Slave of Sarma

by Jeffrey Lord

  On his way back to the dingy office in Copra House, while the taxi crawled through fog, J wondered if Richard Blade was also looking forward to his next trip into Dimension X. There was, sighed J inwardly, really no way of knowing. Richard Blade did his job, performed his duty, and let it go at that. He didn’t talk about it.

  As the taxi slowed and became jammed in traffic, as the fog seeped in a crack of window and spread tentacles like a dank brown octopus, J’s mood began to sink once more. He did smile once as he recalled Lord L’s bawdy attempt to cheer him - the old man did have prescience in other than scientific matters - then his mouth dropped. He was worried. Things had gone too well for too long. His stomach pained him and that was a sure sign. The truth was, J admitted as he stared at a flashing Bovril sign without seeing it, that the Project, PDX, was due for trouble. Law of averages. Inexorable. You could never get away from it.

  How true. When J got back to his office in Copra House the proof was waiting on his desk.

  Richard Blade had left Moscow.

  Chapter Two

  Somewhere in the Kremlin, tucked away deep in the basement labyrinth, is a department known simply as TWIN. In keeping with the implied dichotomy, and to keep an eye on each other, TWIN is run by two high ranking officers: Ilich Yevgeniy of KGB, Victor Nikolayevich of GRU. The two men, apart from the usual departmental rivalry, worked well together.

  TWIN is not a Russian, or an original, idea. The Russians adapted it from the Germans, who called it Doppelganger. The Germans in turn had stolen it from the British in World War 1. The British called it Code Gemini.

  J, as a young officer in World War 1, had worked in Code Gemini for a short time. J never forgot it.

  The basic idea behind TWIN, laughably simple, is predicated on the old belief that every man, and woman, has a double Somewhere in the world. A ringer. The Russians have developed the idea to the Nth degree; where they could not find a double they made one.

  A double for every enemy agent known to the Russians. They helped nature by plastic surgery when necessary. TWIN proteges were schooled, at times for years, in walking and talking, mannerisms, background and education, foibles and virtues. They were permitted to speak Russian only during the few days of leave granted each year. The rest of the time they lived in mockups, sets, of English villages, French towns, Brooklyn backwaters, Chicago slums, New York apartments. Hong Kong penthouses. Japanese farms. Peking pagodas.

  They were surrounded by people who spoke only the particular language in which the “double” was being schooled. Educated speech, slang, idiom, localisms. They wore the right clothes, smoked the proper tobacco, followed the right sports in the right newspapers. Read the same books and magazines, listened to the same music, that their prototype, an agent employed by some power somewhere on the planet, read and listened to. When possible, scars and dental work were duplicated, as were hobbies and skills and, in some cases, even sexual perversions.

  Some of the doubles were never used. They retired, with generous pensions, and were usually given a new Zil sedan. Working in TWIN was a life-time career; you aged exactly as your counterpart aged; you retired when your counterpart retired. If, for some reason, your counterpart came out of retirement, so did you. Just on the chance that you might be of some service to The Party. And make some slight return for the millions of rubles spent on you.

  Because it all cost a great many billions of rubles over the years. There was grumbling and muttering among the budget men. Every year TWIN had to fight for its life, justify its existence, and every year it managed to scrape through.

  J, some years before, had managed to penetrate TWIN. His man, known in the MI6A files as Monster, was an absolute duplicate of J himself. It was a delicious irony and, for one of the few times in his professional career, J found it hard to keep the secret. He was nearly tempted to go into Kensington Green some night and dig a hole and whisper into it. A thing like that should be shared. This being impossible, J contented himself with the next best thing - when he retired and wrote his book, and when the J in Moscow also retired, then he would tell the world about it.

  In the meantime J, alone in his office, his stomach throbbing, stared at the bit of paper he had just taken from his IN basket.

  The Russian Richard Blade had left Moscow two weeks ago.

  Two weeks. J’s stomach fluttered like a gaffed fish. He reached for one of the phones on his desk, telling himself not to panic. He didn’t know anything yet. And yet, as he waited for the trunk call to Dorset, his skin crawled. He told himself not to be a fool. There could be a thousand reasons why the pseudo Richard Blade had left Moscow. A vacation, a love affair, a training mission of some sort. An operation in a far part of the world having nothing to do with PDX.

  J drummed on the desk and opened a drawer to search for his best spare pipe. He managed a smile at himself. Hell! He had been with Blade, the real Blade, only two days before.

  Sitting right in this office, talking about the upcoming trip into Dimension X.

  He found the pipe and a pouch of tobacco. But had it been the real Richard Blade?

  J bit hard on the pipe stem. In this jet age you could get from Moscow to London, or Dorset, in two hours. Forget two weeks!

  J nodded to himself. The trouble was here. The law of averages had run out. From now on he must exercise great caution, watch every P and examine every Q, dot every I and cross every T.

  Then he smiled. His stomach eased a bit. He had one sure and infallible check. Even granted that the Russians had stumbled onto PDX - he could not see how - but even if they knew about it, and were trying for a plant, they must be sure to fail. No Russian had ever been out into Dimension X. Only the real Richard Blade had done that. Only the real Richard Blade could answer questions about the dangers and the weird adventures that had befallen him after be went through the computer.

  J smiled again. Then immediately frowned. What, then, were the bastards up to? It would nag him now, he would never have any peace, until he knew.

  The call to Dorset went through. A girl answered. She sounded as though she had been crying.

  “Hallo? Who is it?”

  “Mr. Blade, please. Richard Blade. This is his cottage?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. But Richard isn’t here just now, I’m afraid. He is down on the beach.”

  J glanced out his single window at the thickening fog competing with oncoming night,

  “The beach, my dear?”

  A sniff. Then a moist laugh. “Walking, you know. Not swimming or anything silly like that.”

  J frowned at the phone. The caution of years could not be shaken off. And yet it was probably nothing - just another quarrel with another of Blade’s girls. He had had a lot of them lately. Trying to find another Zoe.

  J said: “Who are you, young lady?”

  “Mary. Mary Hetherton. I - I’m a friend of Richard’s.” Silence. Then what J could only identify as a sob.

  “I really must speak with him, Miss Hetherton. I wonder if you would be so kind - ?”

  “Of course. Hold on. He can’t be very far.”

  But it was five minutes - J watched the little clock on his desk - before Blade came on the line. “Hallo?”

  “Richard? This is J, dear boy. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, sir.” Blade sounded puzzled. “Why, sir? Shouldn’t I be?”

  J nodded and smiled at his end of the line. No mistaking that voice, that cheerful, well-spoken, light baritone. This was the man who had worked for him, for MI6 before it had become MI6A, ever since J had, in person, recruited him at Oxford.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Just being conversational,” J said with a laugh. “And, of course, a bit of business. A certain boffin wants to see you right away, Richard.”

  Unthinkable now to waste two precious days. It might already be too late. There was a tiny snapping sound. J stared down at his spare pipe, the stem broken in half in his palm. You, he told himself, had bloody well pull yourself togethe
r and bloody fast, too.

  Blade said: “Lord L, eh? I didn’t think it was quite ready yet, sir. Not that I mind coming up at once, but the last time I saw you I got the impression that - “

  J leaped at it. “Oh, that - er, yes. When did I see you last, Richard? My memory is getting fuzzy these days.”

  Silence. The wire hummed in desolation. J thought he heard gulls screaming in the background. He guessed at the puzzlement on Blade’s face. The lad knew there was nothing wrong with his, J’s, memory.

  Blade did sound puzzled. Cautious. Remote now. J smiled. Blade was a professional like himself.

  “Day before yesterday, sir. In your office.”

  “Right,” said J. “That will be all, Richard. Get up here at once, as soon as you hang up. Go to Lord L’s place. You know it?”

  But now Blade wasn’t giving anything away. All he said was, “I know it, sir. At once. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Richard.”

  J hung up and sat staring down at the broken pipe. Were his nerves really all that strung up? He tossed the bits of pipe into a wastebasket and reached for another phone. No time to waste now.

  As he worked he stared occasionally out the window. Here, in the city, just off Threadneedle Street, it was quiet. Raining again, adding to the murk. There was no shimmer of neon, no street noise. The brokers and the merchants had gone for the day.

  J locked his door, a thing he had not done in years. Before he went back to his desk he went again to peer out the window. Out there somewhere, perhaps not in London, or even in England, but somewhere, was another Richard Blade. A double, twin, doppelganger, call him what you would. He was there. As perfect a replica of the real Blade as years of training could make him.

  J went to his files and unlocked them. He found a manila folder and scanned it rapidly. The Russian version of Blade had been in the works for some ten years. They had never used him.

  Why now?

  Could the Russians, impossible and incredible as it seemed, somehow have found out about PDX? Dimension X?

  Chapter Three

  Richard Blade had never been cut out for the role of rejected suitor. Massive, handsome, steel thewed, endowed with a superior brain that matched his superb body, he was a man moulded for heroic things. Yet here he was, lurking in a dark areaway on a day of pouring rain, watching another man marry the girl he had loved and bedded. Any moment now she would come out of the little church across this quiet Mayfair street, borne on the triumphant arm of Reginald Smythe-Evans, CPA.

  Blade made a bear-like sound in his throat. Reginald Smythe-Evans, indeed! Reggie! Blade spat and pulled the collar of his trenchcoat tighter against the rain. It was almost obscenely like something out of P.G. Wodehouse. Reggie was pale, thin, and had spots. And a great deal of money, because Reggie, Sr. owned the firm.

  Yet none of that explained it - Blade knew what did. Zoe Cornwall wanted a man around the house. Operative word - around. A man who would be there when wanted, whether for love-making or fixing things. A man who would not be forced to lie to her, by silence or omission, because the Official Secrets Act had him trussed like a Christmas goose.

  Blade sighed and forgot it. That was over and done with. Zoe was out of his life and he wished her well with Reggie. There was a job to be done now, duty to be fulfilled, and the wedding of Zoe and Reggie had - how she would have hated the idea - set the stage.

  If matters went well today, if the trap worked, they would take the fake Richard Blade.

  The three of them, J, Lord Leighton, and Blade, had devised the plan during an arduous eighteen hour session at the house in Prince’s Gate.

  Blade, peering through gray ropes of rain at the blank gothic arching of church doors, smiled as he recalled how J had made him recount certain details of his three previous adventures into Dimension X. J was not a man easily satisfied. For a long time Blade had answered questions about the land of Alb, about his adventures among the Caths and Mongs in the Jade Mountains, the perils he had faced in the weird twilight world of Tharn, the strangest of all the X Dimensions into which the computer had sent him.

  It was Blade’s private opinion that J overdid things at times. His Lordship must have been of the same opinion and, being His Lordship, did not have to remain quiet about it.

  “Don’t be such a ruddy ass,” he told J. “Who in the bloody hell else could it be? Let us have less ‘security,’ J, and more creative thinking. How are we going to trap this fake Richard Blade?”

  J, sulking a bit, retired with his newly repaired pipe to a chair before the fire. Blade and the old scientist talked and, half-heartedly, tried to come up with something. Neither tried very hard. Both knew that in the end it would be J who solved the problem.

  And so it was. An hour or so later J had it all worked out. The wedding, the next day, was fortuitous. What more natural than that a rejected suitor, a little the worse for wear, needing a shave and with whiskey in him, should hover in the shadows and watch his lost love?

  Lord L rubbed his hands in half-contemptuous glee. “Pure Stella Dallas. But it might work.”

  Now Blade glanced at his watch. A quarter after four.. There was music in the church and massed shadow play behind the vaulting stained glass. One of the great double doors swung open. Any moment now the bride and groom would be descending the rain shiny steps to the waiting limousine. Blade took a step upward from his dark railed areaway so he could look up and down the street.

  The driver of the rented bridal limousine was J’s man. So was the helmeted, rain caped “Bobby” making his slow patrol near the church steps. One of J’s cars half blocked the end of the narrow street. The far end was a cul de sac.

  J himself was one of the guests. He was in the church now. When the throng began to bubble out of the church, tossing rice and old shoes and generally effusing, J would have to bubble and effuse with them. Blade wondered how J had wangled his invitation.

  A taxi came down the street at the same moment the crowd spilled from the church. Blade stepped down into the area again and peered through the spiked iron grille. This was the essence of J’s plan. A third Richard Blade! J was offering them a decoy and hoping they would bite.

  The taxi halted just short of the church. The crowd, perhaps sixty-odd men and women, surged down the steps, broke around the tall figure of J’s Bobby and formed two roughly equal groups flanking the lane down which would come the happy couple.

  Blade watched the taxi.

  The man who got out and paid the driver, refused his change, and stared in a sullen, hurt manner at the church doors, was an excellent actor. J’s makeup people had labored for hours. The result, the real Blade admitted now, was astounding. For a short time, in bad light, the man could pass for Richard Blade. Now he stood, swaying a little, scowling, hands in pockets, waiting for a last look at the girl he had lost. The actor had been coached by J in person.

  J came out of the church, moving a bit out from the crowd and remaining at the top of the steps. He was carrying a bouquet and a large paper sack of rice. Blade grinned. J was a thorough man.

  J did not expect the Russians to make an attempt at snatching Blade on the church site, or even near it. What J did expect was that the Russians - provided they showed up at all - would pick up the actor - Blade and tail him away from the wedding after he had run through the histrionics of a half-drunken sore loser. That was the script: the Russians would tail the actor - Blade and J’s men would tail the Russians. At the proper time J and his men would pounce. And, since the Russian Blade had not put in an appearance - neither Blade nor J had really thought he would - the captured agents would be taken to a certain old house in Hampstead Heath and, in J’s parlance, ‘questioned a bit.’ When J’s men questioned you, you usually talked.

  It did not work out that way. Not at all.

  The florist truck came down the street and passed the church. Traveling slowly, it went on up the street, reversed in a drive, and came back down the street. As it neared the church and t
he little crowd it slowed to a bare crawl. Blade, concealed in the areaway, watched the truck with a little tic of unease. Still - what more natural than a florist truck, late because of weather and traffic, delivering flowers to a church? J’s men guarding the end of the street had no orders to keep anyone out. This was supposed to be a trap - you had to let the quarry in.

  A riffle of sound arose from the crowd, a melange of shouts and laughter and old jokes and flung rice and shoes. The happy couple were coming down the church steps arm in arm.

  It was a tribute to Blade’s professionalism that he took one look at Zoe’s face, remembered her body for a last time, and then kept his eyes on the actor - Blade. That talented gentleman, under orders to make a discreet scene and call attention to himself, was trying to push through the throng and get to the newlyweds. He was having rough going. The crowd was small, but tightly knit, and it took the actor a couple of minutes to make it through the last clot of friends and well-wishers. Then, of course, the ham in the actor came out. He faced Zoe and Reggie, the latter taking a fast backward step, and, swaying drunkenly, made a wild gesture and said something. Blade was caught between laughter and pity for Zoe. She really didn’t deserve this. It was just bad luck that she and Reggie, and their wedding, had to be caught up in J’s machinations with the Kremlin.

  Zoe thought it was the real Blade. A drunken, demented Richard Blade. She clung to Reggie as the actor pointed an accusing finger and declaimed something. The babble of the crowd died as they sensed something unusual. Reggie, by neat footwork, managed to remain behind his bride.

  Richard Blade, fascinated as he was by the absurd little tableau, was still to blame. He should have been more alert than he was. But Blade was man, not superman, and at the moment he was empathic with poor Zoe. His gorge rose and yet he was near laughter as she in turn pointed a finger at the man she thought was Blade and began to tell him off.

  Blade wrote his own dialog for the scene: “Have you gone mad, Richard? This is not like you. Not at all like you! And drunk in the bargain! Oh, Richard, Richard, how could you come here like this and - “