‘God, the minds of you people!’ Harry felt genuine disgust.
And Clarke actually agreed. He nodded glumly. ‘You haven’t heard the worst of it. We told them that our prognosticators had given him a high success rating: he was going to come back with the goods. Except . . .’
‘Yes?’ Harry narrowed his eyes.
‘Well, the fact is we’d given him no chance at all; we knew he was going to be picked up!’
Harry jumped up, slammed his fist down on the table so hard that he made it jump. ‘In that case it was criminal even to let them send him!’ he shouted. ‘He’d get picked up, spill the beans under pressure, drop the people who’d helped him right in it – to say nothing of himself! What the hell’s been happening in E-Branch over the last eight years? I’m damned sure Sir Keenan Gormley wouldn’t have stood for any of this in his day!’
Clarke was dead white in the face. The corner of his mouth twitched but he remained seated. ‘Oh, yes he would have, Harry. This time he really would have.’ Clarke made an effort to relax, said: ‘Anyway, it isn’t as black as I’ve painted it. See, Chung is so good that he’d know the minute Simmons was taken. He did know, and as soon as he said so we passed it on. As far as we’re aware MIS has alerted all Simmons’s contacts over there and they’ve taken action to cover their tracks or even get the hell out of it.’
Harry sat down again, but he was still coldly furious. ‘I’ve just about had it with this,’ he said. ‘I can see now that you’ve got yourself in a hole and you’ve come to ask me to dig you out. Well, if that’s the case, then the rest of what you have to tell me had better be good because . . .frankly, this whole mess pisses me off! OK, let’s recap. Even knowing Simmons would get picked up, you fixed him up with a dummy D-cap and let him get himself sent on an impossible mission. Also – ‘
‘Wait,’ said Clarke. ‘You still haven’t got it right. As far as we were concerned, that was his mission: to get picked up! We knew he was going to be anyway.’ His expression was as cold as Harry’s but without the other’s fury.
‘I can’t see this improving,’ said Harry in a little while. ‘In fact it gets worse and worse! And all of this to get a man inside the Perchorsk Projekt, so that your scryer Chung could spy through him. But . . . didn’t it dawn on you that the Soviet espers would pick Chung up, too? His ESP?’
‘Eventually they would, yes,’ Clarke nodded. ‘Even though Chung would use his talent in the shortest possible bursts, they’d crack him eventually – and in fact we believe they have. Except we’d hoped that by that time we’d know exactly what was going on in there. We’d have proof, one way or the other, about what the Soviets were making – or breeding – down there!’
‘Breeding – ?’ Harry’s mouth slowly formed an ‘O’. And now his tone was very much quieter. ‘What the hell are you trying to tell me, Darcy?’
‘The thing they shot down over the Hudson Bay,’ Clarke said, very slowly and very clearly, ‘was one hellish thing, Harry. Can’t you guess?’
Harry felt his scalp tingling again. ‘You’d better tell me,’ he said.
Clarke nodded and stood up. He put his knuckles on the table-top and leaned forward. ‘You remember that thing Yulian Bodescu grew and kept in his cellar? Well, that’s what it was, Harry, but big enough to make Bodescu’s creature look tiny by comparison! And now you know why we need you. You see, it was the biggest, bloodiest vampire anybody could possibly imagine – and it came out of Perchorsk!’
After a long, long moment Harry Keogh said: ‘If this were someone’s idea of a joke, it would be just too gross to-‘
‘No joke, Harry,’ Clarke cut in. ‘Down at HQ we have film of the thing, shot from an AWACS before the fighters got it and burned it out of the sky. If it wasn’t a vampire – or at least made of the stuff of vampires – then I’m in the wrong business. But our people who survived that raid on Bodescu’s place, Harkley House in Devon, they’re a lot more qualified than I am; and they all say that it was exactly like that, which to my mind means there’s only one thing it could possibly be.’