‘I owe you my thanks,’ he told Vlady then.
‘You owe me nothing,’ said Vlady.
‘But you came to me just in time,’ Harry insisted, little realising the significance of his words.
‘Time is relative,’ the other shrugged, and chuckled. ‘What will be, has been!’
‘Thanks, anyway,’ said Harry, and passed through the door to the Chateau Bronnitsy.
At 6:31 p.m. exactly, Dragosani’s telephone came janglingly alive, causing him to start.
Outside it was dark now, made darker by snow falling heavily from a black sky. Searchlights in the Chateau’s outer walls and towers swept the ground between the complex itself and the perimeter wall, as they had swept it since the fall of dark, but now their beams were reduced to mere swaths of grey light whose poor penetration was of little or no consequence,
Dragosani found it annoying that vision should be so reduced, but the Chateau’s defences had more going for them than human eyesight alone; there were sensitive tripwires out there, the latest electronic detection devices, even a belt of anti-personnel mines in a circle just beyond the outbuilding pill-boxes.
None of which gave Dragosani any real sensation of security; Igor Vlady’s predictions had ignored all such protections. In any case, the call did not come from the pill-boxes or the fortified perimeter: the men in their defensive positions were all equipped with hand radios. This call was either external or it came from a department within the Chateau itself.
Dragosani snatched the handset from its cradle, snapped, ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘Felix Krakovitch,’ a trembling voice answered. ‘I’m down in my lab. Comrade Dragosani, there’s . . . something!’ Dragosani knew the man: a seer, a minor prognosticator. His talent wasn’t up to Vlady’s standard by a long
shot, but neither was it to be ignored – not on this of all nights.
‘Something?’ Dragosani’s nostrils flared. The man had put an eerie emphasis on the word. ‘Make sense, Krakovitch! What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t know, Comrade. It’s just that. . . something’s coming. Something terrible. No, it’s here. It’s here now!’
‘What’s “here”?’ Dragosani snarled into the phone. ‘Where, “here”?’
‘Out there, in the snow. Belov feels it, too.’
‘Belov?’ Karl Belov was a telepath, and a good one over short distances. Borowitz had often used him at foreign embassy parties, picking up what he could from the minds of his hosts. ‘Is Belov there with you now? Put him on.’
Belov was asthmatic. His voice was always soft and gasping, his sentences invariably short. Right now they were even more so: ‘He’s right, Comrade,’ he gasped. ‘There’s a mind out there – a powerful mind!’
Keogh! It had to be him. ‘Just one?’ Dragosani’s once-sensitive lips curled back from a mouthful of white daggers. His red eyes seemed to light from within. How Keogh had come here he couldn’t say, but if he was alone he was a dead man – and to hell with that traitor Vlady’s predictions!
On the other end of the line, Belov fought for air, struggled to find a means of expression.
‘Well?’ Dragosani hastened him.
‘I … I’m not sure,’ said Belov. ‘I thought there was only one, but now -‘
‘Yes?’ Dragosani almost shouted. ‘Damn it all! – am I surrounded by idiots? What is it, Belov? What’s out there?’
Belov panted into the phone at his end, gasped, ‘He’s . . . calling. He’s some sort of telepath himself, and he’s calling.’
To you?’ Dragosani’s brows knitted in baffled frustration. His great nostrils sniffed suspiciously, anxiously, as if to draw the answer from the air itself.
‘No, not to me. He’s calling to … to others. Oh, God – and they’re beginning to answer him!’
‘Who is answering him?’ Dragosani barked. ‘What’s wrong with you, Belov? Are there traitors? Here in the Chateau.’
There came a clattering from the other end – a low moan and a thudding sound – then Krakovitch again: ‘He has fainted, Comrade!’
‘What?’ Dragosani couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Belov, fainted? What the hell-?’
Lights were beginning to flicker on the call-sign panel of the radio Dragosani had had moved in here from the DO’s control cell. A number of men with handsets were trying to contact him from their defensive positions. Next door Borowitz’s secretary, Yul Galenski, sat nervously behind his desk, twitching as he listened to Dragosani’s raging. And now the necromancer started bellowing for him: