‘Felix, get out of there!’ Gulharov was nervous.
Krakovitch backed out of the circle; Gulharov struck a match, tossed it; in a moment the cabinet was an inferno. Like the oblong mouth of a jet engine on test, the cabinet hurled a pale blue sheet of fire roaring into the cold air, a shimmering column of intense heat. And then Dragosani sat up!
Gulharov clutched Krakovitch, clung to him. ‘Oh God! Oh, mother – he’s alive!’ he croaked.
‘No,’ Krakovitch denied, tearing himself free. ‘The thing in him is alive, but mindless. It’s all instinct with no brain to govern it. It would flee but doesn’t know how to, or even what it’s fleeing from. If you spear a sea-cucumber it reacts, spills out its guts. No mind, just reaction. Look, look! It’s melting!’
And indeed it seemed that Dragosani was melting. Smoke curled upward from his blackened shell; layers of skin peeled away, bursting into flame; the fats of his body ran like candle wax, and were consumed by the fire. The thing inside him felt the heat, reacted. Dragosani’s trunk shuddered, vibrated, convulsed. His arms shot out straight, then fell to dangle over the sides of the blazing cabinet, where all the while they jerked and twitched. His clothing was completely burned away by now, and as Krakovitch and Gulharov watched and shuddered, so his crisped flesh burst open here and there, putting out frantic, whipping tendrils that melted and slopped down into the furnace.
In a very little while he fell back and was still, and the two men stood in the snow and watched the fire until it burned itself out. It took all of twenty minutes, but they stood there anyway . . .
3.00 P.M., 27 August 1977.
The big London hotel, within easy walking distance of Whitehall, contained rather more than its exterior might suggest. In fact the entire top floor was given over to a company of ‘international financial entrepreneurs’, which was the sum total of the hotel manager’s knowledge about it. The company had its own elevator at the rear of the building, private stairs, even its own fire escape. Indeed the company owned the top floor, which was therefore entirely outside the hotel’s sphere of control and operation.
In short, the top floor was the headquarters of the most secret of all British secret services: namely INTESP, the British equivalent of that Russian organisation housed just outside Moscow at the Chateau Bronnitsy. But the hotel was only the headquarters; there were also two ‘factories’, one in Dorset and the other in Norfolk, direct-linked to each other and to the HQ by telephone, radiotelephone and computer. Such links, though top-security screened, were open to sophisticated abuse, of course; a clever hacker might get in one day. Hopefully before that happened the branch would have developed its telepaths to such an extent that all of this technological junk would be unnecessary. Radio waves travel at a mere 186,000 miles per second, but human thought is instantaneous and carries a far more vivid and finished picture.
Such were Alec Kyle’s own thoughts as he sat at his desk and formulated Security Standing Orders for the six Special Branch officers whose sole task in life was the personal security of an infant boy just one month old, a child called Harry Keogh. Harry Jnr – the future head of INTESP.
‘Harry,’ said Kyle out loud, to no one in particular, ‘you can have the job right now, if you still want it.’
No, came the answer at once, startlingly clear in Kyle’s mind. Not now, maybe not ever!
Kyle’s mouth fell open and he started upright in his swivel chair. He knew what this was, had known some-thing very much similar at a time some eight months ago.
It was telepathy, yes, but it was more than telepathy. It was the ‘infant’ he’d just been thinking about, the child whose mind housed all that was left of the greatest ESP talent in the world: Harry Keogh.
‘Christ!’ Kyle whispered. And now he knew what it had been about, ‘it’ being the dream or nightmare he’d had last night – when he’d been covered with leeches as big as kittens, whose mouths had fastened on him to drain his blood, while he had leaped and gibbered in a glade of stirless trees, until he’d been too weak to fight any longer. Then he’d fallen on the earth amidst the pine needles, and the leeches had clung to him, and he’d known that he was becoming a leech!