The Cross

Chapter Forty-One

Donskoi reached down to the laptop and clicked to another page of the same website: www.theylurkamongstus.com. In the centre of the screen, a video clip began to download.

Alex’s gaze flicked sideways to the block of text that accompanied it.

STOP PRESS! Latest news from the front lines in the war against the Undead. For all you people out there who know the truth, and for all you doubting cynics who are about to be silenced … Errol Knightly is proud to present a sneak preview of the most sensational video evidence ever seen that VAMPIRES EXIST. Warning: what you are about to see is real, and not suitable for viewers of a sensitive dis position. Of the group of vampire hunters who captured this incredible footage in Romania, only one escaped with his life. Our technicians are hard at work cleaning up the rest of the footage and we guarantee that when you see the complete video, there will be no more excuses, no more doubters

…. YOU WILL BELIEVE.

‘What?’ Alex said. Nobody else spoke. She could feel their eyes on her as the video clip finished loading and the images began to play on the screen. Only then did she understand.

‘Oh, shit,’ she said.

‘You might say that,’ Gibson sneered.

The picture was grainy and indistinct, but Alex recognised the setting immediately as the dank, stinking basement of the semi-derelict cottage deep in the Romanian countryside where her mission had taken her. The greenish-hued images unfolded, jerkily but unmistakably, to a muffled, distorted soundtrack of wild screaming. The first human going down, writhing in a dark pool on the cellar floor; a blurred flash of brick wall; a snatched glimpse of the red-smeared face of the vampire, opening his mouth — just for a split second, the money-shot glimpse of his fangs, gleaming white in the murky shadows of the basement — before he grabbed the second human and ripped his throat out.

Alex had seen enough horror movies to know what a fake vampire looked like on a screen. This one didn’t look fake. He looked every bit as real as he had face to face.

‘But where was the camera?’ she muttered. ‘There was no camera. I’d have seen it.’

Gibson smirked. ‘Maybe you have some other explanation as to why we’re seeing this?’

‘Silence,’ Olympia said.

Now the hidden lens turned round to point in the opposite direction, and Alex’s mouth hung open as she saw herself onscreen, walking down the cellar steps. She was wearing the tight-fitting black combat kit she’d used for the job, carrying the Desert Eagle in its tactical holster. Her features were a little grainy but clearly recognisable.

‘What an entrance,’ Donskoi said. ‘Joan Crawford would have envied it.’

Alex couldn’t speak. She heard herself on the video clip saying ‘Surprise!’ Saw her hand go to her holster and draw the pistol.

Then, just about audible over the speakers:

‘Federation scum. Your time is over.’ The vampire’s voice.

The next few seconds of footage left no doubt as to what was happening in the cellar. The flash and boom of the gunshot. The scream of the vampire, falling into the shadows, the Nosferol already ravaging his body. The camera gave a violent wobble and seemed to turn away in horror.

It was then that Alex realised how the footage had been filmed. The surviving human had had some kind of miniature spy camera attached to him, turning whichever way he turned, seeing what he saw. It could have been anything, a badge, a button on his jacket.

Alex suddenly felt very cold and shaky. The worst was yet to come. She remembered what the human had said to her next, when he’d seen the way she’d destroyed the vampire with a single bullet to the chest:

‘How did you—’

And her reply, just before she’d injected him: ‘It takes a vampire to destroy a vampire properly.’

Immediately afterwards, she’d pumped her syringe-load of Vambloc under his ear, erasing his memory of everything that had just happened. Her comment to him had been no more than a throwaway line, intended for dramatic effect and meant to be instantly forgotten. Just a way to liven up a routine chore she’d been carrying out for decades.

But captured on digital audio, an admission like that to a human was a Federal crime that meant a one-way trip to Termination Row.

And Olympia had heard it loud and clear, Alex thought. This was it, then. Her fate was sealed.

But just as it reached the crucial moment, the footage cut off abruptly. In its place was a line of text that promised: ‘TO BE CONTINUED …’

Alex let out a long inward sigh of relief.

‘A fine day’s work that was, Agent Bishop,’ said Olympia.

‘How could I have known?’ Alex started to protest.

‘What happened to the human?’ Donskoi asked.

‘I carried him out of there, pumped full of Vambloc.’

‘With the camera intact,’ Gibson put in. ‘That’s one memory you didn’t erase.’

‘Why didn’t you dispose of him?’ Olympia demanded. ‘If you had destroyed the body, you would have destroyed the video evidence.’

‘My job is to terminate rogue vampires, not to kill humans. I thought that was just slightly against Federation laws?’

‘Your job,’ Olympia snapped, ‘is to protect and uphold the Federation. At all cost, vampire or human. The Federation laws are the code we expect our common vampire citizenry to abide by. For the sake of the greater good, however, those of us granted the appropriate authority may sometimes have to bend the rules in a considered fashion. I would have thought that you, as a senior agent, would have understood that.’ She paused, visibly seething. ‘Evidently not. And now, thanks to you, the humans know about us. They know about the Federation. The very thing we have most sought to avoid since its foundation. Concealment is, has always been, the whole purpose of its existence.’

‘Did you speak to the human, Agent Bishop?’ asked Donskoi, looking at her with the penetrating eye of a hardened interrogator. ‘Is there anything we should know about — anything you might have revealed that will be shown in the next instalment this Knightly posts on his website?’

Alex stared at Donskoi. Did he know the truth, or was he just cleverly trying to lure her into incriminating herself? She swallowed. ‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘I did the job I was trained and ordered to do, and I got out of there. That’s it.’

‘This Errol Knightly is gaining a great deal of publicity from his new book,’ Olympia said. ‘Drawing millions of humans to his website. I hope you realise how serious this is?’

‘With respect, I disagree,’ Alex said. ‘Ignore it, and it’ll soon be forgotten, along with all the fake footage of Yetis, ghosts and the Loch Ness monster. This is the internet, Supremo Angelopolis. It’s already so full of shit that nobody will take this seriously.’

‘We take it very seriously, Agent Bishop,’ Donskoi said. ‘We are not idiots. Within days, hours even, this footage will have spread virally across the entire web, and by then there will be nothing we can do to control the situation. We have technicians at work as we speak, attempting to hack and crash the site. That may buy us some time. But to avert this disaster fully, the footage must be destroyed at source.’

‘You have forty-eight hours,’ Olympia told her. ‘Starting from now. Find and destroy all copies of this video, any hard drives on which it is stored, and anyone who tries to stand in your way. You will then track down the human who sent the footage to Knightly and erase his memory permanently. Are these orders understood?’

Alex nodded, avoiding Gibson’s eye. She could feel delight radiating off him in warm waves.

‘Forty-eight hours, Agent Bishop,’ Olympia said. ‘Fail this time, and you have my word that you will face immediate Nosferol termination.’