The Cross

Chapter Forty

London

VIA personnel needed only a brief glimpse of the look of thunder on Alex’s face to know to get out of her way as she marched towards her office. She hadn’t been back to HQ since Baxter Burnett had given her the slip and promptly vanished. Working from the hotel room that was her base until she could find another suitable apartment to rent, she’d spent countless hours on the phone, using up every trick and every contact she could think of to find out where he’d gone. Nothing. There was no point in just scouring the streets. He was gone, and now the only option left open to her was to admit failure. There would be no way to make this look good on the official report she’d now have to write up.

Alex reached her office door, wrenched it open sullenly, slammed it shut behind her and was about to hang up her coat and bag when she stopped in her tracks.

Cecil Gibson was lounging behind the desk with his feet up on a stack of her paperwork. His close-set eyes seemed to glitter as he saw her walk in.

‘You’re in my chair, Gibson,’ she said.

Gibson clicked his tongue disapprovingly. ‘I know that fool Harry Rumble cut you an awful lot of slack, but let me tell you this, honey bunny. Your days of insubordination are over. You answer to me now.’

‘All right, then get the fuck out of my chair, sir. That do you? I’m busy.’

But far from flying into the indignant rage she’d secretly wanted to provoke, Gibson just smiled knowingly. Something was up.

‘Maybe you didn’t hear me,’ she said suspiciously. ‘I have work to do.’

He shook his head. ‘You don’t have time for that right now. You need to be getting ready.’

Hmm. Something definitely was up. ‘Ready for what?’ she asked.

‘Ready for your visitors,’ Gibson said. ‘You’re in the deepest shit imaginable, Bishop. They’ve been waiting for you upstairs.’

‘Who’s been waiting for me upstairs?’

‘You’ll see.’ Gibson glanced at his watch. Right on cue, there was a loud hammering on the door, and Gibson sprang out from behind the desk to answer it.

The little stoat must have called upstairs the second Queck admitted her through security, Alex thought. Her mind raced to understand what this was about. If it was some kind of disciplinary hearing, it could surely only be about one thing. Could the VIA top brass already know about Baxter Burnett going rogue on her? Had his little escapade outside the school made it onto YouTube already? She could see the headlines: ‘BAD BOY BURNETT ON RAMPAGE!’ ‘MOVIE STAR IN CHILD ATTACK HORROR!’

Gibson flung open the door with a dramatic flourish that looked like he’d been practising it in the mirror. Alex blinked as her visitors came striding into the office. Leading the way, nose in the air and robes trailing behind her, was Supremo Olympia Angelopolis. At her side strutted the figure of her PA, Ivo Donskoi: grizzled hair cropped military-style, small, narrow-chested, dark suit, a laptop under his arm. Four F.A.N.G. guards marched in behind them, shut the door and stood either side of it with their high-capacity assault weapons cocked and locked.

Alex was speechless. Gibson just had time to throw her a quick smirk before he went scurrying towards the Vampress. ‘Ma’am, it’s a great honour to welcome you in person to our—’

‘Quiet,’ Olympia commanded with a snap of her fingers. ‘I haven’t cancelled some very important meetings and come all this way to bandy words on ceremony. Ivo, if you please.’

Without a word, Ivo Donskoi shoved the paperwork on Alex’s desk to one side, set the laptop down on the desk and flipped it open. As the screen flashed into life, Alex found herself staring at the garish graphics of a website she’d never seen before.

‘Do you know what this is?’ the Vampress demanded. ‘No, I didn’t think you did.’

‘“They Lurk Amongst Us”?’ Alex said, peering at the screen. ‘Errol Knightly — bestselling author, vampire hunter. Uh-huh. Right.’ She looked up at the Supremo. ‘Come on. We’ve seen these types plenty of times before. It’s obvious this guy’s just a showman.’

Olympia’s lips tightened. ‘And it seems you’ve become the star of his little show, my dear.’

‘You’re going to have to explain what this is about,’ Alex said.

Donskoi cut in. ‘Ten days ago, your superior Harry Rumble sent you on a mission to investigate possible rogue vampire activity in our eastern Europe sector. Correct? We want to know what happened.’

‘It was in the Carpathian mountains,’ Alex said, even more baffled. ‘Out in the middle of nowhere. The VIA mainframe had flagged up a blog where some bunch of amateur wannabe vampire hunters were talking about going into this little rundown cottage in the woods where local rumour said there was a vampire. It was almost certainly going to be just another false alarm, but we decided to check it out. In the end, it turned out to be for real. It was one of the first signs that Gabriel Stone’s rebellion was about to kick off. I think the vampire was one of his Trad followers.’

‘And you dealt with the situation?’

‘Yes, I did. This was all in my report at the time. Why are we going back over it?’

Olympia smiled. ‘Let’s go through it again.’

Alex shrugged and went on. ‘Okay. The situation was messy. By the time I got there, the humans were already in trouble. Three of them, young guys in their twenties. The target took two of the humans down before I terminated him.’

‘And you followed the proper procedure?’

‘To the letter of the Fed regs. I injected the two dead humans with Nosferol to make sure they stayed that way, and gave the survivor a shot of Vambloc to kill his short-term memory. Then as an extra security measure I took out the whole place with an incendiary device. The report was logged with Harry Rumble and everything was gone through in the debriefing. I can’t understand what the problem is.’

‘Let me show you the problem, Agent Bishop,’ Donskoi said.

Locked in an office in another part of the VIA Headquarters, someone was furtively taking out a very unauthorised mobile phone and dialling a number that nobody else within the organisation could ever know about.

‘It’s me,’ the vampire whispered urgently, glancing at the door furtively, fearful that someone outside could be listening. ‘Have you got it?’

‘Yes,’ said Gabriel Stone’s voice on the other end of the line. He sounded tense. ‘We have it. The plan is in motion.’

‘There’s been an unexpected development,’ the vampire whispered. ‘Angelopolis is here. She flew in unannounced from Brussels yesterday. It was all kept hush-hush, but she’s in some kind of meeting with Bishop. The two of them are right here in the building.’

‘My man is on his way as we speak,’ Gabriel said.

‘Tell him to get here fast. Angelopolis and Bishop — we can get them both if we hurry.’