Department 19: The Rising (23 page)

“Excellent,” said Valentin. He jumped up from the chair and approached the barrier, until he was less than a metre away from Jamie. He tilted his head to one side, as if examining the teenager.

“You look like him, you know?” Valentin said. “Your grandfather. You look very much like him.”

“Step back from the barrier,” warned Major Turner.

“I’ve only ever seen a portrait,” said Jamie. He could feel himself sinking into Valentin’s wide grey eyes. “He died before I was born.”

“You could be his double,” said Valentin. The air between them was thick with tension, as though the UV barrier was giving off a field of static electricity.

“Mr Rusmanov, step back from the barrier,” said Turner, his voice as cold as ice. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

Valentin blinked, and then stepped back, breaking the spell.

“My apologies,” he said, smoothly. “Please, by all means, continue with your questions.”

Almost three hours later the men of the Zero Hour Task Force made their way down the corridor of the detention level.

The interrogation was progressing well; in fact, it was progressing far beyond even their most optimistic projections. So far, Valentin Rusmanov had been true to his word; he had told them everything they wanted to know. He had not restricted his disclosures to Valeri and Dracula either; he had encouraged them to enquire about all aspects of vampire life, and when a question had been posed to which he did not know the answer, he had simply given the briefest of glances to Lamberton, who had immediately supplied it.

The information was flowing at such a rate – everything from known vampire habitats and congregations, to sources of black-market blood, to how much awareness the vampire community had of the supernatural Departments and the tactics they used to evade their attention – that Seward had called the first session of the interview to an end and ordered a resumption the following morning. He intended to spend the rest of the day formulating a structured approach for extracting the enormous amount of valuable intelligence that Valentin Rusmanov was carrying in his head.

As the lift made its way up through the Loop, the Operators
filed out one by one. On Level B, Jamie made for the door; his plan was to gather his thoughts for a few minutes in his quarters, then go and find Larissa. But as he stepped forward, he felt a hand fall across his shoulder, and he turned back. Admiral Seward was looking at him with a strange expression.

“I need to see you in my quarters, Lieutenant Carpenter,” the Director said.

“Now, sir?” asked Jamie.

“Now.”

“Yes, sir,” he replied, and watched the grey metal doors of the lift slide shut.

Admiral Seward held the door to his quarters open, waited for Jamie to step through it, then followed him inside and closed the door. Jamie stood patiently as the Director removed his jacket and settled himself behind his desk.

“I got a reply from Beijing,” said Seward. “In less than forty-eight hours, remarkably. Damn nearly a record for PBS6.”

“What did they say, sir?”

“They’re investigating the circumstances of the Chinese citizens who arrived in Britain on the
Aristeia
, and they’ll keep us up to date on their findings. Standard stuff.”

“Can we offer to send a team out to help them?”

“We certainly can,” answered Seward. “And I probably will. But I can tell you now what their reply will be; they’ll thank us for our kind offer and tell us they’ll be sure to inform us if they need our assistance.”

“But they won’t.”

“No,” said Seward. “They won’t.”

There was a long moment of silence that was not entirely
comfortable; the obvious concern on the Director’s face made that impossible.

“You do realise,” said Seward, eventually, “that Valentin’s reason for being here may well be to take revenge against you, for what you did to Alexandru?”

Jamie recoiled. “I don’t understand, sir,” he replied. “If he wanted to kill me, why didn’t he do it in the Twilight Home? Why go through all this?”

“I don’t know, Jamie,” said Seward, rubbing his eyes. The Director looked old, and worn down. “It may be part of a plan that we can’t see the shape of yet; it may just be for his own amusement. I may be completely wrong, and his reasons for wanting to be alone with you might be exactly what he says they are. But you need to know the possibilities, Jamie, because I’m not going to order you to speak to him. I’m leaving that decision up to you.”

“Why, sir?”

“Because all the information in the world is not worth putting an Operator of this Department alone in a room with a Priority Level 1 vampire against their will,” replied Seward. “Much of what we do here lies within the grey areas of morality; that is our burden, one we all share, and it weighs heavier on some than on others. But we do not throw our people to the wolves, Jamie; we do not put lives at risk on the whims of monsters. And we are not about to start now, on my watch.”

“Is he going to stop answering questions if I don’t talk to him?” asked Jamie.

“He says so,” replied Seward. “He wants to talk to you tomorrow, before we continue. I say again, Jamie, I will not order you to do this. But if you think you can handle it, I won’t stop you either. It’s up to you.”

Jamie thought about the lives that Valentin Rusmanov’s information could save, remembered the feeling of standing before Alexandru, the sensation of total helplessness, and tried to imagine the power that Valentin said Dracula possessed.

“I’ll do it, sir,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, like he wants.”

“We’ll be watching you every second,” Seward replied. “But we won’t be able to have anyone in the cellblock with you; Valentin specified that it be just you and him, and he’ll detect anyone else from a mile away.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway, sir,” said Jamie, a small smile on his face.

“Why not?”

“Because if Valentin decides to kill me, we could put the entire Department in the cellblock and it wouldn’t be enough to stop him. Sir.”

The two men considered the awful truth of Jamie’s words; they were standing in the centre of the most highly classified, technologically advanced and heavily armed military facility in the country, but sitting casually in a worthless cell several hundred metres below them was a creature they were powerless to control if it decided to do harm.

It felt like standing on quicksand.

The intercom on Admiral Seward’s desk buzzed into life, startling both men. Jamie smiled, a sheepish, nervous grin that the Director returned before he pressed the button on the intercom.

Marlow’s voice appeared instantly.

“Sir, we have a situation on Level B that requires your attention.”

“What kind of situation?” asked Seward.

“A civilian boy was brought in last night, sir, after making an emergency call he admits was designed specifically to attract our attention. Squad B-9 picked him up in Derbyshire, destroying two
vamps that were about to kill him. He spent the night in the secure dorm, sir.”

“So what?” asked Seward, impatiently. “Quarantine him, explain what will happen to him and his family if he talks, give him twenty-four hours in isolation to think it over, then send him home. Why are you involving me in this?”

“Two reasons, sir,” said Marlow, his voice like that of a parent trying to explain something simple to a child. “First, how did the vamps know where he was? They can’t be monitoring the entire 999 system for anything supernatural, sir, it’s too vast; that’s why we have Echelon, to filter through it all.”

“I know exactly why we have Echelon,” snapped Seward. “Get to the point, Marlow.”

“Yes, sir. They were there before our squad was, which means they knew about the call at least as soon as we did. How did they know that?”

“My God,” said Jamie, softly. An image of Thomas Morris’s smiling face burst into his mind. “The vamps have access to Echelon.”

“How could they?” asked Seward, his voice sounding far more confident than he felt. “There are only two monitoring stations: GCHQ and…”

“Here,” said Jamie. “The leak’s here in the Loop, sir. It has to be. GCHQ doesn’t scan for the supernatural.”

“Christ,” said Seward, then addressed the intercom. “Marlow, are you still there?”

“Yes, sir,” his aide replied. “What do you want me to do, sir?”

“Kill it,” Seward said. “No mention of this goes beyond the people who already know. I have Lieutenant Carpenter with me; who is with you?”

“Major Turner, sir.”

“OK. This goes no further. Don’t touch the logs or the database; I don’t want anyone in Comms to know we’re looking into this. I want recommendations from Major Turner on how to proceed by 1900 hours, is that clear?”

“It is, sir,” said Marlow.

“Good,” replied Seward. “What was the other thing?”

“Sir?”

“You said there were two things that required my attention. What’s the second one?”

“Sorry, sir. The civilian they picked up last night is the same boy who was injured on the night Lieutenant Carpenter arrived at the Loop, sir.”

Jamie’s eyes widened. “Matt?” he asked, incredulous. “They brought Matt back in?”

“That’s right, Matt Browning,” said Marlow.

“So what?” asked Seward. “The Security Division has protocols for every possible civilian eventuality, Marlow. I really fail to see why you’re telling me this.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m telling you because when we asked him why he made the emergency call, he confessed that he was trying to engineer a way back to the Loop. It appears that the amnesia he was diagnosed with after he woke from his coma was fake, sir.”

“And?”

“We asked him why he wanted to get back here so badly, and he said that Lieutenant Carpenter told him to. Sir.”

Seward froze, then slowly craned his neck upwards.

“Stand by,” he said into the intercom, and then fixed Jamie with a look that could have been carved out of a mountainside, an expression of indescribable disappointment. “Jamie,” he continued, his voice low and full of menace. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

Jamie took a deep breath. “Sir, I don’t
want
to tell you—”

“Tell me what you did!” bellowed Seward.

The teenager swallowed hard, and began to talk.

Jamie waited in the corridor beyond the infirmary, leaning against the wall, attempting to look casual. His head was lowered, and he had an open folder in his hands that he appeared to be leafing through, but his attention was surreptitiously fixed on the double doors of the infirmary, forty metres down the corridor.

He had been denied permission to see Matt Browning ever since the boy had awoken from his coma. The operating theatre at the rear of the infirmary had been cordoned off, and the boy had been placed in complete isolation; only his doctor and the nurse who had treated him were allowed entry, and they were forbidden from discussing anything other than strictly medical matters with the teenager.

Jamie understood the protocol that had been put in place; the boy was lying in the middle of the most secret government installation in the country, and the only way it would ever be possible for him to be returned home was to prevent him from seeing or hearing anything that would make him a security risk. It was the right thing to do, but Jamie didn’t care; he felt a remarkable bond with the boy, with whom he had never spoken.

Matt’s life had changed forever on the same day as his, and in the dark nights that followed, as Jamie had fought to keep himself going as horror descended around him, he had sought solace in the unconscious teenager, making regular visits to his bedside. He had told Matt what he was going through, grateful to have the ear of someone who was incapable of lying to him, or trying to manipulate him.

It was more than that, though; Jamie had been at the Loop for less than an hour when Matt had arrived, barely breathing, after Larissa had torn his throat out in his small suburban garden. Larissa hadn’t meant to
do it, claimed to not even remember having done it, and Jamie believed her; it was merely one of the long list of things that filled the vampire girl with guilt, and was why she had refused to help him when he explained his plan to her.

But whether she had intended to or not, she had almost killed Matt, and the sight of the pale, critically injured boy in the hangar on the night that Jamie had arrived had served as a warning more real than any of the hundreds he had received during his training. Matt had been the barely-living proof that what Jamie had found himself a part of wasn’t a game, or an adventure; it was life and death.

Since Matt had woken up, Jamie had repeatedly petitioned Admiral Seward for permission to visit him, until the Director had threatened to place him on the inactive list. Jamie hadn’t asked again, but nor had he given up; he had begun to observe the patterns of the security that had been placed around Matt, and after a week or two, had identified a window of opportunity.

Every evening, there was a hole, sometimes as long as six minutes, often no longer than three, where Matt was unattended; it happened during the shift changeover at 8pm, when the doctor in charge of the infirmary went to his office to send his update report to Admiral Seward. His office was at the far end of the corridor, near the lift, and he was always gone for at least ten minutes.

The problem was the Operator who was on guard outside the door; only once in the time that Jamie had been watching had the sitting officer been physically relieved; the vast majority of the time he left with the doctor on the stroke of eight, before his replacement had arrived. This was by any measure unacceptable, and Jamie’s response to the discovery should have been to alert Major Turner, the Department’s Security Officer. Instead, he kept it to himself, and waited to put his plan into action.

Now that moment had arrived.

Jamie checked his watch, and saw that it was thirty seconds until 8pm. He lowered the visor on his helmet, not far enough to look suspicious, but enough to obscure his features to anyone who took more than a passing look at him, and waited. Then he heard the rush of air as the infirmary doors opened, and two voices echoed along the corridor, decreasing in volume as they walked briskly away from where Jamie was standing.

Regular as clockwork,
he thought to himself, and grinned.

He raised his head a fraction, and saw the doctor disappear into his office. The Operator was standing with his back to Jamie, waiting for the lift. This was the crucial moment; if the lift opened and the relieving Operator stepped out of it, then he was screwed. He felt his heart begin to beat a little bit faster as he heard the lift slow to a halt.

The doors slid open to reveal an empty metal box. The Operator stepped inside, then turned to face down the corridor; Jamie felt a sudden burst of panic as the man’s eyes seemed to momentarily meet his own. But the expression on the Operator’s face didn’t change; the lift doors closed, leaving Jamie alone in the corridor.