Department 19: Battle Lines

by Hill, Will

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Karlsson, looking out across the ranks of the Lazarus Project. “We have in our hands an opportunity to do great good. To save thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and to eradicate a disease more deadly than that being worked on in any laboratory in the world. This Project represents the furthest frontier of scientific research, and each and every one of us should be proud at having been given the chance to be a part of it.”

  Karlsson continued to talk, but Matt was no longer listening. Instead, his thoughts had turned to his mother, to how proud she would be if she could see him and what he was doing, and to the last month, which had been without doubt the happiest of his life.

  For the first time in his life, he felt like he belonged. It was a dizzying sensation for Matt, a boy who had spent the majority of his life alone, ashamed of himself and unwilling to put anything more than the absolute minimum of himself forward; long experience had taught him that the more you allowed the world to know about you, the more it would use that information to hurt you. But he no longer believed that. Here, in this strange, unlikely place beneath the forests of eastern England, he had found true friendship, created under the most intense pressure, and a cause to which he was quite prepared to dedicate the rest of his life, if that was what was required.

  “Get to work,” said Karlsson, and the round of applause that met the end of the Director’s speech roused Matt from his thoughts. He joined in, quickly enough that he was sure no one would notice he had been daydreaming, and as the men and women of the Lazarus Project began to return to their work, to the undertaking that each and every one of them had sacrificed the prospect of a normal existence for, Matt saw Natalia Lenski glance in his direction before she turned to her console, her pale cheeks flushed a beautiful, delicate pink.

  3

  SLOW NEWS DAY

  WAPPING, LONDON

  THREE MONTHS EARLIER

  Kevin McKenna dropped the last of his cigarette into the warm can of lager on his desk and checked his watch.

  It was almost nine thirty and he was the only member of The Globe’s editorial team still in the office. England were playing Portugal in Oporto and everyone else was either across the road in The Ten Bells, cheering and drinking and swearing, or on their way home, grateful for an excuse to leave the office at a reasonable time without appearing lazy. McKenna wanted to be in the pub with his colleagues, but the phone call he had received an hour earlier had been simply too intriguing to ignore. So, instead, he was sitting in his office with the door shut and the smoke detector unplugged, waiting for a courier to bring him a package from a dead man.

  The call had come from a lawyer McKenna didn’t know; it wasn’t one of the many to whom he regularly passed white envelopes of cash in return for five minutes alone with the case files of celebrity lawsuits and super-injunctions. The man had been polite, and had solemnly informed McKenna that his firm was discharging the estate of the late Mr John Bathurst. There had been a long pause, which McKenna had clearly been expected to fill with gratitude, or sorrow, or both. But he had not known what to say: the name was utterly meaningless.

  Then a flash of realisation had hit him, and he had laughed loudly down the phone.

  The lawyer’s voice, when it reappeared, had a hint of reproach in it, but the man remained smoothly professional. He told McKenna that he had been left an item in Mr Bathurst’s will, an envelope, and asked whether he would like it couriered to him. In any other circumstance, McKenna would have told the man to put it in the post and made his way to the pub. Instead, he gave the lawyer The Globe’s address and told him he would wait to sign for it.

  You’re dead and you’re still causing me grief, he thought, lighting another cigarette. Mr John bloody Bathurst.

  There was a simple reason why it had taken him a moment to realise he knew the name of the man who had remembered him in his will: he had only ever heard it spoken aloud a single time, and there was a reason for that as well.

  It was Johnny Supernova’s real name, and his most closely guarded secret.

  There had been a time when Kevin McKenna would have spat in the face of anyone who had dared to suggest that he might one day spend his time writing stories about minor celebrities for a publication as morally bankrupt and pro-establishment as The Globe.

  This younger, slimmer, angrier version of himself had arrived in London in 1995 at the age of nineteen, his ears ringing with guitar bands and house music and his veins full of working-class fire, to start work as a journalist for legendary left-wing style bible The Gutter. He strolled into the magazine’s offices off Pentonville Road to be greeted by a receptionist more beautiful than any girl he had ever seen in his nineteen years in Manchester. She held open the door to the editor’s office and gave him a ridiculously provocative smile as he walked through it.

  Sitting behind a huge glass desk, on which were arranged glossy colour spreads of the latest issue, was Jeremy Black. He wore a charcoal-grey suit, which McKenna knew without asking would be either Paul Smith or Ozwald Boateng, over a faded tour T-shirt for the Beatles. He glanced up as McKenna stopped in front of his desk.

  “Beer?” he asked.

  “Sure,” replied McKenna. It was barely eleven thirty in the morning, but he had no intention of looking like a lightweight in front of his new boss.

  Black reached down and pulled two cans from a fridge that McKenna couldn’t see. He handed one over, then leant back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “I don’t want to see you in here more than a couple of times a week,” he said. “If you’re in the office, you’re not doing your job. Yeah? The stories are out there.”

  “Got it,” replied McKenna, opening his beer and taking a long swig that he hoped was full of casual bravado.

  “Leave your copy at reception. I’ll give you a call if it’s good enough.”

  “All right.”

  “I got someone to agree to show you the ropes. He’s going to hate you, and he’s going to treat you like shit, but he owes me about ten thousand words I’ve already paid him for, so that’s his bad luck. Yours too, probably.”

  “Who is it?” asked McKenna, as a smile crept on to his boss’s face.

  Jeremy Black was right: Johnny Supernova did indeed treat him like shit. But McKenna didn’t care.

  Supernova was a legend, a freewheeling, anarchic genius who roared through the London night like a drug-fuelled hurricane. His writing was a reflection of the man, a furious avalanche of beautifully written invective, shot through with language and imagery that would have embarrassed Caligula: despatches from the bleeding edge of popular culture which served to define the time almost as much as the events they described.

  The man himself was small and wiry, with pallid skin and a shock of black hair. He was older than McKenna, almost forty, maybe more. His eyes were narrow and piercing, and his appetites, for drink, drugs and debauchery, were famously prodigious. He greeted McKenna with obvious suspicion when they met for the first time, but allowed him to join him at his table in the Groucho Club, clearly still sufficiently connected to reality that he had no desire to be sued by The Gutter for breach of contract.

  Back then, at that brief moment of cultural awakening, Johnny Supernova had been king. Pop stars, artists, actors, actresses and directors: they all flowed to his table and fawned over him. Kevin sat at his side, night after night, in the tall building in Soho, basking in his mentor’s reflected glory. He was older, and cleverer, and harsher than them all, and as a result, they worshipped him.

  But it couldn’t last, and it didn’t.

  The drugs, the booze, the endless girls and boys: all were fuel for the vicious self-loathing that burned inside Johnny Supernova, that drove him to examine the worst depths of human behaviour. What had been fun became hard to watch as Supernova’s edge began to slip, taking with it the hold over the glitterati he had once had. His table became a little more empty, his writing a little more soft, lacking the razor-sharp precision with w
hich it had once slashed at its readers. Excess takes its toll eventually and, when it does, it either happens gradually, slowly, almost imperceptibly, or all at once, like an avalanche. For Johnny Supernova, it was the former. His star faded, rather than burning out.

  McKenna was hanging on by his last fingernail by then; the craziness had ceased to be fun and had begun to feel like work. Johnny appeared to be shrinking before his eyes, week on week, month on month. Eventually, in late 2006, McKenna bought him dinner, told him that he was tired, that he wanted a little bit of stability, a little bit of normality, and that he had taken a job at The Globe.

  The explosion he had expected didn’t come.

  Instead, Supernova gave him a red-eyed look of disappointment that was infinitely more painful. “You’re the worst of them all,” he said, his eyes fixed on McKenna’s. “You could have been good. You could have mattered. But you’re just a whore like the rest of them.”

  They never spoke again.

  The phone on McKenna’s desk rang, making him jump. He had been lost in the past, drifting through the memories of a man he realised he had almost forgotten.

  He reached out and picked up the receiver.

  “Courier for you,” said the receptionist.

  “Send him up,” said McKenna.

  The courier arrived a minute later. Kevin signed for the package, thanked the man, and settled back in his chair to open it. He tore through the tape and the bubble wrap until he was looking at what Johnny Supernova had left him: an audio cassette, a thin folder and a sheet of thick creamy paper. McKenna placed the tape and the folder on his desk, lifted the sheet of paper, and read the short message that had been typed on it.

  Kevin,

  If there is still some tiny worm of integrity in that black void you call a soul, maybe this will give it something to chew on.

  Johnny

  McKenna couldn’t help but smile, despite the insult.

  As he read the words, he heard them spoken in Johnny Supernova’s thick Mancunian accent, spat out as if they tasted bitter. He realised it had been four years since he had last heard that voice, seen the gaunt, narrow face from which it emerged. Supernova had died three months ago, from a heroin overdose that had surprised precisely no one.

  McKenna had been too ashamed to go to the funeral.

  He put the note down on his desk, considered the cassette, then decided it would be too much trouble to find a player at this time of night and picked up the folder instead. Inside was a small sheaf of copier paper, almost transparent, with faded black ink punched almost all the way through it. McKenna lifted the first sheet and read the header.

  TRANSCRIPT

  INTERVIEW WITH ALBERT HARKER. JUNE 12 2002

  Barely a decade ago, thought Kevin. Jesus Christ, it seems so much longer.

  In 2002 Johnny Supernova was past his prime: still famous, still infamous, still relevant, but fading fast, starting to realise, with disappointed bile in his heart, that his angry brand of burn-it-all-down cynicism was becoming a tougher and tougher sell in the New Labour wonderland. McKenna read the header again.

  Albert Harker. Never heard of him.

  He lifted another can of lager out of the bottom drawer of his desk, lit a new cigarette with the smouldering end of the last one, and began to read.

  A minute later he paused, his drink forgotten.

  “Jesus,” he muttered.

  Five minutes later his cigarette burned down to the filter and hung, dead, in the corner of his mouth, spilling ash on to his lap.

  McKenna didn’t even notice.

  4

  THE DESERT SHOULD BE NO PLACE FOR A VAMPIRE

  LINCOLN COUNTY, NEVADA, USA,

  YESTERDAY

  Donny Beltran leant back in his chair and stared up into the dark desert sky. Stars hung above his head, an infinite vista of flickering yellow and milky white that he could have watched for hours had Walt not announced that the burgers were ready, jerking him out of his awe and eliciting a loud rumble from his ample stomach.

  Donny picked his chair up, lumbered to his feet and made his way over to where Walt Beauford was plucking burgers from a metal grill and placing them on a plastic plate beside white buns and sachets of ketchup and mustard. He fished another beer out of the cool box as his friend approached; Donny took it, twisted off the cap, and took a long swallow. He belched loudly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grinned at his friend. The two men settled into their chairs and began to eat their supper; they were completely at ease in each other’s company, the result of two and a half decades of friendship that had started at college in California, and had survived the pleasant, unavoidable diversions of marriages and children.

  This weekend, though, was sacred.

  It was the anniversary of the strange, surreal day in 1997 when they had sold five per cent of their shares in the search engine they had helped found to a private investment group in San Francisco, and realised with genuine bemusement that they had both become millionaires. They had celebrated by taking Donny’s old van out to Joshua Tree, where they drank whisky and smoked grass and reminisced, and it was now traditional for them to head into the desert for two days every year.

  Donny wolfed his burger down in three bites. Walt ate slowly, savouring each mouthful, and was still finishing his first as his friend was attacking his third. They ate in companionable silence, their eyes fixed on the skies to the west, above the low hills that shielded Area 51 from unwelcome eyes. Their little clockwork radio sat on the desert floor between them; they had found a Las Vegas classic rock station at the edge of the dial and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Highway Patrolman’ was crackling softly out of the speakers.

  Donny finished the last of his burgers, felt his stomach rumble appreciatively, and settled himself in his chair. The two friends would stay like this until they fell asleep. Eventually, one of them would wake up and rouse the other, and they would stumble into their tent to see out the rest of the rapidly cooling night. It was a familiar routine, and one they enjoyed immensely.

  “What’s that?” asked Walt.

  Donny grinned. The first time they had come up here, almost a decade earlier, they had spent most of their first night claiming to see something in the distance, trying to make each other jump. But they had never seen anything in the famous Area 51 skies apart from regular military jets and helicopters, and Donny had no intention of falling for this old routine.

  “Nothing,” he said, without even turning his head. “Just like it was nothing last year, like it’s always been nothing. Don’t even try it, Walt.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Something in Walt’s voice made Donny look round. It wasn’t fear, or even unease; it sounded more like incredulity. He turned his head slowly and saw Walt pointing towards the northern horizon. He followed his friend’s finger and looked.

  In the distance, a tiny red light was moving smoothly through the night sky. It was perhaps half a mile away, little more than a pinprick in the darkness, but it was darting quickly through the air, seeming to change direction rapidly. Then Donny realised something else.

  It was moving in their direction.

  “What the hell is that?” he said.

  “No idea,” replied Walt, his gaze fixed on the approaching light. “It’s small, whatever it is.”

  “No sound either,” said Donny. “No engine. Listen.”

  The two friends fell silent. Out on the highway, a car rumbled quickly past. But from the north, the direction the glowing dot was coming from, there was no sound of any kind.

  The light swirled and swooped through the sky with dizzying speed. It accelerated in one direction for a second or two, appeared to stop dead and hover, then zoomed away in another direction entirely. It flickered, as though it was rapidly turning on and off, then shot towards the ground, so low that it seemed to scrape the desert floor, before rocketing back into the sky. And it was getting closer, second by second, to the two watching men.

 
“Can’t be a plane,” said Donny. “Too quiet. Too quick.”

  “Maybe a drone?” said Walt. “Some new model?”

  “Maybe,” replied Donny, but he didn’t think so. The speed and the angles of the light’s movement were too fast, too sudden, for even the smallest remote aircraft. He stared at the dancing light, fascinated, then felt the breath catch in his throat as it accelerated directly towards them. It swooped low, and now, for the first time, Donny could hear something: the rattling of desert sand as whatever it was passed above it at incredible speed. He opened his mouth to say something to Walt, but didn’t get the chance.

  The glowing red light hurtled through their campsite, barely two metres above their heads. Their barbecue thudded to the ground and their tent fluttered heavily in the rushing air, its canvas sides rattling out a suddenly deafening drumbeat. Plates and cups and empty beer cans leapt into the air and Donny raised a protective arm across his eyes, feeling his weight shift as he did so. His gaze was still fixed on the patch of sky through which the light had passed at incredible, unbelievable speed, and he overbalanced, hearing the plastic of his chair rip as he thudded to the ground. Walt was beside him immediately, dragging him to his feet, then shushing him before he uttered a single word. The two men stood in the middle of their scattered campsite, listening intently, scanning the skies for the red light.

  There was no sign of it in any direction.

  It was gone.

  “What. The. Hell. Was. That?” asked Donny.

  “I don’t know,” replied Walt, his eyes shining with excitement. “I’ve never seen anything move like that. Never. And I…” He trailed off, still staring up into the sky.