Read Department 19: Battle Lines for Free Online

believed that. Here, in this strange, unlikely place beneath the forests of eastern England, he had found true friendship, created under the most intense pressure, and a cause to which he was quite prepared to dedicate the rest of his life, if that was what was required.
    “Get to work,” said Karlsson, and the round of applause that met the end of the Director’s speech roused Matt from his thoughts. He joined in, quickly enough that he was sure no one would notice he had been daydreaming, and as the men and women of the Lazarus Project began to return to their work, to the undertaking that each and every one of them had sacrificed the prospect of a normal existence for, Matt saw Natalia Lenski glance in his direction before she turned to her console, her pale cheeks flushed a beautiful, delicate pink.

3
SLOW NEWS DAY
WAPPING, LONDON
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
    Kevin McKenna dropped the last of his cigarette into the warm can of lager on his desk and checked his watch.
    It was almost nine thirty and he was the only member of
The Globe
’s editorial team still in the office. England were playing Portugal in Oporto and everyone else was either across the road in The Ten Bells, cheering and drinking and swearing, or on their way home, grateful for an excuse to leave the office at a reasonable time without appearing lazy. McKenna wanted to be in the pub with his colleagues, but the phone call he had received an hour earlier had been simply too intriguing to ignore. So, instead, he was sitting in his office with the door shut and the smoke detector unplugged, waiting for a courier to bring him a package from a dead man.
    The call had come from a lawyer McKenna didn’t know; it wasn’t one of the many to whom he regularly passed white envelopes of cash in return for five minutes alone with the case files of celebrity lawsuits and super-injunctions. The man had been polite, and had solemnly informed McKenna that his firm was discharging the estate of the late Mr John Bathurst. There had been a long pause, which McKenna had clearly been expected to fill with gratitude, or sorrow, or both. But he had not known what to say: the name was utterly meaningless.
    Then a flash of realisation had hit him, and he had laughed loudly down the phone.
    The lawyer’s voice, when it reappeared, had a hint of reproach in it, but the man remained smoothly professional. He told McKenna that he had been left an item in Mr Bathurst’s will, an envelope, and asked whether he would like it couriered to him. In any other circumstance, McKenna would have told the man to put it in the post and made his way to the pub. Instead, he gave the lawyer
The Globe
’s
address and told him he would wait to sign for it.
    You’re dead and you’re still causing me grief
, he thought, lighting another cigarette.
Mr John bloody Bathurst.
    There was a simple reason why it had taken him a moment to realise he knew the name of the man who had remembered him in his will: he had only ever heard it spoken aloud a single time, and there was a reason for that as well.
    It was Johnny Supernova’s real name, and his most closely guarded secret.
    There had been a time when Kevin McKenna would have spat in the face of anyone who had dared to suggest that he might one day spend his time writing stories about minor celebrities for a publication as morally bankrupt and pro-establishment as
The Globe
.
    This younger, slimmer, angrier version of himself had arrived in London in 1995 at the age of nineteen, his ears ringing with guitar bands and house music and his veins full of working-class fire, to start work as a journalist for legendary left-wing style bible
The Gutter
. He strolled into the magazine’s offices off Pentonville Road to be greeted by a receptionist more beautiful than any girl he had ever seen in his nineteen years in Manchester. She held open the door to the editor’s office and gave him a ridiculously provocative smile as he walked through it.
    Sitting behind a