by Brian Lumley
A mile towards Paignton, a clattering fire engine came tearing from the other direction. Layard drew dutifully in towards the side of the road to give the fire engine room. He grinned tiredly, without humour. ‘Too late, my lads,’ he commented under his breath. ‘Much too late — thank all that’s merciful.’
They dropped Trask off at the hospital in Torquay (with a story about an accident he’d suffered in a friends garden) and after seeing him comfortable went back to the hotel HQ in Paignton to debrief.
Roberts enumerated their successes. ‘We got all three women, anyway. But as for Bodescu himself, I have my doubts about him. Serious doubts, and when we’re finished here I’ll pass them on to London, also to Darcy Clarke and our people up in Hartlepool. These will be simply precautionary measures, of course, for even if we did miss Bodescu we’ve no way of knowing what he’ll do next or where he’ll go. Anyway, Alec Kyle will be back in control shortly. In fact it’s queer he hasn’t shown up yet. Actually, I’m not looking forward to seeing him: he’s going to be furious when he learns that Bodescu probably got out of that lot.’
‘Bodescu and that other dog,’ Harvey Newton put in, almost as an afterthought. He shrugged. ‘Still, I reckon it was just a stray that got into… the grounds. somehow?’ He stopped, looked from face to face. All were staring back at him in astonishment, almost disbelief. It was the first they’d heard of it.
Roberts couldn’t restrain himself from grabbing Newton’s jacket front. ‘Tell it now!’ he grated through clenched teeth. ‘Exactly as it happened, Harvey.’ Newton, dazed, told it, concluding:
‘So while Gower was burning that… that bloody thing which wasn’t a dog not all of it, anyway — this other dog went by in the mist. But I can’t even swear that I saw it at all! I mean, there was so much going on. It could have been just the mist, or my imagination, or… anything! I thought it loped, but sort of upright in an impossible forward crouch. And its head wasn’t just the right shape. It had to be my imagination, a curl of mist, something like that. Imagination, yes — especially with Gower standing there burning that godawful dog! Christ, I’ll dream of dogs like that for the rest of my life!’
Roberts released him violently, almost tossed him across the room. The fat man wasn’t just fat; he was
heavy, too, and very strong. He looked at Newton in disgust. ‘Idiot!’ he rumbled. He lit a cigarette, despite the fact that he already had one going.
‘I couldn’t have done anything anyway!’ Newton protested. ‘I’d shot my bolt, hadn’t reloaded yet.
‘Shot your bloody bolt?’ Roberts glared. Then he calmed himself. ‘I’d like to say it’s not your fault,’ he told Newton then. ‘And maybe it isn’t your fault. Maybe he was just too damned clever for us.’
‘What now?’ said Layard. He felt a little sorry for Newton, tried to take attention away from him.
Roberts looked at Layard. ‘Now? Well, when I’ve calmed down a little you and me will have to try and find the bastard, that’s what now!’
‘Find him?’ Newton licked dry lips. How?’ He was confused, wasn’t thinking clearly.
Roberts at once tapped the side of his head with huge white knuckles. ‘With this!’ he shouted. ‘It’s what I do. I’m a “scryer”, remember?’ He glared again at Newton. ‘So what’s your fucking talent? Other than screwing things up, I mean.
Newton found a chair and fell into it. ‘I… I saw him, and yet convinced myself that I hadn’t seen him. What the hell’s wrong with me? We went there to trap him — to trap anything coming out of that house — so why didn’t I react more posit —,
Jordan drew air sharply and made a conclusive, snapping sound with his fingers. He gave a sharp nod, said, ‘Of course!’
They all looked at him.
‘Of course!’ he said again, spitting the words out. ‘He’s talented too, remember? Too bloody talented by a mile!
Harvey, he got to you. Telepathically, I mean. Hell, he got to me too! Convinced us he wasn’t there, that we couldn’t see him. And I really didn’t see him, not a hair of him. I was there, too, remember, when Simon was burning that thing. But I saw nothing. So don’t feel too bad about it, Harvey — at least you actually saw the bastard!’
‘You’re right,’ Roberts nodded after a moment. ‘You have to be. So now we know for sure: Bodescu is loose, angry and — God, dangerous! Yes, and he’s more powerful, far more powerful, than anyone has yet given him credit for.
Wednesday, 12.30 A.M. middle-European time, the border crossing-point near Siret in Moldavia.
Krakovitch and Gulharov had shared the driving between them, though Carl Quint would have been only too happy to drive if they had let him. At least that might have relieved some of his boredom. Quint hadn’t found the Romanian countryside along their route — railway depots standing forlorn and desolate as scarecrows, dingy industrial sites, fouled rivers and the like — especially romantic. But even without him, and despite the often dilapidated condition of the roads, still the Russians had made fairly good time. Or at least they’d made good time until they arrived here; but ‘here’ was the middle of nowhere, and for some as yet unexplained reason they’d been held up ‘here’ for the last four hours.
Earlier their route out of Bucharest had taken them through Buzau, Focsani and Bacau along the banks of the Siretul, and so into Moldavia. In Roman they’d crossed the river, then continued up through Botosani where they’d paused to eat, and so into and through Siret. Now, on the northern extreme of the town, the border crossing-point blocked their way, with Chernovtsy and the Prut some twenty miles to the north. By now Krakovitch had planned on being through Chernovtsy and into Kolomyya under the old mountains the old Carpathians for the night, but.
‘But!’ he raged now in the paraffin lamplight glare of the border post. ‘But, but, but!’ He slammed his fist down on the counter-top which kept staff a little apart from travellers; he spoke, or shouted, in Russian so explosive that Quint and Gulharov winced and gritted their teeth where they sat in the car outside the wooden chalet-styled building. The border post sat centrally between the incoming and outgoing lanes, with barrier arms extending on both sides. Uniformed guards manned sentry boxes, a Romanian for incoming traffic, a Russian for outgoing. The senior officer was, of course, Russian. And right now he was under pressure from Felix Krakovitch.
‘Four hours!’ Krakovitch raved. ‘Four bloody hours sitting here at the end of the world, waiting for you to make up your mind! I’ve told you who I am and proved it. Are my documents in order?’
The round-faced, overweight Russian official shrugged helplessly. ‘Of course, comrade, but —’
‘No, no, no!’ Krakovitch shouted. ‘No more buts, just yes or no. And Comrade Gulharov’s documents, are they in order?’
The Russian customs man bobbed uncomfortably this way and that, shrugged again. ‘Yes.’
Krakovitch leaned over the counter, shoved his face close to that of the other. ‘And do you believe that I have the ear of the Party Leader himself? Are you sure that you’re aware that if your bloody telephone was working, by now I’d be speaking to Brezhnev himself in Moscow, — and that next week you’d be manning a crossing-point into Manchuria?’
‘If you say so, Comrade Krakovitch,’ the other sighed. He struggled for words, a way to begin a sentence with something other than ‘but’. ‘Alas, I am also aware that the other gentleman in your car is not a Soviet citizen,
and that his documents are not in order! If I were to let you through without the proper authorisation, next week I could well be a lumberjack in Omsk! I don’t have the build for it, Comrade.’
‘What sort of a bloody control point is this, anyway?’ Krakovitch was in full flood. ‘No telephone, no electric light? I suppose we must thank God you have toilets! Now listen to me —‘
‘— I have listened, Comrade,’ at least the officer’s guts weren’t all sagging inside his belly, ‘to threats and vitriolic raving, for at least three-and-a-half hours, but —‘
>
‘BUT?’ Krakovitch couldn’t believe it; this couldn’t be happening to him. He shook his fist at the other. ‘Idiot! I’ve counted eleven cars and twenty-seven lorries through here towards Kolomyya since our arrival. Your man out there didn’t even check the papers of half of them!’
‘Because we know them. They travel through here regularly. Many of them live in or close to Kolomyya. I have explained this a hundred times.
‘Think on this!’ Krakovitch snapped. ‘Tomorrow you could be explaining it to the KGB!’
‘More threats.’ The other gave another shrug. ‘One stops worrying.’
‘Total inefficiency!’ Krakovitch snarled. ‘Three hours ago you said that the telephones would be working in a few minutes. Likewise two hours ago, and one hour ago — and the time now is fast approaching one in the morning!’
‘I know the time, Comrade. There is a fault in the electricity supply. It is being dealt with. What more can I say?’ He sat down on a padded chair behind the counter.
Krakovitch almost leaped over the counter to get at him. ‘Don’t you dare sit down! Not while I am on my feet!’
The other wiped his forehead, stood up again, prepared himself for another tirade.
Outside in the car, Sergei Gulharov had restlessly turned this way and that, peering first out of one window, then another. Carl Quint sensed problems, trouble, danger ahead. In fact he’d been on edge since seeing Kyle off at the airport in Bucharest. But worrying about it would get him nowhere, and anyway he felt too banged-about to pursue it. If anything, not being allowed to drive being obliged to simply sit there, with the drab countryside slipping endlessly by outside — had made him more weary yet. Now he felt that he could sleep for a week, and it might as well be here as anywhere.
Gulharov’s attention had now fastened on something outside the car. He grew still, thoughtful. Quint looked at him: “silent Sergei’, as he and Kyle had privately named him. It wasn’t his fault he spoke no English; in fact he did speak it, but very little, and with many errors. Now he answered Quint’s glance, nodded his short-cropped head, and pointed through the open window of the car at something. ‘Look,’ he softly said. Quint looked.
Silhouetted against a low, distant haze of blue light — the lights of Kolomyya, Quint supposed — black cables snaked between poles over the border check point, with one section of cable descending into the building itself. The power supply. Now Gulharov turned and pointed off to the west, where the cable ran back in the direction of Suet. A hundred yards away, the loop of cable between two of the poles dipped right down under the night horizon. It had been grounded.
‘Excusing,’ said Gulharov. He eased himself out of the car, walked back along the central reservation, and disappeared into darkness. Quint considered going after him, but decided against it. He felt very vulnerable, and outside the car would feel even more so. At least the car’s interior was familiar to him. He tuned himself again to Krakovitch’s raving, coming loud and clear through the night from the border post. Quint couldn’t understand what was being said, but someone was getting a hard time.
‘An end to all foolishness!’ Krakovitch shouted. ‘Now I will tell you what I am going to do. I shall drive back into Siret to the police station and phone Moscow from there.’
‘Good,’ said the fat official. ‘And providing that Moscow can send the correct documentation for the Englishman, down the telephone wire, then I shall let you through!’
‘Dolt!’ Krakovitch sneered. ‘You, of course, shall come with me to Siret, where you’ll receive your instructions direct from the Kremlin!’
How dearly the other would have loved to tell him that he had already received his instructions from Moscow, but… he’d been warned against that. Instead he slowly shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, Comrade, I cannot leave my post. Dereliction of duty is a very serious matter. Nothing you or anyone else could say could force me from my place of duty.’
Krakovitch saw from the official’s red face that he’d pushed him too far. Now he would probably be more stubborn than ever, even to the point of deliberate obstruction.
That was a thought which made Krakovitch frown. For what if all of this trouble had been ‘deliberate obstruction’ right from the start? Was that possible? ‘Then the solution is simple,’ he said. ‘I assume that Siret does have a twenty-four hour police station — with telephones that work?’
His opponent chewed his lip. ‘Of course,’ he finally answered.
‘Then I shall simply telephone ahead to Kolomyya and have a unit of the nearest military force here within the hour. How will it feel, Comrade, to be a Russian, commanded by some Russian army officer to stand aside, while I and my friends are escorted through your stupid little checkpoint? And to know that tomorrow all hell is
going to descend on you, because you will have been the focus of what could well be a serious international incident?’
At which precise moment, out in the field to the west of the road and back a little way towards Siret, Sergei Gulharov stooped and picked up the two uncoupled halves, male and female, of a heavy electrical connection. Taped to the main supply cable was a much thinner telephone wire. Its connection, also broken, was a simple, slender plug-and-socket affair. He connected the telephone cable first, then without pause screwed the heavier couplings together. There came a sputter and crackle of current, a flash of blue sparks, and — The lights came on in the border post. Krakovitch, on the point of leaving to carry out his threat, stopped at the door, turned back and saw the look of confusion on the official’s face. ‘I suppose,’ Krakovitch said, ‘this means your telephone is also working again?’
‘I… I suppose so,’ said the other.
Krakovitch came back to the counter. ‘Which means,’ his tone was icy, ‘that from now on we might just start to get somewhere.
1.00A.M. in Moscow.
At the Château Bronnitsy, some miles out of the city along the Serpukhov Road, Ivan Gerenko and Theo Dolgikh stood at an oval observation port of one-way glass and stared into the room beyond at a scene like something out of a science fiction nightmare.
Inside the ‘operating theatre’, Alec Kyle lay unconscious on his back, strapped to a padded table. His head was slightly elevated by means of a rubber cushion, and a bulky stainless-steel helmet covered his head and eyes in a half dome, leaving his nose and mouth free for breathing. Hundreds of hair-fine wires cased in coloured plastic sleeves shimmered like a rainbow from the helmet to a computer where three operators worked frantically, following thought sequences from beginning to end and erasing them at the point of resolution. Inside the helmet, many tiny sensor electrodes had been clamped to Kyle’s skull; others, along with batteries of micro-monitors, were secured by tape to his chest, wrists, stomach and throat. Four more men, telepaths, sat paired on each side of Kyle on stainless-steel chairs, scribbling in notebooks in their laps, each with one hand resting lightly on Kyle’s naked body. A master telepathist — Zek Foener, EBranch’s best
— sat alone in one corner of the room. Foener was a beautiful young woman in her mid-twenties, an East German recruited by Gregor Borowitz during his last days as head of the branch. She sat with her elbows on her knees, one hand to her brow, utterly motionless, totally intent upon absorbing Kyle’s thoughts as quickly as they were stimulated and generated.
Dolgikh was full of morbid fascination. He had arrived with Kyle at the château about 11.00 A.M. Their flight from Bucharest had been made in a military transport aircraft to an airbase in Smolensk, then to the Château in EBranch’s own helicopter. All of this had been achieved in absolute secrecy; KGB cover had been tight as a drum. Not even Brezhnev — especially Brezhnev — knew what was happening here.
At the Château Kyle had been injected with a truth serum — not to loosen his tongue but his mind — which had rendered him unconscious. And for the last twelve hours, with booster shots of the serum at regular intervals, he had been giving up all the secrets of INTESP to the Soviet espers. Theo Dol
gikh, however, was a very mundane man. His ideas of interrogation, or ‘truth gathering’, were far removed from anything he saw here.
‘What exactly are they doing to him? How does this work, Comrade?’ he asked.
Without looking at Dolgikh, with his faded hazel eyes following every slightest movement in the room beyond
the screen, Gerenko answered, ‘You, of all people, have surely heard of brainwashing, Theo? Well, that is what we are doing: washing Alec Kyle’s brain. So thoroughly, in fact, that it will come out of the wash bleached!’
Ivan Gerenko was slight, and so small as to be almost childlike in stature; but his wrinkled skin, faded eyes and generally sallow appearance were those of an old man. And yet he was only thirty-seven. A rare disease had stunted him physically, aged him prematurely, and a contrary Nature had made up the deficiency by giving him a supplementary ‘talent’. He was a ‘deflector’.
Like Darcy Clarke in many ways, he was the opposite of accident-prone. But where Clarke’s talent avoided danger, Gerenko actually deflected it. A well-aimed blow would not strike him; the shaft of an axe would break before the blade could touch his flesh. The advantage was enormous, immeasurable: he feared nothing and was almost scornful of physical danger. And it accounted for his totally disdainful manner where people such as Theo Dolgikh were concerned. Why should he afford them any sort of respect? They might dislike him, but they could never hurt him. No man was capable of bringing physical harm to Ivan Gerenko.
‘Brainwashing?’ Dolgikh repeated him. ‘I had thought some sort of interrogation, surely?’
‘Both,’ Gerenko nodded, talking rather to himself than by way of answering Dolgikh. ‘We use science, psychology, parapsychology. The three Ts: technology, terror, telepathy. The drug we’ve put in his blood stimulates memory. It works by making him feel alone — utterly alone. He feels that no one else exists in all the universe