Battle Lines. Will Hill

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      EVERYTHING HEALS, IN TIME

      Kate Randall wiped her eyes and splashed water on her face. It was the first time she had cried in almost two and a half days, a new personal best since the night a month earlier when she had watched her boyfriend die.

      She was standing in the bathroom within the small suite of rooms that had been commandeered by ISAT, the Internal Security Assessment Team. In the centre was the interview room, containing a seat flanked by two metal cabinets of monitoring equipment, a desk and two plastic chairs. Outside the entrance to the interview room was a small lobby, separated from the rest of the Intelligence Division by a heavy steel door, which was accessed by a nine-digit code known only to three people. To the left of the lobby stood a door, leading into a small living room and kitchen. The thin plaster wall of the living room contained two further doors; one led into the small quarters that the ISAT Director had taken to sleeping in, the other into the bathroom where Kate had just stopped crying.

      There was a gentle knock on the door behind her.

      “One minute,” she called.

      “Are you all right?” asked a male voice, full of concern.

      “I’m fine,” she replied. “Just… give me a minute, OK?”

      “OK,” replied the voice. “We’re ready when you are. Take your time.”

      Kate wiped her eyes a final time.

      Get it together, she told herself, sharply. He needs you.

      She stared at herself for a long moment in the mirror above the sink; she took a deep breath, held it, let it out, then turned and opened the bathroom door. Major Paul Turner was standing in the small ISAT living room, his arms folded across his chest. He smiled at her, almost, but not quite, managing to hide the expression of concern she had seen on his face as she emerged from the bathroom.

      “Ready?” he asked.

      “Ready,” she replied.

      Turner clapped her on the shoulder, his hand pausing momentarily before falling away, then led her out into the lobby and through the door to the interview room.

      ISAT had been formed in the aftermath of Valeri Rusmanov’s attack on the Loop, in response to a claim made by his brother Valentin during the interrogation that had followed his defection to Blacklight.

      Paul Turner had asked the ancient vampire whether he had any information regarding the existence of double agents inside the Department. The sad case of Thomas Morris, the former Operator who had betrayed them to Valentin’s brother Alexandru and had been responsible for the death of Julian Carpenter, had been assumed to be an isolated incident. Valentin’s answer had immediately cast doubt over that assumption; he had claimed to know with absolute certainty that Valeri had maintained at least one agent inside the Department since its expansion in the 1920s.

      Valentin had been able to offer no support for this claim, no names, no dates, no incriminating evidence, and the thought that it may have been intended to sow distrust within Blacklight had immediately occurred to everyone. But then the Loop had been attacked, by a vampire army that had made its way undetected beneath the radar arrays and through the motion detectors and laser nets, and the double life of Professor Christopher Reynolds had been uncovered; he had been in the employ of Valeri Rusmanov his entire life. As Cal Holmwood tried to piece the wounded, reeling Department back together, Paul Turner had approached him and quietly explained that they needed to clean house, as a matter of urgency. Holmwood had agreed and instructed Turner, the Department’s Security Officer, to create a team to carry out the task.

      “They’re going to hate you for this, Paul,” warned Holmwood. “But you’re right, it needs doing. When you’re ready to start interviewing, come and tell me. I’ll go first.”

      Turner agreed, then set about the creation of ISAT, the first internal affairs team in the long, proud history of Blacklight.

      Holmwood was right: they hated him for it. The knowledge that he was creating a team to investigate Operators leaked quickly through the Loop, and proved incredibly unpopular; it seemed cruel to subject men and women who had just fought for their lives, who had watched friends and colleagues fall at their sides, to new suspicion. The survivors felt they had proved themselves, that their loyalty had been shown beyond question. Paul Turner understood their position, but didn’t care. And the whispered consensus within the Loop was that why he didn’t care was obvious: as far as Turner was concerned, ISAT was a personal crusade. One of the Operators who died during the attack on the Loop was Shaun Turner, Paul’s twenty-one-year-old son, who had also been Kate Randall’s boyfriend.

      As a result, the first dozen Operators that Turner approached about joining ISAT turned him down flat. They were too scared of the Security Officer, whose glacial grey eyes could turn even the boldest Operator’s insides to water, to tell him exactly what they thought of his project, but not to reject his offer. Turner didn’t hold it against them; he merely moved on to the next person on his list. He needed only a single Operator to share the ISAT burden, someone who could ensure his actions were above suspicion, and he would ask every single man and woman in the base if necessary. If they all said no, he would go back to the top of his list and ask them all again. But in the end, this proved unnecessary.

      Kate told Jamie she was going to volunteer for ISAT before she did so; she wasn’t asking his permission, but she didn’t want him to find out from someone else. His response had been entirely as she expected.

      “You’re kidding,” he said. “Why the hell would you do that?”

      “I have my reasons,” she replied, looking him directly in the eye. “I’m sure you can work out what they are.”

      “Of course I can,” he snapped. “Obviously I can. But have you thought this through, Kate? Like, really thought it through? Everyone’s going to hate you if you do this. Everyone.”

      “I don’t care,” she said. “Let them hate me.”

      He had tried to talk her out of it for a further half an hour, but once it became clear that she was not going to be persuaded to change her mind, he had done the second thing she had expected: told her that he would stick up for her, no matter what anyone else said or thought. She had thanked him, and given him a long hug that had brought tears to her eyes and a lump to her throat.

      Larissa and Matt had both been amazing in the aftermath of Shaun’s death, and could empathise with her, up to a point; both were living without the people they loved, in Matt’s case voluntarily, in Larissa’s as a result of what had been done to her by Grey, the ancient vampire who had turned her. They understood loneliness, and what it meant to miss someone, but they couldn’t fully appreciate what she was going through. Jamie was the only one who could, having watched his father die less than three years earlier.

      Kate would never have dreamt of suggesting that her loss in any way compared to his. She had only been with Shaun for a couple of months, barely any time at all, even given the hyper-reality of life inside Blacklight. She knew the loss of her boyfriend didn’t come close to the loss of his father, and never tried to claim otherwise. But what it did mean was that Jamie understood the thing that she was struggling to find a way past, the same thing that had tormented him in the months that followed Julian Carpenter’s death: the fact that Shaun was gone, that everything he had ever been, everything he might one day have become, had disappeared into nothing. She was never going to see him again, and neither was anyone СКАЧАТЬ