by Brian Lumley
From behind the outraged, hate-filled voice came Dra gosani himself, to stand outlined for a moment in a frame of jagged, dangling glass teeth, before hurling himself across the table and tumbled chairs at Borowitz where he floundered on the floor. In his hand something glittered, silver against the grey of his flesh.
‘No!’ Borowitz boomed, his bullfrog voice loud with terror in the confines of the small room. ‘No, Boris, you’re mistaken. You’re not poisoned, man!’
‘Liar! I read it in his dead brain. I felt his pain as he died. And now that stuff is in me!’ Dragosani leapt on to Borowitz where he fought to struggle to his feet, bore him down again, raised high the sickle shape of silver in his clenched fist.
The man called Mikhail had been flapping in the background like a wind-torn scarecrow, but now he came forward, his hand reaching inside his overcoat. He caught Dragosani’s wrist just as it commenced its downward sweep. Expert with a cosh, Mikhail applied it at precisely the correct point, just hard enough to stun. The bright steel flew from Dragosani’s nerveless fingers and he fell face down across Borowitz, who managed to roll half out of the way. Then Mikhail was helping the older man to his feet, while Borowitz cursed and raved, kicking once or twice at the naked man where he lay groaning. Up on his feet, he pushed his junior away and began to dust himself down — but in the next moment he saw the cosh in Mikhail’s hand and understood what had happened. His eyes flew open in shock and sudden anxiety.
‘What?’ he said, his mouth falling open. ‘You struck him? You used that on him? Fool!’
‘But Comrade Borowitz, General, he — ‘
Borowitz cut him off with a snarl, pushed with both hands at Mikhail’s chest and sent him staggering. ‘Dolt! Idiot! Pray he is unharmed. If there’s any god you believe in, just pray you haven’t permanently damaged this man. Didn’t I tell you he’s unique?’ He went down on one knee, grunting as he turned the stunned man over on to his back. Colour was returning to Dragosani’s face, the normal colour of a man, but a large lump was growing where the back of his skull met his neck. His eyelids fluttered as Borowitz anxiously scanned his face.
‘Lights!’ the old General snapped then. ‘Let’s have them up full. Andrei, don’t just stand there like — ‘ he paused, stared about the room as Mikhail turned up the lights. Andrei was not to be seen and the door of the room stood ajar. ‘Cowardly dog!’ Borowitz growled.
‘Perhaps he has gone for help,’ Mikhail gulped. And continued: ‘Comrade General, if I had not hit Dragosani he would have — ‘
‘I know, I know,’ Borowitz growled impatiently. ‘Never mind that now. Help me get him into a chair.’
As they lifted Dragosani up and lowered him into a chair he shook his head, groaned loudly and opened his eyes. They focused on Borowitz’s face, narrowing in accusation. ‘You!’ he hissed, trying to straighten up but failing.
, ‘Take it easy,’ said Borowitz. ‘And don’t be a fool, if you’re not poisoned. Man, do you think I would so readily dispose of my most valuable asset?’ ‘But he was poisoned!’ Dragosani rasped. ‘Only four days ago. It burned his brain out and he died in agony, thinking his head was melting. And now the same stuff is tin me! I need to be sick, quickly! I have to be sick!’ He struggled frantically to get up.
Borowitz nodded, held him down with a heavy hand, grinned like a Siberian wolf. He brushed back his central Streak of jet-black hair and said, ‘Yes, that is how he died — but not you, Boris, not you. The poison was something special, a Bulgarian brew. It acts rapidly… and dis perses just as rapidly. It voids itself in a few hours, leaves no trace, becomes undetectable. Like a dagger of ice, it strikes then melts away.’
Mikhail was staring, gaping like a man who hears something he can’t believe. ‘What is this?’ he asked. ‘How can he possibly know that we poisoned the Second in Command of the — ‘
‘Be quietagain Borowitz rounded on him. ‘That loose tongue of yours will choke you yet, Mikhail Gerkhov!’
‘But — ‘
‘Man, are you blind? Have you learned nothing?’
The other shrugged, fell silent. It was all beyond him, completely over his head. He had seen many strange things since he’d been transferred into the branch three years ago — seen and heard things he would never have believed possible — but this was so far removed from anything else he’d experienced that it defied reason.
Borowitz had turned back to Dragosani, had clasped his neck where it joined his shoulder. The naked man was merely pale now, neither leaden grey nor fleshy pink but pale. He shivered as Borowitz asked him: ‘Boris, did you get his name? Think now, for it’s very important.’
‘His name?’ Dragosani looked up, looked sick.
‘You said he was close to me, the man who plotted my assassination with that gutted dog in there. Who is he, Boris? Who?’
Dragosani nodded, narrowed his eyes, said: ‘Close to you, yes. His name is… Ustinov!’
‘Wha-?’ Borowitz straightened up, realisation dawning.
‘Ustinov?’ Mikhail Gerkhov gasped. ‘Andrei Ustinov? Is that possible?’
‘Very possible,’ said a familiar voice from the doorway. Ustinov stepped through it, his thin face lined and drawn, a submachine-gun cradled in his arms. He directed the weapon’s muzzle ahead of him, carelessly aimed it at the other three. ‘Definitely possible.’
‘But why?’ said Borowitz.
“But isn’t that obvious, “Comrade General”? Wouldn’t any man who’d been with you as long as I have, want to see you dead? Too many long years, Gregor, I’ve suffered your tantrums and rages, all your petty little intrigues and stupid bullying. Yes, and I served you loyally — until now. But you never liked me, never let me in on anything. What have I been — what am I even now but a cipher of J yourself, a despised appendage? Well, you’ll be pleased to note that I am, after all, an apt pupil. But your deputy? No, I was never that. And I should step aside for this upstart?’ he nodded sneeringly towards Gerkhov.
Borowitz’s face clearly showed his disgust. ‘And you were the one I would have chosen!’ he snorted. ‘Hah!No fool like an old fool…’
Dragosani groaned and lifted a hand to his head. He made as if to stand, fell out of the chair on to his knees, sprawled face down on the glass-littered floor. Borowitz made to kneel beside him.
‘Stay where you are!’ Ustinov snapped. ‘You can’t help him now. He’s a dead man. You’re all dead men.’
‘You’ll never carry it off,’ Borowitz said, but the colour was draining from his face and his voice was little more than a dry rustle.
‘Of course I will,’ Ustinov sneered. ‘In all this mayhem, this madness? Oh, I’ll tell a good tale, be sure — of you, a raving lunatic, and of the worse than crazy people you employ — and who will there be to say any different?’ He stepped forward, the ugly weapon in his hands making a harsh ch-ching as he cocked it.
On the floor at his feet, Boris Dragosani was not unconscious. His collapse had simply been a ploy to put him within reach of a weapon. Now his fingers closed on the bone handle of the small, scythe-like surgical knife where it had fallen. Ustinov stepped closer, grinned as he quickly reversed his weapon, slamming its butt into Borowitz’s unsuspecting face. As the Head of ESP Branch flew backwards, blood smearing his crushed mouth, so Ustinov adjusted his grip on the gun and squeezed the trigger.
The first burst caught Borowitz high on the right shoulder, spun him like a top and tossed him down. It also lifted Gerkhov off his feet, drove him across the room and slammed him into the wall. He hung there for a second like a man crucified, then took a single step forward, spat out a stream of blood and fell face down. The wall was scarlet where his back had pressed against it.
Borowitz scrambled backwards, trailing his right arm along the floor, until his shoulders brought up against the wall. Unable to go any farther, he hunched himself up and sat there, waiting for it to happen. Ustinov drew his lips back from his teeth like a great shark before it strikes. He aimed at Borowitz�
��s belly, closing his finger on the trigger. At the same time Dragosani lunged upward, his knife not quite hamstringing Ustinov behind his left knee. Ustinov screamed, Borowitz too, as bullets chewed up the wall just over his head.
Hanging onto Ustinov’s coat, Dragosani hauled himself to his knees, sliced blindly upward a second time. His sickle blade cut through overcoat, jacket, shirt and flesh. It carved Ustinov’s upper right arm to the bone and his useless fingers dropped the gun. Almost as a reflex action, he kneed Dragosani in the face.
Gasping his pain and terror, knowing he was badly cut, Andrei Ustinov, traitor, hobbled out of the door and slammed it shut. Another moment saw him pass through a tiny anteroom and out into the corridor. There he closed the soundproof door more quietly behind him, stepped over the body of the KGB man where it lay with lolling tongue and caved-in skull. The killing of this one was unfortunate, but it had been necessary.
Cursing and gasping his pain, Ustinov hobbled down the corridor leaving a trail of blood. He had almost reached the door to the courtyard when a sound behind him brought him up short. Turning, he brought out a compact fragmentation grenade from his inside pocket, pulled the pin. He saw Dragosani step out into the corridor, stumble over the body sprawled there and go to his knees. Then, as their eyes met, he lobbed the grenade. After that there was nothing to do but get out of there. With the grenade’s bouncing ringing in his ears, and Dragosani’s hiss of snatched breath, he opened the steel door to the courtyard, stepped through it and pulled it firmly shut behind him.
Out in the night, Ustinov mentally ticked off the seconds as he limped towards the two white-coated attendants at the rear of the ambulance. ‘Help!’ he croaked. ‘I’m cut — badly! It’s Dragosani, one of our special operatives. He’s gone mad, killed Borowitz, Gerkhov, and a KGB man.’
From behind him, lending his words definition, there came a muffled detonation. The steel door gonged as if someone had struck it with a sledgehammer; it bowed outward a little and broke a hinge, then was sucked back and open to slam against the corridor wall. Smoke, heat and a lick of red flame billowed out, all bearing the heavy stench of high explosives.
‘Quick!’ Ustinov shouted over the frantic questioning of the attendants and the yelling of security guards as they came clattering over the cobbles. ‘You, driver, get us away from here at once, before the whole place goes up!’ There was little fear of that happening, but it would guarantee some action. And it would get Ustinov out of harm’s way, for the moment anyway. The hell of it was that he couldn’t be sure any of them back there were dead. If they were he would have plenty of time to construct his story; if not he was done for. Only time would tell.
He flopped into the back of the ambulance as its engine roared into life, followed by the attendants who at once began to peel off his outer garments. Doors flapping, the vehicle pulled away across the courtyard, passed under a high stone archway and onto a track leading to the perimeter wall.
‘Keep going,’ Ustinov yelled. ‘Get us away!’ The driver hunched down over the wheel and put his foot down.
Back in the courtyard the security men and the helicop ter pilot hopped and skittered on the cobbles, coughing in the streamers of acrid smoke from the hanging door. The fire, what little of it there had been, had died in the smoke. And now, out from behind that dense, reeking wall of smoke staggered an ashen nightmare figure: Dra gosani, naked still, black-streaked over grey and gore-spattered flesh, carried a bellowing Gregor Borowitz draped in a fireman’s lift across his shoulders.
‘What?’ the General shouted between coughs and splut ters. ‘What? Where’s that treacherous dog Ustinov? Did you let him get away? Where’s the ambulance? What are you bloody fools doing?’
As the security men lifted Borowitz down from Drago sani’s bowed back, one of them breathlessly told him: ‘Comrade Ustinov was wounded, sir. He went off in the ambulance.’
‘Comrade? Comrade?” Borowitz howled. ‘No comrade, that one! And “wounded”, you say? Wounded, you arsehole? / want him dead!’
He turned his wolfs face up to the tower, yelled: ‘You there — do you see the ambulance?’
‘Yes, Comrade General. It approaches the outer wall.’
‘Stop it!’ Borowitz screamed, clutching at his shattered shoulder.
‘But — ‘
‘Blow it to hell!’ the General raged.
The marksman in the tower slid his night-sight binocu lars into a groove in the butt of the Kalashnikov, slapped home a mixed clip of tracers and explosive bullets. Kneeling, he picked up the vehicle again in the crosshairs of the night-sights, aimed at the cab and bonnet. The ambulance was slowing down as it approached one of the archways through the perimeter wall, but the marksman knew it would never get there. Jamming his weapon between his shoulder and the parapet wall, he squeezed the trigger and kept it squeezed. The hosepipe of fire reached out from the tower, fell short of the vehicle by a few yards, then jumped the gap and struck the target.
The front end of the ambulance burst into white fire, exploded and hurled blazing petrol in all directions. Blown off the track, turned on its side, the vehicle ploughed to a halt in torn-up turf. Someone in white crawled away from it on hands and knees as it burned; someone else, wearing an open, flapping shirt and carrying a dark overcoat, cowered back from the flames and limped in the direction of the covered exit.
Unable to see out of the courtyard from where he stood supported by the security men, Borowitz eagerly shouted up to the tower, ‘Did you stop it?’
‘Yes, sir. Two men at least are alive. One is ambulance crew, and I think the other is — ‘
‘I know who the other is,’ Borowitz screamed. ‘He’s a traitor! To me, to the branch, to Russia. Cut him down!’
The marksman gulped, aimed, fired. Tracers and bul lets reached out, chewed up the earth at Ustinov’s heels, caught up with him and blew him apart in blazing phos phorus and exploding steel.
It was the first time the man in the tower had killed.
Now he put down his gun, leaned shakily against the balcony wall and called down, ‘It’s done, sir.’ In the lull, his voice seemed very small.
‘Very well,’ Borowitz shouted back. ‘Now stay where you are for the moment and keep your eyes open.’ He groaned and clutched at his shoulder again where blood seeped through the material of his overcoat.
One of the security men said, ‘Sir, you’re hurt.’
‘Of course I’m hurt, fool! It can wait a little while. But for now I want everyone called in. I want to speak to them. And for the moment none of this is to be reported outside these walls. How many bloody KGB men do we have here?’
‘Two, sir,’ the same security man told him. ‘One in there — ‘
‘He’s dead,’ growled Borowitz, uncaring.
‘Then only one, sir. Out there, in the woods. The rest of us are branch operatives.’
‘Good! But… does the one in the woods have a radio?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Even better. Very well, bring him in and lock him up for now — on my authority.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘And don’t let anyone worry,’ Borowitz continued. ‘All of this is on my shoulders — which are very broad, as you well know. I’m not trying to hide anything, but I want to break it in my own time. This could be our chance to get the KGB off our backs once and for all. Right, let’s see some action around here! You — ‘ he turned to the helicopter pilot. ‘Get yourself airborne. I need a doctor — the branch doctor. Bring him in at once.’
‘Yes, Comrade General. At once.’ The pilot ran for his machine, the security men for their car where it was parked outside the courtyard. Borowitz watched them go, leaned on Dragosani’s arm and said:
‘Boris, are you good for anything else?’
‘I’m still in one piece, if that’s what you mean,’ the other answered. ‘I just had time to shelter in the anteroom before the grenade exploded.’
Borowitz grinned wolfishly despite the te
rrible burning in his shoulder. ‘Good!’ he said. Then get back in there and see if you can find a fire extinguisher. Anything still burning, stop it. After that you can join me in the lecture room.’ He shook off the naked man’s arm, swayed for a moment then stood rock steady. ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’
As Dragosani ducked back through the ruined door into the corridor, where the smoke had almost completely disappeared now, Borowitz called after him: ‘And Com rade, find yourself some clothes to wear, or a blanket at least. Your work is over for tonight. It hardly seems right that Boris Dragosani, Necromancer to the Kremlin — one day, anyway — should be running about in his birthday-suit, now does it?’
A week later at a special hearing held in camera, Gregor Borowitz defended the action he had taken at the con verted Chateau Bronnitsy on the night in question. The hearing was to serve a double purpose. One: Borowitz must be seen to have been called to order over ‘a serious malfunction of the “experimental branch” under his con trol’. Two: he must now be allowed the opportunity to present his case for complete independence from the rest of the USSR’s secret services, particularly the KGB. In short, he would use the hearing as a platform in his bid for complete autonomy.
The five-strong panel of judges — more properly ques tioners, or investigators — was composed of Georg Krisich of the Party Central Committee, Oliver Bellekhoyza and Karl Djannov, junior cabinet ministers, Yuri Andropov, head of the Komissia Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB, and one other who was not only ‘an independent observer’ but in fact Leonid Brezhnev’s personal representative. Since the Party Leader would in any case have the last say, his ‘nameless’ but all-important cipher was the man Borowitz must most impress. He was also, by — virtue of his ‘anonymity’, the one who had least to say…
The hearing had taken place in a large room on the second floor of a building on Kurtsuzov Prospekt, which made it easy for Andropov and Brezhnev’s man to be there since they both had offices in that block. No one had been especially difficult. There is an accepted element of risk in all experimental projects; though, as Andropov quietly pointed out, one would hope that as well as being ‘accepted’, the risk might also on occasion be ‘anticipated’, at which Borowitz had smiled and nodded his head in deference while promising himself that one day the bastard would pay for that cold, sneering insinuation of inefficiency, not to mention his smug and entirely inappropriate air of sly superiority.