Department 19: Zero Hour (29 page)

“All right,” said Jamie, as the helicopter throttled down. “Let’s go and say hello.”

Larissa unclipped her safety harness, slung her bag over her shoulder, and floated across to the wide door that filled one side of the helicopter’s hold. She twisted its handle and slid it open, breathing in the cool evening air that swirled into her nostrils as Jamie leapt down on to the tarmac. She floated down beside him and took her first look at the
Schwartzhaus
.

Her first thought was how different it looked to both the Loop and Dreamland, which were largely identical in design, despite the NS9 facility having been built beneath a mountain.

The
Schwartzhaus
was something else.

Instead of a central structure with a hangar built into one side of it, the FTB base was a ring of eight single-storey buildings with wide, empty spaces between them. In the distance, on the other side of the buildings where she could also make out the long lights of a runway, stood a row of large rectangular shapes, which Larissa assumed were the hangars and vehicle maintenance depots. A road led from where the helicopter had landed towards the nearest building of the ring, which had a large number five printed on its side. A door stood open in the centre of the wall, from which a dark figure was emerging.

“Different,” said Jamie, pointing away from the buildings.

Larissa followed his gesture and saw what he was referring to. Where the Loop was surrounded by forest and Dreamland by empty desert, beyond the distant security towers of the
Schwartzhaus
she could see the rising silhouettes of industrial buildings and hear the steady hum of traffic.

Hidden in plain sight,
she thought.
Not like us.

Behind her, the helicopter’s engines built back up to a crescendo of noise. She flew forward, Jamie crouching and running beside her as the rotors began to scream, churning the air and pushing it against their backs. The helicopter lumbered into the air and thudded away to the south-west as Larissa stopped halfway along the road that led to Building Five. The FTB Operator, a small, neat woman with her hair tied back in a ponytail, stepped forward with her hand extended.

“
Guten Abend
,” said the woman, as Larissa took her hand and shook it. “I am Krista Gottlieb, the Security Supervisor for Complex 17. You are most welcome.”

“Thank you,” said Larissa. “It’s good to be here.”

Gottlieb smiled, then shook Jamie’s hand. “Please follow me,” she said. “The others are waiting.”

“We’re the last ones here?” asked Jamie.

“That is correct,” said Gottlieb. “Please, follow me.”

The Security Supervisor turned and strode towards the square building. Larissa glanced over at Jamie as they followed; her boyfriend’s face was creased with a deep frown.

Stay calm,
she silently told him.
Being last doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t make us look bad.

Larissa knew that Jamie was still preoccupied with the mistake he had made in the graveyard, and terrified of going back to Blacklight without his reputation fully rehabilitated; she just hoped his obvious tension didn’t create the very situation he was trying to avoid.

The two Operators followed Gottlieb into Building Five, and found themselves standing in a square room containing nothing apart from a pair of metal lift doors and a small button set into the wall. The Security Supervisor pressed it, and the three of them waited in a silence that was not entirely comfortable; tension was radiating out of Jamie in waves that were almost visible.

“Are these buildings all the same?” asked Larissa, trying to break the silence.

“Yes,” said Gottlieb. “They are all controlled from below, and access from more than one cannot be granted at the same time. If the base is attacked, they can work as bottlenecks.”

“Makes sense,” said Larissa. She glanced at Jamie, who didn’t appear to be listening. “Makes it harder for an attacking force to get inside in large numbers.”

“Exactly,” said Gottlieb. “It has never happened here, thankfully. But we must always be ready, especially now.”

Larissa nodded.

Lucky,
she thought.
I’ve seen what can happen. Seen it all too clearly.

The attack on the Loop was seared into the memory of everyone who had been involved, and she was no exception; gunfire and screams had filled the air, blood had sprayed and run across the tarmac, and she had felt the flesh burned away from her own bones by an explosion of ultraviolet light that had been visible from space.

The lift doors slid open and they stepped inside. Gottlieb pressed a button marked B and, when the doors opened again, they revealed a long corridor painted a pale blue that seemed far less oppressive than the grey that covered every surface inside the Loop. The Security Supervisor led them along it and stopped outside a pair of frosted glass doors.

“In here,” she said. “The best of luck to you all.”

“Thank you,” said Larissa, and looked pointedly at Jamie.

“Cheers,” he managed, then lowered his eyes back to the floor.

Gottlieb nodded, then walked away down the corridor. Larissa waited until she disappeared round a distant corner, then turned on her boyfriend.

“Snap out of this shit,” she said, feeling heat behind her eyes. “Do you hear me, Jamie? Right now.”

He recoiled. “What are you talking about?”

“If you go looking for the second most powerful vampire that’s ever lived wound up this tight, you’re going to get yourself or somebody else killed,” said Larissa. “Holmwood and Turner aren’t here, and we are. So you need to let go of all the shit that’s happened over the last couple of days, get your head clear, and focus on what we’re here to do. Everything else can wait.”

Jamie’s eyes narrowed, then widened to their usual dimensions.

“You’re right,” he said, his voice low. “I’m sorry. I’ve got this, I promise.”

“All right,” said Larissa, and smiled as relief flooded through her. “I believe you.”

She turned back to the frosted doors. Stencilled on the glass was the word
Geschäftstätigkeit
. She cast a final, reassuring glance in Jamie’s direction, then turned the handle and pushed the door open.

The room fell silent as Larissa and Jamie entered it; the three Operators gathered at a round table in the middle of the room looked up and took stock of the new arrivals. They were two men and a woman, their expressions somewhere between friendly and cautious, their eyes clear and focused.

“Hey,” said Larissa, forcing a smile. “I’m Larissa Kinley. Good to meet you all.”

“Jamie Carpenter,” said Jamie, from beside her.

The silence was broken by a chorus of greetings and the scraping of chair legs on linoleum as the Operators got to their feet and made their way towards Larissa and Jamie, smiles on their faces, hands outstretched.

“Good to meet you both,” said a tall, blond-haired man with a deep tan and wide shoulders. “Kristian Van Orel. Military Detachment Alpha, South Africa. I heard we had a vampire and a Blacklight descendant on the team, but I wasn’t sure if I believed the rumours. I’m glad they turned out to be right.”

Larissa’s smiled widened, partly as an involuntary result of the charm radiating out of Kristian Van Orel’s pores and partly because of the grin that had risen on to the face of her boyfriend. Jamie stepped forward and shook the South African’s hand, as the woman who had been sitting next to him offered her own to Larissa.

“Greta Engel, FTB,” said the woman. “It is an honour to meet you. I have heard many stories.”

“Thank you,” she said, shaking the German Operator’s hand. “It’s good to be here.”

The FTB Operator looked to be in her late twenties, tall and narrow, with brown hair that brushed her shoulders. Her green eyes gleamed under the fluorescent glare of the overhead lights, and she stood easily in the well-balanced, relaxed stance that Larissa had come to recognise as characteristic of Operators, regardless of which Department they were from.

Engel moved over to say hello to Jamie, and Larissa found herself looking into the hard face of the third and final occupant of the room. The man’s skin was pale, his jaw almost perfectly square, his grey eyes piercing below a scalp that was closely shaved. His body was thickly muscled, its lines and contours clear through the black material of his uniform. He looked Larissa up and down, then nodded.

“Arkady Petrov,” he said. “SPC.”

Larissa frowned. “Petrov?” she said. “Were you related to—”

“Yuri was my uncle,” said Petrov.

“Shit,” said Larissa. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Petrov nodded again. “Thank you,” he said. “I am looking forward to working with you.” Then he was gone, greeting Jamie with the same gruff manner, and leaving Larissa wondering what he must have been through in the last few months.

Yuri Petrov had been the SPC Director before Aleksandr Ovechkin, and a legend in the supernatural community; a former member of the Spetsnaz, he had spent more than a decade in the KGB, including its bloody, paranoid transformation into the post-Soviet FSB, before moving to the SPC and rising to its head.

He had been murdered by Valeri Rusmanov and his followers on the night that Dracula was resurrected, murdered inside the vault in which the first vampire’s ashes had been kept for almost a century, having fought to his very last breath. It had been Petrov who had warned Henry Seward that access to vault 31, arguably the most highly classified secret in any of the Departments, had been compromised, information that had led to the discovery of Thomas Morris’s treachery against Blacklight. He had deserved far, far better than what had been done to him; he had been tortured and torn to pieces, his disembodied head placed on the pillar that had held Dracula’s ashes to greet the rescue party that Seward and Paul Turner had led.

So much death,
she thought to herself.
General Petrov and Shaun Turner and Thomas Morris and all the others. So much misery and grief.

Engel and Van Orel had circled back to the table in the centre of the room. Larissa pulled out a chair and joined them, leaving Jamie talking to Petrov.

“The Security Supervisor told us we were the last to arrive,” she said. “Are we missing someone?”

Van Orel shook his head. “Our squad leader is in with the FTB Director. He should be back any minute.”

“He got in this morning,” said Engel. “He was the first to arrive. He’s very enthusiastic, very …
American
, but I think we are in good hands.”

“Great,” said Larissa. “I worked with most of the senior NS9 Operators. They’re good people.”

Behind her, the door opened again. Larissa turned to see who would be leading them into Romania and felt her heart stop in her chest, the blood freeze in her veins.

“Lieutenant Kinley,” said Tim Albertsson, smiling widely as he walked to the front of the room. “Lieutenant Carpenter. Welcome to Germany.”

Valentin Rusmanov leant back in his chair and confessed something to himself that he would never have admitted to anyone else.

He had absolutely no idea what to do next.

The promise he had made to Paul Turner as they faced the bloody proof of Richard Brennan’s betrayal, that he could find his brother and his former master and bring their locations back to Blacklight, seemed destined to be broken. Valeri had amassed a huge portfolio of property over the decades and centuries, and Valentin had visited every location that he was aware of: the cabin in the Swiss mountains, the apartments in Rome and Zurich, the vast estates in Colorado, Moscow Oblast and New South Wales, the islands in the Grenadines and Philippines.

All to no avail.

Several of them had contained cadres of Valeri loyalists, fanatics similar to those he had found standing guard in the dacha in Romania. Valentin had unleashed tortures and torments that he had not applied for hundreds of years, inflicting agonies that no human or vampire could withstand, but found himself no closer to his goal. The vampires he had tortured had received their orders third or fourth hand, via a series of intermediaries who had disappeared back into the darkness. Only Genevieve, if the vampire known as Jackson was to be believed, had been in possession of first-hand information, and Valentin had killed her. Since her death, he had found a wall of silence around his brother’s location, one that he was increasingly sure was impenetrable.

A waiter placed Valentin’s Americano down on the glass top of the table and backed discreetly away. He took a long sip of the wonderfully bitter drink, settled back in his chair, and tried to push away the memory of what he had told Paul Turner before he left the Loop.

I said I could find Valeri and Dracula, if he let me. But I was wrong. They’re hiding and I have no idea where they are.

He had travelled to San Sebastián as a last resort. The beautiful Basque port had been Ana Rusmanov’s favourite place in the world, and Valentin had hoped that his brother’s relentless, all-consuming love for his dead wife might have influenced his choice of hiding place. But after three days of futile searching, he had reached two conclusions: firstly, that Valeri’s desperate obedience to his master had evidently trumped his nostalgic devotion to Ana, and secondly, that the eldest Rusmanov had clearly kept his cards far closer to his chest than Valentin had realised.