Defilers

by Brian Lumley

  Perchorsk again? Russian military types? Putting some kind of squeeze on him? And—Necroscope? Grieve raised a surprised and querying eyebrow, looked at Trask.

  Trask shrugged it off for the moment and said, “I’m working on it. Believe me, Gustav, you’ll be the first to know. But until then … well, I still have a few very big problems of my own. Three of them, in fact.”

  “Ah, yes, of course! But you’ll also recall we talked over the possibility of your retirement and a place in the sun?”

  Political asylum. Defection. But his, not yours.

  “Indeed I do.”

  “Well, keep it in mind,” said the other. “I would like to be able to visit with you some time—that is, if you do decide it’s time you settled down.”

  For you read I. He is talking about himself. If or when he makes a run for it, be wants to come to us.

  “And of course you’d be welcome,” said Trask.

  “My time’s up,” said Turchin. “I have accepted—ahem!—Herr Bruchmeister’s apology, and he has allowed me these couple of minutes in private, away from my, er, retinue—”

  “Your cretinue!” Trask grinned, however wryly.

  “—Precisely, to make this call.”

  “Let’s not leave it so long next time,” said Trask.

  “Goodbye, Ben,” said the premier. And the line went dead …

  Trask looked up and John Grieve was still there. Their eyes met and Trask said, “Do you want me to explain? I mean, a better or more complete explanation than the one you have now?”

  “Only if you’re so inclined,” Grieve answered. “But in any case I think I got the gist of it—except maybe that bit about a Necroscope. I mean, Turchin knows we have a Necroscope?”

  Trask shrugged. “He’s a pretty shrewd old fox. But anyway, don’t go worrying your head about it. He’s only guessing. And I will explain … but not just to you.” He glanced at his watch. “1350. I’m giving a briefing in just ten minutes, so I’d better be on my way. Whistle the rest of them up, will you, John? Especially Liz Merrick and Jake Cutter. I want every available man in the ops room in ten minutes—espers and techs alike—and woe betide any absentee who doesn’t have a watertight excuse.”

  After Grieve had left, Trask sat there for a moment feeling old. Hell, he was old now. Or getting there, anyway. The reason he felt it so much on this occasion was because he’d failed out there in Brisbane, Australia. He’d failed Zek—failed to kill the one who had killed her.

  And so back to that again. It was eating at him like acid, and he couldn’t afford to let it. Because that way the bastards would win. They would win and the world of men, or of mankind’s domination, would die—or undie. There would still be men, but they would be slaves, thralls, and the women would be odalisques, chattel, cattle. And the blood would be the life, but not human life. And everyone would be food.

  That was why Malinari and the other two were here, but how they hoped to achieve it—how they planned to bring it about, in a world with equal amounts of night and day—that was something else, as yet unfathomed. Or perhaps not, for out there in Australia there’d been clues. Which was one of the things Trask must talk about (he checked his watch again) in just five minutes’ time.

  He went to straighten his tie but wasn’t wearing one. Too damn hot, in this ongoing, never-ending, bloody El Niño summer. Talk about Australia. Huh!

  Trask stood up, slid out from behind his desk and paced to the door, paused, shook his head in disgust and went back again. And picking up his notes from the pending tray, he thought:

  Old and absentminded: me, Ben Trask, who once thought he’d be young forever. That was Zek. With Zek I could be young until I died. Or until she died. And she did.

  But he knew what would make him young again: to see Malinari cut down, beheaded, burned to ashes. Malinari and the other two, and all of theirs that they’d corrupted. When they’d gone, then he’d be young again. For a little while, anyway.

  But what the hell … this was E-Branch, and in the Branch you could get old pretty damn fast no matter what. If you lived long enough! And:

  Damn it to bell! Trask got angry with himself, stamped his feet, shook a fist. There’s plenty of life in this old dog yet! And telling himself that he felt a little better, he headed for the ops room. On the way out, he remembered to snatch his light summer jacket from the coatstand …

  For some forty-odd years now, E-Branch HQ in the centre of London had occupied the same site. Ostensibly, and viewed casually from the outside, the place was a well established hotel within easy walking distance of Whitehall; down below, it was precisely that—an expensive hotel. Its top floor, however, was totally given over to a company of “international entrepreneurs,” which was and had always been the sum total of a string of hotel managers’ knowledge about it.

  The seldom-seen occupants of that unknown upper region had their own elevator at the rear of the building; private stairs, also at the rear and entirely closed off from the hotel itself; even their own fire escape. Indeed they—“they” being the only identification one might reasonably apply in such circumstances—owned the top floor, and so fell entirely outside the hotel’s sphere of control and operation. And while their private elevator gave them access to the hotel’s restaurants and various facilities, the hotel’s elevators stopped short of the top floor. Their indicator panels didn’t even show that such a floor existed. So that just like floor thirteen in many another hotel, E-Branch simply wasn’t there.

  Except it was.

  The ops and briefings room was at the opposite end of the main corridor from Trask’s office. Walking down that corridor, he necessarily passed Harry’s Room. An old name plate, looking a little tatty and spotted now, said just that:

  HARRY’S ROOM

  Trask paused and tried the doorknob. They had had knobs in those days, not handles. Now they didn’t even have handles! You just blinked at an eye-level spot marked ID; if the door recognized you it would let you in. Trask had often wondered about that: how did dwarves manage? Did they have to jump up and down or were they given special rooms? And what about someone sporting a recent black or bloodshot eye?

  But Harry’s Room was undisturbed. It had remained the same ever since he’d stayed over here, when for a time he’d considered a position as Head of Branch. That had come to nothing and he’d moved on, but the impression he’d made had stayed. And no one had ever thought to change Harry’s Room, not even in the slightest degree.

  The door was locked; its key swung on a hook in the D.O.’s key-press; no one went into Harry’s Room because … well, just because. Because it was a region out of time, and sometimes out of space. Because it was still his room …

  And Trask moved on, but Harry stayed with him.

  Harry.

  Harry Keogh, Necroscope. The only man in the world—in this world, anyway—who could talk to dead people. And Trask shivered despite the unaccustomed warmth. The only man who had spoken to Zek in life who would have been able to speak to her even in … in …

  But he must put that out of his mind. For now, out of the blue, there was another. And Trask didn’t know if he liked the idea of Jake Cutter speaking to Zek. With Harry, there had been warmth, courtesy, humility, and understanding. But Jake Cutter … was Jake Cutter. And there was something about him—still something about him, despite that he’d made a bloody good show of it out in Australia—that Trask couldn’t fathom.

  Perhaps that was it: simply that he was unfathomable, to Ben Trask, anyway. For Trask’s talent no longer worked on him; face-to-face with Jake, his built-in lie detector switched off. The man’s mental shields were that strong and getting stronger. Why, he could be lying his head off and Trask wouldn’t know it, not for sure! He’d probably suspect that something wasn’t quite right, might even suspect his own talent, but had no way to determine the truth of it one way or the other.

  It was much the same for many of Trask’s espers. Ian Goodly had difficulty reading Jake’s
future; even Liz Merrick—who had something of a rapport with Jake—could get into his mind only when he was asleep and his shields were down. And that was yet another reason why Trask … why he didn’t like him? Why he couldn’t cotton to him? Because it was Trask himself, the boss, the faultless Head of E-Branch, who must break the Branch’s unspoken moral code by using Liz to discover what was going on in there, in Jake’s unruly head.

  Unruly, yes, and Trask was sure that he still had his own agenda, that given the chance he’d go off and do his own thing, and maybe even get himself killed doing it. What, Luigi Castellano? A gang boss, drug-runner, torturer, and murderer with the Italian and French police—some of them, anyway—in his pay, and Mafia contacts deep in the heart of degenerate Russia? You couldn’t be a one-man army against odds like that and get away with it. You needed backing. Backing such as E-Branch might be willing to supply, and even Gustav Turchin, if only Jake would back off and give them the chance. If only he’d accept that he now had responsibilities ranging far wider than the gratification of his own blood-lust. And:

  Hah! Trask gave a derisive snort. Jake Cutter’s blood-lust, indeed! But the fact was that Trask wanted Jake for himself, to use in satisfying his blood-lust, his craving for the blood and the lives of the Wamphyri.

  At the end of the corridor, people were going into the ops room. “Two minutes,” said John Grieve, catching up with Trask and passing him. And three of four more of them right behind him, making sure they’d be there before he got started. He paused at the doors to let them go by, looked back and saw that the corridor was now empty, and followed them in …

  The ops room. Half of it given over to gadgets, mainly communications, like the eye-in-the-sky links that could zoom in on an ongoing battle in Ethiopia and show you a pretty decent (indecent?) picture of a soldier grinning as he pushed his bayonet up the anus of a crucified “rebel.” Or the links to GCHQ, the listening station that could tap any insecure (and some “secure”) telephone conversations anywhere in the world. Or the extraps, computers whose sole function was to extrapolate: to use as many as possible of the known conditions of today’s world to try to determine and describe the world of tomorrow.

  Pretty amazing stuff … until you realized what it really was, that all it was was a disassociated brain controlling nothing whatsoever. Using it, you could see and hear, but you could never taste, smell, or touch. And except on rare occasions you couldn’t change anything either. Trask sometimes likened it to God—but not exactly, because God is omniscient, and the computer can know only what you tell it; even an extrap is only guessing—but he likened it to God because of his belief that He was not omnipotent. Having given men free will, how could He possibly control their actions? Even if He could, how could He apply himself to any single act? How could He select or correct or counter any single atrocity when a million more were happening simultaneously all over the world?

  Answer: He couldn’t … and in Trask’s case, He hadn’t.

  Trask had thought a great deal about God since Zek’s passing. He had tried to come to terms with Him, but as yet hadn’t quite managed it. Instead he put his faith in the gadgets and the ghosts.

  The ops room and its gadgets, which were usually attended by the “techs,” the men who controlled them. But gadgets, like God (in Trask’s eyes, at least), simply couldn’t do everything. And much less than God, their eyes and ears couldn’t be everywhere at once. Hence the ghosts.

  For where it takes time to make a telephone or video call, telepathy is instantaneous. And where mechanical extraps could only “guess” at future events, precogs such as Ian Goodly occasionally “glimpsed” the future. And however diligently spies in the sky might search for chemical and nuclear pollutants in the world’s continents and living oceans, locators like David Chung could actually sniff them out, like an X ray finding a cancer. In other words—and insofar as Trask’s weirdly skilled agents really did touch, taste, and smell much of the otherwise invisible—they were in many ways superior to the machines, principally in that they didn’t need programming … but there were times when they did need inspiring.

  Electrical and mechanical clatter—the hum and buzz and stutter from the other side of the large room—fett to a minimum as Trask climbed four steps up to the podium, then turned to face a semicircular array of chairs in three ranks, so organized that no one’s face was hidden behind anyone else’s. And there they were: his ghosts, or the people who dealt with them, looking right back at him.

  “No niceties,” he told them then, his voice rasping like a file on glass. “No congratulations on work well done. I’ve been through all that; and it was well done, but it wasn’t finished. So no ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,’ because it isn’t, even if you are. It’s a bad afternoon—it’s a black afternoon—ladies and gentlemen. Worse, it could even be one of the last afternoons, before a hellishly long night. And without wanting to seem too melodramatic, you may be the only ones standing between the twilight and the final darkness.”

  He looked at all the faces—blank, emotionless, waiting to receive emotion, inspiration. But where to find it? Why, in the truth of course, where Trask had always found it.

  “You all know the problem,” he told them. “But until we—our Australian team—went out there, no one knew, we couldn’t be sure, that the problem knew us. Now we know. There are Wamphyri in our world, and they know that we know about them. Which makes it a very different ball game. Now we hunters have to be doubly careful and ensure that we don’t end up the hunted.”

  It had happened before, some thirty-odd years ago, when an Earth-born vampire, Yulian Bodescu, blood-son of Thibor Ferenczy, had set himself against E-Branch to destroy it. Then, only Harry Keogh and his infant boy child, a Necroscope whose powers rivalled his father’s, had been able to stop the impending destruction of E-Branch and the plague of vampires that would have ensued. But Trask didn’t need to elaborate; his espers had read the files and knew the story almost but not quite as well as he did. But Trask had actually been there. And their faces weren’t so much blank or emotionless as respectful—deeply respectful. For of all the great survivors who ever were, surely Ben Trask must rank among the greatest.

  And now that he had started—now that he’d settled down a little and saw how well he commanded the attention of his audience—Trask began to recognize those oh-so-respectful faces. Why, he even began to discover likenesses to faces that were no longer there! But with all respect, the latter were real ghosts now who existed only in fond memory and imagination.

  Such as Darcy Clarke. Darcy, the world’s most nondescript man, and the one with the world’s most effective, most beneficent—to Darcy—and reliable talent. For he had been a deflector, the very opposite of accident prone: a man with a guardian angel, who could stumble blindfolded through a minefield in snowshoes and come out the other side completely unscathed!

  Darcy had been Head of Branch once over—until the thing that had got into Harry Keogh got into him, too, and robbed him of his guardian. Some might say it was Harry’s fault, but Trask didn’t think so. It was E-Branch, the job, this work that would get them all in the end. Darcy’s face lingered on for a second in Trask’s memory, then it was gone. Gone like Darcy himself.

  But there were others, far too many others, ready to take its place; crowding in, they appeared to superimpose themselves on the new faces in the small crowd of people waiting for Trask to continue. And he couldn’t help but remember them.

  Sir Keenan Gormley, first Head of Branch. Trask saw him as he had been: sixtyish and starting to show his age; round shoulders on a once well-built but inevitably sagging body, supporting a short neck and the lofty dome of his head. His green eyes a little muddied but missing very little, and laughter lines in their corners that belied the weight of his duties; his greying, well-groomed hair receding just a little.

  Apart from a minor heart problem common in men of his age, Sir Keenan had been good for a lot more years yet … had been, unti
l he’d met up with Boris Dragosani and Max Batu, ESPionage agents for Russian’s E-Branch. Dragosani had been a vampire and a necromancer, while Batu had been so deadly that he could kill with a glance. His “talent” had stopped Sir Keenan’s heart!

  But all of that had been many years ago, and with the collapse of Communism the former USSR had suffered such turmoil it was still in a state of flux and political disarray even today. And in any case Dragosani and Max Batu had long since paid with their lives—paid in full, and more than paid—for all their evil deeds; they were gone into far darker places than poor Sir Keenan. All thanks to Harry Keogh.

  Gormley’s face faded from the eye of Trask’s memory, and in its place, in his audience, was the living face of John Grieve, a contemporary of Sir Keenan’s from the old days, whose presence here had probably invoked the memory in the first place …

  But that wasn’t the end of these faces from the past; they came in seemingly endless procession. Faces such as that of the seer, Guy Roberts.

  Cursing, irreverent, far-scrying, chain-smoking Guy, who’d been the team leader down in Devon that time, after Harry Keogh had warned E-Branch about Yulian Bodescu. Trask remembered that time well; he still had small white scars back and front, under his right collarbone, where he’d been skewered by a pitchfork’s tine in the barn of Bodescu’s country seat.

  That had been one hell of a bad time for E-Branch. And hell was the only word that adequately described it. Bodescu, a fledgling vampire, had killed Guy Roberts (or rather he’d butchered him, battered his head to a pulp) as Roberts tried to protect Brenda Keogh and her baby son. But Guy hadn’t been alone in paying the price of working for E-Branch.

  Their names … they weren’t quite legion, but that was how Trask thought of them. So many friends gone from the world forever. Peter Keen, Simon Gower, and young Harvey Newton: Bodescu had killed them all. And then there’d been Carl Quint, blown to bits in the Moldavian foothills at the site of an ancient evil. Their faces came and went, and the list went on.