Department 19: Zero Hour (78 page)

She took another step, and felt her foot slide through something wet. Revulsion shuddered through her; it cleared her mind, pushed back her vampire side, and the right thing to do, the
only
thing, was suddenly clear. Blacklight had already taken losses she doubted it could withstand; if
she
died now, if she tried to kill Dracula and failed, then Valentin would be destroyed as well, and two of the only reasons to believe they might get another chance to end the first vampire would be gone.

But what if you don’t fail?
hissed her retreating vampire self.
You can end this now.

Larissa growled. “Your day will come,” she said, looking directly into the first vampire’s eyes. “And I will be there when it does. You can count on that.”

“I shall be looking forward to it,” said Dracula, and smiled.

“I wouldn’t be,” said Larissa. “If I were you.”

Then she moved, fast enough to make one of Valeri’s vampires gasp out loud. Without taking her eyes from Dracula’s, she reached down, scooped up the limp, sodden halves of Valentin Rusmanov, and disappeared into the sky.

Jamie opened his eyes as the helicopter touched down outside the Loop’s hangar, and rubbed them roughly with the palms of his hands.

He had slept through most of his second journey back from Château Dauncy; not through choice, but from complete exhaustion. After Henry Seward’s intervention on the battlefield, he had done as Paul Turner ordered and searched the wide gravel courtyard for injured survivors. At the base of the high northern wall, one of the three that were still standing more or less intact, he had found an Operator he recognised, but whose name he didn’t know; one of the hundreds of semi-familiar men and women that passed him in the grey corridors of the Loop. The man’s barely conscious face was pale, sweat stood out on his forehead and upper lip, and his mouth was twisted with a tight grimace of pain. The cause of his expression was horribly apparent: his stomach had been opened from belt to sternum, and his gloved hands were the only things keeping his guts inside his body.

Jamie scooped him up as gently as he was able, and flew him back to the Loop as fast as his supernatural muscles would carry him, his heart racing with concern for Larissa. He was sure that Valentin would look after her, but he had no idea whether that would be enough, for either of them. Dracula had unquestionably been on the ropes, beginning to wear down before their eyes, but chasing after him was nonetheless remarkably dangerous, even for two vampires as powerful as Valentin and his girlfriend.

Somewhere over the English Channel, the Operator began to scream. The high-pitched shrieks of pain hurt Jamie’s ears, and continued all the way to the Loop, where he delivered the stricken man into the care of two of the Department’s doctors.

As they rushed the Operator away on a stretcher, Jamie threw himself back into the air, pushing his tired body as hard as he dared towards the devastated château. When he arrived, the courtyard was quiet and almost empty. The remainder of the injured survivors were on their way to the Loop in one of the transport helicopters, accompanied by the Tiger gunships that had been summoned from Toulouse-Blagnac to escort them. That left two intact helicopters sitting on the gravel, into one of which the bodies of the dead were being loaded.

With no one left to carry back to the Loop, Jamie joined the men and women who had chosen to stay and carry out this most miserable of tasks. He was not remotely surprised to see Angela Darcy and Lizzy Ellison among their number; he was certain that Paul Turner would have been there too, had he not been needed back at the headquarters of the Department he was now in charge of.

Or is he?
Jamie wondered.
Maybe Henry Seward is still Director? I don’t know how that works.

As the helicopter rumbled north-west, the news had come through the speakers in Jamie’s helmet that Larissa had arrived safely at the Loop, and he had lowered his head and silently wept.

The scale of what had happened in the grounds of the château was so huge that he was struggling not to let it overwhelm him.

Cal Holmwood was dead.

Patrick Williams was dead.

Operators who had fought with everything they had were dead.

Valeri Rusmanov was dead.

And Dracula had survived.

As the tears rolled down his cheeks, fully aware that the other Operators sitting in the helicopter’s hold were doing him the courtesy of pretending not to notice them, Jamie tried to find a way to convince himself that so much death had been worth it.

The roar of the helicopter’s engine began to subside as Angela Darcy slid open its long door. He stood up and made his way across to it; Angela gave him a small smile as he approached her, which he returned as he leapt down on to the tarmac. His feet had barely touched the ground when Larissa thundered into him, almost sending him flying; only her arms, which were crushing him against her, kept him upright. For a long moment, he merely hung in her grip, unable to persuade his aching limbs to do anything. Then, slowly, he wrapped his arms round her waist and buried his face against her neck. When he finally drew away, noticing with a pang of teenage shame the wet patches his tears had left on her uniform, the helicopter was empty, and they were alone in the landing area.

“What happened?” he asked, his voice low and thick. “With Dracula.”

Larissa shook her head. “Later,” she said.

“Valentin?”

She nodded. “He’s here,” she said. “He’s going to be all right.”

Jamie grimaced, and felt tears appear in the corners of his eyes again. “Cal,” he said. “And Jack’s brother. So many people.”

“I know,” said Larissa.

There was nothing else to say; it was all too big, too raw, too hard to be solved or improved by words. Jamie knew better than anyone that time was the only thing that would heal the Department’s broken heart.

Larissa put her arm round his shoulders as they walked slowly into the hangar. The floor was smeared with blood and covered in torn strips of gauze and bandaging, and the double doors at the rear were wedged open with a pair of black helmets, presumably because the flow of stretchers had been so heavy. Jamie walked through them, not sure of where they should go now, or what they should do, and saw Matt Browning and Kate Randall hurrying along the corridor towards them. He carefully removed Larissa’s arm from around his shoulders, and smiled as his friends started to run, their boots thudding on the grey floor.

They crashed into him, shouting and yelling and asking a hundred questions at once, and despite it all, despite the pain in his chest and the tiredness in his limbs, he started to laugh. Larissa joined in, throwing her arms round them all and holding them tightly.

“It’s so good to see you,” said Matt, his eyes wet with tears. “Larissa told us you were OK, that you’d made it out, but until I saw for myself …”

“You got Valeri, Jamie,” said Kate, her eyes wide. “I can’t believe it. You got him.”

“
We
got him,” said Jamie. “Me and Valentin. Then him and Larissa chased after Dracula. Can you believe that? They
chased
him, on their own.”

Kate nodded. “She told us. It’s unbelievable.”

“It isn’t,” said Jamie, and gave his girlfriend a long look. “I saw it with my own eyes. Turner tried to stop her until Henry Seward overruled him. But she was going anyway.”

Larissa blushed, her cheeks turning a beautiful pale pink, and smiled at him.

“We saw Admiral Seward,” said Matt. “We came up to help when everyone started arriving. I never really thought I’d see him again.”

“Neither did I,” said Jamie. “I don’t think anyone did.”

There was a loud crackle from the speakers set at intervals along the corridor, followed by Paul Turner’s amplified voice. The Security Officer, or Interim Director, or whatever he now was, sounded more exhausted than Jamie had ever heard him, but his voice still contained its usual streak of steel.

“Attention everyone currently hearing my voice,” he said. “With the exception of medical personnel, please gather at once in the Ops Room on Level 0. Those of you who do not call the Loop home, please find a member of Blacklight to show you the way. Thank you.”

Jamie looked round at his friends. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go together.”

Nobody sat down in the Ops Room.

The chairs were still there, the plastic seats that had last been occupied as Cal Holmwood gave what would now stand as his final briefing, but they had been pushed to the sides of the room, leaving a wide space that was now full of men and women. Jamie noted the subtle differences in uniform that identified Operators from Russia, Germany, America and South Africa, saw the white coats of the Science Division, the pale, shocked faces of the Blacklight Operators who had manned the Loop while their friends and colleagues fought for their lives. Standing near the back, his face pale, his eyes clear, was Aleksandr Ovechkin, talking quietly to Bob Allen. The two Directors seemed to be struggling to stay upright; it looked like a strong gust of wind would have blown them over. Notably missing from the assembly, along with the men and women working furiously in the infirmary, was Frankenstein. The monster was still in his wolf form, and had been sealed into one of the maintenance hangars out by the runway; it had been deemed too dangerous to try and get him down to his usual cell on Level H.

The room fell silent as Paul Turner stepped through the door and made his way up to the lectern at the front. For a long moment, he didn’t speak, just looked out over the bloodied ranks of men and women who had fought and survived.

“Nothing I say,” he said, eventually, “will lessen the pain of this moment. Nothing will bring back those we have lost. Investigations are under way, reports are being prepared, and briefings will begin tomorrow. But for now I would ask nothing more from you than a minute’s silence.”

Turner typed briefly on the lectern’s terminal and the wall screen behind him bloomed into life. What it showed, in plain white letters on a black background, was a list of names, a list that was horribly long. He turned to face it, then lowered his head. As one, the crowd of men and women behind him did the same.

Jamie stared at the floor. He felt Larissa’s hand slowly move into his, and held it gratefully. The names made real the horror they had endured in the courtyard of Château Dauncy; by necessity, he had made himself numb to the real cost of their actions. The operation, its priorities and its success, had been all he had allowed himself to think about. As people fell around him, Jamie had forced himself not to really see them.

Now he would.

He raised his head and looked at the names, feeling the truth of what each one truly meant. They represented parents who had lost their children, boys and girls who had lost fathers and mothers, brothers and friends who had left holes in the lives of their loved ones that nothing would ever fill.

He saw Cal Holmwood’s name halfway down the first column.

Patrick Williams was near the bottom of the second.

On the low stage at the front of the room, Paul Turner raised his head and turned back to the lectern, his face shockingly pale. He tapped the terminal a second time, then faced the screen as everyone in the Ops Room lifted their heads. Jamie could see tears on many of the faces, men and women holding each other up, arms round shoulders, hands clasped in hands.

The screen changed, the list of the dead replaced by a large digital clock. It read 00:00:00:53 and was counting steadily down.

Jamie watched, his hand still entwined with Larissa’s. Beside him, he heard Matt breathing deeply, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Kate’s face set in a tight expression of determination.

00:00:00:45

00:00:00:44

00:00:00:43

He glanced around the silent Ops Room. Every pair of eyes was fixed on the screen. He saw Jack Williams standing near the front, Angela Darcy and Dominique Saint-Jacques holding him up by his shoulders, and his heart went out to his friend.

00:00:00:31

00:00:00:30

00:00:00:29

Jamie looked up at Paul Turner, standing alone on the stage, and wondered how the man had even been able to step on to another battlefield, given what had happened to his son. In truth, he could not begin to imagine how the brilliant, glacial Major even managed to get out of bed every morning.

00:00:00:17

00:00:00:16

00:00:00:15

Valentin Rusmanov was standing by the door, watching the countdown with an unreadable expression on his narrow face, a face that was still covered with the dried blood of his brother.

00:00:00:10

00:00:00:09

00:00:00:08

Jamie squeezed Larissa’s hand. It felt as though every single person in the Ops Room was holding their breath.

00:00:00:02

00:00:00:01

00:00:00:00

“Time’s up,” he whispered.