Department 19: Battle Lines Read Online Free PDF Page B

poring over was the speech he was about to give. He left his boss to it and made his way to one of the desks by the far wall of the wide room. He logged in to the Lazarus Project’s secure server, opened the analysis he had been working on until only a few hours earlier, and lost himself in the incredible complexity of the building blocks of the human body.
    By ten past seven, all thirty-two members of the Lazarus Project were at their desks. There was a hum of intensity, the buzz of great intellects bent to a single purpose, a purpose as noble as any in the history of scientific research. Matt’s gaze was drawn, as it often was, to the narrow, pretty face of Natalia Lenski, the almost superhumanly clever eighteen-year-old Russian who sat five desks away from him. She had been recruited by the SPC, the Russian Supernatural Protection Commissariat, out of the University of Leningrad, where she had been studying for her doctorate, having attained her Master’s degree four years earlier, when she was fourteen. Her skin was as pale as Siberian snow, her blonde hair only a shade or two darker. She glanced up from her screen and smiled at him as Matt felt heat roar into his cheeks; his eyes widened and he jerked his head back towards his monitor, mortified.
    Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.
    Slowly, millimetre by agonising millimetre, Matt turned his head back in her direction, using the very edges of his peripheral vision, and saw, to his utter horror, that she was still looking at him, the smile on her face unchanged. He was rescued from these terrible, seemingly endless seconds by Professor Karlsson, who chose that precise moment to get to his feet, walk quickly to the front of the room and bang on the nearest desk with his hand. Instantly, the spell was broken; every man and woman in the room, including Natalia, turned their attention towards their Director, who looked distinctly uncomfortable as their gazes settled on him.
    “Good morning,” he said, his voice unsteady. “It’s good to see us all together for the first time. Very good indeed.”
    There was a murmur of approval from the watching scientists.
    “Mr Browning,” continued Karlsson, locking eyes with the teenager. “Matt. Could you come up here, please?”
    Matt’s colleagues turned to him, smiles and expressions of encouragement on their faces, and assumed the crimson hue of his face was the result of being singled out by the Director; only Natalia knew differently. Matt pushed his chair back and got nervously to his feet. He walked slowly to the front of the room and stood stiffly next to Professor Karlsson; his Director was looking at him with an expression of great pride, and Matt felt a smile rise on his face as the heat in his cheeks began to recede. He was suddenly incredibly happy; he felt full of purpose, full of righteous determination.
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Karlsson, looking out across the ranks of the Lazarus Project. “We have in our hands an opportunity to do great good. To save thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and to eradicate a disease more deadly than that being worked on in any laboratory in the world. This Project represents
the
furthest frontier of scientific research, and each and every one of us should be proud at having been given the chance to be a part of it.”
    Karlsson continued to talk, but Matt was no longer listening. Instead, his thoughts had turned to his mother, to how proud she would be if she could see him and what he was doing, and to the last month, which had been without doubt the happiest of his life.
    For the first time in his life, he felt like he belonged. It was a dizzying sensation for Matt, a boy who had spent the majority of his life alone, ashamed of himself and unwilling to put anything more than the absolute minimum of himself forward; long experience had taught him that the more you allowed the world to know about you, the more it would use that information to hurt you. But he no longer