Frankenstein looked at Jamie.
“Stephen could have done anything he wanted. He could have been Prime Minister. But he chose Blacklight.”
Jamie’s head was pounding; he felt as though he had been holding his breath since the monster had started talking. He breathed out, took new air into his lungs, sipped his water, and trained his attention back on Frankenstein.
“So there was Stephen, and his brother Jeremy, and their cousin Jacob Scott, who you met yesterday. Ben Seward was still around, and his son Henry, who’s the Director now, joined a few years after your father. George Harker was there, and Paul Turner, who married Henry Seward’s sister, and Daniel Morris, Tom’s father. And Julian, of course. These men were the future of Blacklight, with Stephen Holmwood in the middle. They rose quickly through the ranks, transforming the Department as they did so. When Peter Seward stepped down in 1982, Stephen was the unanimous choice to replace him as Director. And then things really started to happen.”
Frankenstein drained the last of his coffee, and set the mug down on the table.
“Everything you see around you, this base and everything in it, is the result of Stephen Holmwood’s tenure as Director. He petitioned the government to increase Blacklight’s budget, and he sank the new funds into this place. He sent your father on a fact-finding mission to America in 1984 to visit NS9, which is their equivalent of Department 19. He was gone for ten weeks, and he returned home with a report that was the blueprint for the Loop. We expanded, taking the best men from all three branches of the military, widening our sphere of operations, hunting across Europe and beyond, running missions into Africa and Asia for the first time since the war. Stephen worked with the Departments of other countries, sharing data and resources, sending men on exchanges to every corner of the world, organising and establishing areas of responsibility, so the entire globe came under the jurisdiction of the various organisations.”
He grinned, wickedly.
“The vampires were decimated,” he continued. “They had come to believe that if they kept their heads down, they would be safe. But that was no longer true. We pursued them, chasing them from town to town, from country to country, even, and we destroyed them, one after the other. There was nowhere for them to hide.”
He stopped talking, and looked down at the surface of the table. “What happened?” asked Jamie.
Frankenstein raised his head and looked at him, and Jamie was alarmed to see that the monster’s misshapen eyes were damp with tears. “Stephen died,” he said, simply. “He had a heart attack in 1989. No warning. He just died, at his desk in his quarters.”
“That’s horrible,” said Jamie, in a low voice.
“It was,” said Frankenstein. “It devastated the Department. No one knew what to do; Stephen had been the heart of everything, and suddenly he was gone. There was no Director, and the people who were best able to step up and keep us going were the people who were most shattered by his death. So when Daniel Morris put himself forward, everyone was so grateful that they said yes before they’d even really thought about it.”
“Tom told me his father was Director,” said Jamie, remembering the conversation in the Fallen Gallery. “He said it wasn’t for very long though.”
“Too long,” spat Frankenstein, and Jamie recoiled. “Dan Morris wasn’t a bad man,” he continued, after a pause. “Far from it, really. He was impulsive, and he was aggressive, and that made him a great Operator, but a terrible Director. It was difficult for him, to take over in the circumstances he did. It would have been difficult for anyone; Stephen cast such a long shadow. But that doesn’t excuse the risks he took, and the people who got hurt.”
Frankenstein got up from the table and poured himself water from the dispenser. He sat back down heavily in front of Jamie.
“We should have seen it coming; I should have seen it coming. But it took a long time for Blacklight to recover after Stephen died, and so for at least a year no one was paying much attention to what Dan was doing. A night mission here, an overseas operation without proper clearance there. Small things, at least to start with. But some people did notice them, and began to keep a closer eye. Your father was one of them, Henry Seward was another. And so was I.”
The monster sipped his water.
“In March of 1993 Dan ordered an operation into Romania – modern-day Transylvania – where all this started in 1891. That part of the world is under the jurisdiction of the SPC, the Russian Supernatural Protection Commissariat, and they have never taken kindly to foreign Departments operating in their sphere of influence. Under the Soviets, it was almost impossible even to enter their territory, and the penalties for doing so were severe. But then the USSR collapsed and the SPC started slowly to extend its hand towards the other Departments. Your father led a delegation to Moscow in late 1992, the first of its kind in almost fifty years, and he came home excited about having Russia back in the fold. Then Dan ordered Operation Nightingale, and we nearly lost them forever.”
“What was Operation Nightingale?” asked Jamie.
“It was a mission to destroy a blood factory near Craiova. A vampire gang was kidnapping people, mostly drug addicts and the homeless, from all across central Europe, and bleeding them in an old slaughterhouse. Hundreds of men and women a year, for God knows how long, then selling the blood on the black market. We’d known about it for a couple of years, and reported it to the SPC on a number of occasions. We got nothing back, not even an acknowledgement that the message had arrived. That’s what it was like when the Iron Curtain still stood; information disappeared into a black hole. Then when the Curtain came down, we reported it again, and this time we got a reply, saying that the factory was a priority SPC target. Six months later, still nothing had happened, so Dan sent a team in.”
Frankenstein looked at Jamie. “When I think back to that day—” “You were there?” interrupted Jamie. “You went on the mission?”
“Of course,” replied Frankenstein. “Me, your father, Paul Turner and seventeen other Blacklight men. We flew in on the 18th of March 1993, and we reached the factory in the late morning of the following day.”
“What happened?”
“They were waiting for us. More than seventy vampires, all well fed and rested, wide awake and waiting when we went through the door. I noticed that the black paint covering the windows was still wet, and I told your father, who ordered everyone to retreat. But it was too late. They came down from the rafters. We never stood a chance.”
“But you made it out. And so did my dad, and Major Turner.”
“We were lucky. That’s all there is to it. Maybe we were a little more experienced; some of the team were just boys, no more than a year or two under their belts. When we saw them coming, we turned and ran. I was the last one to make it out of the building.”
“How many of you made it?” asked Jamie, his voice taut with horror.
“Six of us,” replied Frankenstein. “Six of us made it into the sunlight, and fourteen men died in a dark building full of blood and death.”
Frankenstein reached for his mug, saw that it was empty, and pushed it aside.
“Dan could never prove the Russians let them know we were coming. The operation was an unauthorised run into another Department’s territory, so there were no permissions, no call logs to check. But that didn’t matter to him. Your father defended the SPC,