by Brian Lumley
The Russian was in his late forties but looked at least ten years older. He had a paunch and his dark hair was streaked with grey; his sideburns ran into a neatly trimmed, pointed beard beneath a fleshy mouth; his dark eyes were red-rimmed and deeply sunken in a face lined and grey. He did not appear in good health, but Keogh suspected that there was a dangerous strength in him. Also, his hands were huge, his shoulders broad for all that they were a little hunched, and if he had stood upright he would be well over six feet tall. All in all, he was a grotesquely impressive figure of a man. And (Keogh now allowed himself to remember) he was a murderer whose blood was cold as ice.
“Er, you do give language lessons, don’t you?”
Shukshin’s face cracked into something approaching a smile. A nervous tic tugged at the flesh at the corner of his mouth. “Indeed I do,” he answered, his voice liquid and deep, retaining a trace of his native accent. “I take it I was recommended? Who, er, sent you to me?”
“Recommended?” Keogh answered. “No, not exactly. I’ve seen your ads in the papers, that’s all. No one sent me.”
“Ah!” Shukshin was cautious. “And you require lessons, is that it? Excuse me if I’m slow on the uptake, but no one seems much interested in languages these days. I have one or two regulars. That’s about it. I can’t really afford the time to take on anyone else just now. Also, I’m rather expensive. But didn’t you get enough of them at school? Languages, I mean?”
“Not school,” Keogh corrected him, “college.” He shrugged. “It’s the old story, I’m afraid: I had no time for it when it was free, and so now I’ll have to pay for it. I intend to do a lot of travelling, you see, and I thought—”
“You’d like to brush up on your German, eh?”
“And my Russian.”
Alarm bells rang in Shukshin’s mind, vying with the pressures already there. This was all false and he knew it. Also, there was more to this young man than some weird ESP talent. Shukshin had the odd feeling that he knew him from somewhere. “Oh?” he finally said. “Then you’re a rare one. Not many Englishmen go to Russia these days, and fewer still want to learn the language! Is your visit to be business or—?”
“Purely pleasure,” Keogh cut him off. “May I come in?”
Shukshin didn’t want him in the house, would greatly prefer to slam the door in his face. But at the same time he must find out about him. He stood aside and Keogh entered, and the door closing behind him sounded to him like a lid coming down on a coffin. He could almost feel the Russian’s animosity, could almost taste his hatred. But why should Shukshin hate him? He didn’t even know him.
“I didn’t catch your name,” said the Russian, leading the way to his study.
Keogh was prepared for that. He waited a moment, following on the other’s heels until they reached the airy study with its natural light flooding in through the patio windows, then said:
“My name is Harry. Harry Keogh … Stepfather.”
In front of him, Shukshin had almost reached his desk. Now he froze, poised for a moment as if turned to stone, then quickly turned to face his visitor. Keogh had expected a response something like this, but nothing quite so dramatic. The man’s face had turned to chalk in the frame of his darker sideburns and beard. His jelly lips trembled with a mixture of fear, shock … and rage?
“What?” his voice was hoarse now, a gasp. “What’s that you say? Harry Keogh? Is this some kind of practical—?” But now he looked closer and knew why he had thought he’d known this youth before. He had been only a child then, but the features were the same. Yes, and his mother had had them before him. In fact, now that he knew who this was, the resemblance was remarkable. What was more, the boy seemed to have acquired something of her wild talent, too.
Her talent! The boy was a psychic, a medium, inherited from his mother! That was it! That was what Shukshin could detect in him—echoes of his mother’s talent!
“Stepfather?” said Keogh, feigning concern. “Are you all right?” He offered a hand but the other backed away from it into his desk. He clawed his way round the desk, flopped into his chair. “It’s a … shock,” he said then. “I mean seeing you, here, after all these years.” He got a grip of himself, sighed his relief and breathed more deeply, more freely. “A great shock.”
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Keogh lied. “I thought you’d be pleased to see me, to learn how well I’m doing. Also, I thought it was time I got to know you. I mean, you’re the only real link I have with my past, my early childhood—my mother.”
“Your mother?” Shukshin immediately went on the defensive. His face was regaining a little of its former colour as he quickly composed himself. Obviously his fears that he’d been discovered by the British ESP Agency were unfounded. Keogh was simply paying him a belated visit, returning to his roots; he was genuinely interested in his past. But if that was so—
“Then what was all that rubbish about wanting to learn German and Russian?” he snapped. “Was it really necessary to go through all that just to get to see me?”
“Oh,” Keogh answered with a shrug, “yes, I admit that was just a ploy to get to see you—but it was in no way malicious. I just wanted to see if you’d recognize me before I told you who I was.” He kept the smile on his face. Shukshin was in control of himself again, his anger plain and making his face ugly. Now seemed a good time to drop a second bombshell. “Anyway, I speak both German and Russian far more fluently than you ever could, Stepfather. In fact, I could instruct you.”
Shukshin prided himself on his linguistic ability. He could hardly believe his ears. What was this pup talking about, he could “instruct” him? Was he insane? Shukshin had been teaching languages since before Harry Keogh was born! The Russian’s pride took precedence over his churning emotions and the hatred inside him which the presence of any ESPer invariably invoked.
“Hah!” he barked. “Ridiculous! Why, I was born a Russian. I took honours in my mother tongue when I was just seventeen. I had a diploma in German before I was twenty. I don’t know where you get your funny ideas, Harry Keogh, but they don’t make much sense! Do you honestly think that a couple of GCEs can match the work of a lifetime? Or are you deliberately trying to annoy me?”
Keogh continued to smile, but it was now a smile with hard edges. He took a chair opposite Shukshin and smiled that hard smile right across the desk and into the other’s scornful face. And he reached out his mind to an old friend of his, Klaus Grunbaum, an ex-POW who had married an English girl and settled in Hartlepool after the war. Grunbaum had died of a stroke in ’55 and was buried in the Grayfields Estate cemetery. It made no difference that that was one hundred and fifty miles away! Now Grunbaum answered Harry, spoke to him—through him—spoke in a rapid, fluent German, directly across Viktor Shukshin’s desk and into his face:
“And how’s this for German, Stepfather? You’ll probably recognize that this is how it’s spoken around Hamburg.” Harry paused, and in the next moment changed his/Grunbaum’s accent: “Or perhaps you’d prefer this? It’s Hoch Deutsch, as spoken by the sophisticated elite, the gentry, and aped by the masses. Or would you like me to do something really clever—something grammatical, maybe? Would that convince you?”
“Clever,” Shukshin sneeringly admitted. His eyes had widened while Harry talked but now he narrowed them. “A very clever exercise in dialectal German, yes, and quite fluent. But anyone could learn a few sentences like that parrot-fashion in half an hour! Russian is a different matter entirely.”
Keogh’s grin grew tighter. He thanked Klaus Grunbaum and switched his mind elsewhere—to a cemetery in nearby Edinburgh. He’d been there recently to spend a little time with his Russian grandmother, dead some months before he’d been born. Now he found her again, used her to speak to his stepfather in his native tongue. With Natasha’s unwavering command of the language, indeed with her mind, he commenced a diatribe on “the failure of the repressive Communist system,” only pausing after several astonishing minutes whe
n finally Shukshin cried:
“What is this, Harry? More rubbish learned parrot-fashion? What’s the purpose of all this trickery?” But for all his bluster, still Shukshin’s heart beat a little faster, a little heavier in his chest. The boy sounded so much like … like someone else. Someone he had detested.
Still using his grandmother’s Russian but speaking now from his own mind, Keogh answered: “Oh, and could I learn this parrot-fashion? Are you so blind that you can’t see the truth when you meet it face to face? I’m a talented man, Stepfather. More talented than you could possibly imagine. Far more talented than ever my poor mother was.…”
Shukshin stood up and leaned on his desk, and the hatred washed out from him in a tide, seeming almost physically to break on Keogh like a wave. “All right, so you’re a clever young bastard!” he answered in Russian. “So what? And that’s twice you’ve mentioned your mother. What are you getting at, Harry Keogh? It’s almost as if you were threatening me.”
Harry continued to use Shukshin’s own tongue: “Threatening? But why should I threaten you, Stepfather? I only came to see you, that’s all—and to ask a favour.”
“What? You try to make me look like a fool and then have the audacity to ask favours? What is it you want of me?”
It was time for the third bombshell. Keogh also got to his feet.
“I’m told that my mother loved to skate,” he said, his Russian still perfect. “There’s a river out there, down beyond the bottom of the garden. I’d like to come back in the winter and visit you again. Perhaps you’ll be less excitable then and we’ll be able to talk more calmly. And maybe I’ll bring my skates and go on the frozen river, like my mother used to, down there where the garden ends.”
Once more ashen, Shukshin reeled, clutched at his desk. Then his eyes began to burn with hatred and his fleshy lips drew back from his teeth. He could no longer contain his anger, his hatred. He must strike this arrogant pup, knock him down. He must … must … must—
As Shukshin began to sidle round the desk towards him, Harry realized his danger and backed towards the door of the study. He wasn’t finished yet, however. There was one last thing he must do. Reaching into his overcoat pocket, he drew something out. “I’ve brought something for you,” he said, this time speaking in English. “Something from the old days, when I was very small. Something that belongs to you.”
“Get out!” Shukshin snarled. “Get out while you’re still in one piece. You and your damned insinuations! You want to visit me again, in the winter? I forbid it! I want nothing more of you, step-brat! Go and make a fool of someone else. Go now, before—”
“Don’t worry,” said Harry, “I’m going, for now. But first—catch!” and he tossed something. Then he turned and walked through the door into the shadowy house and out of sight.
Shukshin automatically caught what he’d thrown, stared at it for a second. Then his mind reeled and he went to his knees. Long after he’d heard the front door slam he continued to stare at the impossible thing in his hand.
The gold was burnished as if brand new, and the solitary cat’s-eye stone seemed to stare back at him in a cold speculation all its own.…
* * *
From the air, the Château Bronnitsy seemed not to have changed a great deal from the old days. No one would guess that it housed the world’s finest ESPionage unit, Gregor Borowitz’s E-Branch, or that it was anything but a tottering old pile. But that was exactly the way Borowitz wanted it, and he silently complimented himself on work well planned and executed as his helicopter fanned low over the towers and rooftops of the place and down towards the tiny helipad, which was simply a square of whitewashed concrete emblazoned with a green circle, lying between a huddle of outbuildings and the château itself.
“Outbuildings,” yes—that is what they looked like from up here—old barns or sheds long fallen into disrepair and allowed to settle and crumble until they were little more than low humps of masonry dotted about the greater mass of the château. And this, too, was precisely to Borowitz’s specifications. They were in fact defensive positions, machinegun posts, completely functional and fully efficient, giving them a total arc of fire to cover the entire open area between the château and its perimeter wall. Other pillboxes had been built into the wall itself, whose external face could become an electrical barrier at the throw of a switch.
Second only to the space-base at Baikonur, E-Branch was now housed in one of the best-fortified installations in the USSR. Certainly it vied favourably with the joint atomic and plasma research station at Gargetya, lost in the Urals, whose chief asset was its isolation; but in one major aspect it was superior to both Baikonur and Gargetya: namely it was “secret” in the fullest sense of the word. Apart from Borowitz’s operatives, no one but a double-handful of men even suspected that the château in its present form existed, and of these only three or four knew that it housed E-Branch. One of these was the Premier himself, who had visited Borowitz here on several occasions; another, less happily, was Yuri Andropov, who had not visited and never would—not on Borowitz’s invitation.
The helicopter settled to its pad and as its rotor slowed Borowitz slid back his door and swung out his legs. A security man, ducking low, ran in under the whirling vanes and helped him down. Clutching his hat, Borowitz let himself be assisted away from the aircraft and through an arched doorway into that area of the château which once had been the courtyard. Now it was roofed over and partitioned into airy conservatories and laboratories, where branch operatives might study and practise their peculiar talents in comparative comfort or whatever condition or environment best suited their work.
Borowitz had been late out of bed this morning, which was why he’d called for the branch helicopter to fly him in from his dacha. Even so, he was still an hour late for his meeting with Dragosani. Passing through the outer complex of the château and into the main building, then up two flights of time-hollowed stone stairs into the tower where he had his office, he grinned wolfishly at the thought of Dragosani waiting for him. The necromancer was himself a stickler for punctuality; by now he would be furious. That was all to the good. His mind and tongue would be sharper than ever, setting the stage perfectly for his deflation. It did men good to be brought down now and then, an art in which Borowitz was past master.
Taking off his hat and jacket as he went, finally Borowitz arrived at the second-floor landing and tiny anteroom which also served as an office for his secretary, where he found Dragosani pacing the floor and scowling darkly. The necromancer made no effort to alter his expression as his boss passed through with a breezy “Good morning!” on the way to his own more spacious office. There he deftly kicked the door shut behind him, hung up his hat and jacket and stood scratching his chin for a moment or two as he pondered the best way to deliver the bad news. For in fact it was very bad news and Borowitz’s temper was far shorter this morning than appearances might suggest. But as everyone who knew him was well aware, when the boss of E-Branch appeared in a good mood, that was usually when he was most deadly.
Borowitz’s office was a spacious affair of great bay windows looking out and down from the tower’s curving stone wall over rough grounds towards the distant woodland. The windows, of course, were of bulletproof glass. The stone floor was covered in a fairly luxurious pile carpet, burned here and there from Borowitz’s careless smoking habits, and his desk—a huge block of a thing in solid oak—stood in a corner where it had both the protection of thick walls and the benefit of maximum light from the bays.
There he now seated himself, sighing a little and lighting a cigarette before pressing a button on his intercom and saying: “Come in, Boris, will you? But do please see if you can leave your scowl out there, that’s a good fellow.…”
Dragosani entered, closing the door a little more forcefully than necessary, and crossed catlike to Borowitz’s desk. He had “left his scowl out there,” and in its place presented a face of cold, barely disguised insolence. “Well,” he said, “I�
��m here.”
“Indeed you are, Boris,” Borowitz agreed, unsmiling now, “and I believe I said good morning to you.”
“It was when I got here!” said Dragosani, tight-lipped. “May I sit down?”
“No,” Borowitz growled, “you may not. Nor may you pace, for pacing irritates me. You may simply stand there where you are and—listen—to—me!”
Never in his life had Dragosani been spoken to like that. It took the wind right out of his sails. He looked as if someone had slapped him. “Gregor, I—” he began again.
“What?” Borowitz roared. “Gregor, is it? This is business, agent Dragosani, not a social call! Save your familiarity for your friends—if you’ve any left, with that snotty manner of yours—and not for your superiors. You’re a long way off taking over the branch yet, and unless you get certain fundamentals sorted out in your hot little head you may never take it over at all!”
Dragosani, always pale, now turned paler still. “I … I don’t know what’s got into you,” he said. “Have I done something?”
“You, done something?” now it was Borowitz’s turn to scowl. “According to your work sheets very little—not for the last six months, anyway! But that’s something we’re going to remedy. Anyway, maybe you’d better sit down. I’ve quite a lot of talking to do and it’s all serious stuff. Pull up a chair.”
Dragosani bit his lip, did as he was told.
Borowitz stared at him, toyed with a pencil, finally said: “It appears we’re not unique.”
Dragosani waited, said nothing.
“Not at all unique. Of course we’ve known for some time that the Americans were fooling about with extra sensory perception as an espionage concept—but that’s all it is, fooling about. They find it ‘cute.’ Everything is ‘cute’ to the Americans. There’s little of direction or purpose to anything they’re doing in this field. With them it’s all experimentation and no action. They don’t take it seriously; they have no real field agents; they’re playing with it in much the same way they played with radar before they came into World War Two—and look what that got them! In short, they don’t yet trust ESP, which gives us a big lead on them. Huh! That makes a nice change.”