“But if it was an unauthorised mission...” protested Jamie.
Frankenstein smiled at him.
“You can see the problem, fourteen years later. And your father and I could see it then. We weren’t alone, either. At that point, the mission was the biggest disaster in Blacklight history, and losing fourteen men in one day had a terrible impact on the Department. Just about every Operator knew one of the men who had died, and there was a lot of anger about what had happened. A lot of it aimed at Dan Morris. So your father took control of the situation.”
“What did he do?”
“He and a number of senior Operators – Henry Seward, Paul Turner and myself amongst them – made a formal motion to the Chief of the General Staff that Dan Morris be removed as Director. We explained the mistake he had made in ordering the mission, and the huge overreaction he was planning in response to its failure, and we asked that he be relieved of duty, for the good of Blacklight. Thankfully, the General agreed with us, and did as we asked.”
“No wonder you and Tom don’t get on,” said Jamie, softly. “He must hate you for doing that to his dad.”
“He can hate me all he wishes,” said Frankenstein, sharply. “I don’t give a damn what he thinks. We did what we did because it needed doing, because more men would have died needlessly if we hadn’t. I don’t regret it for a moment.”
“What happened to Tom’s dad? Did he stay in Blacklight?”
“He could have,” said Frankenstein. “He was removed as Director, not from the Department. And there were plenty of people who tried to persuade him to do so, including your father. But his pride would not allow it. He left the day after he was removed from office.”
The monster looked at Jamie. “He put his pistol in his mouth six months later.”
“Jesus,” whispered Jamie.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, the sad tale of Thomas Morris’s father hanging in the air between them.
Eventually Jamie spoke. “So that was when Admiral Seward took charge?” he asked.
Frankenstein nodded.
“He was Commander Seward then. But yes. He steadied the ship, with your father’s help. And the Department recovered. Everything was fine, for more than a decade. Henry and Julian were a great team, and Blacklight prospered. And then Budapest happened, and nothing was ever really the same again.”
Jamie sat forward, his eyes full of dreadful inevitability.
“What happened in Budapest?” he asked.
Chapter 26
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
MOLNÁR ESTATE, NEAR BUDAPEST, HUNGARY 12TH FEBRUARY 2005
Julian Carpenter fired his T-Bone at point-blank range, turning his head away as the vampire exploded in a shower of blood, soaking his Blacklight uniform. He turned to the four men standing behind him.
“Be careful from here on,” he said.
Four faces looked back at him. The huge mottled face of Frankenstein gave him a quick grin, and Paul Turner stared at him without expression, his grey eyes cold and calm. The two young Operators, Connor and Miller, looked at him with queasy uncertainty, their training just about masking their obvious fear. Carpenter felt for them; neither should have been on a mission with such a high-value target, and all five men knew it. The two young Privates had less than a year’s experience between them, and it was Connor’s first live operation.
There had been no time to examine records; the intelligence that had drawn them to this exquisite estate on the edge of Budapest had needed acting on immediately, and Carpenter had gathered the first four able-bodied men he could find. He was grateful that two of them had been Frankenstein and Turner, veterans of hundreds of operations, and two of his closest friends in Blacklight. Connor and Miller would just have to do what they had been trained to; eventually every Operator was required to sink or swim.
Carpenter had been overseeing the shift change in the Ops Room when the report had come in. At first he had thought it was a practical joke. It was written by a Blacklight Major called John Bryant, who was celebrating his thirtieth wedding anniversary with his wife on a cruise down the Danube. He and his wife had taken a stroll down to the river banks of Budapest and had literally walked into Alexandru Rusmanov and his wife Ilyana.
Ninety minutes later Carpenter’s team were in the air, heading east. They were strapped on to benches inside an EC725 Cougar that had been stripped down and essentially rebuilt. The improvements that most pleased Julian Carpenter had been to the rotors and the engines, which now delivered a cruising speed of just over 300 miles per hour. This was significantly faster than the publicly acknowledged world record speed for a helicopter, and it meant that the flight to Budapest would take little more than an hour. Mina, the supersonic Blacklight jet that could have covered the distance to Budapest in less than twenty minutes, was in Tokyo, and he could not afford to wait for the Harker brothers to bring her home.
Julian pressed a button in the console next to his seat and a screen folded down from the ceiling. The most recent photo of Alexandru filled the frame, and he told the four men on the benches to study it carefully.
“This is Alexandru Rusmanov,” he said, raising his voice slightly above the steady pulse of the helicopter’s engines. “Turner, Frankenstein, I know you don’t need reminding of just how dangerous this target is. So Connor, Miller, I say this for your benefit; nothing in your training has prepared you for dealing with a vampire as old and powerful as Alexandru. Nothing.”
He contemplated the eager, nervous faces of the two Privates.
“You’re looking at the second oldest vampire in the world. He was turned by Dracula himself, along with his brothers, Valeri and Valentin, more than four hundred years ago. He is powerful in a way that distorts the scales; he can knock down buildings, he can move faster than your eyes can follow, he can fly indefinitely. And more than that, he is clever, and he is vicious. He views humanity as nothing more than a herd of cattle from which to draw his sustenance. If he chooses to, he will kill you without a millisecond’s hesitation.”
Carpenter pressed the button again, and the image changed to a black and white photo of a stunningly beautiful woman with dark hair and sharp features.
“This is Ilyana, Alexandru’s wife. She is almost as old as he is; he turned her himself, with Dracula’s permission. She has stood at his side for more than four centuries, and is every bit as dangerous as her husband. In modern psychological terminology, Ilyana is a pure sociopath, without empathy for others, without feelings for anyone apart from her husband. She is unpredictable, and she is deadly.”
A final press of the button sent the screen folding back into the ceiling. Carpenter looked at his team, and saw fear in the faces of Connor and Miller.
Good, he thought. They need to be scared.
“Both these individuals are high-value targets, rated A1 by every Department in the world. Our orders are to eliminate them both. If that proves impossible, if the opportunity only arrives to make one kill, then Alexandru is the priority. Understood?”
The four men on the benches shouted that they did, and Julian nodded.
I hope you do, he thought. I really hope you do.
The helicopter touched down at a Hungarian airbase on the outskirts of Budapest. The aircraft’s call sign meant it did not appear on civilian radar, and only a handful of military air traffic controllers in the world would have recognised the unique combination of letters and numbers that signified a Department 19 vehicle.
Working quietly and