Department 19: Zero Hour (47 page)

This could be just as old,
she realised, as Petrov dropped on to the boards.
At least. Maybe older.

Her four squad mates drew their torches again and shone them down the tunnel towards her. The light was blinding and she narrowed her eyes, a guttural warning growl rising from her throat. The torch beams were instantly lowered, and as she waited for her vision to clear, her squad mates made their way towards her.

“Shit,” said Van Orel. “Sorry, Larissa.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “This way.”

Tim Albertsson stepped forward. “Larissa, you take point,” he said. “I want to know if there’s anything down here.”

Larissa reached out, grabbed a handful of the American’s uniform, and pulled him close enough that she could feel the heat rising from the skin of his face.

“You’re pathetic,” she whispered, her voice so low that only he could hear it.

She released him, and flew away down the tunnel before he had time to respond. There was a moment’s silence, before heavy footsteps followed her.

After a length of time that felt unknowable, but was likely no more than two or three minutes, Larissa saw something in the distance. The tunnel was perfectly straight, long and wide, built deep and solidly, and her vision was the only one of her supernatural senses that she still fully trusted. She could smell nothing but damp earth, and her head was fuller than ever with the incessant noise that had been plaguing her since they first set foot inside the forest.

“Something up ahead,” she said.

“Hostile?” asked Tim Albertsson.

“I don’t think so,” said Larissa. “It looks like light. Electric light.”

“Down here?” said Engel.

“That’s what it looks like,” said Larissa.

“Ready One,” said Albertsson.

Larissa fought back the urge to laugh; given the target they had been sent to Romania to search for, permission to use force seemed somewhat redundant. Instead, she quickened her speed, flying steadily towards the distant glow. When she got within fifty metres of it, she saw that she had only been partly right. Bright white electric light was indeed radiating from a bulb hanging from the roof, but it was contained within something far stranger than she could have expected.

Filling the height and width of the tunnel was a wall. Its lower half was made of bricks that had been painted white, its upper half of glass. In its centre was a metal door, which, were it not shut, would lead into a space Larissa and her squad mates could see through the panes of glass.

It looked like a control room.

Two large metal cabinets stood to one side, their shelves packed with server boards and panels that flashed relentlessly with red and blue lights. Opposite them, a simple desk contained a computer and two racks of complicated-looking machinery. The computer’s screen was dark, although an amber light glowed on its side.

“This is crazy,” said Van Orel. “What the hell is this?”

Larissa shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

The room was roughly three metres wide. On its far wall, an identical door stood open, leading into a tunnel that appeared to be a continuation of the one they were standing in.

“Can we get in?” asked Albertsson.

“I can open the door,” said Larissa. “But whoever built this place is going to know as soon as I do. Look.” She pointed to two plastic boxes that sat in the upper corners of the room; red light blinked steadily from lenses at their centres.

“Alarms,” said Petrov.

“Alarms,” said Larissa. “The door is probably rigged too.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” said Albertsson, staring through the glass. “Who builds an IT office under the goddamn forest? And what the hell are those machines doing?”

“I think the bigger question,” said Van Orel, pointing to the door on the other side of the room, “is where does that tunnel go?”

“I don’t know,” repeated Larissa. “But I think we’d find the man we’re looking for at the end of it.”

“The first victim?” said Engel. “You think
he
built this?”

“Who else?” asked Larissa. “We know that nobody else comes here. And where we came down didn’t look much like an entrance to me, or at least not one that’s been used in the last fifty years. It looked like an exit. Or an escape route, more likely.”

“Escape from what?” asked Albertsson.

“How should I know?” said Larissa.

“I would like to know what those machines are,” said Petrov.

You and me both,
thought Larissa. Although she had a strong suspicion, one that she wasn’t prepared to share with her squad mates.

Not yet, at least.

“All right,” said Albertsson. “If we can’t go through without alerting him to our presence, we head back.”

“He’s already alerted to our presence,” said Larissa. “Obviously. You saw the dead animals, we all did. We should just go through.”

“No,” said Albertsson. “We have no idea where that tunnel goes, or whether there are more of them. We’d be like rats in a maze. We’re going back to the surface.”

Larissa looked at him. “But if we just—”

“That’s an order,” said Tim Albertsson, his voice like ice.

“Fine,” said Larissa. “
Sir
.”

Jamie watched Van Orel prod at their fire with a branch, and pulled his sleeping bag more tightly round his shoulders. It had been cold in the forest by day, the dense canopy preventing all but the occasional shaft of warming sunlight from reaching the ground.

By night, it was absolutely freezing.

He had listened with what he hoped had seemed like professional calm as his squad mates described what they had found in the tunnel, had looked with apparent interest at their photos of the strange white room and its unidentified machines, and listened to their theories about exactly what it might be. Inside, he had been burning with outrage. It felt like his worst days at school, in the months after his father had died; as if he was on the edge of everything, that things were happening, but he wasn’t allowed to be a part of them.

Larissa was clearly desperate to talk to him alone, most likely to express her solidarity over Tim’s blatantly personal decision to leave him outside the entrance to the tunnel, but the opportunity had so far failed to present itself. The DARKWOODS squad had regrouped and struck out along what they hoped was the same path taken by the underground tunnel; Tim was working on Larissa’s assumption that there was something at the other end, even if none of them knew what it might be.

But night had fallen, bringing with it a darkness that was quickly total, and they had walked for barely fifteen minutes before Tim Albertsson ordered them to stop and make camp. They had pitched their shelter, built a fire that produced little warmth, and eaten; now they were resting, the exertions of the day clinging heavily to their bones and muscles, and talking in the awkward way of groups of people who feel they ought to get to know one another.

“Your toughest operation,” said Engel. “The very worst you’ve been on.”

“Easy,” said Van Orel.

“Really?” asked Petrov. “For me it is not easy.”

“Vamps attacked a tourist shark boat called the
Quint
in False Bay,” said Van Orel. “Just off the coast of Cape Town. The boat’s operator called the coastguard when it didn’t come back in and they couldn’t hail it, and we intercepted a message from another boat saying they’d seen the
Quint
adrift as the sun went down. Blood in the water, two figures on the deck, one of them seemed to have glowing eyes. You know the drill.”

The members of the squad nodded in unison; they knew it all too well.

“So my squad got the op,” continued Van Orel. “The coastguard took us out to the
Quint
, which looked deserted. We boarded her, and in the cabin we found these two vamps in a blood coma. Have you ever seen that? Where a vamp has drunk so much that it’s overwhelmed them? It looks like an overdose. Anyway. We found the captain dead in the cabin next to them, so we staked the vamps and searched the rest of the boat. No sign of anyone. Then I saw this little camcorder attached to the TV, so I pressed PLAY.”

Van Orel looked round at his squad mates, who were hanging on his every word.

“They’d been feeding on the tourists, bleeding them, then throwing them over the side for the sharks. You’ve never seen anything like it, or at least I hope you haven’t. The blood in the water, the froth, the Great Whites breaching and spinning and biting. There had been twelve people on board the
Quint
that day, not counting the captain. All were gone.”

“Jesus,” said Larissa, her voice low.

Van Orel nodded. “I’ve had
harder
operations, much harder. I mean, when it came down to it, this was two vamps who were so out of it they barely knew we were there. But it stays with me like none of the others. It was sport, nothing more. Twelve people murdered and used as shark bait for the sake of a home movie.”

“
Scheisse
,” said Engel, her voice barely more than a whisper. “What about you, Jamie?”

He felt eyes settle on him; his short Blacklight career was already the stuff of legend. Only Tim Albertsson looked disinterested.

“There are two,” he said. “I can’t choose between them. The first I ever went on, which wasn’t even actually an authorised operation. To get my mother back from Alexandru Rusmanov.”

There was a series of nods; the story of how a teenage boy with barely any training destroyed the second-oldest vampire in the world had swept through the supernatural Departments like a hurricane.

“The second was Paris,” he said. “Colonel Frankenstein was being held by an old vampire called Dante, who called himself the king of Paris, and I took a team to rescue him. Dante ran a theatre, a vampire theatre, where they tortured and murdered humans on stage every night for entertainment. We destroyed him and every other vamp in the place, and we got Frankenstein out, even after his lycanthropy took hold of him. I’m still not sure how we managed it, to be honest.”

“Were you there, Larissa?” asked Van Orel.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not on that one.”

Jamie watched her closely, searching her face for signs of anger. The decision not to take either her or Kate Randall to Paris with him had been one of the hardest he had ever had to make, and he had genuinely worried that it might represent the end of him and Larissa before whatever was between them even had a chance to get off the ground. And Larissa
had
been furious, although she had accepted his almost desperate desire not to see her in danger while he was trying to focus on rescuing Frankenstein.

Accepted it, but not agreed with it. Not in the slightest.

“Why not?” asked Tim Albertsson, smiling narrowly.

Larissa shrugged. “It was Jamie’s call,” she said. “You’ll have to ask him.”

“Jamie?” asked the American.

“Do I have to explain my decisions to you?” he asked.

Albertsson held his hands up in mock surrender. “I’m just asking,” he said, his tone light. “We’re all friends here, right?”

“Right,” said Jamie. “Sure we are.”

Engel frowned deeply, then turned to Tim. “What about you?” she asked.

“Hard to pick one for me too,” said Albertsson. “I led the squad that searched for Adam, the supposedly cured vampire, and lost three men in the process. Did you hear about that?”

The Operators nodded; word of the disastrous mission in the Californian desert had got around, despite its classified status.

“The toughest, though?” continued Albertsson. “That would have to be Mexico, after Valeri’s vamps broke the jails. The leadership of a cartel in Nuevo Laredo were in the Florence Supermax when it was cracked, and were all turned. They went home, murdered everyone who had taken their places while they were inside, and took everything back over. We went in to get them before they got too settled.” He looked over at Larissa and smiled. “Didn’t we?”

The vampire shifted uneasily as attention swung her way. “We did,” she said. “I was attached to Tim’s squad for the operation.”

“And we were glad to have her,” said Tim. “We entered the house and did a sweep, but they were waiting under the floor for us in the basement. We engaged them, and destroyed what we thought was all of them, but there was no sign of their leader, a General called Garcia Rejon. He ambushed us, blasted a hole in Larissa, and fled. I ordered everyone to hold, but she went after him anyway.”

“It didn’t really register that I’d been shot,” said Larissa, quietly.

“Right,” said Albertsson. “I got the rest of my squad together and we climbed up through the hole Rejon had made to escape, and all the time there’s shrieking and screaming outside. By the time we got there, all that was left of him was a streak of blood across the lawn.”

“That doesn’t sound that bad,” said Jamie. “It sounds like Larissa did most of the work.”

“She did,” said Albertsson, and smiled widely. “What makes it the toughest op I’ve been on was what happened in Rejon’s garden, after the fighting was over. When it was just Larissa and me left.”

Ice crept up Jamie’s spine. He looked over at Larissa and flinched; her face had turned so pale it was almost translucent, and she was staring at Albertsson not with anger, but with eyes full of pleading.

“What happened?” asked Engel.

Albertsson looked around, savouring the attention. “Nothing,” he said. “That was the problem.”

Silence descended, thick and awkward and full of unasked questions. Jamie felt the rage he had been trying to control since the squad first stepped into the forest roar through him; it took every iota of his willpower to hold it at bay. Larissa had dropped her eyes and was staring into the fire, shock written across her face. The rest of the squad were looking uneasily at one another, unsure how to respond to Albertsson’s story, the point of which had simultaneously been ambiguous and utterly obvious.

“Petrov?” asked Engel, trying for a light, cheerful tone, but getting nowhere near it. “What about you?”

The Russian gave her a long look, then shook his head.

“No more talk,” said Albertsson. “Get some rest. Tomorrow’s going to be our day, I can feel it.”