Department 19: Zero Hour (42 page)

Matt grinned as heat bloomed in his chest. His fingers flew across the console’s screen.

FROM: Browning, Lieutenant Matthew (NS303, 83-C)

TO: Lenski, Natalia (NS304, 11-L)

Thanks :) I’ll be home soon …

The laboratory door flew open and Matt found himself surrounded by his squad mates; they shouted excitedly, and clapped him on the back, and jostled and cheered and celebrated. Major Simmons stood apart from them, watching the commotion with the ghost of a smile on his hard face.

“I didn’t do anything,” protested Matt, grinning widely. “I really didn’t. We just found the right man.”

The NS9 Operators were not interested in such modesty, false or otherwise; they congratulated him over and over, until his back hurt from endless gloved blows and his arm ached from being pumped up and down. When calm finally began to descend once more over the lab, he looked around at his squad mates.

“We should go,” he said. “I need to get the samples back to Nevada.”

Major Simmons nodded, and stepped forward. “All right,” he said. “You heard him. Pack up everything, and I do mean everything. I want it to look like we were never here. Browning, are you still plugged in to anything?”

“The DNA analysis is running at Dreamland,” said Matt. “But there’s no way to access it once I cut the connection.”

Simmons nodded again. “Good,” he said. “We’ll take the computer you’ve been using with us. I want nothing left to chance.”

“Yes, sir,” said Matt.

“All right,” said Simmons. “Then get to it, all of you.”

The men and women scattered across the laboratory, gathering up their equipment, removing empty cans and used mugs, wiping down surfaces and eradicating footprints, as Matt turned his attention back to his screen. He killed the external connections, erased the cache, the IP record and the keylogs from the laboratory server, then shut down and disconnected the computer itself. It went into his bag along with the samples, which he removed from the refrigerator and placed into a vacuum bag that closed with a loud hiss of escaping air. He sealed the bag, wrapped it in three thick layers of protective foam, then took a last look round the lab for anything he might have forgotten.

Major Simmons walked over to him. “All set?” he asked.

“Set,” replied Matt. “Ready to go, sir.”

“Good,” said Simmons, then drew his pistol and pointed it at Matt’s head. “Nobody move a damn muscle.”

Jamie watched Larissa glide easily round a shaft of sunlight, and smiled despite himself.

The light was pale yellow, thick with dust, and fell to the ground from a tiny gap in the canopy overhead as straight and true as a laser beam. The rest of the forest was thick with shadow, dark and cold and gloomy, but the look on Jamie’s girlfriend’s face, as she skirted within millimetres of the light before swooping away, was a reminder that it was still morning; despite the darkness surrounding them, Larissa was clearly relishing the opportunity to fly during the day.

After the tension within the squad had threatened to boil over as they stood in the clearing for what only Tim Albertsson refused to admit was the second time, a palpably dangerous moment in which it had taken every ounce of Jamie’s self-control not to break the stock of his MP7 over the American’s smug, stupid face, they had finally started to make progress. The going was slow, torturously so, but they were now deep in the perpetual twilight of the forest and moving forward. But part of the reason he was so pleased to see the momentary bloom of happiness on Larissa’s face as she evaded the beam of light was because his girlfriend was acting more and more strangely with each hour that passed.

Her eyes were constantly flaring red, and her movement was both incessant and increasingly erratic; she would dart away in one direction, then swoop so low that her outstretched fingers brushed the ground, before disappearing up into the darkness near the tops of the trees, all without a word to anyone. When he asked her what was going on, she just shook her head and muttered about the smell, and the noise. Jamie, who knew his senses were painfully dull in comparison to hers, could detect only the earthy aroma of the forest, and could hear nothing out of the ordinary. Telling her this had not helped, however; she had given him a withering look of disappointment, and floated back into the air.

Since the grotesque arrangement of corpses, Jamie had seen no signs of animal life at all among the trees. On several occasions he had heard the faint snap of a branch, or caught the low bushes and shrubs moving in the corners of his eyes, as though something had disturbed them, but he had
seen
nothing; it had begun to feel like they were the only living things in the forest.

Apart from the man we’re looking for,
he told himself.
Obviously.

Jamie was a country boy at heart; he had grown up in Kent, the south-eastern county known as the garden of England, and had spent a great many weekends of his childhood stomping through woods with a stick in his hand and his father at his side. Those distant places, copses of oaks and sycamores full of foxes and squirrels and birds, bore no resemblance to where he now found himself; the Teleorman Forest felt like an entirely different world, and not a welcoming one.

“Stop right there.”

Jamie looked up, startled out of his memories. It was Larissa’s voice, raised and urgent, a command not a request. He looked along the path the squad were steadily beating through the thick underbrush and saw her floating in the air ahead of them, her hand out, her eyes fixed on the forest floor. Van Orel, who was on point, did as he was told, stopping where he stood.

The rest of the squad followed suit.

Jamie glanced around, and felt a shiver run up his spine. He had become acutely aware, as they made their way deeper and deeper into the forest, of exactly how isolated they were becoming, of just how far away help would be if something went wrong in this old place.

“What is it?” shouted Albertsson. “What’s going on?”

Larissa didn’t respond. Without taking her eyes from a patch of ground beneath where she had stopped, she flew to her left and pulled a thick branch from the trunk of one of the trees. She glided back to her previous position, held out her gloved hand, and dropped the branch.

The chunk of wood hit the ground with a deafening clang of metal that echoed through the forest, making Jamie jump and causing his hand to fly to the handle of his pistol. An explosion of splinters drifted through the cool, gloomy air, before silence and stillness took over again.

“Come forward,” said Larissa. “Very slowly.”

Jamie moved up tentatively with the rest of the squad, his heart pounding in his chest. Larissa pivoted in the air until she was upside down, then reached down with her long arms and tore out several handfuls of shrubs, now coated in wood dust.

“Oh Jesus,” said Engel.

Lying on the newly exposed patch of forest floor was a metal bear trap. Its teeth were clamped round the remains of the branch that Larissa had dropped, and were rusty and caked in dirt. The trap looked old, but still vicious; the teeth formed a silver-brown grin around the shattered branch, like that of some ancient shark.

“Nobody move,” said Albertsson, his voice low. “Stay right where you are. Larissa, can you check if there are more of them?”

Larissa nodded, and flew slowly away in the direction the squad had been heading. Jamie stared down at the trap, his stomach a tightly clenched ball, wondering what would have happened if Van Orel had stepped into it. It had been less than two metres in front of the South African when Jamie’s girlfriend had ordered them to stop.

It would have taken his leg off,
he thought, and felt his head swim.

“A bear trap,” said the South African, his voice little more than a whisper. “It didn’t even occur to me to be looking. Are there even bears in Romania?”

Engel nodded. “Lots of them,” she said, her eyes fixed on the trap. “Did you even read the briefing on this place? Second largest European population after Russia. Bears, and wolves, and wild boars, and God knows what else.”

“In which case,” said Albertsson, “where the hell are they all? I haven’t seen anything move since we left camp. Have any of you?”

“No,” said Petrov. “I have seen nothing that was not dead.”

His comment hung in the air. Bears and wolves were apex predators, and yet there was no sign of them in a place that should have been their natural home.

“Maybe because there’s something worse than them here,” said Jamie, giving voice to the thought that had taken root in all of their minds.

Albertsson shot him a look that Jamie was sure was meant to be dismissive, but which contained far too much uncertainty to be convincing. He returned the look with an even stare, until the American Operator looked away.

From somewhere up ahead there came a second clang of metal, closely followed by a third. Jamie tried to slow his heart, his eyes fixed on the gloom into which his girlfriend had disappeared. For a long, empty moment, nothing moved or made a sound. Then Larissa flew slowly out of the darkness, her face pale.

“Two more,” she said. “That’s all I could see, but I’m not guaranteeing that’s all there is. I suggest you all tread very carefully.”

Albertsson nodded. “You heard her,” he said. “I want everybody looking at their feet as we move. This is no place for a medical evac.”

The members of the DARKWOODS squad nodded, and Van Orel led them onwards again, even slower than before. The trap had spooked them all; that much was obvious to Jamie as he carefully followed the path flattened by his squad mates, suddenly grateful for his place at the rear of their column. If there were more traps in their path, three pairs of feet would reach them before his.

Albertsson may have been stating the obvious, but he was also right; this would be no place to have to deal with an injured Operator. It had gone unspoken, but every member of the squad was fully aware that the possibility of any kind of conventional evacuation was now remote; their consoles and radios had all lost signal within thirty seconds of entering the forest, leaving them no means of contacting the outside world. If something happened to one of them, their best chance of survival was going to be to hold tightly to Larissa’s waist and hope she could fly them both to help in time.

And that would mean losing our most valuable weapon,
thought Jamie.
The only one of us who has the slightest chance of standing up to him when we find him.

Although he was sure it wasn’t a conviction that all his squad mates shared, Jamie had absolutely no doubt they would find the first victim. He didn’t know long it would take, what state they would be in, or what was going to happen when they found him, but he was certain that they would. And what was more, he had begun to believe that the first victim
wanted
to be found, regardless of how that sounded. The tableau of dead animals had appeared to be a warning to come no further, but if whatever lived at the heart of the forest
really
wanted to be left alone, it could very clearly have murdered them all as they slept.

I think he’s intrigued,
he thought.
He could have killed Grey, and he could have killed us, but he didn’t. I think he wants to know why we’re here, and what we want.

The thought was strangely comforting. Jamie was not remotely convinced that he or any of his squad mates were going to make it out of the forest alive, but he was increasingly sure they were going to
reach
their target, if nothing else; what happened then would be in the hands of fate.

Ahead of him, the squad were debating the bear traps. Engel believed they had been put there to deter humans, which she saw as proof that they were going in the right direction. Van Orel and Albertsson agreed with her, while Petrov remained his usual silent self. Jamie disagreed; the traps had not been placed on any discernible path, or hidden in such a way as to make it likely that a human being might stumble into them. And Florin, the villager that he and Van Orel had spoken to the previous evening, had made it clear that anything beyond the very outskirts of the forest had been treated as off-limits to the local population, for several generations at least.

They were for animals,
he thought.
Not for us. I’m sure of it. Maybe the first victim laid them, or maybe not. But I don’t think it means we’re going the right way. I don’t think it necessarily means anything.

“Jamie!” shouted Tim Albertsson.

He looked up and saw the Special Operator standing with his hands on his hips.

“Yes, sir?” he replied.

“Take point,” said Albertsson. “It’s your turn.”

Jamie smiled, as murderous thoughts raced through his mind. “Yes, sir,” he said.

He walked up the short column of Operators, past Petrov and Engel, past the gently smirking Albertsson, and past Van Orel, whose mouth twitched with a tiny smile of sympathy. Jamie stepped to the front of the line and began to walk, taking great care with each step. Ahead and above him, Larissa flew slowly back and forth, scanning the upcoming terrain. She glanced down as he led the squad deeper into the forest, and gave him a fierce smile that warmed his heart.