Merciful darkness – and the thought in George’s tottering mind: God! It’s feeding on them, and it’s feeding itself to them! And Yulian so close now that he could hear his rasping breathing. Light again, as the lamp settled to a jerky jitterbug – and the mattock wrenched from George’s nerveless fingers and hurled away. And George finally face to visage with the man he’d intended to kill, who now he discovered to be hardly a man at all but something out of his very worst nightmares.
Fingers of rubber with the strength of steel gripped his shoulder and propelled him effortlessly, irresistibly towards the vat. ‘George,’ the nightmare gurgled almost conversationally, ‘I want you to meet something . . .’
Chapter Six
Alec Kyle’s knuckles were white where his hands gripped the rim of his desk. ‘God in heaven, Harry!’ he cried, staring aghast at the Keogh apparition where bands of soft light flowed through it from the window’s blinds. ‘Are you trying to scare the shit out of me before we even get started?’
I’m telling it as I know it. That’s what you asked me to do, isn’t it? Keogh was unrepentant. Remember, Alec, you’re getting it secondhand. I got it straight from them, from the dead — the horse’s mouth, as it were — and believe me I’ve watered it down for you!
Kyle gulped, shook his head, got a grip of himself. Then something Keogh had said got through to him. ‘You got it from “them”? Suddenly I have this feeling you don’t just mean Thibor Ferenczy and George Lake.’
No, i’ve spoken to the Reverend Pollock, too. From Yulian’s christening?
‘Oh, yes.’ Kyle wiped his brow. ‘I see that now. Of course.’
Alec! Keogh’s soft voice was sharper now. We have to hurry. Harry’s beginning to stir.
And not only the real child, three hundred and fifty miles away in Hartlepool, but also its ethereal image where it languidly turned, superimposed over and within Keogh’s midriff. It too was stirring, slowly stretching from its foetal position, its baby mouth opening in a yawn. The Keogh manifestation began to waver like smoke, like the heat haze over a summer road.
‘Before you go!’ Kyle was desperate. ‘Where do I start?’
He was answered by the faint but very definite wail of a waking infant. Keogh’s eyes opened wide. He tried to take a pace forward, towards Kyle. But the blue shimmer was breaking down, like a television image going wrong. In another moment it snapped into a single vertical line, like a tube of electric blue light, shortened to a point of blinding blue fire at eye-level — and blinked out.
But coming to Kyle as from a million miles away: Get in touch with Krakovitch. Tell him what you know. Some of it, anyway. You’re going to need his help.
‘The Russians? But Harry —, Goodbye, Alec. I’ll get. . . back. . . to. . . you.
And the room was completely still, felt somehow empty. The central heating made a loud click as it switched itself off.
Kyle sat there a long time, sweating a little, breathing deeply. Then he noticed the lights blinking on his desk communications, heard the gentle, almost timid rapping on his office door. ‘Alec?’ a voice queried from outside. It was Carl Quint’s voice. ‘It . . it’s gone now. But I suppose you know that. Are you all right in there?’
Kyle took a deep breath, pressed the command button. ‘It’s finished for now,’ he told the breathless, waiting HQ. ‘You’d all better come in and see me. There’s time for an ‘O’-group before we knock it on the head for the day. There’ll be things you’re wanting to know, and things we have to talk about.’ He released the button, said to himself: ‘And I do mean “things”.’
The Russian response was immediate, faster than Kyle might ever have believed. He didn’t know that Leonid Brezhnev would soon be wanting all the answers, and that Felix Krakovitch had only four months left of his year’s borrowed time.
They were to meet on the first Friday in September, these two heads of ESPionage, on neutral ground. The venue was Genoa, Italy, a seedy bar called Frankie’s Franchise lost in a labyrinth of alleys down in the guts of the city, less than two hundred yards from the waterfront.