by William Hill
Carpenter stood up and looked at the three men around him. Miller was staring blankly down at Connor, his eyes blank and lifeless. Frankenstein was returning Julian’s gaze, an even look on his face, and Turner was looking up at him with his expressionless gray eyes. Carpenter clenched his jaw, reached down, and pulled the Glock from its holster.
At the sight of the gun, Miller cried out. “What are you doing?”
“What needs to be done,” said Frankenstein.
“He needs a hospital!” shouted Miller, tears brimming in the corners of his eyes. “He doesn’t need putting down like a sick dog!”
“We don’t let people turn. Ever. And he doesn’t want to. You heard him say so.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s saying!”
“Yes,” said Frankenstein, firmly. “He does.”
Miller’s face contorted into an expression of such terrible misery that Carpenter’s heart nearly broke.
“But… it’s not fair,” he said, his voice cracking.
“I know,” said Carpenter. “It’s not. But letting him turn would be worse than letting him die. You understand that, right?”
Miller nodded, slowly.
Carpenter turned back to Connor, who was still unconscious. He knelt down beside him and placed the muzzle of the Glock against the young private’s temple. Turner stayed knelt on his other side, staring levelly at his commanding officer. Julian placed his other hand above the barrel and pulled the trigger.
The remainder of the team were silent as they made their way deeper into the tunnels, passing through a second door and arriving at a large stone arch, topped with a sculpted image of the crucifixion. Turner shoved open the ancient wooden door, and the four operators walked into a wide circular chapel. The walls were covered with statues of saints, and a huge stone crucifix stood behind a plain stone altar at the rear of the room.
The floor was covered in vampires.
There had to be at least twenty of them, sleeping, tightly packed together like bats. As they took in the scene, Private Miller gasped. The vampire nearest to them, an old man with a beard almost to his bare waist, opened his eyes, which instantly boiled red. He let out a piercing scream, and every vampire in the room awoke, and leapt to their feet.
The Blacklight team launched themselves into the chapel, a blur of black uniforms and piercing weapons. Frankenstein lowered his head and barreled into them, sending vampires flying in every direction. He pulled the MP5 from his belt and emptied it into the crowd of stumbling, half-asleep vampires, who were so tightly packed together, they were struggling to move. The bullets tore into them. Miller, whose young face bore the look of a man who had already seen more than he had ever wanted to, attacked the disorientated crowd with a fervor that bordered on mania, staking vampire after vampire, an inarticulate roar emanating from his wide open mouth. Turner sidestepped along the wall and drew his T-Bone. Calmly, without hurrying, he shot six vampires one after the other, letting the stake wind back in each time, then taking new aim and firing again. Carpenter ran to Frankenstein’s side, and the two of them pressed the howling, injured vampires back against the stone wall, then staked them in a flurry of sharpened metal.
It was over in less than a minute.
“Alexandru?” asked Carpenter, breathing deeply.
Turner shook his head.
“In there?” suggested Frankenstein, motioning toward the altar.
They walked forward. Behind the altar, beneath the sculpted crucifixion, was the entrance to a short corridor. Carpenter leaned down and looked along it. The stone passage was no more than twenty feet and ended in what looked like a prayer room; he could see a kneeling board against the back wall.
Frankenstein led them into the corridor, bending slightly to fit his large frame through the opening. He had replaced the empty MP5 on his belt and had drawn the silver and black riot shotgun he always carried with him; he loaded it with solid shot, and it could blow a hole through a tree trunk.
They were almost at the door when something emerged from it, moving fast. Frankenstein pulled the trigger on the shotgun, and fire exploded from the barrel as a deafening noise filled the passage. The thing smashed against the wall, slid to the floor, and started to scream.
As the smoke cleared, Carpenter stepped forward and looked at the shape. A beautiful female face, twisted into a grimace of agony, stared back at him.
“Ilyana,” he said. “Where is your husband?”
She snarled and then spit a thick wad of blood into his face.
“Too late, valet! He’s gone! Too late!” she shrieked.
Julian’s boot thumped into her ribs, sending her crashing into the wall. An enormous hole had been blown in her stomach, and blood was gushing out across the stone floor.
“Too late! Too late!” She started crawling again, screeching obscenities as she did so, and Julian walked back to the rest of his team.
“He’s not here,” Carpenter said.
“What do you mean, he’s not here?” asked Turner.
“I mean he’s not here,” Julian snapped. “He’s somewhere else, he’s gone, he’s not here. Understand?”
Turner didn’t reply, but nor did he drop his gaze. “I’ll finish her,” he said. “She’s a valuable target. It means the mission wasn’t a failure.”
“Tell that to Connor,” said Miller.
“No. I’ll do it,” said Carpenter, pulling the T-Bone from his belt. “You stay here.”
He walked down the corridor.
Ilyana had dragged herself into the room at the end, and Julian followed her in. Above the kneeling step, a carving of the Virgin Mary stared down at him as he entered, the door swinging shut behind him.
At the other end of the corridor, the three Blacklight operators waited. From behind the door came a piercing scream, a rush of air, then a wet splashing sound. The door opened and Julian Carpenter emerged, his uniform soaked in blood. Behind him, the walls of the room dripped red, and he left crimson footprints on the stone floor as he returned to his men.
27
THREE’S A CROWD
Jamie lifted his hands away from his face and looked at Frankenstein. He had covered himself when the monster finished his story; he didn’t want to let him see his tears.
“So that’s why Alexandru has my mother?” he said, his voice shaking. “Because Dad killed his wife?”
“I don’t know,” said Frankenstein. “It would appear so.”
“Why does it appear so?” said Jamie, anger filling his voice. “It seems pretty clear to me.”
“I’m sure it does,” replied Frankenstein. His calm tone was maddening.
“Why doesn’t it to you then?” he said, fiercely. “What aren’t you telling me?”
The monster sighed. “There are a lot of people who, in light of what happened later, don’t believe your father killed Ilyana at all. Neither Major Turner or I saw her die. We just heard the shot.”
Jamie stared at him. “You think he faked it.”
Frankenstein slammed his fist down on the surface of the table. “I was your father’s closest friend,” he said, his voice like ice. “And I have stood at the side of your family for almost ninety years. And yet you sit there and question where my loyalties lie? I have done things in the protection and service of your ancestors that would make your ears bleed, and you question me?”
“I’ll question whatever I want!” yelled Jamie, standing up from the table and sending his chair clattering to the floor. He put his hands onto the surface and leaned toward Frankenstein. “Do you think Ilyana is still alive? That my father let her go? Tell me!”
The monster slowly unfolded himself out of his chair and rose to his full height. His shadow engulfed Jamie. “Listen to me,” he said. “I would have died for Julian Carpenter. I never doubted or questioned him, until a swarm of vampires brought the Blacklight jet down in a ball of fire on the runway of this base, killing eight good men in the process. It happened a quarter of a mile beyond the ou
ter fence, on the edge of the most strictly classified and highly protected base in the country. A place that doesn’t exist on any map, a place that planes and satellites are not permitted to fly over. A place-”
“A place where hundreds of people work every day,” interrupted Jamie. “Any of them could have told Alexandru where we are.”
“No,” said Frankenstein. “They couldn’t. The civilian staff are flown in and out every day on a plane with no windows, from an airport fifty miles away from here. They have no idea where they are. Only senior operators are allowed to come and go.”
“And there’s how many of them? A hundred? Two hundred? More?”
“About two hundred. And you’re right, any of them could have told Alexandru where Blacklight is. But very few of them could have given him a map of the infrared sensors that fill the woods for ten miles beyond the fence. Only about six people in Department 19 have access to that information. And without that information, there would have been time for the passengers to pull their chutes. But she was so low when they hit her, there was no time for anyone to do anything. She exploded, right out there on the runway. The investigation was still ongoing when your father died, ten days after the crash. He left base the night he died without warning or permission, without telling anyone where he was going. But he was still logged into the network when he left, and a duty officer saw something unusual on his screen. When they investigated, they found an e-mail your father had sent to an unknown address. Attached to it were maps of the infrared sensor array.”
Jamie walked stiffly away from the table and slid down the wall to the floor. He wrapped his arms around his knees and buried his head against them. When he spoke again, his voice was tiny. “Why would he do it? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Frankenstein lowered himself back into his chair. “After he died, the data forensics team dug through every key Julian had ever pressed on a Blacklight computer. Buried way down in his personal folders, behind about a dozen passwords and layers of encryption, they found a letter he had written. In it, he claimed to be righting the wrongs that had been done to your family, the injustice you had suffered at the hands of the other founding families. He believed that they still only thought of him as the descendant of a valet, and they would never see or treat him as an equal. He cited the fact that no Carpenter has ever been director as proof of how your family was perceived, and he said that he was not going to tolerate it any longer.”
“How would bringing down the jet accomplish that?” asked Jamie, without raising his head.
“The Mina’s pilots that day were John and George Harker,” said Frankenstein. “Two descendants of arguably the most famous name in Blacklight history.”
The image of the plaque in the rose garden burst into Jamie’s mind.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh, Dad. What did you do? There was only one thing he didn’t understand: one final straw to cling to. “Why did Alexandru come for us, if Dad was working with him? Why would he want us dead?”
“I don’t know,” Frankenstein said, simply. “Maybe Julian did kill Ilyana and made a deal with Alexandru so that he would spare you and your mother. Maybe Alexandru double-crossed him. Or maybe he did let Ilyana live, and Alexandru double-crossed him for the sheer hell of it. It doesn’t matter now. He’s gone.”
Jamie raised his head and looked at Frankenstein with puffy, teary eyes. “Isn’t there any part of you that still believes in him?” he asked. “That believes he didn’t do it?”
The monster turned his chair toward Jamie, rested his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward. “I believed in him for as long as I could,” he said. “I fought his case for months after he died. I examined every scrap of the evidence against him, reviewed every line of the data forensics report, checked and double-checked every word. I refused to even entertain the idea that Julian could have done such a thing; I threatened to resign a dozen times.”
He looked sadly at Jamie, and took a deep breath. “I never found anything that would exonerate him. We buried John and George, and we waited for Alexandru to make his next move. But it never came. And as time passed, I eventually had to accept what everyone else had come to realize; that Julian had done what they said he had done, and I was just going to have to live with it, no matter how much it hurt my heart to do so.”
Frankenstein sat patiently, watching Jamie. But Jamie wasn’t thinking about his father; he was thinking about his mother and the awful way he had treated her after his dad had died, the terrible things he had said. Hot shame was flooding through him, and he would have given anything to be able to tell her how sorry he was, to tell her he was wrong and ask her to forgive him.
“I was so angry with him for leaving us,” he said, eventually. “My mother always told me I was being unfair. But I wasn’t. He betrayed everyone.”
“Your father was a good man who did an awful thing,” said Frankenstein. “He made a terrible mistake, and he paid for it with his life.”
“And eight other people’s lives,” said Jamie, his voice suddenly fierce. “What did the people on the plane do to deserve what happened to them? Not be nice enough to anyone whose surname was Carpenter? How pathetic is that?”
Frankenstein said nothing.
“I’m ashamed to be his son,” spit Jamie. “No wonder everyone in this place looks at me like they do. I would hate me, too. I’m glad he’s dead.”
“Don’t say that,” said Frankenstein. “He was still your father. He raised you, and he loved you, and you loved him back. I know you did.”
“I don’t care!” Jamie cried. “I don’t care about any of that! I didn’t even know him; the man who raised me wasn’t even real! The man who raised me was a case officer at the Ministry of Defense, who went on golf weekends with his friends and complained about the price of gasoline. He didn’t exist!” He leapt to his feet and kicked his fallen chair across the room. It skidded across the tiled floor and slammed into the wall. “I won’t waste another second thinking about him,” he said, his pale blue eyes fixing on Frankenstein’s. “He’s dead, my mother is still alive, for now at least, and we need to find her. I’m going to talk to Larissa again.”
The monster stiffened in his seat. “What good do you think will come of that?” he said.
“I don’t know. But I think she wants to help me. I can’t explain why.”
Frankenstein stared at the teenager. He was about to reply when the radio on Jamie’s belt crackled into life.
Jamie pulled it from its loop and looked at the screen. “Channel 7,” he said.
“That’s the live operation channel,” said Frankenstein. “No one should be using it.”
Jamie keyed the CONNECT button on the handset, and then almost dropped it as a terrible scream of agony burst from the plastic speaker. Frankenstein stood bolt upright, staring at the radio in the teenager’s hand.
A low voice whispered something inaudible, and then a man’s voice, trembling and shaking, spoke through the radio.
“… Hello? Who i-is this?”
“This is Jamie Carpe-”
There was a tearing noise, horribly wet, and the scream came again, a high-pitched wail of pain and terror.
“Oh God, please!” shrieked the man. “Please, please, don’t! Oh God, please don’t hurt me anymore!”
Jamie looked helplessly at Frankenstein. The monster’s face had turned slate gray, and his misshapen eyes were wide. He was staring at the radio as though it were a direct line to hell.
Something whispered again, and then the voice was back, hitching and rolling as the man who was speaking fought back tears.
“You have to come,” the voice said between enormous sobs of pain. “H-he says you h-have to come to him. He s-says if you d-don’t then you’ll n-never see your m-mother again.”
Rage exploded through Jamie. “Alexandru,” he growled, his voice unrecognizable. “Where are y-”
The man screamed again, so long and loud that the scream descended to a high-pitched croak. Some
thing laughed quietly in the background, as the man spoke two final, gasping words. “Help me.”
Then the line went dead.
Jamie stared at the radio for a long moment, then dropped it on the table, a look of utter revulsion on his face. Frankenstein slowly lowered himself back into his chair and looked at the teenager with wide, horrified eyes.
“How would he have that frequency?” Jamie asked, his voice trembling. “How could he possibly have it?”
“I don’t know,” replied Frankenstein. “It’s changed every forty-eight hours.”
“So someone must have given it to him in the last two days?”
Frankenstein’s eyes widened as the realization of Jamie’s point sank in. He pulled his own radio from his belt, twisted the channel selector switch, then spoke into the receiver.
“Thomas Morris to Level 0, room 24B, immediately,” he said, and then Jamie gasped as the monster’s voice boomed out of the speakers that stood in the high corners of every room in the base.
“You’ll wake the entire Department,” he protested. “What are you doing?”
“Getting some answers,” replied Frankenstein.
Barely a minute later, Thomas Morris pushed open the door to the office and staggered inside. His face was puffy and his eyes were narrow slits, and he was yawning even as he asked them what the emergency was.
“You’re security officer, Tom. So you can search the network access logs, correct?” asked Frankenstein.
Morris rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I can do that,” he replied.
“Good. I need you to search for anyone who has accessed the frequency database in the last forty-eight hours.”
Morris groaned. “This couldn’t have waited until-”
“I need you to do it now, please,” interrupted Frankenstein.
Morris shot the monster a look of mild annoyance, then pulled his portable console from the pouch on his belt. He placed it on the desk, coded in, and ran the search, as Jamie and Frankenstein watched over his shoulder.
