‘Who are you talking to, Mr Harry Keogh?’ asked a voice that wasn’t Mobius’, 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 recognised 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? Fm 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.
‘You can’t win, Harry!’ Gormley insisted. ‘Not like this.’
‘He’s right,’ said James Gordon Hannant. ‘This is your last chance, Harry, and you have to take it. Even if you stop these two there’ll be others. This isn’t the way. You have to use your talent, Harry. Your talent is bigger than you suspect. I didn’t teach you anything about maths – I only showed you how to use what was in you. But your full potential remains untapped. Man, you have formulae I haven’t even dreamed of! You yourself once said something like that to my son, remember?’
Harry remembered.
Strange equations suddenly flashed on the screen of his