"Lumley, Brian - Vampire World 2 - The Last Aerie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

'Actually, he died six, seven months ago,' she said.
'What?' She'd taken Trask by surprise.
'He was dead to us the moment he went through the Perchorsk Gate,' she explained. 'Or as good as. There was no way we were ever going to see him again. He'd used both of the Gates, the one in the Urals and the one in Romania. He couldn't come back; the grey holes would reject him.'
Trask had been happy to hear her voice, talk to Zek, but suddenly his mood was grim. She'd brought something up that he didn't like to think about. 'That's true as far as it goes,' he said, 'but his son used a different route. Harry had considered himself the master of the Mobius Continuum, but in fact he was a novice. Those are his words, not mine. Harry Junior was the real master. But if anyone knows that, you do: it's how he brought you and Jazz out of that place back here.'
There was a pause before she answered. 'The Dweller still worries you, right?'
The Dweller?' Trask frowned. But in the next moment: 'Oh, yes, you mean Harry Junior. He worries me,
right enough. The Perchorsk Gate worries me, and the resurgence of one of the Danube's tributaries near Radu-jevac in Romania. They all worry me, for they're all routes into this world from the world of the vampires.'
'But they're covered now, surely?'
'Harry Junior isn't.'
And now it was Trask's turn to sense the shake of a head. 'He won't be coming back,' Zek told him. 'He was Wamphyri, yes, but he was different. As different as the Lady Karen. As different as his father. He fought for his territory on Starside, and he'll stay there and keep it. He battled with the vampires, Ben, destroyed them, and to my knowledge he didn't create one out of himself. He kept no thralls, no lieutenants, no vampire lovers. Just friends. But they did love him, even as much as the Great Majority loved his father.'
She had reassured him. 'Zek, I know you've turned me down before,' he said, 'but I really think you and Jazz should come over here some time. Be our guests and stay in London a while at our expense, and tell us your story in full. No, you don't owe us anything, neither one of you. But you said it yourself: we're friends. And the pair of you have such a lot of information locked in your heads: about Starside, the Wamphyri, even things about Harry Keogh and his son, that only you know. The world's improving, Zek - not by leaps and bounds, not yet - but who knows ... maybe you can help it along the way? Or if not help it, protect it at least.'
And before she could answer him, 'I mean, it's not like it used to be, Zek, not any more. You were used, you and Jazz both - oh, and too many others - by Russia's E-Branch, and by ours, too. But lessons were learned and it isn't like that any more. We are learning all the time. I've thought about it a lot, and it's as if
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everything the Necroscope touched upon has been improved and changed forever. Before he'd even discovered the Mobius Continuum, he had to use Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin to get into East Germany and talk to Mobius in his Leipzig grave. And where's the checkpoint now, eh? As for Romania ... Do you see what I mean, Zek? It's as if mankind has turned over a new leaf, and all since Harry came along, or since he left us. But should we be surprised, really? I remember Harry once said, "There are a great many talents among the dead, and they have their ways of using them." But it was him who showed them how to talk to each other, connecting them up in their graves. Since then - just look around the world.
'Are they responsible, the teeming dead? Who knows what they've achieved, or how they did it? Communism is on its last legs, a dismal failure, and the world's a safer place. After we send the rest of our false ideological gods packing, then maybe we can start over: a grand restructuring, the ecology of Mother Earth herself. Right now the world is safer, but it's still not safe enough. Could you and Jazz help make it just a little bit safer, Zek? That's what I want you to think about. If not for me, for Harry. I mean, don't you reckon it's worth finishing the job that he started?'
That's cheating, Ben,' she told him.
'Well, think about it anyway.'
Later, she did think about it. Zek and Jazz both. But they didn't go to London. It would take a long time for their wounds to heal, a long time before they would forgive the world's ESP-Branches ...
While sixteen years isn't a long time in the great scheme of things, still changes do occur. People, faces, places change; governments and organizations come and go;
causes and ideologies collapse and others spring into being. But establishments are wont to continue, if only because they are established.
Cold wars had come and gone; hot ones, too, however brief, localized; the world's Secret Services were always in demand. Even during periods of intense perestroika and glasnost (perhaps especially through such periods), that most esoteric of all services, E-Branch, had gone on, with Ben Trask continuing as Head of Branch. While some of his agents were no more and others had been recruited to take their places, the organization itself was an extremely successful establishment. There would always be work for the Branch, and if ever that should change ... the truth of it was that the government of the day probably wouldn't know what to do with the Branch's esoteric talents if they were disbanded. At least this way the espers could be seen to be working for the common good.
As for the current state of the world:
Communist China was slipping fast on the worn-down heels of Russia into a bog of stagnation and economic decay, and the USSR itself was much less unified. Internally, Russia was still recovering from seventy years of self-inflicted wounds, but its occasional haemorrhages were all on the inside now, and issued from vastly reduced lesions. There was no longer even a remote threat of global conflict; the last remaining Superpower, the USA, was ultimately potent and alert, as were her allies. But more importantly, theirs was a generally benign alliance. And just as Ben Trask had once forecast, the world was a much safer place now; so much so that it had become a fad among political and historical commentators to attempt to identify the turning point and name the prime factors and movers:
The microchip; Lech Walesa; giant technological
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spin-offs from the space race and the Star Wars programme; spies in the sky; Chernobyl; the total collapse of European Communism; President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and to some extent Premier Gorbachev; the war in the Gulf, where the entire world had watched with fascination, astonishment, and more than a little horror as uninspired warriors with outmoded, outgunned weapons were mown down under the previously unimaginable onslaught of outraged passions and superior technology.
And through all of this, no one except perhaps a handful of E-Branch members remembered Harry Keogh, Necroscope, or attributed anything of the current world order to his works. And other than that same small handful, no one credited the Great Majority, the teeming dead, with even the smallest part in it.
Which was the way things stood on that Monday morning in January 2006 when Trask arrived at E-Branch HQ in the heart of London, and found David Chung prowling to and fro in the foyer with a cellphone, waiting for him. Except it wasn't the cellphone which brought Trask up short as he entered the building but the look on Chung's face, and what he was holding in his other hand: an old hairbrush.
Harry Keogh's old hairbrush ...
Before Trask saw that, however, he recognized Chung's urgency and commenced to say, 'Sorry, David, my earphone is on the blink. And anyway there's so much interference these days a man can't even think, let alone speak! Is there a problem? Were you trying to ... contact... me?'
By then he'd seen the hairbrush and jerked to a halt. The occurrences of that night sixteen years ago had all come rushing back in a flood of vivid memories, and the beat of Trask's heart had picked up speed to match the
sudden flow of adrenaline. 'David?' he said, making it a question.
Chung answered with a grim nod, simply that, and whisked him into the elevator. But as the doors slid shut on them and they were alone, he uttered those words which Trask had most dreaded to hear: 'He's back.'
Trask didn't want to believe it. 'He?' he husked, knowing full well who he must be, the only one he could be. 'Harry?'
Chung nodded, shrugged helplessly, seemed lost for words. 'Something of him,' he answered at last, 'who or whatever he is now. But yes, Ben, I'm talking about Harry. Something of Harry Keogh has come back to us ..."
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II
Harry's Room
From the hotel manager's point of view, E-Branch didn't even exist. He occasionally forgot that the hotel had a top storey; which wasn't strange, for he'd never seen it. The occupants of that unknown uppermost level had their own elevator situated at the rear of the building, private stairs also at the rear, even their own fire escape. Indeed, 'they' owned the top floor, and so fell entirely outside the hotel's sphere of management and operation.
As to who 'they' were: international entrepreneurs, or so the hotel manager had been given to understand; nor was he alone in his ignorance. For from the outside looking in, very few would suspect that the building in toto was anything other than it purported to be: an hotel. Which was exactly the guise or aspect, or lack of such, which 'they' wished to convey. And so, except to its members, and to a select core of Very Important Persons in the Corridors of Power, who could be numbered on the fingers of one hand - only one of which, the Minister Responsible, knew the actual location of E-Branch HQ - the Branch simply did not exist.
Yet paradoxically E-Branch's existence and indeed its location were known of elsewhere in the world, to one organization at least and probably more than one. The Soviet equivalent knew of it certainly, and possibly China's mindspy organization too. They knew about E-
Branch HQ but made no great show of it - not yet. Let it suffice that the hotel had been earmarked and was a target; in the unlikely event of global conflict it would be an early casualty, simply because it gave the West too much of an edge.
This was of small concern: since the end of World War Two inner London itself had been a target, as were all centres of government, finance, and commerce worldwide, not to mention a thousand military establishments. And for that matter, so were the Russian and Chinese ESP-agencies targets, including Soviet HQ on Protze Prospekt in Moscow, next door to the State Biological Research Laboratories. Also the Soviet 'listening' cell in Mogocha near the Chinese border, where a team of telepaths kept an eye (or an ear) on the Yellow Peril; and likewise the Chinese outfit itself on Kwijiang Avenue, Chungking. The commencement of World War Three would be a hot time for espers, which was as good a reason as any why such agencies should work for its prevention. And so to all intents and purposes, perestroika and glasnost were still very much the order of the day.
Which was why it came as no surprise to Trask when Chung told him, 'Our "friends" on Protze Prospekt have confirmed it: something has come through the Perchorsk Gate. They've got it trapped there and want our help with it - urgently.' He used the term 'friends' loosely; the British and Soviet E-Branches had never been more than wary adversaries. In fact the Necroscope in his time had twice pared 'the Opposition' down to the bone. But ever since the Chernobyl disaster, the Russians had been far less reluctant to ask for outside help. They'd asked for it not only with that horror but also with the decommissioning and mothballing of a dozen more outdated, outmoded and positively lethal
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