by Brian Lumley
‘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 right 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 happen 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 machinegun 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 Château —‘
‘— 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 of 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 colour 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 Château 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? That 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 a
gain 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. 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 Geriovese 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 harbour. 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 M15. 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 EBranch 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, heavjowled 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 run-around he could happily murder this pair! And it would be so easy. They seemed utterly obsessed with this most seamy side of the city.
Thirty yards ahead of him, Kyle and Quint made a sudden sharp turn into 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 grey 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.
That was always the way of it with big men: they tended to assume that they were the biggest, the toughest. But that wasn’t always the case. Brown was about the same weight as Dolgikh, but he was three inches taller and five years younger. Ex-SAS, his training had been none too gentle. In fact, if he hadn’t developed something of a kink in his mental make-up, he’d probably still be with the SAS.
He grinned again, then hunched his shoulders and shrank down into his raincoat. Hands thrust deep into his pockets, he hurried to fetch his car.
Chapter Eight
That same Saturday at noon, Yulian Bodescu decided he’d had enough of his ‘uncle’ George Lake. Rather, he decided that the time had come to use Lake in his search for knowledge. His specific aim was simple: he desired to know how a vampire could be killed, how one of the undead might be made more surely dead — forever, never to return — and in this way learn how best to protect himself from any such demise.
They could die by fire, certainly, he knew that much already. But what about the other methods? Those methods specified in the so-called ‘fictions’. George would provide the ideal test material. Better far than the Other, which was more a dull tumour than a healthy intelligence.
When a vampire comes back from the dead, the thought suddenly struck Yulian, he comes back stronger!
He had put something into Georgina, Anne and Helen, something of himself. But he had not killed them. Now they were his. George he had killed, or at least caused to die, and George was not his. He obeyed him, yes, or had until now. But for how much longer? Now that George was over the initial shock, he was growing strong. And hungry!
Twice during the night, striving restlessly for sleep, Yulian
had sprung awake feeling oppressed, menaced. And twice he had sensed Lake’s skulking, furtive movements down in the cellars. The man prowled down there in the darkness, his body aching, thoughts seething. And a monstrous thirst was on him.
He had taken from the woman, from the veins of his own wife, but her blood had not been much to his taste. Oh, blood is blood — it would sustain him — but it was not the blood he craved. That blood flowed only in Yulian. And Yulian knew it. Which was the other reason he had determined to kill George. He would kill him before he himself was killed (for sooner or later George would certainly try it), and before George could drain Anne; oh yes, for if not there’d soon be two of them to deal with! It was like a plague, and Yulian thrilled to the thought that he was the source, the carrier.
And then there was a third reason why Lake must die. Somewhere out there — in the sunlight, in the woods and fields, lanes and villages — somewhere there were people who watched the house even now. Yulian’s senses, his vampire powers, were weaker by day, but still he could feel the presence of the silent watchers. They were there, and he feared them. A little.
That man last night, for instance. Yulian had sent VIad to fetch him, but Viad had failed. Who had he been, that man? And why did he watch? Perhaps George’s return had not gone entirely unnoticed. Was it possible that someone had seen him emerge from his grave? No, Yulian doubted that; the police, in their innocence, would have mentioned it. Or then again, perhaps the police had not been satisfied with his reaction that day they came here with their report of vile grave-robbing.
And George with his bloodlust: what if he should break out one night? He was a vampire now, George, and growing stronger. How long could VIad contain him? No, better far if George died. Gone without a trace, leaving no shred of evidence, no jot of proof of the evil at work here. He would die a vampire’s death this time, from which there’d be no returning.
At the back of the house a great stone chimney rose from earth to sky, buttressed at the bottom and flaring up through the gable end. Its source was a huge iron furnace in the cellars, a relic of older generations. Though the house was centrally heated now, a heap of dusty coke still lay in the furnace room down there, nesting place for mice and spiders. Twice, when the winters had been especially cold, Yulian had stoked up the fire and watched the iron flue glow red where its fat cylindrical conduit joined the furnace to the chimney’s firebrick base. It had served to heat the back of the house admirably. Now he would go down there and sweat a little and fire the thing up again, albeit for a different purpose. But his sweat would be well worth the effort.
