Danny lay quite still, welcoming the sudden peace. He did not try to move, because he knew from experience he would not be able to. The paralysis had been terrifying the first time it happened. Now he kept telling himself it would soon wear off; all he had to do was wait for the bats.
They weren’t bats, of course. He wasn’t even sure they were living creatures. At the Project they’d been named Guardians, or Threshold Guardians, since they seemed to appear just as you were about to leave your body. They were shapes and they flew around your head and they looked a bit like bats. Danny was the only Project operative who could see them around other agents as well as himself.
It seemed to take a very long time—probably just because he was feeling impatient—but the bats finally appeared, flitting around his head, perfectly visible despite the fact he had his eyes closed. Then, abruptly, they disappeared and he could move again. He opened his eyes and stretched. His arms reached above his head, penetrated the headboard and the wall beyond. He drew them back and swung his feet off the bed onto the floor. As he sat up, he could see Fuchsia seated in the armchair, unaware of what he was doing.
Danny glanced back at his physical body, still lying on the bed, eyes closed as if asleep. Then he turned and walked quickly through the wall on his way out of the embassy building.
Chapter 29
Danny, Out-of-Body over Moscow, 1962
Danny flew. The feeling of exhilaration was so great that he had made several preliminary circles about the building before he realized he had no idea how to get back to Lubyanka Square. The city below him was a maze of confusing streets, avenues, boulevards, and squares, crisscrossed by major arteries that looked completely unfamiliar. He tried to re-create his memory of the walk back to the embassy on the territory below and failed. The viewpoints were just too different.
He felt a swelling of frustration. Often, in the astral body, it was possible to reach a location just by thinking of it: “Gross movement follows thought” was a training maxim at the Project. But for that to work, one of two conditions had to be in place. Either your target was in sight, however distantly, or you were so familiar with it that you could visualize it clearly and in detail. He had only seen KGB headquarters once, and while he had a general impression in his mind—yellow building, clock set up high—he had paid little attention to details, and even less to details of Lubyanka Square. At the time it had never occurred to him he might need to find his way back there without a street map. And the one great drawback of astral projection was that you could bring nothing with you.
Hazy though it was, he called up a picture of the building as best he remembered it, closed his eyes, and willed himself to go there. Even before he opened them again, he knew he had not succeeded. He tried again, eyes open this time. When gross movement really did follow thought, the results were instantaneous. One clock tick you were here, the next you were there. But however hard he tried to visualize now, he remained stubbornly here.
Danny’s frustration grew into a simmering anger, directed mainly at himself. The problem was, he had not thought of using his out-of-body ability to help his friends until Fuchsia brought it up. It was infuriating. If the idea had occurred to him earlier, while he was in Lubyanka Square, he could have studied the KGB building more carefully, ensured he could get back there any time he pleased. But he hadn’t and now he was stuck with the consequences.
He thought briefly of returning to his physical body, collecting a map, and walking back to the target building, but dismissed the idea at once. He would waste far too much time getting there and back when only God knew what dangers Opal and Michael were facing. There had to be a faster way. He hovered three hundred feet above the ground, staring out across the cityscape, and forced himself to think.
It occurred to him abruptly that he was being stupid. He was in the air now. He didn’t have to follow streets the way he did while he was on the ground. In the air, you thought in terms of general directions, looked for landmarks, then used them to orient yourself. In the air, you could see broad swaths of the city, whereas on the ground you could only see the road ahead. As a general direction, he was sure Lubyanka Square lay somewhere to the east of the embassy he’d just left. Possibly not due east, but . . .
Another thought occurred to him. What did lie due east of the embassy was Red Square, and Lubyanka was hardly more than half a mile away from there. If he could find his way to Red Square, he should be able to locate Lubyanka fairly easily. And he could surely find Red Square—it was the biggest square in Moscow.
Danny flew upward until the city turned into a panoramic network. He spotted the Moskva River at once, and while it was not a landmark he could use directly, it did help him maintain a sense of direction. He dropped his altitude again and began to fly carefully east, keeping the river in sight.
It was difficult to judge speed while out of the body. Travel by the gross-movement-follows-thought principle was instantaneous as far as anybody in the Project could judge. Cruising, as most operatives referred to what he was doing now, could vary greatly from a leisurely birdlike swoop to something more resembling a rocket or a jet plane. But there was no air against the face, no rushing in the ears, so only the apparent movement of the ground below gave him much of a clue to his momentum. All the same, he seemed to have been flying fast and long with no sign of Red Square.
He racked his brain for any other memory of the city and, after a moment, one laboriously emerged. Red Square lay just north of the river: he remembered that much from his earlier glances at the map. At this height, all he had to do was watch what bordered the river to the north and he was bound to see Red Square. Unless he’d already passed it, of course. But just as the thought occurred, he spotted it—not Red Square itself, but the vivid towers of St. Basil’s Cathedral, where his friends had been kidnapped.
Danny dropped lower in order to make sure—there seemed to be quite a few colorful churches and cathedrals scattered throughout Moscow—but it was St. Basil’s, all right. He could see the Kremlin across the square and, as he lost height, could even pick up the distinctive outline of Lenin’s tomb. Now it was only a question of finding Lubyanka Square.
He turned north and took a slow, serpentine flight path, fanning alternately east and west. Lubyanka might be north of Red Square, but not directly north, and this was a way of making sure he did not miss it. All the same, he seemed to have traveled well over half a mile without seeing anything he recognized. He was beginning to wonder about returning to Red Square and trying a broader sweep when a flash of yellow caught his eye. Excitedly, Danny swooped toward it. As he came closer, his excitement turned to triumph. He could see the façade now, with its yellow brickwork. He could see the clock set into the building’s topmost floor.
Danny landed delicately as a butterfly and stood staring up at KGB headquarters.
It was nearing sunset, a time when offices would shut for the evening, but there was no sign of this place closing. Lights were coming on behind many of the windows, and people still entered and left by the main doors. As before, there were few cars on the street, but there were large numbers of people in the square. And this time he noticed something about them that had not struck him before: those who didn’t enter the building walked past it hurriedly, their eyes firmly downcast, like people hoping they would not be noticed. It was as if the building frightened them.
A pedestrian walked through him, headed for the main doors. Danny made a snap decision and walked quickly after her. The studded door closed again in his face, but he walked straight through it into a narrow, featureless hallway guarded by a dour receptionist seated behind an old-fashioned wooden desk with score marks across its surface. The visitor ignored her, but produced an ID card for the uniformed guard at the entrance to the broad foyer beyond—Danny thought she must be a KGB employee, somebody’s secretary perhaps, who knew the workings of the building inside out and was a familiar face to casual security.
Danny moved toward the guar
d as the woman he’d been following disappeared into the deeper reaches of the building. The man looked through him blankly. The foyer beyond was grandiose, with pink marble pillars, an inlaid marble checkerboard floor, and several white-painted doors leading off. On his right was a broad stone staircase leading to the upper stories. As he glanced up, he could see a life-size statue of some Russian dignitary waiting on the first landing.
Where to go? KGB headquarters was five stories high and quite gigantic. He could imagine the interior as a warren of offices and corridors. Opal and Michael could be anywhere, and even though he could go where he liked without challenge, it might take him hours to find them. Which was a good reason to get started, except that he couldn’t make up his mind where to start.
Danny stood beside the guard and looked around, trying to decide. If Opal and Michael had been seized by the KGB (and he could think of no other explanation for their being taken here), then they were surely under suspicion of something. It was hard to think what—nobody in 1962 could possibly know anything about their mission—but the Soviets were clearly paranoid, so simply staying in the American embassy might be enough to draw attention to them. For all he knew, grabbing foreigners off the street might even have been standard practice during the Cold War. But what would be the next logical step after that?
Being out of his body allowed him to move about like a ghost, flying through the air and passing through doors or walls, but he certainly didn’t feel like a ghost. He felt exactly as if he was still in his physical body. Danny experienced a chill as a thought occurred to him. Beneath KGB headquarters was Lubyanka Prison, where, their briefing guide said, suspects were held and tortured. Was that where he should start looking for Opal and Michael? He pushed the thought aside. He needed to get this whole thing into perspective. Opal and Michael were obviously being questioned somewhere, but there was no way they would warrant a jail cell or torture. Far more likely they would be in a perfectly civilized office somewhere, chatting over a cup of tea or whatever it was Russians drank, before being sent back to the embassy once the KGB was satisfied they weren’t about to overthrow the government. Maybe he and Fuchsia were panicking unnecessarily. Maybe it would all work itself out inside an hour or two.
And maybe he was about to get a knighthood for services rendered, Danny thought cynically. He’d had his own run-ins with the law, and even in a best-case scenario he knew that if they’d been held this long, their chances of release before tomorrow were slim. And every hour that went by was one more hour when they weren’t talking to Cobra, weren’t even starting to sort out the mess around the whole Cobra business. All the same, he still thought the basement prison was unlikely. He decided to start on the fifth floor, fly quickly through every office he could find, then drop down a floor and do the same thing if he hadn’t found Opal and Michael, repeating the process until he did find them.
But the little voice in Danny’s head wouldn’t leave him alone. What if they weren’t in any of the five floors he was going to explore? What if he didn’t find them? Then I’ll go down to the basement—all right? he told the little voice savagely. Sometimes Danny knew things about himself he’d rather not have known, and at the moment he knew he didn’t want to visit Lubyanka Prison. You could still smell blood when you were in your second body.
Using the stairwell as his guide, Danny floated quickly upward to the topmost floor.
He found Opal almost at once. He entered a small room with a single curtained window, and his eye was drawn immediately to a combination desk and seat, like the sort of thing you sat in at elementary school, set against one wall. Beside it was an open lavatory bowl and a sink with only one tap. Set against the opposite wall was a bunk bed. It took him a moment to realize there was someone curled on the bed, a moment more to realize it was Opal.
Danny went directly to her. She had her face toward the wall and seemed to be asleep. Or knocked unconscious. But her breathing was deep and regular, and there was no immediate sign of any injury. . . . He walked through the bunk and turned, standing partially inside the wall, so that he could get a better look at her face. It was almost covered by one arm, but from what he could see she was all right. He moved out again, back into the room, and took another, proper, look around. It wasn’t the Ritz, that was for sure. He moved to the door.
Although he couldn’t try to open it—his hand would just sink helplessly into the handle—the thing was so ill-fitting that close up he could see partway through the crack between the door and the jamb. As he’d suspected, the door was locked. He could see where it was bolted across.
He wished Opal would wake up. He couldn’t talk to her, of course. While she was still locked in her physical body, she couldn’t see him in his astral, couldn’t hear a word he might say, even if he shouted in her ear. All the same, he’d have liked to see her move around, just to be sure there were no broken bones, no limp or anything else that would suggest a beating. But Opal didn’t wake up, didn’t even turn in her sleep. He wanted to shake her, but that was as impossible for him now as turning the doorknob.
“Opal!” He tried anyway, shouting at the top of his lungs, just in case some hint of psychic talent caused her to pick up an echo of his voice, but she did not stir. Nothing more he could do here. His next step had to be to find Michael, who was probably somewhere nearby. Danny made a mental note about the position of the room and stepped out into a green-painted corridor with plain wooden doors every few yards. Some, he noted at once, had small metal nameplates set above head height. He floated up to examine one more closely, but the lettering was Cyrillic and meant nothing to him.
He began to examine the other rooms and ran into difficulties immediately. Those closest to Opal’s room were all offices—in one of them there was a balding man with glasses working late at a massive desk—but none contained Michael. When he returned to his earlier plan of swooping quickly through the building walls floor by floor, he soon discovered he could not keep mental track of where he’d been. Almost every room was an office, almost all were occupied, and there was a sameness about both the paintwork and the people that made one blend into another. With a sinking feeling he realized that if he was going to search this massive building properly, he needed a different approach.
For a while he tried staying in the corridor he’d found, moving from one door to another, sticking his head through the woodwork to find out what was inside, withdrawing when there was no sign of Michael, then moving to the next door. It was painfully slow, and he quickly discovered branching corridors with their own closed doors and not a single marking he could understand. To make matters worse, the KGB seemed to work twenty-four hours a day, for after an initial lull, he discovered the main corridors were often filled with people, men and women, some in uniform, some in civilian clothing, all busily going about their business. It was confusing in the extreme. It occurred to him within five minutes that he could easily have missed Michael half a dozen times.
Danny stopped to think, pressed instinctively against a corridor wall to avoid a group of women walking past. Now that he’d confirmed Opal was here, did he really need to find Michael as well? They’d both been seized by the same men, which meant Michael had to be in this building somewhere. Surely that was the only thing that mattered? Fuchsia was right when she’d said they needed help from the embassy—some sort of diplomatic approach to assure the Soviets that Opal and Michael were harmless and should be released at once. And now that he was absolutely sure their friends were being held by the KGB, they could get that help. No need to mention time lines or astral projection, of course; they could simply claim they’d seen Opal and Michael taken into the big yellow building in Lubyanka Square and let the embassy put two and two together. Let the embassy figure out why, as well. Danny certainly had no idea why the KGB had taken an interest in them. What he needed to do was get back to his physical body at once and see if they could get a meeting with the ambassador.
All the same he hesitated. Something w
as niggling at the back of his mind, demanding he should find out if Michael was all right. Danny closed his eyes and sank through six floors.
When he opened them again, he was in Lubyanka Prison.
Chapter 30
Danny, Out-of-Body, Lubyanka Prison
The contrast with the upper offices was striking. Danny found himself in another corridor, this time with plain brickwork and a stone floor relieved only by a strip of plain linoleum. Here too there were doors every few yards, but unlike the wooden doors above, they were faced in metal with grilles at head height. Somewhere, distantly, someone was screaming. The noise echoed hollowly.
Unlike the bustling corridors above, this passageway was empty. Perhaps the prison officials did not work in the evenings, unlike their administration comrades. The scream came again, and Danny felt himself go chill. Perhaps somebody was still working. He didn’t think the victim was Michael—the sound was too high-pitched. But then again, he had no idea how Michael would sound if he was . . . if he was being . . .
With huge reluctance, almost without willing it, Danny began to move toward the sound. He floated rather than walked, passing easily, almost mindlessly, through obstructing walls and doorways (and on one occasion a short stone staircase). He had mental pictures of some hideous torture chamber, but when he reached his destination, he found himself in another passageway, almost identical to the one he’d just left. The screaming, now almost continuous, was coming from a cell a little way along. Sick to his stomach, Danny floated down the corridor and entered the cell.
There was an old man inside, seated on a wooden bench and wearing only prison trousers. There were ancient scars across his chest and arms and what looked like a burn on the index finger of his right hand. One ankle was manacled to a chain attached to the foot of his bench, but the chain looked long enough to allow him to walk anywhere inside his cell if he wanted to.
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