Department 19 d1-1

by William Hill

  The operator behind the glass looked at Jamie, his mouth hanging open. After a moment, he sighed, rolled his chair back across the office, and pulled open a stainless-steel fridge set into the wall. Cold air flooded out, and the guard reached in and pulled out two liter pouches of O-negative blood. He pushed the chair back across the tiled floor, the wheels rattling across the shiny surface, and brought himself to a halt in front of Jamie. He shoved the pouches through the slot in the plastic, then rolled back to his desk, without giving Jamie another glance.

  The teenager ran back down the block. Larissa had crawled to her bed and was holding her injured arm against her chest. She smiled at him when he reappeared, but her eyes were full of pain.

  Jamie walked straight through the UV field and went to her. He handed her the blood and sat on the bed next to her as she tore the first one open with her teeth, holding it in her good left hand.

  “Look away,” she said.

  “No chance,” he replied.

  She didn’t wait to see if he would change his mind; she upended the plastic pouch and squeezed the contents into her mouth. Her eyes turned red as the blood slid down her throat, and she swallowed convulsively, her throat working, her head thrown back. There was a fizzing sound, and Jamie looked down at her arm.

  What he saw astonished him. The charred, blackened skin was bubbling, as though it had been soaked in acid. Before his eyes, the flesh lightened to a dark red, then a bright scarlet, then to the same pale pink as the rest of her. Muscle fibers and thin sheets of skin regrew, knitting to the revived flesh and filling the holes the fire had burned.

  The fizzing lessened, and Jamie gasped. Larissa’s arm looked no worse than if she had been lying in the sun for an afternoon.

  She was breathing hard, her lips thin, her eyes crimson.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked. “When it grows back?”

  She nodded, then opened her trembling mouth. “Not as badly,” she said. “But it hurts.”

  She pulled open the second pouch and drank it hungrily. A thick stream of blood broke from the corner of her mouth and ran down her chin; Jamie fought the absurd urge to lick it off. The fizzing noise came again, and the color of her arm faded until it was impossible to believe any injury had been done to it. He reached out and stroked the new skin; it was warm and smooth.

  She took his hand, looked him in the eyes.

  “I would never hurt you,” she said. “I’m sorry for leading you to Valhalla without telling you why I wanted to go. But you can trust me. I’ll never lie to you again.”

  He leaned over and kissed her. Her lips met his, but this time he pulled away and stood up off the bed. She looked at him, confusion on her face.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and smiled.

  39

  A FORMAL INVITATION

  Department 19 Northern Outpost

  RAF Fylingdales, North Yorkshire Moors

  Fifteen minutes ago

  Flying Officer John Elliott checked his screens, stepped through the door of the bunker into the cold evening, and breathed out a cloud of warm air. Night watch was the worst. The hours stretched out forever and tiredness pulled constantly at him, no matter how many coffees he drank and cigarettes he smoked.

  He checked his watch: one eighteen. Forty-two minutes to go.

  Elliott lit a Camel Light, grimaced as the smoke crawled across his dry throat but persevered. Dave Sargent had the next watch, and as soon as he keyed in his access code and swung open the door of the bunker, Elliott could stand down. He could be in his bed within four minutes. He had timed it.

  The young flying officer looked out across the base and to the moors beyond. The giant pale blue golf balls that had hidden Fylingdales’ Cold War radar dishes were gone now, but the vast three-sided phased array pyramid that replaced them rose up from the top of Snod Hill, silent and still ominous even after a year stationed here.

  The Blacklight outpost was at the western edge of the base, away from the roads that carried busloads of tourists to Whitby during the summer months, away from the RAF personnel and their families, a nondescript gray concrete square with a heavy steel door set into it that led down into a small bunker, one square room with two desks set into the walls and a tiny bathroom at the rear. The barracks was a short distance away along the route of the fence, linked to the front of the bunker by a gravel path. The low brick building was dark; the rest of Elliott’s unit were asleep in their beds.

  Beyond the fence that ran past the bunker were the empty moors, the bracken and long grass undisturbed by ramblers and hikers who knew better than to approach the base. Across the moors, in the hills above Harrogate, was RAF Menwith Hill, the NSA listening post that was sovereign US territory.

  Elliott had been there a couple of times, had eaten a burger in the diner and drank Coors Light and lost forty dollars in the bowling alley. The Yanks had made themselves right at home, building an authentic American small town in the shadows of the vast radar fields that scanned the world’s airwaves for the words and phrases that threw up red flags on the Echelon database.

  Before he joined Blacklight, Elliott had thought the people who believed in things like Echelon were crazy loners who spent all their time wearing tinfoil hats and feverishly posting on the Internet. Now he knew things that would make them weep into their keyboards.

  Something crunched the gravel softly behind the bunker.

  Instantly, Flying Officer Elliott drew his Glock from its holster and pulled his radio from its loop on his belt. He keyed his ID code into the pad and held it to his ear.

  “Code in.” Commander Jackson’s voice sounded tired and grumpy.

  “Elliott, John. NS303-81E.”

  “What’s going on, Elliott?”

  “I heard something, sir. Behind the bunker.”

  “Did you investigate?”

  “No, sir.”

  The commander swore heartily. “Go and check it out. I’ll be there in three minutes.”

  “Sir, the protocol-”

  “Three minutes, Flying Officer. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Elliott placed the radio back in his belt and wrapped his left hand around his right. Treading softly, he stepped along the side of the bunker. Experience told him it would be an animal of some kind, a badger burrowed under the fence from the moors, or a seagull come inland from the coast and too tired to fly back. But the protocols existed for a reason. No one came near the Blacklight bunker without authorization, and any unusual noise was taken very seriously.

  He reached the corner of the bunker and steadied his Glock in his hands. He took a deep breath, then stepped around the corner.

  Nothing.

  The wide space between the wall of the bunker and the fence was empty, the gravel track undisturbed. Elliott lowered his weapon and reached for his radio to let Commander Jackson know it was a false alarm.

  Thunk.

  Adrenaline splashed through Elliott’s nervous system. No animal had made the heavy noise that had come from the front of the bunker. He raised his pistol again and stepped sharply round the corner and against the long wall of the bunker. Before him, RAF Fylingdales glowed brightly with amber yellow light, and Elliott wished for the first time that the flat expanse of grass that separated the Blacklight bunker from the rest of the complex didn’t exist.

  He checked his watch as he inched along the concrete wall. Forty-five seconds since he had spoken with Commander Jackson. Just over two minutes until backup arrived.

  Elliott crept along the wall, the nose of his gun steady in the cool evening air. Then he heard a noise that chilled the blood in his veins, and he saw the muzzle of the pistol start to tremble involuntarily.

  It sounded like a laugh.

  A high-pitched, almost childlike laugh.

  The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and his whole body began to shake as a second huge dose of adrenaline crashed through his system. He inched forward, took a deep breath, covered the last
two feet to the corner of the bunker, and swung himself around the corner.

  There was a figure standing in front of the door.

  Everything moved in slow motion. Elliott stifled a scream, his eyes bulging in terror, and he began to pull his finger back against the feather-light trigger of the pistol. The figure was wearing a white T-shirt, and it was this detail that sank into Elliott’s brain just quickly enough to halt his finger. He took a second, closer look and then lowered the gun, panting, his breath coming in sharp hitches.

  It wasn’t a person.

  It was just a T-shirt, fastened to the door of the bunker. There was something dark sticking out of the middle of the chest, and there were words printed on the white material. He stepped forward to take a closer look, then a hand fell on his shoulder, and this time he did scream.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you, Elliott?” barked Commander Jackson, spinning the young flying officer around to face him. “Are you…”

  He trailed off as he saw the T-shirt flapping gently in the night air.

  The two men stepped forward, and Commander Jackson took the heavy torch from his belt and shone it on the bunker door.

  The T-shirt was pinned by a heavy metal bolt, at least a foot long, that had been driven through the material and several inches into the steel bunker door.

  How much force does it take to do that? Elliott wondered.

  Printed on the T-shirt was a line drawing of an island with a single word below it in cheerful yellow type.

  LINDISFARNE

  Below that, across the stomach, in a dark red liquid that turned Elliott’s stomach, five words had been scrawled: TELL THE BOY TO COME

  “Issue a proximity alert,” Commander Jackson said, in a low voice. “And wake the rest of the unit.”

  Elliott pushed open the heavy door, noticing with slightly numb horror that a small pyramid of metal now emerged from the inside of it.

  It almost went right through.

  He sat at the communications desk and punched in the command to issue the proximity alert. This signal would be sent to every military base within a fifty-mile radius, ordering them to check their radars for any unexplained aerial phenomenon in the last thirty minutes. The radar operators in the bases would not know what they were looking for, or why, and would delete the record of their search as soon as the results had been transmitted back to the Northern Outpost, as the protocol dictated.

  Elliott was about to key in the command to wake the rest of their unit, when something on one of the monitors caught his eye. It was a BBC News 24 feed, and the words Breaking News were scrolling along the bottom of the screen.

  “Better let the Loop know about the message,” Jackson called through the open door.

  Elliott didn’t take his eyes from the screen as he replied. “I think they already know, sir.”

  40

  BREAKING POINT

  Jamie shoved open the door to the Ops Room. Frankenstein and Thomas Morris were exactly where he had left them; the two men were not looking at each other, and Jamie doubted a word had been said in the time he had been underground. They looked up as he entered, and he sat in a chair in front of them.

  “She didn’t do it,” he said.

  Both men opened their mouths to protest, but he didn’t give them the chance.

  “I don’t care whether you believe me or not. I know she didn’t do it. Which means you two, me, Admiral Seward, and the operator who moved the satellite are the only other people in the world who knew we had found Alexandru. The rest of the strike team were briefed in the air, and all radio traffic was monitored. So one of those has to be the person who tipped him off.”

  He ran his hands through his hair, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms.

  “To be honest,” he continued, “I don’t care who did it. All I care about is what we do next. As far as I can tell, we have no more leads, and Alexandru has more than likely killed a load of innocent people to punish me just for looking for him. So I want to know what happens now.”

  With a whirring noise and bright flash of light, the screen that covered one entire wall of the Ops Room burst into life. The Department 19 crest appeared on the screen, six feet in diameter, as automated security protocols were implemented, then a window opened in the center of the Blacklight system desktop, and a BBC news report appeared in front of the three startled men.

  “What’s happening?” asked Jamie.

  “The monitoring system checks all civilian media for potential supernatural incidents,” answered Morris, staring up at the screen. “This is happening now, whatever it is.”

  The words BREAKING NEWS were scrolling along the bottom in thick white text. The screen showed a reporter addressing the camera from a beach, his hair blowing in the wind, the sound crackling as the night air whistled across his microphone. Behind him a pair of portable spotlights were trained on the water’s edge, where a fishing boat appeared to have run aground. There were men and women wandering over the sand, dazed looks on their faces and blankets wrapped around their shoulders, while a number of policemen and paramedics moved among them.

  The caption at the bottom of the screen informed the viewer that the report was coming live from Fenwick, Northumberland.

  In the bottom-right corner of the screen, a man was standing still, a grimace of pain on his face as a paramedic applied a bandage to his neck. Two policemen were wrestling a screaming woman to the ground, and the reporter was trying desperately to find someone coherent enough to answer his questions.

  A lightbulb suddenly blazed on in Jamie’s head.

  “Tom!” he yelled, and the security officer jumped. “Can you rewind this report?”

  Morris looked confused but said that he could.

  “I need you to take it back thirty seconds and freeze it. Quickly!”

  Morris opened a window and keyed a series of buttons. As he did so, Frankenstein lumbered to his feet and walked over to stand beside Jamie.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” replied the teenager, without taking his eyes away from the screen.

  As Morris worked the controls, the news report stopped, then began to run backward.

  “Freeze it there!” shouted Jamie after a couple of seconds, and Morris did so. “Zoom in on the man in the bottom right of the image.”

  A grid of thin green lines appeared over the picture, dividing it into sixty-four squares. Morris highlighted the four at the bottom right and clicked on them. They expanded to fill the screen, a blurry image twelve feet high. He clicked a series of keys, and the image sharpened into perfect clarity.

  The paramedic was about to place a bandage over the man’s neck. Blood was splattered over the pale skin, almost black in the silver light of the full moon that hung above him, now removed from view. Jamie drew in a deep breath sharply, and held it.

  In the center of the matted blood were two round holes of pure black.

  Jamie followed the blood down to the man’s shoulder, where it had spilled onto his upper arm and across onto his chest. He was wearing a white T-shirt, now stained a dark red.

  “Where is this place?” demanded Jamie. “I need a map of the surrounding area. My mother is wherever this boat came from, I know it.”

  Morris leapt down from his control panel, opened a long narrow cupboard set into one of the metal walls, and hauled out a sheaf of maps. Jamie ran over to him, and they began to spread them across one of the tables.

  “Northumberland, Northumberland,” said Morris aloud, casting aside map after map. Behind them something beeped, but neither he nor Jamie looked up.

  “This is the one,” exclaimed Morris, and spread a map of the North Sea coast across the desk. The two men huddled over it, their fingers hovering in the air as they searched for the tiny coastal town of Fenwick.

  “Jamie,” said Frankenstein, but the teenager didn’t even look up, just waved a hand and continued to pore over the map.

  “Jamie!” sai
d the monster again, loudly, and this time the urgency in the voice lifted the teenager’s head, a scowl creasing his features.

  “What is-” Jamie stopped dead, his eyes following Frankenstein’s pointing finger to the giant screen. A new window had opened, containing an e-mail from an address that was an indecipherable combination of letters and numbers. There was no text in the body of the mail, just a single high-quality photograph of the T-shirt that had been hammered into the door of the Department 19 Northern Outpost. The yellow lettering that spelt out the word LINDISFARNE was clearly visible, as were the words scrawled below it, the drying blood a sickly black color: TELL THE BOY TO COME

  Jamie took a long, deep breath and looked around at his friends. “That’s where she is,” he said.

  Jamie unloaded his weapons on to the Ops Room desk and checked each one in turn. He didn’t look up when Frankenstein and Morris walked back into the room.

  “I’ve spoken to the Northern Outpost,” Morris said. “They’ll control the press and keep the police off the island until we give them the all clear.”

  “Good,” replied Jamie. “That’s good.” He retied the laces on his boots, clipped his body armor into place, and replaced the weapons in their holders. “I can feel you looking at me,” said Jamie, pulling one of his gloves on and fastening it to the sleeve of his uniform. “Say whatever you’ve got to say.”

  “The rescue team will be back in a few hours,” said Morris. “Why don’t you wait, and then we can-”

  “No waiting, Tom,” said Jamie. “I’m going now. Give me the code for Larissa’s cell.”

  “What for?” asked Frankenstein.

  “I’m taking her with me,” Jamie replied. He saw the look on the monster’s face, and he stopped what he was doing and faced him. “She didn’t do it, Victor. I know she didn’t. If you can’t believe me, that’s fine, but I trust her, and I’m taking her with me.”

  “Jamie,” said Morris. “If she didn’t do it, then who did?”