‘You may not have a lot of choice, Gillian.’
‘Look, please, Bill. Can’t we just do whatever tests are necessary first, to find out what’s wrong with her before we start—’
‘Creating a scandal?’
‘I want what’s best for Kate,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t want this out in public until we’re absolutely sure.’
Dr Andrews looked at her long and hard. ‘Fine. Then I’m going to book her into the clinic as quickly as I can. Then we can start to try to figure this out.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Alex had been pacing impatiently up and down her living room floor when, a few minutes before nine a.m., the phone had rung. She’d been on it before the first ring was over.
Harry Rumble’s voice had sounded terse. ‘I need you over here. Right away.’
The sense of worry was palpable as she strode through the VIA headquarters.
Rumble was in his office with Garrett and Kelby, one of the admin chiefs. There was a grim silence between them. Rumble was standing bent over his desk with his fists planted on its leather top, looking careworn, his hair ruffled, his tie crooked. In front of him was a plain cardboard box, three feet long, two wide.
‘What?’ Alex said, frozen in the doorway.
Rumble lifted a fist off the desk and pointed at the box. ‘This just arrived by motorcycle courier.’
Alex approached the desk and lifted the lid of the box. A puff of fine grey-white powder wafted out. ‘It’s ash,’ she said, looking up at Rumble with a frown.
‘It’s more than ash,’ Kelby said.
Alex rolled up the sleeve of her black satin blouse and stuck her arm into the box up to the elbow. The ash was still warm. Her fingers felt something inside. Something hard, brittle and rough.
Bits of bone.
And something else. It was warmer than the bone, smoother. She pulled it out and examined it.
‘Fuck,’ she muttered. She tossed the blackened dog tags down on Rumble’s desk with a tinny clatter. The name, rank and serial number stamped into the metal belonged to Lt Greg Shriver USMC.
‘Guess we can call off the search,’ Garrett said dryly.
Alex fired him a look that made him back up a step. Before Rumble could stop her, she ripped open the box, and its grisly contents spilled out over the desktop. Fine ash rose up like a dust cloud. Garrett sneezed.
Alex reached down and picked up what was left of Greg’s charred skull. Flakes of carbon fell away as she took it in her hands. His empty eye sockets stared back at her.
Just last night, he’d been there with her. Now he was this.
I’m sorry, Greg.
‘We’ll get these bastards,’ Rumble said. Then, noticing Alex’s frown: ‘What is it?’
‘There’s something in his mouth.’ She poked her fingers in between the charred teeth, brushing away the bits of soot and ash from inside. Wedged at the back of where his throat had been was a small object, black plastic, two inches long. She rooted it out and held it up to show them.
It was a USB flash drive, and it definitely hadn’t been in Greg’s mouth when he’d burned up.
‘Looks like someone has sent us a message,’ Alex said. She put down the skull.
There was black soot on her fingers. She wiped it away quickly.
‘Kelby, run that,’ said Rumble. ‘Let’s take a look.’
Alex dropped the flash drive in Kelby’s palm. He flipped open a laptop on a side table and was about to insert the drive into a port when the office door burst open.
They all looked round to see the pale, startled face and wide eyes of Jen Minto looking at them.
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Minto’s voice was shaky. ‘You have to come and see this.’
‘In a minute,’ Rumble said irritably. ‘We’re busy.’
Minto gulped. ‘With respect, sir, you really need to come and see this. Now.’
They followed her out into the operations room. Every desk was deserted.
‘Where did everyone go?’ Rumble asked.
Minto pointed at the far end of the room. The entire VIA office staff were crowding around the banks of enormous screens where broadcasts from all over the world played twenty-four/seven. Right now, news channels across Europe were broadcasting the same images to a babble of mixed languages.
‘Let me see.’ Rumble pushed through to the front. Alex followed, and stood next to him as they stared at the screens.
‘That’s—’
‘Terzi,’ Alex said. ‘Or was.’
On the centre screen a pretty Sky News reporter in a bright orange jacket was talking to the camera. Her hair was blowing in the wind and wisps of sleet were drifting by. In the background, fire crews were hosing down the scorched, smoking rubble of what used to be the pharmaceutical plant in the Italian Alps.
‘…speculation about the cause of the blast. Italian police have yet to comment on initial claims that this may not have been a chemical explosion, but a terrorist attack.
Sources have revealed tonight that extremist anti-vivisection groups may have made threats against the company in the past, despite assurances that no animal testing takes place…’
Rumble had seen enough. He grabbed a remote and muted the sound to the whole bank of screens at once. The room was plunged into shocked silence. Then, after a few moments, everyone began to talk over each other in panic as the full implications of what had happened began to hit home.
Rumble jutted out his jaw and let out a long breath. ‘Where’s Slade?’ he demanded loudly.
‘Here, sir.’ A squat, porky vampire with straggly hair and a patchy beard pushed through from the back of the crowd. His shirt was hanging out of his bulging waistline.
They called him The Slob, but behind the scenes Doug Slade was one of the most important cogs in VIA’s operations, responsible for managing and distributing supplies of Nosferol, Solazal and Vambloc for all its agents. And it was through his team that Solazal was rationed out to the thousands of vampires across the Federation’s global realm via its network of vampire doctors and pharmacists.
‘Doug, what’s the state of our stockpiles?’
‘Of everything?’
‘Of everything.’
Slade shrugged. ‘Whoever did this timed it just right, because we were just about to ship a massive order out of there. Stocks are low to desperate. Especially on the Nosferol front.’
‘How desperate is desperate?’
‘Running on fumes, basically.’
Alex was working hard to remember exactly how much Nosferol she had in her private stock, and how many prepared rounds of ammo were in her armoury. She thrust her hand in her jeans pocket. One tube of Solazal, three-quarters full. Enough for a few days. Two more tubes in her bedside drawer — or was it just one? Like everyone else, she’d been waiting for a delivery.
Kelby said in a stunned voice, ‘What, this happened in the middle of the night and we’re only getting to hear about it from the human media? How come none of our own people there alerted us?’
‘They’re destroyed,’ Alex told him. ‘They’re all gone.’
‘How long before we can restart production?’ Rumble asked Slade.
Slade puffed out his hairy cheeks. ‘Well, even if the formulae had been wiped off the mainframe, as long as we still had a drop left we could still analyse the stuff and start over. No emergency there, okay? But it’s gonna take weeks before we can get supply flowing again. Maybe months before it’s back to normal.’
Rumble exploded. ‘Months! I’m going to find out just what happened here!’
‘Who would have done such a thing?’ Minto said, fear in her eyes.
