by Guy Adams
‘Then tell me all about Harry Reid – before the vodka puts you to sleep.’
Thorpe reached for a folder of notes. ‘Absolute madness, of course. Just what’s needed to pep up a dull week. We’ve had a hell of a time even getting the permission to examine him. All medical tests show that he’s dead and yet he’s moving. I don’t know what strings they pulled at the Home Office, but I finally got to get my scalpel into him. He’s definitely Harry Reid, deceased 1963. Dental records have confirmed it. He has no brain activity, no pulse, no respiration at all. And yet … he’s moving. He’s an absolute medical impossibility. Which is both exciting and yet also really fucking annoying. They’ve got me and my team trying to prove that he wasn’t dead before so that the case makes sense. Which we can’t, because he was.’
‘A fun morning, then.’
‘Infuriating. And wonderful. The decomposition is all wrong, which I think is what gives CID hope. He appears to have been preserved by some kind of chemical, rendering him so hard it was a nightmare to cut into him. He’s more like a rubber facsimile of a cadaver than the real thing.
‘His toxicology reads like a sci-fi novel. The tissue was positively reeking of alien contaminants.’
‘Alien?’
‘Steady, old girl, not in the space ship sense.’
‘That’s some relief.’
‘I’m not sure it is; at least that would have explained a few things. I’ve taken samples but I won’t have the analysis back for a few hours. It must be the cause of his condition because … well, Occam’s Razor – we’ve an unnaturally preserved corpse, and it’s packed full of unknown chemicals … Seems that the facts must be related.’
April pulled her brother’s set of old case notes out of her bag, rifling through them until she found the ancient pharmacology report for the sample taken from the warehouse. ‘Make a copy of that and let me know if your results match would you?’
‘Any reason why they would?’
‘Only a guess. Occam’s Razor again, I suppose. I have a feeling that a case my brother is working on might be heavily linked.’
‘Do you have any idea what could be going on?’ Thorpe took her hand. ‘All jokes aside, we’re looking at what my delightful trainee likes to call an “absolute clusterfuck”. I’m out of my depth and don’t mind admitting it.’
‘If I knew, I’d tell you,’ April replied, ‘but at the moment I’m as in the dark as you are.’
‘You’ve never been in the dark in your life, you infuriating cow.’
‘If only that were true; I’m just better at hiding it than the rest of you.’
c) Shad Thames, London
Tamar made her way upstairs, as much to get away from Derek’s constant chatter as to investigate the upper floor. She was sure the man meant well, but she was not interested in his conversation, only the return of her August.
She paced the length of the upper floor, listening to the creak of the old timbers beneath her feet. Old ghosts, she thought, I am always surrounded by old ghosts.
As she turned towards the daylight flooding in from the open hatchway, it almost seemed as if she caught a glimpse of one. A figure, dressed in dark fatigues. She held her hand up to her eyes, filtering out some of the sunlight. There was nothing there.
‘Derek?’ she shouted, just to ensure he was where he was supposed to be and all was well.
‘Yeah?’ came his voice. ‘Please don’t tell me you want me to come up there. I don’t think the stairs would take it.’
‘No, just checking on you.’
‘Still here, still soldering on.’ He chuckled at his own joke and returned to a world of fuses and circuit boards.
Tamar, having no idea what he found so funny – and caring even less – walked over to the open hatchway. She supposed it was possible that her eyes had deceived her. The afternoon sun was now catching the open doorway head on and the glare made coloured shapes dance before her. And yet … Tamar knew what she had seen. A silhouette of a man in military clothing. She was not fanciful by nature nor was she easily confused. Things were or they were not. She did not believe in ghosts.
She would have approved of the fact that the boot which collided with her lower back was reassuringly solid, were it not for the fact that it pushed her straight through the open hatchway and into thin air.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: TRUTH
It was a relief to get a phone call from April as I needed the distraction. My patience with Gavrill had worn perilously thin but punching him was only going to make both of us feel more miserable.
‘I have to take this call,’ I told him, ‘in private. But we’ll talk some more. Krishnin is active and a clear threat. You will tell me everything I need to know in order to deal with him. Understood?’
‘I’ve told you everything that I can …’
‘I don’t believe that for a moment, but we’ll discuss it in a minute. Can I trust you not to start phoning any old colleagues the minute my back is turned?’
He shrugged. ‘I am an old traitor. Who would I call?’
I took the phone outside. ‘Hi, sorry, I was in mixed company.’
I told her about Gavrill and the little he had admitted to in our conversation.
‘And what is he doing now?’ she asked.
‘I very much hope he’s calling whatever remains of his old contacts within the FSB,’ I said. ‘Shining overheard a Russian being tortured during his original surveillance back in the ’60s, which suggests Gavrill’s telling the truth about Krishnin being rogue even then. I could spend the next hour or so knocking the old sod about a bit until he coughs up everything he knows, but I’d rather not. He’s damned irritating, but beating up pensioners has limited appeal.’
‘Pleased to hear it. Whereas if he’s encouraged to co-operate by his own people …’
‘Who would no doubt want to avoid Krishnin becoming an antique embarrassment …’
‘It’s in everyone’s best interests.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You manipulative little bugger – you’ll be a decent spy yet.’
‘I’m so glad you think that. So, what do you know?’
She gave me a breakdown of what she’d learned at the police mortuary and flicked through the details of August’s original file. It went some way towards confirming what I had just heard.
The operation had been classified as a limited success. Though Shining had failed to get to the bottom of Krishnin’s plan, the fact that he was dead and therefore no longer deemed a threat was good enough for the powers that be. Shining had also believed Krishnin to be acting outside his remit and that it was therefore unlikely someone else would continue his work. All that may have been true, but offered little comfort to us now, fifty years later.
‘They’re still working on the chemical analysis of Reid,’ April said, ‘but some of the ingredients found in the sample O’Dale picked up all those years ago are suggestive.’
‘Go on.’
‘Phenol, methanol and formaldehyde.’
‘Preservative chemicals.’
‘Absolutely. The base ingredients when preparing an arterially administered embalming fluid.’
‘They were injecting this stuff into the dead.’
‘And I think we can hazard a guess as to what the unidentified elements in the sample do.’
‘They make someone like Harry Reid pop up from the ground and forget their condition.’
Neither of us said anything for a moment. ‘Well,’ I finally added, ‘at least I can rest easy that even you find this one hard to believe.’
‘And yet the evidence points to it.’
‘It does,’ I agreed. ‘I look forward to drawing my therapist’s attention to the fact when they lock me up.’
‘On the subject of the embalming fluid, if that’s indeed what it is—’
‘Let’s just throw caution to the wind and accept the fact shall we?’
‘Can we find out how much of it was distributed?’
This was, of course, the most important point. Was Harry Reid a guinea pig? An isolated case? It was doubtful, and when the countdown on the numbers station reached zero I suspected we’d have our answer.
I finished the call with April and went back inside.
‘I hope that gave you enough time?’ I said.
Gavrill had the good grace to smile rather than argue.
‘I may have made a brief enquiry as to how someone would expect to proceed were it true that Krishnin is not as dead as had been assumed.’
‘And the response?’
‘I can tell you anything you need to know, as long as it helps make the situation go away.’
‘Go away?’
‘Nobody wants an international incident. There is no reason for one man’s lunacy to become a serious political issue.’
‘Fine. His actions do not represent, nor did they ever represent, the wishes or intentions of his homeland. A fact that is reflected in said homeland’s generous assistance in bringing the man to justice. Right?’
‘I knew you would understand.’
‘Operation Black Earth.’
‘Yes.’
‘It was an operation designed to reanimate the dead?’
Gavrill gave an awkward shrug. ‘Absurd, I know.’
‘So absurd it appears to be happening.’
That certainly surprised him. ‘Really? It works?’
‘We have a body dating from 1963 that should be nothing but dust and yet has been dangerously active.’
‘How dangerously?’
‘One man dead.’
Gavrill shook his head, got to his feet, topped up his glass and began to talk once more.
‘In its simplest terms the idea was this: what better sleeper agents could we hope for than the dead? People die every day, millions of the population, boxed up and hidden away, from coast to coast. If there was a way of weaponising them, of turning them to our advantage, we could cripple a country in a matter of hours.
‘The principle is sound enough, albeit too macabre for most politicians’ taste. It would be hard to fly the flag of glorious victory when that victory had been won by rotting cadavers. Apparently they would rather drop nuclear bombs.
‘Sünner had developed a serum that he claimed would achieve two distinct things: preserve the body post mortem (it’s all very well using the dead as sleeper agents, but how long are they of any viable use?) and turn the corpse into a controllable shell. The former was achievable, the latter was not. You’re working against impossible factors. The body is dead, its brain nothing more than meat. Even if you could somehow preserve the viability of the nervous system how could you control the body remotely? They still achieved the impossible: they reanimated test subjects, but they could not control them.
‘I was actually there for one of the experiments. The body was subjected to a sonic wave, a trigger signal I assume, activating the nervous system. I watched the corpse of a homeless man suddenly thrash and contort on the operating table, a violent wreck. It was utterly silent; I think that was the most disturbing thing – it didn’t scream or grunt, its face was rigid and empty. It just fought.
‘They kept it alive for four days. Four days of this thing beating itself (or anyone or anything that came anywhere near it).
‘I remember one of the other men in the team crossing himself and offering an apologetic prayer. “It fights to be free,” he said. “It knows it’s unnatural, is desperate to return to the darkness.” We Russians always were pompous old sods.
‘Having brought it back to life, they couldn’t “kill” it again. Whatever they did, it continued to writhe around. In the end they cut it up and dumped it.
‘Krishnin was ordered to cease the experiment, to reassign the funding and men to something more palatable and actually viable. But Krishnin was not a man to give up so easily. Besides, he had already been pursuing Black Earth off his own bat for some time. He considered the experiment a success and had already rolled out a program of contamination. The serum was being distributed on a large scale; undertakers all over the country were using it. Security was negligible – nobody worries about poisoning the dead. The serum was spread far and wide.’
‘And then?’
‘This went on for some considerable time. Krishnin was determined he would prove our government wrong. In the end though, he was shot, and as far as we were concerned the matter was buried. Literally.’
I took my phone out of my pocket and triggered the app. ‘It’s been dug up again.’
‘Eight hundred and seventy three, five, five, seven, five, five, seven …’
‘When that countdown reaches zero, I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot more bodies clawing their way back onto our streets. How many?’
Gavrill looked panicked. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t … but … hundreds of thousands! You have to understand we were distributing that stuff for well over a year. Nearly two. Shining only became aware of it when Krishnin returned from that final visit to Moscow.’
Wonderful. A fifty-year-old time bomb, ignored by everyone, was about to blow up on my watch.
‘We have to stop the control signal,’ said Gavrill. ‘It’s the only thing we can do. A bomb without a trigger is nothing.’
‘No shit, Ivan,’ I said, biting down on The Fear.
This was too much. I had to find a way of getting the rest of the Service involved. There was no way I could handle it on my own. But would anyone believe me? I had the evidence of Harry Reid … but could I convince them that he was only the tip of the iceberg? That there might be whole armies waiting to follow his example?
‘So stupid,’ Gavrill was saying, his manner, calm until then, overcome by his own panic. ‘He should never have been allowed to operate. They knew what he was like, knew he was mad. That thing he did, that ability of his … you’re not supposed to be able to take your body with you. That was what did it. That’s what turned him, I’m sure of it …’
Some of his words filtered through my thoughts and triggered an alarm at the back of my head. I realised that I hadn’t asked the one question of him I should have done. Suddenly The Fear lifted.
‘Say that again …’
SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
‘Are you all right, Krishnin old chap? I heard one hell of a kerfuffle going on upstairs. Argumentative rats? Oh … If you’ll forgive me for noticing, you don’t look your best either. Something happen to your chest? You look like someone’s been using you as a pin cushion for a particularly lethal pin.’
‘I have been keeping an eye on your colleagues. For someone who claims to be working on his own, you seem surrounded by people.’
‘A few well-meaning amateurs, perhaps, nothing more. Did one of them take umbrage? With something sharp?’
‘It is of no consequence. I am in a better condition than you, I think.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me some stitches, ibuprofen and a lazy week in Brighton won’t fix. We Shinings heal quickly.’
‘Then perhaps I should see about making your condition more permanent.’
‘If you were going to kill me, you’d have done so by now. It’s obvious I don’t know anything and, even if I did, tied to a chair and steadily bleeding on my nice suit trousers, I’m not in a position to do much with the knowledge. I suppose you craved the company?’
‘It has been a quiet few years. It is better here if one keeps to oneself.’
‘A strange choice for a base of operations, certainly.’
‘It is peaceful and, thanks to my unusual condition, the residents tend to leave me alone.’
‘Unusual condition. Yes. I’m impressed. You move well, considering. Is there a gym here?’
‘I am better than most. My motor functions seem relatively unimpaired. Other test subjects varied. The process is imperfect. So far, for example, I have been the only candidate with sufficient strength of will to continue functioning intelligently.’
‘Strength of will
? From what you said I think it’s more likely you owe your continued thought-processes to my youthful squeamishness. I didn’t take a head-shot. You died slowly. The transition was controlled, the switch from one state of being to the other gradual. How long were you even medically brain dead I wonder? Seconds?’
‘I wasn’t in a fit state to judge.’
‘I imagine not. Could have made all the difference though, don’t you think?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Intelligence isn’t necessary to have Black Earth prove a success. I need an army of fighters not thinkers.’
‘A common enough assumption on the part of dictators.’
‘A dictator? No. I have no wish to rule. I just want to destroy things.’
‘Hardly a noble goal. I realise we never knew each other that well, but I confess I expected better from you. I thought you were a man of learning?’
‘I am. I have learned what I would like to do.’
‘But why? Where’s the gain? Is it revenge? Is it ideology?’
‘There must have been a good reason once. As the years have gone by it becomes hard to remember. Does it matter?’
‘Of course it matters! You’re proposing to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. You can’t just do that sort of thing on a whim.’
‘It feels like I can. And that might be the most important thing. I do it because I can.’
‘That’s an aphorism for climbing mountains, not mass slaughter. You said before that you want power, you want control … Power over whom? Control over what?’
‘I don’t know. You’re trying to analyse me. Trying to understand me. Why? Is it because you think that knowledge will help you talk me out of what I want to do?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But the thing I really want, the thing that drives me more than anything else is to see this happen. You have nothing to argue against. I am doing this because I want to.’
‘But there must be a reason …’
‘Must there? Not anymore. I am a simpler man. I am a force. A solid punch aimed at your country. I look forward greatly to clenching my fist.’
