by Brian Lumley
Finally he struggled upright. “Dragosani!” he held out wildly fluttering, pudgy hands towards the necromancer. “Drago—”
Again Dragosani hurled his psychic bolt, and again.
Borowitz was swatted like a fly by the first blast, knocked over backwards onto the couch. He actually managed to sit up, to finish the last word he would ever speak, before the second blast hit him: “—sani!”
Then it was done. The ex-boss of E-Branch sat there, upright, dead as a doornail, showing all the signs of a heart attack.
“Classic!” Dragosani grunted his approval.
He glanced about the room. The door of a corner cupboard stood open, displaying a battered old typewriter on a shelf with papers, envelopes and other items of stationery. He quickly carried the machine to a table, inserted a blank sheet of paper, began to type laboriously:
I feel unwell. I think it is my heart. Natasha’s death has affected me badly. I think I am finished. Since I have not yet nominated another to carry on my work, I do so now. The only man who can be trusted to carry on where I leave off is Boris Dragosani. He is completely faithful to the USSR, and especially to the aims and welfare of the Party Leader.
Also, if as I fear the end is coming, I want my body put in Dragosani’s care. He knows my wishes in this respect.…
Dragosani grinned as he rolled the typewritten sheet up a space or two. He read over the note, took up a pen and scrawled “G.B.” as nearly as possible in the style of Borowitz at the end of the last line, then dusted the keys with his handkerchief where he’d touched them and carried the machine to the couch. Sitting down beside the dead man, he took his hands and laid his fingers briefly on the keys. And all the time Borowitz watching him through sightless, popping eyes.
“All done, Gregor,” said Dragosani as he took the typewriter back to the table. “I’m going now, but I’ll not say goodbye just yet. After they find you we’ll be meeting again, eh, at the Château Bronnitsy? And what price your innermost secrets then, Gregor Borowitz?”
It was 12:25 P.M. when he let himself out of the silent cabin in the trees and backtracked to his car.
* * *
Since it was a Saturday there were fewer people about than one would usually find at the Château Bronnitsy, but as the guards on the outer wall checked Dragosani through, so they sent word of his arrival ahead of him. At the central cluster of buildings the Duty Officer was waiting for him. Wearing the Château’s uniform of grey overalls with a single diagonal yellow stripe across the heart, he came breathlessly forward to greet Dragosani where he parked his Volga in its designated space.
“Good news, Comrade!” he declared, walking with Dragosani through the complex and holding a door open for him. “We have word of this British agent, this Harry Keogh, for you.”
Dragosani at once grabbed him by the shoulder, his grip like a vice. The other carefully disengaged himself, stared curiously at Dragosani. “Is anything wrong, Comrade?”
“Not if we’ve got Keogh,” Dragosani growled. “No, nothing at all. But you’re not the man I spoke to last night?”
“No, Comrade. He has gone off duty. I read his log, that’s all. And of course I was here this morning when word of Keogh came in.”
Dragosani looked more closely at the speaker. He saw a thin man with a weak chin and sloped shoulders: a typical nothing to look at, yet puffed up with his own importance. Not an ESPer, the Duty Officer was simply Senior Ground Staff. A good clerk, mainly, and efficient, but a bit too pompous—too smug and self-satisfied—for Dragosani’s liking.
“Come with me,” he said coldly. “You can tell me about Keogh as we go.”
With the DO at his heels, Dragosani loped easily through the Château’s corridors and began climbing stairs towards Borowitz’s private office complex. Finding it hard to keep up, the man said, “Slow down a little, Comrade, or I’ll not have breath to tell you anything!”
Dragosani kept going. “About Keogh,” he snapped over his shoulder. “Where is he? Who has him? Are they bringing him here?”
“No one ‘has’ him, Comrade,” the other puffed. “We merely know where he is, that’s all. He’s in East Germany, Leipzig. He got in through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin—as a tourist! And no attempt to hide his identity, apparently. Very strange. He’s been in Leipzig for three or four days now. Seems to have spent most of his time there in a graveyard! Obviously he’s waiting for a contact.”
“Oh?” Dragosani came to a brief halt, glared at the other, sneered at him. “Obvious, did you say? Let me tell you, Comrade, that nothing is obvious about that one! Now, quickly, come into my office and I’ll give you some instructions.”
A moment later and the DO followed Dragosani into the antechamber of Borowitz’s suite. “Your office?” he gaped.
Behind his desk, Borowitz’s secretary, a young man with thick-lensed spectacles, thin eyebrows and a prematurely receding hairline looked up, startled. Dragosani jerked his thumb towards the open door. “You, out! Wait outside. I’ll call when I want you.”
“What?” bewildered, the man stood up. “Comrade Dragosani, I must protest! I—”
Dragosani reached across the desk, grabbed the man by the left cheek of his face and dragged him bodily across the desk top, scattering pens and pencils everywhere. Amidst a squall of muted, pained squawkings, he whirled him towards the open door and aimed a kick at his backside as he released him. “Protest to Gregor Borowitz next time you see him,” he snapped. “Until then obey my orders or I’ll have you shot!”
He continued through into Borowitz’s old office, the DO trembling as he followed on behind. Without pause Dragosani lowered himself into Borowitz’s chair behind his desk, continued to glare at the DO. “Now, who’s watching Keogh?”
Completely overawed, the DO stuttered a little before settling down. “I … I … we … the GREPO,” he finally got it out. “The Grenzpolizei, the East German Border Police.”
“Yes, yes—I know who the GREPO are,” Dragosani scowled. Then he nodded. “Good! They’re very efficient, I’m told. Right, these are my orders—on behalf of Gregor Borowitz. Keogh is to be taken, alive if possible. That was what I ordered last night, and I hate to repeat myself!”
“But they had no holding charge, Comrade Dragosani,” the DO explained. “He is not listed, this Keogh, and so far he has done nothing wrong.”
“The charge is … murder,” said Dragosani. “He murdered one of our agents, a sleeper, in England. Anyway, he will be taken. If that proves difficult, the orders are to shoot him! I ordered that, too, last night.”
The DO felt that he, personally, was being accused. He felt he had to make excuses: “But these are Germans, Comrade,” he said. “Some of them like to believe that they still govern themselves, if you see what I mean.”
“No,” said Dragosani, “I don’t. Use the telephone next door. Get me the headquarters of the Grenzpolizei in Berlin. I’ll speak to them.
The DO stood gaping at him.
“Now!” Dragosani snapped. And as the man scurried out he called after him: “And send in that dolt from outside.”
When Borowitz’s secretary entered Dragosani said, “Sit. And listen. Until the Comrade General returns I’ll be in charge. What do you know about the working of this place?”
“Almost everything, Comrade Dragosani,” answered the other, still pale and frightened and holding his face. “The Comrade General left many things to me.”
“Manpower?”
“What about it, Comrade Drag—”
“Cut that out!” Dragosani snapped. “No more ‘Comrade,’ it wastes time. Simply call me Dragosani.”
“Yes, Dragosani.”
“Manpower,” Dragosani said again. “What do we have here right now?”
“Here at the Château? Right now? A skeleton staff of ESPers, and maybe a dozen security men.”
“Call-in system?”
“Oh, yes, Dragosani.”
“Good! I’ll want at least enough men to mak
e our numbers up to thirty. And I’ll want them by 5:00 P.M.—at the very latest. I want our best telepaths and forecasters, including Igor Vlady, to be among them. Can that be done? Can we muster these men by 5:00 P.M.?”
The other immediately nodded. “In more than three hours? Oh, yes, Dragosani. Definitely.”
“Then get on with it.”
When he was alone Dragosani settled back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. He thought about what he was doing. If the East Germans took Keogh, especially if they killed him (in which case Dragosani must make sure that he, personally, got hold of the body) that must surely cancel out the possibility of Keogh’s being part of tonight’s disturbance. Mustn’t it? In any case it was difficult to see how Keogh could possibly make it here, from Leipzig, in just a few hours. So perhaps Dragosani should be concentrating on some other eventuality—but what? Sabotage? Was the cold ESP war finally starting to heat up? Had his murdering Sir Keenan Gormley lit some sort of slow fuse, laid perhaps a long time ago? But what could possibly harm the Château? The place was impregnable as a castle. Fifty Keoghs wouldn’t even make it over the outer wall!
Angry with himself, with the gradual build-up of tension inside him, Dragosani forced Keogh out of his mind. No, the threat must come from somewhere else. He gave a little more thought to the Château’s fortifications.
Dragosani had never fully understood the need to fortify the Château, but now he was glad indeed for its defences. Of course, old Borowitz had been a soldier long before he had started E-Branch; he was an expert strategist, and doubtless he’d had his reasons for insisting on this degree of security. But here, right next door to Moscow itself? What had he feared? Insurgency? Trouble from the KGB, perhaps? Or was it just one of the old man’s hang-ups from his political or military feuding days?
Not that this was the only fortified place in the USSR, far from it. The space centres, nuclear and plasma research stations, and the chemical and biological warfare labs at Berezov were all security hotspots, tight as proverbial drums.
Dragosani scowled. How he wished he had Borowitz here now, downstairs in his operating theatre, stretched out on a steel table with his guts hanging open and all the secrets of his soul laid bare. Ah, well, and that too would come to pass—when they finally found the old bastard’s body!
“Comrade Dragosani!” the DO’s voice calling from next door shattered his thoughts to shards. “I have GREPO HQ in Berlin for you. I’m putting them through now.”
“Good,” he called back. “And while I’m speaking to them there’s something else you can do. I want the Château searched top to bottom. Especially the cellars. To my knowledge there are rooms down there no one ever went into. I want the place turned inside out. Look for bombs, incendiary devices, for anything at all that looks suspicious. I want as many men on it as possible—particularly the ESPers. Understood?”
“Yes, Comrade, of course.”
“Very well, now let me speak to these damned Germans.”
* * *
It was 3:15 P.M. and Arctic cold in the city cemetery in Leipzig.
Harry Keogh, his overcoat turned up around his ears and a flask of coffee (long empty) in his lap, sat frozen at the foot of August Ferdinand Möbius’ grave and despaired. He had sought to apply his ESPer’s mind—his “metaphysical” talent—to the equally conjectural properties of altered space-time and four-dimensional topology and failed. Intuition told him it was possible, that he could in fact take a Möbius trip sideways in time, but the mechanics of the thing were mountain-sized stumbling blocks that he just couldn’t climb. His instinctive or intuitive grasp of maths and non-Euclidean geometry was not enough. He felt like a man given the equation E = mc2 and then asked to prove it by producing an atomic explosion—but with his mind alone! How do you go about turning unbodied numbers, pure maths, into physical facts? It’s not enough to know that there are ten thousand bricks in a house; you can’t build the house of numbers, you need the bricks! It was one thing for Möbius to send his unbodied mind out beyond the farthest stars, but Harry Keogh was a physical three-dimensional man of living flesh and blood. And just suppose he succeeded and actually discovered how to teleport himself from “A” to some hypothetical “B” without physically covering the space between. What then? Where would he teleport himself to—and how would he know when he was there? It could prove as dangerous as stepping off a cliff to prove the law of gravity!
For days now he’d occupied his mind with the problem to the exclusion of almost everything else. He had taken food and drink and sleep, yes, attending to all of Nature’s needs, but to nothing else. And still the problem remained unsolved, space-time refused to warp for him, the equations remained dark unfathomed squiggles on the now grubby, well-thumbed pages of his mind. A wonderful ambition, certainly—to impose himself physically within a metaphysical frame—but how to go about it?
“You need a spur, Harry,” said Möbius, wearily breaking in on his thoughts for what must be the fiftieth time in the last day or so. “Personally, I think that’s all that remains. After all, necessity is the mother of invention, you know. So far you know what you want to do—and I for one believe you have the knack, the intuitive ability, even though you haven’t found it yet—but you haven’t a good enough reason for doing it! That’s all you need now, the right spur. The prod that will make you take the final step.”
Harry gave a mental nod of acknowledgement. “You’re probably right,” he said. “I know I will do it; it’s just that I … haven’t tried yet? It’s something like giving up smoking: you can but can’t. You probably will when it’s too late, when you’re dying of cancer. Except I don’t want to wait that long! I mean, I have all the maths, all the theory—I have all the ego, really, the intuition—but I haven’t the need, not yet. Or the spur, if you like. Let me tell you what it feels like:
“I’m sitting in a well-lighted room with a window and a door. I look out the window and it’s dark out there. It always will be. Not night but a stronger darkness that will last for ever. It’s the darkness of the spaces between the spaces. I know there are other rooms out there somewhere. My problem is that I don’t have any directions. If I go out that door I’ll be part of the darkness, surrounded by it. I might not be able to come in again, here or anywhere else. It’s not so much that I can’t go out but more that I don’t want to think about what it’s like out there. Actually, to know it’s there is to know I can go out into it. I feel that the going will just be an extension of the other things I can do, but an untried extension. I’m a chicken in a shell, and I won’t break out until I have to!”
“Who are you talking to, Mr. Harry Keogh?” asked a voice that wasn’t Möbius’, a flat, cold voice, as curious as it was emotionless.
“What?” Startled, Harry looked up.
There were two of them, and it was obvious who or what they were. Even knowing nothing about spying or East-West politics, he would have recognized these two on sight. They chilled him more than the thin wind which now began to keen through the empty cemetery, blowing dead leaves and scraps of paper along the aisles between the tombs.
One was very tall, the other short, but their dark-grey overcoats, their hats pulled down at the front and their narrow-rimmed spectacles were so uniform in themselves as to make them appear twins. Certainly twins in their natures, in their thoughts and their petty ambitions. As plain-clothes men—policemen, probably political—they were quite unmistakable.
“What?” Harry said again, coming stiffly to his feet. “Was I talking to myself again? I’m sorry about that, I do it all the time. It’s just a habit of mine.”
“Talking to yourself?” the tall one repeated him, and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.” His accent was thick, his lips thin as his mirthless smile. “I think you were talking to someone else—probably to another spy, Harry Keogh!”
Harry backed away from them a pace or two. “I really don’t know what—” he began.
“Where is your radio,
Mr. Keogh?” said the short one. He came forward, kicked at the dirt of the grave where Harry had been sitting. “Is it here, buried in the soil, perhaps? Day after day, sitting here, talking to yourself? You must think we’re all fools!”
“Listen,” Harry croaked, still backing away. “You must have the wrong man. Spy? That’s crazy. I’m a tourist, that’s all.”
“Oh?” said the tall one. “A tourist? In the middle of winter? A tourist who comes and sits in the same graveyard day after day, to talk to himself? You can do better than that, Mr. Keogh. And so can we. We have it on good authority that you are a British agent, also that you’re a murderer. So now, please, you will come with us.”
“Don’t go with them, Harry!” It was Keenan Gormley’s voice, coming from nowhere, unbidden to Harry’s mind. “Run, man, run!”
“What?” Harry gasped. “Keenan? But how…?”
“Oh, Harry! My Harry!” cried his mother. “Please be careful!”
“What?” he said again, shaking his head, still backing away from the two men.
The small one produced handcuffs, said, “I must warn you, Mr. Keogh, against resistance. We are counterespionage officials of the Grenzpolizei, and—”
“Hit him, Harry!” urged Graham “Sergeant” Lane in Harry’s innermost ear. “You have the measure of both these lads. You know the way. Do it to them before they do it to you. But watch it—they’re armed!”
As the short one took three quick paces forward, holding out the handcuffs, Harry adopted a defensive stance. Also closing in, the tall one yelled: “What’s this? You threaten violence? You should know, Harry Keogh, that our orders are to take you dead or alive!”
The short one made to snap the cuffs on Harry’s wrists. At the last moment Harry slapped them aside, half-turned, lashed out with his heel at the end of a leg stiffened into a bar of solid bone. The blow took the short one in the chest, snapped ribs, drove him backwards into his tall colleague. Screaming his agony, he slipped to the ground.
