“I told her there was no way out, and then she did start to cry, the tears glowing bright red as they rolled away from the light in her eyes. I tried to calm her down, I told her I would stay with her, that I wouldn’t let anything happen to her, and she looked at me with this terrible hope in her eyes, like she wanted to believe me, but didn’t know whether she dared to do so.
“I led her to the corner of the ballroom, away from the worst of it, and I wrapped my arms round her, hiding her as best I could, even if I couldn’t shield her from the screams and the sounds of violence. We stayed like that all through the night, until there was an hour or so until dawn, and the doors were unlocked. Only vampires walked out of the room; everyone else was dead.
“I led her out, avoiding the gazes of the other monsters, and for a terrible second, I saw Alexandru looking at me through the crowd as I left his brother’s house. I lowered my head, and forced myself not to run, and then we were outside, on West Eighty-Fifth Street, and I picked the girl up and ran with her into the park and never looked back.”
Adam stubbed out the cigarette. Smith watched him do so, saw that the man’s fingers were trembling as he pressed the smouldering end against the wood of the bench.
“We hid in a storm drain on the north side of the park, and waited for the sun to go down. In those few hours, we learnt everything there was to know about each other, and we realised that we loved each other, instantly, and completely.
“She was twenty, from a little town in the Midwest. She’d been at summer camp in the Catskills that summer, when something had taken her in the woods and turned her. She survived the hunger, although she never told me how – it was the one thing she would never talk about – but her family thought she was dead, and she was too scared to go home and show them what had happened to her. Her father was a Methodist preacher, and she thought he would believe she was possessed by the devil.
“So she drifted east, and got picked up by an old vampire in Boston, who took her in as his pet. She told me the things he made her do – what she did to survive that first hunger was the
only secret she ever kept from me – and for years I swore that I would hunt him down and kill him. But she didn’t want me to, so I never did. And he had brought her down to New York for the party, so in some way I suppose, I ought to be grateful to him; I never would have met her if he hadn’t.
“We waited until the sun went down, and we started running west. She didn’t know whether the old vampire would try to find her, and I didn’t think Alexandru would give a damn about me, but we couldn’t be sure. We zigzagged all over the Midwest, up and down the Pacific coast, until eventually we settled in San Francisco.”
Adam paused, and looked at Smith, his face hot and tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “Her name was Emily,” he said. “And we spent the next twenty years together.”
Smith sat alone on the bench, staring out over the canyon. Adam had excused himself for a moment, and gone inside the cabin. The effort of telling his story had visibly taken its toll on the man, and Smith had a feeling there was worse to come.
Part of me doesn’t want to know. I don’t want to know why Emily isn’t here with him. I don’t want to know how he was cured. I just want to leave him in peace, with his memories, with all he has left. But I have to know. I’ve come too far to back out now.
“I’m sorry,” said Adam, rounding the corner of the cabin and retaking his seat beside Smith. “I’ve never told anyone this story, not willingly at least, and it’s hard. Harder than I thought it would be.”
“I’m sorry to put you through it,” replied Smith. “Believe me, I wouldn’t unless I was sure it was important.”
“I believe you,” said Adam, and forced a smile. “And I think you’re right, although I don’t know why. So where was I? San Francisco, right?”
Smith nodded, and Adam continued.
“We lived as man and wife for twenty years, in the Mission. Boring night jobs, boring lives really, but we had each other, and we were happy. We fed on blood we bought from a Halal butcher in the Castro, kept ourselves to ourselves, and lived, like any other couple. But over the years, and then the decades, Emily started to change.
“It was little things at first, like it always is: bad moods, arguments, fights. Nothing I thought meant anything. But she wasn’t happy, and I didn’t realise she wasn’t until it was too late to save her. I thought we had our condition under control; we never used our strength or our speed, we drank only the necessary amount of blood to keep us alive and we lived in every other way like ordinary humans.
“But we weren’t ageing. We never met our neighbours, never socialised in the same places too often, so there was no chance of detection, which I thought was all that mattered. But it wasn’t. I thought immortality was the only good thing to come out of what had been done to us, because it meant I could spend forever with her. She didn’t feel the same way.”
“Why not?” asked Smith.
“She thought it made everything meaningless. That everything, experience, intimacy, even love, was insubstantial, that nothing that had no end could ever mean anything. I tried to convince her otherwise, tried to convince her that our lives had meaning because we loved each other, and for a while she seemed to be placated. But she wasn’t; she was just a much better actress than I had given her credit for. One evening I woke up, and she was gone. There was a note in the kitchen, telling me she loved me, and that she was sorry. And I never saw her again.”
Adam lowered his head, and tears fell steadily on to the dry desert earth, creating tiny dark craters in the orange sand. Smith watched, his heart breaking for the man sitting beside him. After several minutes, he spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I truly am.”
Adam raised his head, and forced the kind of smile that is only available to those unlucky people to whom the worst thing that could possibly happen to them has already happened and who are faced with having to somehow find a way to carry on, to simply keep breathing in and out; a smile of utter tragedy and bewilderment, without a flicker of happiness in it.
“Thanks,” he replied, his voice little more than a whisper. “I appreciate it. It was the worst moment of my life, even after all the ones that followed it. But it still doesn’t justify what I did next.”
Jamie left Matt arranging the piles of files and folders on his shelves, and opened the door to his own quarters next door.
Matt had been thrilled to have been given a room of his own, and even more so because it was the one next to Jamie’s. He had no possessions to speak of, merely the small rucksack he had been carrying when he had been rescued in the park near his home. He had only a single change of clothes, which he had dutifully hung in the narrow wardrobe at the foot of his bed, and a small framed photograph of him and his parents and sister, which he placed carefully on his small bedside table. Then he had set about making sense of the great mass of papers he had been sent by Professor Talbot, and Jamie had told him that he would be back in half an hour, ready to show him round the rest of the Loop.
Inside his room, Jamie flopped down on to his bed and closed his eyes, just for a moment. It had been, even by the standards of life inside Department 19, an exhausting day, and it was barely noon.
His conversation with Valentin had been a rollercoaster: unsettling, occasionally terrifying, but ultimately thrilling. His conversation afterwards, with Admiral Seward, had been nothing of the sort; the
revelation that there was even the slightest possibility that Frankenstein was still alive had destabilised him so completely that he could now understand why it was obvious that the Director had wrestled with the decision of whether to tell him, or leave him in the dark.
But his time with Matt had made him feel better, as talking to the boy when he was comatose in the infirmary had done, six months earlier. There was something about him that put Jamie’s mind at ease, and he thought he had figured out what it was: Matt was one of those people whose outlook was so positive, so enthusiastic, that it made Jamie feel churlish and spoilt for failing to see the same wonder in everything that Matt saw. He was not naive, or annoying in his positivity; it just radiated out of his pores, infecting those around him.
Jamie had read his file while he was being held in seclusion in the infirmary, had seen the history of bullying that had started when Matt was no more than six or seven, and his heart had gone out to the teenager.
He knew bullying, knew it very well; knew what it was like to feel worthless and alienated from everyone around you, to want so desperately to fit in even though you understand that it’s not a choice you get to make, because some part of the very person you are is what the bullies hate, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
But Jamie had only been on the receiving end for a couple of years, in the aftermath of his father’s death, when the official story was that Julian Carpenter had been a traitor to his country. Matt had been bullied since almost the first day he walked through the gates of a school, and Jamie knew, just from the information in the file, exactly why. Matt was prodigiously clever, had no interest
in sport, loved books, and hated rudeness and impoliteness. He might as well have walked into school with a target on his back.
A fierce thread of anger ran up Jamie’s spine as he thought about the tormenting his new friend must have endured. He could picture it all too clearly; he had seen it done to the quiet, intelligent kids at every school he had been to, was ashamed to admit that he had participated on occasion himself when he was younger, although with little appetite. It had been a self-preservation thing, the horrible choice that so many schoolchildren face, of whether to help make someone else unhappy or risk drawing the wrath of the bullies on to themselves by refusing to do so.
No one will mess with him again
, he thought.
Not here. And not anywhere else, if I’m around. I dare anyone to try.
Jamie pulled his console out of his pocket, and quickly typed a message to Kate and Larissa, telling them he had been ordered to show Matt round the base, and asking if they wanted to come with him. Two quick return beeps told him that they did, so he closed his eyes again while he waited for them to arrive, and was fast asleep in less than thirty seconds.
He was roused from a deep, dreamless void by a distant thudding sound that grew louder and louder as he drifted awake. Cursing, Jamie hauled himself off his bed, crossed the room and opened the door. Standing in the corridor outside were Kate and Larissa.
“What took you so long?” asked Larissa. “We were starting to worry.”
“I fell asleep,” replied Jamie, groggily. “Hold on while I grab Matt.”
He walked out into the corridor and knocked on the door to Matt’s new quarters. He smiled as he heard a frenzy of movement, before the door burst open and Matt’s excited face peered out at him.
“Hey,” said Jamie. “How’s the sorting going?”
“I got bored,” smiled Matt. “So I haven’t really done it. Are you going to show me round now?”
“That’s the plan,” said Jamie. “Come on.”
Matt nodded enthusiastically, then stepped out into the corridor, pulling the door shut behind him. He followed Jamie the tiny distance along the corridor and through the open door, to where Kate and Larissa were waiting for them.
“Hello,” Matt said, shyly, as the two girls looked up at him. “Nice to see you again.”
Kate and Larissa smiled at each other.
“You too,” said Kate. “You settling in OK?”
“Definitely,” said Matt. “I’ve got about a thousand things to read for Professor Talbot, and then Dr Yen is going to brief me on the progress of—”
He stopped, and a horrified look emerged on his face. He looked over at Jamie, his eyes wide.
“It’s OK,” said Jamie, gently. “They know about the Lazarus Project.”
Matt let out a huge sigh. “Oh, that’s good,” he said, breathlessly. “I’m sorry, I just get so excited.”
“It’s great that you do,” said Larissa. “You might want to be a bit more careful, outside of the people in this room, though.”
Matt nodded.
“All right,” said Jamie. “Let’s get started then. Matt, is there anything you particularly want to see first?”
Matt looked at Jamie, a mischievous smile emerging on his open face.
“Did I hear someone say you had a plane?” he asked.
Jamie woke the next morning feeling deeply conflicted.
The prospect of spending several hours on the cellblock again, as Major Turner picked up the interrogation of Valentin Rusmanov, was not the most appealing, especially when his mind was dominated by the Field Investigation Team, who were somewhere out there looking for any clues that Frankenstein was still alive. But his own conversation with the youngest Rusmanov brother had gone better than he or, he suspected, anyone else had expected, and he felt that he had proved himself again, to Admiral Seward and the others.
He showered quickly, and returned to find a message from Admiral Seward beeping on his portable console, a message telling him to attend a briefing in the Ops Room. This had become such a regular occurrence since he had been placed on the Zero Hour Task Force that it no longer even qualified as surprising, or disconcerting. He simply got dressed, then headed towards the lift that would take him up through the Loop.
Jamie walked into the Ops Room expecting to see at least some of the Zero Hour Operators gathered in the large oval space, but was surprised to find only two men waiting for him. Admiral Seward and Major Turner were huddled round one of the grey desks; both looked up at him as he entered, and he fought the immediate urge to check his watch. He knew that, for once, he wasn’t late.
“Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Seward, nodding in his direction. “Over here, please.”
“Sir,” replied Jamie, and walked over to join the two men.
They were gathered round a schematic drawing, a complicated-looking maze of lines and blocks that meant nothing to Jamie.
“Tell Mr Carpenter what you just told me, Paul,” said the Director.
Major Turner gave Seward a quizzical look, but did as he was ordered.
“The investigation into the leak within the Communications Division was concluded early this morning,” said Major Turner. “This diagram represents what I think we all suspected. There is a spy inside the Department.”
Gentle fingers of ice crawled up Jamie’s spine. “What is it?” he asked. “The diagram?”
“It’s a ghost user,” replied Turner. “A user on the mainframe that doesn’t correspond to an actual Operator, or any of the support staff. It lives inside the code that keeps the systems running. It’s been recording every change to any file on the system for at least three months, including the call logs and the security servers. It’s been tracking everything.”
“How?” asked Jamie, incredulous. “Why didn’t we see it until now?”
“Because it’s extremely clever,” replied Turner. “Whenever a user logs out of the system, it takes their place, appearing in all the logs to still be them. It runs for a minute or so, searching and logging changes. Then it disappears, and waits for another user to log out, and repeats. Over and over. The time difference is so minimal that even if you compare the user logs with the CCTV, you would barely notice the anomaly. It’s just been quietly going about its business, recording every single thing that happens on our system, and dumping a report out to a secure drop box every hour.”
“Who has access to the drop box?”
“Impossible to know. It’s an online file server; no traceable IP addresses, no way to follow who is accessing it. Like I said, very clever.”
“Have you killed it?” asked Jamie.
“That’s what we’re trying to decide,” said Admiral Seward. “Obviously, that was our first instinct. But Major Turner has
suggested that there might be a way we can use it to find out who is behind it.”
“By doing what?” asked Jamie.
“By feeding false data into the system, and seeing who responds to it,” said Turner. “We can schedule it so we can eliminate people from suspicion, Operators who are off-base, or who are physically not near a computer. Narrow it down until we find them.”
“I think you should kill it,” said Jamie, firmly. “It’s still going to be recording everything else, along with the false data. That’s too dangerous, surely?”
“That’s what Major Turner and I have to discuss,” said Seward. “But the last time there was a spy in Department 19, three descendants of the founders were killed, including your father. That cannot be allowed to happen again.”
Jamie felt the ground move beneath him at the mention of his dad. He tried not to think about him, wherever possible, for very different reasons than before the night his mother had been kidnapped and Frankenstein had rescued him. Then, it had been shame, and hatred; now it was pure grief.
“I would hope,” said Major Turner, fixing his glacial stare on Jamie, “that I don’t need to tell you that this information cannot leave this room. I would prefer you not to have been told, but Admiral Seward feels that since you were already aware of the possibility of a spy, it was better that you know the facts. Now that you do, I hope you can see that any attempt to uncover the spy will be utterly compromised if word of their existence gets out?”
“I get it,” said Jamie. “You can trust me.”
“So Henry assures me,” said Turner, casting a glance at the Director.
There was a heavy silence for several seconds, as the three men considered the implications of what had been said.
We’re tied together
, thought Jamie.
The three of us. We’re the only ones who know about this.
Then a chill ran up his spine, and he physically shivered.
What if it’s Major Turner? What if he’s the spy? He’s the Security Officer, just like Thomas Morris was. He’d be under orders to search for himself. He could do whatever he wanted to throw us off the trail.
The thought was nauseating, and Jamie forced it away. The pale, stoical former SAS Sergeant was many things, terrifying not the least of them, but he was as loyal to Blacklight as anyone; he was married to a descendant of the founders, to Henry Seward’s sister no less, and his son was a serving Operator.
No way it’s him. It just can’t be. So who the hell is it?
“There is a second matter I need to raise,’ said Seward, and Jamie refocused on the two men in the room with him. “It concerns you both, for different reasons.”
The Director picked up the console which controlled the Ops Room’s facilities and pressed a series of keys. The giant screen, which covered the majority of the flat wall at one end of the room, burst into life. The Department 19 crest appeared, then the system ran through its series of automatic safety checks.
Not much point in it doing them now, is there?
thought Jamie.
The home screen of the Blacklight system appeared: a series of folders and file trees, above a complicated dashboard of controls and programs. Seward clicked more keys, and an audio program loaded, filling the screen with a long waveform track and a series of control buttons.
“This was left on my secure line overnight,” said Admiral Seward. “It’s from the Field Investigation Team.”
He clicked the PLAY button, and a voice boomed out through the Ops Room.
“Operator Ellis, Christian, NS303, 47-J, coding in. Commanding officer, Field Investigation Team 27-R. Twelve-hour status report, submitted at 0055 hours, January 22
nd
.
Report begins. A spectroscopic survey of ninety-five miles of the Northumberland coastline, a value suggested by the atmospheric and oceanic conditions present on the date of the disappearance of Colonel Frankenstein, proved negative. There is no evidence, analytical or anecdotal, to suggest that Colonel Frankenstein returned to the British mainland, either alive or dead. Analysis of the tidal patterns around Lindisfarne on the night in question, along with general oceanic conditions present at the time, confirmed the possibility of Colonel Frankenstein having been washed out to sea, as the currents break around the island of Lindisfarne on a sharp east–west line. Such conditions could have sent the Colonel out to sea, while returning the lycanthrope to land.
As a result of said information, my team were despatched to the main home ports of the fishing fleets of the North Sea, as rescue by a passing boat appeared to be the only likely remaining survival option for Colonel Frankenstein. Negative reports were filed from all the main Belgian and Swedish ports. However, anecdotal evidence provided by the residents of Cuxhaven, in northern Germany, described the appearance of a large figure of unknown origin, who arrived in the town aboard a small fishing boat named the
Furchtlos.
The vessel is currently at sea, so questioning her crew has proved impossible thus far. In my opinion, this represents the only viable lead we currently have. I am therefore formally requesting that FTB approval be secured, so that we might officially enter German territory, and continue our search. Report ends.”