight every bit as complicated as that maintained by any of the passenger airlines is organised and set in motion; forklift trucks whir incessantly, carrying cases of wine from Bordeaux, of cheese from Rouen and Reims, of machine parts, of cruise missile timing triggers and glow-in-the-dark stuffed animals, all bound for the four corners of the world. Beside the freight offices stand the maintenance hangars, where planes trundle in and out every day of the week, needing new tyres, their carpets steam-cleaning, or their worn, creaking joints oiled.
At Orly, the buildings are older than most, for a very good reason. Until 1967, when the French government withdrew from NATO central command and ordered all non-French forces to leave the country, the sprawling site was a United States Air Force base. The soldiers are long gone, as are the military aircraft, but many of the buildings remain, a crumbling legacy of the airport’s former life, of a time when fast jets screamed overhead, and the heavy thump-thump-thump of helicopter rotors filled the air. Now all that remains is nondescript industrial sprawl, where nothing much of note ever happens.