“Thank you,” said Julian. “I need—”
“Shut up,” ordered the guard, the M4 pointing steadily at Julian’s heart. “If you move, I will shoot you. Is that clear?”
Julian nodded, his hands out in front of him, arms wide and submissive.
The guard moved his left hand from the rifle’s barrel, and pulled a radio from his belt. The gun didn’t so much as tremble as the Captain brought the handset to his ear, thumbed a button and repeated the code that Julian had given him. There was a burst of static and then a voice spoke to the guard, the words unclear to Julian, even with his trained ears. When the voice finished speaking, the Captain confirmed that he understood, then placed the radio back on his belt. He returned his hand to the M4, and looked at Julian with a professionally unreadable stare.
“You’re going to be collected,” the Captain said. “But make any sudden movement and I will shoot you. I don’t care who you are. Is that understood?”
Julian told him that it was. The two men stood, staring at each
other, the dust that had clouded the road now swirling lazily round their ankles, and after no more than a couple of minutes, they heard the rumble of an approaching vehicle over the idling motor of Julian’s jeep. The vehicle, a sand-brown Humvee, roared round the corner and screeched to a halt.
A man wearing a plain black uniform that reflected no light, even under the blinding desert sun, stepped out, regarded Julian with a look of incredulity, as though he had half-believed that the collection order he had received had been a practical joke, and ordered the guard soldier to stand down. The man did so, shooting Julian an expression of deep distrust as he returned to the guard post.
“Come with me, please,” said the black-clad figure, and nodded at the Humvee.
Julian stepped forward without replying, and climbed into the vehicle.
They drove through the guard post and into the barren hills that surrounded the facility. The Humvee’s engine roared, a huge cloud of thick dust blowing up from the wide rear tyres as they made their way on to the dry expanse of Groom Lake. Suddenly it lay before them: the sprawling collection of towers, buildings and hangars that comprised the experimental base. They drove past it without stopping, skirting the edge of the enormous runway, and followed the dirt road round the mountains and on to Papoose Lake.
At the base of the hills alongside the lake, a wide opening had been carved into the ancient rock, leading to a cavernous hangar, a gleaming semi-circle of white concrete and silver steel. Beneath this, descending eighteen storeys below the desert floor, lay the facility that the ufologists referred to, in hushed tones, as S-4: the headquarters
of National Security Division 9, the American supernatural enforcement Department that had been founded by Bertrand Willis in 1930.
The Humvee stopped inside the hangar, where a tall, powerfully built man in his late fifties was waiting for it. He was wearing the same all-black uniform as the driver, and carried himself with the upright demeanour of a lifelong soldier. He pushed his silver-grey hair back from his temples with one hand as he waited for the passenger to get out of the Humvee. Julian stepped out, smiled at the man and extended his hand. The grey-haired man pushed it aside, and embraced him in a crushing bear hug.
“Hello, Bob,” said Julian Carpenter. “It’s been a long time.”
“That it has,” replied General Robert Allen, the Director of NS9. “They told me you died.”
“Yes, sir. They thought I did.”
“I guess they were wrong then.”
“Yes, sir. About a lot of things.”
General Allen released his grip on Julian, took a step backwards and regarded him with a look of amazement on his face. “Is it really you?” he asked.
“It’s me, Bob,” replied Julian. “Really.”
“I believe you,” said General Allen, a grin on his face. “Come on. Let’s get you inside.”
He led Julian through the hangar, to the back wall where an enormous American eagle crest was bolted high above the floor, beneath which stood an iris-scanner sealed door. Allen lowered his eye to the scanner, waited for the green authorisation light to blink into life and pushed the heavy door open. They stepped through it and into a long grey corridor with an elevator at the end. As they walked down the corridor, Julian cast his mind back to the last time he had been in the NS9 facility.
God, 1985. That’s a lifetime ago.
They stepped into the elevator. General Allen keyed a button, and the car began to descend. The similarities between the NS9 base and the Loop were overwhelming, the result of the fact-finding mission Stephen Holmwood had sent Julian on more than two decades earlier. The Americans had recently finished the purpose-built facility he was now standing in, and Julian had been blown away by the scale and implementation of their vision. He had returned to England with an exhaustive series of recommendations, and the renovations that had turned the Loop into the place it now was had begun the following month.
As the elevator descended, General Allen glanced at Julian twice before he eventually spoke.
“I never believed what they said about you,” he said, in a low voice. “About what they said you’d done. I never believed it.”
“It’s OK,” replied Julian, favouring the General with a warm smile. “Tom Morris framed me well. And Blacklight was hurting, after John and George died. I don’t blame them for what they did.”
The elevator slid to a halt, and the doors opened on a corridor that was an almost exact replica of the cellblock in the bowels of the Loop. Julian rounded on General Allen, his face colouring red with anger.
“What the hell is this, Bob?” he demanded.
“I have to put you in a cell, Julian,” replied Allen, gently. His hand moved almost imperceptibly nearer to the butt of the Glock pistol on his hip. “Until we get this all straightened out. You’re supposed to be dead and you just walked in out of the desert. What would you do if you were me?”
Julian’s anger subsided. “It’s OK,” he said. “I get it.”
The two men walked towards the security airlock that sealed off
the twin rows of cells, and the NS9 Director asked the question he really wanted to know the answer to.
“The night you died, Julian. How did you—”
Julian interrupted him as they came to a halt outside a heavy metal door. “That’s going to have to wait, Bob. I’m sorry.”
General Allen nodded, and told Julian to step into the airlock. Julian did as he was told, felt the familiar moment of claustrophobia as the door sealed itself shut behind him, the rush of the gas as it billowed up from his ankles, and the sensation of relief as the second door opened, and he stepped through it. Thirty seconds later General Allen emerged from the same door, and they began to walk down the corridor.
“I need you to do me one favour, Bob,” said Julian. “You can lock me up, I’ll go quietly, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know. But I need one favour.”
“Name it.”
“I need you to speak to Henry and ask him to let me see my son. I think he’s in danger.”
“Jamie?” asked Allen. “Christ, I saw the report on the termination of Alexandru Rusmanov. Absolutely incredible, a kid his age. You must be proud.”
A fierce look of love crossed Julian’s face. “I am.”
General Allen looked at the expression on Julian’s face, and his own crumpled with concern. “Oh God,” he said. “Julian – do you know—”
“I know what happened to my wife, Bob. She’s safe, for now. Jamie might not be.”
They reached the end of the corridor, past the long lines of empty-fronted cells with their shimmering UV walls. Allen keyed a code into a door as nondescript as all the others, and pushed it
open. Julian stepped through it, and into the cellblock reserved for those prisoners who did not qualify as supernatural. There were no UV barriers here, just thick, sturdy-looking green metal doors set into concrete walls. Allen keyed his code in again, this time on to a pad beside the first of the cells. Its lock disengaged with a series of rumbling clunks and thuds, and it swung open.
“Where the hell have you been, Julian?” Allen asked, staring closely at his old friend. “Why didn’t you come in, after Lindisfarne? They cleared you of all charges.”
“I wasn’t ready to be an Operator again,” replied Julian. “And I had something I needed to do.”
“What was that?”
Julian took a deep breath. “Find a cure. For Marie, and for everyone else. I’ve been all over the country, tracking down Adam. You know the legend, right?”
“Sure. The one vampire who was cured.”
“That’s the one,” replied Julian. He paused, for a long moment. “I found him, Bob.”
Allen recoiled. “You found him?” he asked, incredulous. “What do you mean you found him? You mean he’s real?”
“As real as you and me,” replied Julian. “He lives out in the desert in California, miles from anywhere. He doesn’t know how he was cured, but he was. And I think I know where, if not how.”
“Where?”
“Here,” said Julian. “Right here, Bob.”
General Allen started, the look on his face one of confusion. “What do you mean here? We’ve never—”
“This was before you were Director,” interrupted Julian. “Probably fifteen years ago. He was taken in San Francisco, and woke up in a high-security lab, somewhere in the desert. Sound familiar?”
General Allen said nothing, so Julian continued. “He remembers a doctor, a scientist, who was running the show. He was youngish, but he had grey hair. Adam never knew his name.”
Allen flinched.
“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” asked Julian, and the General nodded. “Who was he, Bob? And what the hell were you letting him do?”
After a long pause, General Allen looked directly at Julian, and began to talk.
“It was the nineties. The Cold War was over, and the USSR had dissolved. All our missiles, our orbital defence platforms, they all became obsolete overnight. There were a hundred former Soviet factions that sprang up, all over the Caucasus. We were drowning in new intelligence, trying to formulate new strategies and tactics. The world had changed completely; our enemy was gone, and had been replaced by chaos. Then a rumour came out of Polyarny, from an informant in the SPC; a rumour that they were experimenting on vampires, trying to isolate the genetic strand that caused the condition.”
“So?” said Julian. “Abraham Van Helsing was working on that over a century ago, trying to find a cure.”
“You don’t understand,” said Allen. “They weren’t trying to cure vampirism; they were trying to weaponise it. Preserve the strengths, remove the weaknesses. Create a class of supersoldiers that were invulnerable, immortal.”
“So you did the same thing,” said Julian. It wasn’t a question.
General Allen nodded.
“Did you ever actually ask the SPC what they were doing?” asked Julian.
“No. The Joint Chiefs didn’t think we should show our hand.”
“That’s what happens when you have Joint
Chiefs
. There have always been too many people you have to answer to, Bob.”
“Two of the world’s largest continents are under our jurisdiction, Julian. You can afford to only have two or three people know about Department 19 because you only cover a little corner of Europe, and let the Germans and the Russians do all the heavy lifting.”
Allen smiled at Julian, who broke into a grin. This was an old conversation, so old that it was almost rehearsed by now.
“So this doctor,” said Julian. ‘Where did he come from?”
“His name was Reynolds,” replied Allen. “And I don’t know where he came from, I really don’t. He arrived from the Pentagon, security-cleared, background-checked, ready to work. The name was an alias of course. One of my staff thought he might have been a genetics professor from Harvard who was supposed to have died a few years earlier, but we didn’t know for sure. Orders came down for me to leave him alone, so I did. Was happy to do so, to be honest with you. His lab was… well. You and I have seen things we wish we could forget, right?”
Julian nodded.
“That lab was as bad as anything I’ve ever seen. It was a hi-tech torture chamber, nothing more. There were gene sequencers, and supercomputers, and teams of biologists and geneticists and doctors and surgeons, but there was no hiding what was going on down there; he was spending a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to cut vampires open and see how they worked.”
“Jesus,” said Julian, in a low voice.
“Six months in I got a call from Yuri Petrov, highest encryption, asking me why we were trying to make tame vampires. I told him, off the record, that we were responding to what we had been told they were doing. He flatly denied it, and I believed him. So I went
to Washington and told the Joint Chiefs and the President that we were acting on false intelligence, that the SPC threat wasn’t real. The President, to his credit, ordered me to suspend Reynolds’ work, pending an intelligence review. But by the time I got back here, he was gone.”
“What do you mean he was gone?”
“I mean he was gone. We chipped him when he arrived, but it had stopped transmitting. His lab was stripped clean – he had run electromagnets over the hard drives – and no one in the whole facility had seen him leave. His staff were all dead from exposure to nerve gas, and all the vampire subjects had been destroyed.”
“Didn’t you look for him, Bob? Jesus, he could still be out there somewhere.”
“I know; he probably is. I ordered his Pentagon records declassified, but they were gone, stripped out by a remotely activated virus. No one knew anything about him, and there was no way to find him.”
Julian looked at Allen, a sudden realisation darkening his face. “He faked the intelligence from the SPC, didn’t he? So he could get government funding for his work.”
“I don’t have any proof of that,” replied Allen. “But I’m sure he did, yes.”
“It worked, though, Bob,” said Julian, urgency rising in his voice. “Whatever he was doing down there, it worked. Adam was cured. I saw it for myself with my own eyes. And now you’re telling me that the data that led to the most important scientific discovery of all time is gone, taken by some lunatic?”
Allen nodded, slowly. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”