Will Hill - Battle Lines

“Jesus,” said Patrick Williams. “He was strong. ”

“And fast,” said Dominique. “Too fast.”

“Correct,” said Holmwood. “The vampires who have been destroyed so far all exhibited strength and speed far beyond what would normally be expected of the newly-turned.”

“How come?” asked Amy Andrews.

“We don’t know. Science Division is examining the two inmates we’ve recovered, but they’ve found nothing so far. But there is obviously something different about these vamps, and there are about three hundred of them out there right now. That’s why this is our number-one priority, Lieutenant Carpenter, because this Department’s mission is to protect the public from the supernatural. Do you understand?”

“I do, sir,” said Jamie. “How come the Science Division is examining the captives? Shouldn’t that be a Lazarus Project thing?”

Holmwood shook his head. “I don’t want Lazarus diverted from its primary task. Dr Cooper is liaising with Professor Karlsson and, if he genuinely needs their help, I’ve authorised him to ask for it.”

“OK,” said Jamie.

“Good,” said Holmwood. “Anything else?”

“Where’s Angela, sir?” asked Jack Williams. “She should be here for this.”

“Lieutenant Darcy and her squad are in the field,” replied Holmwood. “They were active when the first calls started to come in. They’re due back within the hour.”

Jack nodded, unable to keep his obvious concern from his face.

“All right,” said Holmwood. “Anything else? No? In which case—”

“What about Zero Hour?” said Jamie. “How are we going to protect the public if Dracula is allowed to rise?”

Holmwood fixed Jamie with a cold stare. “The men who escaped from Broadmoor had been removed from society, Lieutenant Carpenter. Many of them suffer from the most severe personality disorders, a large number have long histories of violent and unpredictable behaviour, and the majority are dependent on pharmaceutical assistance. They have been turned in such a way as to make them unusually powerful, something that is worrying and new in itself, and in the next few hours every one of them is going to become insatiably hungry for running blood. If we don’t take them down, there might not be a public to protect.”

Jamie dropped his gaze.

“So what’s the plan, sir?” asked Patrick Williams, his voice steady, his jaw set firm.

Cal Holmwood looked at him. “Search and destroy,” he replied, softly. “As quickly as possible. It’s as simple as that.”

Jamie looked at the overturned car on the screen.

Right , he thought. Simple .

Matt Browning pushed open the heavy door in the centre of the Level F corridor, as excited as a child on Christmas morning, and saw that, despite the early hour, he was not the first member of the Lazarus Project to arrive for work. Professor Karlsson looked up as he entered, gave him a smile and a brief nod, then returned his attention to a page of text resting on his desk.

He is the boss, thought Matt, smiling to himself. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

The reconstruction of the Lazarus Project had been undertaken with great urgency in the aftermath of the loss of Admiral Henry Seward. Cal Holmwood had given Matt, its only surviving member, carte blanche to make recommendations; he had done so, putting his natural shyness aside once he came to realise that he was not going to get into trouble for saying what he thought. His very first suggestion was that Blacklight make every possible effort to persuade Professor Robert Karlsson, the Director of the Swedish Institute for Genetic Research, to become the new head of the project. He had been aware of Karlsson’s work for some time, and considered him one of the cleverest people on the planet, a towering intellect whose area of specialisation was the manipulation of replicator enzymes within DNA, making him the perfect candidate to advance the search for a cure for vampirism.

Holmwood had nodded with polite incomprehension. Four days later Karlsson had arrived at the Loop with a small suitcase and a leather satchel full of portable hard drives. He had been introduced to Matt, listened politely as the teenager gushed at him like an adolescent girl meeting her favourite pop star, then suggested they got to work.

Today was to be the first day of the fully staffed, fully equipped, fully functional second incarnation of the Lazarus Project. Karlsson and Matt had spent the last month recruiting the finest minds from around the globe, rebuilding and expanding the laboratories, and overseeing the installation of the most powerful local computer network in Europe.

Every minute of time that was not consumed by the practicalities of rebuilding was devoted to analysing the data on the hard drive that had been salvaged from Professor Richard Talbot, the former head of the Lazarus Project and a servant of Valeri Rusmanov whose real name they now believed had been Christopher Reynolds. The hard drive had been recovered when Jamie Carpenter shot the treacherous Professor in the head, as Matt lay unconscious on the floor between them. Reynolds had murdered the Project’s entire staff, and had been about to kill Matt and make good his escape when Jamie intervened. It was thanks to Reynolds that it had taken a month to re-staff the Project; the background checks carried out on every potential recruit had been thorough to the point of being overtly invasive, as a repeat of the Professor’s treachery simply could not be permitted.

Reynolds had been working on vampire genetics for more than a decade, and had acquired the bulk of his data via methods that were as immoral as they were criminal: vivisection, live experimentation, torture. His work, in particular his mapping of the vampire genome and his analysis of the physical effects of vampirism on a turned human being, was proving invaluable to everything the new Lazarus Project was doing. Without it, the scale of the task might well have seemed insurmountable.

With it, there was hope: if nothing else, there was a place to begin.

The process of analysing and building upon the recovered data was already under way; each new member of the Project that arrived had immediately got started. But this morning was to be the official beginning, as it were, and Matt knew full well that the page of text that Karlsson was poring over was the speech he was about to give. He left his boss to it and made his way to one of the desks by the far wall of the wide room. He logged in to the Lazarus Project’s secure server, opened the analysis he had been working on until only a few hours earlier, and lost himself in the incredible complexity of the building blocks of the human body.

By ten past seven, all thirty-two members of the Lazarus Project were at their desks. There was a hum of intensity, the buzz of great intellects bent to a single purpose, a purpose as noble as any in the history of scientific research. Matt’s gaze was drawn, as it often was, to the narrow, pretty face of Natalia Lenski, the almost superhumanly clever eighteen-year-old Russian who sat five desks away from him. She had been recruited by the SPC, the Russian Supernatural Protection Commissariat, out of the University of Leningrad, where she had been studying for her doctorate, having attained her Master’s degree four years earlier, when she was fourteen. Her skin was as pale as Siberian snow, her blonde hair only a shade or two darker. She glanced up from her screen and smiled at him as Matt felt heat roar into his cheeks; his eyes widened and he jerked his head back towards his monitor, mortified.

Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.