by Andy Maslen
“Very well,” Caroline said, her impression of a world-weary public servant a marvel to behold.
She opened her shoulder bag and retrieved a plastic ID card complete with photo, bar code and official HSE logo. Tomas had given her a rather grand job title – Senior Inspector, Toxins, Pathogens and Radioactivity – and I suspect that this, coupled with her brusqueness, was enough to convince our Doubting Thomas.
“Come on, Emily,” he said. Then, to Caroline, “How long is your inspection going to take?”
“Inspection? Oh, no,” she said. “You’re closed. Indefinitely. Go home and wait. Breaches of the National Code on Radioactive Materials Abuse are usually on the news by tea-time, so you’ll find out what’s happening if you stick close to your TV.”
The two scientists fled. Caroline rushed across the lab, dodging all kinds of high-tech equipment mounted on white plastic and steel benches and tore open the door to David’s office. Lily and I didn’t bother watching the reunion. We had work to do. Lily wedged the door open and ran back to the car to fetch the petrol and the C4. I took a screwdriver from my pocket and began removing hard disks from all the PCs I could see. These I bagged. We intended to destroy them back in London.
While I was engaged in this monotonous task, Caroline emerged from the glass cubicle with David. He was smiling broadly and holding her hand –a good sign. It meant Velds’s influence over him had vanished. He was talking, gabbling, really.
“But Caro,” he was saying, “how are you going to stop her? I mean, she’s mega-rich and mega-powerful. You can’t just—”
Then he saw me with the pile of hard drives on the table beside me.
“Hey! What are you doing?” he shouted. “Leave those alone. That’s all our work. You can’t—”
“Darling,” Caroline said. “This is Shimon. He’s helping me. There’s so much I have to tell you and it’s going to seem crazy but I promise you, it’s for the best.”
“What’s for the best? What is he doing?”
I stood up and offered my hand. Instinctively, he took it and we shook. Amazing how you can derail almost anyone’s train of thought with so simple a gesture.
“Hello, David,” I said. “I am Shimon Gregorius. I am a vampire hunter. We need to destroy all your work, all your files, and this laboratory. Completely and utterly. My associate Lily Bax will be back shortly with gasoline and explosives.”
I calculated the impact of my initial statement would cloud his mind and prevent his fully assimilating the import of my other words.
“Wait. What? You’re a what? Caroline, who is this guy? Did he just say he was a vampire hunter?”
She put her hands on his shoulders and looked deeply into those eyes – such a bright blue, like my Mother’s old porcelain dinner service. She spoke slowly, and clearly, almost as if explaining something to a child.
“Yes he did say that. He, and Lily, and I, and a lady called Ariane and another man called Tomas. We are all vampire hunters. It’s Peta Velds, David. She is a vampire.”
His eyes widened so far I could see the white above as well as below his china-blue irises. He ran both hands through his mop of blond curls and scratched his scalp so vigorously I thought he might begin tearing his hair out.
“Ok. First of all, slap me. Hard. Otherwise I figure this is a hallucination I’m having and I should just go and lie down.”
I thought Caroline would protest or use more words. But no. She drew her right hand back and delivered a resounding blow to his left cheek. The sound was amplified and reflected by all the hard surfaces in that clinical space and a red after-image blossomed on his pale skin.
“This is real, David. You have to come with us now. I can explain everything later.”
I’d been working away while this little drama played out and I had gathered all but the hard drive from whatever computer David had in his office. I stowed them in the rucksack I had brought for the purpose and turned to him.
“Caroline is right, David,” I said, in my best fatherly voice. “Now, what sort of machine do you have in your office? A desk-top or a laptop?”
“A laptop. I keep everything on it.”
“Go and get it, please, David. And is there a server, too?”
He pointed to a grey steel cabinet, secured with a padlock and ventilated with a grid of small holes on both sides.
“In that cupboard.”
While David went to retrieve his laptop, I told Caroline to go and help Lily with the materiel. She left, and I severed the padlock’s shackle with bolt cutters. Inside was a tower of uniform black boxes, each with a row of winking red lights along the front and the logo of a well-known Korean company. If they knew who was using their technology, I thought, they wouldn’t be so keen to boast of its robustness in their advertising. “Used to exsanguinate the human race,” is not much of an advertising slogan.
There were too many boxes to deal with individually, and I didn’t know how much time we’d have before someone came in. Something more drastic was called for. I pulled the power cable out from the wall and cut it off where it entered the back of the assembly of servers. With my wire cutters, I stripped off the final ten centimetres of plastic insulation from the cable, exposing the copper cores. These I fed through the cooling slots at the rear of the central device until I felt them meet an obstruction. I secured the cable with duct tape. Finally, I pushed the plug home into a domestic light-timer, set the ‘ON’ time for ten minutes later and then plugged the timer into the wall socket and switched on the power.
David reappeared. His eyes were wary but relaxed, and he held out the laptop to me.
“This is it,” he said. “Apart from the desktops and those servers, there’s nothing else here. Everything else is in the cloud.”
“Good,” I said. “Thank you, David.”
Then Lily and Caroline reappeared. Each carried two jerry cans of petrol, and the sagging rucksack on Lily’s back contained the C4. They put the cans down on the floor and the petrol sloshed heavily inside. Lily took charge. Violence on this scale is more her field of expertise than mine.
“Caroline, get everything soaked in the gas. Except yourself, obviously. Start in David’s office and work your way back towards the door. David, stay close to Shimon. Do what he says.”
Then she knelt by the server tower and unsnapped the catches on her rucksack.
She unwrapped the black plastic film on a package of the plastic explosive and moulded the round block into a flattish square. This she slid inside the server tower, on top of one of the boxes. She repeated the process one layer further down with a second block of explosive. She retrieved a detonator and timer from her rucksack but then she spotted my stripped power cable wires.
“Did you do this, Shimon?” she said.
“Guilty as charged.”
“Excellent! But instead of trying to fry the disks with juice, we’ll blow them up.”
With that she pulled the plug and its timer out from the socket again – “Can’t be too careful”. Then she connected the wires to a slender silver cylinder the size of a cigarette, which she explained was an electric detonator, and pushed it into the oily, grey slab of C4. She replaced the plug and timer and switched on the power. I noticed a bead of sweat rolling down her temple. Never a relaxing job, working with plastique.
Caroline tossed the last of the empty jerry cans into the corner where it bounced off a desk with a hollow clang.
“Done,” she called. “My God, this place stinks.”
“Not half as much as it will do when the plastique goes up,” Lily said. “Now, time to leave.”
I swung my rucksack loaded with hard disks onto my back, David grabbed his laptop and then all four of us ran for the door. I checked my watch. Five minutes to go. Then, disaster!
Outside the lab we came face to face with Stoker and two female lamia. He was pointing a shotgun at Caroline’s chest and the two creatures separated and began advancing on us from left and right.
; Lily and I drew our blades and the smell of the salcie usturoi drove the lamia back for a moment, hissing in that infernal manner they have. Stoker simply laughed.
“Oh, dear, mediaeval daggers soaked in a condiment against a rather nicely engineered German pump-action shotgun. You lose, I’m afraid. Now go back in there and undo whatever it is you’ve just done, while I wait here with Miss Murray.”
“Wait!” David cried. “No! It’s over, Stoker. I’m not going to solve Peta’s problem. So you’d better start blasting.”
“Very well,” Stoker said and he racked a shell into the chamber. “But you’ll have to live with your fiancée’s death for the rest of your life.”
He levelled the brutish looking gun and aimed at the centre of Caroline’s chest. She was paralyzed with fear, eyes wide, one hand clutching her throat.
Then something strange happened.
Stoker started trembling.
Just a little at first, enough to make the fabric of his suit vibrate over his chest. Then, more violently, so that his whole torso began shivering.
He dropped the shotgun. To my great surprise, Caroline darted forward and scooped it up off the floor, before turning it to point at Stoker.
“What have you done?” he asked, as splits started appearing in the skin of his face and hands.
Lily and I knew, at least in general, and we pulled David and Caroline back to a safe distance. David answered.
“After Peta left, I came out of whatever trance she put me in. Ariane couriered me a letter explaining what was going on. And how to kill vampires. Plus a little bottle of a smelly yellow liquid. For all your cyber security, Stoker, you forgot about blokes with bike helmets turning up in reception with lab supplies. Caroline, take a look at the grip on that shotgun, just don’t grab it hard.”
“Clever boy!” she said. “Look Stoker. He carved a nick in it and coated the splinter with salcie usturoi.”
Stoker’s time was up and we shielded our eyes as, with a scream, he collapsed in a widening pool of his own blood that flooded out from his trouser hems and the sleeves of his jacket. As the head burst we were running for the door, the two lamia hanging back as they keened over their dead master.
“Come on!” Lily shrieked. “We don’t have much time.”
We reached the car in a scramble of arms and legs, piling in to the front and rear and stuffing the rucksacks wherever they would fit.
Lily jammed the key in the ignition and started the car with a roar from its engine. Her foot was flat on the accelerator. She threw it into first and screeched around in a wide circle before barreling across the tarmac for the front gates. Ahead of us, under twin pools of pinkish-yellow light, the tall gates began to close on their greased rails.
We reached them just as the distance between their leading edges closed to the width of the car. Lily hit the space dead centre and kept her foot down as the steel gates scraped their way down the bodywork of the car. Thank God for those Swedes and their safety consciousness. I wouldn’t have fancied trying the same trick in a Lada.
I swear they snapped at us like the jaws of a gigantic crocodile as we got free, before clanging shut. Lily turned left out of the access road, tyres squealing as she straightened the car onto the main road heading towards the town. As we rocketed along the road the three of us not driving looked out of the side and rear screens.
“It should have blown by now,” Lily said.
“No,” I said. “Those domestic timers are only accurate enough to turn lights on and off.”
I was just about to explain the clockwork mechanism when there was a bright flash from the lab followed a second later by an enormous rushing, roaring boom – almost two separate sounds but running into one another. I watched as a fireball blossomed from the roof of the building – a beautiful thing if you could ignore its significance. Although, maybe if you considered what it meant it was all the more pleasing to the eye. There were a series of three or four more explosions – lab equipment, I assumed, or chemicals.
Lily slowed the car: leaving the scene of an explosion on British soil doing ninety is bound to attract the wrong type of attention. As we entered Lowestoft at a sedate thirty miles per hour, all was quiet apart from a few workers heading out from their houses to catch buses or trains or perhaps just take their pet pooch for a walk. No sirens. They would take a while to come as we hoped we had killed everyone left at the lab.
35
Caroline Murray’s Journal, 17th November 2010
I have David back. After we returned to London, the others dropped us off at the flat. Shimon said they had work to do setting another trap to catch Peta Velds. Plus they had those disks to destroy. I asked, perhaps foolishly, if they were going to “wipe” them, though I confess I had no clear idea of what that means, or even whether it’s a real thing.
Shimon just laughed and said they were going to use “a bloody big hammer”. Crude but effective, I suppose.
Last week, I took David to see a blood specialist in Harley Street. I thought barristers were well paid but after he presented his bill I swear I trained in the wrong profession.
David told me that Peta had indeed bitten him, and the plasters were covering up the evidence. She did it the very first night he was up there, the bitch. But here’s the most amazing part of this. The results came through yesterday morning and his blood is completely free of parasites. No infections. No raised T-cell count. Nothing. She had him under some sort of hypnotic spell, but to be honest, any moderately forceful woman could probably achieve the same results with David. However, there is an interesting side angle to all the good news.
David has a rare blood disorder. Something called n-Theta-Haemoblasticity. It’s asymptomatic, although it has been linked to bipolar disorder – who knew? – but it hyper-stimulates the sufferer’s white blood cells. In David’s case, they multiplied to 1,000 times their normal concentration. I think they just basically destroyed the parasites that came through into his bloodstream from Peta Velds’s saliva.
I called Ariane, who is back from New York, though without Tomas – dreadful news. She was close to tears several times as we spoke. I told her that we, at least, had been successful, and she told me what to do with David to be absolutely sure he was “pure”, as she put it. Actually, it was a rather pleasant day.
First we went for a walk in the sunshine. It was bitterly cold and I had my good coat on, but Ariane said David should expose as much of his skin as possible. We got some funny looks, I can tell you. Me in a floor-length greatcoat buttoned up to my chin and poor David in shorts and a T-shirt. But he was fine. Well, blue with cold but no exploding, thank God. Then we had to expose him to garlic oil. I booked a table at Café da Aldo in Soho and we stuffed our bellies with garlic bread and spaghetti ali e oli. The restaurant is still open and still wearing its original décor, which, by the way, I don’t think has changed since about 1972. Finally, the worst test and the only bit of the day I regret.
After lunch we went to the middle of Soho square and sat on one of the benches. It was empty, apart from a couple of homeless types and they seemed far more interested in the Japanese tourists and their stupid selfie-sticks than in us. I had brought a little sharpened stick of willow wood with me that I’d cut from one of the trees in the gardens of Chiswick House.
I made David hold out his hand, palm down, and I had to push the stick into his skin until I drew blood. Brave boy just gritted his teeth but I was weeping by the end of it. That did draw blood but nothing more. No shivering, no splitting skin or any of that revolting business that happened to Stoker.
So I reported back to Ariane and she signed him A1, fit for duty. I honestly think that had I not done the tests as she’d prescribed, she would have come after him herself.
36
Emails between Peta Velds and Lucinda Easterbrook, 18th November 2010
From: Peta
To: Lucinda
Subject: Vengeance
MY LUCINDA,
HA
VE YOU HEARD? THAT WOMAN DESTROYED MY LAB. SHE TOOK DAVID AWAY FROM ME. AND SHE KILLED STOKER.
I WANT HER DEAD. I WANT HIM DEAD. I WANT THEM ALL DEAD. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? I AM FLYING BACK TONIGHT.
COME TO ME AT MY LONDON HOUSE TOMORROW EVENING.
PETA
From: Lucinda
To: Peta
Subject: Re: Vengeance
Oh my darling Peta,
I did hear a little something on the grapevine. I still have my sources. A boy in Caroline’s chambers overheard her talking on the phone. I “persuaded” him to tell me what he’d heard.
I will come to you and together we will fix them. All.
I love you.
Lucinda x
37
[draft post] Ramblings of a free-revving mind – David Harker’s blog, 20th November 2010
I can’t believe it. Not really. According to Caro, Peta Velds is a vampire. And Stoker. And basically everybody at the lab apart from my team. I can’t deny what I saw and Caro triple-checked my meds with me: she even made me count the holes in the blister pack to prove to me I was taking them every day.
And now I have to destroy all my work. Every single test result, research note and protocol. Every simulation, every model, every iteration of every algorithm. It’s just so gutting. Except, obviously, it has to go because otherwise Peta would have the key to hunting round the clock and out in broad daylight. So, yes, I see the need for it but I wish there was some way I could keep a copy. Even a hard copy. I’m sure I could refocus the work back onto skin cancer. But Caro’s adamant. She says the stakes are so high we have to erase everything. Which, by the way, is not as easy as it sounds. You can’t just go into Explorer and press Ctrl + Alt + Del. There are copies being created and distributed all over the place on our cloud network. I designed the system with quadruple redundancy so even if three servers went black we’d be safe.
