Lightning-quick Montgomery brought a chunk of polished marble from on top of a pile of papers down on Barnsby’s head. Barnsby just took the hit, he didn’t even try to block it with his free arm. An amazing sound like a coconut being stuck by a hammer resounded as the marble connected with Barnsby’s head, and only then did he let go of Montgomery’s hand. The little man fell, crashing headlong into a small display table of books, sending dozens of volumes flying, and then struck the ground.
Arnold realized he had been watching Barnsby when he should have been watching Montgomery, or whoever the hell the clerk was. To rectify the situation Arnold let go with his .45, tracing a scattered line of holes across the clerk’s counter. The sound of the gun was overwhelming in the tiny shop—a ringing remained in the air for seconds after each shot. As Arnold dove for cover behind a display table, knocking it over to block Montgomery’s line of fire, out of the corner of his eye he saw the clerk come up with a huge blue-steel shotgun. The weapon looked very at home in the clerk’s hands.
Arnold didn’t think. He dove to the left, behind a stone outcropping which acted as a ceiling support. A second later a huge hole ripped through the table where his chest had been. The front window shattered into a million pieces, spraying the street with razor-sharp shards of glass. Arnold took the risk and let go again, emptying his pistol, cutting jagged wood-splintered holes into the swinging door to the back room. A door somewhere in the back room slammed shut with a bang. The clerk had gone. Arnold considered running after him, but dropped the idea almost as soon as it had formed. MI-5 ran the tightest counter-intelligence system this side of the Kremlin. Sooner rather than later, Arnold knew, they’d pick Montgomery up. Besides, no one needed a running gun battle through the streets of Scarborough, especially one starring an American intelligence officer.
Arnold replaced the magazine in his .45 and ran over to Barnsby, who had pulled himself up to a sitting position in a corner, holding his head in both hands, trying to staunch the flow of blood. His entire face was a mask of red, although his eyes seemed alert. He glanced up at Arnold and smiled through all the blood.
Arnold said, “Shit! Barnsby, are you all right? What the hell were you doing?”
“Smooth, eh? He’s Abwehr, Tom,” Barnsby said thickly, spitting out a wad of blood which had flowed into his mouth.
“Really? You think so? Is this your special skill—finding spies by getting clocked by them?”
“His name is Albrecht Rahn. He’s a sleeper. Been here since ’36. His code name is Summer. He has a safehouse in Wear Head in the mountains. That’s where he’s going...ahh.” Barnsby was prodding around the wound with one gloved hand. Blood continued to pour out of it in amazing quantities, drenching his coat, shirt, and even his pants.
“You knew all this and didn’t tell me?” Arnold could not believe what he was hearing.
“No, no, I shook his hand.” Barnsby pushed himself up, unsteadily, to his feet, presenting his naked blood-stained hand to Arnold as if to illustrate the point. Arnold waited for the punchline. He began to think that Barnsby had lost a few marbles in that last round.
“And?” Arnold let the question hang. As his hearing returned to normal, in the distance he could make out the whistles of the local constables as they rushed to the scene of the gunplay.
“I saw all of it. He was thinking in German. I saw his mind,” Barnsby replied, in a harsh whisper.
“I think you better sit down, pardner. You took a bad hit.”
Barnsby laughed and spit a bit of blood into a now completely red handkerchief.
“What’s so funny?”
“I saw your mind too, in the parlor at the manor,” Barnsby offered.
“What did you see?” Arnold asked, taking his identification card from his breast pocket.
“A man who misses his brother very much,” Barnsby said, solemn faced, pressing the red cloth to his head. They could both hear people approaching, running frantically up the pavement towards their position. Arnold replaced his gun in his shoulder holster.
“So what? Anyone could know that.” Arnold turned away, looking through the broken window across the street at the trees in the park.
“I also saw a man who likes my fiancee a little too much for my comfort.” Barnsby laughed as he said this, and Arnold turned around.
“Who?”
“Natalie Greer. Major Cornwall’s secretary. You were thinking about it when we touched. I saw it in your mind.” Barnsby touched his finger to the clot of tacky blood on his forehead and considered it carefully. “I could likely use someone else’s mind, right now. Mine seems to be leaking out.” He laughed and Arnold stared at him with wonder.
“You’re one of Cornwall’s Talents,” Arnold muttered numbly.
“I am one of Cornwall’s Talents,” Barnsby replied.
The bobbies arrived and the two men presented their identification.
Albrecht Rahn, a.k.a. Michael Mark Montgomery, a.k.a Abwehr Agent Summer was captured in a raid on his safe house in Wear Head the following morning. The unit involved in the capture had all of Summer’s codes and passwords through some miracle in intelligence gathering (no one knew these and other vital clues were gathered through Barnsby’s special “Talent”). The MI-5 team was able to draw the enemy agent out into the open where he could be subdued easily. A general media silence was thrown over the whole incident, including the unfortunate shoot-out in Scarborough.
Agent Summer turned almost immediately when confronted with the rather one-sided option British intelligence offered him. It was either continue his broadcasts to Berlin under the auspices of British counterintelligence, feeding the Reich messages Churchill wanted to put in the Fuhrer’s ear, or face a firing squad. To the haughty, self-centered German there was no choice, really. He would be absorbed by England’s growing Double-Cross system, which by 1942 had transformed over thirty-five Axis spies into double agents and engulfed much of the English Abwehr network, along with most of the British MI-5 staff in the bargain. British intelligence officers had to act in all capacities to control a turned agent. MI-5 officers acted as case officers, translators, drivers, and even cooks for the turned agents. Often one turned agent required more than seven fully briefed officers to handle him properly. This number seemed to be steadily growing, with no visible end to the incredibly advantageous and delicate program in sight. The prime minister believed its benefits were worth the drain on labor. Recruitment for the British intelligence sections had been increased to fill the gap in manpower.
Summer surrendered a case full of coded transmissions that contained a great deal about the history of Jermyn House, which he had located in his instructed search in November 1942 and had transmitted back to Berlin later that month. He knew very little, it seemed, about why the Nazis required the information. Several facts relevant to the PISCES/DELTA GREEN investigation were discovered among these papers. Summer had found documentation about another man who had been interested in Jermyn House, or at least in its last lord, Arthur Jermyn. The man was an American who stayed at the manor house as Sir Jermyn’s guest for more than a week in October of 1912, drawn, it seemed, by Jermyn’s interest in occult lore.
This American was Professor Nathaniel Peaslee. Although no records existed to indicate what the two spoke of during his stay at Jermyn House, it seemed Peaslee had been on a tour of the principle cities of Europe in that year, perusing private libraries on the continent for occult literature. Arthur Jermyn’s interest in the occult aspects of African religions and his extensive library of rare volumes were well known to the staffs of many universities. While visiting Durham University, Peaslee was directed to the Jermyn estate to further his research. Summer believed Peaslee went to Jermyn House to search the lord’s library for occult information.
Little else about Peaslee was mentioned in the spy’s text, except that he later purchased a rather costly 1768 monograph called Observation on the Several Parts of Africa from Durham University. This book had been penn
ed by Arthur Jermyn’s great-great grandfather Sir Wade Jermyn, who died in the madhouse at Huntington, screaming about a lost city in the middle of the Congo in which certain unmentionable creatures lived. Research and Analysis at PISCES headquarters had failed to locate a copy of the book in Britain, which suddenly seemed terribly important to the Nazi Parsifal investigation. Two copies of it were known to be on the continent and were by now probably in Nazi hands.
Was the ape thing discovered by the Karotechia in the crate in Antwerp an inhabitant of Sir Wade Jermyn’s lost Congo city? DELTA GREEN and PISCES agreed it was likely that was exactly what the Karotechia believed, especially considering the lengths to which their experiments on the coast of Normandy had gone to before they were stopped. But what had Sir Wade’s book told them? What had Sir Arthur Jermyn and Professor Peaslee discussed? Of what possible interest could a ruined city be to the Nazi war effort?
Donovan, Cook and Cornwall met in the aftermath of the seizure of Agent Summer and concurred. Further information was needed before a mission into the Congo would be planned, if there was to be one at all. The copy of Observation on the Several Parts of Africa that was in America needed to be located and studied by PISCES Research and Analysis, and Professor Peaslee needed to be questioned. Major Cornwall dispatched several agents to the Belgian Congo to join up with the British intelligence groups in the area and keep an eye out “for the Hun,” just in case the Karotechia was prepared to enter the jungles there in search of the grey city.
On January 12, 1943, OSS officer 1st Lieutenant Thomas Arnold and PISCES officer Lieutenant Alan Barnsby left the Southampton docks for the United States of America to pursue a book penned by a madman, and to find its owner, the inscrutable Professor Peaslee.
INTERLUDE 3:
The man in the black coat turns
January 22, 1943: Bary, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
The assassin had been sent through time into the body of a human child both to assure that the greatest portion of its knowledge survived the transfer and to decrease the likelihood that it would be detained by human authorities. Often, the simple brains of humans were far too small to contain the alien minds of the Great Race and much information was lost in the exchange of intellects, just as water may overfill and spill from a tiny receptacle. Excess knowledge was permanently lost. Such was the price of time travel. The brains of immature humans, however, had a higher capacity for the storage of information, much more so than the adults of their species. The assassin’s intellect was vast, so the Motion chose a juvenile human to suit the alien’s needs.
The Motion existed in every time where the Great Race traveled. The Motion comprised individuals from lesser species who had discovered the existence of the Great Race and had chosen to revel in the destruction of their own cultures. The Motion aided the agents of the Great Race, teaching the language, customs, and history of their cultures to those who needed such information, in exchange for technological trinkets and the Race’s good favor. The assassin had come forward in time from the early Paleocene era, an era ruled by the Great Race, guided by a human group of the Motion who had constructed one of the Great Race’s mind-transfer machines on their modern Earth.
It had no pronounceable name in human times, and was simply called One by the members of the Motion. In ancient Pnakotus it was known as the entity who was sent to render justice to wrongdoing, a constable of sorts, and its title was translated into human analog roughly as One Who Is Many Places at Once. Unbeknownst to a vast majority of the Great Race, it traveled throughout time capturing and destroying those of its race who betrayed the chosen line of temporal advancement. Most in Pnakotus thought that their civilization was assured, that their populace was content and that their knowledge was unlimited. But the Great Race, like any other sentient species, held secrets. Even with the strictest safeguards, agents sent through time to further the goals of the Race often defected. The reasons for these betrayals were numerous, but they often stemmed from chemical imbalances inflicted upon the minds of the agents by their newly acquired biological forms. The problems remained no matter what steps were taken to prevent them. So a whole class of citizens of Pnakotus, such as One, rose up to fill the need of their culture. They became the solution decreed by the elders of Pnakotus; a network of assassins throughout time.
The sealed records of the future of the Earth were constantly monitored by the learned elders of the Great Race in the ancient library of Pnakotus. This was the library’s sole purpose, to note eddies and changes in the times they recorded. Why else would such great lengths be taken to create the most magnificent library in earth’s history only to leave it in ruin in the midst of the Australian desert? When the authors of the documents returned to their times, occasionally, the recollections within the documents would shift. Only the elders had access to these original records, and only the elders knew of the great grey area which existed in the midst of human history. While some portions in time would occasionally shift, this great grey spot in time, an area of constant flux, consumed most of the Great Race’s effort. This turbulent era was constantly changing along with records from these times, reflecting a natural maelstrom in history which needed to be continuously corrected to assure the future of the Great Race. Agents were sent forward again and again to guarantee the final outcome of human civilization—the seeding of earth’s atmosphere with sufficient radiation to assure the development of the beetle species which the Great Race would come to inhabit in the far-distant future.
One had jumped forward to the very edge of the grey area in human history, to pursue the races’ greatest traitor, once the most trusted agent of the elders of Pnakotus. One would enjoy expunging the traitor from existence, and would surely succeed where lesser assassins had failed. The traitor was crafty and powerful, but certainly by now its intellect had degraded. The traitor had jumped through many forms, each time losing a bit of its intellect to the limits of the human brain. Soon it would be no match for One, however renowned its intellect had once been.
The inconsequential humans of the Motion had supplied One with the necessary electronics for the hunt. It had then spent some time on modern Earth preparing its arsenal to destroy the prey. Now the pursuit had begun. That final precipice in time, the instant of death, would consume all who stood in One’s way...
The primitive vehicle navigated down a disordered, roaming path which was inefficiently tiled; great gaps in the surface hindered the vehicle’s performance. Multi-level constructions randomly littered the landscape in ill-conceived grids, within which the space-obsessed humans made their insignificant lives. In a dim imitation of Pnakotus, the humans had begun, in this portion of their epoch, to gather in numbers, although no good seemed to come of this advancement. The vehicle continued to travel for a time, until it had left the urban center and instead was rolling on the most rudimentary of paths surrounded by unmanicured wilderness on all sides. The jumbled peaks of distant, rounded mountains, backlit by the falling sun, reminded One once more of the desperate savagery of this time. Humans still lived in consequence of nature, a fact the assassin found highly revolting.
The humans of the Motion flanked One in the center of the vehicle. It sat very still while the humans surrounding it fidgeted. It looked like a small, somber child dressed in dark clothing, its hair combed to match human custom, its hands folded politely in its lap. It held a small device which looked like half of a telephone receiver. One considered the device, which let out a low and steady hum. Suddenly, the tone emitted by the device rose several octaves and took on an odd, ululating resonance.
“Stop,” the child’s body said in a small voice.
Contact with previous pursuers of the traitor (those that survived the encounter) had indicated that the criminal had recovered restricted texts from the ruins of Pnakotus on modern Earth, a fact which was not lost on One. These “books” were unusual by human standards and were easy to isolate, so although it was impossible for the traitor to be tracked itself, its equ
ipment could be located through the use of the simple device One had created. It had proven quite easy. The trail had led straight to the traitor’s retreat.
The human construction was isolated in a field of frozen water precipitate, surrounded by deciduous fir trees. There were no other constructions within the area. The small, single-level building had been fabricated of local plant stock and simple pieces of alloyed minerals. Panes of glazed sand hung in gaps in the walls, forming portals to the outside. A single, vertical pivot formed a gate to the interior, although the gate remained closed. Cloth had been hung in the portals to obscure the interior.
One and its agents exited the vehicle. The Motion men carried human-made lightning guns of Great Race design, crooked to their shoulders in a martial stance. These devices, shaped vaguely like rifles but made of solid bronze, could emit searing rays of electricity and were far in advance of anything humans possessed. One itself held a small, box-like device, which none of the Motion could identify but which they assumed was a weapon. One approached the portal slowly, cautiously observing the situation with the limited range of human senses. A single trail of indentations in the precipitate indicated the traitor was inside.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 14