many evenings in this room, the Director telling tales of Julian Carpenter, Jamie drinking them in hungrily, then passing them on to his mother, often after heavy editing for violence. It had made the Carpenters feel like a family again, had rebuilt the bonds between that had been eroded in the years after Julian had died, when neither mother nor son had known how to fill the void that had been left in the middle of their lives.
Now look at us, thought Jamie, and stifled a grin. I hunt and destroy vampires for a living, she IS a vampire and lives in a cell hundreds of metres below the earth, yet we’ve never got on better.
“Something funny, Jamie?” asked Seward.
He had clearly not stifled the grin as well as he thought, and drew himself up to attention.
“No, sir,” he replied.
Seward smiled at him.
“At ease,” he said. Jamie relaxed into an easy stance, his hands loosely together behind his back. “Give me your report.”
“Nothing notable, sir. Father and daughter vamps robbing a blood bank.”
“Were you able to capture them?”
“Yes, sir. I handed them over to Dr Yen, sir.”
The Director nodded. “Well done. Lazarus needs all the warm vamps it can get its hands on.”
“So I hear, sir.”
“Any signs?”
“Yes, sir. On the wall outside the hospital. The same two words.”
Admiral Seward swore, scribbling a quick note on a piece of paper.
“Sir,” Jamie continued. “Why does the Lazarus Project need so many captive vamps? What are they doing down there?”
The Director put down the pen he had been writing his note with, and looked at the young Operator. “The Lazarus Project is classified, Jamie,” he replied. “You understand what classified means, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me remind you, just in case you’ve forgotten. It means that everyone who needs to know what the Lazarus Project is doing already knows what the Lazarus Project is doing. Is that clear, Operator?”
“It is, sir.”
“Good. There’s a Zero Hour Task Force briefing scheduled for 1100 tomorrow. Mandatory attendance.”
“New information, sir?” asked Jamie, hopefully.
Admiral Seward shook his head. “Just routine, Jamie. Dismissed.”
Jamie nodded, and left the Director’s study. As he walked towards the lift that would finally, mercifully, deliver him to his bed, his mind drifted back to the speech Admiral Seward had given a month earlier, that had brought to light the existence of the Lazarus Project, that had birthed the Zero Hour Task Force, that had altered how every Operator in the Department went about their job.
The speech that had changed everything.
3
THE ART OF COMING CLEAN
TWENTY-NINE DAYS EARLIER
“Do you know what this is about?” asked Larissa.
She and Jamie were walking along the main Level B corridor towards one of the lifts standing near its centre. Larissa had a towel slung round her shoulders, and was dressed in a dark green vest and a pair of shorts. Jamie guessed she had been with Terry in the Playground, the wide, sweat-soaked space in the bowels of the Loop where the veteran Blacklight instructor ruled with an iron fist, and she looked deeply unimpressed about being interrupted.
“I’ve no idea,” replied Jamie, glancing over at her. “I got the same message as you.” He had been asleep when his console had blared into life, and was almost as grumpy as Larissa.
“All right,” she said. “Don’t bite my head off.”
“Sorry,” he replied, casting her a weary smile which she returned.
The two teenagers were tired, more tired than they could ever remember having been in their lives before Department 19. You never really got used to it, not completely, although they had both become skilled at not letting it interfere with either their performance as Operators, or the tiny sliver of each day that could charitably be called their social lives. But there was something looming on the horizon that was fuelling their bad moods, something that all the T-Bones and ultraviolet light in the world couldn’t stop.
In five days’ time, it would be Christmas.
Even inside the Loop, surrounded by men and women utterly committed to the secret mission they had undertaken, it was impossible to avoid the festive season. The Operators who had families, who lived off-base as Jamie’s father had once done, filled the officers’ mess with tales of trees and decorations, of presents that had been bought or still needed buying, while the younger men and women who lived in quarters at the Loop juggled days off and swapped shifts in the hope of seeing their loved ones at some point over the holiday. For Jamie and Larissa, it was nothing more than a continual reminder of the differences between them and everyone else, even Kate.
The two teenagers were unique, in that Blacklight’s Intelligence Division had taken them off the grid; they no longer existed in the outside world, on paper or in the eyes of the law. Although she didn’t know it, had Larissa’s mother walked into any governmental office and attempted to prove that she had ever had a daughter, it would have been impossible for her to do so; there were no longer any official records of her child having been born, or having lived, and her copy of Larissa’s birth certificate would have been dismissed as a forgery.
It was the same situation for Jamie; in his case because he was now the son of a creature that did not officially exist, in Larissa’s because she was a creature that did not officially exist. Kate still had a presence in the world; she was officially listed as missing after the Lindisfarne attack, and her father knew that she was still alive, even though he was sworn to secrecy on the subject.
Jamie and Larissa were voluntary prisoners inside Department 19, unable to live anywhere else, because they did not exist anywhere else. Jamie had asked Admiral Seward about it once, asked him what would happen if the time came that he wanted to get married and have a family, have some semblance of a normal life. Seward had told him that it might, might, be possible to reintroduce him into the world under an assumed identity. As far as Jamie was concerned, he had not sounded very confident about it.
Jamie would readily concede, however, that it was far harder for Larissa than for him. All that remained of his family lived in a cell in the base of the Loop, and there had been a small Christmas tree standing in Marie Carpenter’s cell for over a week. Larissa’s family, and in particular her little brother, were still out there, living their lives without her, making preparations for what had always been her favourite time of the year. They had talked about it several times, both of them trying hard not to make the other feel worse, but it had been clear to them both that they were united in a single wish: for Christmas to be over as soon as possible, so their lives could get back to what they had come to consider normal.
They reached the
