chapter 21
“Alex, we’re out of time.” Director Carreras, a paunchy, middle-aged man with a Spanish name and a British accent, spoke the words flatly, as if to end an argument they had barely begun.
Alex realized the moment he, Sangster, and Astrid slunk into the Polidorium headquarters below the woods surrounding Lake Geneva that the game was considered over. There were twice as many agents as usual in the halls, and when Sangster had driven their van in from the airstrip, they had been slowed by heavy traffic moving down through the tunnels. There were rocket launchers being prepared. He saw agents practicing formations and assaults in fake urban landscapes in the far corners of the cavern.
And then Sangster had been texted and ordered immediately to a briefing room, and Alex and Astrid were sent to see the principal. Or in this case, the director. Armstrong was with him, a pair of crutches leaning against the wall behind her. She looked sour.
“What do you mean, ‘out of time’?” Alex said. “We have two more days. Two days to make a weapon that can stop the Queen.”
“With what? The DNA is gone,” Carreras said. “The one shot was to find DNA from Claire and Byron’s daughter, and we’ve missed it.”
“Well, don’t you think that’s a little strange?” Alex said. He waved the envelope. “This is a letter. From Polidori, from your founder. It’s a clue. Sangster said it has something to do with Frankenstein.”
Carreras sighed. He had been the one to give Sangster permission to bring Alex into the Polidorium in the first place. He even seemed to know Alex’s dad, and Alex was aware that he truly owed every part of his adventures with the group to him. But the director had run out of patience. “A clue, if it’s real, left nearly two hundred years ago. Agent Van Helsing, we have preparations to make. We’ve run out of time to chase a cure. I’ve already assigned Agent Sangster to more pressing matters. This mission is done.”
“Sir, Astrid and I are still on the search.”
“That is not the plan.”
“So what—” He looked around the boardroom at Armstrong, then at Astrid, who sat silently. “What is your plan?”
Carreras tapped a keyboard and brought up a map onscreen—Europe, then it toggled and unfolded to show the western hemisphere. Little gray lights blinked all across the map. “We have to prepare for the next phase.”
“Next phase?” That didn’t sound good.
“Everyone has a job, Alex,” Carreras said. “Agent Sangster is assigned to France, where the Polidorium will rally with the French secret police. All of the high-ranking agents are being field-promoted to Special Agents in Charge and are now receiving their orders. Transports are leaving on the hour. These gray lights you see? Those are Polidorium stations. In ten minutes I have a conference call with the defense authorities of every nation. U.N. peacekeeping forces are being shifted and reassigned.”
Alex looked at the map. Switzerland. France. Germany. The U.K. The U.S. Russia. He shook his head. “This is giving up.”
Carreras looked at Alex. “No. This is defense. The Scholomance is not negotiating, Alex. They’re not asking for a ransom. They’re going to plunge the world into darkness, and we have to be ready for a new…normal.”
“And what is the new normal?”
“There will be armies of vampires in the streets,” Armstrong said. “Chatter among the clans is off the charts. They’re preparing to occupy every major city when there’s no more daylight. We’ll need armed forces on every street corner. We’ll need to close schools for a time until we can figure out how to get them open—if we can. Hospitals, don’t even get me started. Forget shopping malls. Forget grocery stores. We’ll have to have armed forces delivering food to protected drop zones, and escort civilians in groups from their neighborhoods to the storehouses.”
“Something like this,” Carreras cut in, “was bound to happen. We always knew it and we have the plans in place.”
Alex pushed back his hair, friendly faces the world over zipping through his brain. “I haven’t seen anything about this…on the news.” Even though he hadn’t actually been watching the news, he knew what he was saying was stupid. If people knew this was coming they’d have taken to the streets already. “Are you going to tell everyone…to prepare them?”
“We’re not announcing it until the night before, until late Sunday night. There wouldn’t be any point. By the time we make the announcement, roadblocks will be in place.”
Alex understood what Carreras was saying. Give the people of the world a few more days of thinking everything was going to keep on the way it had kept on their whole lives. Monday would bring a new order, when every family would be prisoners in their own home.
“And not just vampires,” Carreras continued. “Every kind of vampire the Scholomance wants to roll out. According to Sangster, they had a Nuckelavee digging up the grave in London.”
“A what?” Alex asked. Then he remembered. The thing with the roving legs was a Nuckelavee. He had seen one of them at Creature School, in fact. He waved this away, trying again. “Look, I can find the DNA. I have the instructions for the vial gun. I just need the DNA. We don’t have to assume that the apocalypse is coming.”
“And again I ask you,” Carreras repeated, “find it with what? Find it where?”
Alex sat back, drummed his fingers on the table. He pointed at Astrid. “What about Hexen?”
“I checked in,” Astrid said. “We are prepared to cooperate. We feel a certain responsibility for Queen Claire.”
Alex shook his head. “So I guess you’re going back to…”
“The Orchard?” Astrid asked. “I could, but I have an assignment I’m still on, so those are not my orders.”
“Oh, right.” Alex turned to the rest of them. “Did I mention this? She’s a spy here to watch me.”
Carreras blinked. “I think under the circumstances you can use the help.”
“Oh? Where am I supposed to go?”
“We’ve left this up to you, Alex. You were Sangster’s protégé, so if you choose to stay on at this time, we can use you with him in France, or you can choose your current station, Geneva. You’d be reporting to an agent named Hall. Or you can go back to school, since you have that right. Or we’re prepared to send you home. You can leave within the hour. Wyoming might need you. Personally I think with the population involved, we could use you here more, but again, it’s up to you.”
For a moment Alex pictured it, his parents’ house in Wyoming. They would have Dad, who had all his skills, and Mom, who had all of Astrid’s and more. And they would have two teenage girls and two smaller girls. And it would be dark outside, with roving bands of vampires led by whoever ruled that part of North America.
“No, no, this is crazy,” Alex said, shaking his head. “I don’t accept this.”
“We are out,” Carreras repeated slowly, “of time.”
Alex scanned all the faces. He was done arguing. New plan. “How long do I have to decide?”
“Twenty minutes.” Carreras stood. He seemed to slump for a moment, then stood straighter, smoothing his suit coat over his paunch. “After this meeting, I’m afraid things will be such that you won’t see me like this anymore. Agent Van Helsing, it has been good working with you.” He extended a hand.
Alex shook it. “I’ll be in the library.”
As Alex walked out he looked at Astrid. “You gonna follow at a distance or just come on?”
In the Polidorium library, an enormous room of plain-gray metal shelves and high white ceilings, the first thing Alex grabbed was a Polidorium tablet with an internet connection.
“What are you doing?” Astrid asked as they took a table in the back.
“Get me a copy of Frankenstein.” Alex booted up the tablet as his mind raced through what he had learned about the book just a month or so before. “Both editions, 1818 and 1831.”
“What are you looking for?”
Alex removed his wireless and clicked it off, and gestured for Astrid to do the same. “John Polidori had Mary Shelley put clues about Claire and Byron in Frankenstein. I’m hoping there’s more.”
“What are you doing, Alex?” Astrid shook her head. “They said you can go home. They’ve given up on this. In fact, I think you said you were out, that you didn’t want to do this anymore.”
“Go home to what? Everlasting night because they don’t want to read? No, no. Just…get the books; we quit later.”
She shrugged. “I never wanted to quit anything.”
Alex pointed, not looking up as he scribbled notes. “Books.”
By the time she returned with the books, Alex had opened an internet chat and in a separate window entered the phrase the coarsest sensations of men into Google. The search brought up the notation instantly. “Sangster was right: It is a phrase from Frankenstein.” For a moment Alex wondered at someone’s ability to hear a few words and place the book from which they came. He had internet tools to do this, but only careful reading over time could allow you to do it by memory. He had the suspicion that he could pick any five words out of any book Sangster had read and the teacher would be able to nail it. He could use him now.
A voice spoke from the tablet, young and female. “Are you sure you need this?”
Alex whispered near a microphone grating at the corner of the tablet. “Yes. Do you still have access to the forms?”
There was the sound of typing. The voice on the other end was looking something up. “Yes.”
Astrid looked at the chat window and read the name of Alex’s chat partner. “Who are you talking to? Who is ‘RVH’?”
“That would be Ronnie Van Helsing,” Alex said. “Short for Veronica. My little sister.”
“Where is she?”
“In the States, but she’s the only one who can do what I need her to do in the time we have.” Alex scribbled some notes on a sheet of paper.
“New girlfriend, Al?” the voice taunted.
“Not the time, Ron,” Alex answered. “Just set me up and come back when you do.” He took the book Astrid handed him and flipped through the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, to the place where his Google search had led him, chapter 11. He looked at Astrid. “Polidori had Shelley put her hints in the 1831 edition, but here this phrase is in the 1818 version. That means it wasn’t a plant by Polidori; it was just a reference. Still, see if there’s a difference in the 1831 book.”
Astrid flipped to chapter 11 and frowned. “It’s not here.”
“The chapters are different.” Alex glanced back at the internet version. “Try chapter…nineteen in yours.”
“Okay.” Astrid searched the pages. “Paragraph?”
“A few pages in, starts ‘On the whole island, there were but three miserable huts.’”
Astrid found it and they pushed the books together and confirmed that the paragraphs were the same in both, just in different chapters. Alex made a decision that the difference meant nothing. He had to move quickly and rely on snap decisions.
“What’s going on in this section?” Astrid asked.
Alex scanned, relying as much on having read the book recently as on what he was seeing. “Uh, Dr. Frankenstein has been threatened, and he has to build a bride for the monster. He has to go off by himself to do it. And he chooses an island.” He paused and looked up. “Is it possible that Polidori hid Allegra’s body away on this island, wherever it is—this is somewhere in Scotland, by the way—and used a reference to Frankenstein to lead us there?”
“Why would Polidori do that?”
“I guess to keep the body safe.”
“But why not just leave instructions?”
“If I had to guess? Because he didn’t want random grave robbers to know, and because from my limited experience, that’s kind of the way he worked.”
“It’s a lot of assumptions, Alex.”
“Yes,” Alex hissed, “but look: Every clue we’ve followed so far has been right. The vampires caught up to us at Harrow. We were right. So this has a good shot at being right, too.”
Astrid sighed and looked at the paragraph. “This island is in Scotland?”
Alex read some. “They don’t name it. Ugh. So it’s just ‘an island.’ In the Orkneys,” he read, jumping around paragraphs. He went back to the computer and brought up the Orkneys on the internet, finding a map of tiny islands scattered around the north of Scotland. “The Orkneys is an archipelago, a system of islands. We can’t search a system of islands for a two-hundred-year-old body. Not in the time we have.” Need a new plan.
“How would you search?”
“Hang on, hang on; don’t get ahead of me. I know you’re good at that, but don’t do that right now.” He gave her a half-smile and turned back to reading. “Orkneys. What does Mary Shelley say in the book? Frankenstein gets food from the mainland, which is five miles distant.” Then he looked at his watch. “Okay. ‘Five miles from the mainland.’ That could be any of these, along the south of the archipelago. And it doesn’t make sense that Polidori would leave a clue that could point to anything. By the way, I think we’ve got ten minutes and then our friends come looking for us.”
Next he brought up a list of the individual Orkney Islands. “Oh,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not ‘an island five miles off the mainland of Scotland.’ It’s ‘five miles off Mainland,’ which is the name of another island. I hope, I mean. There is one called Mainland.”
“Go with your gut, Alex,” Astrid said.
“If this”—and now he pointed at the largest island in the group—“is Mainland, then there’s only one island on this map that’s within five miles.” He spun the tablet around to show it to her.
Astrid read the name. “Brough of Birsay?”
“Brough of Birsay. An isolated, desolate island of old ruins. That’s where Mary Shelley picked to be the lab for Frankenstein building the bride. And it’s where Polidori picked to hide the body of Allegra Byron when he stole it, or most likely bribed it, off the gravediggers in England.” There was something else, though. Something Armstrong had said.
“Nuckelavee,” Alex said. When Astrid looked at him, he continued, “That digger creature the Scholomance brought. I learned about them at Creature School. It’s Scottish. It’s also from here, from the Orkney Islands.”
Astrid shook her head. “That seems like a strange coincidence, that they’d use a creature from the place where the DNA is actually buried.”
“It’s the other way around,” Alex said. “The Scholomance really seemed to think that they were going to find the body in England. You know what it means? That Polidori moved the body to the island because he knew that would be the place where Claire would set off the Triumph of Death. He knew the spell would be set off there, and he wanted to plant us a weapon.”
“Something else, though,” Astrid said. “That implies that the Strangers—Blacktowers—have been continuing Polidori’s preparations. Outside the Polidorium.”
“Or Polidori was working for Blacktowers,” Alex offered.
“Does that matter?”
“It might if I ever get the chance to ask Blacktowers.”
Ronnie’s voice spoke up, interrupting them. “Alex, give them eight minutes.”
“Thanks. Hang up now and erase all of this.” He looked at his watch. Time was about up in the library. He stood, closing the tablet and shoving it into his go package. He headed out of the library, saying, “Come on. If we’re right, we could stop Claire at the Brough of Birsay.”
The moment they stepped out of the library’s glass door into the hall, an alarm bell rang.
“What’s that?” Astrid asked.
“I just removed a Polidorium tablet computer with all of the database and more from its home area.” He was walking faster now, then jogging as the alarm receded behind them. “Another few moments and it’ll go off throughout the farmhouse.”
“Then what?” They swiftly walked past a couple of agents around the next corner, who paid them no mind because they were watching a training video on the wall about how to defend a grocery store.
“We won’t be here then.” Alex clicked on his wireless and instantly heard a chirp.
“Alex, where are you?” Carreras yelled.
“I’ve thought about it, sir.” They reached the carpeted hallway that led to the main hangar, and Alex made note of the muddy tracks where countless agents had been coming and going. Custodianship was getting lax. He opened the door for Astrid and they were in the hangar, running down the metal steps. He scanned the area, looking at pilots working on their planes and maintenance crews at the vans. He whispered to Astrid, “Do you have a spell for opening doors?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He made a beeline for the motorcycles and picked one. It was Sangster’s black Triumph.
Alex started the engine as Astrid hopped on, and this time they attracted the attention of a couple of the agents.
Carreras came back. “So? You thought about it?”
“I can’t stay,” Alex said. “Good luck.”
“Alex, what do you mean? Are you going home or to the school or what?”
Alex started to roll the bike, past the other parked motorcycles, and then they were cruising past a maintenance crew working on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
“Good luck, sir.”
Alarm bells erupted as the time for a negligent agent to return the tablet to the library lapsed and a full theft was assumed. Now Alex saw cameras in the hangar swivel and point at him as he throttled the Triumph and picked up speed, heading to the start of the exit ramp. It was half a mile to the surface.
“Hey!” shouted a guard near the entrance. “Stop!”
Alex saluted as Astrid held on and they began to move up the ramp, which was wide enough for a pair of tanks. He saw gun emplacements swiveling and he watched the cameras. Surely they wouldn’t shoot him. Right?
“Where are you going, Alex?” the voice sounded in his helmet.
“If you pay attention, you’ll know.”
“Alex!” called Astrid. He could barely hear her over the roar of the engine. “Why not just throw the tablet away?”
“Because I want them to know!” he shouted. “They’re giving up and I want them to know!” Alex pointed up ahead, where a closed garage door about a half mile away slowly grew larger. “Can you open that door?” He looked over his shoulder at Astrid. “Like now?”
Astrid brought up her staff and reached it around him. She screamed something he didn’t understand. Now he heard the sounds of other engines behind them. There was a flash from the end of her staff, and Alex saw the door warp for a second. She called again, something with thick consonants that he couldn’t make out, and then he heard, “Open.”
The door swung open an inch or two and they were still zooming toward it. “It’s protected against magic.”
“I’m not stopping, do you hear me, sir? I’m not stopping.”
The British voice sounded curious. “Oh? Where are you going?”
“Scotland. Are you going to stop me because you don’t want me stealing a computer?”
“Just turn around and we’ll talk about it.”
“Talk about it? I am doing your job, sir!” Alex called. “Are you people insane? You’re falling back to babysitting a vampire apocalypse? No.”
Alex looked back at the line of motorcycles and a truck behind him. An agent was hanging out of the side of the truck with a machine gun.
“I am going to hit this door at sixty miles an hour,” said Alex. “And I’m gonna be jelly, but you know what? You’ll have a door to fix, and your defenses will be damaged, and you’ll have vampires coming in your front door under permanent nightfall.”
The door was looming. Alex sped up.
“You won’t get far, Alex,” came the response, and the door swung open, heavy and fast, and he burst through the exit into the night and the woods.
The motorcycles followed him as he shot through the trees, keeping their distance, watching. “They have no idea what we’re doing,” Alex said.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Astrid shouted.
Alex veered around a tree and zipped onto the road to Secheron village. After a moment he heard a new sound, a helicopter zooming in overhead. A searchlight opened up and surrounded them, so they cast a long shadow on the road.
“You want me to take out the helicopter, maybe damage it a little?”
Alex waved his arm. “No! For Pete’s sake, there’s no such thing as damaging a helicopter a little. And besides, that’s not the Polidorium.” He looked back and saw that his Polidorium escorts were still behind him, though. Alex waved at the helicopter, signaling Up ahead and left.
Alex headed another quarter mile up the road, and then veered off near a clearing, a soccer field. With a loud, chutting sound of rotor blades, the helicopter chased past them and then swiveled in the field, dropping down and hanging a few inches off the deck.
“Okay.” Alex ground the bike to a halt and hopped off, tossing his helmet. “Come on.”
“Whose helicopter is that?” They were running across the field now.
As they drew closer, Alex saw a huge red cross on the side of the chopper and the blazing words BRINGING HEALTH AND KNOWLEDGE TO THE WORLD.
The pilot, whom Alex didn’t know, waved at him and Astrid as they scrambled into the side door of the chopper.
Alex and Astrid sprawled on the inside of the chopper and were still getting into their seats as they lifted off the soccer field and into the air, a stream of motorcycles and vehicles following. Alex waved at them as they went.
As the chopper pitched and they put on their seat belts, the waters of Lake Geneva sparkled and zipped by below them.
Alex pulled a headset off the wall and spoke to the pilot. “Thanks very much.”
“No problem,” came the voice of the pilot. “So you have humanitarian work to do in the middle of the night?”
“We have an early morning.” Astrid was clearly full of questions, and Alex held up a finger to stall her for a moment. He asked the pilot, “How long till we get there?”
“Three hours. That’s why the dispatcher ordered a long-distance unit. Were those guys chasing you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Alex answered. “Thanks again.” He put the headset away and turned to Astrid. “I called the States and had my sister Ronnie fake a work order. If anyone asks, we’re doing a humanitarian visit on the Brough of Birsay. That’s what we do.”
“Who?”
Alex tapped a plaque on the wall above the window of the chopper as they crossed over the other side of the lake, and the trees and land of France came into view. In a little while, they would be over the ocean.
The plaque read:
THE VAN HELSING FOUNDATION.