Necroscope: Defilers

  Jake relaxed his shields a little, stood up, and said, “Did you say something? Or was it someone out there, opening up this last door?”

  Here, Korath growled. The formula. Use it now, and let’s be gone from here.

  And before the vault door could be opened, as those weirdly flowing equations commenced scrolling down the screen of Jake’s mind, so he made a door of his own and stepped through it …

  As yet, Jake was by no means expert at judging the coordinates. He emerged rather clumsily from the Continuum on a popular seafront esplanade east of the city, but directly in the path of a young couple who walked arm in arm on the broad pavement. Before he could open his mouth to excuse himself, the young man apologized for his clumsiness—he obviously hadn’t been watching where he was going—and Jake escaped into a store that he knew sold quality optical instruments: the place that had been his original target destination.

  He bought a pair of binoculars, found a shaded doorway, and moved on to Paris.

  We really must begin to master this thing, Korath told him. We must be more discreet how and where we emerge. Incidentally, where are we now? The way you keep your mind half-closed, I can never tell for sure.

  “What good would it do you to know?” said Jake. “You’re not familiar with this world.”

  And never will be at this rate! Korath answered. Very well, I accept that I was out of order in that vault—but you can’t blame me for trying. Even so, I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you, but simply attempting to ease the way for both of us. I can’t help you if I don’t know what you’re about, and certainly not while you insist on keeping your mind half-closed to me.

  “Which I do.”

  Indeed, Korath sighed. Which prompts me again to ask: Where are we?

  “We’re in the Saint-Germain Depres district of the French capital,” Jake told him. “Paris, the Latin Quarter. I used to come here with my mother from time to time, and we stayed at several pleasant little hotels.”

  But why here?

  “Why not? The food’s good, and I’m not much known here. And anyway, what’s the difference? We can go anywhere we want to.”

  And after a moment’s pause: I like that, said Korath.

  “Oh?”

  You said “we.” You’re beginning to think of us as a team.

  “And so we are, according to our original agreement,” Jake answered. “Why, I might even let my shields down a little, if I thought I could trust you not to pull any more stupid stunts.”

  You have my word, said Korath, making it sound just sincere enough. For that was a pointless exercise at best.

  “Very well,” said Jake, “my perimeter shields are down. But I’ll know in a moment if you try to intrude a step further than that. Unlike the bank, my inner vaults are out of bounds!”

  Now we’re getting somewhere, said Korath. I can tell you’re becoming accustomed to this. And that is good! But don’t try to run before you can walk.

  “Meaning?”

  We’ve both a way to go before we master this thing. While I can now read your thoughts clearly, see what you see, and so on and so forth, still I can’t guide your physical actions. If you were attacked, you would have to rely on your own battle skills to get you out of trouble.

  “Exactly the way I like it,” Jake nodded. “Having you in my mind, and having you control it are two different things. Since I need access to the Möbius Continuum, the first is something I have to live with. But that’s as far as it goes.”

  And in a little while: Obstinate, yesss, Korath hissed, before falling silent …

  Jake found a small hotel, booked in under an assumed name, and paid cash for three nights. He didn’t know if he would need as much time as that, but best to be prepared.

  In his rooms he showered, lay on the bed with hands behind his head, locked Korath out of his mind for the time being, and tried to think things through in private. Which wasn’t too easy because pictures of two women kept intruding. Natasha was one—but rapidly fading now, even as she dispersed herself and faded in death—and Liz was the other, taking on sharper definition.

  Liz, sweet Liz … but not so sweet once she’d set her mind on doing something, on getting somewhere. Gutsy Liz. Gritty and even earthy Liz, in a certain kind of way. Long-legged and sexy Liz, yes …

  Then Jake realized that this wasn’t so much an intrusion as a part of the overall problem; whether it would work or not, he now saw Liz as a major part of his future. Assuming he had one.

  And of course he could have one—he might still have one, with E-Branch—if by now he hadn’t entirely ruined his chances by running away, and at a crucial moment at that. He remembered what Trask had told him: that when E-Branch could trust him, it would be his home, his family, his everything; and also that it would protect him with every fibre of its being. He also remembered Trask’s warning: that if he were to cheat, try to put his own agenda first and run off, how that would be the end of it.

  Except Jake felt that he hadn’t so much run off as been … what? Called away? Sidetracked? Lured by something—or someone—inside him? Unfinished business, yes, which someone else had started.

  Someone like the Necroscope Harry Keogh, perhaps?

  But if that were the case, why hadn’t Harry explained it or tried to tell him about it? Granted the Necroscope had admitted that he “wasn’t entirely there”—that his elevator didn’t stop on every floor, and his revenant had been watered down in order to operate on different, far-flung levels—but shouldn’t he at least have known his own purpose here?

  Well, whatever the Necroscope’s purpose in choosing him as his instrument, and in burdening him with all the problems that went with it, Jake Cutter had a cause of his own to pursue. And lying here on this bed wasn’t going to get it done. Or was this urgency—this tightening of his guts, this compelling need for action against Castellano—was it simply another facet of the unknown force that was driving him? Damn! It was like some kind of maddening, everdecreasing circle that must sooner or later drive him headfirst up his own backside!

  To hell with it!

  He jumped up, went down to the lobby, and obtained a map of the locality: Paris and all the roads and countryside around to a radius of fifty miles. And back in his room he studied it. He remembered a factory on the way to the Cote-d’Or and Dijon, the route his mother had used to drive when they visited Paris, and the map brought several landmarks back to memory. Jake had been there, and so knew their coordinates.

  Back in his room he let down his shields, invited Korath in and told him, “We’ve work to do.”

  Then, after buying a sturdy sausage bag in the hotel’s gift shop, and using a stall in the gentlemen’s toilets as a private launching site to the Möbius Continuum, they were on their way. Jake couldn’t know it but the original Necroscope had used just such jumping-off places in his time.

  Or on the other hand, maybe he did know it. Maybe something deep inside him was remembering …

  They were in the French countryside between Nemours and Courtenay, not far from the southbound motorway. Jake was leaning on a three-bar fence in the last of the day’s light, staring along an access road at a modern-looking factory complex set in three or four acres, all enclosed behind a fifteen-foot-high security fence. And of course Korath looked with him.

  So, then, said the vampire in a little while. Perhaps breaking into places is catching after all. But what is this place?

  In all the surrounding countryside there was no other building to be seen. A river, woods, and several small lakes, but no buildings—and Jake knew why. “They make industrial explosives here,” he said. “Including one called plastique, with which I’m fairly familiar. I used it in the SAS. Demolition was something I was good at. It seems I had something of a flare for it.” And changing the subject, but not really: “Notice how quiet it is?”

  I was wondering about that, said the other.

  “The closest place is about a mile away,” Jake told him. “A h
ospital built on rollers on the Saint-Valerien road.”

  On rollers?

  “So that if this place goes up, the hospital will shift but it won’t get blown away,” Jake answered.

  Ab! said Korath. Now I know what you’re talking about. This plastique: you used it when you were a soldier, you say? But it seems to me you’ve used it once or twice since then, too.

  His words evoked brief but violent memories, sending a pair of scenes flashing across Jake’s mind one after the other: Jean Daniel, almost cutting himself in half when he started his car, and a fat German faggot being torn apart in the blast that blew him screaming into hell.

  “That’s right,” said Jake, “but my source of supply on both of those previous occasion was very limited and cost me a great deal of money. This time I need a whole lot of the stuff, and I don’t have time to fool around trying to buy it from people who crack safes for a living.”

  Why should you? said Korath, when you could be the greatest thief of all time?

  Jake ignored that last and said, “A place as big as this, a couple of acres, with contents like that … there are bound to be guards, night watchmen.”

  Indeed, said Korath. And plainly my vampire senses would be invaluable. That is, if we were as one.

  “You never give in, do you?” said Jake. And then, cursorily, “Forget it. All we need is a diversion, and I have the makings. Anyway I’m not too concerned. In a place like this, the guards won’t be armed with anything more dangerous than nightsticks.”

  They took the Möbius route into the grounds of the factory, an area well away from the main building, where wooden pallets, empty crates, and other containers were stacked ready for collection. Having checked that the coast was clear, Jake took wads of toilet paper from his sausage bag, poured a brandy miniature onto the paper, quickly set fire to it, and tossed broken pieces of a tinder-dry crate into the flames.

  Another Möbius jump took him into the shadows of the main building—the one with all the NO ENTRY, and skull-and-crossbones warning signs—from where he could watch the action. In a little while alarms began to sound, then shouting voices and running footsteps, while floodlights snapped on all around the perimeter wire.

  “Now,” said Jake. “While they’re coming out, we go in.”

  Inside the factory, the incidence of NO SMOKING signs, and of skulls and crossbones and other pictorial warnings of fires and explosions, was like a signposted path to Jake’s objective; the more signs he passed, the closer he was to what he sought. So that in just a few seconds and two or three Möbius jumps he was filling his sausage bag with top-quality plastique in containers like giant toothpaste tubes.

  Then it was time to go. And when Korath conjured Möbius’s equations again, Jake still hadn’t seen a single guard.

  When Jake tossed down the heavy sausage bag on the floor of his hotel room, he felt Korath wince. For the dead vampire had seen in his mind the devastating properties of this stuff, which was as much as he knew about it.

  But Jake grinned humourlessly and said, “So what’s worrying you now? You are already dead.”

  But—

  “But don’t concern yourself,” Jake told him. “I could jump up and down on this stuff wearing hobnailed boots. It will only work with microwave radiation, a detonator, or excessive heat—which is why I started that fire back at the factory. I knew it would attract a lot of attention—and fast! As for detonators: I have a small cache hidden away in Marseilles. We can pick them up later. But the night is young, and I’m getting hungry, so I’m going to eat first in the restaurant downstairs. After all, I’m only flesh and blood.”

  As I was, upon a time, said Korath. Ah, well, at least I’ll be able to taste it, if only secondhand.

  “Who said I was taking you with me?” said Jake. But he took him anyway …

  Jake ate well—too well—and along with the good food and a bottle of excellent wine, everything else caught up with him all at once. Suddenly realizing how tiring it could be to share his mind with someone else, and a mind that was full of problems of its own at that, he decided to make an early night of it.

  But Jake’s weariness wasn’t only down to Korath and a full stomach. The metaphysical Mobius Continuum had sapped him, too; the very weirdness of the thing was totally draining, with side- or after-effects not unlike the glorious hangovers he’d used to suffer after his drinking sprees when his mother died. And then to top it all off there was what Natasha had told him: the fact that their affair hadn’t been real was a downer despite that it had freed him—

  —Which in turn led to the biggest paradox of all: that it hadn’t freed him in every respect, and that he couldn’t ever be free until his vendetta with Castellano was resolved one way or the other …

  He had taken a second bottle back to his room with him, and he’d started to open it before having second thoughts. The idea had been that a couple of extra slugs would settle him down for a good night’s sleep … but wouldn’t it also dull his mind? He couldn’t afford that, not with Korath waiting on the threshold. Probably best to stay sober, he thought, or not to get any more drunk than he was now.

  But to be doubly sure he issued the usual warnings, and banished the dead vampire back to his sump. Following which he was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillows …

  Jake didn’t dream, and he did get a good night’s sleep, without any intrusions from Korath.

  Something you probably didn’t know, that one told him, when Jake called out for him. But even the dead grow weary. We do as we did in life, Jake, and for a third of our lives we slept! So is it so strange that we occasionally shut down in death? Well, let me tell you: it makes for a very pleasant escape. Myself, I would spend all of my time sleeping if not for you … for what else was there to do, before you and Harry Keogh came along? So you see, no less than you, I, too, have been wearied by the weirdness of all this.

  “Breakfast,” said Jake, finishing shaving. “And then I need to buy some new clothes. Black pants, pullover, shirt, shoes—the whole bit.”

  All in black?

  “Yes,” Jake nodded. “It has to be my training coming out in me. Since we’ll be doing most of our work at night, that has to be my colour.”

  Your colour?

  “The colour of night.”

  Ahhh! said Korath. And after you’ve purchased your clothes?

  “Then we’ll visit that list of places Natasha gave me, that bastard Castellano’s properties, the bases he works from. First we’ll find him, and then—”

  You’ll kill him.

  “An eye for an eye,” Jake answered—then staggered just a little, as a feeling of déjà vu took him unawares.

  Oh? said Korath, for he had felt it, too.

  “It’s nothing,” Jake lied, aware that he’d suffered several of these spells just lately: paramnesia, as they called it. But whatever they called it, the feeling was real and lingered on a while …

  I thought we were going to do most of our work at night? Korath queried grumblingly. For he could “feel” the sun warm on Jake’s back where he lay propped on his elbows, on a hillside of bone-dry stubble, looking down on Castellano’s villa near Marseilles. While the hot weather was beginning to break inland, it hadn’t yet reached the Mediterranean coast.

  “Your eyes might be up to that, but mine aren’t,” Jake told him, as he adjusted the focus of his binoculars. “And don’t tell me how much easier it would be if I had your eyesight, et cetera, and all of that stuff. My eyes are just fine—better than most. And anyway, this has to be done in daylight. I need these coordinates for later. I only have to see a place, and lock on; then its coordinates go straight into my head and get filed away for later. I don’t ‘remember’ them as such, I just know them.”

  How do you know that?

  “Didn’t I know how to find that swimming pool in Malinari’s Xanadu? And the garden of our safe house in Brisbane? The Latin Quarter in Paris, the plastique factory, and this place?”

&n
bsp; I accept that you know, said Korath. But I don’t understand how you know. Do you?

  Jake shrugged and said “It just … came to me.” Like maybe he’d inherited it. Along with a lot of other stuff, apparently.

  But if you already know these coordinates, why are we here?

  “The coordinates of this hillside, yes,” said Jake. “But of the insides of that villa, no. I only remember one room in that place, and I almost wish I didn’t. But it’s all too vague in my memory … I wasn’t in the best possible condition at the time. Anyway, right now I’m looking into a large downstairs room that might be a study. And I’ve got its coordinates.”

  And that’s all we’re here for?

  “No. For as you’re well aware I’m also looking for Castellano himself. But at this visit, yes, it will have to suffice. I needed an exact reference and I’ve got it. A room in that house which I know I can find unerringly from now on any time I want to.”

  But when precisely?

  “When I’m ready …” He held up a mental hand, said, “Please be quiet, now. I just saw some movement in there, and I want to know who it is.”

  It was a bent old man, who had just this moment entered the study. There was nothing especially sinister about him; he went about dusting furniture, some items on a desk, and moved to the windows to check their locks. A caretaker, by his looks.

  “Castellano’s not at home,” said Jake. “It seems to me this place is empty. Time to move on.”

  To Genoa, San Remo, Bagheria—all the places that Natasha told you about?

  “One at a time, yes,” said Jake. “You have a good memory.”

  A legacy of Malinari, Korath answered sourly. The only good thing be ever gave me—and only then by virtue of what he took from me! But—do you have the coordinates to those places?