The Last Aerie (38 page)

Deep inside, Siggi Dam shuddered. For already it was as if Tzonov believed his own fictitious but very plausible scenario …

A Corporal came into the entrance bay from the direction of the duties and control room. He came to attention in front of Krasin, saluted Tzonov, and took out a slim notepad from a black leather briefcase. “Sergeant,” he said to Krasin. “You ordered me to search the rooms which the British occupied. I did so, and found this.”

Krasin examined the pad. “Blank?”

“It’s the light,” the Corporal explained. “But there are impressions.”

“Well done. You can leave it with me.” Krasin dismissed the man.

In Tzonov’s rooms the three examined the notepad under a powerful lamp. The Corporal was quite right; using a soft lead pencil, Tzonov criss-crossed the faint marks until they sprang into sharp relief. Then:

“What?” he frowned. But in another moment his frown faded and was replaced by a look of partial understanding. The drawing was a sign, a sigil: a flat loop with a half twist, in the form of a figure of eight. “Nathan’s earring?”

“More than that,” Siggi breathed. That’s a Mobius Strip. And there’s a connection —” For a moment she could have bitten her tongue, but in the next she reconsidered. What, something as simple as this? A notepad, perhaps incriminating (at least in Turkur Tzonov’s eyes), left lying casually in Trask’s room where it was certain to be discovered?

“— With Harry Keogh!” Tzonov had caught on to her line of reasoning. “I remember now. The first time Keogh is known to have used teleportation, he was visiting the tomb of August Ferdinand Mobius in Leipzig. The Grenz Polizei had trapped and surrounded him—but he disappeared! Only to turn up again at the Chateau Bronnitsy, the then E-Branch HQ, and to wreck it!” He turned to Krasin.

“You were right, Bruno, and this doodle tells all. Trask has given himself away. He would employ exactly the same tactics that the British have used before, and send the alien to Leipzig in the hope that his Necroscope father’s greatest talent will be reborn there. Except it won’t be; on the contrary, it will die there!”

Krasin nodded; he wasn’t
au fait
with the Keogh files and records, but Tzonov’s enthusiasm for this new clue, this promising development, was infectious. “And our next step?”

“I’ll have to speak to Moscow, Turchin,” Tzonov answered. “And he will have to give me carte blanche in this matter. But I want this Nathan, who or whatever, dead. For after all —” he glanced at Siggi, “— we’ve already extracted a deal of information from him. We no longer have any use for him and so it’s the safest way to conclude the matter. Moreover, it will deny the British any possible use of his services.”

Krasin nodded. “Meanwhile we’ll keep searching, and in an ever-widening circle. Why wait until he gets to Leipzig?”

“Exactly.” Tzonov slapped his shoulder. “Very well then, let’s all of us now agree to act accordingly.”

Siggi was last out of his room. Before leaving she took up the notepad and looked again at the simple telltale sketch. But in the privacy of her own room she smiled a secret smile, and thought:
Well then, Mr. Ben Trask, Mr. human lie-detector. But just because your talent is to discover lies, that doesn’t mean you can’t tell one from time to time, eh? Or sketch one? And so you would like to fuck my face, would you? Well, I can forgive you for that, for I know it was only your way of testing me. But if you’ll settle for a kiss …?

And smiling, she blew a kiss across the empty room .,.

As they passed through customs at Heathrow, Trask and Goodly were met by the spotter Frank Robinson. In his early forties, still Robinson looked no more than twenty-eight or -nine. His freckles gave him a permanent schoolboy look and his hair was blond as ever; he would always seem a “young” sort of person. His presence at the airport served a dual purpose. One: he was meeting the Head of E-Branch and a colleague off their plane, and two: he was keeping his eyes and mind open for other mindspies. During the last twenty-four hours there had been a lot of unaccustomed esper activity, most of it stemming from the Russian embassy. It had been quite a while since things were as hot as this.

During the drive to HQ, Trask wasted no time asking how the Branch had known he and Goodly were coming home; he automatically assumed they’d know almost as much as he did. But he was interested in the state of play. “How are we dealing with the Opposition?”

“Diplomatically,” Robinson answered.

Trask knew what he meant: applying pressure to diplomatically immune persons could be difficult. But: “Would you like to be a little more specific?”

“Well, one of their best telepaths was getting a bit too close for comfort by the time I spotted him. Cheeky sod! He’d booked himself into the hotel downstairs and was listening in from point-blank range! We told our friends in Special Branch about him; they picked him up on a moving traffic offence and planted—er, ‘found’—some very illegal substances hidden in his car. Tsk-tsk! He’s been confined to the embassy while the Minister for Foreign Affairs looks into it. And two more of Tzonov’s people have been driving round throwing a screen of static at us morning, noon, and night, trying to scramble our probes. We haven’t bothered to counter them; it’s good to know where they are and what they’re up to, and their efforts have been pretty useless at best. Also, some of our little yellow friends have been showing a lot of interest in us, but since Peking and Moscow aren’t in cahoots these days, we’ve simply let them get on with it. Meanwhile, we’re keeping our eyes peeled, so to speak.”

“Huh!” Trask grunted. “Well, I know I should be reassured, but I’m not. Things feel wrong. We could be under surveillance right now, by gadget if not by ghost.” It was a Branch in-joke. The espers talked of the two sides of espionage: the gadgets of modern day technology, and the ghosts of parapsychology. Except this time Trask wasn’t joking but stating a fact. For well over thirty years now, hi-tech electronic surveillance had been one of the world’s fastest growing industries.

“The car could be bugged, certainly,” Robinson shrugged. “But it’s something we live with. We can’t cover ourselves all of the time.”

“We can try,” Trask told him. “And this time it’s important as never before. So tell me no more for now, and I’ll save what I’ve got until we’re home and dry.”

“As you will.” Robinson nodded. “But at least let me tell you this much: there’s a surprise waiting for you at HQ.”

“Good or bad?”

Robinson was negotiating a bend and for a moment couldn’t answer. Ian Goodly, precog, was with Trask in the back of the car; he was looking out of his window, saying nothing. Perhaps he was hiding his face, which wore a grin like a Cheshire cat. Finally Robinson answered Trask’s question. “Good or bad? You mean your surprise? Good, I think. Indeed, excellent!”

“We shall see,” Trask grunted. Which was the end of their conversation—

* * *

—Until the scanners hidden in the walls of the elevator at E-Branch HQ had cleared them for bugs, and they were on their way up. Then Trask said: “What’s the surprise?”

Robinson grinned. “I think she’d prefer to speak for herself.”

She? Trask wasn’t in the mood for games, and was on the point of saying so when the doors hissed open. As they stepped out into familiar surroundings, he heard voices from his office at the end of the corridor where the door stood ajar. One voice was soft and even a little sibilant for all that its owner was a Londoner born and bred: David Chung, who was the acting-Head of Branch in Trask’s absence. And the other was female and not quite … unfamiliar?

Then, quite clearly, Chung said: “They’re here!”

Trask and Goodly knew that he could only be referring to them. But who was he talking to? Goodly thought he already knew but would wait and see. They weren’t kept waiting, and as “she” stepped out into the corridor Goodly saw how right he’d been. Sometimes the future was worth reading after all.

Trask saw her, too, and his jaw dropped like a trapdoor. Zek Föener!

Across a distance of a dozen paces, Ben Trask and Zek Föener checked each other out. At first there were differences: they
looked
as different as people do with the passage of time. But stepping cautiously towards each other and as the distance narrowed down, the years and all the changes fell away. Zek …

She was still very beautiful. No, Trask made a mental correction, forget the “still”: Zekintha Föener
was
beautiful, as simple as that. She always had been and he guessed she always would be. At five feet nine, she was just an inch shorter than he himself. But a looker: she was something else. Named by her Greek mother after Zante (or more properly Zakinthos, the Mediterranean island where she had been born), Zek was slim, leggy, blonde and blue-eyed. Trask would never forget how she’d looked that time out in the Greek Islands, towards the end of the Janos Ferenczy nightmare; that day on Manolis Papastamos’s boat, when they’d gone looking for the white ship, Ferenczy’s
Lazarus
, to send her and her vampire crew to hell:

Zek had worn a yellow bikini consisting of very little and leaving nothing at all to the imagination. Just like now, she’d scarcely looked her age but was sleek, tanned, stunning. With her eyes blue as the Aegean, her hair flashing gold, and a smile like a white blaze, everyone had agreed that she was a distraction. It was intended that she should be, a trick she’d learned from a Wamphyri Lady on Starside: that even when men’s eyes are wary for other things, still it’s relatively easy for a beautiful woman to turn them aside. And not only the eyes of men, but sometimes of monsters, too …

And that was something else well worth remembering: that quite apart from her wonderful command of telepathy (her father had been an East German parapsychologist), Zek Föener was probably the world’s greatest living expert on the Wamphyri source-world. She had actually been there—had lived there for long weeks and months, with both the Travellers and the Wamphyri—and survived the experience on her own until Jazz Simmons had found her, since when they’d never been apart.

Trask returned to the present. Zek must be—some fifty years old now? Not that you’d ever guess it just from looking at her. Strange, but for all that she and Siggi Dam were miles apart, and not alone in their ages, he found it difficult not to compare them. Perhaps it was because Siggi was fresh in his mind, or maybe it was simply that their colours and shapes were alike. But that was a peripheral comparison, lying fuzzy on the edge of his awareness; while the rest of it, seen close-up … that was the difference between a fjord and the Côte d’Azur.

Not so simply put, Siggi Dam was flawless and therefore, by human standards, imperfect, while Zek Föener’s small flaws were what made her perfect! For example her mouth, whose soft, naturally moist lips were just a fraction too full, and tended to tremble when she was angry. And the uneven jut of her jaw, also when she was upset, which seemed slightly more prominent on the right. Unlike Siggi, and for that matter Turkur Tzonov, too, the two halves of Zek were a long way short of being mirror images, but they did accentuate her humanity. Trask knew which he preferred.

He also knew that all of these thoughts were his alone, that Zek wouldn’t betray a trust and read him uninvited. For while the mindspies of E-Branch worked as closely as possible as one body, it was important that they retain their own identities and personalities intact, inviolate. Being a powerful telepath in her own right, Zek would understand that the code of such people made no allowance for casual snooping.

At the other end of the spectrum, however, in the event it became necessary in the performance of their duties (if a colleague’s life were under threat, or E-Branch itself endangered), then it might be possible, theoretically at least, to link-up as one Entity, one Talent. It hadn’t happened yet, and never would if it meant permanent damage to identity.

Still … Trask knew how he found Zek, and couldn’t help wondering how she found him. Time hadn’t been too devastating, but neither had it been quite so kind to Ben Trask.

“Ben,” she finally said, and again looked him up and down. “Not too much damage, eh?” If he didn’t know better … but he did. She managed a smile; it was wan, half-hearted. Perhaps she was tired.

“I was thinking the same thing —” he answered. “—About myself, I mean! But you …” He shrugged. “It’s like yesterday.”

“Liar!” Her smile was still wan. “But a nice try.”

“When did you get in?” They touched hands, hugged however briefly.

“Two hours ago. An early morning flight from Athens.”

“On your own?” Trask raised an eyebrow. David Chung had joined them from Trask’s office. He was trying hard to catch Trask’s eye across Zek’s shoulder. But too late.

Zek didn’t look away, didn’t even blink. “Jazz died six weeks ago,” she said, softly. “Something he’d been fighting a little less than a year.”

Trask squeezed his eyes shut and let out his breath in a slow, painful sigh. “Oh, Zek! I…”

He wanted to hold her again but she took a small pace to the rear, and cut him off with: “Before Jazz died, he said he wished that we’d tidied things up a bit. For Harry’s sake, if for no other reason.”

“And that’s why you’re here?”

She nodded. “Also, because I thought I might be needed. For almost a week now I’ve felt that something was going on. I mean, after Harry … left us, I felt sort of switched off, drained, depressed. But this last five or six days I’ve felt switched on again. David here has filled in a few blanks for me, but not everything. No, of course not, because I suppose you’ll want to clear me.”

“You want to work with us?” It was too good to be true.

Again her nod. “For now, anyway. Jazz would have wanted me to, certainly.”

Zek’s truth registered in Trask’s mind. “You’re cleared,” he said. And to Chung, urgently now: “Where is everyone?”

“In Ops. Working, watching, planning, waiting—for you. We only need your say-so to go in and bring him out.”

Trask said: “
Bring
him out? Only as a last resort.
Guide
him out, that’s different.” He looked at Zek again. “Have you met everyone? Are you fed and watered? Has David looked after you? I mean, I hate to throw you in at the deep end, Zek, but you’re right: things are on the move.”