Department 19: The Rising

by Will Hill

  Until tonight.

  The Blacklight helicopter burst through the clouds that were hanging low over the airport. The sun was drifting lazily towards the horizon in the west, and the squat black shape gleamed in the last of the evening light as it dropped sharply towards the ground.

  The Communications Division had made contact with the French Security Services as the chopper made its way across the Channel, and had been granted permission to land on French soil. The agreed site was a helipad in the centre of the industrial complex, a helipad that had once served American helicopters as they ferried senior personnel in and out of the base.

  “Thirty seconds,” announced the pilot, over the helmet communication system that the five Operators strapped into the chopper’s belly were all linked into.

  “Roger,” said Jamie, over the howl of the rotors and the shriek of the rapidly decelerating engine. “Comms and weapons checks.”

  The four members of his team, identically clad in their matt-black uniforms, the visors of their helmets pushed up from their faces, quickly ran through the list of final checks, examining their weapons and kit and replacing each item in its proper place on their belts and webbing.

  “Check,” said Angela Darcy.

  “Check,” said Jack Williams.

  “Check,” said Dominique Saint-Jacques.

  “Check,” said Claire Lock.

  “Understood,” said Jamie. “Clear in ten seconds, team. I want to be in Paris in thirty minutes. And visors down; no one sees us, clear?”

  The four Operators nodded, then pulled their purple visors down over their faces. The flat, featureless screens instantly lent the team an inhuman, unsettling air; it would be difficult for anyone who saw them to believe that there were men and women beneath the plastic façades, and impossible for them to give any clues as to their identities.

  The helicopter’s engines roared, reaching a volume and pitch that sent bolts of pain through Jamie’s ears, despite the protection his earpieces and helmet provided. Then, with a bone-jarring jolt, the heavy wheels of the chopper squealed on to tarmac, and rolled to a halt.

  “Move!” shouted Jamie, releasing himself from his safety belt and throwing open the side door of the helicopter. His team leapt out, one after the other, and disappeared from view, as he ordered the pilot to take off as soon as they were clear, and wait at the location the French military had given them, a NATO airbase ninety miles to the east.

  “Be ready to come and get us!” he shouted.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the pilot. “Good luck, sir.”

  “Thanks!” yelled Jamie, and leapt out of the helicopter.

  Dominique and Claire were standing at the rear corners of the vehicle, their MP5s at their shoulders, scanning the area around them. The helipad, cracked and faded by the passage of time, was in the middle of a loose ring of metal huts, rust climbing relentlessly up their sides, their roofs beaten and tarnished by years of neglect. There were no lights on in any of them, or in the first rows of low concrete buildings that stood beyond them, but Jamie was glad to see his team were taking no chances.

  The heavy ramp at the back of the helicopter had already been lowered, and as he made his way towards it, he heard the rumble of a powerful engine bursting into life. A second later a jet black SUV rolled down the ramp, and stopped in the empty yard, its headlights blazing, its black windows completely opaque.

  As soon as the back wheels hit the tarmac, the ramp rose back into place. The helicopter’s engines screamed again, and it hauled itself into the air. The churning rotors whipped the air, and Jamie fought to stay on his feet. Then the helicopter was climbing, and the wind and the noise lessened. Within thirty seconds, all that was left of the huge black chopper was a rapidly diminishing pair of yellow lights, heading east in the gathering gloom.

  The passenger side door opened and Angela Darcy stepped out, her pretty face hidden behind the flat purple of her visor.

  “Your carriage awaits, sir,” she said, motioning towards the rear doors.

  Jamie smiled beneath his mask, and ordered everyone into the vehicle. He took the front seat next to Jack Williams, who was sitting comfortably behind the steering wheel, and pushed back his visor. Angela, Claire and Dominique filled the two rows of seats behind them, and did likewise.

  “Dominique,” said Jamie. “I need to find this Latour, quickly. Where do we start?”

  “The Marais,” replied Dominique, instantly. “We start in the Marais.”

  Jack Williams hit the accelerator and the heavy SUV leapt forward. He slid the car carefully between the ageing huts and on to the wide strip of tarmac that served as the industrial area’s main thoroughfare. Watery yellow light spilled down from a series of flickering streetlights; the drone of forklift truck engines rumbled in the cool evening air, and the occasional shouted instructions could be heard. Jack turned left, and headed towards where their satellite read-out told him the gate would be.

  The black SUV rounded a corner, and passed a small gang of workmen huddled along the long wall of one of the shabby office buildings, sipping coffee from flasks and smoking short white cigarettes. They looked briefly at the car as it passed, then returned to their conversations; the vehicle, and its contents, clearly did not merit a second look.

  Two minutes later they were on the motorway, and accelerating north towards Paris.

  On the stage of the Fraternité de la Nuit’s theatre, Frankenstein heard the door, the door that he had walked through a hundred times in another life, creak open, and used a significant amount of his remaining strength to lift his head.

  He had been tied to the wooden pole in the middle of the small stage for more than thirty-six hours, and had long passed through the threshold of what would be conventionally described as agony. His arms and legs, which were pulled back at unnatural angles and tied at the wrists and ankles, had gone from a dull, throbbing ache to white-hot fire to a pain so vast he could not fully comprehend it, a pain that had felt as though every millimetre of the grey-green skin that covered his limbs was being sliced away with razor blades before salt was massaged into the wounds. Now, after a day and a half, they were empty, useless things; he could not feel them at all, and only the ruthless application of logic was able to convince him that they were still there.

  He had been given water, sparingly, by Lord Dante’s butler, who had refused to speak to him, or even look at him as he delivered it; it felt as though the butler saw this duty as little more than feeding a pet, and not a favoured one at that. There had been no food, and the rumbling and gurgling in his stomach had given way to dull emptiness, a yawning vacuum at the centre of his being. His bodily functions had been taken care of twice, in humiliating fashion. And beneath it all, beneath the pain and the fear and the shame, Frankenstein could feel it coming.

  Twice in the past hours he had found himself staring up at the ceiling, at the point where he knew, with absolute certainty, the moon was rising beyond the ornate roof of the theatre. He could feel the grinding sensation in his bones that he had come to dread, feel the prickling of his skin, feel the urge to run and leap and bite.

  Now, as he lifted his head, he saw a dark figure standing silently at the rear of the theatre, just inside the door. He watched as the figure slowly walked forward, and emerged into the low lighting that glowed at the edges of the stage, and recognised the pale, narrow face immediately.

  “Latour,” he breathed. “Are you here to gloat?”

  “No, my old friend,” replied Latour, floating slowly up on to the stage and landing in front of Frankenstein. “I am not. It causes me great pain to see you like this.”

  “Then you are the cause of your own suffering,” spat Frankenstein.

  Latour’s eyes flared red, and he closed the gap between the two men in a millisecond.

  “You brought this all on yourself,” he hissed. “It was you who crippled Lord Dante, and you who returned to the one city in the world where you knew full well there was a generous price
on your head. Do not blame me for your own stupidity; had it not been me who found you and delivered you here, it would have been someone else, I can assure you of that.”

  “Would the someone else you speak of have claimed to be my friend as they handed me over to be murdered?” asked Frankenstein. “Would they have talked of old times as they exchanged my life for nothing more than a pretty young girl, and a pat on the head from their master?”

  The fire in Latour’s eyes darkened for a moment, then died, as the vampire took a step back and regarded the bound monster.

  “No,” he said, softly. “It is unlikely that they would.”

  Frankenstein saw the look on the vampire’s face, the pain and sadness that were written clearly upon it, and seized upon what he believed might be his last, and only, chance.

  “Let me go, old friend,” he said, quietly. “Let me leave this place, this city, and never return. You could come with me.”

  Latour’s eyes widened, and Frankenstein knew that he had never considered the possibility that had just been suggested to him. He pushed ahead.

  “If you leave me here, Dante is going to kill me,” he said. “For sport. For the entertainment of his friends, of which he counts you among the number. You will have to watch me die, Latour, and know the role you played in it. Can you do that?”

  The vampire said nothing; he merely stared at Frankenstein.

  “Beyond even that,” he continued, “there is something coming, something that I cannot explain to you. But if it is allowed to happen, then I cannot guarantee your safety. Unless you let me down from here, and we leave this place.”

  Latour recoiled, as if he had been slapped. Then he laughed, shortly.

  “Your words are pretty, old friend,” he said. “As they always were. But I would not cross Lord Dante for you, or anyone else; I will not make the mistake you made. I confess that handing you over to him was hard, far harder than I had imagined it would be, but I do not regret it. My place here is secure, for all eternity. I will watch you die, my friend, and while I will take no pleasure in it, I will shed no tears either. The man I called my friend is gone; all that remains is a monster, whose end is overdue.”

  Frankenstein’s heart sank. He had not believed that he could persuade Latour to free him, not really, but there had been a brief moment when it had appeared that his words were getting through to the vampire. Now that moment had passed, and with it the last of his hope.

  “We all have to live with the decisions we make,” he said, his voice cracking. “I hope you can live with yours. Truly I do. Goodbye, Latour.”

  Latour smiled. “There is no need for goodbyes,” he said. “I will see you in a matter of hours. See you very clearly, from my seat in the front row.”

  His smile widened into a grin of pure malice, and then he was gone, disappearing back into the shadows at the rear of the theatre. Frankenstein watched him go, then let his head slump down to his chest.

  Less than a mile away, Jamie Carpenter raised his pistol for the second time, and then found his arm gripped from behind. He spun round, fury written all over his face, and found Jack Williams staring at him with obvious concern.

  “He doesn’t know anything, Jamie,” said Jack. “He really doesn’t.”

  Jamie wrenched his hand out of his friend’s grasp, and turned back to the figure that was cowering on the ground before him.

  “S’il vous plaît,” it whispered, from behind trembling, blood-soaked hands. “S’il vous plaît, monsieur.”

  Dominique had navigated Jack round the Périphérique and through the maze of one-way systems and side streets until they had arrived at Rue de Bretagne, where Jamie had ordered his team out of the car. The sun was less than forty minutes below the horizon, but the Marais was, as always, full of people; the bars and restaurants heaved with men and women, music and laughter and snatches of conversation filled the air, as street vendors hustled and the earliest casualties of the night’s excesses staggered.

  It was not, Jamie realised immediately, a place where five figures in black uniforms and purple visors would find it easy to be inconspicuous. On the other hand, the photosensitive filters in their visors made identifying vampires easy, and Jamie found himself, as he often did, torn between caution and recklessness.

  He had attempted to compromise, at least initially. His team had stuck to the labyrinthine backstreets and alleys of this old part of Paris, their black forms blending effortlessly into the shadows, and peered out at the passing throngs, looking for the telltale bloom of red that would indicate a vampire.

  After fifteen minutes, they had got lucky. A middle-aged vampire was walking briskly down the middle of Rue Debellyme, his hands in the pockets of his coat, his lips pursed together as he whistled a gentle ragtime melody. Angela Darcy had been the first to spot him, and had whispered as much to the rest of the team. Jamie had ordered them to follow him, and they had done so, looping through the dark alleyways that Dominique appeared to know like the back of his hand.

  The vampire gave no sign of being aware of their presence; he strolled through the Parisian evening as though he was without a care in the world. At the intersection of Rue de Saintonge and Rue de Turenne, Jamie watched as the man made a left, and saw his chance. As the man passed a dark alleyway, the shadows at the entrance appeared to suddenly come to life, and he found himself pinned against the cold brick wall with stakes pressed against his throat and chest before he had time to even register what was happening.

  The vampire, whose name was Alain Devaux, and who had never hurt so much as a fly in the century he had been alive, had been strolling home from a pleasant day in the company of his daughter, Beatrice, who lived on the Rive Gauche in an apartment she had tailored to suit the peculiar needs of her father. The windows were covered in blackout blinds and in the fridge, beside her brie, and her chorizo, and her Pouilly-Fumé, stood a neat row of bottles of blood, procured without any questions asked from her butcher in Saint Germain-des-Prés who, she had come to realise, believed that she made her own black puddings from the thick crimson liquid she ordered so regularly.

  Beatrice was Alain’s third daughter; he had outlived the first and second, with whom his relationship had ceased at the moment of his turning; he had decided when Beatrice was born that he was not going to make the same mistake again. He was a gentle man, who had spent long years ashamed of what he had become, who had never been able to fully accept that what had been done to him was not his fault.

  He kept no company with other vampires, and he had no interest in their affairs; as a result, he was blissfully unaware of the existence of Department 19. So when one of the black figures peered at him from behind a mask of bright purple, fear had overwhelmed him, and he forgot the supernatural strength that lay in his muscles, strength that would have given him a reasonable chance of escape, even against the five shapes that melted out of the shadows.

  “Do you know Jean-Luc Latour?” the figure demanded, its voice metallic and emotionless through its helmet filters.

  “W-what?” asked Alain, trembling with terror.

  The stake at his neck was jabbed hard into his throat, breaking the skin. Alain smelt the rich copper scent of his own blood, and his eyes flared red, involuntarily.

  “Eyes!” shouted one of the other figures.

  “I can’t help it,” said Alain, looking pleadingly at the dark shapes. “I can’t—”

  There was a blur of movement, as the figure that had been peering at him drew a black pistol from its belt. Alain had no time to beg for his life, which he was sure was about to come to an end, before the dark figure raised the gun above its shoulder and brought it crashing down in the centre of his forehead, splitting the skin to the bone.

  Blood gushed out, and Alain slid to his knees. His mind was blank, wiped by the enormity of the pain, and his hands gripped involuntarily at the legs of Jamie’s uniform, as though he was about to pray to the dark shape in front of him.

  “Latour!” bellowed
the figure that had hit him. “One of your kind! Jean-Luc Latour!” Alain stared up at him, noticing with absent horror that he could see the steady arc of blood spraying from his forehead and pattering to the cold cobbles of the alleyway. “Don’t pretend you don’t know who I’m talking about! Have you seen him?”

  “Je ne comprends pas,” whispered Alain. He felt nauseous, and light-headed, as though he was drunk. “Je suis désolé, je ne comprends pas. Je suis désolé.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Claire Lock.

  She was watching the awful scene play out from the middle of the alleyway, with the rest of the team; she made no movement to intervene, but the disapproval in her voice was plain to hear, and it served only to enrage Jamie further.

  He shoved the vampire, hard, and Alain fell back against the wall, instinctively covering what was left of his face with his pale, shaking hands, as blood pumped out between his fingers and on to his chest, and his wide eyes stared up at Jamie with utter horror.

  “Where is Latour?” Jamie roared. “Tell me where he is!”

  He raised the gun again, and that was when Jack Williams moved, stepping forward and grabbing his friend’s wrist. “He doesn’t know anything, Jamie,” he said. “He really doesn’t.”

  Jamie wrenched his hand out of Jack’s grasp, and turned back to the figure that was cowering on the ground before him.

  “S’il vous plaît,” it whispered, from behind trembling, blood-soaked hands. “S’il vous plaît, monsieur.”