Vamphyri!

by Brian Lumley

Krakovitch heaved a sigh of relief. “I also,” he shrugged. “At least, no bad warnings.” Time was running out for the Russian and there were things he desperately needed to know, questions he must have answered. This Englishman might be the only one who could answer them. “So what we do about it?”

  Quint said, “Wait.” He got up, crossed to the bar, ordered fresh drinks. He also spoke to the bartender. Then he came back with drinks on a tray. “When we get the nod from the bloke behind the bar we pile out of here fast,” he said.

  “Eh?” Kyle was puzzled.

  “Taxi,” said Quint, smiling tightly. “I’ve ordered one. We’ll go to … the airport! Why not? On the way we can talk. At the airport we find a warm, comfortable place in the arrivals lounge and carry on talking. Even if our pal over there manages to follow us he won’t dare get too close. And if he does show up we’ll take a taxi somewhere else.”

  “Good!” said Krakovitch.

  Five minutes later their taxi came and all four exited at speed. Kyle was last out. Looking back, he saw the KGB man come slowly to his feet, saw his face twisting in anger and frustration.

  In the taxi they talked, and at the airport. They started talking at about twenty minutes before midnight and finished at 2:30 A.M. Kyle did most of it, aided by Quint, with Krakovitch listening intently and only breaking in here and there to confirm or ask for an explanation of something that had been said.

  Kyle started with these words:

  “Harry Keogh was our best. He had talents no one ever had before. A lot of them. He told me everything I’m going to tell you. If you believe what I tell you, we can help you with some big problems you’ve got in Russia and Romania. In helping you, we’ll also be helping ourselves, for we’ll learn by experience. Now then, do you want to know about Borowitz and how he died? About Max Batu and how he died? About the … the fossil men, who wrecked the Chateau Bronnitsy that night? I can tell you all of those things. More importantly, I can tell you about Dragosani …”

  And nearly three hours later he finished with these: “So, Dragosani was a vampire. And there are more of them. You have them, and we have them. We know where at least one of yours is. Or if not a vampire, something a vampire left behind. Which could be just as bad. Whichever, it has to be destroyed. We can help if you’ll let us. Call it what you like-détente, while we deal with a mutual threat? But if you don’t want our help, then you’ll have to do the job yourself. But we’d like to help, because that way we might learn something. Face it, Felix, this is bigger than East-West political squabbling. We’d work together if it was plague, wouldn’t we? Drug trafficking? Ships in trouble at sea? Of course we would. And I’m admitting right here and now, our own problem back in England might be bigger than we know. The more we learn from you, the better our chances. The better all of our chances …”

  Krakovitch had been silent for a long time. At last he said: “You want to come to USSR with me and … put this thing down?”

  “Not the USSR—” said Quint. “Romania. That’s still your territory.”

  “The two of you? Both the leader, and a high-ranking member of your E-Branch? Is that not to be the big risks?”

  Kyle shook his head. “Not from you. At least I don’t think so. Anyway, we all have to start trusting someone somewhere. We’ve already started, so why not go all the way?”

  Krakovitch nodded. “And afterwards, I perhaps come with you? See what kind problem you have?”

  “If you wish.”

  Krakovitch pondered it. “You tell me a lot,” he said. “And you solve some big problems for me, maybe. But you not say where exactly this thing in Romania.”

  “If you want to go it alone,” said Kyle, “I will tell you. Not exactly, for I don’t know exactly, but close enough that you’ll be able to find it. Working together we might do it a lot faster, that’s all.”

  “Also,” Krakovitch was still thinking it out, “you not say how you knowing all of this. Hard to accept all I hear without I know how you know.”

  “Harry Keogh told me,” said Kyle.

  “Keogh is dead a long time now,” said Krakovitch.

  “Yes,” Quint cut in, “but he told us everything right up to the time he died.

  “Ah?” Krakovitch drew breath sharply. “He was that good? Such talent in a telepath must be … very rare.”

  “Unique!” said Kyle.

  “And your lot killed him!” Quint accused.

  Krakovitch quickly turned to him. “Dragosani killed him. And he killed Dragosani—almost.”

  It was Kyle’s turn to gasp. “Almost? Are you saying that—?”

  Krakovitch held up a hand. “I finish the job Keogh started,” he said. “I tell you about that. But first: you say Keogh in contact until the end?”

  Kyle wanted to say, he still is! But that was a secret best kept. “Yes,” he answered.

  “Then you can describe what happened that night?”

  “In detail,” said Kyle. “Would that satisfy you that the rest of what I’ve said is the truth?”

  Krakovitch slowly nodded.

  “They came out of the night and the falling snow,” Kyle began. “Zombies, men dead for four hundred years, and Harry their leader. Bullets couldn’t stop them, for they were already dead. Cut them down with machine-gun fire, and the bits kept right on coming. They got into your defensive positions, your pillboxes. They pulled the pins on grenades, fought with their old rusty weapons, their swords and axes. They were Tartars, fearless, and made more fearless by the fact that they couldn’t die twice. Keogh wasn’t just a telepath; amongst his other talents, he could also teleport! He did—right into Dragosani’s control room. He took a couple of his Tartars with him. That was where he and Dragosani had it out, while in the rest of the Chateau—”

  “—In the rest of the Château,” Krakovitch took up the story, his face deathly white, “it was … hell! I was there. I lived through it. A few others with me. The rest died—horribly! Keogh was … some kind of monster. He could call up the dead!”

  “Not as big a monster as Dragosani,” said Kyle. “But you were going to tell me what happened after Keogh died. How you finished off the job he started. What did you mean by that?”

  “Dragosani was a vampire,” Krakovitch nodded, almost to himself. “Yes, you are right, of course.” He got a grip on himself. “Look, Sergei here was with me when we clean up what was left of Dragosani. Let me show you what happen when I remind him about that—and when I tell to him there are more of them.” He turned to his silent companion, spoke to him rapidly in Russian.

  They were sitting at a scruffy bar lit by flickering neon in the airport’s almost deserted night arrivals lounge. The barman had gone off duty two hours earlier and their glasses had stood empty ever since. Gulharov’s reaction to what Krakovitch told him was immediate and vehement. He went white and drew back from his boss, almost falling from his barstool. And as Krakovitch finished speaking, so he slammed his empty beer glass down on the bar.

  “Nyet, nyet!” he gasped his denial, his face working with a strange mixture of fury and loathing. And then, his voice gradually rising and growing shrill, he began a diatribe in Russian which would soon attract attention.

  Krakovitch gripped his arm and shook him, and Gulharov’s jabbering faded into silence. “Now I ask him if we accepting your help,” Krakovitch informed. He spoke to the younger man again, and this time Gulharov nodded twice, rapidly, and his color began to return to normal.

  “Da, da!” he gasped emphatically. His throat made a dry rattle as he added something else, unintelligible to the two Englishmen.

  Krakovitch smiled humourlessly. “He says we should accept all the help we can get,” he translated. “Because we have to kill these things—finish them! And I agreeing with him …” Then he told these strangest of allies all that had happened at the Chateau Bronnitsy after Harry Keogh’s war.

  When he’d finished there was a long silence, broken at last by Quint. “We’re in agreement, then? Th
at we’ll act together on this?”

  Krakovitch nodded. He shrugged, said simply, “No alternative. And no time to waste.”

  Quint turned to Kyle. “But how do we go about it?”

  “As far as possible,” Kyle answered, “we go the straightforward way. We get it all right up front, without any of the usual—” The airport tannoy broke in on him, echoing tinnily as some sleepy, unseen announcer requested in English that a Mr. A. Kyle please take a telephone call at the reception desk.

  Krakovitch’s face froze. Who would know that Kyle was here?

  Kyle stood up, shrugged apologetically. This was very embarrassing. It could only be “Brown,” and how to explain that to Krakovitch? Quint, on the other hand, was his usual ready-for-anything self. Calmly he said to Krakovitch, “Well, you have your little bloodhound following you about. And now it would seem that we have one too.”

  Krakovitch gave a curt, sour nod. And with an edge of sarcasm, echoing Kyle, he said, “Without any of the usual, eh? Did you know about this?”

  “It’s none of our doing,” Quint wasn’t exactly truthful. “We’re in the same boat as you.”

  On Krakovitch’s orders, Gulharov accompanied Kyle to the reception-cum-enquiries desk, leaving Quint and Krakovitch alone together. “Maybe this is all in our favour,” said Quint.

  “Eh?” Krakovitch had turned sour again. “We are followed, spied upon, overheard, bugged, and you say is favourable?”

  “I meant you and Kyle both having shadows,” Quint explained. “It evens things up. And maybe we can cancel out one with the other.”

  Krakovitch was alarmed. “I not being party to violence! Anything happen to that KGB dog, is possible I get the troubles.”

  “But if we could arrange for him to be, er, detained for a day or two? I mean, unharmed, you understand—completely unharmed—just detained … ?”

  “I not know …”

  “To give you time to clear our route into Romania. You know, visas, etcetera? With a bit of luck we’ll be finished there in just a day or two.”

  Krakovitch slowly nodded. “Maybe—but positive guarantee, no dirty work. He is KGB—you say—but if true, then he’s Russian too. And I am Russian. If he vanish …”

  Quint shook his head, grasped the other’s thin elbow. “They both vanish!” he said. “But only for a few days. Then we’ll be out of here and getting on with the job.”

  Again Krakovitch gave his slow nod. “Maybe—if it can be arranged safely.”

  Kyle and Gulharov returned. Kyle was careful. “That was somebody called Brown,” he said. “He’s been watching us, apparently.” He looked at Krakovitch. “He says your KGB tail has traced us and is on his way here. By the way, this KGB fellow is well known—his name is Theo Dolgikh.”

  Krakovitch shook his head, shrugged, looked mystified. “I never heard of him.”

  “Did you get Brown’s number?” Quint was eager. “I mean can we contact him again?”

  Kyle raised his eyebrows. “Actually, yes,” he nodded. “He said that if things were getting sticky, he might be able to help. Why do you ask?”

  Quint grinned tightly, said to Krakovitch, “Comrade, it might be a good idea if you were to listen carefully. Since you’re a little concerned about this, you can start working on an alibi. For from this point forward you’re hand in hand with the enemy. Your only consolation is that you’ll be working against a greater enemy.” The grin left his face, and deadly serious he said, “OK, here’s what I suggest …”

  On Saturday morning at 8:30 Kyle phoned Krakovitch at his and Gulharov’s hotel. The latter answered the call, grunted, fetched Krakovitch who came grumbling to the phone. He was just out of bed, could Kyle call later? While this brief show was going on, downstairs in the Genovese’s lobby, Quint was talking to Brown. At 9:15 Kyle phoned Krakovitch again and arranged a second meeting: they would meet outside Frankie’s Franchise in an hour’s time and go on from there.

  There was nothing new in this arrangement; it was part of the plan worked out the night before: Kyle suspected that the phone in his room was now bugged and he simply wanted to give Theo Dolgikh plenty of advance notice. If Kyle’s phone wasn’t bugged, then Krakovitch’s surely was, which could only work out the same way. Anyway, the psychic sixth senses of both Kyle and Quint were playing up a little, which told them that something was brewing.

  Sure enough, when they left the Genovese just before 10:00 A.M. and headed for the docks, they had a tail. Dolgikh was keeping well back, but it could only be him. Kyle and Quint had to admire his tenacity, for despite his rough night he was still very much the master-spy; now his attire was that of the shipyard worker, dark-blue coveralls and a heavy bag of tools, and the blue-black stubble of twenty-four hours’ growth on his round, intense face.

  “He must have a hell of a wardrobe, this lad,” said Kyle as he and Quint approached the narrow, still slumbering streets of Genoa’s dockland. “I’d hate to have to carry his luggage!”

  Quint shook his head. “No,” he answered, “I shouldn’t think so. They’ll probably have a safe house here and there’s bound to be one of their ships in the harbor. Whichever, when he requires a change of clothing, they’ll be the ones who’ll fix it for him.”

  Kyle squinted at him out of the corner of his eye. “You know,” he said. “I’m sure you’d have been better off in MI5. You have a bent for it.”

  “It might make an interesting hobby.” Quint grinned. “Mundane spying, that is—but I’m happy where I am. The real talent’s with INTESP. Now if our man Dolgikh were an esper, then we could be in real trouble.”

  Kyle gave his companion a sharp glance, then relaxed. “But he isn’t or we’d have spotted him without Brown’s assistance. No, he’s simply one of their surveillance types, and pretty good at his job. I’ve been thinking of him as something big, but this is probably the biggest assignment he’s ever had.”

  “Which,” Quint grimly added, “with any luck, is just about to terminate a mite ingloriously. But I wouldn’t be too sure he’s small fry, if I were you. After all, he was big enough to show up on Brown’s firm’s computer.”

  Carl Quint was right: Theo Dolgikh was not small fry, not in any sense of the word. Indeed, it was a measure of Yuri Andropov’s “respect” for the Soviet E-Branch that he’d put Dolgikh on the job. For Leonid Brezhnev would likely give Andropov a hard time if Krakovitch were to report to him that the KGB were interfering again.

  Dolgikh was in his early thirties, a native Siberian bred of a long line of Komsomol lumberjacks. He was the complete communist for whom little else existed but Party and State. He had trained, and later done some teaching in Berlin, Bulgaria, Palestine and Libya. He was an expert in weapons (especially Western Bloc weapons), also in terrorism, sabotage, interrogation and surveillance; as well as Russian, he could speak a broken Italian, decent German and English. But his real forte—indeed his penchant—lay in the field of murder. For Theo Dolgikh was a cold-blooded killer.

  Because of his compressed build, Dolgikh might seem at a distance short and stubby. In fact he was five-ten and weighed in at almost sixteen stone. Heavy-boned, heavy-jowled under a moon face that supported a mop of uneven jet-black hair, Dolgikh was “heavy” in all departments. His Japanese instructor at the KGB School of Martial Arts in Moscow used to say:

  “Comrade, you are too heavy for this game, Because of your bulk, you lack speed and agility. Sumo wrestling would be more your style. On the other hand, very little of your weight is fat, and muscle is most useful. Since teaching you the disciplines of self-defence is probably a great waste of time, I shall therefore concentrate my instruction on ways of killing, for which I am assured you are not only physically but mentally best suited.”

  Now, closing in on his quarry as they entered the winding, labyrinthine streets and alleys close to the docks, Dolgikh felt his blood rising and wished this were that sort of job. After last night’s runaround he could happily murder this pair! And it would be so easy. Th
ey seemed utterly obsessed with this most seamy side of the city.

  Thirty yards ahead of him, Kyle and Quint made a sudden sharp turn in a cobbled alley where the buildings loomed high, shutting out the light. Dolgikh put on a little speed, arrived at the alley’s entrance, passed from gray drizzle into a steamy gloom where the refuse of four or five days stood uncollected. In many places overhead the opposing buildings were arched over. Following a frantic Friday night, this district wasn’t even awake yet. If Dolgikh had been after the lives of these two, this would have been the place to do it.

  Footsteps echoed back to him. The Russian agent narrowed small round eyes to gaze through the gloom of the alley at a pair of shadowy figures as they rounded a bend. He paused for a second, then started after them. But, sensing movement close by, a silent presence, he at once skidded to a halt.

  From the shadows of a recessed doorway a gravelly voice said, “Hello, Theo. You don’t know me, but I know you!”

  Dolgikh’s Japanese instructor had been right: he wasn’t fast enough. At times like this his bulk got in the way. Gritting his teeth in anticipation of the dull smack of the suspected cosh and its pain, or maybe the blue glint of a silencer on the end of a gun barrel, he whirled towards the voice in the darkness, hurled his heavy bag of tools. A tall, shadowy figure caught the bag full in the chest, grunted, and lobbed it aside to clatter on the cobbles. Dolgikh’s eyes were getting used to the gloom. It was still dark, but he’d seen no sign of a weapon. This was just the way he liked it.

  Head down, like a human torpedo, he hurled himself into the doorway’s shadows.

  “Mr. Brown” hit him twice, two expertly delivered blows, not calculated to kill but simply stun. And to be doubly sure, before Dolgikh could fall, Brown slammed the Russian’s head into the stout panels of the door, splintering one of them.

  A moment later he stepped out of the shadows into the alley, glanced this way and that, satisfied himself that all was well. Just the drip of rain and the stinking vapours from the garbage. And now there was this extra heap of garbage. Brown grinned hugely, toed Dolgikh’s crumpled figure.