Clarke stepped inside. 'Home,' said Harry, following him and sliding the doors shut in their frames. 'Don't you think it suits me?'
Clarke didn't answer, but he thought: well, your taste was never what I would have called flamboyant. Certainly the place suits your talent!
Harry waved Clarke into a cane chair, seated himself behind a blocky oak desk dark with age. Clarke looked all about and tried to draw the room into focus. Its gloom was unnatural; the room was meant to be airy, but Harry had put up curtains, shutting out most of the light except through the glass doors. Finally Clarke could keep it back no longer. 'A bit funereal, isn't it?' he said.
Harry nodded his agreement. 'It was my stepfather's room,' he said. 'Shukshin — the murdering bastard! He tried to kill me, you know? He was a spotter, but different to the others. He didn't just smell espers out, he hated them! Indeed, he wished he couldn't smell them out! The very feel of them made his skin crawl, drove him to rage. Drove him in the end to kill my mother, too, and to have a go at me.'
Clarke nodded. 'I know as much about you as any man, Harry. He's in the river, isn't he? Shukshin? So if it bothers you, why the hell do you go on living here?'
Harry looked away for a moment. 'Yes, he's in the river,' he said, 'where he tried to put me. An eye for an eye. And the fact that he lived here doesn't bother me. My mother's here, too, remember? I've only a handful of enemies among the dead; the rest of them are my friends, and they're good friends. They don't make any demands, the dead…' He fell silent for a moment, then continued: 'Anyway, Shukshin served his purpose: if it hadn't been for him I might never have gone to E-Branch — and I mightn't be here now, talking to you. I might be out there somewhere, writing the stories of dead men.'
Clarke, like Harry's mother, felt and was disturbed by his gloomy introspection. 'You don't write any more?'
'They weren't my stories anyway. Like everything else, they were a means to an end. No, I don't write any more. I don't do much of anything.' Abruptly, he changed the subject:
'I don't love her, you know.' 'Eh?'
'Brenda,' Harry shrugged. 'Maybe I love the little fellow, but not his mother. See, I remember what it was like when I did love her — of course I do, because haven't changed — but the physical me is different. I've a new chemistry entirely. It would never have worked, Brenda and me. No, that's not what's wrong with me, that isn't what gets to me. It's not knowing where they are. Knowing that they're there but not knowing where. That's what does it. There were enough changes in my life at that time without them going off, too. Especially him. And you know, for a while I was part of him, that little chap? However unwillingly — unwittingly? — I taught him much of what he knows. He got it from my mind, and I'm interested to know what use he's made of it. But at the same time I realize that if they hadn't gone, she and I would have been finished long ago anyway. Even if she'd recovered fully. And sometimes I think maybe it's best they did go away, and not only for her sake but his, too.'p>
All of this had flooded out of Harry, poured out of him without pause. Clarke was pleased; he believed he glimpsed a crack in the wall; maybe Harry was discovering that sometimes it was good to talk to the living, too. 'Without knowing where he'd gone, you thought maybe it was the best thing for him? Why's that?' he said.
Harry sat up straighter, and when he spoke his voice was cold again. 'What would his life have been like with E-Branch?' he said. 'What would he be doing now, aged nine years old, eh? Little Harry Keogh Jnr: Necroscope and explorer of the Mobius Continuum?'
'Is that what you think?' Clarke kept his voice even. 'What you think of us?' It could be that Harry was right, but Clarke liked to see it differently. 'He'd have led whatever life he wanted to lead,' he said. This isn't the USSR, Harry. He wouldn't have been forced to do anything. Have we tried to tie you down? Have you been coerced, threatened, made to work for us? There's no doubt about it but that you'd be our most valuable asset, but eight years ago when you said enough is enough… did we try to stop you from walking? We asked you to stay, that's all. No one applied any pressure.'
'But he would have grown up with you,' Harry had thought it all out many, many times before. 'He'd have been imprinted. Maybe he could see it coming and just wanted his freedom, eh?'
Clarke shook himself, physically shrugged off the mood the other had begun to impose upon him. He'd done part of what he came to do: he'd got Harry Keogh talking about his problems. Now he must get him talking, and thinking, about far greater problems — and one in particular. 'Harry,' he said, very deliberately, 'we stopped looking for Brenda and the child six years ago. We'd have stopped even sooner, except we believed we had a duty to you — even though you'd made it plain you no longer had one to us. The fact is that we really believed they were dead, otherwise we'd have been able to find them. But that was then, and this is now, and things have changed…'
Things had changed? Slowly Clarke's words sank in. Harry felt the blood drain from his face. His scalp tingled. They had believed they were dead, but things had changed. Harry leaned forward across the desk, almost straining toward Clarke, staring at him from eyes which had opened very wide. 'You've found… some sort of clue?'
Clarke held up placating hands, imploring restraint. He gave a half-shrug. 'We may have stumbled across a parallel case — ' he said, ' — or it may be something else entirely. You see, we don't have the means to check it out. Only you can do that, Harry.'
Harry's eyes narrowed. He felt he was being led on, that he was a donkey who'd been shown a carrot, but he didn't let it anger him. If E-Branch did have something… even a carrot would be better than the weeds he'd been chewing on. He stood up, came round the desk, began pacing the floor. At last he stood still, faced Clarke where he sat. Then you'd better tell me all about it,' he said. 'Not that I'm promising anything.'
Clarke nodded. 'Neither am I,' he said. He glanced with disapproval all about the room. 'Can we have some light in here, and some air? It's like being in the middle of a bloody fog!'
Again Harry frowned. Had Clarke got the upper hand as quickly and as easily as that? But he opened the glass doors and threw back the curtains anyway. Then: Talk,' he said, sitting down carefully again behind his desk.
The room was brighter now and Clarke felt he could breathe. He filled his lungs, leaned back and put his hands on his knees. There's a place in the Ural Mountains called Perchorsk,' he said. That's where it all started…'
Darcy Clarke got as far as Pill — the mysterious object shot down over the Hudson Bay, but without yet explaining its nature — when Harry stopped him. 'So far,' the Necroscope complained, 'while all of this has been very interesting, I don't see how it's got much to do with me; or with Brenda and Harry Jnr.'
Clarke said, 'But you will. You see, it's not the sort of thing I can just tell you part of, or only the bits you're going to be interested in. If you don't see the whole picture, then the rest of it will be doubly difficult to understand. Anyway, if you do decide you'd like in on this, you'll need to know it all. I'll be coming to the things you'll find interesting later.'
Harry nodded. 'All right — but let's go through to the kitchen. Could you use a coffee? Instant, I'm afraid; I've no patience with the real thing.'
'Coffee would be fine,' said Clarke. 'And don't worry about your instant. Anything has to be good after the gallons of stuff I drink out of that machine at HQ!' And following Harry through the dim corridors of the old house, he smiled. For all the Necroscope's apparently negative response, Clarke could see that in fact he was starting to unwind.
In the kitchen Clarke waited until Harry brought the coffee to the large wooden kitchen table and seated himself, then started to take up the story again. 'As I was saying, they shot this thing down over the Hudson Bay. Now-'
'Wait,' said Harry. 'OK, I accept that you're going to tell it your own way. That being the case, I'd better know the bits round the edges, too. Like how your lot got interested in Perchorsk in the first place?'
'Actually, by accident,' Clarke answered. 'We don't automatically get called in on everything, you know. We're still very much the "silent partner", as it were, when it comes to the country's security. No more than half-a-dozen of Her Majesty's lads in Whitehall — and one lady, of course — know that we even exist. And that's how we prefer to keep it. As always, it makes funding difficult, not to mention the acquisition of new technology toys, but we get by. Gadgets and ghosts, that's always been the way of it. We're a meeting point — but only just — between super-science and the so-called supernatural, and that's how we're likely to stay for quite some little time.
'But since the Bodescu affair things have been relatively quiet. Our psychics get called in a lot to help the police; indeed, they're relying up on us more and more all the time. We find stolen gold, art treasures, arms caches; we even supplied a warning about that mess at Brighton, and a couple of our lads were actually on their way down there when it happened. But by and large we're still very much low-key. So we don't tell everything, and alas we don't get told everything. Even the people who do know about us have difficulty seeing how computerized probability patterns can work alongside precognition. We've come a long way, but let's face it, telepathy isn't nearly as accurate as the telephone!'
'Isn't it?' Harry's sort — with the dead — was one hundred per cent accurate.
'Not if the other side knows you're listening in, no.'
'But it is more secret,' Harry pointed out, and Clarke sensed the acid in his tone. 'So how did you "accidentally" learn about Perchorsk?'
'We got to know about it because our "Comrades" at Perchorsk didn't want us to! I'll explain: do you remember Ken Layard?'
The locator? Of course I remember him,' Harry answered.
'Well, it was as simple as that. Ken was checking up on a bit of Russian military activity in the Urals — covert troop movements and what-not — and he met with resistance. There were opposed minds there, Soviet espers who were deliberately smothering the place in mental smog!'
Now a degree of animation showed in Harry's pale face, especially in his eyes, which seemed to brighten appreciably. So his old friends the Russian espers had regrouped, had they? He nodded grimly. 'Soviet E-Branch is back in business, eh?'
'Obviously,' said Clarke. 'Oh, we've known about them for some time. But after what you did to the Chateau Bronnitsy they've not been taking any chances. They've been even more low-key than we are! They have two centres now: one in Moscow, right next door to the biological research laboratories on Protze Prospekt, and the other in Mogocha near the Chinese border, mainly keeping a wary eye on the Yellow Peril.' "And this lot at Perchorsk,' Harry reminded him. 'A small section,' Clarke nodded, 'established there purely to keep us out! As far as we can tell, anyway. But what on earth can the Soviets be doing there that rates so high on their security list, eh? After Pill, we decided we'd better find out.
The MI branches owed us favours; we learned that they were trying to put one of their agents — a man called Michael J. Simmons — in there; and so we, well, we sort of hitched a lift.'
'You got to him?' Harry raised an eyebrow. 'How?
And more to the point, since he's one of ours anyway, why?'
'Quite simply because we didn't want him to know!' Clarke seemed surprised that Harry hadn't fathomed it for himself. 'What, with Soviet espers crawling all over the place, we should openly establish a telepathic link with him or something? No, we couldn't do that, for their psychics would be onto him in a flash — so we sort of bugged him instead. And since he was in the dark about it, we decided not to tell his bosses at MIS either! Let's face it, you can't talk about what you don't know about, now can you?'
Harry gave a snort. 'No, of course not!' he said. 'And after all, why should the left hand tell the right one what it's doing, eh?'
'They wouldn't have believed us, anyway,' Clarke shrugged off the other's sarcasm. They only understand one sort of bugging. They couldn't possibly have understood ours. We borrowed something belonging to Simmons for a little while, that's all, and gave it to one of our new lads, David Chung, to work on.' 'A Chinaman?' Again the raised eyebrow. 'Chinese, yes, but a Cockney, actually,' Clarke chuckled. 'Born and raised in London. He's a locator and scryer, and damned good at it. So we took a cross Simmons wears and gave it to Chung. Simmons thought he'd mislaid it, and we arranged for him to find it again. Meanwhile David Chung had developed a "sympathetic link" with the cross, so that he would "know" where it was at any given time and even be able to see or scry through it, like using a crystal ball. It worked, too — for a while, anyway.'
'Oh?' Harry's interest was waning again. He never had thought much of espionage, and had considered ESPionage the lowest of all its many forms. Yet another reason why he'd left E-Branch. Deep down inside he thought of espers who used their talents that way as psychic voyeurs. On the other hand he knew it was better that they worked for the common good than against it. As for his own talent: that was different. The dead didn't consider him a peeping Tom but a friend, and they respected him as such.
'The other thing we did,' Clarke continued, 'was this: we convinced Simmons's bosses that he shouldn't have a D-cap.'
'A what?' Harry wrinkled his nose. That sounds like some sort of family planning tackle to me!'
'Ah, sorry!' said Clarke. 'You weren't with us long enough to learn about that sort of thing, were you? A D-capsuIe is a quick way out of trouble. A man can find himself in a situation where it's a lot better to be dead. When he's suffering under torture, for instance, or when he knows that one wrong answer (or right answer) will compromise a lot of good friends. Simmons's mission was that kind of job. We have our sleepers in Redland, as you know. Just as they have theirs over here; your stepfather was one of them. Well, Simmons would be working through a group of sleepers who'd been activated; if he was caught… maybe he wouldn't want to jeopardize them. The initiative to use his death capsule would be Simmons's own, of course. The capsule goes inside a tooth; all a man has to do is bite down hard on it and…'
Harry pulled a face. 'As if there aren't enough of the dead already!'
Clarke felt he was losing Harry, that he was driving him further from the fold. He speeded up: