by Brian Lumley
Right there and then she might have done it, blurted it out and accepted the consequences… except at that precise moment Ben Trask appeared in the door to the house, calling, ‘Liz? And is that you, Jake? O-group time. Come and get your orders.’
Heading for the house, suddenly Liz found herself hating it all. But especially hating her weird talent, her telepathy. And more clearly than ever she understood why most E-Branch espers thought of their skills as curses. Again and again her condemnation of herself rang in her mind, but she heard it as an accusation, as if spoken by Jake:
‘Sneaking in my mind like a thief! — like a thief! — like a thief!’ And she hated it, yes. For the fact of the matter was that
Liz valued him far too much for that. And not only psychically,
either…
Then it was Monday.
By midday an observation post had been set up on the single approach road that angled up the mountain to Xanadu. In a tree-shrouded lay-by, it looked like a party of picknickers was enjoying the view and the mountain air. A table had been set up, and a small barbecue stand sent up smoke from where it stood on the stump of a tree. Cubes of meat sizzled on skewers, and a camera and six-pack of beer sat on the table. Two of the cans had been opened, one of which lay on its side. All very ‘casual.’
Three men in light summer clothes ran the show. One of them was sitting in the car with the windows rolled down, apparently listening to the radio. In fact he was using a radio, or would be when it was required. Another soldier sat at the table, ‘casually’ watching the road where it zig-zagged up into the wooded heights. He wore binoculars round his neck but only rarely used them. The third member of the team carried a guitar. He perched on a stool in the shade of a pine, his broad-brimmed hat giving him a little extra cover as he strummed an inadequate, mainly tuneless tune out of his instrument, which was in fact capable of far more serious music. He was the team’s ‘minder,’ and the sound-box of his guitar housed a deadly 9mm machine-pistol.
So far, the man in the car had registered their call-sign and reported their situation only once, clearly and succinctly stating that they were ‘In situ…’
Also at midday, Liz’s Warrant Officer Class Two ‘Red’ Bygraves, and the tech Jimmy Harvey, had bought ‘day visitor’ tickets at Xanadu’s gatehouse reception desk. By I p.m., having ‘cased the joint’ but oh-so-carefully, they were sunbathing on opposite sides of the main pool. Both men had taken an armful of local morning newspapers with them, with front-page spreads that dealt with the incursion of Asiatic Plague; these had been left in strategic locations where they were bound to be picked up and read. Of course the resort had its own newsvending outlets; Trask’s news-sheet ploy was intended as a supplementary incentive once his evacuation scheme got in gear.
As for the scheme: that was simplicity itself.
At precisely 1:15 p.m. Bygraves got up and strolled round to Harvey’s side of the pool, stepping carefully around or over the many tanned bodies lounging there. The two men were ‘total strangers/ of course. Jimmy Harvey saw Bygraves coming, adjusted his dark glasses, and stretched his arms up above his head, letting the sun caress the pale underarm areas. And:
‘Christ!’ said Bygraves, going down on a knee beside him, staring at the dark, purplish blotches under Jimmy’s arms.
‘Eh?’ Harvey sat up. ‘What?’
‘Sir/ said Bygraves, ‘would you mind if I examined those marks, that pustule?’
‘Marks? Pustule?’
‘Under your arms, sir. Because if they’re what they look like…’
Harvey glanced under his arm, looked concerned. ‘Is that something new?’ he said. And, ‘Who are you, anyway?’
‘Doctor Bygraves/ said the other, prodding beneath Harvey’s left arm where he obligingly lifted it. And by now the people at the poolside were interested in what was going on.
‘A doctor?’ Harvey was starting to look worried.
‘Specializing in communicable Asiatic diseases/ Bygraves nodded. ‘I’m up here for the day, before reporting for duty in Brisbane. And while I don’t want to frighten you, right now it looks like I’ll have my work cut out!’ He pushed Harvey’s arm down by his side and asked: ‘How long have you been up here?’
‘Just a fortnight/ Harvey was on his feet now. Tm taking my summer break. So what the hell’s wrong?’
But ‘suddenly’ Bygraves became aware of the people gathering to watch the show. And he leaned closer to Harvey, bending down to whisper in the smaller man’s ear.
‘What?’ Harvey yelped.
‘But haven’t you heard the news, read the newspapers?’ Bygraves looked astonished, and more than ever worried. ‘You say you’ve been up here for two weeks? Then it’s here. It has to be here! Have you seen any rats? Have you noticed any other people with these marks? Jesus, it could be in the water!’
‘Plague?’ The word burst loudly from Harvey’s mouth. ‘Hey, did you say plague? But how in hell can I have—?’
‘Don’t say it!’ Bygraves cut him short, glancing anxiously at the concerned faces all around. ‘Listen, we have a serum. It isn’t that serious if you get it seen to early — but I do mean right now! All of the medical facilities in this area have been supplied with the antidote. Unfortunately I don’t have any with me, and this isn’t a registered medical centre. So I can’t give you any shots that will help here in Xanadu, but—’
As he set off in a hurry, with Harvey in tow, back around the pool to his sunbed, a small, anxious crowd began to follow on behind. Harvey caught up, grabbed his arm and said:
‘But?’ His jaw was beginning to flap. ‘But what?’
Bygraves picked up a briefcase, went to open it and ‘accidentally’ spilled some of its contents: pamphlets describing the symptoms of Asiatic Plague, a new strain of bubonic. They fluttered to the crazy-paved pool surround and were quickly picked up by the gathering crowd.
And looking hopeless, frustrated, Bygraves said, ‘Look, I think we’re probably too late to stop it spreading through this place, but you are already short on time.’ Pulling on a pair of shorts over his swim trunks, he said. ‘I have to get you out of this place now. And as for the rest of you people/ he glanced at the milling, gawping faces all around. ‘This thing will work its way through this place like wildfire! So pass the message: you should all get out, go home, report to your hospitals, doctors, medical facilities — and you should do it now!’ Then, to Harvey: ‘My car’s this way.’
‘But my clothes…!’ Harvey, whose clothes were in fact in their vehicle, started to protest.
‘It’s your clothes or your life!’ said Bygraves, pushing a way through the crowd.
Ten minutes later they were out of there, and fifteen minutes after that the general exodus began. And Red Bygraves was right: the thing worked its way through Xanadu like wildfire…
By that time Ben Trask and David Chung were at the observation point. They were on hand to greet WO II Bygraves and Jimmy Harvey when they came tearing down the road from Xanadu in a cloud of dust and heat-shimmer, pulled into the lay-by and braked to a halt behind the other car.
‘How did it go?’ Trask was anxious; he sluiced sweat from his brow, glanced up and down the road. Up there the mountains, and down below the coastal plain reaching to the vastly curving horizon of the South Pacific. Normally it would be a beautiful, exhilarating view, but Trask had no time for that right now.
‘Some people were piling into their cars even as we pulled out of the place,’ Jimmy Harvey said, keeping well down and out of sight inside the car. The dust was still settling. ‘I think we made a good job of it. Thank God for amateur dramatics, eh? Would you believe I once played Romeo?’
Trask looked down at him and couldn’t help but smile. ‘No, but I’d believe a munchkin!’
‘Eh?’ Harvey grimaced as he pulled a blob of purplish cosmetic putty from under his left arm.
‘ The Wizard of Oz,’ Trask answered. ‘Probably before your time. How about the place? How did it l
ook?’
‘Like a resort.’
‘Nothing odd about it?’
‘No.’ The other shook his bald dome of a head. ‘Unless you
consider all those well-heeled people and all that tanned flesh odd. But me? I felt like a right whitey from Blighty!’
Trask shook his head, chewed on his upper lip. ‘Why is it I’m not happy?’ he asked of no one in particular. ‘Why is it so quiet? I don’t know… but something doesn’t feel right.’ And to Jimmy: ‘Time you got some clothes on, and wear a hat. We’re out of here as soon as people start to exit the place, or we’ll get snarled up in the traffic. That is, if people start to exit the place!’
The locator David Chung was at the side of the road. Lowering binoculars from his eyes, he called out, ‘Ben, here they come! A whole stream of cars on the high zig-zag up there. Ten minutes and they’ll be here.’ He came at a run across the lay-by’s gravel surface.
WO II Bygraves had changed his T-shirt, put on a baseball cap and sunglasses. He slid out of the driver’s seat and Trask got in. Now Bygraves would take over as the commander of this sub-section, making its numbers up to four. And they’d be here until they were ordered on up to Xanadu. There were sufficient armaments in their vehicle to start World War III.
Trask spoke to Chung. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘He’s up there, definitely,’ said Chung. ‘At this range I can’t be mistaken. Mindsmog, and dense. But it’s so steady — I mean, it registers like steady breathing, you know? — that at a guess I’d say he’s asleep. Which at this time of day shouldn’t come as a surprise. But Ben, hear me out: I think there’s more smog than just his.’
Vampires!’ said Trask, emphasizing the plural. ‘Lieutenants? Thralls? How many?’
‘Him, and maybe two others. I can’t be sure. But they’re weak, too weak to be lieutenants. Again I’m guessing, but I’d say they’re raw recruits, thralls.’
Trask shook his head. ‘It still feels wrong. Too easy. I have this feeling he knows about us, that this whole scenario is — I don’t know — a lie?’
Chung shrugged, but not negligently. ‘That’s your department, boss. I can’t help you.’
Trask gave himself a shake, tried to tell himself he was wrong. And anyway, there was nothing he could do about it now. Tonight was their window of opportunity, and it had been ‘foreseen’ by lan Goodly. So from now on it was all go, go, go.
‘David,’ Trask said. ‘I won’t be seeing you until I come in with Chopper One, after dark. Take care to stay tuned, old friend. And lead these people right to their target, right?’
‘You’ve got it,’ Chung answered, as the first car out of Xanadu sped in a cloud of dust past the lay-by and on down the often precipitous road.
‘You’d better be on your way,’ Chung nodded. ‘Good luck, Ben.’
But then a strange thing. A car coming in the other direction, up the mountain road, pulled in sharply onto the lay-by’s gravel surface and skidded to a halt.
The driver cursed out of his open window, said, ‘Did you see that? If it wasn’t for this lay-by I’d be over the fucking edge! I mean, God damn it to…!’ He had been forced off the road by someone trying to overtake the lead cars in the exodus from Xanadu. ‘What the fuck is going on up there?’
Trask stared hard out of his own vehicle’s window at the speaker — at his angular, somehow spidery figure, that seemed crammed into the seat of his battered, blue-grey, Range Rover-styled vehicle — and for a moment knew a sensation of deja vu. The man wore an open-necked shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, and the way he crouched over the steering wheel like that, he had to be pretty tall.
Tall and spidery, and his vehicle was…
Trask stared harder, and the tall thin man stared back — but only for a moment. Then his eyes went wide and the back of his vehicle fishtailed as he slammed her in first, revved up, and slewed back out onto the road. And:
‘Damn!’ Trask shouted, getting out of his car as the dust of the other’s departure drifted back to earth. ‘Deja vu nothing! That car, and that man — they fit Liz Merrick’s description of the watcher at the airport where we came in!’
Even as the suspect car had fishtailed out onto the road, so the SAS type with the guitar had yanked open the boot of the observation post’s vehicle and hauled out an evil-looking piece of artillery. Quickly assuming a firing stance behind a stunted pine, he rested the rifle’s long barrel on the gnarled stump of a branch. And sweeping the steeply snaking road, he made adjustments to the telescopic sights. Then:
‘Mr Trask,’ he shouted. ‘Up there where the road zig-zags. I can take him out as he rounds that last bend. The range isn’t too much, maybe five hundred yards, and this weapon is lethally accurate to fifteen hundred. That’s to assume a stationary target, of course. But I’m qualified with this gun and won’t miss. Once he’s over that ridge, though, he’s gone with the wind. You have maybe thirty seconds to think it over.’
Trask thought it over. He knew he was right — but what if he was wrong? What if the spidery man was an innocent? But then again, why had he taken off like that? And the look on his face — probably shock as he’d realized he was face to face with his master’s enemy. In which case he’d be on his way to make report to Malinari even now. But if Trask was wrong… how to balance one life against the security of a world?
The man with the sniperscope yelled, ‘He’ll be coming into view any time now!’
And Trask thought: The die is cast. We’ve got Nephran Malinari trapped up there. He can’t come out until sundown, and Lan Goodly has forecast shit and hellfirefor tonight, the night of the full moon. So what difference does this make one way or the other?
What was it that the precog was always saying — something about the future being as immutable as the past? ‘What will be has been,’ and all that? Yes, that was it… but it was always coupled with, ‘There’s no way of telling how it will be, that’s all…’
Trask started towards the marksman’s position, and in his mind’s eye he saw the knuckle of the man’s finger turning white on the trigger. As if that were some kind of invocation, the marksman called out, ‘I have him in my sights now, Mr Trask.’
There was no time left, and Trask skidded to a halt shouting, ‘Do it! Take him out!’ But:
‘Skit!’ said the other. His finger went slack on the trigger, and beads of sweat sprang into being on his forehead. Letting his weapon slump, he said, ‘Cars out of Xanadu, a fucking convoy! They were in my way, shielding him. Ordinary civilians. No way I was going to risk firing on them.’
Trask had been holding his breath. Now he let it out in a long ‘Phew!3 and then said, ‘Take it easy. It isn’t your fault, and it wasn’t meant to be. The future can be like that.’
‘What?’ said the other, relieved but frowning. ‘Some kind of fatalism?’
‘Forget it,’ Trask told him. ‘But tonight, if you see that car or its driver in the resort, then you can fire on them with all you’ve got. And ditto should they try to come back down out of there.’
Then it was time for a final word with Bygraves and Chung, before the downhill traffic got too heavy. Even now the thunder of fleeing vehicles was becoming deafening.
‘It looks like our little scheme is going to work,’ Trask told Bygraves. ‘Stay on it, and when the traffic thins out flag down a car. See if you can get some idea of how many people are still up there. As for that fellow who slipped through our fingers a moment ago: don’t let it worry you. I’ll do the worrying for all of us. And anyway, what can he tell Malinari other than what he’s already figured out for himself— or will figure out just as soon as he pops up from his hidey-hole?’
Then he turned to Chung. ‘David, stay tuned. If that mindsmog gets active, starts moving about, let us know at once. But whether it does or doesn’t, and unless something really drastic happens, we’ll probably be going in as planned. Okay?’
After the WO II and Chung had nodded their understanding, Trask got back in
to the car with Jimmy Harvey and drove to the side of the road. There he waited for a break in the stream of traffic, gave a final wave and set off downhill.
The vast bulk of the exodus was still to come…
And in a Xanadu that would soon be empty of entirely human life, there were just three and a half hours of life-giving, or wn-life threatening, natural light left. Then the sun would dip westward, the shadows of the mountain range would lengthen, and Xanadu’s lights would blink on one by one, holding the darkness and the long night to follow at bay.
Or at least, that was how it would be under normal circumstances…
It was some eighty miles back to the safe house. Along the way Jimmy Harvey radioed ahead to give the people back there their ETA. He also passed a brief, coded message concerning Liz Merrick’s watcher, and likewise passed on the locator David Chung’s expert opinion that Lord Nephran Malinari was indeed in Xanadu. At which the team at the safe house held a final o-group, then went into action to ensure that everything would be fully operational and ready for Trask on his return.
Radio messages went out. With the exception of the Xanadu observation post, the various SAS units began converging on the flying club where Chopper Two had been checked over, refuelled, and was warming up for the long flight to Gladstone. The other machine stood idle for the moment; its flight to Xanadu would be of much shorter duration. Meanwhile, in the harbour at Gladstone, a fully-fuelled coastguard vessel and pilot had gone on immediate standby. And every man who formed a part of the team was fully aware of the details of the job in hand…
5:15 p.m. in Xanadu, and for more than three hours now private eye Garth Santeson had been trying to get to see his employer, Aristode Milan. But Santeson wasn’t the only employee, and the two well-built young men who saw to Milan’s privacy in daylight hours had been proving obstinate. For three hours and then some Santeson had prowled the casino and watched it emptying of punters, hostesses, croupiers and their overseers, and finally and most tellingly the tellers. For when the people who handled the cash moved out, then you knew for sure that something was about to go down.