Nobody moved.
Jamie waited for a long moment, then sighed.
“Thank you,” he said, meaning it. “I’m sure I don’t need to fill any of you in on my personal history with Colonel Frankenstein, or the circumstances that led to his apparent death. So for me, it’s as simple as this: if he’s alive, I’m going to find him. I don’t care if I have to destroy every vampire in France to do it. Is that clear?”
There was a second chorus of agreement, and Jamie felt his heart lift as he looked at the seven faces staring coolly back at him.
I would walk into the fire with any of them
, he thought.
Gladly too.
“It’s a five-man team,” said Jamie, and felt a stab of guilt as the seven Operators glanced around at one another. “I’m sorry it has to come to this, but I had no idea how many people might show up, with all the squads so flat out at the moment. There’s nothing personal in my decision, I want you all to know that.”
He saw smiles break out on the faces of Kate and Larissa, and felt a stab of pain at what he was about to do. As far as they were concerned, it was going to be the two of them, plus two of the others. He didn’t blame them for thinking that, but they had no true understanding of the rage that was burning inside his chest when he thought about the possibility of getting Frankenstein back, and he didn’t want them around if things in Paris went the way he expected them to.
“Dominique, I’d be grateful if you would be my second on this operation,” he said. “How about it?”
He saw Kate and Larissa’s smiles falter, just a fraction, as the
tall Frenchman eased himself to his feet. He strode over and clasped Jamie’s hand.
“I’m in,” he said. “Let’s bring him home.”
“Thank you,” said Jamie. “I appreciate it.”
Dominique nodded and stood beside Jamie, who looked out at the remaining Operators.
“Are you up for this, Jack?” asked Jamie. “I’d love to have you if you are.” His friend leapt to his feet, and Jamie felt a grin threaten to burst across his face. He pushed it back, and gripped Jack’s outstretched hand.
“Cheers, Jamie,” said Jack, in a low voice, then took his place beside Dominique.
Jamie looked at the five remaining Operators, and felt his face flush with heat. Angela was looking at him with a curious expression on her face, as though she was more interested in what he was doing than whether or not he was going to pick her. Claire Lock was watching him with an even look, in which Jamie believed, or wanted to believe, at least, that he saw encouragement.
Shaun Turner was openly scowling at him, their conversation in the corridor the previous day clearly now long forgotten. And Kate and Larissa were staring at him with the colour draining from their faces, as though they had just entertained for the first time the reality that he might not choose them.
Don’t do this to us
, their expressions appeared to be saying.
Please don’t. Not like this.
“Claire,” Jamie said. “I could really do with your help.”
The former marksman shone a quite lovely smile in Jamie’s direction, and got to her feet.
“You’ve got it,” she said, shaking his hand briskly before joining the others.
He faced the four men and women who were left; faced three faces full of rapidly rising anger and one of complete detachment.
Do it
, he thought.
Get it over with.
“Angela,” he said. He heard a tiny gasp emerge from Larissa, and watched as Kate put her hand over her mouth. The eyes of his two closest friends shone with betrayal; those of Shaun Turner merely blazed with anger. “What do you say?”
“I say yes, sir,” she said, and slid slowly to her feet. She walked over to him and leant in beside his ear, so close that he could feel her warm breath against his skin. “You just made your life really, really difficult. You know that, right?”
“I know,” replied Jamie, his voice barely audible. “Believe me, I know.”
She pulled away, gave him the kind of smile that men spend their whole lives hoping to see a beautiful girl give them, and went and joined the rest of the team that Jamie had selected. He turned to face them, and they stood immediately to attention.
“Weapons and tactics briefing in the hangar in fifteen,” he said. “I want wheels up within half an hour. Dismissed.”
The four Operators filed quickly past him, and out of the Ops Room. He took a deep breath, and turned to face the three black-clad figures who remained in their seats.
“What the hell was that?” hissed Shaun Turner. “You told me we were cool, that you’d put Wallsend behind you, and you treat me like that?”
“Shaun—”
“I’m the best Operator in this room,” spat Shaun, either not noticing or not caring about the look of hurt that appeared on Kate’s face. “I’m twice the Operator you are, you spoilt little prick. You think your name gives you licence to behave like this? Well, to hell with that.”
Turner bounced up out of his seat, and made as if to launch himself at Jamie.
He never got the chance.
Larissa was out of her seat quicker than any pair of human eyes in the room could follow, and was between the two men before Shaun even had the chance to tense his muscles to leap, her eyes blazing crimson, her fangs bursting into view.
“Don’t even think about it, Shaun,” she growled. “Just sit down next to Kate, there’s a good boy.”
Fury, naked and ugly, burst across Shaun’s face, but he did as he was told. For all his confidence in his own abilities, confidence that was normally well justified, he knew he was no match for Larissa; the vampire girl could have killed him with one hand tied behind her back, without breaking a sweat. He sat back down heavily in his seat. Kate reached out a hand towards him, and he pushed it angrily away. The look on Kate’s face broke Jamie’s heart, and he heard Larissa growl again, a clear rumble of warning. Then she spun away from Kate and Shaun, and faced him, her eyes raging with dark red fire.
“After everything we’ve been through,” she growled. “Everything we said to each other, you, me and Kate. You do this. How could you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Jamie. “You have to know there’s no one I’d rather have on my side than you, than both of you.” He leant round Larissa and looked at Kate, who was staring at him with open pain on her face. “You have to believe me when I say that. But I don’t want you to come on this mission with me. I meant what I said; if he’s still alive, there’s nothing living or dead that is going to stop me from bringing him home. I don’t want to put the two of you in that position. And if things go bad over there, which I am fully
expecting them to, I want to know that the two of you will look after each other. I want to know that you’re safe.”
Later, when the dust settled, Jamie would have given anything to be able to go back in time, and choose his words differently. But by then it was far too late.
“Shaun, the same goes for you,” he continued. “If something happens to me, then I know you’ll look after Kate. That’s more important to me than whether or not you hate me right now. I’m sorry, but it just is. I don’t expect you to understand.”
The anger on Turner’s face dissipated slightly; the deep red that had risen in his cheeks paled, until it was merely a virulent pink. He got up from his chair, and walked stiffly towards the door; as he passed Jamie, he paused and stared at him with a look that seemed to mostly be full of pity.
“You’re making a huge mistake,” he said, softly. “I don’t think you realise it now, but you will. I promise you that much.”
Then he strode across the room, and was gone.
Kate got to her feet, looking frantically between Jamie and the door.
“Go after him,” said Jamie. “It’s not you he’s angry with. And I really am sorry, Kate. I just can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you because of me, because of something I have to do. I hope you can forgive me one day.”
A look of desperate misery flickered on Kate’s face, and then she was moving, across the room and out of the door, leaving Jamie and Larissa alone.
“I know you think you’re protecting me,” she said, her red eyes looking at him with enormous affection. “But you’re not. You’re just hurting me. And I think you know that, deep down.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I really am. I just need to know that
you’re going to be here when I get back, whatever happens. I need to be able to rely on that.”
Larissa sighed, and the red disappeared so quickly from her eyes that it might never have been there.
“I’ll be here,” she replied, softly. “You know I’ll be here. Go do what you have to do.”
Jamie leant in and kissed her, hard. For a moment, there was no response from Larissa, but then she gave in; her lips parted, and she kissed him back, fiercely.
“Thank you,” said Jamie, breaking the kiss. Three different words had screamed in his mind, but he pushed them away, for now at least.
“So what now?” sighed Larissa. “What happens next?”
“I go to Seward for final authorisation,” said Jamie. “Then we fly to Paris, and I start destroying vampires until someone tells me something useful. After that, I don’t know.”
“All right,” replied Larissa. “Go.”
Jamie leant in and kissed her again, a hard, fast kiss full of passion. Then he pulled away from her, and strode across the Ops Room. As he put his hand on the handle of the door, Larissa called his name, and he turned back to her.
“Come back to me, Jamie,” she said, softly. “OK?”
“I will,” he replied. “You can count on it.”
LINCOLN COUNTY, NEVADA, USA
Julian Carpenter, the man who had been calling himself Robert Smith, sipped water from the glass the waitress had brought him. His dinner lay untouched in front of him; the burger looked good, but he had realised as soon as it had arrived that he had no appetite. His stomach was squirming at the thought of what he was about to do.
The quest he had embarked on more than a year before, the quest that had occupied his every waking moment since he had slipped unseen on to the Newark docks with a single small bag over his shoulder, had suddenly been rendered unimportant by the vision he had shared in the desert with the man he had crossed the country to find.
His desire to find a cure for vampirism, a cure that could return his wife to normal, that could bring an end to the cursed condition that had destroyed his life, had given him a single-mindedness he had come to rely on; he had allowed nothing else to matter, for what felt like as long as he could remember.
The sporadic information he had been able to gather, from
still-loyal friends in the supernatural Departments around the world, by using old aliases, old dead-drops and long-forgotten back doors, had reassured him that his son was safe, or at least as safe as it was possible to be when you were responsible for the death of the second oldest vampire in the world. But at least he was with Blacklight, and Julian was certain that Henry Seward would be looking after him.
And Marie as well,
he thought.
I know he’ll have looked after both of them.
He had been in Savannah when word had reached him of his son’s triumph on Lindisfarne. For the first time since the world had believed he had died, Julian Carpenter had got drunk: roaring, falling-down drunk, his heart pounding with pride and relief in equal measure, burning with the desire to break his cover, and go home. He had forced himself not to do so, but it had been touch and go.
He knew that Thomas Morris had been exposed as the true betrayer of Blacklight, and as the man who had framed him for crimes he had never committed. But he had let his friends and his family believe he was dead, and he couldn’t predict with enough certainty how the Department would react to his reappearance. He wanted to go home, more than anything, but he could not take the chance that his welcome might be hostile, at least not until he had found what he was searching for.
But he now no longer cared if he exposed himself, or what the consequences of doing so might be. The vision in the cave had shaken him to his very core, and he was now every bit as anxious to make sure Jamie was all right as he was to continue his pursuit of a cure. Mercifully, both roads led to the same place, less than twenty miles from where he found himself.
He was sitting at a table in The Little A’Le’Inn, the modest restaurant and gift shop that accommodated the steady trickle of tourists that ventured to this remote part of the Nevada desert, lured by the small town of Rachel’s proximity to the Holy Grail of American ufologists: the classified airbase at the heart of the White Sands test range that was known the world over as Area 51.
The base, built on the vast salt flat of Groom Lake, was where the US Air Force had developed and tested the U2 spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117A stealth fighter and any number of other black projects, projects carried out away from the watchful eyes of the American public, and all but the highest echelons of the American government. It was also, if the conspiracy theorists were to be believed, the place where the remains of an alien spaceship that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 had been taken, where the extraterrestrial technology had been studied and incorporated into strange, angular aircraft that could apparently be regularly seen in the night skies around the base.
In the booth behind Julian, two teenagers were expounding on the subject of Area 51, their adolescent voices shot through with posed bravado and hushed caution.
“Groom is for the tourists,” said the teenager directly behind Julian, a pale, acne-ridden boy of about seventeen, his long hair jutting out from a woollen beanie and descending over the shoulders of a black T-shirt printed with the slogan of an old TV show.
I Want to Believe
it stated, in urgent fluorescent green letters. “Papoose Lake, that’s where the real action is. The S-4 facility. They’ve got an installation dug into the mountains there, goes a hundred storeys below ground. That’s where they keep the greys.”
The second teenager, a boy of similar age but hugely increased
girth, with a voluminous black hoodie hiding the ripples and folds of his stomach, frowned.
“You saying they’ve got
live
greys down there?” he asked. “Roswell was sixty-five years ago, dude.”
The first teenager rolled his eyes at the stupidity of the question, and sighed. “You’re thinking about this all wrong. All wrong. Firstly, you don’t know how long the greys live, man. You’re thinking they’re like us, but they’re not. That’s the whole point, right? Do you know what the average lifespan is on Zeta Reticuli? I know I don’t. No one does. Secondly, you forgot about cryopreservation, dude. The greys that crashed at Roswell, you know some of them were hurt, right?”
“Right.”
“Those ones, the injured ones, the government froze them, until it could experiment on the dead ones and the live ones and understand how they worked.
Then
they could thaw out the injured ones and make them better. That’s cryopreservation.”
“Like what they did to the colonial marines in
Aliens
?”
“Exactly.”
“And Fry in
Futurama
?”
“You’ve got it.”
“And Walt Disney?”
“Shut the hell up now, Jonny. Just eat your burger and be quiet.”
Julian’s face contorted into a sudden mask of misery. Jamie was roughly the same age as the two boys arguing behind him, and Julian wondered whether his son had a friend with whom he argued in such a familiar, friendly way. Two years was a lifetime where teenagers were concerned; they regularly appeared to change their personalities completely overnight, and Julian was terrified that when the time came that he saw Jamie again, as it was vital for him to believe he would, he might no longer recognise his son.
He pushed Jamie from his mind. Even though the crazy, dangerous thing he was preparing himself to do he was doing for his son, he couldn’t let himself think too hard about him; he needed his mind clear, and his instincts sharp, if he was going to survive the next few hours. So he thought instead about what the teenagers had been saying, and allowed a smile to rise on his face.
They’ve no idea how right they are
, he thought.
They’re wrong about what’s down there, obviously, but they’re right about Papoose Lake. It’s where the real action is.
Julian paid his bill and headed out of the restaurant. It was late afternoon, and the sky to the west was beginning to take on the first hues of evening, fingers of pale red that bled into the sky above the distant mountains. He climbed into his jeep, put it in gear and pulled out of the parking lot, throwing up a cloud of dust that hung in the air behind him. Thirty minutes later he was driving south on Groom Lake Road, towards the end of his long quest.
Julian Carpenter brought the jeep to a halt, in front of the warning signs that marked the entry to the Air Force Flight Test Center (Detachment 3), the strip of runway and collection of small buildings and hangars that the world knew as Area 51.
He had slowly made his way down the dirt road that led to the base, watchful for the cream-coloured pick-up trucks that patrolled the perimeter of the restricted area, waiting for the red and white signs that marked the border between the America that belonged to everyone, and the America that belonged to the government. They stood in front of him now, simple red text on white metal, warning him that going any further was a Federal offence, an act of trespass which the use of deadly force was authorised to prevent.
He scanned the desolate desert to his right and left, noting the
black surveillance cameras standing on reinforced metal poles, and the sensors and imaging scanners disguised as trees and rocks. They were invisible, unless you knew what you were looking for, which Julian did.
As he sat in the jeep, collecting himself, one of the cream pick-ups rolled silently into view on the ridge above him. Its occupants, two men in dark sunglasses and desert camouflage, made no move to get out of their vehicle, but Julian knew they were watching him for the first sign of any intention of going further.
Five metres in front of him, the orange poles that marked the perimeter of the base stood at wide intervals, wide enough that many a ufologist had been arrested for trespassing without knowing he had been doing so; the undulations of the desert topography made accurately placing yourself on a map difficult, and GPS was unreliable at best in this empty part of the Nevada wilderness.
This is it. Forty-five seconds. No mistakes. Think about your family.
Julian took a deep breath, then ground his foot hard on to the jeep’s accelerator. The little car leapt forward towards the blind curve that protected the rest of the road from prying eyes, accelerating all the time, dust billowing up and around it.
Instantly, the cream pick-up truck’s engine roared into life, and it disappeared from view as its driver hurled it down the ridge towards the road. Julian pressed the pedal harder; he knew this was the crucial moment, where the success or failure of his plan would be decided. If the pick-up appeared in front of him on the road, it was over. If it appeared behind him, there was still a chance.
He hauled the jeep’s steering wheel to the right, sending it skidding behind the high ridge of rock that blocked the view of the gangs of ufologists who gathered on the safe side of the orange poles, and along a narrow valley. Walls of sloping rock rose on
either side of the dirt road, and Julian instantly saw the thick plume of dust rising behind the pick-up truck as it made its way to intercept him.
He gunned the jeep’s engine, squeezing every last bit of power from its tired cylinders, and the little car gave him one final effort; it shot forward, devouring the dirt road beneath its tyres, and he gripped the wheel, fighting to keep the car pointing in the right direction. He roared along the valley floor, his eyes flicking from the ground ahead of him to the speeding pick-up, and as he approached the second turn, the turn he knew led to the gatehouse, he realised he was going to beat it to the corner.
Julian let out a primal roar of triumph, his voice deafeningly loud, even above the screaming engine and squealing tyres. Then he was past the pick-up; as he accelerated towards the final turn, at suicidal speed, he saw the large cream-coloured shape crunch down on to the road in his rear-view mirror, where it disappeared into the cloud of dust that was following him.
Suddenly he was at the turn.
Too fast too fast too fast.
Julian crushed the brake pedal, and the jeep’s tyres howled with protest as they threw off the speed they had been carrying. He stamped his foot back on the accelerator, felt the back end of the car begin to slide inexorably towards the rocks at the edge of the road, and hung on as he spun the steering wheel to the left. The car teetered at the apex of the corner, its weight shifting radically to the right, and for a moment, Julian was sure it was going to roll, that he was going to be crushed against the side of the road, within sight of his target.
But it didn’t roll; with a deafening, high-pitched scream, the tyres dug into the loose surface, found just enough grip, and bit. The
jeep exploded around the corner, back on to the straight dirt road, and shot towards the squat structure that rose ahead of it.
The guard post, hidden from all but the most intrepid of public eyes, was a small square building, dug into the desert floor beside a long red and white barrier that covered the entire width of the road. As Julian thundered towards it, the square shape of the pickup truck still looming in his rear-view mirror, he saw the dark silhouette of a man stand up from a desk, grab something from the wall and run out towards the road. When Julian was twenty metres from the barrier, he slammed on his brakes, and the jeep skidded to a squealing, crunching halt.
Julian shoved the door open, leapt out of the car and immediately threw his hands in the air as the pick-up truck screeched to a halt behind him and a dark shape ran through the dust towards him from the guard post. The dust swirled as he saw two men leap out of the pick-up truck, M16 assault rifles clutched in their hands. They ran towards him, but the guard from the post arrived first, stopping two metres away from Julian, training an enormous M4 carbine on his chest, and shouting at him through the cloud of orange dust.
“Down on the—”
“Code F-357-X!” Julian shouted, and even through the dust he saw the guard’s eyes widen. “I need you to take me to General Allen. Right now.”
The two men from the pick-up truck arrived at Julian’s side, and twisted his arms instantly behind his back. He bent forward as the pressure on his shoulders forced him down, but then the guard shouted for them to release him, and the pressure disappeared. He stood back up straight, and looked at the two men who had chased him along the road. They were standing still, looks of confusion on their faces, their eyes hidden behind reflective sunglasses.
Hired security
, Julian thought.
Thank God they recognise the chain of command.
The guard, who was still pointing his M4 at Julian, wore the dark blue uniform of the United States Air Force with the gold bars on his shoulders that denoted he was a Captain. He looked at the two perimeter guards, then barked at them.
“Get back in your vehicle!” he shouted. “Go back to your station and forget this ever happened! Do you understand?”
The two guards stared at him, then nodded their assent, anger and embarrassment written across their faces. They trudged back to their pick-up, and a moment later they were gone, back the way they had come.