Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (15 page)

She stared at me sharply.

“If this gets out, that the hippie Helsing activist Coleman has been kidnapped, mutilated and likely killed by a GO, it would be incendiary. The GO rights movement would be in uproar. Conspiracy theories, rioting in the streets, who knows what else? This woman is like some kind of saint to them.”

Cloves rubbed the bridge of her nose, pacing the floor.

“The Mankind Movement would leap on it as evidence of the GOs’ evil nature. Clashes between the two factions would be inevitable.”

She made the word sound apocalyptic.

“Cabal and, by extension, your precious Blue Lab would be caught right in the middle of the whole steaming pile. How would we explain our involvement, why we have two morgue lockers full of teeth?”

She stopped marching up and down in front of the screen to stare me down, pointing the remote control at me to emphasise her words.

“We need to get on top of this
now
,” she said. “This isn’t just some random serial killer, I’m sure of it. There’s a bigger agenda at play here.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“We?” she blinked at me, her expression incredulous. “Listen, Harkness, I pulled your fat out of the fire last night at the GO club because right now, you are the
only
tenuous link I have to the GOs. But let me make sure you have this straight: we are
not
partners on this. There is no ‘we’.
I
am going to HQ to see what we’ve got on these bloody encrypted files.
You
, Doctor, are going to work. Act normal, do your day job, and when the sun goes down and the vamps are up, call your bloody source.”

“Allesandro?” I was taken aback. “You seriously want me to contact him again? You told me last night you didn’t trust him and that I shouldn’t either.”

“That’s true, I don’t and you shouldn’t,” she said. “But we
were
right to sniff around him. His boss is clearly involved in this somehow. We need his intel, whatever it is. Arrange another meeting.”

She held up her hands to silence me before I could protest.

“Just … be more
subtle
this time.”

She folded her arms and glared at me.

“You’ll be on your own tonight. I won’t be there to watch your back. I have a fundraiser to go to.”

“I’m sorry, a fundraiser?” I asked incredulously.

This seemed a little out of left field when I had just been told that the evil tooth-fairy had struck again.

“I have a day job to maintain too,” she grimaced. “As Cabal’s PR. I have an interview with that bloody Channel Seven reporter at noon, and then this evening I’m representing the Cabal at Marlin Scott’s business expo. I can’t shirk my other duties just to chase vampires around the city with you.”

Marlin Scott was a name I knew. He was a powerful figure in our city, a wealthy entrepreneur and high society blue-blood businessman who had made his sizeable fortune designing the gate technology for the wall. He had worked closely with the Bonewalkers on its construction. Nothing makes you rich more than being the only person able to keep the hordes of mutant death at bay.

Marlin Scott now owned roughly half the industry in New Oxford. He was also, if I remembered correctly, a very vocal Mankind Movement campaigner.

“Will you call me when you decrypt the files?” I asked.

The Cabal Servant looked at me as though I were something she had accidentally stepped in.

“I’ll call you if I have any
use
for you,” Cloves replied.

Honestly, it truly warmed me to the heart how close we two had become of late.

19

I took a taxi and headed back to my place to change before I headed into the lab. I figured it would be safe enough during daylight when all the GOs were ‘sleeping’, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to turn up to work dressed like Joan Collins. I’d had quite enough of wearing other people’s clothes in the last twenty four hours.

My flat was a shambolic mess. For a moment I wondered if Gio and his vampire clan had come round last night and turned the place over, maybe looking for me or the mystery files, but then I remembered it always looked like this. I really had to get around to tidying.

There were no messages on my answer phone, which worried me a little. Not that is was usually full, but Lucy hadn’t called me back. Had she got home alright after the club? I reasoned she had probably gone it alone after we got separated, probably onto another club. She was a seasoned Helsing, I had to remind myself. She could probably look after herself.

Probably.

I wasn’t reassured. I was such a bad liar, I couldn’t even lie to myself.

It was past ten by the time I got to Blue Lab, scanned myself in, descended to BL4 and made my way along our ultraviolet corridor.

I felt inexplicably guilty as I entered the lab proper and saw Griff at his station, same as always in his white lab coat, his glasses reflecting the data which currently surged across his screen. Everything looked normal. I fervently hoped Lucy hadn’t mentioned anything to him about our painting the town red.

“Morning boss,” he said, looking up as I entered. “I wondered if I was the only one bothering today. Did you get that admin done for Trevelyan yesterday okay? We missed you down here at the coal-face.”

“Admin?” I asked, blinking at him blankly for a second before I remembered my excuses for leaving yesterday. “Oh yes … That. Fine.”

I frowned as I shrugged out of my coat, glancing at the empty workstation.

“What do you mean the only one bothering? Where’s Lucy?”

Griff shrugged, unconcerned, not looking up from his screen.

“Hasn’t shown up yet,” he said simply. “What with the scary old bulldog, Trevelyan, and you both avoiding the office lately, I half-wondered if the three of you had gone off to form a travelling circus.”

He stuck out his bottom lip, making it tremble.

“I sure been awful lonely, Doc,” he said in a fake American accent. “But hey, you’re in now, and you’re going to be glad you bothered.”

He was smiling at me like it was Christmas morning. I immediately felt suspicious.

“Why, what is it?”

“I have some
very
interesting results for you.”

I was deeply worried about Lucy, but I tried not to let it show.

“What results?” I asked, slipping my lab coat on.

Griff led me excitedly to the rat pens, practically dancing with contained excitement. The pens are located at the rear of BL4, where we keep all our test subjects in a tall bank of individually stacked cages.

“Say good morning … to Brad.” Griff grinned with a flourish.

I peered into the numbered cage. A large white rat stared back at me placidly, its tiny eyes like drops of blood.

This was astonishing in itself because all around it, the other twenty-two rats were throwing their little bodies violently around their respective cages, slamming against the walls repeatedly. Their flanks were matted with scabs and crusted blood, muzzles pink with foam.

This was the usual state of the rats in our lab: frenzied, violent, and dangerous. We had made them this way. Each was deliberately infected with DNA samples taken from the Pale.

Cruel yes, I’m sure P.E.T.A wouldn’t approve, but how else were we going to develop a successful retardant? The sacrifice of a few for the good of the many, right? And yes, I’m aware I sound like Veronica Cloves.

Angelina had been just like them, furious and rabid, until we had injected her with the Epsilon strain. She had calmed for a couple of hours at least. Right before she exploded in an exciting, artistic, but scientifically redundant manner.

“
This
is Brad?” I stared, open-mouthed.

The calm rodent delicately cleaned its long muzzle with a tiny paw. He was a model of normalcy. I stared at Griff, wide-eyed.

“How long has he been like this?”

Griff checked his watch.

“Nineteen hours, thirty minutes,” he said proudly. “Angelina lasted four hours before she went critical.”

“Is this Epsilon?” I said.

He nodded.

“I ran the numbers again, like you told me to. I checked our existing data against the dailies that we’d gathered overnight. You weren’t here to consult, but I had the idea to reduce the potency of the inhibitor. I took a bit of a leap. It’s basically a more diluted version of Epsilon, but conversely a larger dose. I’ve sent the figures to your workstation.”

He was leaning down next to me, peering into the cage proudly like God looking at Adam. He smelled faintly of the cinnamon bun he’d had for breakfast, mixed with chemicals. My eyes were glued to the non-homicidal rat, but I could
feel
Griff grinning next to me.

“This is our best result so far.”

“Don’t jinx us!” I said, swatting him on the arm, but I couldn’t help but be astonished.

I wasn’t going to jump for joy and declare Brad the first rat to ever be successfully cured of the Pale virus, but this was astonishing work. If we had managed to develop a workable retardant…

“Maintain this dosage,” I instructed my assistant. “This is bloody excellent work, Griff. Clearly I need to leave you alone with the rats more often.”

“Yeah, thanks for that, boss,” he said wryly with a roll of his eyes. “Hey, how about we go wild? A celebratory Starbucks?”

I agreed, if only because it got Griff out of the lab and off on an errand for a while. With Lucy absent, there was something I wanted to do in private.

I know I should have been grinning. This could be the biggest scientific breakthrough since the wars began if it panned out. This was my life’s work, for God’s sake, my magnum opus.

Yet all I could think about right now was the GO rights protester Jennifer Coleman and Trevelyan. Two women and a pair of pliers wielded by a vampire killer who was surely even less pleasant than the one who had mind-melded me last night.

There was something I wanted to do.

As soon as Griff left the lab, I fired up my workstation. He had indeed sent me the figures for the revised Epsilon formula. I fully intended to look over them just as soon as people stopped being inconveniently kidnapped and tortured around me. But for now I guiltily dismissed the data. Instead, I opened my most secret and invisible sub-sectors and data files.

I wasn’t entirely stupid and I still didn’t trust Cabal to tell me anything they didn’t need to. When I had initially found the files Trevelyan had dumped on my station and transferred them to a data stick for Cloves, I had also made a copy for myself at the same time.

It was still heavily encrypted and there was nothing I could do to unscramble it on my own, but what had caught my eye at the time had been what was
attached
to the encrypted file. Trevelyan’s Blue Lab security clearance codes, all of them.

I had been told by Servant Leon Harrison that Trevelyan was head of other, more ‘sensitive’, departments than just my own little kingdom. Now I wanted to know what other pies she’d had her fingers in.

With a deft flick across the screen, I sent the codes to the printer. My heart was racing, expecting an alarm to go off somewhere in the building or for Griff to reappear at the wrong moment. Stealing higher clearance at Blue Lab is pretty much treason. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my monitor had fired a death ray at me.

However, nothing happened other than a security pass sliding innocently off the printer, bearing my boss’ name, a rather unflattering photographic likeness and about a thousand megabytes of data squeezed into an elaborate barcode. The printer had even laminated the pass for me, which was so thoughtful I gave it a little pat of approval.

Nervously I pocketed the swipe-pass, shoving it deep down into my lab coat pocket. As an afterthought, I deleted my print history from the workstation. I had no idea how effective this was, but it made me feel slightly better.

I re-hid the encrypted files and read through the clearance codes.

BL4
Toxicology
; this was us, obviously.
BL10
M
.
A
; no idea what that was.
BL26
Archives
; pretty self-explanatory.
BL29
Development
; same again.

So Trevelyan had been busy in, or had at least had access to, four separate departments including our own. We barely knew what the other parts of Blue Lab were working on. Everything was sensitive here, everything classified. Anyone working in any given sector, on any given level, only knew their own work.

After sitting at my workstation for a while, tapping the laminated pass nervously against the table and occasionally glancing over at Brad the rat who was determinedly not exploding, I decided to bite the bullet and stop being a complete pussy.

It was time to take a walk.

I haven’t always made the most sensible decisions. Returning to the ground floor atrium, getting into a different access elevator and swiping Vyvienne Trevelyan’s extremely personal security pass, I reasoned, was possibly the most stupid so far.

The amount of trouble I could get myself into for breaking protocol like this was mind-bogglingly immense, but I’m a scientist; curiosity is my nature. At random I pressed the button for level 10. MA. It seemed as good a place to start as any.

I was actually surprised when the lift began to smoothly descend. I had half expected that Cabal would have rescinded my boss’ clearance the second she had gone AWOL. I pictured metal bars descending with a clang and trapping me guiltily in the elevator until a troop of stone-faced security Ghosts turned up to escort me to Leon Harrison to explain myself. Cloves was a pain in my backside, Harrison actually scared me.

But the lift, evidently satisfied that I was Trevelyan, dropped me down into the darkness gracefully. I guess Cabal hadn’t counted on anyone else having access to her clearance.

The doors pinged open ten stories below street level. I took in my surroundings.

There was no plushly carpeted reception area here, no potted plants. It was nothing like the level where I’d had my cosy meeting with the nameless Godfather. Luckily it also wasn’t like BL4, my level, with its palm-reader pad and iris scanner security. Here there was just a long concrete corridor, with heavy metal doors set either side. It looked like I had stumbled into the boiler room or some kind of maintenance level.

No one seemed to be around to question me, which was good as I hadn’t bothered to think up any reason to be down here. For good measure, I clipped Trevelyan’s ID to my coat and made my way forward, my lab shoes making hushed whispers on the bare concrete floor.

The doors were locked and windowless on both sides, I tried them all. They were numbered like cells in functional black stencils. At the far end of the long corridor, once I had passed ten or more doors on either side, the corridor opened into a circular area with bank of workstations. They were all unmanned, but one of the screens was lit.

I glanced around. To my left, beyond the workstations, the corridor continued around a bend and presumably deeper into whatever this complex was. Whoever was meant to currently be on duty here was absent. Maybe they had gone to stretch their legs or take a bathroom break, grab a coffee. Ah well. Their prostate problem was my blessing.

I slid into the chair and ran my hand across the screen to activate it. The system purred awake and silently demanded identification.

I swiped Trevelyan’s pass on the side of the glass monitor. Words appeared on the screen.

Trevelyan, Vyvienne. Welcome.

Below the words, an empty box with the dreaded description:
Password
.

Crap.

My fingers hovered over the keys. I had no way of knowing what Trevelyan’s password might be. I knew next to nothing about the woman, other than that she made my life unpleasant on a daily basis.

On the off-chance that the universe had a sense of irony, I typed ‘password’.

The screen flashed red, and then returned to the login screen.

Incorrect password, attempt 1 of 3.

I hadn’t really expected anything else.

Hmm, think this through, Phoebe. This woman had heavily encrypted data and hidden it in my workstation. Whatever her password was, it wasn’t going to be something as simple as her first pet cat’s name or her favourite movie star.

I checked the code printed along the barcode on her swipe pass. It was fourteen digits long. I typed them in.

Again the screen flashed red.

Incorrect password, attempt 2 of 3.

Shit. This was always a lot simpler in the movies.