‘Hannant?’ he frowned suspiciously. ‘What did he – ?’
‘Oh, nothing to be concerned about. In fact I think he’s more than a little frightened of you. Harry, I’ve listened to you talking to your poor dead Ma in your sleep, and I knew you were holding real conversations! And there were so many other things. Your writing, for instance. I mean, how come you were suddenly a brilliant author? I’ve read your stories, Harry, and they’re not you. Oh, they’re wonderful stories, all right, but you just aren’t that wonderful! Not the real you. The real you is ordinary, Harry. Oh, I love you – of course I do – but I’m nobody’s fool. And your swimming, your skating, your Judo? Did you think I’d believe you were a super man? I promise you it’s easier to believe you’re a necroscope! It’s a relief to know the truth, Harry. I’m glad you’ve finally told me . . .’
Harry shook his head in open astonishment. Talk about level-headed . . .!
Finally he said: ‘But I haven’t told you everything, love.’
‘Oh, I know that,’ she answered. ‘Of course you haven’t! If you’re to be working for your country, why obviously there’ll be things you need to keep secret -even from me. I understand that, Harry.’
It was as if someone had lifted a great weight off his
chest. He breathed deeply, lay back again, let his head
link into his pillows. ‘Brenda, I’m still very tired,’ he
yawned. ‘Just let me sleep now, there’s a love. Tomorrow
I’m to go down to London.’
‘All right, my love,’ she leaned over him to kiss his forehead. ‘And don’t worry, I won’t ask you to tell me a thing about it.’
Harry slept right through until evening, then got up and ate a meal. They went out about 8:00 p.m. just to walk for an hour in the crisp night air, until Brenda started to feel the cold. Then they hurried home, took hot showers, and made love, and afterwards both of them slept right through the night.
It was the least Harry had done in any single day in his life.
Later he would have reason to recall it as the most wasteful day in his life.
Sir Keenan Gormley was thoughtful as he left ESP HQ, took the lift down to the tiny lobby and went out into the cold London night. Several things had given him cause for concern just recently, not the least of them being Harry Keogh. For Keogh had not yet contacted him, and with each day that passed Gormley felt the time weighing on him like lumps of lead. It was just after nine o’clock as Gormley walked the streets heading for Westminster tube station, and two hundred and twenty-five miles away Harry Keogh himself was just making love to his wife before settling to a night’s sleep.
As for Gormley’s other causes for concern: there were two of them. One was the way his second in command
kept enquiring after his health, which might seem silly if his second in command weren’t Alec Kyle, and if Alec Kyle wasn’t a very talented seer, a man whose by no means negligible talent lay in foretelling the future! Kyle’s concern for his boss over the last week or ten days had been pretty obvious, no matter how carefully he’d tried to hide it. If there was anything specific, Gormley knew that Kyle would tell him. That was why he hadn’t pressed him about it, but it was worrying anyway.
And finally there was the other thing, the big thing. Over the period of the last six or seven weeks there had been at least a dozen different occasions when Gormley had known that there were ESPers about, when he’d ‘spotted’ them in his mind. He had never come face to face with one, had never been able to pin one down, but he’d known they were there anyway. At least two of them.
It had got so he could recognise them almost as easily as he recognised his own men, but these were not his men. Their auras were strange. And always they watched him from the safety of crowds, in the busy places, never where he could tie a face to a feeling. He wondered how long they would go on watching, and if that was all they would do. And as he reached the underground and went down to the trains he patted the bulge of his 9 mm Browning through his overcoat and jacket. At least that was a comfort. There wasn’t an ESPer in the world who could think himself out of the way of a bullet – not that Gormley knew of, anyway . . .