Department 19: Battle Lines

by Hill, Will

  When he was sated, he let the corpse fall from his grip and rose into the air. He threw back his head, his throat convulsing, his body trembling uncontrollably, and waited for the rush to pass. After several minutes, it began to: his heart started to slow; sensation began to return to his fingers. He breathed deeply, in and out, like a man on the verge of a panic attack, then descended slowly to the blood-soaked carpet, understanding rushing through him.

  That was why vampires killed: that glorious, Godlike ecstasy.

  Trembling, Harker walked across the living room, stepping round the worst of the mess, and out into the hallway. His legs seemed to move on autopilot and his eyes burned a terrible, lustful red as he slid back the bolt that locked the cellar door. He stared down the dark staircase, his supernatural hearing picking up heavy breathing and whimpering from the underground room, his breath coming deep and slow. He took a step forward, then paused as he heard a female voice whisper below him.

  “Don’t be scared,” it said. “I won’t let him hurt you. I promise.”

  Oh God. Oh dear God.

  The glow died in Albert Harker’s eyes as he realised what he had been about to do. His stomach lurched and his head swam; he shoved the cellar bolt back into place, ran down the hallway on suddenly unsteady legs, smashed the front door open and fled out into the night.

  18

  THE MOST IMPORTANT

  MEAL OF THE DAY

  Kate Randall stared at the day’s ISAT schedule and tried to ignore the tension swirling in her stomach.

  You knew this was coming, she told herself. Everyone is going to end up here eventually. It’s just the same as any of the others.

  After a bad start, the first day’s interviews had been entirely successful; they had uncovered no evidence of any treason against the Department, and no significant incidents of an Operator attempting to lie to them. Stephen Marshall’s admission that he had used his position in the Surveillance Division to eavesdrop on his girlfriend had been reported to his superior for appropriate disciplinary action, but was not ultimately what ISAT was concerned with; what they were concerned with, they had so far failed to uncover.

  Kate read the first line of the schedule again and felt her stomach churn.

  0800. Browning, Matt.

  Behind her, the ISAT lounge door clicked open.

  “Morning,” she said, swinging her chair round.

  Paul Turner, looking visibly invigorated by the extra hours of sleep that she had insisted he take, smiled at her. “Morning,” he said. “Are you ready for this?”

  “Absolutely,” Kate replied, instantly. “If we don’t treat everyone the same way, then there’s no point in doing this. Right?”

  “That’s right,” replied Turner. He was looking at her with an expression so obviously full of pride that she felt herself begin to blush. “Exactly right.”

  “I know,” said Kate. “That’s why I said it.”

  There was a long moment of comfortable silence, punctured only when Turner’s radio buzzed into life. He plucked it from his belt and lifted it to his ear. After a second or two, he said, “Understood,” and placed the handset back in its loop.

  “He’s here,” said Turner. “I’ll get him wired in, you get yourself up to speed on his file, then meet me inside in five minutes. OK?”

  “Got it,” replied Kate.

  Turner nodded and left the lounge. Kate watched him go, then went to the filing cabinet that stood against the wall beside the desk. The cabinet contained the personnel files of every single Operator in the Department, from the rookies that were currently undergoing training to Interim Director Holmwood himself. She placed her hand on a black panel on the front of the cabinet and a lens rose out of the top on a plastic stilt. Kate lowered her eye to the level of the sensor and let the red laser beam slide across her eyeball. There was a series of clicks as the cabinet’s locks disengaged, before Kate hauled open the second drawer and flicked through the files. She found Matt’s, and settled on the sofa to read it.

  Four minutes later she set the file down and made her way to the interview room. She was smiling as she walked; the story of how Matt had ended up working for the Lazarus Project was one she knew very well, having lived through most of it, but she still wanted to laugh at its sheer reckless audaciousness. Matt had put himself in danger, far more danger than she suspected he had actually realised, just for the chance to return to the Loop, to a place where he honestly believed he could be useful. He was never going to be half the Operator that she or Jamie were, nor probably a quarter of the terrifying force of nature that Larissa was becoming, but in his own way, he was every bit as brave and resilient as anybody in the Department, even if he would have protested vehemently at such a suggestion; his modesty was one of the things she loved most about him.

  Kate pushed open the interview-room door and saw that the Intelligence Division technicians had finished their prep; Matt was sitting in the chair at the far end of the room, attached to the trolleys of monitoring equipment by a series of sensors that had been placed on the skin of his chest, arms and neck. She smiled at him as she took her seat beside Paul Turner and he smiled back, without much conviction. Turner glanced over at her and she nodded.

  Let’s get this over with.

  “Lieutenant Browning,” said Paul Turner, his tone warm and polite. “Do you understand why Lieutenant Randall and I are carrying out this process?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Matt. “You’re looking for traitors.”

  Turner smiled. “That’s correct, Lieutenant. Answer our questions truthfully and you have nothing to worry about.”

  Matt nodded. Kate gave him a moment, then cleared her throat and began.

  “This is ISAT interview 057, conducted by Lieutenant Kate Randall, NS303, 78-J in the presence of Major Paul Turner, NS303, 36-A. State your name, please.”

  “Matt Browning.”

  Kate looked down at the screen set into the table and watched the two grey boxes turn bright green. “Please answer the following question incorrectly,” she said. “State your gender, please.”

  Matt grinned. “Female.”

  The boxes on the screen turned red.

  “All right,” said Kate. “Mr Browning. Are you a Lieutenant in Department 19?”

  “Yes.”

  Green.

  “Are you currently working for the classified section of the Science Division known as the Lazarus Project?”

  “Yes.”

  Green.

  “What does that work entail?”

  “That’s classified,” said Matt.

  Green.

  “Not to us, Lieutenant,” said Paul Turner. “Please answer the question.”

  “Lazarus is classified to everyone, sir,” said Matt, his tone apologetic. “Unless you get Interim Director Holmwood in here to tell me otherwise.”

  Green.

  Kate grinned. She was suddenly very proud of Matt; she knew how intimidating the surroundings of the ISAT interview room were, having been the second person to go through the process herself. And she knew full well that Matt was at least as terrified of Paul Turner as most people in the Loop, possibly more so. But his loyalty to the Lazarus Project, and what it was trying to do, had apparently overwhelmed his nerves. She continued with the interview, which passed without incident.

  When the technicians finished unhooking Matt from the monitoring equipment, he stood up, massaging the places where the sensors had been, and smiled at Kate. They were alone in the interview room; Paul Turner had disappeared into the ISAT lounge, having ordered Kate to go and get breakfast before they resumed their interviews.

  “That wasn’t too bad,” said Matt. “I hope I did OK?”

  “You did fine,” replied Kate, smiling back at him. “I knew you would.”

  “Good,” said Matt, a tiny bit too eagerly. “That’s good. I was really nervous. Even though, you know…”

  “Even though you had nothing to hide,” finished Kate. “It’s OK, Mat
t, really it is. Everyone who comes in here is nervous. That’s sort of the point.”

  Matt nodded. “I suppose it would be.”

  Kate checked her watch, then looked at Matt with a cheerful expression on her face. “I’m starving,” she announced. “I’m going to get breakfast and you’re coming with me. We haven’t talked in ages.”

  “I should get back to work,” said Matt. “We’re on the verge of isolating—”

  “If they cure vampirism in the next half an hour,” interrupted Kate, smiling broadly, “I’m sure Professor Karlsson will message you. Now come on. I simply must have coffee.”

  Matt broke into a grin. “All right,” he said. “Let’s do it. I haven’t had a breakfast that didn’t come out of a vending machine in weeks.”

  Kate put her tray down on one of the tables at the far end of the canteen, away from the line of Operators queuing in front of the hotplates and fruit bowls and coffee machines. She had a bowl of grapefruit, a plate containing brown toast and two badly poached eggs, a tall glass of orange juice and two mugs of steaming coffee. She hadn’t lied to Matt; she was drinking probably a dozen coffees every day at the moment, just to keep her brain firing and her limbs moving. The Shaun-shaped hole at her centre was always threatening to pull her backwards, to drag her under, and caffeine was one of the ways she stayed beyond its reach.

  Matt’s tray thudded on to the table and Kate laughed out loud at the sight of it. He smiled with embarrassment and took a seat behind a towering, unstable mountain of bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms, baked beans and toast. He had a mug of tea and a glass of water and attacked his breakfast with the urgency of a starving man who has just wandered out of the desert.

  “Are you sure you’ve eaten anything in weeks?” asked Kate, only half serious. “They do feed you down there, right?”

  Matt nodded, fighting to swallow his mouthful. “Don’t worry, they do,” he said, reaching for his tea. “It’s pretty good too. There’s a cook whenever you want something, no matter what time it is.”

  “No wonder you hardly ever come out. Twenty-four hours a day?”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of intense down there, Kate. Everyone works long hours.”

  “How long?”

  “Long,” said Matt, then dug back into his food. Kate watched him eat; he didn’t look like he’d lost much weight, so she wasn’t worried about his physical health. But her friend looked absolutely exhausted; his skin was pale, almost ashen, and the bags beneath his eyes were black and swollen.

  “So how’s it going?” she asked. “Lazarus, I mean. What’s the news?”

  Matt looked up and smiled with his mouth full. He would have sat in the ISAT interview room until the end of time before he told Paul Turner anything about the Lazarus Project, but Kate was a different matter. When things had seemed at their worst, before Jamie went to Paris and the Loop was attacked, the four of them, Kate, Jamie, Larissa and himself, had sworn that they would tell each other everything from then on; secrets and hidden agendas had been on the verge of tearing them apart, and they had vowed not to let such a situation arise again.

  “There’s not much to tell really,” he said. “We’re making progress on mapping the vampire DNA strand, and we’ve isolated some of the elements of the protein that triggers the turn. We’ve got a theoretically viable carrier enzyme in the early stages of development, and we’re continuing our analysis of the data Jamie recovered from Christopher Reynolds.”

  Kate nodded. She had barely understood a word that Matt had said, but she didn’t want him to know that; instead, she struck out for the one subject he had raised that she felt confident in discussing.

  “Is Reynolds’ data helping?” she asked. “Even though he was working on the opposite of what you’re trying to do?”

  “Oh, it helps,” said Matt. “Trust me. The processes aren’t the same, but the steps he took have given us a road map we can use. Professor Karlsson thinks we’ve saved at least a year by having access to his work.”

  His work, thought Kate, with disgust. Torture is all it was. Murder.

  “He was a genius,” continued Matt. “Evil. But a genius.”

  “Maybe so,” said Kate. “I’m still glad Jamie shot him.”

  Matt grinned broadly. “Me too,” he said. “Very glad indeed.”

  “So everything just carries on then?” asked Kate, slicing open one of her eggs and smearing it across a piece of toast. “No major breakthroughs, no big eureka moments?”

  Matt shook his head. “I’m afraid not. The truth of the matter is, we get fractionally closer every day. But unless we get some magic shortcut, or someone takes an incredible leap of deduction that turns out to be correct, it’s still going to take a long time. Years, maybe.”

  “Even with all of you killing yourselves every day,” said Kate. “Shows what I know. I don’t understand how anything can take years to work out.”

  “The cleverest people in the world have been trying to prove string theory for the last half a century,” said Matt, sipping his tea. “And I’m sure they all work pretty hard.”

  “Have you told Jamie?” asked Kate.

  Matt shook his head again. “No. I haven’t seen very much of him lately, to be honest with you. But he knows it’s going to take a long time; Reynolds explained it to him, when he was still pretending to be Talbot. It must have been one of the few times he told anyone the truth.”

  “It must be killing him,” said Kate, softly. “His mum and his girlfriend.”

  “I suppose so,” said Matt. “He’s got more invested in Lazarus than most of us who actually work there. And if there was anything I could do to speed it up, to accelerate a cure for Larissa and Marie, you know I would. Right?”

  “Of course I do,” said Kate. “And so does he.”

  Matt smiled briefly, then set about demolishing the remainder of his breakfast. Kate did the same; when their plates were empty, she sat back in her chair and started on her second coffee. Matt had drained the last of his tea and was looking at her expectantly.

  “What?” she asked, frowning. “Have I got egg on my face?”

  “No,” said Matt. “I told you about Lazarus. It’s your turn.”

  “ISAT?”

  Matt nodded.

  “Not much to tell either,” she said, putting down her mug. “We’re only one full day in. Nothing to report yet.”

  “Nothing?” asked Matt.

  Kate considered telling him about the Surveillance Operator and his girlfriend, but decided against it; she didn’t believe their promise to tell each other everything covered the personal indiscretions of others.

  “Nothing,” she repeated. “Which is good, obviously.”

  “When are you doing Jamie?”

  “I don’t know,” lied Kate. “The schedule is randomly generated every night.”

  “So Reynolds was the last leak?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” said Kate. “But we haven’t found anything so far that suggests a security threat.”

  “What about Major Turner?”

  “What about him?”

  “Working with him,” said Matt. “What’s that like?”

  Kate took a long sip of her coffee and considered the question. “It’s… remarkable,” she said, eventually. “I’ve never seen anyone more dedicated to what they do than Paul. It’s inspiring, to tell the truth.”

  “And that’s not because of… well, you know, because of…”

  “Shaun?” said Kate, putting her friend out of his misery. “That’s definitely part of it. He lost his son because the Department wasn’t secure, because we’d stopped looking at ourselves, I mean really looking at ourselves, and neither of us wants what happened to Shaun to happen to anyone else. But it’s not a personal crusade, whatever anyone thinks. It’s about the Department. For both of us.”

  “Well, rather you than me,” said Matt, smiling gently. “He still scares the crap out of me.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Kate, returni
ng his smile. “He has that effect on most people.”

  “But not on you?”

  “Not any more,” she said. “We’ve… well, I guess we’ve become pretty close. Very close, actually. I’d trust Paul with my life.”

  “So would I,” said Matt. “He still scares me, though.”

  Kate laughed and, after a second or so, Matt joined in. There was warmth in the laughter, a sense of comfort in each other’s company, and a familiar thought appeared in Kate’s head.

  We need to do this more often. Jamie too, and Larissa when she gets back.

  Matt’s laughter subsided and he opened his mouth, before appearing to think better of whatever he had been about to say. Kate was a remarkably observant girl, who rarely missed anything, especially not something as obvious as Matt’s aborted gesture, and she immediately leant forward in her chair.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” said Matt, flushing bright red. “I was just going to… it’s nothing.”

  “It’s clearly not nothing, whatever it is,” said Kate, her voice gentle. “Tell me.”

  Matt swallowed hard. His face appeared to be on the verge of bursting into flames. “There’s… a girl,” he said, eventually. “She works downstairs. Her name’s Natalia.”

  A girl, thought Kate, grinning inwardly. Of course there’s a girl. Well, whoever she is, she has to be a better bet than the last girl he had a crush on. Angela Darcy would have torn him to pieces. Probably literally.

  “All right,” said Kate. “A girl called Natalia. I don’t think I know her.”

  “You don’t,” said Matt. “She lives in the Lazarus quarters and she hardly ever leaves the lab.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “She’s Russian,” said Matt, and Kate saw his eyes light up as he thought about her. “The SPC pulled her out of university a couple of years ago and sent her to us when we were re-staffing Lazarus. She’s only eighteen, but she’s smarter than almost anybody in the Project. I think maybe only Professor Karlsson…” Matt trailed off and blushed again at the realisation that he had been gushing.