Avengers

by Brian Lumley

  “So what are they working with?” Trask was licking his lips again. “How are they working? Trial and error? God, I hope not! This is just too fucking dangerous for common or garden laboratory experiments.”

  “Common or garden?” said the Minister. “Not at Porton Down, Ben. They’re the best in the world.”

  “But this shit isn’t from our fucking world!” Trask said. The Minister sat up straight again and said, “I supose I’ll have to put that last down to considerable stress, right?”

  Trask ignored that and said, “I’ll ask you again: what have the scientists at Porton Down got to work with—I mean, apart from what we’ve just sent them?”

  “They have a whole specimen,” the Minister answered. “But a dead one, of course. An old tramp who spent his last few months wandering in and out of King’s Cross with a brown paper bag and a bottle of methylated spirits.”

  “Huh!” said Trask. “They asked me for a live one.”

  “To make comparisons, I suppose,” said the Minister.

  “But a dead one?” Trask was suddenly worried; or rather, he was more worried than before. “How did he die?”

  “He was found asleep on the station. They couldn’t wake him up, took him into hospital. He died a few hours later.”

  “When was this?” Trask said, anxiously now.

  “He was one of the first,” said the Minister. “Knowing his lifestyle, there was no need for an autopsy. They’d begun looking for someone to claim him when I dropped my bombshell. After that, Porton Down asked for him.”

  “So by now he’s been dead for…for what? Something like three days, maybe?” But Trask had placed heavy emphasis on the word “dead.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Then you had better have another word with the Porton Down people,” said Trask grimly. “If they haven’t already started to slice him up, they should watch his body very carefully! On the other hand if they have cut into him…then maybe they should start watching each other…”

  “Don’t go over the top with this thing, Ben,” said the Minister. “I know how bad it’s looking, but we’ve called our best in on it. And as I said, it’s all rubber gloves and face masks and what have you.”

  “Which won’t help one little bit,” said Trask, “if this old gentleman of the road wakes up and starts biting people!”

  “Point taken,” said the Minister. “And I will speak to Porton Down—from your place, before I go on to my meeting.”

  Trask’s mind was racing ahead now. “Okay,” he said, “so I’m in the picture. Now, what do you expect of me and mine?”

  “Well,” said the Minister, “I’ve had more time to think it over than you, and I do have a couple of ideas.”

  “Such as?”

  “Our Gypsy friend from the vampire world,” said the Minister. “I’ve been given to understand he can somehow smell these creatures out, right?”

  “Lardis Lidesci isn’t just ‘our Gypsy friend,’” said Trask. “In his own world he was a chief, who in his time was very much feared by the Wamphyri. As for smelling them out: no one can be that certain, but there are tests which can be applied, yes. On the other hand, I don’t suppose they go much on witchcraft down at Porton Down. Except it isn’t witchcraft but alien chemistry. So if it’s a surefire litmus test they’re needing, tell them to try silver and garlic.”

  “Yes,” the Minister nodded, and at once slapped his knee in anger. “Damn it all, why didn’t I think of that! It’s just that it all seems so way out, so over the top. I’ve been your Minister Responsible all these years, and still it’s as if your work has been some kind of fantasy. I just haven’t got the imagination for it. But yes, I’ll tell them that, too. And then we have your locators.”

  “Mindsmog?” said Trask. “That may be more difficult, uncertain. If these people have been infected with vampirism, it may take its time showing. Maybe a group of them in close proximity would register on David Chung’s mental screen, I can’t say. But we must certainly give it a try. And then what? Supposing we do find a vampire plague brewing in these poor people? Well, I can tell you what the Old Lidesci’s answer would be to that!”

  “Yes, I know,” said the Minister, quietly. “It might yet be our answer, too, if the microbiologists don’t come up with something in very short order.” He paused a moment, then went on:

  “Anyway, as for you and yours: that’s all that will be required of you at this time. But as soon as you’ve rested up—or even before that—I want you back out in the field doing what you and your people do best. Here at home, we’ll deal with whatever’s coming, but your job is the same as always: to deal with the ones who have brought it upon us. You are our avengers, and despite all the menaces, in a way I envy you.”

  Trask looked out of the window. They were descending toward the lights of central London. Like a vast bright spiderweb, the city’s wetly gleaming electric network spread out in all directions, rotating with the helicopter’s motion and seeming to rise to meet them.

  Behind those swimming lights dwelled all that was known and human. While in the darkness between them lurked something utterly inhuman, a different kind of spider in the man-made web of the city and indeed the world.

  “There are many millions of people down there,” said Trask, quietly. “How is it such a small handful of us has become responsible for so many?”

  “Not easy, is it?” said the Minister. “And now you know how I have felt, and for more than thirty years…”

  Millie Cleary and Paul Garvey, both telepaths, were at the helipad on the roof to meet Trask and the Minister Responsible. The chopper’s downdraft turned the rain aside, blowing it horizontally at Millie. It grabbed at her umbrella and turned it inside out, then flattened her blouse to her upper body and her skirt to her legs, highlighting her trim shape in the strobing beams of the landing beacons. She didn’t seem to mind getting wet.

  Trask and the Minister vacated the chopper, and ducking low ran for the roof shelter with its stairwell leading down to the top-floor complex which was E-Branch HQ. Trask caught up Millie along the way, and Paul Garvey took the Minister’s elbow, guiding him in out of the rain. Behind them, the helicopter’s pilot remained on board, slowing his machine’s big fan to a tick-over whup—whup—whup while waiting on the Minister’s orders.

  On their way down the stairs Millie dug her heels in, dragging Trask to a halt in order to hug and kiss him. “Slow down,” she said then. “Look, the Minister has put us in the picture as much as he was able and we’re doing what we can; not that there was much we could do with you and the others away. And now that you’re back there’s nothing much you can do, either, not tonight, and not by way of work. So will you please, please stop forging ahead, at least until I’ve told you that…that it feels very good to have you back?”

  Trask knew that last to be an understatement; the way Millie was pressed to him told him that much, without his talent so much as whispering it.

  Millie. Upon a time she’d been like a kid sister to him; he had always had time for Millie. She’d been here even before Zek, but always in her kid sister role. And because of Zek—and the job, of course—she’d never let Trask know how she felt about him. Not until recently.

  Millie was in her mid to late forties but looked five years younger. A very attractive blonde, her hair was cut in a fringe low over her forehead, flowed onto her shoulders and framed her oval face while partly concealing her small, delicate ears. Her eyes were blue under pencil-slim, golden eyebrows, and her nose was small and straight. Millie’s teeth were very white, if just a little uneven in a slightly crooked, frequently pensive mouth. Five feet six inches tall, amply curved and slim-waisted, she’d always made Trask feel big and strong, and sometimes clumsy. He had always liked her a lot—indeed, a great deal—and now knew that he loved her…which made him feel a little guilty.

  His wife Zek had passed almost three years ago, but she had been such a huge part of his life—indeed, Trask
had sometimes believed she was his life—that it still didn’t feel like she was gone; it felt like she was still there, and maybe watching. And the last thing Trask wanted was that Millie be seen as someone who was filling a gap. It was his loyalty, that was all; it was the “truth” of his love for Zek, an undying love, which had yet made room for another…

  He held her at bay for a moment, then said, “Come on. We’ve work to do, you and I. The rest of the team are on their way in by limo from Gatwick. There’s not much traffic on the roads, so we’ve got maybe an hour before they get here. By then I want to be able to delegate tasks. From tomorrow morning at first light we’re going to be working overtime as never before.”

  Behind them as they reached the security door—where Trask blinked rain from his eyes before positioning his face in front of the retinal scanner—they heard the Minister’s very audible sigh of relief. He’d obviously been listening to what Trask and Millie had said to each other, and as he and Paul Garvey caught up with them:

  “She’s right, Mr. Trask,” he said. “It’s always very good to have you and your people back. And despite that things are more complicated now, it’s also good to see that your—is ‘enthusiasm’ the right word?—that your energy is undiminished.”

  But here in front of “the minions,” as it were, Trask noted that the formalities were on again. Smiling to himself, however wryly, he said, “Thank you, Minister.” And then to Paul Garvey, as the steel doors hissed open and they all four passed through into the HQ’s main corridor: “See that the Minister gets to use one of our secure telephones, will you, Paul? And then he’ll be needing an escort back up to the roof.”

  Then, as Garvey and the Minister turned right for the Duty Officer’s room, and Millie and Trask went the other way, toward his office at the very end of the corridor, the Minister paused and called out, “Oh, and Mr. Trask, there’s one other thing that seems to have slipped my mind. You’ll find you’ve a rather important visitor. Normally we’d accommodate and, er—look after him elsewhere, but it seems he’s intent on staying with you! So since your HQ is probably as ‘safe’ as anywhere in the city, he’s all yours. I’m sorry about this—that in addition to what I’ve already handed you, I’m dumping this on your plate, too—but in the current situation…” He could only offer an awkward shrug.

  Trask had half turned back. Now who—? he was about to ask, but Millie “knew” what was on his mind and preempted him. “He’s in your office,” she said. “And he seems a very nice man. Well, considering some of the tricks he’s had to pull to stay so long in power.”

  And Trask knew the truth of it at once. His “visitor” could only be—“Premier Gustav Turchin himself!” he said, as he and Millie reached the open door to his office and the man in question stepped into view to meet them.

  Upon a time Turchin had seemed an unshakable rock of a man. Blockily built, square of face, and short in the neck—with a shock of black hair, bushy black eyebrows, darkly glinting eyes over a blunt nose, and an unemotional mouth—he’d been a veritable bulldog. But that had been some years ago, since when the Russian Premier had faced up to many problems in his vast, ever-turbulent postcommunist homeland. Some of these problems, when they had coincided with E-Branch’s, had served to bring the two men together in several mutually beneficial endeavours.

  The understanding between them and the respect they had for each other were still very apparent, but as for Turchin himself—his physical appearance—there had been changes. He was much thinner, less bright and sharp of eye, and his hair had turned an iron-grey. The last time Trask had spoken to him in person—in Australia, only a few weeks ago—even Turchin’s voice had lost something of its former authority. The intellect was still there (and still lethal, as Trask had soon discovered), but the dynamism was failing. Seven years of political power in a bankrupt country teetering on the brink of anarchy had taken their toll of him. When things went wrong, which they had, and frequently, then he had become a prime target for every disaffected, disillusioned citizen, some of whom were powerful members of the once-mighty military.

  The one thing that had stood him in good stead was the fact that he had inherited control of what was left of “The Opposition,” Trask’s term for E-Branch’s Russian equivalent: the leftovers of a once-powerful mindspy organization with headquarters in Moscow. The original Soviet outfit back in the ’70s had been Leonid Brezhnev’s baby and very effective at first, but successive failures, most of them down to the Necroscope Harry Keogh, had disenfranchised the organization almost to extinction. Turchin, always the visionary, had given its members his patronage when no one else wanted anything to do with them. In their turn they now gave him their support. But even The Opposition hadn’t sufficed to save him from his current dilemma.

  Trask was privy to what had happened:

  Close to retiring, a Russian army general, Mikhail Suvorov, had learned that a parallel world called Sunside/Starside was a huge open-cast gold mine compared to which the Klondike had been a worthless bag of frozen dirt; also that beneath the Perchorsk ravine in the Ural Mountains, a man-made singularity or “Gate,” the result of a failed nuclear experiment, would provide access to all of this previously undreamed wealth, and also a possible invasion route into an entirely new and “defenseless” world.

  As the C-in-C of two military gulags at Beresov and Ukhta, punishment garrisons straddling the Urals east to west, General Suvorov had been perfectly placed to take charge of Perchorsk’s decommissioning when Turchin had ordered the place flooded. But the soldiers he’d sent in to do the job had been other than the team of “military engineers” which he’d made them out to be. In fact they were hardened long-term criminals, and he had offered them the choice of serving their sentences or serving him. Thus after they’d stripped the massive lead shielding from the complex’s power plant, and after the legitimate engineers had moved out, Suvorov’s crew had stayed on as “caretakers” at Perchorsk.

  Having then drained the complex to allow the general and a team of geologists and soldiers passage through the Gate, these men were still there waiting on his return and the rich rewards he’d promised them. But they would have to wait a long time; for in fact Mikhail Suvorov was dead on Starside, where Nephran Malinari of the Wamphyri had sucked him dry of all knowledge of Earth and of the Gates and of life itself.

  However, when General Suvorov had entered Starside—despite the fact that Gustav Turchin had let him proceed unadvised of the dangers that might be lurking there, but suspecting that such might be the case—he had not been so naïve as to simply step off into a parallel universe without some kind of lifeline or at least a connection to his home-world.

  And so he’d told a handful of military cronies that he was onto something big—something so big that it could even change the course of history and elevate Russia to her former might as a world superpower—but, in the event he was gone for too long, they should start asking questions of the Premier.

  Recently, they had been doing just that, and now it seemed Turchin had had enough of it…

  “Ben,” he said, reaching to engage Trask in a none too firm handshake. And then, a little nervously, “Well, and here I am!”

  “And it couldn’t be at a worse time,” Trask answered, looking around his office. “I see they somehow managed to leave you on your own with all my little secrets?”

  Turchin lifted a bushy eyebrow and followed Trask’s gaze to a large wall screen, then to the filing cabinets, the computer, the intercom, and other gadgets on his desk. And, “Ah!” he said. “But no, for your Mr. Garvey switched them all off from his Duty Office. Anyway, I was not alone. And in any case, how could you even think it? Is there no honour, not even among mindspies?”

  Trask allowed himself to grin. “You’re an old fox, Gustav,” he said, indicating that the other should take a seat.

  “Too old,” Turchin answered. “And now I have gone to ground, or rather I’ve been driven to earth. Oh, and incidentally, when Mr. Garvey
turned off your toys, it seems he also turned off the central heating. I’ve been feeling the cold a long time, Ben—even before I got here—and now I’m tired of it. This charming lady was helping me warm up a little.”

  “I was doing my bit to entertain the Premier,” Millie said, indicating the glass of whiskey and a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey standing on a corner of Trask’s big desk.

  “Yes,” said Trask. “And warming him up with some of my best booze, at that! But do help yourself.” Then he noticed Turchin’s overcoat and fur hat hanging from the horns of a coatstand just inside the door; they were still wet.

  “And so am I,” said Millie, in that new, very disconcerting way of hers. Her telepathy, with which she read his mind: something she’d previously kept under control…or at least Trask had always assumed she kept it that way. And when he remembered some of the things he had thought about her backside (the delicious way it moved when she walked) and occasionally, when he’d been thinking these things, the way she’d looked at him in that less than innocent way of hers…

  Now, as she headed for the door, he saw that she was blushing, but she covered her confusion by saying, “I think perhaps I had better change out of these wet things. Anyway, I suppose you two have plenty to talk over in private.”

  “Ah, privacy!” said Trask drily. “Yes, I remember that.”

  “Personally,” said Millie, as she stepped from the room, “I think it should all wait till morning. You’ll only manage a few hours’ sleep, Ben.” (That last pointedly.) “And Mr. Turchin looks very tired, too. The Minister’s people delivered him to us only a few minutes before you arrived, and I gather his getting here was a bit, er, circuitous?”

  After she’d gone Turchin said, “The lady in your life. And unless I miss my guess, a telepath at that. The slightly purple bloom under her eyes gives her away. I think you are very fortunate, my friend.”