by Brian Lumley
Wellesley’s red hair was receding fast. At forty-five he was perhaps six or seven years the Russian’s senior, and looked every day of it. A generally unattractive man, he had one redeeming feature: his mouth, which was firm, well shaped, and housed an immaculate set of teeth. Other than that, his nose was bulbous and fleshy, his watery blue eyes too round and staring, and his excess of colouring brought the large freckles of his forehead into glaring yellow prominence. Zharov concentrated on Wellesley’s freckles a moment more before straightening up again.
“Ah, détente!” he tut-tutted. “Glasnost! What have they brought us to when we must bargain with debtors? Why, in the good old days we would simply send in the debt collectors! Or perhaps the bullyboys? But now … the gentleman’s way out: bankruptcy, receivership! Norman, I’m very much afraid you’re about to go bankrupt. Your cover is about to be”—he formed his mouth into a tube and puffed cigarette smoke through it in a series of perfect rings—“blown!”
“Cover?” Wellesley’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and his colour deepened more yet. “I have no cover. I am what I appear to be. Look, I made a mistake and I understand I must pay for it. Fine—but I’m not about to kill for you! Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?—for me to turn a small debt into a massive great overdraft! But it’s not on, Nikolai. So go ahead, Comrade, drop me in it. ‘Bankrupt’ me, if that’s the threat. I’ll lose my job and maybe my liberty for a while, but not forever. But if I play your game, I’m a goner! I’d be in even deeper. And what will it be next time, eh? More treachery? Another murder? What you’re doing is blackmail and you know it, but I’m not having any. So do your worst and kiss any ‘favours’ I owe you good-bye forever!”
“Bluff.” Zharov smiled. “And nicely played, too. But bluff all the same.” His smile fell from his face and he stood up. “Very well, I call: you are a mole, a sleeper!”
“A sleeper?” Wellesley’s fists shook where he held them clenched at his sides. “Well, and maybe I was—but never activated. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Zharov smiled again but it was more a grimace. He gave a small shrug of his thin shoulders and headed for the door. “That will be your side of it, of course.”
Wellesley jumped to his feet and got to the door first. “And where the hell do you think you’re going?” he rasped. “We’ve resolved nothing!”
“I have said all I had to say,” said the other, coming to a halt and standing perfectly still. After a moment’s pause he carefully reached out and took his overcoat from a peg. “And now”—his voice had deepened a little and his thin mouth twitched in one corner—“now I am leaving.” He took thin, black leather gloves from a pocket of the overcoat and swiftly pulled them on. “And will you try to stop me, Norman? Believe me, that would be something of an error.”
Wellesley had never been much for the physical side of things; he believed the other well enough. He backed off a little, said, “So what will happen now?”
“I shall report your reticence.” Zharov was forthright. “I shall say you no longer consider your debt outstanding, that you wish it written off. And they shall reply: no, we wish him written off! Your file will be ‘leaked’ to someone of responsibility in one of your own intelligence branches, and—”
“My file?” Wellesley’s watery eyes began a rapid, nervous blinking. “A few dirty pictures of me and a whore snapped through one-way glass in a grubby Moscow hotel all of twelve years ago? Why, in those days that sort of stuff was ten-a-penny! It was dealt with on a day-to-day basis! Tomorrow I shall go and make a clean breast of that old … affair! And what will your side do then, eh? Moreover, I’ll name names—yours specifically—and there’ll be no more courier jobs for you, Nikolai!”
Zharov gave a small, sad shake of his head. “Your file is somewhat thicker than that, Norman. Why, it’s quite full of little tidbits of intelligence information you’ve passed on to us over the years. Make a clean breast of it? Oh, I should think you’ll be doing that—or at least trying to—for quite a few years to come.”
“Tidbits of … ?” Wellesley was now almost purple. “I’ve given you nothing—not a thing! What tidbits of … ?”
Zharov watched him shaking like a leaf, shaking from a combination of rage and frustration; and slowly the Russian’s smile returned. “I know you’ve given us nothing,” he said quietly. “Until now we haven’t asked for anything. I also know you’re innocent, more or less—but the people who count don’t. And now, finally, we are asking for something. So you can either pay up, or …” And again his shrug. “It’s your life, my friend …”
As Zharov reached to open the door Wellesley caught at his arm. “I need to think about it,” he gasped.
“Fair enough, only don’t take too long.”
Wellesley nodded, gulped. “Don’t go out that way. Go out the back.” He led the way through the flat. “How did you come here anyway? Christ, if anyone saw you, I—”
“No one saw me, Norman. And anyway, I’m not much known over here. I was at a casino in the Cromwell Road. I came by taxi and let him drop me off a few blocks away. I walked. Now I shall walk again, and eventually get another cab.”
Wellesley let him out the back door and went with him down the dark garden path to the gate. Before pulling the gate to behind him, Zharov took out a manila envelope from his overcoat pocket and handed it over. “Some photographs you haven’t seen before,” he said. “Just a reminder that you shouldn’t take too long making up your mind, Norman. We’re in a bit of a hurry, as you see. And don’t try to contact me; I shall be in touch with you. Meanwhile … I’ll have a night or two to kill. I might even find myself a nice clean whore.” He chuckled dryly. “And if your lot take any pictures of me with her … why, I’ll just keep them as souvenirs!”
When he’d gone, Wellesley went shakily back indoors. He freshened up his drink and sat down, then took out the photographs from their envelope. To anyone who didn’t know better, they’d seem to be blowups of simple snapshots. But Wellesley knew better, and so would just about any agent or officer of British intelligence—or of any of the world’s intelligence agencies, for that matter. The pictures were of Wellesley and a much older man. They wore overcoats and Russian fur hats, walked together, chatted in a scene where the spiral cupolas of Red Square were prominent over red-tiled rooftops, drank vodka seated on the steps of a dacha. Half a dozen shots in all, and it would seem they were bosom pals.
Wellesley’s older “friend” would be in his midsixties: he was grey at the temples with a central stripe of jet black hair swept back from a high, much-wrinkled brow. He had small eyes under bushy black eyebrows, lots of laughter lines in the corners of his eyes and lips, and a hard mouth in a face which was otherwise quite jolly. Well, and he had been a jolly sort of chap in his way—and jolly murderous in other ways! Wellesley’s lips silently formed his name: Borowitz, then spoke it out loud: “Comrade General Gregor Borowitz—you old bastard! God, what a fool I was!”
One picture was especially interesting, if only for its scenery: Wellesley and Borowitz standing in the courtyard of an old mansion or chateau, a place of debased heritage and mixed architectural antecedents. It had twin minarets jutting upwards like rotting phallus mushrooms from steeply gabled end walls; their flaking spiral decorations and sagging parapets added to a general sense of decay and dereliction. But in fact the chateau had been anything but derelict.
Wellesley had never been inside the place, hadn’t even known what it housed, not then. But he knew well enough now. It was the Chateau Bronnitsy, Soviet mindspy HQ, an infamous place—until Harry Keogh had blown it to hell. It was a pity he hadn’t done it just a couple of years earlier, that’s all …
The next morning, Darcy Clarke was late for work. A bad traffic accident on the North Circular, traffic-light failure in the centre of town, and finally some dumb bastard’s rust bucket parked in Darcy’s space. He’d been about to let the air out of the offender’s tyres when he turned up, said “Fuck you!” to Clarke�
�s raving, and drove off!
Still fuming, Clarke used the elevator discreetly placed at the rear of an otherwise perfectly normal-looking up-market hotel to climb up to the top floor, which in its soundproof, burglar-proof, mundane-, mechanical-, and metaphysics-proofed entirety housed E-Branch, also known as INTESP. As he let himself in and shrugged out of his coat, last night’s duty officer was just leaving for home.
Abel Angstrom gave Clarke the once-over and said, “Morning, Darcy. All hot and bothered, are you? You will be!”
Clarke grimaced and hung up his coat. “Nothing can go wrong that hasn’t already,” he grunted. “What’s up?”
“The boss,” Angstrom told him. “That’s what’s up. He’s been up since six-thirty, locked in his office with the Keogh file. Drinking coffee by the gallon! He’s watching the clock, too—been gripping each and every bloke who’s come in after eight A.M. He wants you, so if I were you, I’d wear my flak jacket!”
Clarke groaned, said, “Thanks for the warning,” went to the gents and tidied himself up a little.
As he was straightening his tie in a mirror, suddenly everything boiled over. To himself he rasped, “What the bloody hell? Why do I bother? Dog’s-bloody-body Clarke! And Himself wants to see me, does he? Shit and damnation—it’s like being in the bloody army!” He deliberately unstraightened his tie, mussed his hair, looked at himself again.
There, that was better! And come to think of it, what did he have to fear anyway? Answer, nothing; for Clarke had a psi-talent no one had positively tagged yet; it kept him out of trouble, protecting him as a mother protects her child. He wasn’t quite a deflector: fire a gun at him and your bullets wouldn’t swerve, you’d simply miss him. Or the firing pin would come down on blanks. Or he’d somehow stumble at just the right moment. He was the opposite of accident prone. He could walk through a mine field and come out unscathed … and yet he still switched off the current to change a light bulb! Except this morning he wasn’t in the mood for switching off anything. Let it all hang out, he thought, heading for the sanctum sanctorum.
When he knocked on the door, a surly voice said, “Who?”
Arrogant bastard! he thought. “Darcy Clarke.”
“Come in, Clarke,” and as he passed inside: “Where the hell have you been? I mean, do you work here or not?” And before he could answer: “Sit down …”
But Clarke remained standing. He didn’t need this. He’d had it, taken all he could take of his new boss in the six months the man had been the head of E-Branch. Hell, there were other jobs; he didn’t have to work for this overbearing bastard. And where was the continuity? Sir Keenan Gormley had been a gentleman; Alec Kyle a friend; under Clarke himself the branch had been efficient and friendly—to its friends, anyway. But this bloke was … hell, a boor! Gauche! A primitive! Certainly as far as internal relationships—man management—were concerned. As for talents: so what was the guy? A scryer, telepath, deflector, locator? No, his talent was simply that his mind was impenetrable: telepaths couldn’t touch him. Some would say that made him the ideal man for the job. Maybe it did. But it would be nice if he was human, too. After serving under such men as Gormley and Kyle, working for someone like Norman Harold Wellesley was—
Wellesley was seated at his desk. Without looking up, he sighed, took a deep breath, and said, “I said—”
“That’s right, I heard you,” Clarke cut him short. “Good morning to you, too.”
Now Wellesley looked up, and Clarke saw that he was his usual, florid self. He also saw the file on Harry Keogh spread every which way across the surface of Wellesley’s desk. And for the first time he wondered what was going on.
Wellesley saw Clarke’s attitude at once, knew it wouldn’t be wise to try riding roughshod over him this morning. Also, he knew there was a power struggle coming up, that it had been in the wind ever since he’d taken over here. But that was something he didn’t need, not right now, anyway.
“All right, Darcy,” he said, tempering his tone a little, “so we’ve both been having a bad time. You’re the second-in-command, I know that, and you believe you’re due some respect. Fine, but when things go wrong—and while we’re all running round being nice and respectful—I’m the one who carries the can! However you feel about it, I still have to run this place. And with this kind of job … who needs an excuse to be ill-mannered? That’s my story. So how come you got out of the wrong side of bed this morning?”
Clarke thought, What? When did he last call me Darcy? Is he actually trying to be reasonable, for Christ’s sake?
He allowed himself to be mollified, partly, and sat down. “The traffic was hell and some clown stole my parking space,” he finally answered. “That’s just for starters. I’m also expecting a call from Rhodes—from Trevor Jordan and Ken Layard—on that drugs job; customs and excise, and New Scotland Yard, will want to know how things are progressing. Add to that about a dozen unanswered requests from our minister responsible for esper support on unsolved major crimes, routine office admin, the Russian-embassy job I’m supposed to be supervising, and—”
“Well you can skip the embassy job for one,” Wellesley was quick to break in. “It’s routine, unimportant. A few extra Ivans in the country? A Russian delegation? So what? Christ, we’ve more on our plate than mundane snooping! But even without all that … yes, I can see you’re up to your neck.”
“Damn right,” said Clarke. “And sinking fast! So you see I wouldn’t think you rude—in fact I’d probably thank you—if you simply told me to piss off and get on with my job! Except I don’t suppose you’d have called me in here if there wasn’t something on your mind.”
“Well, no one could ever accuse you of not getting straight to the point, could they?” said Wellesley. And for once his round eyes were unblinking and less than hostile where they searched the other out. What he saw was this:
For all his weird talent, Clarke wasn’t much to look at. No one would suppose that he’d ever been the boss of anything, let alone head of the most secret branch of the British Secret Services. He was Mr. Nondescript, the world’s most average man. Well, maybe not that indistinct, but getting on that way, certainly. Middle height, mousey-haired, with something of a slight stoop and a small paunch—and middle-aged to boot—Clarke was just about middle of the range in every way. He had hazel eyes in a face not much given to laughter, an intense mouth, and generally downcast air. And the rest of him, including his wardrobe, was … medium.
But he had run E-Branch; he’d been around through some pretty hairy stuff; he’d known Harry Keogh.
“Keogh,” said Wellesley, the name coming off his lips like it tasted sour. “That’s what’s on my mind.”
“That”: as if Keogh were some kind of contraption or thing and not a person at all. Clarke raised an eyebrow. “Something new on Harry?” Wellesley had been monitoring Bettley’s reports himself—and keeping whatever they contained to himself.
“Maybe, and maybe not,” Wellesley answered. And rapidly, so as not to allow Clarke time to think: “Do you know what would happen if he got his talents back?”
“Sure,” and even though Clarke did have time to think, he said it anyway: “You’d be out of a job!”
Unexpectedly, Wellesley smiled. But it quickly faded from his face. “It’s always good to know where one stands,” he said. “So you think he’d take over E-Branch, right?”
“With his talents he could be E-Branch!” Clarke answered. And suddenly his face lit up. “Are you saying he’s got it back?”
For a moment Wellesley didn’t answer. Then: “You were his friend, weren’t you?”
“His friend?” Clarke frowned, chewed his bottom lip, began to look a little worried. No, he couldn’t honestly say he’d ever been a friend of Harry’s, or even that he’d wanted to be. There’d been a time, though, when he’d seen some of Harry’s friends in action—and he still had nightmares about it! But at last he answered, “We were … acquainted, that’s all. See, most of Harry’s real fri
ends were sort of, well, dead.” He gave a shrug. “That’s what qualified them, sort of.”
Wellesley stared harder at him. “And he actually did what these documents credit him with doing? Talked to the dead? Called corpses out of their graves? I mean, I’ll grant you telepathy: I’ve seen it working in our test cubicles, and in all the criminal cases the branch has dealt with in the last six months. Even your own peculiar talent, Darcy, which is well documented even if I haven’t yet seen it in action. But this?” He wrinkled his bulbous nose. “A damned … necromancer?”
Clarke shook his head. “A Necroscope. Harry wouldn’t like you to call him a necromancer. If you’ve been through his file, you’ll know about Dragosani. He was a necromancer. The dead were frightened of him; they loathed him. But they loved Harry. Yes, he talked to them, and called them up out of their graves when that was the only way to do what he had to do. But there was no pressure involved; just for them to know he was in dire straits was often sufficient.”
Wellesley was aware that Clarke’s voice had gone very quiet, and that the man himself was now quite pale. But still he pressed on. “You were there in Hartlepool at the end of the Bodescu affair. You actually saw this thing?”
Clarke shuddered. “I saw many … things. I smelled them, too …” He shook his head, as if to clear it of unbearable memories, and pulled himself together. “So what’s your problem, Norman? Okay, so during your time here we’ve mainly been dealing with mundane stuff. Well, that’s what we deal with, mainly. As for what Harry Keogh, Gormley, Kyle, and all the others came up against that time … just hope and pray it’s all done with, that’s all.”
Still Wellesley seemed unconvinced. “It couldn’t have been mass hypnotism, mass illusion, some kind of trick or fraud?”
Again Clarke shook his head. “I have this defence-mechanism thing, remember? You might be able to fool me but you can’t fool it. It only gets scared when there’s something there to be scared of. It doesn’t run away from harmless illusions, only from real dangers. But it sure as hell propels me away from dead people and undead people and things that would chew my fucking head off!”
