Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “You don’t say,” I shot back sharply. I wasn’t at all sure that the translation potion could handle the level of irony that I had injected into the phrase. Few languages can comfortably convey the same level of archness as English, a fact that the British make very good use of at every opportunity. “That’s one hell of an upgrade.”

  That was the truth in anyone’s language. Four of the almost-legendary giant spiders of gemstone quality roaming around in your wine cellars was roughly the same as upgrading from a market stall mp3 player to the entire London Philharmonic Orchestra.

  With guest soloist.

  That was the kind of upgrade that only someone with a very good reason for keeping people out and a very, very large amount of money to call upon was capable of installing.

  Then again, Grigor Alexandreyevich Pitrov was capable of almost anything, and not just because of the size of his personal wealth. Pitrov hadn’t been born on the wrong side of the tracks; he had been born on the tracks themselves whilst a freight train was hurtling past overhead. The time he had spent in official education had been hit and miss, mainly depending on how well the teachers could dodge. The only graduation that Pitrov had managed was to petty crime and thuggery. Then he had joined the ranks of Moscow’s most vicious street gang, rising to become leader of the Muscovite Dogs at about the same time they started hanging around the reservoir they had called home. In a stunning betrayal, though, he had sold out the entire gang to the authorities in exchange for a senior position on the city’s anti-corruption taskforce. From there, he had been able to launch investigations into a whole range of politicians and oligarchs. In his time, he had brought down a dozen rogue billionaires and almost as many Premiership football teams. He had been placed in charge of overseeing the assets recovery from the subjects of his investigations and had proven to be adept at both recovering and stealing those assets. He was now head of one of the largest business empires in the world. All in the name of Mother Russia, he claimed.

  None of which interested me. U.N.D.E.A.D. did not involve itself in the petty national, or even petty international, squabbles of the world. If the threat being faced wasn’t to the future of the entire human race then it was someone else’s jurisdiction. It there weren’t monsters or demons or demigods (oh my) involved, then the Agency didn’t care.

  The spiders down in the cellars certainly ticked the box marked ‘monsters’ and would have marked out Pitrov as a person of interest to the Agency in even normal times. They alone would have justified me in whistling up an U.N.D.E.A.D. assault squad to reduce the rambling Moscow townhouse to a smouldering pile of ashes. The spiders were not my mission, though.

  And this mission was mine.

  Though I had returned to the Agency fold after another abortive invasion by thousand-eyed, multi-tentacled squid deities from another dimension, a plot set up by a would-be Magic Circle, I had returned for a single purpose. I had returned to avenge my girlfriend, Veronika Bevilacqua.

  Unfortunately for me, this was proving to be a monumentally difficult task. I fully intended to make sure that there was an actual monument dedicated to it once I was finished. The enemy was proving to be more elusive than expected. This was because they were Soulstealers; beings capable of emptying a person’s head of their entire personality and taking up residence themselves, with no outward signs of new ownership. They could not be detected by brain scans, EEGs or brain chemistry analysis. Auras were left completely undisturbed. The body even retained its memories so no general knowledge quiz could trip them up. They were, to all intents and purposes, undetectable.

  And they had killed my Veronika.

  Sort of.

  So now I was hunting them.

  From the shattered remnants of their secret hideout in a rock off the Australian coast, I had tracked the Soulstealers’ influence in the world. I had followed the money, followed the power lines, followed the paper trails and even followed the fashions until I had tracked down everyone responsible. Then I had started on the enablers.

  Pitrov was one such enabler.

  It had taken me months of infiltrating criminal groups and dodgy enterprises to track the supply of small arms and ammunition to an underground faction linked directly to Grigor Pitrov. And now I was here for him. It was fair to say that I had a few questions to ask the man.

  “I think that I will leave now,” Alexei decided, finding the balance of success of our little outing shifting dramatically to the ‘cons’ side.

  “If you do then the next borscht that you and your family sample will be laced with dried slimeweed,” I threatened casually.

  Slimeweed can be preserved in its dried form almost indefinitely and looks very much like an ordinary herb when it is. Dumped into a, for example, sour beetroot soup, it would quickly rehydrate and, if ingested, would slide back up the oesophagus to choke its new host to death. It could then set up home in the newly-created corpse to raise a lot of little slimeweed spores.

  “You are unkind,” Alexei complained even more unhappily.

  “And you don’t know the half of it,” I assured him.

  Since the preferred access route through the extensive cellars beneath Pitrov’s townhouse was blocked by giant man-eating jewellery spiders, another way into the building was required. This would have been child’s play with all the resources of the Agency to play with, but I was supposed to be a street-crook and therefore had to make do with whatever I could feasibly buy on the open black market.

  In spite of what Alexei had suggested earlier, I did have a plan B up my sleeve, so I rolled up my sleeves and extracted the four unimpressive white discs that I had secreted there earlier in the evening.

  “What are these?” Alexei asked as I handed two of the discs to him.

  “A stairway to Heaven,” I told him. “Or the second floor at least.”

  Confused, he watched as I lifted one foot up and pressed the disc hard against the sole of my shoe. I carried out the same process on the other foot. I then stood and stared at him silently until he finally, reluctantly, followed suit.

  “I don’t feel anything,” Alexei said, flexing his feet against the ground.

  “They haven’t been activated yet,” I explained. “Come with me.”

  I led him away from the townhouse, across the road. When I judged that we were at just about the right place, I turned and stamped my feet hard against the ground; first the right and then the left. Then I strode forward. As I did so, each step took me higher. To an observer, it would have looked like I was climbing an invisible staircase. To me, it felt just like that. Each disc was imbued with a repulsion spell that grew in strength with each step, propelling me higher. The discs were small and so the spell was necessarily both simple and time-limited, not to mention not completely reliable, so even as I strode upwards into the night sky, I took a strip of special silly putty out my pocket and started to roll it between my palms into a ball. Just as I came to the height of my target window, I threw the ball as hard as I could against it. The putty hit the surface of the window and splurged outwards under the impact. It then soared to a temperature that melted the glass instantly without so much as a whiff of smoke. The opening made wasn’t as large as I would have liked it to be, but hopefully big enough. I dived in through the opening just as the repulsion effect supporting my left foot failed. As I pushed off, the support there just fell away beneath the boot. Fortunately, the right foot disc remained steady and I was able to get enough of a push off against that to propel me through the hole where the window had once been. I hit the floor inside the townhouse much harder than I had intended and waited to hear if I had brought any attention from the armed guards in the place.

  When I was satisfied that I wasn’t about to meet a deluge of outraged personal security guards looking to prove themselves, I looked around myself. I was, as I had expected to be, in one of the smaller bedrooms on the second floor. The information that Alexei had provided was accurate to that point at least. Pitrov’s family had t
he whole of the first floor for their use, so the second floor was dedicated to staff use and guest rooms for the occasional visitor. Pitrov rarely received guests at the house. He had an empty warehouse on the edge of the city for the less pleasant meetings that he hosted. I had considered trying to challenge him there, luring him out on some pretext for the confrontation, but that would only have achieved half of my aims. Considering the fact that a wide and open warehouse would have been a perfect spot to set the crystal spiders on me, I was glad that I had changed my mind. At home, Pitrov would be much more relaxed and less on his guard. That was what I hoped, at least.

  There was a soft thud behind me and I turned to see Alexei’s arm waving frantically outside the window. He had misjudged his ascent and walked straight into the wall between the windows, just to the left of the entrance that I had made. I hurried across and grabbed his flailing arm, hauling him in through the space formerly known as a window before the spell on his discs wore out.

  “That was not so easy,” he commented, lying on the floor, panting from the unfamiliar exertions. “You do this for a living?”

  “Only when people make it necessary,” I replied, crossing back to the door to listen for any signs that Alexei’s clumsy arrival had raised any interest, specifically interest from muscular men armed with automatic weapons. Apparently, I was the only person who had noticed. “Which, thankfully, is not often.”

  “How did you come to learn then?” he asked.

  “I hung out for a while with the most famous cat burglar in the world,” I told him.

  “You did not!” he denied with a scoff.

  “I did,” I affirmed. “Right up until the moment that she betrayed me and I had to betray her right back.”

  “I think that you are not a man to annoy,” Alexei guessed.

  “I think that you are right,” I agreed.

  Carefully, I eased the door open slightly and checked the hallway beyond. It was brightly-lit, which I didn’t like, but it was also empty, which I did.

  “Come on,” I hissed to Alexei, who had struggled into a sitting position.

  “Why?” he asked resignedly. “I brought you the plans you asked for. I do not even know why I am still here.”

  “You sold me the plans that I asked for,” I corrected him, “and when the time is right you will know why you are still here.”

  I hauled him to his feet in a none-too-gentle fashion.

  “Now, come on.”

  I checked again that the coast was clear and then stepped out into the hallway. I ignored the natural instinct to act furtively and creep around. That had worked well enough to this point, but appearing anything other than completely at home inside the house would instantly arouse suspicion in anyone that we met, and those anyones would all be carrying guns. Unfortunately, I could not think of a single situation in which Alexei would appear to be anything other than shifty. He just had that untrustworthy quality about him. It was his default appearance.

  I strode down the hallway to the point where it turned a corner and then I froze. I heard voices approaching from the other direction. Alexei, who had been scurrying after me, bumped right into me and almost knocked me out into plain view of the opposition. That would have been an embarrassing way to end what had once been a very promising career. I glared at him silently and prepared myself for a fight. I could only make out two voices. They were both male and both sounded young. The fact that they were discussing the relative merits of toe-breaking and unnecessary dental work as ways of eliciting information from unwilling subjects suggested that they could be numbered amongst Pitrov’s personal security forces. That meant that they were likely to be armed and, in my personal opinion, anyone who is armed is dangerous. The level of weapons training they had undergone merely determined to whom they were most dangerous.

  I tensed up, ready to pounce on the first one as he came around the corner. The element of surprise was with me and I could probably disable him before the second one could react. After that, it would be a fair fight; my least favourite kind.

  Then the voices stopped approaching and there was the sound of a door opening. The volume of the conversation was muted as they entered a room and it was cut off completely when the door was closed behind them.

  I relaxed slightly and peered carefully around the corner. The hallway there was much shorter and just as empty as the one we had already traversed.

  I was starting to question my luck. To have penetrated so far through Pitrov’s defences without a single challenge was unprecedented. Admittedly, I wasn’t in the habit of breaking into people’s homes. Remote and forbidding island headquarters, yes that was all in a day’s work. People’s homes, however, were much rarer targets, so I was less used to encountering lower levels of interior security. This was also the part of the house that was located the furthest away from the normal living space of the family, so it was likely to be less well-travelled. Even so, I was finding it hard to believe that things were going so well.

  I walked down the hallway to the door that, according to the plans that Alexei had provided at a cost, led to the CCTV and alarm systems control room. The cameras only covered the main public areas of the house and the approaches to it. No particular attempt had been made to hide them. Pitrov was more concerned about people coming into the house than what those inside were doing. The deterrent effect of the visible cameras was quite deliberate.

  I took out a box from my pocket. Inside the box was a glass tube wrapped in a strip of cloth.

  “When I say go, open the door just enough for me to throw this inside,” I instructed Alexei. “Ready? Go.”

  He opened the door and I threw the glass tube through the gap, keeping hold of the end of the strip of material, which unwound, spinning the tube before finally releasing it.

  “Shut it,” I told Alexei and he slammed the door quickly, nearly taking my fingers off with it.

  From inside the room, there were some muffled warning shouts and then some equally muffled thumps. The town house was old and built with the finest of materials. The wooden doors were thick and held the sound inside remarkably well.

  “When I open the door again, I want you to reach in and switch off the light,” I told Alexei, taking his place at the door handle.

  He looked at me uncertainly, having no idea what had happened beyond the wooden barrier.

  “Ready? One, two, three, go!” I said before he had a chance to object.

  Instinctively, he stuck his hand through the gap and reached for the light switch inside. The room darkened in response, but Alexei swooned and fell backwards. As soon as his arm was back out of the room, I closed the door and tried to catch him. I was too late to keep him upright, but I managed to ease some of the impact with the floor. The thick carpet softened the blow to the back of his head further.

  Out of the box, I slipped a small white pellet, which I placed under his tongue. I then clamped one arm across his chest and my hand over his mouth. I held tightly until the panicked convulsions that racked the man passed. Only when I was sure that he wasn’t going to scream, or hurl abuse at me, did I release him.

  “What was that?” he demanded, after wiping his tongue on his sleeve several times and spitting into the corner of the hallway a dozen times more. “I have never tasted anything so foul in my life, and I have eaten American fast food.”

  “Screamer bats,” I pointed to the door that I had so recently closed. “Tiny, but really grumpy little sods. When subjected to any sort of light, they shriek like merry hell.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” he objected.

  “It’s outside the range of human hearing, but it acts directly on the nerves. Causes a feeling like a million ants crawling about inside your body. Your brain automatically shuts down to get rid of the sensation. You must have caught a blast through the gap. The tasting salts woke you up.”

  “So that is why you brought me,” he complained.

  “Partly,” I agreed.

  I helped
him to his feet.

  “Now, the troops are all asleep and there’s a nasty surprise waiting for anyone who opens that door. Come on.”

  We walked to the end of the hallway and descended the stairs to the ground floor. Pitrov’s family lived on the first floor and I had no argument with them. Men like Pitrov worked late. If it wasn’t by choice on their part then it was required of them by their positions. It was a sort of ‘with great earnings comes a little overtime’ sort of deal. Wives were either understanding, or absent. Apparently, Pitrov’s was in the former category. I had very little sympathy for the man; I was currently living the job full time.

  According to Alexei’s information, Pitrov had an office on the ground floor where he carried out all the tasks that he had not been able to complete in his official government office or couldn’t carry out there because of the blood they left on the carpet. Dismembered corpses could lead to so many awkward questions from the HR department. It was in this office that we were most likely to find him.

  I took a pistol from the waistband of my trousers. U.N.D.E.A.D. standard-issue weapons were non-lethal, but in a place like this, and against a man like Pitrov, non-lethal wouldn’t cut it. In situations like this, you were either deadly or dead. I knew which I preferred.

  I warned Alexei to stand to one side of the door into the study and took hold of the door handle. Twisting it, I opened the door hard enough to break the nose of anyone hiding behind it. I met with no resistance. I swept the room with my eyes and the barrel of the gun, but there was no immediate threat. Pitrov was sitting behind his desk, perusing a sheaf of papers and holding what looked like an expensive glass with some, presumably expensive, amber liquid in it. He looked up at me and there was far less surprise in his expression than I had expected. One side of his face was illuminated by the glow from the computer screen because the lights in the rest of the room were dimmed. I felt a tingle from my trousers, but ignored it.

  Pitrov assessed me carefully and then placed his glass on the blotter atop his desk.