Necroscope

But as everyone who knew him was well aware, when the boss of E-Branch appeared in a good mood, that was usually when he was most deadly.

Borowitz's office was a spacious affair of great bay windows looking out and down from the tower's curving stone wall over rough grounds towards the distant woodland. The windows, of course, were of bullet-proof glass. The stone floor was covered in a fairly luxurious pile carpet, burned here and there from Borowitz's careless smoking habits, and his desk — a huge block of a thing in solid oak — stood in a corner where it had both the

protection of thick walls and the benefit of maximum light from the bays.

There he now seated himself, sighing a little and lighting a cigarette before pressing a button on his intercom and saying: 'Come in, Boris, will you? But do please see if you can leave your scowl out there, that's a good fellow…'

Dragosani entered, closing the door a little more forcefully than necessary, and crossed catlike to Borowitz's desk. He had 'left his scowl out there', and in its place presented a face of cold, barely disguised insolence. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm here.'

'Indeed you are, Boris,' Borowitz agreed, unsmiling now, 'and I believe I said good morning to you.'

'It was when I got here!' said Dragosani, tight-lipped. 'May I sit down?'

'No,' Borowitz growled, 'you may not. Nor may you pace, for pacing irritates me. You may simply stand there where you are and — listen — to-me!'

Never in his life had Dragosani been spoken to like that. It took the wind right out of his sails. He looked as if someone had slapped him. 'Gregor, I — ' he began again.

'What?' Borowitz roared. 'Gregor, is it? This is business, agent Dragosani, not a social call! Save your familiarity for your friends — if you've any left, with that snotty manner of yours — and not for your superiors. You're a long way off taking over the branch yet, and unless you get certain fundamentals sorted out in your hot little head you may never take it over at all!'

Dragosani, always pale, now turned paler still. 'I… I don't know what's got into you,' he said. 'Have I done something?'

'You, done something?' now it was Borowitz's turn to scowl. 'According to your work sheets very little — not for

the last six months, anyway! But that's something we're going to remedy. Anyway, maybe you'd better sit down. I've quite a lot of talking to do and it's all serious stuff. Pull up a chair.'

Dragosani bit his lip, did as he was told.

Borowitz stared at him, toyed with a pencil, finally said: 'It appears we're not unique.'

Dragosani waited, said nothing.

'Not at all unique. Of course we've known for some time that the Americans were fooling about with extra sensory perception as an espionage concept — but that's

all it is, fooling about. They find it 'cute'. Everything is 'cute' to the Americans. There's little of direction or purpose to anything they're doing in this field. With them it's all experimentation and no action. They don't take it seriously; they have no real field agents; they're playing with it in much the same way they played with radar before they came into World War Two — and look what that got them! In short, they don't yet trust ESP, which gives us a big lead on them. Huh! That makes a nice change.'

'This is not new to me,' said Dragosani, puzzled. 'I know we're ahead of the Americans. So what?'

Borowitz ignored him. 'The same goes for the Chinese,' he said. 'They've got some clever minds over there in Peking, but they aren't using them right. Can you imagine? The race that invented acupuncture doubting the efficacy of ESP? They're stuck with the same sort of mental block we had forty years ago: if it isn't a tractor it won't work!'

Dragosani kept silent. He knew he must let Borowitz get to the point in his own good time, t hen there's the French and the West Germans. Oddly enough, they're coming along quite well. We actually have some of their ESPers here in Moscow, field agents

working out of the embassies. They attend parties and functions, purely to see if they're able to glean anything. And occasionally we let them have titbits, stuff their orthodox intelligence agencies would pick up anyway, just to keep them in business. But when it comes to the big stuff — then we feed them rubbish, which dents their credibility and so helps us keep right ahead of them.'

Borowitz was bored now with toying with his pencil; he put it down, lifted his head and stared into Dragosani's eyes. His own eyes had taken on a bleak gleam. 'Of course,' he finally continued, 'we do have one gigantic advantage. We have me, Gregor Borowitz! That is to say, E-Branch answers to me and me alone. There are no politicians looking over my shoulder, no robot policemen spying on my spying, no ten-a-penny officials watching my expense account. Unlike the Americans I know that ESP is the future of intelligence gathering. I know that it is not 'cute'. And unlike the espionage bosses of the rest of the world I have developed our branch until it is an amazingly accurate and truly effective weapon in its own right. In this — in our achievements in this field — I had started to believe we were so far ahead that no one else could catch us. I believed we were unique. And we would be, Dragosani, we would be — if it were not for the British! Forget your Americans and Chinese, your Germans and your French; with them the science is still in its infancy, experimental. But the British are a different kettle of fish entirely

With the exception of the last, everything Dragosani had heard so far was old hat. Obviously Borowitz had received disturbing information from somewhere or other, information concerning the British. Since the necromancer rarely got to see or hear about the rest of Borowitz's machine, he was interested. He leaned for ward, said: 'What about the British? Why are you suddenly so concerned? I thought they were miles behind us, like all the rest.'

'So did I,' Borowitz grimly nodded, 'but they're not. I Which means I know far less about them than I thought I 1 knew. Which in turn means they may be even farther ahead. And if they really are good at it, then how much do they know about us? Even a small amount of knowledge about us would put them ahead. If there was a World War Three, Dragosani, and if you were a member of British Intelligence knowing about the Chateau Bronnitsy, where would you advise your airforce to drop its first bombs, eh? Where would you direct your first missile?'

Dragosani found this too dramatic. He felt driven to answer: 'They could hardly know that much about us. I work for you and I don't know that much! And I'm the one who always assumed he'd be the next head of the branch…'

Borowitz seemed to have regained something of his humour. He grinned, however wrily, and stood up. 'Come,' he said. 'We can talk as we go. But let's you and me go see what we have here, in this old place. Let's have a closer look at this infant brain of ours, this nucleus. For it is still a child, be sure of it. A child now, yes, but the future brain behind Mother Russia's brawn.' And shirt-sleeves flapping, the stubby boss of E-Branch forged out of his office, Dragosani at his heels and almost trotting to keep pace.

They went down into the old part of the chateau, which Borowitz called 'the workshops'. This was a total security area, where each operative as he worked was watched over and assisted by a man of equal status within the branch. It might seem to be what the western world would call the 'buddy' system, but here in the chateau it was designed to ensure that no single operative could ever be sole recipient of any piece of information. And it

Borowitz's way of ensuring that he personally got to know everything of any importance.

Gone now the padlocks and security guards and KGB men. There were none of Andropov's lot here now, where Borowitz's own agents themselves took care of internal security on a rota system, and the doors to the ESP-cells were controlled electrically by coded keys contained in plastic cards. And only one master card, which of course was held by Borowitz himself.

In a corridor lit by blue fluorescent light, he now inserted that key in its slot and Dragosani followed him into a room of computer screens and wall charts, and shelf upon shelf of maps and atlases, oceanographical charts, fine-detail street plans of the world's major cities and ports, and a display screen upon which there came and went a stream of continually updated meteorological information from sources world-wide. This might be the anteroom of some observatory, or the air-controller's office in a small airport, but it was neither of these things. Dragosani had been here before and knew exactly what the room held, but it fascinated him anyway.

The two agents in the room had stirred themselves and stood up as Borowitz entered; now he waved them back to work and stood watching as they took their places at a central desk. Spread out before them was a complex chart of the Mediterranean, upon which were positioned four small coloured discs, two green and two blue. The green ones were fairly close together in the Tyrhennian Sea, mid-way between Naples and Palermo. One of the blue ones was in deep water three hundred miles east of Malta, the other was in the Ionian Sea off the Gulf of Taranto.