Battle Lines

Ellison frowned. “We’ve got five and a half hours until our window closes, sir.”

“I understand that,” said Jamie. “But I’m not going after unidentified targets with a newly commissioned Operator who is having trouble. It isn’t safe.”

“I’ll be all right,” said Morton, instantly. “Really. I just need to get my head round it.”

“I know what you’re going through,” said Jamie. “And believe me when I tell you this doesn’t have to be a big deal. But we’re going home.”

“Don’t do this,” said Morton. “Please. We’ll be a laughing stock before we even finish our first operation.”

“That’s enough, John,” said Ellison, shooting him a sharp sideways glance. “If he says we’re done, we’re done.”

“It’s all right,” said Jamie. “This is on me, I promise you.”

I hope that sounded convincing, he thought. Because I’m really not sure it is.

Jamie addressed his squad as soon as they stepped down on to the concrete floor of the Loop’s hangar.

“Good work,” he said. “Honestly. There’s one less vampire out there and we came home in one piece. That’s a good day around here, trust me. Go and get some rest and I’ll message you as soon as I have tomorrow’s schedule. Dismissed.”

His new squad mates faced him. Ellison’s skin was pale, but her eyes were sharp, and Jamie already found himself full of admiration for her; she nodded, gave him a quick smile, and headed for the elevators. Morton lingered a moment longer; his face was tight with anger, his jaw clenched, his mouth squeezed shut.

“Something you want to say, Operator?” Jamie asked.

Morton held Jamie’s gaze for a long moment, then shook his head. “No, sir,” he said, then turned and strode away across the hangar.

Jamie watched him go, guilt churning in his stomach.

He had lied to Morton, lied to them both; what their squad had done was far from good work. They had destroyed the first of their targets, but cancelling an operation once it was under way was going to mean questions from his superiors. He had turned it over and over in his head on the way back to the Loop, and was already second-guessing the decision he had made.

Maybe Morton had been right, and the rookie Operator had just needed some time to get his head round what had happened with Bingham, to face his fear and deal with it. Maybe he had overreacted, panicked at the first sign of potential trouble. But in the short time Jamie had been a member of Blacklight, he had seen too many people hurt, too many people killed, to take chances; the stakes were simply too high.

He had told the truth about one thing; he would make sure any negative fallout from the aborted mission fell squarely on him. He would not let Morton or Ellison take the blame for his decision.

Jamie scanned the hangar for the Duty Officer and signalled him over.

“Is there a debrief?” he asked.

“No, sir,” replied the Officer. “Written reports only, sir.”

“OK. Thanks.”

The man nodded and went back to what he was doing. Jamie set off in the other direction, heading towards the lift at the end of the Level 0 corridor. He was relieved that he was not required to brief the Interim Director; he had no desire to explain what had happened now.

It could wait until the morning.

Two minutes later Jamie was standing outside the door to his quarters, almost exactly halfway along the long, curving corridor on Level B. He pulled his ID card from its pouch in his uniform, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. A pile of divisional reports teetered on the surface of his small desk, but he didn’t so much as glance at them. Instead, he dragged his uniform from his body, hung it on the hooks behind his door and flopped down on to his bed. His eyes closed, and thirty seconds later he was asleep.

Thud.

Jamie’s eyes fluttered and an involuntary groan emerged from his lips. His brain swam slowly into action, feeling thick and heavy.

Thud. Thud thud.

The noise reverberated through his tired skull as he forced his eyes open. He reached for his console and read the white numbers at the top of the screen.

02:32:56

Thud thud thud thud thud.

He swore loudly, swung his legs down from his bed, and made his way across his quarters. He pulled his uniform back on, then opened the door.

Standing outside in the corridor was Jacob Scott, the veteran Australian Colonel. Behind him, their faces pale, were the members of the Zero Hour Task Force.

“Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Colonel Scott. His usually warm tone was curt and businesslike. “You need to come with us.”

“Am I in trouble?” asked Jamie. He couldn’t think of anything he had done that would warrant such heavyweight attention, but nor could he think of any other reason why most of the senior Operators in the Department would be knocking on his door in the middle of the night.

“Nothing like that,” replied Colonel Scott. “There’s a situation that requires our attention.”

Jamie groaned. “You couldn’t have messaged me?”

“Not while ISAT is ongoing,” replied Scott. “Until they’re finished, we can’t assume electronic communications are secure.”

Jamie glanced at Paul Turner. “This is serious, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Colonel Scott. “It’s serious.”

13

SOCIAL NETWORKING

STAVELEY, NORTH DERBYSHIRE

ONE WEEK EARLIER

Greg Browning put on his headset and prepared to talk to a man he had never met.

He was sitting at the desk that had been his son’s, in the room where Matt had slept until he was taken away by the government and their faceless, terrifying men in black. It was now almost a month since Matt had disappeared for the second time, and three weeks since his wife had taken his daughter and left him. If their son returned, he supposed there was a chance that she might come back, but he didn’t really care, one way or the other; something had broken inside his wife when her son went missing for the second time, and he no longer recognised the woman she had become. In truth, Greg had been relieved when she finally packed her bags. With her gone, there was nothing to distract him from the only thing that still interested him: making the government pay for what they had done to his family.

His boss had tried several times to talk to him about what he referred to as his obsession, but Greg had refused to discuss it. When he had eventually been called into the office and told that he was being let go, he had not been surprised; his work had been slipping for months, since the first time Matt had been taken. He bore his boss no ill will; the man was incapable of seeing the truth of the world around him.

A mental-health worker from the local authority had visited him several days later, presumably at his former employer’s suggestion, and he had answered her questions with unfailing politeness. Shortly afterwards, a Disability Living Allowance cheque had arrived, followed by another a month later. The cheques were proof that the council had categorised him as mentally ill, but he saw no need to correct them; there was a pleasing symmetry to local government financing his crusade against the government.

It was like a snake volunteering to eat its own tail.

Three days after the government had stolen his son away in the night for the second time, Greg had defied his wife’s hysterical protests and started a systematic search through the history on Matt’s computer. He had immediately found a long list of sites about vampires and the supernatural, but nothing he considered out of the ordinary; it was mostly kid’s stuff, about blood and fangs and things that went bump in the night. But, as he had been about to close the machine down, an instant message had appeared in the corner of the screen. He had followed the instructions it contained, not really knowing why he was doing so, and found himself looking at a website that felt like the first genuinely real thing he had ever seen.

The site, which had no name and a URL that was a seemingly random string of numbers and letters, was devoted to a simple concept: that vampires were real, that the government was aware of their existence and maintained a top-secret force to police them. It contained written accounts, blurry photographs, snippets of crackly audio recording; nothing that would have convinced the casual observer. But Greg Browning was far from a casual observer; he had watched an unmarked helicopter land in the middle of his quiet suburban street, stood aside as men dressed all in black forced their way through his house, pointing submachine guns at him and his son. And in his garden, he had seen a girl whose body was so severely injured that she could not possibly have been alive rear up to bite a man wearing a biohazard suit, before tearing his son’s throat out in front of his eyes.

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