The array of speakers positioned around the Ops Room fell silent, as the audio file reached its end.
“Have you spoken to the FTB? Are the Germans going to help?” asked Jamie, his voice trembling.
“They have already granted permission for the team to enter their territory,” said Seward. “I’ve transmitted that to Major Ellis. They should be on the ground by now.”
Jamie’s head spun. His heart had felt as though it might break when the voice had announced that there was nothing to suggest that Frankenstein had ever been returned to the mainland; in his mind, that was the likeliest conclusion, that if they were to find him, they would find him somewhere in northern England, maybe hurt, or incapacitated, or even captured by vampires.
Jamie had not allowed for the possibility that his friend could have been washed the other way, out into the cold vastness of the North Sea. He would not have believed that it would be possible for anyone to survive more than a few minutes in those waters, but then Frankenstein was hardly just anybody; he was ageless, apparently immortal, and if anyone might have survived such an ordeal, Jamie believed it would be him.
But if he was put ashore in Germany,
thought Jamie,
if the person the townspeople are talking about really was him, then why hasn’t he made contact? Why hasn’t he told us to come and get him?
“Let me go and help them,” said Jamie. “I can be there in an hour. Please.”
Major Turner rolled his eyes, and Jamie was filled with a sudden compulsion to shove his thumbs against them until they burst like balloons. He fought it back, and looked pleadingly at Admiral Seward.
“No, Jamie,” replied the Director, although he had the decency
to at least make it appear as though it had been a difficult decision for him to make. “We’ve been through this. Not while the interrogation is ongoing. You told me you understood that it takes priority; were you lying to me?”
Jamie tried to quell the rage, the familiar, joyous, black-red rage that was threatening to burst from the pit of his stomach and consume him.
“No, sir,” he replied, through gritted teeth. “I wasn’t lying to you.”
“So you do understand that Valentin’s interrogation takes priority?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that the Field Investigation Team are perfectly capable of following this lead without your assistance?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” said Seward, smiling. “Then we are in agreement. I promised you I would keep you up to date with their progress, Jamie. I never told you that you would get to take part. Remember that.”
“I will, sir,” spat Jamie.
“Fantastic,” replied the Director. “In which case, we should be on our way to the detention level. The others will be waiting for us. But before we go, I need to give something to you both.”
Jamie glanced over at Paul Turner, whose gaze didn’t so much as flicker from his commanding officer’s.
“The two of you haven’t always seen eye to eye,” said Seward. “That’s OK. If I wanted robots instead of Operators, I’d have the Science Division working on them now. I haven’t always seen eye to eye with either of you myself. But until we find the ghost user, we are going to have to trust each other like never before. After Julian, things got bad, and if this gets out, they could get bad again.
And we have to allow for the possibility that the person we’re looking for knows we’re looking for them, and may take action against us. With that in mind, I want you both to have these.”
Admiral Seward picked up two laminated cards from his desk and handed one to each of the Operators standing before him. Jamie took his, and looked down at it. A ten-digit combination of letters and numbers was printed on the card in plain black text.
“Sir, what is this?” asked Paul Turner.
“It’s the Director level override code,” replied Seward. “It’s the key to the entire Loop. Use it only if you have to.”
“This is highly irregular, sir,” said Turner, frowning at the card in his hand.
“I know it is, Paul,” said Seward. “But the time may come when the situation changes too quickly for you to seek my approval to act. Or something may happen to me which means that you can’t. Either way, take them, both of you, and hope you don’t need them.”
‘Yes, sir,” said Major Turner, putting the card carefully in his pocket.
Jamie didn’t reply; he was still staring at the numbers, a chill climbing up his spine as he thought about the awesome power they represented, and the incredible faith Admiral Seward was showing by giving them to him.
“Jamie,” said the Director, sharply, and this time he did look up. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” Jamie replied. “Loud and clear, sir.”
The three men journeyed down to the detention level in silence.
To Jamie, it felt as though the plastic card was about to burn a hole through the pocket of his uniform, presenting itself for all to see, and there was more than a little bit of him that would have
loved that to happen. Once they were through the double airlock, they met the rest of the Zero Hour Task Force, who were waiting patiently outside the guard office.
As they approached, Cal Holmwood studied the looks on the faces of the three men, and raised one eyebrow towards Admiral Seward, who gave him the briefest shake of the head, so brief it was almost non-existent.
“Morning,” said Jack Williams. The levity in his voice was forced; he could see that there was tension between the late arrivals.
“Morning,” said Admiral Seward, sharply. “Let’s get on with this, shall we? Paul?”
Major Turner nodded, and led them down the corridor to Valentin Rusmanov’s cell.
The ancient vampire was lying on his bed, reading a paperback book, the title of which was in a language that Jamie didn’t recognise. Valentin, who Jamie and the rest of the Task Force knew full well could hear their individual heartbeats from the moment they exited the airlock, peered over the top of the book and smiled, as though surprised to see them appear beyond the ultraviolet barrier he had already proven so conclusively was useless.
“Gentlemen,” he exclaimed. “What a pleasure. I had forgotten we were continuing our discussion this morning.”
There was silence from the line of Operators, and Valentin’s grin widened.
“Oh, dear,” he said, softly. “I sense tension in the ranks. Did someone forget to lock the doors last night before you went to bed?”
“Valentin Rusmanov,” said Major Turner, giving no indication of having heard the vampire’s comment. “We are here to continue our interview with you, as agreed. May I enter and speak with you?”
“Of course, my dear Major,” said Valentin, sitting up and placing his book aside. “Let’s have at it, by all means.”
The vampire stood up from his bed, stretched his long, slender arms above his head, then let them drop back down to his sides. He walked quickly across the cell, and sat down in one of the chairs. Major Turner stepped through the barrier, and lowered himself slowly into the other.
“Fire away, Major Turner,” said Valentin, smiling broadly.
“Thank you,” said Turner, his politeness both impeccable and obviously false. “Mr Rusmanov, your late brother, Alexandru, was responsible for the sequence of events that led to Thomas Morris betraying this Department. To the best of your knowledge, was that an isolated incident, or have vampires attempted to infiltrate Blacklight at other times in the past?”
“That, Major Turner,” replied Valentin, “is an excellent question. Excellent.”
“Would you care to answer it?” said Turner.
“I’m just considering the best way to do so,” replied Valentin. “Your use of the word ‘attempted’ implies that you are asking about plots to infiltrate your Department that were unsuccessful, and I must confess I don’t know about any such plots.”
A chill ran up Jamie’s spine, and he looked over at Admiral Seward. The Director didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as move a muscle, but his face had drained of all colour; he looked suddenly like a ghost.
“I’m sorry,” said Major Turner. “Are you suggesting that you have knowledge of
successful
attempts to infiltrate us? Beyond the case of Thomas Morris?”
Valentin leant back in his chair, and smiled cruelly.
“My dear Major,” he said, softly, “I do not know everything, so
I cannot be sure of every spy that has been placed in your midst. But what I am telling you, what I know for an absolute fact, is that my brother Valeri has had at least one agent inside your Department at all times for the last sixty-five years.”
CALIENTE, CALIFORNIA, USA YESTERDAY
The man who was calling himself Robert Smith waited as patiently as he was able for Adam to finish his cigarette. When it was little more than a glowing stub between his fingers, Adam dropped it to the floor, ground it beneath the sole of his shoe and continued his story.
“I never found out what happened to Emily,” he said. “Never knew whether she left me, or whether she killed herself. The way she had been talking, the things she said, things that I didn’t notice at the time, make me think the latter. She loved me, I know that with all my heart, and I don’t believe it was me she was tired of; it was life itself. But to this day, I still don’t know. And not knowing has been the worst part.
“When she was gone, I lost myself for a while. I drifted into this circle of vampires in the Tenderloin, savages really, who killed and maimed for sport, not even for sustenance. I trawled the streets of San Francisco with them, and I did things I can never be forgiven for, for which even what was done to me later is not punishment
enough. I killed, and tortured, and I drank from humans for the first time in my life.
“And I learnt why most vampires are incapable of stopping themselves from committing the horrors they do: because there is nothing more powerful, more intoxicating, more overwhelming, than running human blood. It made me feel like a god, and I took my anger and my pain out on men and women who didn’t deserve it. I’ll never forgive myself for the things I did; thankfully, I was stopped before I was able to do more harm.”
“What do you mean, stopped?” asked Smith. “Stopped by who?”
“We were living in a tenement building in the Tenderloin. The place had been abandoned for years, and there were about fifty of us in there, like rats. One morning, about ten minutes after the sun had come up, the door was blown off its hinges, and suddenly the building was full of black figures, firing weapons I’d never seen before. Vampires were exploding all around me, bursting into flames, and I was running, trying to get away. Someone was screaming ‘NS9! NS9!’ over and over again, and then something sharp slammed into my leg, and when I woke up, I was somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“I have no idea. I was on the floor of a glass room, a cube really, in a laboratory. There were doctors in white suits and masks staring at me, and then this one doctor, a tall guy with grey hair, even though he couldn’t have been more than forty, pressed a button on a handset and the cube was filled with ultraviolet light. Every millimetre of my skin caught fire instantly, and I screamed until my vocal cords were burned away. I fell to the floor as the purple light dissolved me, and the last thing I saw was the grey-haired doctor making notes as he watched me die.
“Then there was a light, and more pain, and I opened my eyes,
and I nearly died again from shock. My body was a skeleton, blood was gushing on to me from vents in the ceiling of the cube, and as I watched, my muscles and skin were growing round the bones. The pain was indescribable. I screamed for mercy, screamed for it to be over, and then eventually it was, and I was myself again. Then one of the doctors fired a tranquilliser dart through a hole in the cube, and there was nothing.
“When I woke up the second time, I was chained to the back of a glass cube, which was almost the same as the first one, but had two big differences. This one had no front wall, and it was outside. I was in a desert, a lot like the one we’re sat in now, and the sun was minutes away from rising over the mountains in front of me. The doctors were gathered around with their notebooks and their instruments, and the grey-haired man was standing beside the cube, looking at me. I pleaded with him, I begged for mercy, I asked him why he was doing this to me, and do you know what he did?”
“What?” asked Smith, his voice trembling.
“He smiled at me,” spat Adam. “Smiled at me, then carried right on making notes. Then he watched as the sun came over the horizon, and the light crept towards the cube, bit by bit. When it reached my feet, they started to burn. By the time it reached my waist my legs were gone below the knees and I was hanging in the manacles around my wrists, my mind completely gone, driven away by the pain. I stayed conscious until it burned through my chest, and then I died. And then they revived me again.”
“They collected your ashes,” said Smith, quietly. “Didn’t they? Soaked them in blood, and brought you back.”
Adam nodded.
“Nothing they did ever pierced my heart,” he said. “They were very careful not to destroy me. Just kill me.”
“Jesus,” said Smith. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. To kill someone twice and bring them back is inhumane.”
A look of surprise passed over Adam’s face. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “They didn’t kill me twice. They killed me hundreds and hundreds of times.”
Adam rolled another cigarette, and this time Smith asked whether he could have one too. He lit the neat roll-up, took the first mouthful of smoke into his lungs and waited for his host to continue.
“The third time I don’t even know what they did to me,” said Adam. “They strapped me on to a gurney in the middle of the cube and injected me with something, a syringe of bright blue liquid. Nothing happened for about an hour, but then I started to feel pressure, like I was deep underwater. My limbs started to swell up, and I felt blood start to run from my ears and my nose. I passed out before it got too bad, but the last thing I remember is seeing my fingers burst.”
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Smith.
“They revived me again, and killed me again. They drowned me, dissolved me in acid, stabbed every part of my body with metal stakes apart from my heart, blew my limbs off with shotguns one at a time, put timed explosives under my skin and blew me to pieces, injected me with hundreds of drugs and chemicals. And every time, they brought me back and did it again. And again. I don’t know how many times, I don’t how long for. It felt like years, but I don’t know if it was. The doctors came and went, new ones appearing, others disappearing, but the one constant was the man with the grey hair. He was there every time I died, and every time I was reborn, watching me, smiling at me, making his damned notes.”
Adam spat on the ground, and crushed out his cigarette.
“One day I woke up and I was in the cube in the desert, just
before dawn. I don’t know how many times they had burned me by then, so I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t even protest; I knew what was going to happen, and what it was going to feel like, and I could prepare myself for it. It was the new things, the drugs and the chemicals, that scared me. And by then I had realised that begging was useless. So I watched the sun rise over the mountains, I watched it crawl across the floor of the desert and I braced myself as it reached my toes. And nothing happened.”
“What?” asked Smith. “Nothing happened? What do you mean, nothing happened?”
“Nothing happened. The sunlight rolled up my legs, and nothing happened. Across my body, and nothing happened. And eventually, across my face, and nothing happened. I hadn’t felt the sun on my face for more than twenty years, and I started to weep, and I barely noticed when one of the doctors raised their dart gun, and fired it into my leg.
“I woke up some time later, and I knew immediately that something was different. The surface beneath me wasn’t the smooth glass of the cube; it was cracked, and ridged, and uneven. I opened my eyes, to see concrete and spray paint. I was lying in the doorway of an abandoned building. And when I stood up, I saw that it was the building I had been taken from, however many weeks or months earlier.”
“They put you back?” asked Smith. “Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Adam. “I’ve asked myself thousands of times. Maybe they were done with me; maybe they couldn’t learn anything more. Or maybe they had found what they wanted, and I had just been lucky enough to survive it. I don’t know. But they let me go. And I was cured.”
Smith sat back against the wall of the cabin, his mind reeling.
There’s a cure,
he thought.
It exists, it’s really real. Somewhere out there, there’s a cure.
“I tried to fly,” Adam continued. “But I couldn’t. I tried to lift an abandoned car on the street in front of the building, but I couldn’t move it. Finally, I tried to lower my fangs, and nothing happened. But to be honest, I knew before I tried anything; I just
felt
different.
“So I ran, again. I grabbed a suitcase worth of my old life from the house I had shared with Emily, mostly photos, and I left San Francisco that day. I headed south, driving my car in the daytime, leaving the windows open all the way, feeling the sun on my skin, until I got to Caliente. I had the keys to this place – they were left to me when my grandfather died – and I moved in. I’ve been here ever since. And that’s my story, Mr Smith. For what it’s worth.”
The two men sat silently for several long moments, one exhausted by the effort of telling the tale, the other digesting the implications of it. Eventually, it was Smith who spoke first.
“What cured you? Please tell me you know.”
“I’ve no idea,” said Adam, shaking his head, sadly. “I don’t know what any of the drugs they gave me were, and I don’t know which one of them was the cure. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know where you were? Do you remember anything that could help me find the place they held you?”
“I don’t. The inside was a laboratory, the outside was desert. It could have been anywhere. I’m sorry, I really am.”
“Do you know anything that can help me? Anything at all?” Smith’s voice was rising, as frustration spilled through him; he was so close, so close to the end of a quest that had taken him more than a year, and to be denied at this last stage was too much.
“I’m afraid not,” Adam replied. “I’m sorry, I really am. But if it’s any consolation, I still don’t believe that’s really why you’re here.”
“So what is?” exploded Smith. “Tell me, please! What the hell am I doing here?”
“You’ll see soon enough,” replied Adam, an odd smile on his face.
Smith looked at the man, and felt his heart lurch. Adam’s outline was shimmering in the heat of the desert, the shape of his body appearing to have become fluid, like the edges of a drop of oil in water. He looked down the canyon, and watched as the vast expanse of the desert began to breathe, slowly, rhythmically, the landscape expanding and contracting, in and out, in and out. Smith looked back at Adam, and realised that the edges of his vision were becoming blurry, shot through with a kaleidoscope of brilliant colours.
Drugggggedd,
his mind slurred.
Heee druuggggggged meee.
“What… did you do… to me?” he managed to ask.
“Nothing bad,” replied Adam. “And nothing I didn’t do to myself.”
Smith looked down at the cup he had placed beside his feet, then the concentrated psilocybin extract that Adam had added to both their coffees overwhelmed his rational mind, and the two men spiralled into their vision.
They wandered across the pulsing desert, holding hands as they walked, their minds’ understanding of reality usurped by the psychedelic extract flooding through their brains. They talked, about nothing and everything, conversations that slipped away the moment they were concluded, lost in the wilderness, never to be remembered. They laughed, and on several occasions, they cried. At one point they danced furiously beneath the diffusing, liquid sun, danced as
though their lives depended on it, guttural chants spilling from their mouths.
After an unknowable amount of time, they reached a cave.
The opening was low and narrow, little more than a wide crack in a red rock wall at the bottom of a short gulley. They stood in front of it for a long time, until Adam took Smith’s hand and led him forward. Smith resisted: he didn’t want to go inside. He was incapable of expressing why the dark opening filled him with dread, but it did; his disorientated brain was screaming at him that if he went in there, he would never come out.
“Scared,” he managed to slur, when Adam turned back to see why he was resisting.
Then Adam did something that Smith would not have been able to predict, even had his brain been functioning properly. The man stepped forward, and hugged Smith, wrapping his arms tightly round him.
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” he whispered. “This is why you’re here.”
Then he took his visitor by the hand, and led him into the cave.
As soon as Smith was inside the cave, a dark crevice of rock no more than five metres deep, his vision intensified. Starved of outside stimulus, his mind roared into overdrive; thick freshets of blood gushed down the cool rock walls of the cave, pooling at the bottom and creeping gradually across the floor to where the two men were standing. The dark black corners of the cave, where the light entirely failed to penetrate, shifted and moved in the corners of his eyes; dark shapes formed and dissolved, lurching towards the light then retreating, tantalisingly out of sight.
Then time seemed to freeze. The blood that was descending the walls stopped, hanging on the smooth surfaces in defiance of gravity,
and the dark corners fell still. Smith stood, his hand tightly clenched in Adam’s, his heart and mind racing, the darkness surrounding him, and waited.
After what could have been eons or thirty seconds, a shape appeared at the rear of the cave, a pale smudge that slowly coalesced into the form of a teenage boy, who walked slowly forward until he was two metres away from the two visionaries.
The boy was tall and slender, and dressed all in black. One side of his neck was a mess of scar tissue, his face pale and soft-featured, almost feminine.
Smith’s heart accelerated until he was sure it would burst in his chest, as his mind teetered on the brink of collapse. He did the only thing he could think of.
“Hello,” he said, his words echoing in the tight confines of the cave.
The boy bared his teeth, and then, to Smith’s utter horror, his eyes flooded a sickening, glowing red, and two white fangs slid smoothly from behind his upper lip.
“Leave me,” the teenager hissed. “You’re too late.”