Department 19: Battle Lines Read Online Free PDF

Holmwood looked at him. “Search and destroy,” he replied, softly. “As quickly as possible. It’s as simple as that.”
    Jamie looked at the overturned car on the screen.
    Right
, he thought.
Simple
.

2
LAZARUS REVAMPED
    Matt Browning pushed open the heavy door in the centre of the Level F corridor, as excited as a child on Christmas morning, and saw that, despite the early hour, he was not the first member of the Lazarus Project to arrive for work. Professor Karlsson looked up as he entered, gave him a smile and a brief nod, then returned his attention to a page of text resting on his desk.
    He is the boss,
thought Matt, smiling to himself.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
    The reconstruction of the Lazarus Project had been undertaken with great urgency in the aftermath of the loss of Admiral Henry Seward. Cal Holmwood had given Matt, its only surviving member,
carte blanche
to make recommendations; he had done so, putting his natural shyness aside once he came to realise that he was not going to get into trouble for saying what he thought. His very first suggestion was that Blacklight make every possible effort to persuade Professor Robert Karlsson, the Director of the Swedish Institute for Genetic Research, to become the new head of the project. He had been aware of Karlsson’s work for some time, and considered him one of the cleverest people on the planet, a towering intellect whose area of specialisation was the manipulation of replicator enzymes within DNA, making him the perfect candidate to advance the search for a cure for vampirism.
    Holmwood had nodded with polite incomprehension. Four days later Karlsson had arrived at the Loop with a small suitcase and a leather satchel full of portable hard drives. He had been introduced to Matt, listened politely as the teenager gushed at him like an adolescent girl meeting her favourite pop star, then suggested they got to work.
    Today was to be the first day of the fully staffed, fully equipped, fully functional second incarnation of the Lazarus Project. Karlsson and Matt had spent the last month recruiting the finest minds from around the globe, rebuilding and expanding the laboratories, and overseeing the installation of the most powerful local computer network in Europe.
    Every minute of time that was not consumed by the practicalities of rebuilding was devoted to analysing the data on the hard drive that had been salvaged from Professor Richard Talbot, the former head of the Lazarus Project and a servant of Valeri Rusmanov whose real name they now believed had been Christopher Reynolds. The hard drive had been recovered when Jamie Carpenter shot the treacherous Professor in the head, as Matt lay unconscious on the floor between them. Reynolds had murdered the Project’s entire staff, and had been about to kill Matt and make good his escape when Jamie intervened. It was thanks to Reynolds that it had taken a month to re-staff the Project; the background checks carried out on every potential recruit had been thorough to the point of being overtly invasive, as a repeat of the Professor’s treachery simply could not be permitted.
    Reynolds had been working on vampire genetics for more than a decade, and had acquired the bulk of his data via methods that were as immoral as they were criminal: vivisection, live experimentation, torture. His work, in particular his mapping of the vampire genome and his analysis of the physical effects of vampirism on a turned human being, was proving invaluable to everything the new Lazarus Project was doing. Without it, the scale of the task might well have seemed insurmountable.
    With it, there was hope: if nothing else, there was a place to begin.
    The process of analysing and building upon the recovered data was already under way; each new member of the Project that arrived had immediately got started. But this morning was to be the official beginning, as it were, and Matt knew full well that the page of text that Karlsson was