The Spy Who Haunted Me sh-3

by Simon R. Green

  The Spy Who Haunted Me

  ( Secret Histories - 3 )

  Simon R Green

  The legendary Independent Agent is dying ...so who will inherit his hoard of secret information and fabulous secrets? For most of the last century, he was the greatest spy in the world, but now The Independent Agent is retiring, he has decided on one last great game — the six greatest spies in the world today must work together — and compete against each other — to solve the six greatest mysteries in the world. Whoever wins the game will also win The Agent's priceless treasure-trove of information. Eddie Drood, aka Shaman Bond, has been invited to join the great game, and of course he can't say no, especially when he learns what the mysteries are — everything from the Tunguska Incident to the Philadelphia Experiment, to whatever the hell it was really happened at Roswell. But that means he needs to survive working alongside old friends and old enemies ...especially when the spies start dying, one by one ...And one of them is going to haunt him ...for the rest of his life.

  THE SPY WHO HAUNTED ME is the third of the Secret Histories: a riveting roller-coaster ride through the dark side.

  The Spy Who Haunted Me

  (The third book in the Secret Histories series)

  Simon Green

  You don’t have to be afraid of the dark.

  I mean, yes, it is full of monsters . . . and vampires and werewolves and aliens and mad scientists . . . and every-Y thing else that’s ever put the fear of God into you. Plus a whole bunch of people who are stranger and scarier than any mere monster could ever be. But my family exists to stand between you and them every day and all through the night. The Drood family has protected you and all humanity from the forces of darkness for some two thousand years now, and we’re very good at it. My name is Drood; Eddie Drood. Also known as Shaman Bond, the very secret agent.

  I face down the monsters, so you don’t have to.

  But don’t expect a knight in shining armour. I do my best but sometimes . . . the night can be very dark indeed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Crime of the Century

  In the early hours, when it seems like the dark will go on forever and the dawn will never come, the night people come out to play. They swarm through the empty London streets, trailing long multicoloured streamers and brandishing champagne bottles, howling with laughter and singing the bits they remember from popular songs. They always wear the very best, even if it is stained with booze and food and dusted with various powders, andis they all look like film stars or supermodels or personalities . . . It’s only when you get right up close you can see the bloodied and worn-down feet, the haunted eyes and the desperate smiles, and hear the lost, lonely strain in their laughter. For the night people, parties go on forever. There are all kinds of Hell . . .

  I had just left the Leicester Square tube station and was heading unhurriedly into Covent Garden. I was just Shaman Bond that night, my easygoing, relatively harmless cover identity. Dressed well but casually, with nothing to distinguish me from a hundred other late-night revellers. I’ve been trained not to stand out, to blend into any crowd, to have a face that no one will remember ten minutes later. An agent’s face. I come and I go and do what I have to, and no one ever knows. If I’ve done my job right.

  It was an early morning in late September, a pleasant enough night to be out and about. The moon was full, the stars were out, and the streetlamps glowed like tarnished gold. Long black limousines cruised past, transporting high-class hookers with silver hair and artificial smiles to expensive rendezvous at the best hotels. Black-leather-clad couriers on powerful motorbikes carried important secrets back and forth from embassy to embassy, or industry to industry. And a gang of knobbly-looking kobolds in Westminster Council uniforms were chatting and swearing cheerfully as they hauled dead trolls out of an open manhole and dumped the distorted bodies into the back of a waiting refuse truck. There’s a lot goes on in London streets at night that most Londoners are better off not knowing about.

  The kobolds nodded easily to me as I passed, and I smiled easily back. Night people can always recognise their own kind. Kobolds perform necessary repairs, clean up the night’s various messes, and deal very sternly with the various unnatural vermin that thrive deep down under the streets of London. Trolls, albino alligators, intelligent rat colonies, the inhuman spawn of slumming alien deities; that sort of thing.

  You wouldn’t be able to see them, because you don’t have the Sight; the practiced ability to See the world as it really is, in all its awful glory. Even I can’t bear to See it for long. The Sight is one of the advantages of being a Drood. It comes from the golden collar I wear around my throat: a torc, in the old language. The torc is the secret weapon of the Droods. It makes us strong enough to go head-to-head with monsters and demons and kick their nasty arses.

  Farther down the street, two large bottle-green Reptiloids were having a slapping match over the unformed soul they’d ripped out of some squashed piece of roadkill. They’d clearly fallen on hard times and actually backed away when they saw me coming. I left them to it. Eddie Drood might have felt obliged to do something about them, but I was just Shaman Bond that night, and I didn’t want to break cover. Cover identities are very important for a Drood field agent. I’ve spent years building up my ˚public face, my public life, one careful step at a time. Droods come and go, but no one ever sees our faces. We protect the world, but we’re not dumb enough to expect it to be grateful.

  I’m only Eddie Drood when I’m at home, with the family. Or when I’m in action. Anywhen else, I’m Shaman Bond, so I can walk through the world just like you. Drood field agents are ninety-nine percent urban myth, and we like it that way. Makes it so much scarier when we do choose to show ourselves.

  So who is Shaman Bond? I’m glad you asked. He’s an easygoing, vaguely feckless, borderline criminal man about town. Always a part of the scene but never tied to anyone or anything. Everybody sort of knows him, even if they’re not too sure what he actually does to hold body and soul together. If anyone should ask, he’ll just wink and smile and change the subject. There are a lot of people like that, in the long reaches of the night. Shaman knows his way around, is on nodding acquaintance with a surprisingly large number of the people who matter, and is always ready to consider some dodgy venture or clandestine scheme, particularly if his funds are running low. The perfect cover for just turning up anywhere and listening to gossip.

  I think mostly I prefer being Shaman Bond. No duties or responsibilities, no pressure . . . and Shaman’s a nice guy. Eddie Drood doesn’t always have that option.

  Half a dozen Gray aliens were clustered around a strange piece of nonhuman technology that shimmered and sparkled under the heavy light of the streetlamps. The Grays were all wearing designer sunglasses, presumably so they wouldn’t be recognised. Otherwise they were entirely naked, dull gray skin slipping and sliding over their inhuman bone structure as though it wasn’t properly attached. I made a mental note to check with my family that the Grays’ permits were all in order and to see just what that particular bunch were up to.

  There had almost certainly been a memo about it, but I’m always at least a month behind. You wouldn’t believe how much paperwork is involved in being a very secret agent. And don’t even get me started about claiming expenses . . .

  I headed deeper into Covent Garden, and before and behind and all around me blazed layer upon layer of ghosts. Of people and places, buildings and events, all of them trapped in repeating loops of time. Reminders and remainders, recordings of the past, piled on top of each other like the layers of an onion . . . Because no matter how many layers you peel away there’s always one more underneath. London is very old and absolutely li
ttered with things that won’t stay dead. Even if you hit them with a really big stick.

  No one paid me any attention. One of the first things they teach you as a field agent is how to walk unseen in plain sight. To be average and anonymous, just another face in the crowd. You could walk right past me in the street and not even notice I was there. It’s all in the training. You too could give the appearance of being nobody in particular, not worth a second glance, if you were prepared to put in the work.

  My current mission was important but frustratingly vague. The safety of all England hung in the balance, but no one could tell me why. Something important was being planned by foreign elements, some dark and dangerous scheme aimed at the very heart of London, but no one could tell me what or who or when. And of course foreign could mean just that, or it could mean elves or aliens or unnatural forces from outside our reality. The family precogs are always right, but they see the future through a glass darkly, and they’re always vague when it comes to useful details. Some warnings have been so obscure they only became clear in hindsight.

  The Tower of London, they said. Our greatest treasure is at risk. England endangered. The crime of the century . . .

  Vague, or what?

  But the family takes all this stuff very seriously, so I was sent to investigate. London is my territory. London, also known as the Smoke, and everyone knows there’s no smoke without fire. So there I was, Shaman Bond again, out and about to talk to people in the know and hopefully discover what the hell was going on and put a stop to it. I couldn’t just call up the golden armour from my torc and go crashing into places as Eddie Drood, field agent, protector of the innocent and brown-trouserer of the ungodly. They’d all just scatter and head for the hills. But people would talk to Shaman Bond. They like him.

  I’ve gone to great pains to make him likable.

  You get to London’s infamous Hiring Hall by walking down a side street that isn’t always there, knowing the right passWords to say in the right places so the guard dogs won’t turn into hellhounds and rip the soul right out of you, and finally going through a left-handed door that will open only if it likes the look of your face. You’ll soon know if you’ve been blacklisted; the door handle will bite your hand off. And no, you don’t get to complain. No one asked you to come.

  The Hiring Hall’s been around since the time of Elizabeth I; indeed, supposedly the first stalls were set out on the frozen surface of the River Thames in 1589. They had real winters in those days. Like all successful businesses, the Hiring Hall has grown tremendously down the centuries, and though the jobs and services on offer in the Hiring Hall may have changed some since those early days, they haven’t changed in principle. It’s still all about money and power and influence. Love and hate and especially sex. At the infamous and just a bit scary Hiring Hall, jobs are available, services and skills are on offer, deals are made, and people are screwed over on a regular basis.

  The Hiring Hall has been owned by the same family since Shakespearean times. No one ever says the name out loud, but here’s a clue. The company is called Pound of Flesh Inc. and their motto is We always take our cut.

  I walked down the side street, said all the right Words (including good doggy), and pushed open the nicely anonymous door. The handle recognised Shaman Bond and remained just a handle. Inside the hall it was all noise and chaos and the raucous clamour of business being done. The Hiring Hall is long and large and contains wonders, and everyone who is anyone has had a stall there at one time or another. The stalls are packed tightly together, constantly jostling for those extra few inches, lining all four walls for as far as the eye can see and just a bit farther. The great open space in the middle was packed with a deafening, jostling mob of the unnatural and the ungodly, the criminal and the rogue and the defiantly free-thinking, all looking for temporary gainful employment, certain very select and secret services, and the chance to do somebody else down. The din was appalling, the smell not much better, and the sheer spectacle of both people and prospects more than enough to overwhelm the unseasoned visitor.

  Want to hire a murderer or arrange your own death? Sell your soul or someone else’s? Do you have a plan to steal fabulous items or an urgent need to dispose of them? Then you’ve come to the right place. But watch your back, always read the small print, and count your testicles afterwards.

  All around me there were ghosts looking for suitable houses to haunt, werewolves offering to track down the missing or gone to ground, vampires hidden behind romantic glamours offering themselves as gigolos or assassins or means of assisted suicide, and the usual cluster of ghouls, amiable as always, ready to clean up natural disasters or chemical spills. (Ghouls can stomach anything.) Shaman Bond has been known to pick up the odd job here, so no one was particularly surprised to see me. Shaman specialises in supplying secrets and unusual information for an only slightly extortionate fee. The family research department tells me what I need to know, I pass it on to my customers, and everybody’s happy. And if the family occasionally wants to distribute some false information or black propaganda where it’ll do the most damage, well, everyone knows you take your chances when you come to the Hiring Hall. Shaman Bond has a better reputation than most, and that’s all that matters.

  I eased my way through the milling crowd, nodding and smiling to familiar faces, showing my best face to friends and enemies. The Hiring Hall is neutral ground to one and all, strictly enforced by the dozen or so animated brass golems standing around the walls. (And by other, less obvious but quite spectacularly nasty devices hidden away in unexpected places.) It doesn’t matter whether it’s blood feuds, tribal hatreds, centuries-long vendettas, or dogmatic diversity; they all get left at the door if you want to do business in the Hiring Hall.

  I allowed the currents in the crowd to take me where they wanted while I took a good look around. It seemed like everybody had a stall out today: governments and religions, independent contractors and middlemen, service providers and every kind of bad business you could think of. Including some Very Big Names you’d almost certainly recognise. There were even a few stalls representing the smaller countries in the world, offering specialised services and opportunities . . . desperate for a chance to play with the big boys.

  And, of course, there were stalls for every spy and intelligence agency in the world. Not the Droods, of course. We’re urban legends, remember?

  But the CIA was there, and the KGB (or whatever initials they’re hiding behind these days), Vril Power Inc., the Vatican (represented by a big butch nun from the Salvation Army Sisterhood), the Tracey Brothers, Druid Nation (Let’s put the fear back into Halloween!), and a rather familiar face manning the MI13 booth. I wandered over and smiled easily at the balding, middle-aged figure of Philip MacAlpine, once one of England’s top spies. He saw me coming and if anything looked even more put-upon. I came to a halt before him, and he actually sighed loudly.

  “Hello, Phil,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same question,” he growled. “I take it you are here as Shaman Bond and not—”

  “Quite,” I said. “Please don’t mention the name on the tip of your tongue, or I will be obliged to rip out that tongue, throw it on the ground, and stamp on it.”

  He sniffed loudly. “That’s right. Kick a man when he’s down. This is all your fault, you know. I had a perfectly good position at MI5, with seniority and tenure. I had my own office, with a window! And then they sent me after you . . .”

  “And I kicked your arse all over the place,” I said pleasantly. “I remember.”

  He glared at me. “You killed over a hundred of my people. Good men and women, just doing their job.”

  “They were trying to kill me at the time,” I said. “I’ve always taken that very personally.”

  He sniffed again. “Thanks to you and the failure of that mission, I got promoted sideways into MI13. No seniority, no tenure, and I have to share an office with three other operatives and a rubber
plant. Overseeing all the weird shit that none of the other MI offices want to deal with. You know what they’ve got me doing here? Public relations. Handing out leaflets and badges and application forms. Shoot me now, you bastard.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” I said.

  “I had a career! I did important things! I couldn’t tell anybody about them, but still . . . It’s not fair.”

  “I let you live, didn’t I?” I said reasonably. “What’s MI13 up to these days? Anything interesting?”

  He shrugged. “Same old same old. Watching the aliens watching us, making sure they play nice and don’t stray outside the negotiated limits. There’s word of a Mothmen breakout down in Cornwall . . . I think they’re attracted to the lighthouses. When I’m finished here, I’m supposed to be putting together a team to go down to reason with them and/or kick their heads in. Don’t suppose you’d be interested . . .”

  “I’m spoken for,” I said. “Don’t suppose you’ve heard of any current threats to the Tower of London, have you?”

  “Nothing recent.” MacAlpine studied me thoughtfully. “Is this something I should be concerned about?”

  “Of course not,” I said, smiling. “I’m on the case.”

  I could tell he was about to say something indiscreet, so I nodded good-bye and let the currents of the crowd carry me away. I don’t like to spend too much time with any of the intelligence agencies when I’m being Shaman. Part of his usefulness as a cover identity is that Shaman never allies himself with any cause or faction for long and therefore is welcome anywhere. Shaman Bond is a chancer, a hustler, a useful extra hand, and a reliable backup. Always on the scene, but never aspiring to be a major player. A man who knows things, and people, but can be relied on to keep his mouth shut. And . . . just a bit dull and boring, when necessary, so no one ever wants to get too close.