Vamphyri!

by Brian Lumley

  This was Dolgikh’s best chance, the moment the Russian agent had been waiting for. He checked his gun again, took off the safety and reholstered it, then quickly scrambled up the scree slope on his left and into a straggling stand of pines where the trees marched at the foot of the gaunt cliffs. If he used his cover to its best advantage, he could stay out of sight until the last minute. And so, moving with some agility beneath the trees, he quickly closed the distance between him and his intended victims as they approached the gutted ruins.

  In order to maintain his cover in this way, Dolgikh occasionally had to lose sight of his quarry, but finally he reached the furthest extent of the cliff-hugging trees and was forced back down into the lesser undergrowth of the old track. From here the group of men at the ancient castle’s walls were plainly visible, and if they should happen to look in Dolgikh’s direction, they might also see him. But no, they stood silent one hundred yards away, lost in their own thoughts as they gazed upon that which they intended to destroy. All three of them were deep in thought.

  Three? Dolgikh squinted, frowned, glanced quickly all about. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Presumably the fourth man—that young fool, that traitor Gulharov—had entered through the broken exterior wall of the ruins and so passed out of sight. Whichever, Dolgikh knew that he now had all four men trapped. There was no way out at their end of the defile, and in any case they had to come back here to detonate the charges. Dolgikh’s leering expression changed, turned into a grim smile. An especially sadistic thought had just occurred to him.

  His original plan had been simple: surprise them, tell them he was investigating them for the KGB, have them tie each other up—finally hurl them one at a time from the castle’s broken rim. It was a hell of a long way down. He’d make sure that part of the rotten wall went with them, to make it more convincing. Then, at a safe place, he’d climb down, make his way back to them and carefully remove their bindings. An “accident,” as simple as that. There’d be no escape for them: the nylon cord in Dolgikh’s pocket had a 200 lb. breaking strain! They probably wouldn’t even be found for weeks, months, maybe never.

  But Dolgikh was something of a vampire in his own right, except he fed on fear. Yes, and now he saw the opportunity to give his plan an elaborate twist. A little extra something for his own amusement.

  He quickly kneeled, used his strong square teeth to strip the cable down to its copper cores, and connected up the firing box. Then, still on one knee, he called out loudly up the trail: “Gentlemen!”

  The three turned, saw him. Quint and Krakovitch recognized him at once, looked stunned.

  “Now what are we having here?” he laughed, holding up the box for them to see. “See? Someone is forgetting to make the connections—but I have done it for him!” He put down the box and drew up the plunger.

  “For God’s sake, be careful with that!” Carl Quint threw up his arms in warning, stumbled out of the ruins.

  “Stay right where you are, Mr. Quint,” Dolgikh shouted. And in Russian: “Krakovitch, you and that stupid ox of a foreman come to me. And no tricks, or I blow your English friend and Gulharov to bits!” He gave the T-shaped handle two savage right-hand twists. The box was now armed; only depress the plunger, and—

  “Dolgikh, are you mad?” Krakovitch called back. “I’m here on official business. The Party Leader himself—”

  “—Is a mumbling old fool!” Dolgikh finished for him. “As are you. And you’ll be a dead fool if you don’t do exactly as I say. Do it now, and bring that lumbering engineer with you. Quint, Mr. English mind-spy, you stay right there.” He stood up, took out his gun and the nylon cord. Krakovitch and Volkonsky had put up their hands in the air, were slowly leaving the area of the ruins.

  In the next split second Dolgikh sensed that something was wrong. He felt the tug of hot metal at his sleeve before he heard the crack of Sergei Gulharov’s automatic. For when the others had gone forward to the ruins, Gulharov had stepped into a clump of bushes to answer a call of nature. He had seen and heard everything.

  “Put up your gun!” he now yelled, coming at Dolgikh at a run. “The next shot goes in your belly!”

  Gulharov had been trained, but not nearly as thoroughly as Theo Dolgikh, and he lacked the agent’s killer instinct. Dolgikh fell to his knees again, straightened his gun arm toward Gulharov, aimed and squeezed the trigger of his weapon. Gulharov was nearly on him. He, too, had fired again. His shot went inches wide, but Dolgikh’s was right on target. His snub-nosed bullet blew away half of Gulharov’s head. Gulharov, dead on the instant, jerked to a halt, then took another stumbling step forward and crashed over like a felled tree—directly on to the firing box and its extended plunger!

  Dolgikh hurled himself flat, felt a hot wind blow on him as hell opened up just one hundred yards away. Deafening sound blasted his ears, left them ringing with wild peals. He didn’t see the actual explosion, or simultaneous series of explosions, but as the spray of soil and pebbles subsided and the earth stopped shaking he looked up—and then he did see the result. On the far side of the gorge the ruins of Faethor’s castle stood much as before, but on this side they had been reduced to so much rubble.

  Craters smoked where the castle’s roots were bedded in the mountain. A landslide of shale and fractured rock was still tumbling from the cliff onto the wide, pitted ledge, burying deep the last traces of whatever secrets had been there. And of Krakovitch. Quint and Volkonsky—

  Nothing whatsoever. Flesh isn’t nearly as strong as rock …

  Dolgikh stood up, brushed himself down, heaved Gulharov’s corpse off the detonating box. he grabbed Gulharov’s legs and dragged his body to the smouldering ruins, then toppled him from the cliff. An “accident,” a genuine accident.

  On his way back down the track, the KGB man rolled up what was left of the cable; he also collected Gulharov’s gun and the box. Half-way down the ledge where it hugged the cliff he threw all of these things into the dark gurgling ravine. It was finished now, all of it. Before he got back to Moscow he would have thought up an excuse, a reason why Gerenko’s supposed “weapon,” whatever it had been, no longer existed. That was a pity.

  But on the other hand—Dolgikh congratulated himself that at least half of his mission had been accomplished successfully. And very satisfactorily …

  8:00 P.M., at the Chateau Bronnitsy.

  Ivan Gerenko lay in a shallow sleep on a cot in his inner office. Down below, in the sterility of the brain-washing laboratory, Alec Kyle also lay asleep. His body, anyway. But since there was no longer a mind in there, it was hardly Kyle any longer. Mentally, he had been drained to less than a husk. The information this had released to Zek Föener had been staggering. This Harry Keogh, if he had still lived, would have been an awesome enemy. But trapped in the brain of his own child, he was no longer a problem. Later, maybe, when (and if) the child had grown into a man …

  As for INTESP: Föener was now privy to that entire organization’s machinery. Nothing remained secret. Kyle had been the controller, and what he had known Zek Föener was heir to. Which was why, as the technicians dismantled their instruments and left Kyle’s body naked and drained even of instinct, she hurried to report something of her findings—and one thing in particular—to Ivan Gerenko.

  Zekintha Föener’s father was East German. Her mother had been Greek, from Zakinthos in the Ionian Sea. When her mother died, Zek had gone to her father in Posen, to the university where he worked in parapsychology. Her psychic ability, which he had always suspected in her when she was a child, had become immediately apparent to him. He had reported the fact of her telepathic talent to the College of Parapsychological Studies on Brasov Prospekt in Moscow, and had been summoned to attend with Zek so that she could be tested. That was how she had come to E-Branch, where she had rapidly made herself invaluable.

  Föener was five-nine, slim, blonde and blue-eyed. Her hair shone and bounced on her shoulders when she walked. Her Chateau uniform fitted her like a glove, accentuati
ng the delicate curves of her figure. She climbed the stone stairs to Krakovitch’s (no, she corrected herself, to Gerenko’s) office, entered the anteroom and knocked firmly on the closed inner door.

  Gerenko heard her knock, forced himself awake and struggled to sit up. In his shrivelled frame he tired easily, slept often but poorly. Sleep was one way of prolonging a life which doctors had told him would be short. It was the ultimate irony: men could not kill him, but his own frailty surely would. At only thirty-seven he already looked sixty, a shrunken monkey of a man. But still a man.

  “Come in,” he wheezed, as he sucked air into his fragile lungs.

  Outside the door, while Gerenko had come more surely awake, Zek Föener had broken a trust. It was an unwritten rule at the Chateau that telepaths would not deliberately spy on the minds of their colleagues. That was all very well and only decent in normal conditions, normal circumstances. But on this occasion there were gross abnormalities, things which Föener must track down to her satisfaction.

  For one, the way Gerenko had literally taken over Krakovitch’s job. It wasn’t as if he stood in for him at all, but had in fact replaced him—permanently! Föener had liked Krakovitch; from Kyle she had learned about Theo Dolgikh’s surveillance activities in Genoa; Kyle and Krakovitch had been working together on—

  “Come in!” Gerenko repeated, breaking her chain of thought, but not before everything had fallen together. Gerenko’s ambition burned bright in her mind, bright and ugly. And his intention, to use those … those Things which Krakovitch was quite rightly bent on destroying …

  She drew air deeply and entered the office, staring at Gerenko where he lay in the dark on his cot, propped up on one elbow.

  He put on a bedside lamp and blinked as his weak eyes accustomed themselves. “Yes? What is it, Zek?”

  “Where’s Theo Dolgikh?” She waded straight in. No preliminaries, no formalities.

  “What?” He blinked at her. “Is something wrong, Zek?”

  “Many things, perhaps. I said—”

  “I heard what you said,” he snapped. “And what has it to do with you where Dolgikh is?”

  “I saw him for the first time, with you, on the morning that Felix Krakovitch left for Italy—after he left,” she answered. “Following which he was absent until he brought Alec Kyle back here. But Kyle wasn’t working against us. He was working with Krakovitch. For the good of the world.”

  Gerenko swung his brittle legs carefully off the cot onto the floor. “He should only have been working for the good of the USSR,” he said.

  “Like you?” she came back at once, her voice sharp as broken glass. “I know now what they were doing, Comrade. Something that had to be done, for safety and sanity. Not for themselves, but for mankind.”

  Gerenko eased himself to his feet. He wore child’s pyjamas, looked frail as a twig as he made for his great desk. “Are you accusing me, Zek?”

  “Yes!” She was relentless, furious. “Kyle was our opponent, but he personally had not declared war on us. We aren’t at war, Comrade. And we’ve murdered him. No, you have murdered him—to foster your own ambitions!”

  Gerenko climbed into his chair, put on a desk lamp and aimed its light at her. He steepled his hands in front of him, shook his head almost sadly. “You accuse me? And yet you were party to it. You drained his mind.”

  “I did not!” She came forward. Her face was working, full of anger. ‘I merely read his thoughts as they flooded out of him. Your technicians drained him.”

  Unbelievably, Gerenko chuckled. “Mechanical necromancy, yes.”

  She slammed her hand flat down on the desk top. “But he wasn’t dead!”

  Gerenko’s shrivelled lips curled into a sneer. “He is now, or as good as …”

  “Krakovitch is loyal, and he’s Russian.” She wouldn’t be stopped. “And yet you’ll murder him too. And that really would be murder! You must be mad!” And in that she had hit upon the truth. For Gerenko’s warps weren’t only in his body.

  “That—is—enough!” he snarled. “Now you listen to me, Comrade. You speak of my ambition. But if I grow strong, Russia herself grows that much stronger. Yes, for we are one and the same. You? You’ve not been Russian long enough to know that. This country’s strength lies in its people! Krakovitch was weak, and—”

  “Was?” Her arms trembled where she leaned forward, knuckles white on the edge of his desk.

  He suddenly felt that she had grown very dangerous. He would make one last effort. “Listen, Zek. The Party Leader is a weak old man. He can’t go on much longer. The next leader, however—”

  “Andropov?” Her eyes went wide. “I can read it in your mind, Comrade. Is that how it will be? That KGB thug? The man you already call your master!”

  Gerenko’s faded eyes suddenly narrowed, their slits blazing with his own anger. “When Brezhnev is gone—”

  “But he isn’t, not yet!” She was shouting now. “And when he learns of this …”

  That was an error, a bad one. Even Brezhnev couldn’t harm Gerenko, not personally, not physically. But he could have it done for him—at a distance. He could have Gerenko’s state flat in Moscow booby-trapped. Once a booby-trap is set, no man’s hand is involved. From then on the thing is entirely automatic. Or Gerenko could wake up one morning and find himself behind bars—and then they could forget to feed him! His talent did have certain limitations.

  He stood up. In his child’s hand was an automatic, taken from a drawer in the desk. His voice was a whisper. “Now you will listen to me,” he said, “and I will tell you exactly how it is going to be. First, you won’t speak of this matter or even mention it again, not to anyone. You’ve been sworn to secrecy here at the Chateau. Break your trust and I’ll break you! Second: you say we are not at war. But you have a short memory. The British espers declared war against E-Branch nine months ago. And they came close to destroying the organization utterly! You were new here then; you were away somewhere, holidaying with your father. You saw nothing of it. But let me tell you that if this Harry Keogh of theirs were still alive …” He paused for breath, and Föener bit her tongue to keep from telling him the truth: that indeed Harry Keogh was still alive, however helpless.

  “Third,” he finally continued, “I could kill you now—on the spot, shoot you dead—and no one would even question me about it. If they did, I would say that I had had my suspicions about you for a long time. I would tell them that your work had driven you mad, and that you threatened me, threatened E-Branch. You are quite correct, Zek, the Party Leader puts a deal of faith in the branch. He is fond of it. Under old Gregor Borowitz it served him well. What, a woman, mad, running around loose here, threatening irreparable damage? Of course I should shoot her! And I will—if you don’t mark each word I say most carefully. Do you think anyone would believe your accusation? Where’s the proof? In your head? In your addled head! Oh, they just might believe, I’ll grant you that—but what if they didn’t? And would I sit still and simply let you have it all your own way? Would Theo Dolgikh sit still for that? You have an easy time here, Zek. Ah, but there are other jobs in other places for a strong young woman in the USSR. After your—rehabilitation?—doubtless they’d find you one …” Again he paused, put away the gun. He saw that he had made his point.

  “Now get out of here, but don’t leave the Château. I want a report on everything you learned from Kyle. Everything. The initial report may be brief, an outline. I’ll have that by midday tomorrow. The final report will be detailed down to the last minutia. Do you understand?”

  She stood looking at him, bit her lip.

  “Well?”

  Finally, she nodded blinked away tears of frustration, turned on her heel. On her way out, he softly said, “Zek,” and she paused. But she didn’t face him. “Zek, you have a great future. Remember that. And really, that’s the only choice you have. A great future—or none at all.”

  Then she left and closed the door behind her.

  She went to her own s
mall suite of rooms, the austere quarters she used when she was not on duty, and threw herself down on her bed. To hell with his report. She’d do it in her own time, if she did it at all. For what use would she be to Gerenko once he knew what she knew?

  After a little while she managed to compose herself and tried to sleep. But though she was weary to death, she tried in vain …

  Chapter Sixteen

  WEDNESDAY, 11:45 P.M.—FIFTEEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT IN Hartlepool on England’s north-east coast—and a thin drizzling rain turning the empty streets shiny black. The last bus for the colliery villages along the coast had left the town half an hour ago; the pubs and cinemas had all turned out; grey cats slinked in the alleys and a last handful of people headed for their homes on a night when it simply wasn’t worth being out.

  But in a certain house on the Blackhall Road there was a muted measure of activity. In the garret flat, Brenda Keogh had fed her baby son and put him down for the night and was now preparing herself for bed. In the hitherto empty first floor flat, Darcy Clarke and Guy Roberts sat in near-darkness, Roberts nodding off to sleep and Clarke listening with an anxious awareness to the timbers of the old house creaking as they settled for the night. Downstairs in the ground floor flat, its permanent “residents,” two Special Branch men, were playing cards while a uniformed policeman made coffee and looked on. In the entrance hall a second uniformed officer kept his vigil just inside the door, smoking a slightly damp and ill-made cigarette while he sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair and wondered for the tenth time just what he was doing here.

  To the Special Branch men it was old hat: they were here for the protection of the girl in the garret flat. She didn’t know it, but they weren’t just good neighbours, they were her minders. Hers and little Harry’s. They’d looked after her for the better part of a year, and in all of that time no one had so much as blinked at her; theirs must be the cushiest, best paid number in the entire length and breadth of the security business! As for the two uniformed men: they were on overtime, kept over from the middle shift to do “special” duties. They should have gone off home at 10:00 P.M., but it appeared there was this bloody maniac on the loose, and the girl upstairs was thought to be one of his targets. That was all they’d been told. All very mysterious.