Department 19: The Rising Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Charlie and Nick, the best partners in crime I could have asked for

  EPIGRAPH

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  Robert Frost

  How much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

  Victor Frankenstein

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  MEMORANDUM

  12 WEEKS AFTER LINDISFARNE

  91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  1

  ON PATROL

  2

  TRIANGLES HAVE SHARP EDGES

  3

  THE ART OF COMING CLEAN

  4

  GROWING PAINS

  5

  REBIRTH

  6

  CARPENTER AND SON

  7

  VALENTIN RECEIVES A VISITOR

  90 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  8

  THE BIG LEAGUES

  9

  NO STONE UNTURNED

  10

  SLEEPLESS NIGHT

  11

  THE BARE BONES

  12

  INSIDE THE VOID

  13

  HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE

  14

  SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT

  15

  ALL FALL DOWN

  16

  ALWAYS AND FOREVER

  89 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  17

  FAMILY TIES

  18

  KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE

  19

  AT THE CROSSROADS AT MIDNIGHT

  20

  MASTER AND COMMANDER

  21

  HEROES’ RETURN

  22

  TINFOIL HATS

  88 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  23

  THE INTERROGATION OF VALENTIN RUSMANOV

  24

  THE FOURTH MUSKETEER

  25

  THE ILLUMINATED CITY, PART I

  26

  FULL DISCLOSURE

  27

  THE ILLUMINATED CITY, PART II

  28

  THINK BUT THIS AND ALL IS MENDED

  87 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  29

  IN CONVERSATION WITH A MONSTER

  30

  THERE IS NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS FOR REVENGE

  31

  ECHOES OF THE PAST

  32

  THE DEPTHS OF KNOWLEDGE

  33

  IN THE COURT OF THE VAMPIRE KING

  34

  HOW TO STEAL FIRE FROM THE GODS

  35

  HOPE IS A DANGEROUS THING

  36

  VISION QUEST, PART I

  37

  FROM PILLAR TO POST

  38

  VISION QUEST, PART II

  39

  BACK FROM THE DEAD

  40

  VISION QUEST, PART III

  41

  AND A TORCH TO LIGHT THE WAY

  42

  VISION QUEST, PART IV

  43

  THE TIES THAT BIND

  44

  BEHIND EVERY GOOD MAN

  45

  CURTAIN CALL

  46

  THE TWIST OF THE KNIFE

  47

  NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE

  48

  SOME WOUNDS NEVER HEAL

  49

  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  50

  REDUCED TO ASH

  86 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  51

  A COUNCIL OF WAR

  52

  ONLY FORWARD

  FIRST EPILOGUE: IN THE FLESH

  SECOND EPILOGUE: THREE FATHERS

  85 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  MEMORANDUM

  From: Office of the Director of the Joint Intelligence Committee

  Subject: Revised classifications of the British governmental departments

  Security: TOP SECRET

  DEPARTMENT 1

  Office of the Prime Minister

  DEPARTMENT 2

  Cabinet Office

  DEPARTMENT 3

  Home Office

  DEPARTMENT 4

  Foreign and Commonwealth Office

  DEPARTMENT 5

  Ministry of Defence

  DEPARTMENT 6

  British Army

  DEPARTMENT 7

  Royal Navy

  DEPARTMENT 8

  Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service

  DEPARTMENT 9

  Her Majesty’s Treasury

  DEPARTMENT 10

  Department for Transport

  DEPARTMENT 11

  Attorney General’s Office

  DEPARTMENT 12

  Ministry of Justice

  DEPARTMENT 13

  Military Intelligence, Section 5 (MI5)

  DEPARTMENT 14

  Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)

  DEPARTMENT 15

  Royal Air Force

  DEPARTMENT 16

  Northern Ireland Office

  DEPARTMENT 17

  Scotland Office

  DEPARTMENT 18

  Wales Office

  DEPARTMENT 19

  CLASSIFIED

  DEPARTMENT 20

  Territorial Police Forces

  DEPARTMENT 21

  Department of Health

  DEPARTMENT 22

  Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ)

  DEPARTMENT 23

  Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)

  12 WEEKS AFTER LINDISFARNE

  91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  1

  ON PATROL

  THE PILGRIM HOSPITAL BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE

  Sergeant Ted Pearson of the Lincolnshire Police stamped his cold feet on the pavement, and checked his watch again. His partner, Constable Dave Fleming, watched him, a nervous look on his face.

  Half ten, thought the Sergeant, with a grimace. I should be at home with my feet up. Sharon’s making lasagne tonight, and it’s never as good warmed through.

  The 999 call had been made from the hospital’s reception desk at 9.50pm. Sergeant Pearson and his partner had been finishing up the paperwork on an illegal immigration case they were working on one of the farms near Louth, both men looking forward to getting the forms filed and heading home, when they had been told the call was theirs. Grumbling, they had climbed into their car and driven the short distance from the police station to the hospital, blue lights spinning above them, their siren blaring through the freezing January night.

  They had reached the hospital in a little over three minutes, and were questioning the nurse who had made the call, a young Nigerian woman with wide, frightened eyes, when Sergeant Pearson’s radio buzzed into life. The message it conveyed was short and to the point.

  “Secure access to potential crime scene. Do not investigate, or talk to potential witnesses. Stand guard until relieved.”

  Pearson had sworn loudly down his receiver, but the voice on the other end, a voice he didn’t recognise but which was definitely not the usual dispatcher, was already gone. So he had done as he was told: instructed Constable Fleming to cease his questioning of the nurse, and informed all staff that access to the hospital’s blood bank was forbidden without direct permission from him. Then he and his partner had taken up positions outside the side entra
nce to the hospital, shivering in the cold, waiting to be relieved. By who, or what, they didn’t know.

  “What’s going on, Sarge?” asked Constable Fleming, after fifteen minutes had passed. “Why are we standing out here like security guards?”

  “We’re doing what we were told to do,” replied Sergeant Pearson.

  Fleming nodded, unconvinced. He looked round at the dimly lit road; it was a narrow alley between the hospital and a red-brick factory that was falling rapidly into disrepair. On the wall opposite, in black paint that had dripped all the way to the ground, someone had sprayed two words.

  HE RISES

  “What’s that mean, Sarge?” asked Constable Fleming, pointing at the graffiti.

  “Shut up, Dave,” replied his partner, giving the words a cursory glance. “No more questions, all right?”

  The young man was going to make a fine copper, Pearson had no doubt about that, but his enthusiasm, and his relentless inquisitiveness, had a tendency to give the Sergeant a headache. The uncomfortable truth was that Pearson didn’t know what was going on, or why they were guarding the hospital door, or what the graffiti meant. But he was not going to admit that to Fleming, who had been on the force for less than six months. He stamped his feet again, and as he did so, he heard the rumble of an engine approaching in the distance.

  Thirty seconds later a black van pulled to a halt in front of the two policemen.

  The windows of the vehicle were as dark as the panels of its body, and it sat low to the ground on heavy-duty, run-flat tyres. The noise of its engine was incredibly loud, a deep roar that Pearson and Fleming felt through their boots. For almost thirty seconds, nothing happened; the van stood motionless before them, squat and strangely threatening under the fluorescent light emanating from the hospital’s side entrance behind them. Then, with a loud hiss, the vehicle’s rear door slid open, and three figures emerged.

  Fleming stared at them as they approached, his eyes wide. Pearson, who had seen things over the course of his career that the younger man would not have believed, was more adept at hiding his emotions than his partner, and managed to keep his confusion, and rising unease, from his face.

  The three figures that stopped in front of them were dressed head to toe in black: their boots, their gloves, their uniforms, belts and military-style webbing. All black. The only splash of colour was the bright purple of the flat visors that covered their faces, visors attached to sleek black helmets that looked like nothing the policemen had seen before. There was not a millimetre of exposed skin to be seen; the newcomers could easily have been robots, such was the anonymity of their appearance. On their belts, two black guns hung in holsters alongside a long cylinder with a handle and a trigger on one side. It was obviously a weapon, but it was not one that either of the policemen recognised.

  The tallest of the figures stopped in front of Sergeant Pearson, the shiny material of its visor centimetres away from his face. When the figure spoke, the voice was male, but it had a flat, digital quality that Pearson knew from his time on the Met with SO15 meant the person behind the visor was speaking through several levels of filter, to avoid the possibility of voiceprint identification.

  “Have you signed the Official Secrets Act?” the black figure asked, turning its visor-clad face sharply between the two policemen, who nodded, too intimidated to speak. “Good. Then you never saw us, and this never happened.”

  “On whose authority?” managed Pearson, his voice shaking heavily.

  “The Chief of the General Staff,” replied the figure, then leant forward until its visor was a millimetre from the Sergeant’s nose. “And mine. Understood?”

  Pearson nodded again, and the figure drew back. Then it stepped past him and strode into the hospital. The other two dark shapes followed.

  “The blood bank is—” began Constable Fleming.

  “We know the way,” said the third of the figures in a digitally altered female voice.

  Then they were gone.

  The two policemen looked at one another. Sergeant Pearson was visibly shaking, and Constable Fleming reached a hand towards his partner’s shoulder. The older man waved it away, but he didn’t look annoyed; he looked old, and frightened.

  “Who were they, Sarge?” asked Fleming, his voice unsteady.

  “I don’t know, Dave,” replied Pearson. “And I don’t want to know.”

  The three black-clad figures strode through the bright corridors of the hospital.

  The tall one, the one who had spoken to Sergeant Pearson, led the way. Behind, shorter and slimmer than the leader, came the second of the trio, who appeared to glide across the linoleum floor. The third, shorter again, brought up the rear, its purple visor sweeping slowly left and right for any sign of trouble, or witnesses to their presence. As they passed the double doors that led to the hospital’s operating theatre, the tall figure at the front motioned for them to stop, and pulled a radio from his belt. He keyed in a series of numbers and letters, then activated the handset’s wireless connection to his helmet’s comms network. After a pause of several seconds, he spoke.

  “Operational Squad G-17 in position. Alpha reporting in.”

  “Beta reporting in,” the second figure said, in a metallic female voice.

  “Gamma reporting in,” said the final squad member.

  Alpha listened as a voice spoke on the other end of the line, and then replaced the radio on his belt.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and the squad moved on into the hospital. After only a matter of seconds, Gamma spoke.

  “So who made the 999 call?”

  “The nurse at reception,” answered Alpha. “One of the night porters saw a man leading a young girl into the blood bank, said the man had red eyes. He told the nurse he thought it was probably a junkie.”

  Beta laughed. “He’s probably right. But not the kind he’s thinking.”

  The three shadowy shapes pushed open a door marked RESTRICTED, and moved on.

  “Fifth call in three nights,” said Gamma. “Is Seward punishing us for something?”

  “It’s not just us,” answered Alpha. “It’s everyone. Every squad is flat out.”

  “I know,” replied Beta. “And we know why, don’t we? It’s because of…”

  “Don’t,” said Gamma, quickly. “Don’t talk about him. Not now, OK?”

  A small noise emerged from behind Beta’s helmet, a noise that could easily have been a laugh, but she let the subject drop.

  “You were pretty hard on the police,” said Gamma. “The old Sergeant looked terrified.”

  “Good,” replied Alpha. “The more he pretends that tonight never happened, the safer he’ll be. Now no more talk.”

  They had reached the hospital’s blood bank, the door of which was standing open. Alpha stepped slowly into the dark room, and flicked the light switch on the wall.

  Nothing happened.

  He pulled a torch from his belt, and shone it up at the light fitting. The bulb was smashed, leaving a ring of jagged glass surrounding the filament. A slow sweep of the torch revealed carnage; the metal shelves of the blood bank had been ransacked. Blood and shattered plastic dotted the surfaces, and pooled and piled up on the floor.

  “Don’t come any closer.”

  The voice came from the corner of the room, and Alpha instantly swung his torch towards it. Two more shafts of white light joined its beam, as Beta and Gamma stepped into the room and followed their squad leader’s example.

  The beams illuminated the trembling figure of a middle-aged man, crouching in the corner of the room. At his feet lay a sports bag full of plastic sachets of blood. In his arms was a girl, no more than six years old, with an expression of pure terror on her face. The man had a razor-sharp fingernail to her throat, and was looking at the three black figures with an expression of desperate panic.

  Alpha reached up, turned a dial on the side of his helmet and watched his view of the room change. The helmet contained a cryocooled infrared detector, which showe
d the heat variance of every object within the visor’s field of vision. The cold walls and floor of the blood bank were a wash of pale greens and blues, while the little girl was darker, studded with patches of yellow and orange. The man bloomed bright red and purple like a roman candle, distorting Alpha’s vision.

  “I’ll kill her if you come any closer,” the man said, shifting nervously against the wall. He tightened his grip on the girl’s throat, and she moaned.

  Alpha twisted the visor’s setting back to normal.

  “Stay calm,” he said, evenly. “Just let the girl go, and we can talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about!” yelled the man, and jerked the girl off her feet. She cried out, her eyes wide with terror, and Alpha took a half-step forward.

  “Let the girl go,” he repeated.

  “This isn’t right,” said Beta, in a low voice.

  Alpha flicked his head towards her.

  “Don’t make a move without my go,” he warned.

  Beta snorted with laughter. “Please,” she said, then pulled a short black tube from her waist, pointed it into the corner of the room and pressed a button.

  A thick beam of ultraviolet light burst across the blood bank. It hit the man’s arm and the girl’s face dead on, and both instantly erupted into flames. Screams and the nauseating smell of burning skin filled the air, as Gamma gasped behind her visor.

  The little girl wrenched herself free of the arm that had been holding her, beating furiously at her face until the flames were extinguished. She dropped to her knees, tore open one of the plastic pouches of blood, then drank hungrily, slurping the crimson liquid into her mouth.

  The man watched her, a helpless look on his face, then suddenly seemed to notice that his arm was burning. He began to leap around the corner of the room, beating at the limb with his good hand. When the flames were out, he pulled a blood bag from one of the shelves, and devoured its contents. As Squad G-17 watched, the girl’s face and the man’s arm began to heal before their eyes, the muscle and tissue regrowing, the skin turning pink and knitting back together. When the injuries were healed, so completely that there was no evidence that they had been there at all, a process that took only a matter of seconds, the girl looked up at the man, and wailed.