Department 19: Battle Lines (54 page)

“I’m about to radio the grunts and tell them to drive down and say hello to this guy, when whoever’s in the jeep floors it. And for a moment I just stand there, staring at the screen, because what the hell is this guy doing? He’s going to invade Area 51 in his jeep? I see the grunts haul their truck round and start down the hill, and that’s when I snap out of it. I grab my M4 down off the wall, radio in that we’ve got an intruder, run outside to the barrier, and wait to see who gets there first.

“The grunts are hauling ass down the ridge, trying to cut him off, but he’s really shifting, whoever he is. I figure he’s going to roll it on the last bend, but he doesn’t. He comes round the corner, going hell for leather, this huge cloud of dust blowing up behind him, and I see the grunt truck in the dust, and a bit of me is like, I want to meet this guy. Because he has balls, you know, if nothing else. And he can drive, no question about that. I raise the stingers and clear out to the side, because they’re going to flip him about ten metres into the air the speed he’s going.

“But he doesn’t hit them. At the last minute, and I really mean the last minute, he hits the brakes, and there’s this huge squeal of tyres, and the jeep starts to shake from side to side because he’s dumping off the speed too quickly, and then it stops, about a metre in front of the gate and the stingers. The grunt truck screeches to a halt beside it and I’m running out with my M4 raised when the jeep’s door opens and this guy jumps out, his hands in the air.”

“What did he look like?” asked Larissa. Her heart was thumping in her chest; the prisoner, whoever he was, was real. The man sitting next to her had seen him with his own eyes.

“Tall, middle-aged. Pale, even though he was driving in out of the desert. In good shape. Hard eyes, like a soldier. I point my rifle at him and tell him to get down, but he doesn’t move. He keeps his hands in the air and shouts a code at me—”

“Which code?”

“F-357-X. It’s maximum clearance. Old, but still active. Then he shouts that he needs to see General Allen and that just floors me. This guy drives up to the Front Gate, outruns the grunts and then gives me a max code and tells me he needs to see the head of NS9? Refers to him by name? I mean, seriously, what the hell, right?”

“How did he speak?” asked Larissa. “Did he have an accent? Anything unusual?”

“English,” replied Ashworth.

“I guessed that much.”

“No, he had an English accent. The guy
was
English.”

Larissa stared, attempting to process what the Senior Airman was saying. In the deepest corner of her mind, a thought occurred to her: a ludicrous, impossible thought that she quickly pushed away.

“I understand,” she said, slowly.

“Good,” said Ashworth. “Anyway. He’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him, and then the grunts finally show up and they grab him and throw him over the hood of the jeep, and they’re about to cuff him when I suddenly realise I have to call this in. The guy’s used a max code, regardless of how he arrived, so I tell the grunts to stop, to go back to their post and forget this ever happened.

“The English guy watches them leave, then he thanks me and starts to tell me what he needs, but I tell him to shut up, tell him I’ll shoot him if he moves, and he kind of shrugs and just stands there with his hands up, and that’s when I start to think that maybe this guy is more than just a soldier, maybe he’s SAS or something, because he doesn’t even look like he’s sweating, even though he’s just raced through the desert and he’s standing outside the most classified facility in the country with a gun pointing at his head. He looks like he’s just out for an afternoon stroll in the desert.

“I grab my radio and give Central Control the code he gave me. There’s silence, a long silence, which means you’re getting transferred all over the base, and eventually this voice I don’t recognise comes on the line and tells me they’re sending a vehicle out, that I’m not to engage my prisoner in any way, not to even speak to him, but also not to let him out of my sight until he’s been collected.

“So I keep my gun on the guy and we just stare at each other for a few minutes, until this NS9 Hummer arrives and one of you spooks gets out and tells me to stand down. I’m like, no problem, no problem at all, I don’t want any part of this mess, so I head back into the guardhouse. The English guy gets into the Hummer and it drives off towards the lake. I haven’t seen him since and I still don’t know who he is. I’ve told you everything I know and I shouldn’t have told you that. So now you’re going to take your phone out of your pocket and delete those photos, then I’m going to sit here and eat my breakfast while you piss off and leave me alone. I’m all done talking.”

Larissa pulled the mess door shut behind her and stood beneath the wide central canopy, her head spinning.

She hadn’t expected Lee Ashworth to be able to tell her who the secret prisoner was, and she had believed him when he said he didn’t know. But she had got what she wanted from him, and more. The man was real, that much was now certain; he had driven out of the desert in possession of a maximum security code, which meant that he was either directly or indirectly involved with the secret apparatus of the US military. He had asked for General Allen by name, which meant that he was aware of the existence of NS9. And he was English, which didn’t in itself mean anything, but strongly suggested some connection to Blacklight.

Larissa wandered slowly back towards Central Control and the tunnel that would take her back to Dreamland. She was starting to think she might just take an elevator down to Level 8 and see if there was any way to see the prisoner with her own eyes. It would land her in serious trouble if she was caught, but at that moment she just didn’t care.

I have to find out who he is
, she thought.
I don’t even know why it’s become so important to me. I just have to know.

Half a mile to the east and almost the same distance down, the prisoner Larissa was so desperate to identify was finishing his morning shave. Under normal circumstances, prisoners were not allowed anything they could conceivably do themselves harm with, especially nothing as obviously dangerous as a razor blade. But the circumstances surrounding Julian Carpenter were far from normal.

Bob Allen may have had no option other than to lock him up, but he had brought the contents of Julian’s jeep down to the cellblock, and handed them over to him personally. He presumed they had been checked thoroughly first – his old friend was anything but stupid – but he was grateful nevertheless.

Changing his clothes every day, shaving his face in the morning, brushing his teeth in the evening: they were small things, but they made him feel as though he was still human, still himself. He laid the razor on the rim of the sink and looked in the polished sheet of metal that passed for a mirror. His face was paler than ever as a result of more than three months without exposure to natural light. His skin seemed loose; it hung from his cheekbones and beneath his chin.

He looked like an old man.

The situation he found himself in was almost blackly comic. He had overridden a lifetime of training, years and decades of forcing himself to make decisions based on logic rather than emotion, and handed himself over to NS9 because he had been desperately, terribly worried about his son. The vision he had seen in the desert cave with the cured vampire who called himself Adam had seemed terrifyingly real: his son as a vampire, with red eyes and gleaming fangs, telling him he was too late.

Despite Adam’s pleading, his warnings that visions were unreliable, Julian’s mind had been instantly made up. He had needed to know that Jamie was all right, and surrendering to NS9 was the only way he could think to do so; his last remaining contact inside Blacklight, from the time before he had been forced to fake his own death, was missing, presumed dead. And he had been right: Bob Allen had managed to persuade Henry Seward to tell him that his son was alive and well.

Julian’s relief had been enormous, but short-lived. It was not enough to know that Jamie was all right; he wanted to help his son, wanted it more than anything else in the world, and he had put himself in a position from where it would be absolutely impossible for him to do so.

Stupid
, he thought, staring at his reflection.
Weak. Stupid. Old.

At the end of the corridor that ran down the centre of the detention block, the heavy metal door clunked open and footsteps clicked across the concrete, getting louder as they neared his cell. Julian dried his face with the thin towel that was standard issue for NS9 prisoners and waited for Bob Allen to arrive; there was no question of it being anyone else. The detention block Duty Officer brought food three times a day, but never spoke a single word; Julian could have tried to engage him, knowing he would be under orders not to respond, but he had no wish to make the man’s life harder. It wasn’t his fault that Julian was where he was; it was no one’s fault but his own.

The footsteps stopped outside his cell. Julian heard a series of soft clicks as the access code was entered into the control panel, before the door swung open and the NS9 Director stepped into his cell, a tired half-smile on his face.

“Evening, Bob,” said Julian. “Good to see you.”

“You too,” replied General Allen. “How are you doing, Julian?”

“I’m in jail,” he said. “I’m having a ball. Yourself?”

Allen grunted with laughter, then flopped down into the plastic chair that was one of the cell’s three pieces of furniture. Julian pushed himself across his bed and sat with his back against the wall.

“I’m tired, Julian,” said Allen. “We’ve destroyed or detained about forty per cent of the Supermax escapees. Another fifteen per cent are under surveillance. We couldn’t track the rest of them. So they’re gone.”

“That’s good, Bob,” said Julian. Allen had told him about the coordinated prison breaks and the frightening strength and speed of the newly-turned vampires, even though he was breaking about a dozen regulations by doing so. Julian had been full of grudging admiration for the tactics of the vampires. The chaos that had been created had sucked in every supernatural Department, and showed no sign of ending; it was a huge, audacious piece of misdirection, designed to keep them all busy with something other than looking for the still-recovering Dracula. “You’ll have more than half of them by the time it’s all said and done, and that’s not bad. You had no warning, and no reinforcements you could call in to help you out. Half is good, Bob. Don’t beat yourself up.”

“Thanks,” replied Allen. “I appreciate you saying so. And we got some of the very worst. My SpecOps team took down the entire leadership of the Desert Cartel in Nuevo Laredo, with a little help from our vampire guest.”

“Larissa,” said Julian.

The revelation that NS9 had a vampire working for them had been one thing, the fact that she was actually a member of Blacklight on secondment to the US was another, and the
further
fact, confirmed first-hand by his friend, that she was the girlfriend of his son, was the icing on the cake. He was desperate, truly desperate, to meet her. He had begged Allen for the opportunity to do so, for just five minutes to ask her about how Jamie was doing and the person he had grown up to be, but the Director had refused. Julian had seen on his face that it pained him to do so and hadn’t pushed the issue.

Not yet, at least.

“Lieutenant Kinley,” confirmed Allen. “Tim Albertsson, the SpecOps head, said he’s never seen anything like it. Apparently the leader of the cartel shot her point-blank in the stomach with a shotgun and she didn’t even notice it. I think he was a bit scared, to be honest with you.”

“Any of your people get hurt?” asked Julian.

Allen shook his head. “Kinley lost an ear along with her gunshot wound, but they fed her blood and she was back on her feet a minute later. No other injuries and only one civilian fatality.”

“After a night assault on the headquarters of a Laredo cartel,” said Julian. “You’ve got to be pleased with that, Bob.”

“I am,” replied Allen. “To be honest, I wish we could keep her, and I’m not the only one who does. I think I could persuade Cal to let me have her, but she wouldn’t come without her friends, and there’s not a chance in hell that he would transfer your boy. Not after everything he’s done.”

Julian smiled. He was immensely proud of his son and would never be able to forgive either Thomas Morris or himself for conspiring to prevent him being able to share in Jamie’s triumphs. He was a man who had a great many regrets, so many that he had long since committed himself to not thinking about them unless it was entirely unavoidable, but none were greater than how he felt about his son having to fend for himself, having to fight and struggle and survive, without his father.

“That’s sort of why I’m here, Julian,” continued General Allen. “I spoke to Cal this morning. He’s sending a team here overnight. They’re taking you and Larissa home in the morning.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you that. They’re working on something big and Cal says they need Larissa’s help. To be honest, I think he wants to tie up any Blacklight loose ends.”

Julian’s expression didn’t change. “Are they reinstating me?”

“I don’t know,” replied Allen. “But if you want my advice, I would suggest you prepare yourself for disappointment.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” said Julian, his voice rising. “I didn’t betray anyone and I didn’t get the Harkers killed.”

“A warrant was put out for your arrest and you faked your own death rather than answer it,” said Allen, evenly. “I understand why you did what you did, and I’m sure Cal does too. But you died, Julian. Or at least you let everyone think you did. If you’re expecting Cal to give you a big hug and hand you a new uniform, then you’re delusional. You have to see that.”

Julian slumped on the bed, his eyes downcast and red at the corners.

“So, what?” he asked, his voice now little more than a whisper. “What do you think is going to happen to me, Bob?”

“Best guess? They’ll clear you of any wrongdoing and send you on your way. I think they’ll let you have a life, Julian, but I don’t think it will be inside Blacklight.”