by Brian Lumley
Then, quite clearly, Chung said, “They’re here!”
Trask and Goodly knew that he could only be referring to them. But whom was he talking to? Goodly thought he already knew but would wait and see. They weren’t kept waiting, and as “she” stepped out into the corridor Goodly saw how right he’d been. Sometimes the future was worth reading after all.
Trask saw her, too, and his jaw dropped like a trapdoor.
Zek Föener!
Across a distance of a dozen paces, Ben Trask and Zek Föener checked each other out. At first there were differences: they looked as different as people do with the passage of time. But stepping cautiously towards each other and as the distance narrowed down, the years and all the changes fell away. Zek …
She was still very beautiful. No, Trask made a mental correction, forget the “still”: Zekintha Föener was beautiful, as simple as that. She always had been and he guessed she always would be. At five feet nine, she was just an inch shorter than he himself. But a looker: she was something else. Named by her Greek mother after Zante (or more properly Zakinthos, the Mediterranean island where she had been born), Zek was slim, leggy, blonde, and blue-eyed. Trask would never forget how she’d looked that time out in the Greek islands, towards the end of the Janos Ferenczy nightmare; that day on Manolis Papastamos’s boat, when they’d gone looking for the white ship, Ferenczy’s Lazarus, to send her and her vampire crew to hell:
Zek had worn a yellow bikini consisting of very little and leaving nothing at all to the imagination. just like now, she’d scarcely looked her age but was sleek, tanned, stunning. With her eyes blue as the Aegean, her hair flashing gold, and a smile like a white blaze, everyone had agreed that she was a distraction. It was intended that she should be, a trick she’d learned from a Wamphyri Lady on Starside: that even when men’s eyes are wary for other things, still it’s relatively easy for a beautiful woman to turn them aside. And not only the eyes of men, but sometimes of monsters, too …
And that was something else well worth remembering: that quite apart from her wonderful command of telepathy (her father had been an East German parapsychologist), Zek Fö-ener was probably the world’s greatest living expert on the Wamphyri source world. She had actually been there—had lived there for long weeks and months, with both the Travellers and the Wamphyri—and survived the experience on her own until Jazz Simmons had found her, since when they’d never been apart.
Trask returned to the present. Zek must be—some fifty years old now? Not that you’d ever guess it just from looking at her. Strange, but for all that she and Siggi Dam were miles apart, and not alone in their ages, he found it difficult not to compare them. Perhaps it was because Siggi was fresh in his mind, or maybe it was simply that their colours and shapes were alike. But that was a peripheral comparison, lying fuzzy on the edge of his awareness; while the rest of it, seen close-up … that was the difference between a fjord and the Cote d’Azur.
Not so simply put, Siggi Dam was flawless and therefore, by human standards, imperfect, while Zek Föener’s small flaws were what made her perfect! For example, her mouth: those soft, naturally moist lips were just a fraction too full, and tended to tremble when she was angry. And the uneven jut of her jaw; when she was upset, it seemed slightly more prominent on the right. Unlike Siggi, and for that matter Turkur Tzonov, too, the two halves of Zek were a long way short of being mirror images, but they did accentuate her humanity. Trask knew which he preferred.
He also knew that all of these thoughts were his alone, that Zek wouldn’t betray a trust and read him uninvited. For while the mindspies of E-Branch worked as closely as possible as one body, it was important that they retain their own identities and personalities intact, inviolate. Being a powerful telepath in her own right, Zek would understand that the code of such people made no allowance for casual snooping.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, in the event it became necessary in the performance of their duties (if a colleague’s life were under threat, or E-Branch itself endangered), then it might be possible, theoretically at least, to link up as one Entity, one Talent. It hadn’t happened yet, and never would if it meant permanent damage to identity.
Still … Trask knew how he found Zek, and couldn’t help wondering how she found him. Time hadn’t been too devastating, but neither had it been quite so kind to Ben Trask.
“Ben,” she finally said, and again looked him up and down. “Not too much damage, eh?” If he didn’t know better … but he did. She managed a smile; it was wan, halfhearted. Perhaps she was tired.
“I was thinking the same thing,” he answered. “About myself, I mean! But you …” He shrugged. “It’s like yesterday.”
“Liar!” Her smile was still wan. “But a nice try.”
“When did you get in?” They touched hands, hugged however briefly.
“Two hours ago. An early morning flight from Athens.”
“On your own?” Trask raised an eyebrow. David Chung had joined them from Trask’s office. He was trying hard to catch Trask’s eye across Zek’s shoulder. But too late.
Zek didn’t look away, didn’t even blink. “Jazz died six weeks ago,” she said, softly. “Something he’d been fighting a little less than a year.”
Trask squeezed his eyes shut and let out his breath in a slow, painful sigh. “Oh, Zek! I …”
He wanted to hold her again but she took a small pace to the rear, and cut him off with: “Before Jazz died, he said he wished that we’d tidied things up a bit. For Harry’s sake, if for no other reason.”
“And that’s why you’re here?”
She nodded. “Also because I thought I might be needed. For almost a week now I’ve felt that something was going on. I mean, after Harry … left us, I felt sort of switched off, drained, depressed. But this last five or six days I’ve felt switched on again. David here has filled in a few blanks for me, but not everything. No, of course not, because I suppose you’ll want to clear me.”
“You want to work with us?” It was too good to be true.
Again her nod. “For now, anyway. Jazz would have wanted me to, certainly.”
Zek’s truth registered in Trask’s mind. “You’re cleared,” he said. And to Chung, urgently now: “Where is everyone?”
“In ops. Working, watching, planning, waiting—for you. We only need your say-so to go in and bring him out.”
Trask said, “Bring him out? Only as a last resort. Guide him out—that’s different.” He looked at Zek again. “Have you met everyone? Are you fed and watered? Has David looked after you? I mean, I hate to throw you in at the deep end, Zek, but you’re right: things are on the move.”
The ice was broken now; its last few slivers were melting away, and Zek’s smile was that much brighter. She laughed and said, “I’ve had the VIP treatment, but I haven’t met everyone, not yet.”
“First, Ian Goodly,” Trask introduced them. “He’s a precog. Ian, I want you to meet—”
“Zekintha Föener.” Goodly offered his thin warm hand. “An incredible asset.”
“She is, yes,” Trask agreed.
But Goodly only glanced at him, and again looked at Zek in that occasionally intense, disturbing way of his, and said, “No, I meant she will be—and starting right now. Delighted to make your acquaintance, Zek. And don’t worry: you’re going to get on famously with everyone.”
She took to Goodly immediately and, as they started along the corridor towards ops, said, “You read the future?”
“When the future allows it,” he answered, “and only then when I can’t avoid it.” The gloomy expression was back on his face.
“Is it that bad?”
“I’ll try to explain it to you sometime,” he said. “Maybe when you’re settled in.”
And Trask barely managed to keep from snorting his frustration. It was more of a promise than the precog had made him in twenty years! Well, that wasn’t quite true, but he’d never been so ready, willing, and able about it. There again,
Trask wasn’t Zek Föener …
7
Szgany Ferengi
Introductions took fifteen minutes. The actuality of E-Branch—what its members did, what they were, their various talents—wasn’t a problem. Zek simply accepted it at face value, and knew it for a fact. In the old days, at the end of Gregor Borowitz’s term as head of the Opposition, and again during Ivan Gerenko’s reign of terror, she had worked for Soviet E-Branch. Better still, she’d been a close friend of the Necroscope and had seen what he could do—and knew what he had been before he left for Starside. Which were qualifications enough.
Then it was time to put them all in the picture. Including Ian Goodly. Things had happened in Perchorsk which Goodly still didn’t know about, and Trask wondered how he would take being told about them. On the other hand, perhaps he already knew what Trask would talk about. Things which were plain in Trask’s hindsight might very well have been known to Goodly in advance, before the event! Working with espers was hell.
Trask got them all seated and walked up and down in front of them for a moment or two to get his thoughts in order. Then, to David Chung: “What’s the chance of the Opposition latching on to any of this?”
“Very small,” Chung answered. “Things have moved too fast for them. If they’d managed to sneak a couple of good telepaths into London in the last twenty-four hours, maybe then. But they haven’t. What talents they do have are small fry, and the best of them has been nailed down in their embassy. They’re not even trying to eavesdrop, just slinging a little mental mud about.”
Trask glanced at Zek, seated in the front row, cocked his head to one side inquiringly. She put a hand to her brow and closed her eyes, and after a moment nodded and said, “There’s a lot of static about but nothing specific. It’s just so much flak. They don’t know what to aim at. I think I would know if someone was listening.”
“Right,” said Trask. “Briefly, then:
“We went to the Perchorsk Projekt in the Urals to check out a man who had come through the Gate, to find out if he was a man. We went because my opposite number, Turkur Tzonov, invited us … so we thought. But it now turns out we were there mainly because Gustav Turchin had ordered it. Tzonov made the best of a bad situation and used us to his own advantage. His visitor is a man, but by no means an ordinary one. And so that you can all stop wondering about it right now: this isn’t the baby we cared for at Branch HQ that time, who later took his mother to Starside and became The Dweller and a legend there. No, for he was only one of Harry Keogh’s sons. And this visitor from the Gate, he’s another!
“Now, I’m not a telepath, but Nathan—that’s his name—spoke to me like that, telepathically, on three separate occasions. It takes a powerful sort of mind to do that, even when the contact is invited, as I invited him. Also, it’s true that as espers we naturally accept the existence of diverse talents and so make ourselves more accessible to them. Still, Nathan’s talent is something to be reckoned with. He’s as good and even better than our very best.
“What we talked about in our first two conversations isn’t important, but the last time—” Trask paused and looked at Ian Goodly, who had been listening intently from the first mention of this previously unsuspected contact. “That was different. It was during last night, or early this morning. Nathan’s telepathic ‘voice’ came to me in my sleep, but I sensed it was much more than any ordinary dream. He’d been held a prisoner but had freed himself—don’t ask me how! Now he was off and running, heading for Romania and the second Gate, his one route home to Sunside. That’s all Nathan’s trying to do: get back home again to some unfinished business, which he didn’t specify.
“And he needed help. Was there any way I could smooth the way for him, take out any obstacles in his path? Well, perhaps I could, but even so …
“I told him he’d never make it; if he got as far as what used to be the Romanian border, Tzonov’s men would be waiting for him. And Tzonov was only the beginning, for beyond him … no way Nathan could even get into the resurgence without our help. I told him we had the place guarded, and even a little about the Radujevac Refuge. But at least we’re in control out there, so there might be something of a chance eventually. But right now … it was out of the question that he might somehow be able to swim or navigate the underground river to the Gate. Quite impossible. No one but Harry Keogh has ever done it, and Nathan doesn’t have his father’s powers—not yet, anyway.
“How could he have such powers? His people are Travellers, Gypsies. Always on the move to avoid the Wamphyri. They’ve developed no science as such, no numbers. We know that the Necroscope’s thing was a mathematical trick he conjured out of his mind. It was metaphysical math, Möbius math, which has nothing at all to do with multiplication tables and slide rules. Nathan has no schooling; his father’s numbers are in him, certainly, but they can’t find their way out. Not unless he gets some expert help. I told him we might be able to help him that way, and he was interested.
“But he’s even more interested in his father, Harry Keogh, a man he never knew. Nathan’s only a young man, but all of his life he’s had this weird stuff in him, which again he couldn’t or wouldn’t specify, though I could make a pretty shrewd guess. And he’s never known where any of it came from, only the feeling of something incredible waiting just around the corner for him, if only he can get it all together.
“So, I told him a few things about Harry. Not a lot, just enough to illustrate how much we all owed him. And I said that while Harry never got much of a square deal from the living of this world, at least the dead had loved him. So much that they would even get up out of their graves for him! And when Nathan heard that—how much the Great Majority had loved his father, and some of the things they’d done for him—
“That was when I knew I had him!
“But don’t think I take any pride in it, and don’t get me wrong. I haven’t hooked into him like a fish, and I don’t intend to play him like one, either. Now that I’ve met Nathan and know him, I just think he’s entitled to some of the breaks that Harry didn’t get, that’s all. What I’m saying is this: if we do manage to get him out of there, it’s for him, not for us. The only satisfaction we’ll get out of it is knowing that Tzonov hasn’t got him. But after that, it’s Nathan’s choice.”
Trask let everything he’d said so far sink in, then continued:
“When I woke up this morning I knew our business was done in Perchorsk, and the best thing would be to get out of there and see if we could help Nathan from outside. And that’s what we’re doing.” Again he looked at Goodly but spoke to everyone. “So you see, all of this stuff that passed between Nathan and me is news even to Ian Goodly here, because if I had told him about it—”
“Then there’d be another mind to leak it,” Goodly said, nodding. “Yes, of course. I understand.”
“Right,” Trask said. “So now let’s talk some more about Tzonov. Well, Ian and I snooped around in the Perchorsk Projekt and saw some pretty worrying stuff, enough that we think Tzonov is going to be a real problem, and not only to us. He’s already ticking like a political time bomb in his own country, and Gustav Turchin’s the only one who doesn’t seem to hear him yet. Or we hope he doesn’t. But if Turchin’s in on it—well, so much for all the glasnost he’s been engaging in.
“For the fact is, Tzonov’s got an arsenal at Perchorsk, and there can be only one reason why. Ian and I saw the Gate, and we can tell you that it’s locked up safer than the doors on the Bank of England. Just like Nathan, anything that comes through is going to be trapped and dealt with at the discretion of the people at this end. So no need to worry about any sort of invasion from Starside. But maybe we do need to concern ourselves about an invasion in the other direction!
“Now here’s the problem: how to stop it? How can we tell Turchin what we suspect if he’s in on it? Will he want to stop it, or will he consider Sunside/Starside a new Soviet territory ripe for conquest and exploitation? If the latter, and he lets Tzonov
go ahead, how will that work out for the rest of us? The Russians have made some pretty big errors in the past, several of which continue to affect the world even today. Chernobyl and the Aral Sea are just two examples. But to mess with something as dangerous as the Gate …” Lost for words, Trask shook his head. “Pandora’s box just isn’t in the same league!”
David Chung spoke up. “What will you do?”
Trask shrugged. “Pass on all we know to our Minister Responsible, and let him take it from there. Eventually it should get back to Turchin, and hopefully he’ll be able to deal with it—if he’s not in on it. And if he is, he won’t. Which means that at some time in the future, we might have to deal with it ourselves.”
He hitched himself up on the edge of the briefing podium. “Right, that’s me done for now. A detailed report later, which I expect all of you to read. And now it’s your turn. What have you lot been up to?”
Chung stood up. “I tracked you to Perchorsk, just to keep an eye on you. And incidentally, there’s some very heavy Opposition static up there in the Urals!”
“Siggi Dam,” Trask nodded. “She’ll be in my report, too. But I interrupted you; I’m sorry; please go on.”
“This talent, the latent power you felt in Nathan,” Chung continued, “this ‘weird stuff, as you named it. It was what I sensed—and Zek, too—even before he was through the Gate. The closer he got to our world, the more we felt his presence. And that’s where we hold an ace card over Tzonov. Namely, me!” Chung grinned. “Tzonov doesn’t have a first-rate locator. One or two second-raters, but nothing nearly as good as me. And I have my own crystal ball.” He held up Harry’s hairbrush. “Now that Nathan’s through the Gate, it’s like this thing has come alive. If it was a lodestone, Nathan would be due north! I can locate—I’ve been locating him—far easier than anything I ever did before.”
Trask’s sigh of relief was clearly audible, but: “I hope you’ve been careful,” he said in a moment. “God knows we don’t want the Opposition using you as a carrier beam!”