Jamie left Matt arranging the piles of files and folders on his shelves, and opened the door to his own quarters next door.
Matt had been thrilled to have been given a room of his own, and even more so because it was the one next to Jamie’s. He had no possessions to speak of, merely the small rucksack he had been carrying when he had been rescued in the park near his home. He had only a single change of clothes, which he had dutifully hung in the narrow wardrobe at the foot of his bed, and a small framed photograph of him and his parents and sister, which he placed carefully on his small bedside table. Then he had set about making sense of the great mass of papers he had been sent by Professor Talbot, and Jamie had told him that he would be back in half an hour, ready to show him round the rest of the Loop.
Inside his room, Jamie flopped down on to his bed and closed his eyes, just for a moment. It had been, even by the standards of life inside Department 19, an exhausting day, and it was barely noon.
His conversation with Valentin had been a rollercoaster: unsettling, occasionally terrifying, but ultimately thrilling. His conversation afterwards, with Admiral Seward, had been nothing of the sort; the revelation that there was even the slightest possibility that Frankenstein was still alive had destabilised him so completely that he could now understand why it was obvious that the Director had wrestled with the decision of whether to tell him, or leave him in the dark.
But his time with Matt had made him feel better, as talking to the boy when he was comatose in the infirmary had done, six months earlier. There was something about him that put Jamie’s mind at ease, and he thought he had figured out what it was: Matt was one of those people whose outlook was so positive, so enthusiastic, that it made Jamie feel churlish and spoilt for failing to see the same wonder in everything that Matt saw. He was not naive, or annoying in his positivity; it just radiated out of his pores, infecting those around him.
Jamie had read his file while he was being held in seclusion in the infirmary, had seen the history of bullying that had started when Matt was no more than six or seven, and his heart had gone out to the teenager.
He knew bullying, knew it very well; knew what it was like to feel worthless and alienated from everyone around you, to want so desperately to fit in even though you understand that it’s not a choice you get to make, because some part of the very person you are is what the bullies hate, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
But Jamie had only been on the receiving end for a couple of years, in the aftermath of his father’s death, when the official story was that Julian Carpenter had been a traitor to his country. Matt had been bullied since almost the first day he walked through the gates of a school, and Jamie knew, just from the information in the file, exactly why. Matt was prodigiously clever, had no interest in sport, loved books, and hated rudeness and impoliteness. He might as well have walked into school with a target on his back.
A fierce thread of anger ran up Jamie’s spine as he thought about the tormenting his new friend must have endured. He could picture it all too clearly; he had seen it done to the quiet, intelligent kids at every school he had been to, was ashamed to admit that he had participated on occasion himself when he was younger, although with little appetite. It had been a self-preservation thing, the horrible choice that so many schoolchildren face, of whether to help make someone else unhappy or risk drawing the wrath of the bullies on to themselves by refusing to do so.
No one will mess with him again, he thought. Not here. And not anywhere else, if I’m around. I dare anyone to try.
Jamie pulled his console out of his pocket, and quickly typed a message to Kate and Larissa, telling them he had been ordered to show Matt round the base, and asking if they wanted to come with him. Two quick return beeps told him that they did, so he closed his eyes again while he waited for them to arrive, and was fast asleep in less than thirty seconds.
He was roused from a deep, dreamless void by a distant thudding sound that grew louder and louder as he drifted awake. Cursing, Jamie hauled himself off his bed, crossed the room and opened the door. Standing in the corridor outside were Kate and Larissa.
“What took you so long?” asked Larissa. “We were starting to worry.”
“I fell asleep,” replied Jamie, groggily. “Hold on while I grab Matt.”
He walked out into the corridor and knocked on the door to Matt’s new quarters. He smiled as he heard a frenzy of movement, before the door burst open and Matt’s excited face peered out at him.
“Hey,” said Jamie. “How’s the sorting going?”
“I got bored,” smiled Matt. “So I haven’t really done it. Are you going to show me round now?”
“That’s the plan,” said Jamie. “Come on.”
Matt nodded enthusiastically, then stepped out into the corridor, pulling the door shut behind him. He followed Jamie the tiny distance along the corridor and through the open door, to where Kate and Larissa were waiting for them.
“Hello,” Matt said, shyly, as the two girls looked up at him. “Nice to see you again.”
Kate and Larissa smiled at each other.
“You too,” said Kate. “You settling in OK?”
“Definitely,” said Matt. “I’ve got about a thousand things to read for Professor Talbot, and then Dr Yen is going to brief me on the progress of—”
He stopped, and a horrified look emerged on his face. He looked over at Jamie, his eyes wide.
“It’s OK,” said Jamie, gently. “They know about the Lazarus Project.”
Matt let out a huge sigh. “Oh, that’s good,” he said, breathlessly. “I’m sorry, I just get so excited.”
“It’s great that you do,” said Larissa. “You might want to be a bit more careful, outside of the people in this room, though.”
Matt nodded.
“All right,” said Jamie. “Let’s get started then. Matt, is there anything you particularly want to see first?”
Matt looked at Jamie, a mischievous smile emerging on his open face.
“Did I hear someone say you had a plane?” he asked.
Jamie woke the next morning feeling deeply conflicted.
The prospect of spending several hours on the cellblock again, as Major Turner picked up the interrogation of Valentin Rusmanov, was not the most appealing, especially when his mind was dominated by the Field Investigation Team, who were somewhere out there looking for any clues that Frankenstein was still alive. But his own conversation with the youngest Rusmanov brother had gone better than he or, he suspected, anyone else had expected, and he felt that he had proved himself again, to Admiral Seward and the others.
He showered quickly, and returned to find a message from Admiral Seward beeping on his portable console, a message telling him to attend a briefing in the Ops Room. This had become such a regular occurrence since he had been placed on the Zero Hour Task Force that it no longer even qualified as surprising, or disconcerting. He simply got dressed, then headed towards the lift that would take him up through the Loop.
Jamie walked into the Ops Room expecting to see at least some of the Zero Hour Operators gathered in the large oval space, but was surprised to find only two men waiting for him. Admiral Seward and Major Turner were huddled round one of the grey desks; both looked up at him as he entered, and he fought the immediate urge to check his watch. He knew that, for once, he wasn’t late.
“Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Seward, nodding in his direction. “Over here, please.”
“Sir,” replied Jamie, and walked over to join the two men.
They were gathered round a schematic drawing, a complicated-looking maze of lines and blocks that meant nothing to Jamie.
“Tell Mr Carpenter what you just told me, Paul,” said the Director.
Major Turner gave Seward a quizzical look, but did as he was ordered.
“The investigation into the leak within the Communications Division was concluded early this morning,” said Major Turner. “This diagram represents what I think we all suspected. There is a spy inside the Department.”
Gentle fingers of ice crawled up Jamie’s spine. “What is it?” he asked. “The diagram?”
“It’s a ghost user,” replied Turner. “A user on the mainframe that doesn’t correspond to an actual Operator, or any of the support staff. It lives inside the code that keeps the systems running. It’s been recording every change to any file on the system for at least three months, including the call logs and the security servers. It’s been tracking everything.”
“How?” asked Jamie, incredulous. “Why didn’t we see it until now?”
“Because it’s extremely clever,” replied Turner. “Whenever a user logs out of the system, it takes their place, appearing in all the logs to still be them. It runs for a minute or so, searching and logging changes. Then it disappears, and waits for another user to log out, and repeats. Over and over. The time difference is so minimal that even if you compare the user logs with the CCTV, you would barely notice the anomaly. It’s just been quietly going about its business, recording every single thing that happens on our system, and dumping a report out to a secure drop box every hour.”
“Who has access to the drop box?”
“Impossible to know. It’s an online file server; no traceable IP addresses, no way to follow who is accessing it. Like I said, very clever.”
“Have you killed it?” asked Jamie.
“That’s what we’re trying to decide,” said Admiral Seward. “Obviously, that was our first instinct. But Major Turner has suggested that there might be a way we can use it to find out who is behind it.”
“By doing what?” asked Jamie.
“By feeding false data into the system, and seeing who responds to it,” said Turner. “We can schedule it so we can eliminate people from suspicion, Operators who are off-base, or who are physically not near a computer. Narrow it down until we find them.”
“I think you should kill it,” said Jamie, firmly. “It’s still going to be recording everything else, along with the false data. That’s too dangerous, surely?”
“That’s what Major Turner and I have to discuss,” said Seward. “But the last time there was a spy in Department 19, three descendants of the founders were killed, including your father. That cannot be allowed to happen again.”
Jamie felt the ground move beneath him at the mention of his dad. He tried not to think about him, wherever possible, for very different reasons than before the night his mother had been kidnapped and Frankenstein had rescued him. Then, it had been shame, and hatred; now it was pure grief.
“I would hope,” said Major Turner, fixing his glacial stare on Jamie, “that I don’t need to tell you that this information cannot leave this room. I would prefer you not to have been told, but Admiral Seward feels that since you were already aware of the possibility of a spy, it was better that you know the facts. Now that you do, I hope you can see that any attempt to uncover the spy will be utterly compromised if word of their existence gets out?”
“I get it,” said Jamie. “You can trust me.”
“So Henry assures me,” said Turner, casting a glance at the Director.
There was a heavy silence for several seconds, as the three men considered the implications of what had been said.
We’re tied together, thought Jamie. The three of us. We’re the only ones who know about this.
Then a chill ran up his spine, and he physically shivered.
What if it’s Major Turner? What if he’s the spy? He’s the Security Officer, just like Thomas Morris was. He’d be under orders to search for himself. He could do whatever he wanted to throw us off the trail.
The thought was nauseating, and Jamie forced it away. The pale, stoical former SAS Sergeant was many things, terrifying not the least of them, but he was as loyal to Blacklight as anyone; he was married to a descendant of the founders, to Henry Seward’s sister no less, and his son was a serving Operator.
No way it’s him. It just can’t be. So who the hell is it?
“There is a second matter I need to raise,’ said Seward, and Jamie refocused on the two men in the room with him. “It concerns you both, for different reasons.”
The Director picked up the console which controlled the Ops Room’s facilities and pressed a series of keys. The giant screen, which covered the majority of the flat wall at one end of the room, burst into life. The Department 19 crest appeared, then the system ran through its series of automatic safety checks.
Not much point in it doing them now, is there? thought Jamie.
The home screen of the Blacklight system appeared: a series of folders and file trees, above a complicated dashboard of controls and programs. Seward clicked more keys, and an audio program loaded, filling the screen with a long waveform track and a series of control buttons.
“This was left on my secure line overnight,” said Admiral Seward. “It’s from the Field Investigation Team.”
He clicked the PLAY button, and a voice boomed out through the Ops Room.
“Operator Ellis, Christian, NS303, 47-J, coding in. Commanding officer, Field Investigation Team 27-R. Twelve-hour status report, submitted at 0055 hours, January 22nd. Report begins. A spectroscopic survey of ninety-five miles of the Northumberland coastline, a value suggested by the atmospheric and oceanic conditions present on the date of the disappearance of Colonel Frankenstein, proved negative. There is no evidence, analytical or anecdotal, to suggest that Colonel Frankenstein returned to the British mainland, either alive or dead. Analysis of the tidal patterns around Lindisfarne on the night in question, along with general oceanic conditions present at the time, confirmed the possibility of Colonel Frankenstein having been washed out to sea, as the currents break around the island of Lindisfarne on a sharp east–west line. Such conditions could have sent the Colonel out to sea, while returning the lycanthrope to land.
As a result of said information, my team were despatched to the main home ports of the fishing fleets of the North Sea, as rescue by a passing boat appeared to be the only likely remaining survival option for Colonel Frankenstein. Negative reports were filed from all the main Belgian and Swedish ports. However, anecdotal evidence provided by the residents of Cuxhaven, in northern Germany, described the appearance of a large figure of unknown origin, who arrived in the town aboard a small fishing boat named the Furchtlos. The vessel is currently at sea, so questioning her crew has proved impossible thus far. In my opinion, this represents the only viable lead we currently have. I am therefore formally requesting that FTB approval be secured, so that we might officially enter German territory, and continue our search. Report ends.”
The array of speakers positioned around the Ops Room fell silent, as the audio file reached its end.
“Have you spoken to the FTB? Are the Germans going to help?” asked Jamie, his voice trembling.
“They have already granted permission for the team to enter their territory,” said Seward. “I’ve transmitted that to Major Ellis. They should be on the ground by now.”
Jamie’s head spun. His heart had felt as though it might break when the voice had announced that there was nothing to suggest that Frankenstein had ever been returned to the mainland; in his mind, that was the likeliest conclusion, that if they were to find him, they would find him somewhere in northern England, maybe hurt, or incapacitated, or even captured by vampires.
Jamie had not allowed for the possibility that his friend could have been washed the other way, out into the cold vastness of the North Sea. He would not have believed that it would be possible for anyone to survive more than a few minutes in those waters, but then Frankenstein was hardly just anybody; he was ageless, apparently immortal, and if anyone might have survived such an ordeal, Jamie believed it would be him.
But if he was put ashore in Germany, thought Jamie, if the person the townspeople are talking about really was him, then why hasn’t he made contact? Why hasn’t he told us to come and get him?
“Let me go and help them,” said Jamie. “I can be there in an hour. Please.”
Major Turner rolled his eyes, and Jamie was filled with a sudden compulsion to shove his thumbs against them until they burst like balloons. He fought it back, and looked pleadingly at Admiral Seward.
“No, Jamie,” replied the Director, although he had the decency to at least make it appear as though it had been a difficult decision for him to make. “We’ve been through this. Not while the interrogation is ongoing. You told me you understood that it takes priority; were you lying to me?”
Jamie tried to quell the rage, the familiar, joyous, black-red rage that was threatening to burst from the pit of his stomach and consume him.
“No, sir,” he replied, through gritted teeth. “I wasn’t lying to you.”
“So you do understand that Valentin’s interrogation takes priority?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that the Field Investigation Team are perfectly capable of following this lead without your assistance?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” said Seward, smiling. “Then we are in agreement. I promised you I would keep you up to date with their progress, Jamie. I never told you that you would get to take part. Remember that.”
“I will, sir,” spat Jamie.
“Fantastic,” replied the Director. “In which case, we should be on our way to the detention level. The others will be waiting for us. But before we go, I need to give something to you both.”
Jamie glanced over at Paul Turner, whose gaze didn’t so much as flicker from his commanding officer’s.
“The two of you haven’t always seen eye to eye,” said Seward. “That’s OK. If I wanted robots instead of Operators, I’d have the Science Division working on them now. I haven’t always seen eye to eye with either of you myself. But until we find the ghost user, we are going to have to trust each other like never before. After Julian, things got bad, and if this gets out, they could get bad again. And we have to allow for the possibility that the person we’re looking for knows we’re looking for them, and may take action against us. With that in mind, I want you both to have these.”
Admiral Seward picked up two laminated cards from his desk and handed one to each of the Operators standing before him. Jamie took his, and looked down at it. A ten-digit combination of letters and numbers was printed on the card in plain black text.
“Sir, what is this?” asked Paul Turner.
“It’s the Director level override code,” replied Seward. “It’s the key to the entire Loop. Use it only if you have to.”
“This is highly irregular, sir,” said Turner, frowning at the card in his hand.
“I know it is, Paul,” said Seward. “But the time may come when the situation changes too quickly for you to seek my approval to act. Or something may happen to me which means that you can’t. Either way, take them, both of you, and hope you don’t need them.”
‘Yes, sir,” said Major Turner, putting the card carefully in his pocket.
Jamie didn’t reply; he was still staring at the numbers, a chill climbing up his spine as he thought about the awesome power they represented, and the incredible faith Admiral Seward was showing by giving them to him.
“Jamie,” said the Director, sharply, and this time he did look up. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” Jamie replied. “Loud and clear, sir.”
The three men journeyed down to the detention level in silence.
To Jamie, it felt as though the plastic card was about to burn a hole through the pocket of his uniform, presenting itself for all to see, and there was more than a little bit of him that would have loved that to happen. Once they were through the double airlock, they met the rest of the Zero Hour Task Force, who were waiting patiently outside the guard office.
As they approached, Cal Holmwood studied the looks on the faces of the three men, and raised one eyebrow towards Admiral Seward, who gave him the briefest shake of the head, so brief it was almost non-existent.
“Morning,” said Jack Williams. The levity in his voice was forced; he could see that there was tension between the late arrivals.
“Morning,” said Admiral Seward, sharply. “Let’s get on with this, shall we? Paul?”
Major Turner nodded, and led them down the corridor to Valentin Rusmanov’s cell.
The ancient vampire was lying on his bed, reading a paperback book, the title of which was in a language that Jamie didn’t recognise. Valentin, who Jamie and the rest of the Task Force knew full well could hear their individual heartbeats from the moment they exited the airlock, peered over the top of the book and smiled, as though surprised to see them appear beyond the ultraviolet barrier he had already proven so conclusively was useless.
“Gentlemen,” he exclaimed. “What a pleasure. I had forgotten we were continuing our discussion this morning.”
There was silence from the line of Operators, and Valentin’s grin widened.
“Oh, dear,” he said, softly. “I sense tension in the ranks. Did someone forget to lock the doors last night before you went to bed?”
“Valentin Rusmanov,” said Major Turner, giving no indication of having heard the vampire’s comment. “We are here to continue our interview with you, as agreed. May I enter and speak with you?”
“Of course, my dear Major,” said Valentin, sitting up and placing his book aside. “Let’s have at it, by all means.”
The vampire stood up from his bed, stretched his long, slender arms above his head, then let them drop back down to his sides. He walked quickly across the cell, and sat down in one of the chairs. Major Turner stepped through the barrier, and lowered himself slowly into the other.
“Fire away, Major Turner,” said Valentin, smiling broadly.
“Thank you,” said Turner, his politeness both impeccable and obviously false. “Mr Rusmanov, your late brother, Alexandru, was responsible for the sequence of events that led to Thomas Morris betraying this Department. To the best of your knowledge, was that an isolated incident, or have vampires attempted to infiltrate Blacklight at other times in the past?”
“That, Major Turner,” replied Valentin, “is an excellent question. Excellent.”
“Would you care to answer it?” said Turner.
“I’m just considering the best way to do so,” replied Valentin. “Your use of the word ‘attempted’ implies that you are asking about plots to infiltrate your Department that were unsuccessful, and I must confess I don’t know about any such plots.”
A chill ran up Jamie’s spine, and he looked over at Admiral Seward. The Director didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as move a muscle, but his face had drained of all colour; he looked suddenly like a ghost.
“I’m sorry,” said Major Turner. “Are you suggesting that you have knowledge of successful attempts to infiltrate us? Beyond the case of Thomas Morris?”
Valentin leant back in his chair, and smiled cruelly.
“My dear Major,” he said, softly, “I do not know everything, so I cannot be sure of every spy that has been placed in your midst. But what I am telling you, what I know for an absolute fact, is that my brother Valeri has had at least one agent inside your Department at all times for the last sixty-five years.”