‘Of course not! Oh! I see. No, I need him genuinely -and he looks about as gay as a shipyard welder! I’ll tell you why I want him right now – because I’m alone here. And if you were here you’d know what I mean.’
‘Yes, I’m told you’ve had to weather quite a lot. Very well, leave it with me.’
Thank you,’ said Krakovitch. He broke the connection.
Gulharov was impressed. ‘Just like that,’ he said. ‘You have a lot of power, sir.’
‘It seems that way, doesn’t it?’ Krakovitch smiled tiredly. ‘Listen, I’m dead on my feet. But there’s one more thing to do before I can sleep. And let me tell you, if you think what you’ve seen so far is unpleasant, what you’re about to see is far worse! Come with me.’
He led the way through the chaos of shattered rooms and piled rubble, from the covered-in courtyard area into the main, original building, then up two flights of time-hollowed stone stairs into one of the twin towers. This was where Gregor Borowitz had had his office, which Dragosani had turned into his control room on the night of the horror.
The stairwell was scarred and blackened, with tiny fragments of shrapnel, flattened lead bullets and copper cases lying everywhere. The stink of cordite was still heavy in the air. That would be from blast grenades, tossed down here from above when the tower came under attack. But none of this had stopped Harry Keogh and his Tartars. On the second floor landing the door to a tiny anteroom stood open. The room had served as an office for Borowitz’s secretary, Yul Galenski. Krakovitch had known him personally: a generally timid man, a clerk with no extrasensory talent. Just staff.
Between the open door and the stairwell’s safety rail, face down on the landing, lay a corpse in the Chateau’s duty uniform: grey coveralls with a single diagonal yellow stripe across the heart. Not Galenski (he had been a ‘civvies only’ man) but the Duty Officer. The corpse’s face lay quite flat on the floor in a pool of blood. Flatter than it should. That was because there was very little of actual face left, just a raw flat mess.
Krakovitch and Gulharov stepped carefully over the body, entered the little office. Behind a desk, crumpled in one corner, Galenski sat clutching a rusty curved sword where it stuck out of his chest. It had been driven home with such force that he was pinned to the wall. His eyes were still open, but no longer terrified. From some people, death steals all emotion.
‘Mother in heaven!’ Gulharov whispered. He’d never seen anything like this. He wasn’t even a combat soldier, not yet.
They went through a second door into what had been Borowitz’s office. It was spacious, with great bullet-proof bay windows looking out and down from the tower’s curving stone wall toward distant woodland. The carpet was burned and stained here and there. A massive block of a desk in solid oak stood in one corner, receiving light from the windows and protection from the stone wall at its back. As for the rest of the room: it was a shambles – and a nightmare!
A shattered radio spilled its guts onto the floor; walls were pockmarked and the door splintered from the impact of sprayed bullets; the body of a young man in Western styled clothes lay where it had fallen, ripped by machine gun fire, almost in two pieces behind the door. It was glued to the floor with its own blood. This was Harry Keogh’s body: nothing much to look at, but there was no fear or pain on his white, unmarked face.
As for the nightmare: that lay propped against the wall on the other side of the room.
‘Boris Dragosani,’ said Krakovitch, pointing. ‘The thing pinned to his chest is what controlled him, I think.’ He stepped carefully across the room to stand gazing down on what was left of Dragosani and his parasite creature; Gulharov was right behind him, not wanting to get too close.
Both of Dragosani’s legs were broken and lay at weird angles. His arms hung slack down the wall to the skirting, elbows just off the floor, forearms at ninety degrees and hands projecting well beyond the cuffs of his jacket. They were hands like claws, big, powerful and grasping, frozen in Dragosani’s final spasm. His face was a rictus of agony, made worse by the fact that it was hardly a human face at all, and worse still by the gash that split his skull ear to ear.