The Source by Brian Lumley

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 ESP-ionage 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:

‘Anyway, we convinced his bosses that they should give him a fake D-cap, a capsule containing complex but harmless chemicals, knock-out drops at the worst.’

Harry frowned. ‘Then why give him one at all?’

‘Incentive,’ said Clarke. ‘He wouldn’t know it was a fake. It would be there as a reminder to watch his step!’

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