by William Hill
“What was Operation Nightingale?” asked Jamie.
“It was a mission to destroy a blood factory near Craiova. A vampire gang was kidnapping people, mostly drug addicts and the homeless, from all across central Europe, and bleeding them in an old slaughterhouse. Hundreds of men and women a year for God knows how long, then selling the blood on the black market. We’d known about it for a couple of years and had reported it to the SPC on a number of occasions. We got nothing back, not even an acknowledgment that the message had arrived. That’s what it was like when the Iron Curtain still stood; information disappeared into a black hole. Then when the Curtain came down, we reported it again, and this time we got a reply, saying that the factory was a priority SPC target. Six months later, still nothing had happened, so Dan sent a team in.”
Frankenstein looked at Jamie. “When I think back to that day—”
“You were there?” interrupted Jamie. “You went on the mission?”
“Of course,” replied Frankenstein. “Me, your father, Paul Turner, and seventeen other Blacklight men. We flew in on the 18th of March 1993, and we reached the factory in the late morning of the following day.”
“What happened?”
“They were waiting for us. More than seventy vampires, all well fed and rested, wide awake and waiting when we went through the door. I noticed that the black paint covering the windows was still wet, and I told your father, who ordered everyone to retreat. But it was too late. They came down from the rafters. We never stood a chance.”
“But you made it out. And so did my dad and Major Turner.”
“We were lucky. That’s all there is to it. Maybe we were a little more experienced; some of the team were just boys, no more than a year or two under their belts. When we saw them coming, we turned and ran. I was the last one to make it out of the building.”
“How many of you made it?” asked Jamie, his voice taut with horror.
“Six of us,” replied Frankenstein. “Six of us made it into the sunlight, and fourteen men died in a dark building full of blood and death.”
Frankenstein reached for his mug, saw that it was empty, and pushed it aside. “Dan could never prove the Russians let them know we were coming. The operation was an unauthorized run into another Department’s territory, so there were no permissions, no call logs to check. But that didn’t matter to him. Your father defended the SPC, told Dan he didn’t believe they would let Blacklight men die to make a point. But the director was convinced. He ordered Department 19 to sever all ties with the SPC and drew up a letter asking the prime minister to expel Russian diplomatic staff from London. The letter claimed that the SPC had committed an act of war, and it should be treated as such.”
“But if it was an unauthorized mission . . .” protested Jamie.
Frankenstein smiled at him. “You can see the problem, fourteen years later. And your father and I could see it then. We weren’t alone, either. At that point, the mission was the biggest disaster in Blacklight history, and losing fourteen men in one day had a terrible impact on the Department. Just about every operator knew one of the men who had died, and there was a lot of anger about what had happened. A lot of it aimed at Dan Morris. So your father took control of the situation.”
“What did he do?”
“He and a number of senior operators—Henry Seward, Paul Turner, and myself among them—made a formal motion to the chief of the general staff that Dan Morris be removed as director. We explained the mistake he had made in ordering the mission, and the huge overreaction he was planning in response to its failure, and we asked that he be relieved of duty, for the good of Blacklight. Thankfully, the general agreed with us and did as we asked.”
“No wonder you and Tom don’t get along,” said Jamie, softly. “He must hate you for doing that to his dad.”
“He can hate me all he wants,” said Frankenstein, sharply. “I don’t give a damn what he thinks. We did what we did because it needed doing, because more men would have died needlessly if we hadn’t. I don’t regret it for a moment.”
“What happened to Tom’s dad? Did he stay in Blacklight?”
“He could have,” said Frankenstein. “He was removed as director, not from the Department. And there were plenty of people who tried to persuade him to do so, including your father. But his pride would not allow it. He left the day after he was removed from office.” The monster looked at Jamie. “He put his pistol in his mouth six months later.”
“Jesus,” whispered Jamie.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, the sad tale of Thomas Morris’s father hanging in the air between them.
Eventually Jamie spoke. “So that was when Admiral Seward took charge?” he asked.
Frankenstein nodded. “He was Commander Seward then. But, yes. He steadied the ship, with your father’s help. And the Department recovered. Everything was fine for more than a decade. Henry and Julian were a great team, and Blacklight prospered. And then Budapest happened, and nothing was ever really the same again.”
Jamie sat forward, his eyes full of dreadful inevitability.
“What happened in Budapest?” he asked.
26
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Molnár estate near Budapest, Hungary
February 12, 2005
Julian Carpenter fired his T-Bone at point-blank range, turning his head away as the vampire exploded in a shower of blood, soaking his Blacklight uniform. He turned to the four men standing behind him.
“Be careful from here on,” he said.
Four faces looked back at him. The huge mottled face of Frankenstein gave him a quick grin, and Paul Turner stared at him without expression, his gray eyes cold and calm. The two young operators, Connor and Miller, looked at him with queasy uncertainty, their training just about masking their obvious fear. Carpenter felt for them; neither should have been on a mission with such a high-value target, and all five men knew it. The two young privates had less than a year’s experience between them, and it was Connor’s first live operation.
There had been no time to examine records; the intelligence that had drawn them to this exquisite estate on the edge of Budapest had needed acting on immediately, and Carpenter had gathered the first four able-bodied men he could find. He was grateful that two of them had been Frankenstein and Turner, veterans of hundreds of operations, and two of his closest friends in Blacklight. Connor and Miller would just have to do what they had been trained to; eventually, every operator was required to sink or swim.
Carpenter had been overseeing the shift change in the Ops Room when the report had come in. At first he had thought it was a practical joke. It was written by a Blacklight major called John Bryant, who was celebrating his thirtieth wedding anniversary with his wife on a cruise down the Danube. He and his wife had taken a stroll along the river banks of Budapest and had literally walked into Alexandru Rusmanov and his wife, Ilyana.
Ninety minutes later, Carpenter’s team were in the air, heading east. They were strapped onto benches inside an EC725 Cougar that had been stripped down and essentially rebuilt. The improvements that most pleased Julian Carpenter had been to the rotors and the engines, which now delivered a cruising speed of just over 300 miles per hour. This was significantly faster than the publicly acknowledged world-record speed for a helicopter, and it meant that the flight to Budapest would take little more than an hour. The Mina, the supersonic Blacklight jet that could have covered the distance to Budapest in less than twenty minutes, was in Tokyo, and he could not afford to wait for the Harker brothers to bring her home.
Julian pressed a button in the console next to his seat, and a screen folded down from the ceiling. The most recent photo of Alexandru filled the frame, and he told the four men on the benches to study it carefully.
“This is Alexandru Rusmanov,” he said, raising his voice slightly above the steady pulse of the helicopter’s engines. “Turner, Frankenstein, I know you don’t need reminding of just how dangerous this target i
s. So Connor, Miller, I say this for your benefit; nothing in your training has prepared you for dealing with a vampire as old and powerful as Alexandru. Nothing.” He contemplated the eager, nervous faces of the two privates.
“You’re looking at the second oldest vampire in the world. He was turned by Dracula himself, along with his brothers, Valeri and Valentin, more than four hundred years ago. He is powerful in a way that distorts the scales; he can knock down buildings, he can move faster than your eyes can follow, he can fly indefinitely. And more than that, he is clever, and he is vicious. He views humanity as nothing more than a herd of cattle from which to draw his sustenance. If he chooses to, he will kill you without a millisecond’s hesitation.”
Carpenter pressed the button again, and the image changed to a black and white photo of a stunningly beautiful woman with dark hair and sharp features. “This is Ilyana, Alexandru’s wife. She is almost as old as he is; he turned her himself, with Dracula’s permission. She has stood at his side for more than four centuries and is every bit as dangerous as her husband. In modern psychological terminology, Ilyana is a pure sociopath, without empathy for others, without feelings for anyone apart from her husband. She is unpredictable—and she is deadly.”
A final press of the button sent the screen folding back into the ceiling. Carpenter looked at his team and saw fear in the faces of Connor and Miller.
Good, he thought. They need to be scared.
“Both these individuals are high-value targets, rated A1 by every Department in the world. Our orders are to eliminate them both. If that proves impossible, if the opportunity only arrives to make one kill, then Alexandru is the priority. Understood?”
The four men on the benches shouted that they did, and Julian nodded.
I hope you do, he thought. I really hope you do.
The helicopter touched down at a Hungarian Air Force Base on the outskirts of Budapest. The aircraft’s call sign meant it did not appear on civilian radar, and only a handful of military air traffic controllers in the world would have recognized the unique combination of letters and numbers that signified a Department 19 vehicle.
Working quietly and inconspicuously through the bars and restaurants of Budapest, the team picked up Alexandru’s trail. They followed an elderly vampire to his small apartment below the castle, and he told them about a bar called the Ramparts that had been much busier than usual in recent weeks, busy with the kind of creatures the old man stiffly informed them he had no wish to socialize with. When Turner pressed him, he confessed that he felt no kinship with young vampires, found their lust for violence abhorrent and avoided them wherever possible. Carpenter thanked him, and they moved on.
From the Ramparts, they trailed a vampire bartender to a warehouse rave in Budapest’s rundown industrial district. They dragged him out to the parking lot at the rear of the building, the bartender’s eyes wide and rolling, his teeth grinding as Bliss pumped through his system, and he told them that a huge man with a child’s face had dropped a card as he left the Ramparts four nights ago. The card was for a vampire club near Matthias Church, a place the bartender had only ever heard whispered about. When he claimed not to remember the address, Turner applied a UV torch to the vampire’s hand. It burst into flame, jogging his memory.
Outside a beautiful Gothic town house on Balta Köz, the five men sat in a jet-black car, watching. Anderson, the huge child-faced vampire who served as Alexandru’s right-hand man, had entered the building two hours earlier, apparently unaware that anyone was watching. A small gold plate by the door of the town house had been engraved with the words TABULA RASA, which Carpenter thought appropriate for a club frequented by vampires.
A blank slate is exactly what it gives them, he thought. The freedom to leave behind the people they were before they were turned and start again.
“Colonel,” said Paul Turner, in a low voice. Carpenter looked round and saw Anderson emerging from the carved stone doorway. The tall, hunched vampire cast a quick look up and down the quiet street, then stepped casually into the air and disappeared.
Carpenter turned to Private Miller, who was seated in the back of the vehicle, cradling a sleek black laptop that was connected to a spy satellite in geo-synchronous orbit above them.
“Do you have the heat trail?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” responded the young operator. “He’s heading north by northwest, sir.”
Six minutes after dawn the following morning, Julian ordered their car brought to a halt in front of the Molnár estate. Two ornate metal gates stood open, the first rays of sunlight glimmering on the wrought iron. The five men had strapped and clipped their body armor into place during the drive, and there was a heavy sense of anticipation inside the vehicle. Carpenter looked at his team and decided against saying anything more to them. If they weren’t ready, then nothing he could say at this late stage would correct that. And if they were, he didn’t want to give them anything extra to think about. They would soon have more than enough to deal with; of that he was quite sure.
The estate’s main building, an enormous seventeenth-century country house, squatted on top of a long, shallow rise, its upper floors visible from the gate. The road that led from the open entrance wound left then right, through dense lines of neatly clipped trees, then led straight up the hill toward a wide graveled driveway in front of the house. The trees fell away on both sides, and the five Blacklight operators were confronted with a hundred yards of immaculate, featureless lawn, a vast open space that would have filled Carpenter with dread were it not for the pale yellow sunlight reflecting off the morning dew.
They crossed the lawns quickly, moving in a tight X-shaped formation; Carpenter in the middle, Turner and Frankenstein leading the way, the two privates bringing up the rear. Their boots crunched across the gravel as they approached the home of the Molnár family, and then Turner pushed open the towering front door, and the five men slipped silently into the house.
The smell was the first thing that hit them as they stepped onto the tiled marble floor of the atrium; a stench of rot so thick it felt as though you could have bitten into it. A dark haze of flies looped lazily in an open doorway at the rear of the room, and Carpenter led them toward it. Beyond the door was a large, spotlessly modern kitchen, big enough to have serviced a medium-sized restaurant. The smell intensified as they entered, waving the swarming flies away with their gloved hands. On a counter above one of the ovens, in a steel baking tray, was a leg of roast lamb. It was a virulent purple color and had swollen to almost double its size as the rot set in. The meat was leaking a milky fluid that was collecting in a thick pool in the tray, and maggots were swarming in wide crevices that had split open in the decaying flesh. Flies buzzed in a dense cloud above it, landing and taking off in a swirling pattern of shiny black bodies and translucent wings. Beside the tray stood bowls of black, liquidizing potatoes and vegetables, and a tray of crystal champagne flutes, their contents now long since flat.
Private Miller gagged, as quietly as he could.
“How long?” asked Turner, his voice as calm as ever.
“This time of year?” replied Carpenter. “A week, at least.”
The five men stood in silence, regarding the spoiled food. The likely implications for those who had been intending to eat it did not need vocalizing.
“Let’s keep moving,” said Carpenter.
The team moved into the lobby, a beautiful, cavernous space, with wooden walls and gleaming black-and-white marble tiles. Above them, a domed window let in the morning sun, lending the place a sense of peace and calm that couldn’t have been further from what the men were feeling.
In the dining room, they found the bodies.
It was more a hall than a room, a long oak-paneled hall, lined on one side by windows that overlooked the pale green grass of the lawns. A dark wood dining table sat in the middle of the room; stale bowls of bread sat on delicate serving plates in the middle of the surface, and gleaming water glasses and ornate silv
er cutlery stood expectantly in front of empty chairs.
A cavernous fireplace sat in the middle of the far wall and arranged around it were a number of comfortable-looking armchairs, no doubt the setting for thousands of after-dinner brandies over the years, and it was around these chairs that the Molnár family and their servants had been arranged.
There were six bodies in all. A man in his late fifties or early sixties sat in one of the armchairs, his head thrown back and his throat torn out. On his knee had been placed a girl, no more than seven years old, whose slender, pale neck bore two circular puncture marks. No other torment had been visited upon her, as far as Carpenter could see, and he felt a rush of relief at the quick death she had received, a privilege that had not been afforded the rest of the household.
The men approached slowly, although it was immediately obvious that nothing lived in this room. Their boots crunched softly as they tracked through a huge oval of dried blood, and even Turner winced at the sound. Two servants, a butler and a maid, had been laid end to end on the floor, their heads next to each other, their dead eyes staring up at the ceiling above them. Their throats had been slashed so violently that they almost appeared decapitated. Carpenter forced himself to focus on the last two victims, a boy and a girl in their early twenties. They had died with their arms around each other, huddled into one of the armchairs. The boy’s face wore an expression of defiance that brought a savage joy to Carpenter’s heart.
Good for you, boy, he thought. Didn’t give them the satisfaction. Good for you.
The girl, whose arms were wrapped tight around the boy’s neck, had clearly possessed no such steel; her face was a mask of terror and utter, hopeless misery. She had been beautiful, her face a perfect narrow oval, her hair the color of barley, her limbs long and slender. She was dressed in a ball gown made of a silver material that shimmered in the morning sunlight.
