Читать книгу The Rising - Will Hill, Will Hill - Страница 9

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 entrance 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 showed 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.

“Daddy!” she cried, her mouth a wide oval of disappointment. “You said this would work! You promised!”

The man looked down at her with an expression of great sadness.

“I’m sorry, love,” he replied. “I thought it would.” He looked over at the three dark figures, which hadn’t moved. “How did you know she was turned? The poor thing sat in a bath of ice for an hour so she wouldn’t look hot to those helmets of yours. Her teeth only just stopped chattering.”

Beta reached up and lifted her helmet from her head. The face beneath it was a teenage girl’s: beautiful, pale and narrow, framed by dark hair that brushed her neck. She wore a wide smile, and her eyes glowed red under the bright lights of the blood bank.

“I can smell her,” Larissa Kinley replied.

The little girl hissed, her eyes flooding the same red as Larissa’s.

“So it’s true,” said her father. “Department 19 has a pet traitor. How can you hunt your own people? Don’t you have any shame?”

Larissa took half a step towards him, her smile fading.

“You are not my people,” she said, in a voice like ice. Alpha gently laid a hand on her arm, and she stepped back, without taking her eyes from the man in the corner of the room.

Gamma removed her helmet, and shook her head. Short blonde hair flew back and forth above a pretty, heart-shaped face, from which blue eyes stared out above a mouth that was set in a firm line.

“Was it you two who hit Lincoln General last month?” asked Kate Randall.

The man nodded, his eyes still nervously fixed on Larissa.

“And Nottingham Trent the month before that?”

He shook his head.

“Are you lying to me?” Kate asked.

“Why would I lie?” the man replied. He appeared to be on the verge of tears. “You’re going to stake us both anyway, so what would be the point?”

“That’s right,” said Larissa, a wicked smile on her face.

The little girl began to cry. The man placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered soothingly to her.

Alpha looked over at Larissa, who rolled her eyes. Then he reached up, and removed his helmet.

The boy beneath it was no more than sixteen or seventeen, but his face looked older, as though he had seen, and most likely done, things that had taken their toll. A jagged patch of pink scar tissue peeped above the collar of his uniform and climbed across the right side of his neck, stopping before it reached his jaw. His face was handsome, and possessed of a stillness more befitting an older man. His blue eyes were piercing, but he trained them tenderly on Larissa.

“Nobody is staking anyone tonight,” said Jamie Carpenter. “You know the new SOP. Pass me two restrainers, Kate. Lazarus can have these two. I don’t think they’re dangerous.”

The man began to cry along with his daughter.

“We were hungry,” he said. “I’m sorry. My name is Patrick Connors, and this is my daughter, Maggie. We were just so hungry. We didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”

“It’s all right,” Jamie replied, taking the two restrainers from Kate’s hands and tossing them to the man and his daughter. “Put these on, under your armpits. Pull them tight.”

The restrainers were thick belts that looped over the shoulders and crossed in the middle; where they met was an explosive charge that sat over the heart of the person wearing it. Patrick and Maggie shrugged the belts over their shoulders, and tightened them as they had been told. When they were securely in place, Jamie pulled a black tube from his belt with a small dial on one side and a red trigger on the other; he twisted the dial two notches clockwise, and red lights on the explosive charges flickered into life.

Jamie looked at his squad.

“Larissa, you’re going to lead us out of here,” he said. “Sir, you’re going to follow her, then Kate, then you, little one, and I’ll go last. We walk straight out the way we came, we don’t stop, and we don’t talk to anyone. Oh – and normal eyes, please.”

He grinned as Larissa and Maggie’s eyes reverted to their usual colours. Larissa led them out of the blood bank, and strode along the corridor towards the exit, and the waiting van. The rest of Squad G-17 and their prisoners followed in the order that Jamie had instructed, and less than a minute later they marched past Sergeant Pearson and Constable Fleming, who averted their eyes as they passed, and slid the van’s rear door shut behind them.

The inside of the vehicle was silver metal and black plastic; four seats ran along each side of the wide space, between which were fixed a series of moulded stands, with half a dozen unusual spaces in them. A wide LCD screen lay flush against the ceiling, and a series of slots in the floor lay before each seat. Jamie told the man and his daughter to take the two seats closest to the front and strap themselves in. They did so silently; when they were in position, Kate pressed a button set into the wall. A barrier of ultraviolet light appeared from a wide bulb in the floor, cutting them off from the three black-clad teenagers, and both Patrick and Maggie cried out.

“Don’t worry,” said Jamie. “You’re perfectly safe.”

He began to unclip the weapons and devices from his belt, and slide them into the slots on the stand beside one of the seats. The brand-new T-21 pneumatic launcher, the Glock 17, the Heckler & Koch MP5, the torch and the short beam gun that Larissa had used inside the blood bank – all were placed into purpose-built compartments and clicked into place. The detonator he kept in his hand, resting it on his knee as he took his seat and announced that they were ready to go. Instantly, the powerful engine of the vehicle, which was in reality less a van and more a combination of a mobile command centre and an armoured personnel carrier, surged into life, and sped them away from the hospital, leaving Sergeant Pearson and Constable Fleming shivering on the pavement.

“What do we do—”

“Nothing,” interrupted Pearson, before his partner had a chance to finish his question. “We do nothing, and we say nothing, because nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Clear?”

Fleming looked at the older man for a long moment, taking in the pale colour of his face, the lines of worry around his eyes and the firm set of his jaw.

“Crystal, sir,” he replied. “Let’s go home.”

An hour later the black van sped through deepening forest, heading towards a place that didn’t exist. Its official designation was Classified Military Installation 303-F, but it had long been referred to by the men and women who knew of its existence by a simpler, shorter name.

“Welcome to the Loop,” said Jamie, as the van drew to a halt. Patrick Connors and his daughter regarded him with polite incomprehension, and said nothing.

Outside the van there was a low rumble, a metallic sound like a gate being rolled back. Then they were moving again, creeping slowly forward.

“Place your vehicle in neutral.”

The voice was artificial, and it appeared to be coming from all sides at once. The driver of the van, an invisible figure to the men and women in the rear of the vehicle, did as he was ordered. A conveyor belt whirred into life beneath the van, and moved it forward, until the artificial voice spoke again.

“Please state the names and designations of all passengers.”

“Carpenter, Jamie. NS303, 67-J.”

“Kinley, Larissa. NS303, 77-J.”

“Randall, Kate. NS303, 78-J.”

There was a long pause.

“Supernatural life forms have been detected on board this vehicle,” said the voice. “Please state clearance code.”

“Lazarus 914-73,” said Jamie, quickly.

Another pause.

“Clearance granted,” announced the artificial voice. “Proceed.”

The van began to roll forward again, picking up speed. Less than two minutes later it stopped, and Jamie stood up from his seat and slid the rear door open. Kate pressed a button in the wall and the ultraviolet barrier imprisoning Patrick and Maggie disappeared.

“This way,” said Jamie, motioning towards the open door. The man led his daughter slowly down the steps, into a world he had heard rumours about, but could never have possibly imagined.

To the back of the van, an enormous semi-circular hangar stood open to the night sky. The huge space was mostly empty; a line of black SUVs and vans were parked along one wall, and a small number of black-clad figures moved across the tarmac floor. Standing before them, patient looks on their faces, were a man in the same black uniform that Jamie and his squad were wearing and a young Asian man in a white lab coat.

Patrick looked around, and gasped. He had a moment to take in the enormity, and the incredible strangeness, of what he was seeing: the vast curved fence beyond the runway, the labyrinth of red lasers, the ultraviolet no-man’s-land, and the vast holographic canopy of trees that hung across the sky above his head. Then there was a hand on his lower back, and he was being ushered forward, towards the waiting men. His daughter grabbed for his hand, and he gripped it, firmly, as Jamie stepped round him and handed his detonator to the man in the white coat, who thanked him, then addressed the two disoriented, frightened vampires.

“Sir,” he said, his voice low and gentle. “My name is Dr Yen. Please will you follow me?”

Patrick glanced at Jamie, fear blooming on his face.

“It’s OK,” said Jamie. “You’ll be safe with him.”

Patrick glanced down at Maggie, and found her looking back up at him with a determined expression on her face. She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“We will,” he replied, as steadily as he was able. “We’ll follow you.”

The doctor nodded, then turned and walked briskly across the hangar. After a moment’s pause, the man and his daughter followed him across the cavernous room, and through a wide set of double doors.

Jamie watched them go, then smiled at Larissa and Kate. Behind them, an Operator from the Security Division climbed into the van and began unloading their equipment from the moulded stands. It would be checked, cleaned and returned to their quarters within an hour, as it always was. Jamie nodded to the Operator, before turning to the Duty Officer who had been waiting to greet them.

“Cold out here tonight,” he said, watching his breath cloud in front of his face.

“Yes, sir. Bloody cold, sir.”

“How’s my mother?”

“She’s fine, sir,” replied the young Operator. “Asking for you.”

Jamie nodded, and started to walk into the hangar. He was suddenly exhausted, and his small quarters on Level B were calling to him.

“Admiral Seward requested a debrief, sir,” called the Operator, before he had got more than a couple of steps. He sounded apologetic, and Jamie sighed.

“Personally?”

“Personally, sir.”

Jamie swore. “Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said, then marched towards one of the doors at the rear of the hangar, Larissa and Kate following closely behind him.

The three members of Squad G-17 slumped against the walls of the lift as it descended into the lower levels of the Loop.

On Level B, Jamie said goodnight to the two girls, and almost ran to the shower block marked MEN that stood halfway down the corridor. He stood in the shower for a long time, his head under the searing water, trying to prevent the aches and pains that were the accumulation of active service as a Department 19 Operator from returning with a vengeance, as they usually did once the adrenaline of a mission had worn off.

Eventually, with great reluctance, he twisted the shower off, and dressed in a T-shirt and combat trousers. He could almost feel his narrow bunk beneath him, could perfectly visualise the moment when his head would touch the pillow and his eyes would close. He picked up his uniform, opened the door to the corridor and stopped. Larissa was standing in the doorway, her eyes red, her hair wet, her body wrapped in a green towel, a wicked smile on her face.

“Where’s Kate?” asked Jamie.

“Gone to her quarters,” replied Larissa. “She said to tell you she’ll see you in the morning.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but Larissa closed it with her own, her lips on his, and Jamie discovered that he wasn’t nearly as tired as he had thought.