Department 19: Battle Lines

by Hill, Will

  Jamie glanced over at Ellison, whose attention was fixed on her squad mate.

  I got lucky here, he thought. With her. Very lucky.

  On the control screen, a grey download bar was replaced by a window containing two lines of text. He glanced up and read them.

  M-3/FIELD UPDATE RESPONSE

  NO NEW INFORMATION AVAILABLE

  Jamie returned his gaze to John Morton, and made a decision. “I’m pulling the rest of this operation,” he said. “We’re going back to the Loop.”

  Ellison frowned. “We’ve got five and a half hours until our window closes, sir.”

  “I understand that,” said Jamie. “But I’m not going after unidentified targets with a newly commissioned Operator who is having trouble. It isn’t safe.”

  “I’ll be all right,” said Morton, instantly. “Really. I just need to get my head round it.”

  “I know what you’re going through,” said Jamie. “And believe me when I tell you this doesn’t have to be a big deal. But we’re going home.”

  “Don’t do this,” said Morton. “Please. We’ll be a laughing stock before we even finish our first operation.”

  “That’s enough, John,” said Ellison, shooting him a sharp sideways glance. “If he says we’re done, we’re done.”

  “It’s all right,” said Jamie. “This is on me, I promise you.”

  I hope that sounded convincing, he thought. Because I’m really not sure it is.

  Jamie addressed his squad as soon as they stepped down on to the concrete floor of the Loop’s hangar.

  “Good work,” he said. “Honestly. There’s one less vampire out there and we came home in one piece. That’s a good day around here, trust me. Go and get some rest and I’ll message you as soon as I have tomorrow’s schedule. Dismissed.”

  His new squad mates faced him. Ellison’s skin was pale, but her eyes were sharp, and Jamie already found himself full of admiration for her; she nodded, gave him a quick smile, and headed for the elevators. Morton lingered a moment longer; his face was tight with anger, his jaw clenched, his mouth squeezed shut.

  “Something you want to say, Operator?” Jamie asked.

  Morton held Jamie’s gaze for a long moment, then shook his head. “No, sir,” he said, then turned and strode away across the hangar.

  Jamie watched him go, guilt churning in his stomach.

  He had lied to Morton, lied to them both; what their squad had done was far from good work. They had destroyed the first of their targets, but cancelling an operation once it was under way was going to mean questions from his superiors. He had turned it over and over in his head on the way back to the Loop, and was already second-guessing the decision he had made.

  Maybe Morton had been right, and the rookie Operator had just needed some time to get his head round what had happened with Bingham, to face his fear and deal with it. Maybe he had overreacted, panicked at the first sign of potential trouble. But in the short time Jamie had been a member of Blacklight, he had seen too many people hurt, too many people killed, to take chances; the stakes were simply too high.

  He had told the truth about one thing; he would make sure any negative fallout from the aborted mission fell squarely on him. He would not let Morton or Ellison take the blame for his decision.

  Jamie scanned the hangar for the Duty Officer and signalled him over.

  “Is there a debrief?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” replied the Officer. “Written reports only, sir.”

  “OK. Thanks.”

  The man nodded and went back to what he was doing. Jamie set off in the other direction, heading towards the lift at the end of the Level 0 corridor. He was relieved that he was not required to brief the Interim Director; he had no desire to explain what had happened now.

  It could wait until the morning.

  Two minutes later Jamie was standing outside the door to his quarters, almost exactly halfway along the long, curving corridor on Level B. He pulled his ID card from its pouch in his uniform, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. A pile of divisional reports teetered on the surface of his small desk, but he didn’t so much as glance at them. Instead, he dragged his uniform from his body, hung it on the hooks behind his door and flopped down on to his bed. His eyes closed, and thirty seconds later he was asleep.

  Thud.

  Jamie’s eyes fluttered and an involuntary groan emerged from his lips. His brain swam slowly into action, feeling thick and heavy.

  Thud. Thud thud.

  The noise reverberated through his tired skull as he forced his eyes open. He reached for his console and read the white numbers at the top of the screen.

  02:32:56

  Thud thud thud thud thud.

  He swore loudly, swung his legs down from his bed, and made his way across his quarters. He pulled his uniform back on, then opened the door.

  Standing outside in the corridor was Jacob Scott, the veteran Australian Colonel. Behind him, their faces pale, were the members of the Zero Hour Task Force.

  “Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Colonel Scott. His usually warm tone was curt and businesslike. “You need to come with us.”

  “Am I in trouble?” asked Jamie. He couldn’t think of anything he had done that would warrant such heavyweight attention, but nor could he think of any other reason why most of the senior Operators in the Department would be knocking on his door in the middle of the night.

  “Nothing like that,” replied Colonel Scott. “There’s a situation that requires our attention.”

  Jamie groaned. “You couldn’t have messaged me?”

  “Not while ISAT is ongoing,” replied Scott. “Until they’re finished, we can’t assume electronic communications are secure.”

  Jamie glanced at Paul Turner. “This is serious, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” said Colonel Scott. “It’s serious.”

  13

  SOCIAL NETWORKING

  STAVELEY, NORTH DERBYSHIRE

  ONE WEEK EARLIER

  Greg Browning put on his headset and prepared to talk to a man he had never met.

  He was sitting at the desk that had been his son’s, in the room where Matt had slept until he was taken away by the government and their faceless, terrifying men in black. It was now almost a month since Matt had disappeared for the second time, and three weeks since his wife had taken his daughter and left him. If their son returned, he supposed there was a chance that she might come back, but he didn’t really care, one way or the other; something had broken inside his wife when her son went missing for the second time, and he no longer recognised the woman she had become. In truth, Greg had been relieved when she finally packed her bags. With her gone, there was nothing to distract him from the only thing that still interested him: making the government pay for what they had done to his family.

  His boss had tried several times to talk to him about what he referred to as his obsession, but Greg had refused to discuss it. When he had eventually been called into the office and told that he was being let go, he had not been surprised; his work had been slipping for months, since the first time Matt had been taken. He bore his boss no ill will; the man was incapable of seeing the truth of the world around him.

  A mental-health worker from the local authority had visited him several days later, presumably at his former employer’s suggestion, and he had answered her questions with unfailing politeness. Shortly afterwards, a Disability Living Allowance cheque had arrived, followed by another a month later. The cheques were proof that the council had categorised him as mentally ill, but he saw no need to correct them; there was a pleasing symmetry to local government financing his crusade against the government.

  It was like a snake volunteering to eat its own tail.

  Three days after the government had stolen his son away in the night for the second time, Greg had defied his wife’s hysterical protests and started a systematic search through the history on Matt’s computer. He had immediately found a long
list of sites about vampires and the supernatural, but nothing he considered out of the ordinary; it was mostly kid’s stuff, about blood and fangs and things that went bump in the night. But, as he had been about to close the machine down, an instant message had appeared in the corner of the screen. He had followed the instructions it contained, not really knowing why he was doing so, and found himself looking at a website that felt like the first genuinely real thing he had ever seen.

  The site, which had no name and a URL that was a seemingly random string of numbers and letters, was devoted to a simple concept: that vampires were real, that the government was aware of their existence and maintained a top-secret force to police them. It contained written accounts, blurry photographs, snippets of crackly audio recording; nothing that would have convinced the casual observer. But Greg Browning was far from a casual observer; he had watched an unmarked helicopter land in the middle of his quiet suburban street, stood aside as men dressed all in black forced their way through his house, pointing submachine guns at him and his son. And in his garden, he had seen a girl whose body was so severely injured that she could not possibly have been alive rear up to bite a man wearing a biohazard suit, before tearing his son’s throat out in front of his eyes.

  The website didn’t possess the smoking gun that would be needed to blow a big enough hole in the government for the truth to leak out, but Greg saw immediately that it was close.

  Tantalisingly close.

  Almost without thinking, he had opened his son’s word-processing program and started to write. He poured every detail he could remember about the night his life was changed forever on to the page, writing at furious speed, ignoring his wife’s pleas for him to leave Matt’s room, to just leave everything alone. It took him most of the night; the sun was peeking its head over the horizon when he hit SAVE for the final time. With a trembling hand, he copied and pasted the text into the box on the website’s posting form, then paused, as a terrible thought belatedly occurred to him.

  What if this wasn’t real? What if it was all a trap?

  He had followed the instant message’s instructions and used a proxy server to access the website, but he had no idea how secure such things really were. What if the website was nothing more than an elaborate snare, designed to trick people who knew the truth into admitting it, so they could be disappeared? What if he was about to paste a huge target on to his own forehead?

  Greg closed the browser and turned off the computer. He sat staring at the dead monitor screen for a long time, waiting to hear the sirens in the distance that would mean they were coming for him, until he eventually flopped down on to his son’s bed and fell into a light, uneasy sleep. When he awoke the following morning, he turned the computer back on, intending to delete the browser’s history and maybe destroy the machine itself.

  That’ll be the end of it, he thought. Case closed.

  But he quickly discovered that he couldn’t do it.

  Instead, he yelled for his wife to bring him his breakfast and settled in to read the entire website, from start to finish. When he was done he was a changed man, full of a fire he had never previously known and the desire to do something, anything, about what was going on around him. He understood that what had happened to Matt was no isolated incident; there were accounts of missing children from all around the world, children who had disappeared from quiet streets or been dragged from their beds by faceless black shapes. He started checking the website on an hourly basis, and continued to do so as his marriage, his job and his life collapsed around him.

  As the days passed, however, the fire that had burned so suddenly and fiercely inside him began to dwindle. The site was understandably updated extremely infrequently; the kinds of incidents that merited inclusion were, by their very definition, remarkably rare. Greg read every post and user comment dozens of times, searching for something new, something to get his teeth into. His own account of vampires and the men in black was burning a metaphorical hole in his son’s hard drive, but he could not summon up the nerve to post it. Instead, he watched, and waited, and hoped.

  The post that changed everything appeared overnight.

  It was anonymous, as they all were, but claimed to have been written by a survivor of the attack on Lindisfarne by a doomsday cult called the Children of God that Greg vaguely recalled seeing on the news several months earlier. His account opened with a series of short paragraphs that made Greg want to cry.

  THE ATTACK ON THE ISLAND OF LINDISFARNE WAS NOT CARRIED OUT BY ‘THE CHILDREN OF GOD’, AN ORGANISATION THAT I DON’T BELIEVE HAS EVER ACTUALLY EXISTED.

  THE ATTACK ON LINDISFARNE WAS CARRIED OUT BY A LARGE ORGANISED GROUP OF VAMPIRES. I KNOW, BECAUSE I WAS THERE.

  THAT NIGHT, I SAW MY FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS TORTURED AND KILLED. THAT NIGHT, MY DAUGHTER WAS LOST. THE AUTHORITIES HAVE REPEATEDLY TOLD ME THAT SHE IS DEAD. I CANNOT LET MYSELF BELIEVE THAT.

  The post went on to describe the attack on the tiny island in stunning, horrifying detail: the red eyes and gleaming fangs, the blood and helpless screams, the fervent desire on the part of the attackers to violate and murder. It explained how the author escaped with a small number of others on a boat belonging to one of his neighbours, how his daughter was stopped in her tracks by the lifeless body of her best friend, and how the boat had left without her. The last thing the author had seen, as the boat pulled away from the dock, was his daughter’s blonde hair flying out behind her as she ran back on to the island.

  The account continued beyond the attack itself, describing how the author had been visited multiple times in the aftermath by the local police, and by a number of men and women who presented no identification. He was told that his daughter was missing, presumed dead, and warned not to talk to anyone about what had really happened to his home. The Children of God story was given to him and the other survivors wholesale, with the consequences for deviating from it made crystal clear. After a month had passed, he had been told that his daughter was officially dead, although no body had ever been found, and that the matter was now permanently closed.

  To Greg, the post was nothing short of the Holy Grail.

  There was no mention whatsoever of the men in black, as the author had not seen them. But he had seen the vampires, of that Greg had no doubt. The descriptions matched exactly what he had seen in his garden, and he didn’t believe that the government would let such accurate information be posted online, even if the website was a trap. There would be no reason for them to take such a risk.

  He immediately posted a response, thanking the author for his bravery and honesty, and informing him that he was an inspiration. Then he did what he now knew he should have done the day he was first directed to the hidden website: he pasted his own story into the submission box and hit POST.

  Greg had no way of knowing how many people had access to the website, but over the following forty-eight hours it seemed as though every single one of them posted comments on the two new accounts. Between them, they provided descriptions of both sides of the hidden world the site was devoted to exposing, the vampires and the men in black who hunted them, that were vastly more detailed than any of the others. They contained no visual evidence, but the words were more than compelling enough; praise for the authors’ courage and commitment to the truth flooded in, as discussions sprang up about the likely fates of Greg’s son and the man from Lindisfarne’s daughter. In among it all, the two men who had sparked the firestorm of activity began to correspond; tentatively at first, in the comments sections of the opposite number’s post, then more regularly, via the encrypted instant messaging feature that the website provided.

  Now they were about to speak for the first time.

  Greg ran a program he had downloaded from a deeply paranoid Usenet board that he had also begun to frequent; when it was finished, he was safely hidden behind a labyrinth of proxies and IP diverters that would have taken the finest analyst at GCHQ an hour to unravel. Satisfied, he opened Skype, disabled video access, and
waited for the call to come through.

  Less than a minute later the computer’s speakers rang into life. Greg clicked the green ACCEPT button and watched as the connection was established and the counter began to run, indicating that the call was live. A second later a voice spoke to him across the internet.

  “Hello?”

  Real, thought Greg. He’s real. Thank God.

  “Hello,” he replied. “It’s good to talk to you, mate. Really good.”

  “You too,” said the voice. It was warm and friendly, with a thick north-east accent. “Wasn’t sure what to expect, to be honest. Part of me thought my door was going to get kicked down as soon as I clicked on your username.”

  Greg laughed. “Me too, mate. I’ve still got half an ear out for helicopters.”

  The man on the other end of the line laughed heartily.

  “What should I call you?” asked Greg. “I’m happy to do real names, if you are?”

  “Not yet,” replied the other man. “No offence.”

  “None taken,” replied Greg. “What then?”

  “Call me North,” said the voice. “And I’ll call you South. How about that?”

  “Works for me,” said Greg.

  “Great,” said North. “I don’t really want to be on for more than five minutes, if that’s all right with you? I’m about as well hidden as it gets, but I don’t think we should push our luck. So shall we get down to it?”

  “Let’s do that,” said Greg, smiling in the empty quiet of his son’s bedroom.

  “I’m sorry about your boy,” said North. “I can’t believe they put a helicopter down in the middle of your street. That’s incredible.”

  “Cheers,” said Greg. “And I’m sorry about your daughter, I really am. As for the helicopter, I couldn’t believe it either. I thought I was dreaming. Thought it for a long time afterwards, actually. When my son didn’t come back, I asked all our neighbours about the helicopter. None of them would even admit they’d seen it.”