"Lumley, Brian - E-Branch 3 - Avengers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

was, in fact, pursuing a vendetta with this criminal organization's powerful leader and several of his close colleagues - people who had raped and murdered a girl of Jake's aquaintance, with whom he had had a brief but passionate affair - and had been responsible for a series of violent, extremely ugly deaths in their higher echelon.)

But the leader of the gang - a Sicilian vampire named Luigi Castellano - had laid a trap for Jake, causing him to fall into the hands of the Italian police. Incarcerated in a Turin prison, Jake had soon discovered that Castellano was not without influence there, and that his demise had been scheduled for the very near future.

Then, during a jailbreak (also arranged by Castellano), when it seemed certain that Jake must die under fire from the guards . . . a weird reprieve, a miraculous escape: Jake's first taste of things to come, and the beginning of his transition.

Something he took to be a ricochetting bullet - a flash of golden fire - struck him in the forehead. But instead of falling dead he fell into something else entirely and was conveyed through the Mobius Continuum ( a means of metaphysical teleportation) to Harry's Room at E-Branch HQ in London.

Harry's Room:

The long-dead (?) Necroscope Harry Keogh was once the most important member of E-Branch. On those occasions when he stayed at the London HQ, he had a room of his own, as did many espers. Harry's Room, however, has always been (and still is) different from the other rooms. Perhaps to signal their regard for their much loved, highly respected ex-member - or perhaps because the room continues to retain something of the Necroscope's personality - it has been left untouched and unoccupied, exactly as it was in the time of Harry's residence.

And so it was a singular event for Ben Trask and his espers to discover a bewildered stranger inside the locked room of the Necroscope, in the heart of security-conscious E-Branch HQ( And it had to be more than a mere coincidence

Jake's advent had come at a propitious moment (or, at least, everyone except Trask thought so), for it was only a short time later that Nephran Malinari was discovered in Xanadu, his playboy retreat and aerie in the mountains of the Macpherson Range. And teaming Jake up with Liz Merrick, a young, attractive, budding telepathic receiver whose powers, like Jake's, were still developing, Trask took them to Australia as part of his task force.

It was during the course of this largely successful operation that Jake discovered the truth of what Trask and his people had suspected all along: that indeed he had inherited something of Harry's powers. For when the


6


original Necroscope had died on Starside, his metaphysical personality - the sidereal intelligence that was Harry - had fragmented into many golden splinters or darts, one of which had entered into Jake! Now, in his dreams, Jake could converse with the 'dead' Necroscope through the medium of deadspeak. Then, too (not yet aware that his dreams were of crucial importance, that they had real meaning in the waking world and were much more than disturbing symptoms of paramnesia and a crumbling mentality), Jake had felt obliged to ask Trask just what, exactly, a Necroscope was.

But while Trask had been willing to explain something of a Necroscope's powers to Jake - his ability to teleport, and the unearthly 'gift' that enabled him to converse with the dead - there were certain other things that he dared not speak of. For, as the director of E-Branch for many years, Trask had developed an inquiring and sceptical mind; he knew how very deceiving outward appearances could be, and how even the most innocent-seeming of men (especially the innocent ones: for example, the original Necroscope) might be susceptible to the greatest evils. Moreover, Trask had never had much faith in coincidence or synchronicity. He believed that things usually had good reasons for happening, and that when they happened might be equally relevant . . .

Jake had come on the scene at a propitious time, certainly - but propitious for whom? And wasn't it simply too much of a coincidence that at the advent of a trio of Great Vampires out of Starside a new Necroscope should also put in an appearance? So had Jake arrived of his own (or Harry Keogh's) accord, by 'coincidence', or had he in fact been sent to infiltrate E-Branch? What was it of the original Necroscope - how much of Harry, what element - that had entered Jake? Something of his light side, from his earlier life - or something of his far more dangerous side from a later, darker period?

For one of the several things that Jake didn't yet know was that at the end of the Necroscope's time on Earth he had been a vampire in his own right -Wamphyri! And probably the greatest of them all! And not only Harry but two of his sons: they, too, had been vampires, changeling creatures, on Starside in a weird parallel world . . .

Thus Trask's doubts - or, more properly his natural caution, coupled with his inability to read the young Necroscope despite that his own weird talent made him a human lie-detector - held him back from bringing Jake more fully into his confidence. For if Jake was not the real thing, if he had not inherited Harry's mantle to become the fantastic weapon against the Wamphyri that most of Trask's agents believed him to be, but rather possessed the potential to become the exact opposite . . . then Trask might yet have to kill him!


7


Hence his great quandary, for if on the other hand Jake was the real thing, and if he was made privy to everything, then he might easily shy from the knowledge - the full knowledge - of what he was becoming and what he would be capable of doing, and would be lost to E-Branch for ever. For while it takes a special kind of man to accept the responsibilities of a Necroscope, the role of caretaker to the dead, it takes an extra-special man to accept that the Great Majority will do almost anything for love of him . . . including the agony and horror of self-resurrection, of rising from their graves in order to protect him!

After the Australian venture, when Jake was given the comparative 'freedom' of E-branch HQ - if not access to all of its many secrets the first thing he did was desert the cause in order to pursue his own agenda: his vendetta with Castellano. But the fact was that Jake didn't see his leaving as any kind of treachery; his reasons for walking out on Ben Trask and E-Branch were more than one, and not least self-preservation.

First, the Harry Keogh influence had been replaced by something of a far more disturbing nature: Jake was finding himself under constant attack from a deceased vampire lieutenant called Korath (once Korath Mindsthrall), an ex-minion of Malinari's. Dead and sloughed away in a subterranean sump in Romania, Korath had used deadspeak to tell Jake the histories of the three Wamphyri invaders from Starside-but in the process he had also tricked his way into semi-residence in Jake's head. Only let Jake relax and let his mental shields down - and Korath would be there with him in his mind, dreaming his dreams, conversing with him, attempting to influence - to 'guide' or 'advise'- him and generally sharing his wakingworld experiences. Jake could send him away, back to his sump, but he could never be absolutely certain when Korath was or wasn't there.

The only good thing to come out of this was that Korath had 'inherited' something of his former masters mentalism: endowed with eidetic recall, he'd memorized the mathematical Mobius formula given to Jake by Harry Keogh -which for some reason Jake was unable to grasp - and had thus become his reluctant host's one and only key to the metaphysical Mobius Continuum's mode of trans- or teleportation.

And so he and Jake had worked out a compromise. All Korath wanted - or so he had led Jake to believe - was revenge on his former master and the other Great Vampires for killing him as a means of accessing our world. But since Korath was incorporeal, a dead creature whose sole contact with the living was through Jake and his deadspeak, the new Necroscope was the only one who could possibly exact such a revenge. Jake couldn't go about his business without Korath, and Korath would have no existence at all without Jake.


8