by Brian Lumley
As Turchin fell silent, Trask said, “Is that all of it? Are you done?”
“One last word,” said Turchin. “These three men are intent upon discovering Suvorov’s secret mother lode, his fabulous El Dorado, and I have set them a trail to follow. Nothing can satisfy them now except they follow it to its end. And its end—or more properly its beginning—is in Perchorsk. And already in Perchorsk, there’s a small army of thugs just waiting to be led into the Vampire World. So then, the stage is set, and now we have to take action.”
Trask thought about it for a moment, and answered, “In Australia when we talked these things over, you led me to believe that your principal interests were the same as mine—to stop any more vampires coming through into our world, to help me to get rid of those that are already here, to block the Perchorsk Gate permanently, and in so doing to secure the parallel world for Nathan and his people.”
“That was what I wanted then,” Turchin answered, “and it’s what I want now. But it doesn’t make these enemies of mine any less real. They aren’t going to go away, and if I can kill two birds with one stone—or three, as it happens—well, so much the better.”
“As to your enemies,” said Trask, “you’re trying very hard to paint them as the world’s enemies, too. All these dreadful-sounding threats—the atrocities they’d enact if they had the financial means in the form of gold from Sunside/Starside. But the fact is that even if they went there and dug up a mountain of the stuff, and if they were able to shift it, still there’s no way they could ever bring it, or themselves, back. The Gate itself would stop them, for it can only be used in one direction. It’s a one-way ticket to hell! And as for the other Gate, at the Romanian Refuge, that’s already blocked.”
“You have misunderstood me,” said Turchin. “I did not mean to imply that they could do it, but that given the opportunity they would! It’s the thought that they might that drives me to distraction. Ben, there are many great sources of wealth other than Sunside/Starside. My ex-Army thug industrialist ‘friend,’ for example: he is already a multimillionaire. And when he’s a billionaire, what then?”
“Very well,” said Trask, “let’s have it understood. I know what I and my people have to do. And that’s exactly what we’ll do given an opportunity. But as for these political enemies of yours…they’re your concern. If they should happen to cross our paths, however—”
“But they will!” said the other. “I guarantee it.”
“—then that’s different,” Trask went on. “But only if we have to deal with them in order to complete our mission in Perchorsk.”
In answer to which the Premier said, “You can be absolutely sure of it.” And the way he nodded his head—his grim expression—told Trask the rest of it.
“Those wheels you’ve started turning,” he said. “This false trail you’ve set for these people. It’s not so much a red herring as a carrot for three donkeys, right? And it will lead them straight to Perchorsk.”
“Not directly,” said Turchin. “But they’ll get there eventually.”
“When, ‘eventually’?”
“In maybe…three or four days?”
“What!?” Trask was stunned. “Is that all we’ve got? But why did you do it? Why couldn’t you wait a while longer before laying this trail of yours? You said you would have told me everything if there was time. Would a day or two more, another week, have made much difference? I have problems here at home, and we still have to track down these three great enemies of our own.”
“But you’re forgetting something,” said Turchin. “My spy in Perchorsk. There are some three dozen desperate men up there in the Urals. They know that there’s gold on the other side of the Gate, and three nights ago they voted to give Mikhail Suvorov’s party one more week to get back with their share. If he doesn’t—and he won’t, because he’s dead, and couldn’t anyway because as you’ve pointed out the Gate is a one-way ticket—then they intend to arm themselves with all the weaponry in Perchorsk and go through the Gate themselves! But we know they can’t win; the same dreadful fate will befall them as befell Mikhail Suvorov’s party. Then, as before, their vampire murderers might start wondering where these aliens came from. And who can say? This time instead of three of them coming through the Gate—as they did at the Romanian Refuge—why, there could be an entire army of them! That’s what I meant when I said we’ve run out of time!”
Trask groaned. He leaned forward, put his face in his hands and stared down at his desk. And slowly he shook his head.
“Oh?” said Turchin anxiously. “What have I said wrong now?”
Trask looked up at him and said: “Gustav, it looks like you and I have been working at cross-purposes…or perhaps not. I suppose it couldn’t be helped. I only found out about it myself a few minutes ago.”
“Eh? What are you talking about? Found out about what?”
“Found out that there are no more vampires in Sunside/Starside,” said Trask. “The war is over—all of six months ago—and Nathan won it. There won’t be any more Wamphyri invaders of Earth. As for that crippled warrior that came through into Perchorsk: obviously it was a ‘victim’ of then war. It knew it was finished and was looking for somewhere to die.”
As Trask spoke, the look on Turchin’s face changed from one of utter astonishment to dismay, then anger. “But I didn’t know this!” He jumped to his feet, slammed his clenched fist down on the desk. “All I knew was what you told me in Australia—that there was a war in Sunside/Starside, and as a result of Mikhail Suvorov’s expedition three Great Vampires had come through into our world. Now you tell me the war’s over and there are no more vampires in Starside. But my thinking was that when these enemies of mine went through the Gate, then that…that…”
“…That they’d find themselves face-to-face with the Wamphyri,” Trask finished it for him. “End of story, and definitely the end of your enemies. You couldn’t have devised a more cruel trap for them if you’d tried. For them or for anyone else.”
Turchin thought about that and protested, “But it’s like I said: I thought to kill two birds with one stone. Some vampires were bound to die in the battle with Perchorsk’s criminal element, which could only help Nathan’s cause: less of the monsters for him and the Szgany to deal with. Surely you can see that?”
“I can see that we have problems,” said Trask. “But personally, I’ve so many problems my head is spinning with them. It’s getting so I don’t any longer know where to start. I don’t even want to think about them any more.”
“But you have to,” said Turchin. “And anyway, I cannot see that this changes anything. It only means we must act that much faster. Instead of waiting until these three most dangerous men have joined up with the Perchorsk convicts and invaded Sunside/Starside—which would mean a confrontation with Nathan and the Szgany, and more bloodshed—we have to destroy Perchorsk while they are still in situ. For while vampires are one thing, these men are something else. And remember, under the command of military tacticians, the Perchorsk convicts and their weapons will be far more effective than anything Nathan’s Szgany might bring to bear. Even with his weird powers, still it will be bloody.”
“Bloody?” Trask shook his head. “No, it will be a lot worse than that. For there’s something else I just learned: Nathan is out of it, injured, in some kind of mental limbo. So the way I see it, those wheels you’ve set in motion will be rolling over people who have done us no harm. Friends of mine, and at least one of yours—Nathan himself. And I can’t help but think that this is all for you, that you’ve done this for yourself.”
“For myself?” Turchin pulled in his chin and tried to look hurt. “Well, partly, yes. But mainly for my country, and yours, and for the world at large—and for Sunside/Starside!”
“What?” said Trask, sneeringly. “You think you can convince me that turning a gang of gold-crazy convicts loose in Nathan’s world is good for the Szgany? They’ve just finished one bloody war, and now you would give them
another?”
“But I didn’t know!” Turchin protested again, beginning to stride to and fro across the floor. “And I’ve already supplied you with the solution. Surely we are agreed that the Gate must be closed, if only for the safety of Nathan’s world?”
“Of course,” Trask answered. “Man, I wish to God the damned thing had never been created! The point is there shouldn’t have been any immediate need to close it, not with the war won.”
“Again you’re forgetting something,” said Turchin, his fist rebounding from the desk. “No matter what I have done—despite what I’ve done—that need now exists. Those convicts in Perchorsk will go through the Gate with or without the leadership of any enemies of mine! Of course they will. From the moment they saw the gold trappings on that warrior creature, it was inevitable. The only wonder to me is that they haven’t already gone!”
“Well,” Trask stood up. “What’s done is done. From here on any argument would be circular, biting at its own tail. And if I thought I had things to do before…well, now I really have things to do, arrangements to make. You’ll please excuse me.”
“But first,” Turchin said, as he got between Trask and the door, “first I have to know—you have to tell me—that you do have a new Necroscope. I’m at least correct in that assumption, yes?”
And Trask saw no point in denying it now, for soon he’d be putting Jake to use. “Yes,” he answered. “Fortunately for you, me, everyone, we do have a Necroscope. He has his limitations, a few small problems, but we do have him.”
The Premier’s sigh of relief was quite audible. “Then this time they have earned their keep,” he said.
“They?” Trask paused at the door.
“My espers,” said Turchin. “When they told me of a certain heavyweight in the psychic aether—the one signature that was present every time, in every location where Luigi Castellano’s organization suffered devastation—I knew it must be so.”
“And so it is,” said Trask, stepping out into the corridor. “We may have slipped a little behind with our gadgets, but our ghosts are still second to none…”
14
Submarine Sabotage—the Threat of the Threads
IT WAS EARLY EVENING; TRASK AND HIS PEOPLE had been back from the Mediterranean for less than a day and a lot had happened in that time, yet it seemed to the Head of Branch that time was at a near standstill and everything moving in slow motion. He knew he shouldn’t be here but out there in Turkey hunting for Malinari and Vavara…and Szwart? What about Szwart? Was it possible he had survived Jake’s subterranean blast, and if so would the three of them team up again? So many unanswered questions. And so much still to be done.
As for Turkey: Trask would get a team out there as soon as possible, and meanwhile the locator (more properly a hunchman) Bernie Fletcher was in situ somewhere, looked after by a couple of Special Branch minders, policemen he had worked with before. And thank goodness for them! Trask had been a little concerned for Bernie ever since he’d sent that message from Invincible.
The trouble with Bernie was that while he was good at following trails, close up he wasn’t nearly as good as David Chung. His talent wasn’t in question; on the contrary—one could even say it was too effective—which was why normally Trask liked to keep him busy in the headquarters. Bernie Fletcher, yes; as Trask strode the HQ’s corridor towards the Duty Office he pictured him in his mind’s eye:
A burly, middle-aged, five-foot-eight redhead, Fletcher was an intuitive hunchman whose talent made him an ideal target for spotters in that it worked both ways: he could locate and track the object or enemy in question—friend or foe for that matter—but he could also be located. The fault lay in his shielding, which was almost nonexistent. At close range telepathic members of the Branch, and indeed most of Trask’s espers, had little or no trouble homing in on Bernie; to them his mental activity was like magnetic north to a lodestone. As Trask had once put it:
“Let’s face it, Bernie, you stand out like a sore thumb in the metaphysical aether. Man, you glow in the dark!”
Yet now he’d sent the same man into Turkey to begin tracking down two (or maybe three?) of the most dangerous creatures who had ever set foot on Earth. On the other hand, Bernie knew his limitations, and he’d be watched over by the close-protection specialists who were out there with him. And anyway, that’s what E-Branch was all about; danger was no stranger to Trask’s agents, and in the current situation all of them were at risk.
But still Trask’s heart was beating a little faster; likewise his footsteps, as anxiety steadily mounted. Anxiety about almost everything. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d told Turchin that it was getting so he couldn’t even think. But he knew that he must, and he thanked the Lord for the others here who occasionally did it for him. Busy from the moment he’d got back to London, he certainly hoped somebody had been doing the thinking!
And as he strode in through the ever-open Duty Office door, the questions were already spilling from his lips. “John, where are we at, and where are we going? What’s happening out there? Has Bernie Fletcher called in his location yet? When are we due to fly out? Have I decided who’s going yet? And if not has anyone else? And finally, are there any messages for me?”
John Grieve looked up unflustered from a mass of paperwork on his desk, and answered, “Finally? I wouldn’t bet on it! But to answer your questions in that order:
“We are where we’re usually at: muddling through a crisis. But we’re going on. What’s happening out there is all sorts of things, but most importantly there’s some stuff on Premier Turchin’s microfilm you should know about. Fletcher has called in; we do know his location; it appears he’s picked up a couple of alleged ‘friends’ along the way. You’re due to fly first class on a British Airways flight tomorrow morning. You gave a vague or tentative forecast of who would be going with you, which is likely to change when you’ve seen some of the stuff that Turchin brought us. And, ‘finally,’ there’s a gang of our people in the Ops Room waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?” Trask tried as best possible to take in all he’d been told.
“Jake Cutter, Millie, and all your main men,” said Grieve. “I’m not sure what they’re up to, but Jake told me to tell you there’s something that he and Millie want to get done with this evening, right now, in order to put everyone’s mind at rest…or not? Also in Ops, that stuff of Turchin’s is on-screen. And so, to return to your earlier question: I would hazard a guess that that’s where you’re going, to the Ops Room.”
“I’m on my way,” said Trask. And over his shoulder, optimistically: “Book a table for two downstairs, will you? Seven-thirty?”
“That only gives you forty-five minutes,” Grieve told him. “Will you make it?”
“I hope to,” said Trask. But as he headed for Ops, he more than suspected it all depended upon Jake and Millie…
Trask was right about what he’d suspected was going on in Ops. The rest of his agents had told Jake what Harry had said about red threads in Möbius time: how they showed up among the blue, and how an infected person might display a pink stain, a telltale reddening in his personal life-thread.
He arrived in the middle of some kind of argument, with the precog Ian Goodly looking as heated as Trask had ever seen him.
“I can only advise you not to!” Goodly was saying, in that piping voice of his whose pitch climbed the scales whenever he was excited. “The future can make fools of us; it has more than once made a fool of me, and I’m supposed to be the expert! Even Nathan got it wrong when he tried to forecast his future. I was with him. We were in Starside and things were looking bleak, so we looked to the future. He took me into the Continuum where we followed our blue threads through a future-time door; followed them to a place, a time, where Nathan’s thread came to an end.”
“But I’ve just been told that Nathan’s alive.” (Jake Cutter was on the other end of the argument.)
“Exactly!” said Goodly. “His blue thread
had seemed to come to an end on Sunside, but that was only because he was going to step out of that universe into ours. How were we to know that a little further down the time-stream—after he had returned to his own world—his thread would stream on as before? That was something we discovered later. But at the time, what else could we think but that his life was about to end?”
“So what you’re saying,” said Millie, joining the argument, “is that you saw something bad that turned out good? So where’s the harm in that?”
“You’re not listening!” Goodly threw up his hands. “How can I explain it to you? You can’t mess with the future. Even Harry tried to tell you that. His best advice was don’t mess with the future. And the reason is quite simple: if you do see something bad you might be tempted to try to change it—and in so doing cause something worse to happen! The future isn’t really a different time but a different place!” Again he threw up his hands. “God, give me the right words!” Then, seeing their unchanging, determined expressions—seeming to sink down into himself as he turned away—“But what’s the use, for I can see you’ll do it anyway,” he said. “So I can’t any longer argue with you. In any case, maybe it’s meant to be. What will be has been.”
“Not necessarily,” said Trask, stepping forward. “Not while I’m in charge of E-Branch.” And then to Jake: “Don’t I remember telling you that you weren’t to go experimenting or trying anything out unless we were all a part of it, all agreed on it?”
“‘All’ meaning you, right?” said Jake. “Well, we were waiting for you, and now you’re here.” He was looking defiant again…that attitude of his.