by Brian Lumley
He had known it absolutely, for Shukshin, too, was gifted. He was a ‘spotter’: his talent lay in the instant recognition of another ESP-endowed person.
As to who the youth could be, the significance of his appearing here at this time: there were several possibilities. It could be coincidence, an accidental meeting; this would not be the first time nor even the fiftieth that Shukshin had stumbled across such a person. But ESP came in a range of strengths and colours, and this one had been strong indeed and scarlet — a red-tinged cloud in Shukshin’s mind. Or his presence here could be deliberate: he may have been sent here. The British branch must also have its spotters, and Shukshin may well have been detected and trailed. In the light of his recent trips to London — and what he had subsequently discovered of the British ESPionage branch — this theory was by no means far-fetched and sent something of a panic surging through him. Panic and more than panic. There was something else in Shukshin now, something he must control. Something which made his eyes narrow as he thought how easily he might have swerved his car to crush the stranger against the parapet wall. The emotion was hatred, the deep and abiding hatred he felt towards all ESPers.
His rage slowly subsided and he looked at his hands. The knuckles of his fingers were white where he gripped the edges of his desk. He forced himself to release his grip and sat back, breathing deeply. It was always this way, but he had learned how to control it — almost. But if only he had not sent that letter to Borowitz. That might have been a big mistake. Perhaps he should have offered his services direct to the British instead; perhaps he still should, and without delay. Before they could investigate him any further…
Such were his thoughts when the doorbell rang, because they were guilty thoughts he gave a violent start.
Shukshin’s study was downstairs in a room to the rear of the house that opened through patio windows into its own courtyard. Now he stood up from his desk, passed from bright spring sunshine into gloom as he hurried through the ground floor rooms and corridors towards the front, and midway started again as the doorbell once more tore at his nerve-endings.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’ he called ahead — but he slowed down and came to a halt on the interior threshold of the long, glazed porch. Out there beyond the frosted glass stood a well-muffled figure which Shukshin knew at once: it was that of the young man from the bridge.
Shukshin knew it in two ways, one of which was simple observation and could be in error. The other way was more certain, as positive as a fingerprint: he felt again the surge of rare energy-fields and the heat of his instinctive hatred for all such ESP-talented men. Again a tide of panic and passion rose up in him, which he forcibly put down before moving to the door. Well, he had wondered about the stranger, hadn’t he? Now it seemed that he was not to be kept in suspense. One way or the other he would soon discover what was going on here.
He opened the door…
‘How do you do,’ said Harry Keogh, smiling and extending his hand. ‘You must be Viktor Shukshin, and I believe you give private tuition in German and Russian?’
Shukshin did not take Keogh’s hand but simply stood and stared at him. For his own part, Harry stared back. And for all that he continued to smile, still his flesh crawled in the knowledge that he now stood face to face with his mother’s murderer. He put the thought aside; for the moment it was sufficient to just look at the other and absorb what he could of this stranger who he intended to destroy.
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 recognise 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 recognise that this is how it’s spoken around Ham burg.’ 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 when 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 realised 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
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 Chateau 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 chateau 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 chateau. And this, too, was precisely to Borowitz’s specifications. They were in fact defensive
positions, machine-gun posts, completely functional and fully efficient, giving them a total arc of fire to cover the entire open area between the chateau 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 wi
th 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 chateau 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 chateau 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 chateau 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.
