LITMIR.BIZ

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he had just described, when Larissa grabbed his arm, and he turned back. The three members of Squad F-7 were not moving, and Jack Williams was staring at him with a look of enormous apology on his open, friendly face.

      “What’s the problem?” asked Jamie.

      “I take my orders from Jack,” said Shaun Turner, a belligerent look on his face. “Not from you. Nothing personal.”

      Temper flared in Jamie’s chest.

      It bloody well sounds like it’s something personal, he thought. Does he just naturally hate me, like his dad does?

      “Really?” asked Kate, her voice fierce. “You really think now is the time for this petty crap?”

      Shaun’s face flushed, but he didn’t look away.

      “Jack outranks Jamie,” said Angela, who had the decency to sound embarrassed as she spoke. “In terms of experience. We think he should take point.”

      Larissa snarled, and her eyes flickered red. “This is complete bull—”

      “Angela’s right,” interrupted Jamie. “Tell us what you want us to do, Jack.”

      Larissa looked at him, her face pained on his behalf, but he shot her a tiny smile, pleading with her not to make a big deal out of what was happening. She returned it, and his heart swelled with fierce affection for the vampire girl.

      Jack Williams gave him a brief glance, full of gratitude. “Positions as Jamie described,” he said. “Remember that we need at least one vamp alive for questioning. At least one. The new SOP doesn’t apply, which I’m sure we’re all very happy about, but let’s not get carried away. Dead vampires aren’t going to tell us where Dracula is. Let’s move.”

      The six dark figures were crouched, ready to scuttle-run to their posts, when the air around them changed; it seemed thicker, as though something huge was altering the pressure. At the same moment, the six Operators realised they could hear something too: a steady thud-thud-thud, and the low rush of breaking water. They looked up the river, into the thick, swirling fog, as the vast, curved prow of the Aristeia burst into view, blinding them with its running lights, its enormous control tower looming far above them. The huge ship was slowing rapidly, slicing through the river parallel to the long concrete dock.

      “Move! Now!” hissed Jack, and the six Operators scattered, hunkering low to the ground as they sprinted to the positions that Jamie had suggested. Then Larissa’s head was up, turned to the north, her supernatural hearing picking something up in the dark, sodden night air.

      “What is it?” asked Jamie. He was standing with his back to the corner of the container nearest the dock, peering out at the incoming ship. Its size was boggling his mind; the deck was a football-field long, the hull a daunting, vertical wall of steel, the control tower the size of a large office building. It approached with eerie quiet; he could hear no voices, no sounds of any activity on the decks, or below them, just the steady thud of the engines.

      “Trucks,” replied Larissa, then turned to look at him. “Three trucks inside the gate, heading this way.”

      “Any idea what’s inside them?” asked Jamie.

      Larissa nodded.

      “Vampires,” she replied. “Lots and lots of vampires.”

      12

      INSIDE THE VOID

      JEREMY’S 24HR TRANSPORT CAFÉ, NORTH OF KÖLN, GERMANY SEVEN WEEKS EARLIER

      Frankenstein was jolted awake as the truck shuddered to a halt. He opened his eyes, and looked over at Andreas, the skinny, speed-addicted kid who had given him a lift out of Dortmund as the sun set on the previous day.

      “This is as far as I go,” said Andreas. He twitched constantly, gnawing at his fingernails until they bled, but he had shared a flask of soup and some black bread with Frankenstein when they had stopped for petrol, and for that, as well as the lift, the monster was grateful.

      “That’s fine,” said Frankenstein. “Thanks for bringing me this far.”

      He unwrapped a grey-green hand from the moth-eaten blanket the kind lady at the homeless shelter had given him, and extended it towards Andreas, who shook it. Then he wrapped the blanket tightly round himself, grabbed the plastic bag that contained everything he owned and stepped out into the freezing night.

      Frankenstein had woken up four weeks earlier, in the bowels of a fishing boat, without the slightest idea of who he was. When the ship’s captain, a weathered, salt-encrusted old man called Jens, had asked him his name, he had not been able to answer. Subsequent questions – where he lived, his family and friends, and how he had come to be floating adrift in the North Sea with the little finger of his left hand missing and a wound to his neck that should have killed him – were met with the same response: a panicked look of utter confusion. He had lain on the floor of the cabin, as he was too tall to fit into any of the bunks, and tried to remember something, anything, a place he had been, a conversation he had had, a person he had met, but there was a yawning void in the centre of his mind where his memory should have been.

      He was weak from the hypothermia that had nearly killed him, that would have killed him had the crew of the Furchtlos not found him tangled in their nets as they drew in the first catch of their trip. The net, studded with orange buoys at regular intervals, had kept him afloat, and was the reason he had not drowned. His Department 19 uniform, made of heat-regulating material that acted in the same way as a wetsuit, was the reason he had not succumbed to the punishing cold of the water; without it the fishermen would have hauled in a corpse with their catch.

      By talking with the crew as they ate their vast meals of meat and potatoes, he discovered that he spoke German, English, French and Russian, although he had no memory of having been to the countries where he was told these languages had come from. He talked for a long time with Hans, the boat’s first mate, a veteran of more than forty years’ fishing, and as he listened to the old man’s stories, of places he had been and women he had known, of the adventures of the man’s youth, occasionally Frankenstein had felt something tighten in his mind, as though he had almost been able to feel the edge of something solid, before it slipped away through his fingers.

      The crew had sent him on his way when they reached port, with a jumper and a pair of overalls that were far too small for his giant frame. But he appreciated the men’s kindness, and their lack of suspicion; he was half-expecting to see the police and the coastguard waiting for him when the ship steamed into Cuxhaven harbour. But the only people on the dock to greet the boat were the crew’s wives and girlfriends, relieved to see their men home safely once more. The crew, who were fishermen born and raised, and had seen a lifetime of strange things at sea, had clearly decided that the huge grey-green man, whom they had hauled from the water as though he was nothing more than a grossly swollen cod, was none of their business.

      Frankenstein had walked off the dock with no idea where he was, beyond the rudimentary picture of European geography that Hans had described to him, and no idea where he might go to begin the process of attempting to piece together who he was.

      He was completely lost.

      As night fell, and the cold wind drew in around him, carrying heavy flakes of snow with it, he had found a group of homeless men and women beneath a bridge on the outskirts of Cuxhaven. They had not welcomed him, nor offered to share their small amount of food, but they had not driven him away either, and had eventually allowed him to huddle round their brazier, and keep the worst of the cold from his bones. The following day he had headed south, away from the sea; he reached the tiny farming hamlet of Gudendorf as night fell, and the full moon rose above him, sickly yellow and swollen in the clear sky.

      Suddenly a bolt of agony had burst through his body, driving him to his knees. It felt as though his skin was on fire, as though his bones had been replaced by molten metal, and he screamed up at the moon, as his body began to break. With sickening, agonising crunches, his bones snapped and reset in new shapes. Blood boiled in his veins as thick grey hair sprouted

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