Authors: Scott G. Mariani
London
VIA personnel needed only a brief glimpse of the look of thunder on Alex’s face to know to get out of her way as she marched towards her office. She hadn’t been back to HQ since Baxter Burnett had given her the slip and promptly vanished. Working from the hotel room that was her base until she could find another suitable apartment to rent, she’d spent countless hours on the phone, using up every trick and every contact she could think of to find out where he’d gone. Nothing. There was no point in just scouring the streets. He was gone, and now the only option left open to her was to admit failure. There would be no way to make this look good on the official report she’d now have to write up.
Alex reached her office door, wrenched it open sullenly, slammed it shut behind her and was about to hang up her coat and bag when she stopped in her tracks.
Cecil Gibson was lounging behind the desk with his feet up on a stack of her paperwork. His close-set eyes seemed to glitter as he saw her walk in.
‘You’re in my chair, Gibson,’ she said.
Gibson clicked his tongue disapprovingly. ‘I know that fool Harry Rumble cut you an awful lot of slack, but let me tell you this, honey bunny. Your days of insubordination are over. You answer to me now.’
‘All right, then get the fuck out of my chair,
sir
. That do you? I’m busy.’
But far from flying into the indignant rage she’d secretly wanted to provoke, Gibson just smiled knowingly. Something was up.
‘Maybe you didn’t hear me,’ she said suspiciously. ‘I have work to do.’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t have time for that right now. You need to be getting ready.’
Hmm.
Something definitely
was
up. ‘Ready for what?’ she asked.
‘Ready for your visitors,’ Gibson said. ‘You’re in the deepest shit imaginable, Bishop. They’ve been waiting for you upstairs.’
‘Who’s been waiting for me upstairs?’
‘You’ll see.’ Gibson glanced at his watch. Right on cue, there was a loud hammering on the door, and Gibson sprang out from behind the desk to answer it.
The little stoat must have called upstairs the second Queck admitted her through security, Alex thought. Her mind raced to understand what this was about. If it was some kind of disciplinary hearing, it could surely only be about one thing. Could the VIA top brass already know about Baxter Burnett going rogue on her? Had his little escapade outside the school made it onto YouTube already? She could see the headlines: ‘
BAD BOY BURNETT ON RAMPAGE!’
‘
MOVIE STAR IN CHILD ATTACK HORROR!
’
Gibson flung open the door with a dramatic flourish that looked like he’d been practising it in the mirror. Alex blinked as her visitors came striding into the office. Leading the way, nose in the air and robes trailing behind her, was Supremo Olympia Angelopolis. At her side strutted the figure of her PA, Ivo Donskoi: grizzled hair cropped military-style, small, narrow-chested, dark suit, a laptop under his arm. Four F.A.N.G. guards marched in behind them, shut the door and stood either side of it with their high-capacity assault weapons cocked and locked.
Alex was speechless. Gibson just had time to throw her a quick smirk before he went scurrying towards the Vampress. ‘Ma’am, it’s a great honour to welcome you in person to our—’
‘Quiet,’ Olympia commanded with a snap of her fingers. ‘I haven’t cancelled some very important meetings and come all this way to bandy words on ceremony. Ivo, if you please.’
Without a word, Ivo Donskoi shoved the paperwork on Alex’s desk to one side, set the laptop down on the desk and flipped it open. As the screen flashed into life, Alex found herself staring at the garish graphics of a website she’d never seen before.
‘Do you know what this is?’ the Vampress demanded. ‘No, I didn’t think you did.’
‘“They Lurk Amongst Us”?’ Alex said, peering at the screen. ‘Errol Knightly – bestselling author, vampire hunter. Uh-huh. Right.’ She looked up at the Supremo. ‘Come on. We’ve seen these types plenty of times before. It’s obvious this guy’s just a showman.’
Olympia’s lips tightened. ‘And it seems you’ve become the star of his little show, my dear.’
‘You’re going to have to explain what this is about,’ Alex said.
Donskoi cut in. ‘Ten days ago, your superior Harry Rumble sent you on a mission to investigate possible rogue vampire activity in our eastern Europe sector. Correct? We want to know what happened.’
‘It was in the Carpathian mountains,’ Alex said, even more baffled. ‘Out in the middle of nowhere. The VIA mainframe had flagged up a blog where some bunch of amateur wannabe vampire hunters were talking about going into this little rundown cottage in the woods where local rumour said there was a vampire. It was almost certainly going to be just another false alarm, but we decided to check it out. In the end, it turned out to be for real. It was one of the first signs that Gabriel Stone’s rebellion was about to kick off. I think the vampire was one of his Trad followers.’
‘And you dealt with the situation?’
‘Yes, I did. This was all in my report at the time. Why are we going back over it?’
Olympia smiled. ‘Let’s go through it again.’
Alex shrugged and went on. ‘Okay. The situation was messy. By the time I got there, the humans were already in trouble. Three of them, young guys in their twenties. The target took two of the humans down before I terminated him.’
‘And you followed the proper procedure?’
‘To the letter of the Fed regs. I injected the two dead humans with Nosferol to make sure they stayed that way, and gave the survivor a shot of Vambloc to kill his short-term memory. Then as an extra security measure I took out the whole place with an incendiary device. The report was logged with Harry Rumble and everything was gone through in the debriefing. I can’t understand what the problem is.’
‘Let me show you the problem, Agent Bishop,’ Donskoi said.
Locked in an office in another part of the VIA Headquarters, someone was furtively taking out a very unauthorised mobile phone and dialling a number that nobody else within the organisation could ever know about.
‘It’s me,’ the vampire whispered urgently, glancing at the door furtively, fearful that someone outside could be listening. ‘Have you got it?’
‘Yes,’ said Gabriel Stone’s voice on the other end of the line. He sounded tense. ‘We have it. The plan is in motion.’
‘There’s been an unexpected development,’ the vampire whispered. ‘Angelopolis is here. She flew in unannounced from Brussels yesterday. It was all kept hush-hush, but she’s in some kind of meeting with Bishop. The two of them are right here in the building.’
‘My man is on his way as we speak,’ Gabriel said.
‘Tell him to get here fast. Angelopolis
and
Bishop – we can get them both if we hurry.’
Donskoi reached down to the laptop and clicked to another page of the same website: www.theylurkamongstus.com. In the centre of the screen, a video clip began to download.
Alex’s gaze flicked sideways to the block of text that accompanied it.
STOP PRESS! Latest news from the front lines in the war against the Undead. For all you people out there who know the truth, and for all you doubting cynics who are about to be silenced . . . Errol Knightly is proud to present a sneak preview of the most sensational video evidence ever seen that VAMPIRES EXIST. Warning: what you are about to see is real, and not suitable for viewers of a sensitive dis position. Of the group of vampire hunters who captured this incredible footage in Romania, only one escaped with his life. Our technicians are hard at work cleaning up the rest of the footage and we guarantee that when you see the complete video, there will be no more excuses, no more doubters
. . . . YOU WILL BELIEVE.
‘What?’ Alex said. Nobody else spoke. She could feel their eyes on her as the video clip finished loading and the images began to play on the screen. Only then did she understand.
‘Oh, shit,’ she said.
‘You might say that,’ Gibson sneered.
The picture was grainy and indistinct, but Alex recognised the setting immediately as the dank, stinking basement of the semi-derelict cottage deep in the Romanian countryside where her mission had taken her. The greenish-hued images unfolded, jerkily but unmistakably, to a muffled, distorted soundtrack of wild screaming. The first human going down, writhing in a dark pool on the cellar floor; a blurred flash of brick wall; a snatched glimpse of the red-smeared face of the vampire, opening his mouth – just for a split second, the money-shot glimpse of his fangs, gleaming white in the murky shadows of the basement – before he grabbed the second human and ripped his throat out.
Alex had seen enough horror movies to know what a fake vampire looked like on a screen. This one didn’t look fake. He looked every bit as real as he had face to face.
‘But where was the camera?’ she muttered. ‘There
was
no camera. I’d have seen it.’
Gibson smirked. ‘Maybe you have some other explanation as to why we’re seeing this?’
‘Silence,’ Olympia said.
Now the hidden lens turned round to point in the opposite direction, and Alex’s mouth hung open as she saw herself onscreen, walking down the cellar steps. She was wearing the tight-fitting black combat kit she’d used for the job, carrying the Desert Eagle in its tactical holster. Her features were a little grainy but clearly recognisable.
‘What an entrance,’ Donskoi said. ‘Joan Crawford would have envied it.’
Alex couldn’t speak. She heard herself on the video clip saying ‘Surprise!’ Saw her hand go to her holster and draw the pistol.
Then, just about audible over the speakers:
‘Federation scum. Your time is over.’ The vampire’s voice.
The next few seconds of footage left no doubt as to what was happening in the cellar. The flash and boom of the gunshot. The scream of the vampire, falling into the shadows, the Nosferol already ravaging his body. The camera gave a violent wobble and seemed to turn away in horror.
It was then that Alex realised how the footage had been filmed. The surviving human had had some kind of miniature spy camera attached to him, turning whichever way he turned, seeing what he saw. It could have been anything, a badge, a button on his jacket.
Alex suddenly felt very cold and shaky. The worst was yet to come. She remembered what the human had said to her next, when he’d seen the way she’d destroyed the vampire with a single bullet to the chest:
‘How did you—’
And her reply, just before she’d injected him:
‘It takes a vampire to destroy a vampire properly.’
Immediately afterwards, she’d pumped her syringe-load of Vambloc under his ear, erasing his memory of everything that had just happened. Her comment to him had been no more than a throwaway line, intended for dramatic effect and meant to be instantly forgotten. Just a way to liven up a routine chore she’d been carrying out for decades.
But captured on digital audio, an admission like that to a human was a Federal crime that meant a one-way trip to Termination Row.
And Olympia had heard it loud and clear, Alex thought. This was it, then. Her fate was sealed.
But just as it reached the crucial moment, the footage cut off abruptly. In its place was a line of text that promised: ‘TO BE CONTINUED . . .’
Alex let out a long inward sigh of relief.
‘A fine day’s work that was, Agent Bishop,’ said Olympia.
‘How could I have known?’ Alex started to protest.
‘What happened to the human?’ Donskoi asked.
‘I carried him out of there, pumped full of Vambloc.’
‘With the camera intact,’ Gibson put in. ‘That’s one memory you didn’t erase.’
‘Why didn’t you dispose of him?’ Olympia demanded. ‘If you had destroyed the body, you would have destroyed the video evidence.’
‘My job is to terminate rogue vampires, not to kill humans. I thought that was just slightly against Federation laws?’
‘Your job,’ Olympia snapped, ‘is to protect and uphold the Federation. At all cost, vampire
or
human. The Federation laws are the code we expect our common vampire citizenry to abide by. For the sake of the greater good, however, those of us granted the appropriate authority may sometimes have to bend the rules in a considered fashion. I would have thought that you, as a senior agent, would have understood that.’ She paused, visibly seething. ‘Evidently not. And now, thanks to you, the humans know about us.
They know about the Federation
. The very thing we have most sought to avoid since its foundation. Concealment is, has always been, the whole purpose of its existence.’
‘Did you speak to the human, Agent Bishop?’ asked Donskoi, looking at her with the penetrating eye of a hardened interrogator. ‘Is there anything we should know about – anything you might have revealed that will be shown in the next instalment this Knightly posts on his website?’
Alex stared at Donskoi. Did he know the truth, or was he just cleverly trying to lure her into incriminating herself? She swallowed. ‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘I did the job I was trained and ordered to do, and I got out of there. That’s it.’
‘This Errol Knightly is gaining a great deal of publicity from his new book,’ Olympia said. ‘Drawing millions of humans to his website. I hope you realise how serious this is?’
‘With respect, I disagree,’ Alex said. ‘Ignore it, and it’ll soon be forgotten, along with all the fake footage of Yetis, ghosts and the Loch Ness monster. This is the
internet
, Supremo Angelopolis. It’s already so full of shit that nobody will take this seriously.’
‘We take it very seriously, Agent Bishop,’ Donskoi said. ‘We are not idiots. Within days, hours even, this footage will have spread virally across the entire web, and by then there will be nothing we can do to control the situation. We have technicians at work as we speak, attempting to hack and crash the site. That may buy us some time. But to avert this disaster fully, the footage must be destroyed at source.’
‘You have forty-eight hours,’ Olympia told her. ‘Starting from now. Find and destroy all copies of this video, any hard drives on which it is stored, and anyone who tries to stand in your way. You will then track down the human who sent the footage to Knightly and erase his memory permanently. Are these orders understood?’
Alex nodded, avoiding Gibson’s eye. She could feel delight radiating off him in warm waves.
‘Forty-eight hours, Agent Bishop,’ Olympia said. ‘Fail this time, and you have my word that you will face immediate Nosferol termination.’