LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Yes, sir?” replied the instructor. The huge man had taken advantage of the momentary pause in the training to give his mind a moment to clear, and a small smile of pride had emerged on his face as he looked at Jamie Carpenter. It seemed to Terry as though it had been mere days since the boy had arrived in the Playground, nervous and skinny and completely disoriented, but with a streak of bitter determination that had been immediately obvious to Terry, a veteran reader of people. Now he emerged from his thoughts, pushing the smile away as he answered the calm, deadly Operator the boy had so quickly become.

      “CQD, please,” said Jamie. “Again.”

      Both Morton and Ellison let out low groans, their eyes flickering wildly from Jamie to each other, then up to the imposing figure of the instructor.

      “Of course, sir,” replied Terry, and turned towards the two trainees, a wide smile of anticipation on his face.

      Jamie strode along the corridor towards the lift that would take him up through the base to the Ops Room.

      He felt a momentary pang of guilt as he thought about the brutal physical programme Terry was putting Morton and Ellison through; Close Quarters Defence was a regime of violence and exhaustion that he would in all likelihood remember until the end of his days. But he quickly pushed the feeling aside. Recruits were broken down and rebuilt: that was the way it was done, the way it had always been done, and he knew that the understanding his two new provisional squad members would gain from their ordeal would serve them well out in the world, where violence and danger beyond anything they had known lurked around what often seemed like every corner. The darkness that Blacklight had kept at bay for so long was now threatening to overwhelm them, and there was no time to be wasted on the hurt feelings and bloodied bodies of the new intake of recruits.

      Jamie was cautiously hopeful about the two potential Operators who had been thrust into his care, a situation that never ceased to amuse him. Both were older than him and far more experienced in the outside world. Inside the Loop, however, their experience counted for nothing and Jamie was an almost legendary figure; they both looked at him with barely concealed awe.

      John Morton was twenty-one years old and had been recruited personally by Major Paul Turner. He had been about to be transferred to the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, and had already been marked out as a soldier likely to one day undergo the gruelling selection process that would see him join the SAS, the British Army’s elite special forces unit. Turner had become aware of him through his old colleagues at Hereford and had stepped in quickly to derail the young man’s career path. Less than a day later, Morton had arrived at the Loop with a look of wonder similar to the one that had been a fixture on Jamie’s own face barely six months earlier.

      Lizzy Ellison was twenty-three, two years older than her training mate and more than five years older than Jamie. She had been an agent in SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service that had previously been known as MI6, and what she had done there was classified at a level accessible only by the Director General of the SIS and the Chief of the General Staff. Jamie had not asked her, although the time would come when he would do so; he had learnt from personal experience that secrets within a squad could be dangerous. But for the time being, he was content to let her past remain a secret for a single reason: Angela Darcy, the beautiful, fearsome Operator who had accompanied Jamie on his desperate rescue mission to Paris only a month or so earlier, who had also once been SIS and was, he thought, the most deadly and calmly predatory human being he had ever known, knew who Ellison was. He didn’t know how, but it was enough; if she had appeared on the radar of Angela Darcy, who had spent her pre-Blacklight career wading through blood that was often elbow-deep, then he would not push her to reveal her secrets.

      Not yet, at least.

      The lift doors slid open and Jamie stepped inside, pressing the button marked 0. As the lift began to ascend, he wondered what Cal Holmwood might want this time.

      It often felt as though he spent more time in the Ops Room than in the small quarters where he occasionally found the opportunity to sleep. It was an oval room in the centre of the only above-ground level of the Loop, and it was where the Priority Level missions were briefed and despatched. In the month that had followed the attack on the Loop and the abduction of Henry Seward, the Department’s veteran Director, it had become the hub of the entire base, as every mission had become Priority Level. It was exceedingly rare to find good news waiting there.

      Jamie leant against the cool metal wall of the lift and let his mind drift; as was so often the case, his thoughts were quickly full of his friends. The catastrophic attack on the Loop by Valeri and his vampire army had affected them all profoundly; Kate was still struggling to come to terms with the death of Shaun, the young Operator who had been her boyfriend, and had made a decision in recent days that Jamie had pleaded with her to reconsider. Matt was buried deep in the bowels of the Loop, spending every waking second staring at a computer screen. And Larissa, the vampire girl who had become the most important thing in the world to Jamie, was gone.

      The lift door slid open again, and he walked slowly down the Level 0 corridor. He paused outside the door to the Ops Room, took a deep breath, then stepped inside.

      Gathered round the long row of tables in the centre of the room was a group of dark figures.

      Cal Holmwood stood at the head, with Jack Williams at his side. Arrayed along the sides of the table, their attention focused on the Interim Director, stood Patrick Williams, Dominique Saint-Jacques, Jacob Scott, Andrew Jarvis, Richard Brennan and a Communications Division Operator called Amy Andrews. She had been recently added to the Task Force, along with Dominique and Angela Darcy, who appeared to be absent; in the aftermath of Valeri’s attack, it had been expanded to include at least one representative from every Division in the Department.

      As Jamie sat down, he noted that Paul Turner was also missing, although this no longer qualified as surprising.

      “Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Cal Holmwood. “How are your recruits coming along?”

      “Pretty well, sir,” replied Jamie. “Terry’s making sure they realise what they’ve signed up for.”

      Cal Holmwood smiled grimly. “I’m glad to hear it. They’re going to see for themselves in a few hours.”

      Jamie frowned. The Blacklight training programme had once taken thirteen months to complete, on top of the elite-level training that the majority of recruits had already undertaken before they were even made aware of the Department’s existence. But circumstances had made this impossible, and what was being carried out in the Playground now was the very definition of a crash course. It was far from ideal, from anyone’s perspective, but it was unavoidable: the Department had been hurt, and hurt badly.

      There were rooms on the residential levels that had been occupied by Operators who were never going to return to them, unused desks in the Surveillance, Security and Intelligence Divisions, Operational Squads that had lost one, two, or in some awful cases, all three of their members. These empty spaces, these holes in the fabric of the Department, would not be filled easily, even by the new men and women who were being recruited specifically to do so. Friends, colleagues, even family members had been lost, and rookies would not take their places, even though they were vital: restoring the Department to something approaching full strength was of paramount importance.

      The countdown to Zero Hour would not wait for them to be ready.

      Nonetheless, Jamie did not believe the members of his new squad were; he had not been intending to take them out for another week, at least.

      “Why, sir?” he asked, looking at the Interim Director. “What’s happened?”

      Holmwood glanced over at Jack Williams. “Jack?”

      Jamie’s friend nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “In the Security Officer’s absence, I’ve been asked to brief you all on the events of last night.” He tapped a series of commands into the console in front of him, and the Operators turned their attention to the screen set high on the wall. A window opened and grainy CCTV images filled the screen: running figures in white coats, leaping, grasping shapes moving among

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