It had the breasts of women, and a half-formed male head, and many pseudohands. Eyes, bulging behind their closed lids, were everywhere. And mouths, some human and others inhuman. Yes, and there were other features much worse than these.
Emboldened, Gulharov and Volkonsky had come forward; the latter, before he could be cautioned, had reached out a hand and laid it upon a cold, shrivelled breast where it protruded alongside a flabby-lipped mouth. All was the colour of leather and looked solid enough, but no sooner had the big ganger touched the teat than it crumbled into dust. Volkonsky snatched back his hand with an oath, stepped back a pace. But Sergei Gulharov was much less timid. He knew something of these horrors, and the very thought of them infuriated him.
Cursing, he lashed out with his foot at the base of the thing where it sprouted from the floor, lashed out again and again. The others had made no attempt to stop him; it was his way of working it out of his system. He waded into the crumbling monstrosity, fists and feet pounding at
it. And in a very little while nothing remained but billowing dust and a few fretted bones.
‘Out!' Krakovitch had choked. ‘Let's get out of here before we suffocate. Carl.' He'd clutched the other's arm, ‘thank God it was dead!' And with their hands to their mouths, finally they'd climbed back up the stairwell into clean, healthy daylight.
‘That… whatever it was, should be buried,' Volkonsky had growled to Gulharov as they moved away from the ruins.
‘Exactly!' Krakovitch had taken the opportunity to agree with him. ‘So as to be absolutely certain, it has to be buried. And that's where you come in.
The four had been back to the ruins a second time since then, when Volkonsky had drilled holes, laid charges, unrolled a hundred yards of detonating cable and made electrical connections. And now they'd returned for the third and last time. And as before, Theo Dolgikh had followed them, which was why this would be the last time.
Now, from the cover of bushes back along the overgrown track near the cliff and its precarious ledge, the KGB man watched Volkonsky put down his firing box at the end of the prepared cable, watched as the party moved on towards the ruins, presumably for one last look.
This was Dolgikh's best chance, the moment the Russian agent had been waiting for. He checked his gun again, took off the safety and reholstered it, then quickly scrambled up the scree slope on his left and into a straggling stand of pines where the trees marched at the foot of the gaunt cliffs. If he used his cover to its best advantage, he could stay out of sight until the last minute.
And so, moving with some agility beneath the trees, he quickly closed the distance between him and his intended victims as they approached the gutted ruins.
In order to maintain his cover in this way, Dolgikh occasionally had to lose sight of his quarry, but finally he reached the furthest extent of the cliff-hugging trees and was forced back down into the lesser undergrowth of the old track. From here the group of men at the ancient castle's walls were plainly visible, and if they should happen to look in Dolgikh's direction, they might also see him. But no, they stood silent one hundred yards away, lost in their own thoughts as they gazed upon that which they intended to destroy. All three of them were deep in thought.
Three? Dolgikh squinted, frowned, glanced quickly all about. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Presumably the fourth man — that young fool, that traitor Gulharov — had entered through the broken exterior wall of the ruins and so passed out of sight. Whichever, Dolgikh knew that he now had all four men trapped. There was no way out at their end of the defile, and in any case they had to come back here to detonate the charges. Dolgikh's leering expression changed, turned into a grim smile. An especially sadistic thought had just occurred to him.
His original plan had been simple: surprise them, tell them he was investigating them for the KGB, have them tie each other up — finally hurl them one at a time from the castle's broken rim. It was a hell of a long way down. He'd make sure that part of the rotten wall went with them, to make it more convincing. Then, at a safe place, he'd climb down, make his way back to them and carefully remove their bindings. An ‘accident', as simple as that. There'd be no escape for them: the nylon cord in Dolgikh's pocket had a 2001b breaking strain! They probably wouldn't even be found for weeks, months, maybe never.
But Dolgikh was something of a vampire in his own right, except he fed on fear. Yes, and now he saw the opportunity to give his plan an elaborate twist. A little extra something for his own amusement.
He quickly kneeled, used his strong square teeth to strip the cable down to its copper cores, and connected up the firing box. Then, still on one knee, he called out loudly up the trail: ‘Gentlemen!'
The three turned, saw him. Quint and Krakovitch recognised him at once, looked stunned.
‘Now what are we having here?' he laughed, holding up the box for them to see. ‘See? Someone is forgetting to make the connections — but I have done it for him!' He put down the box and drew up the plunger.
‘For God's sake, be careful with that!' Carl Quint threw up his arms in warning, stumbled out of the ruins.
‘Stay right where you are, Mr Quint,' Dolgikh shouted. And in Russian: ‘Krakovitch, you and that stupid ox of a foreman come to me. And no tricks, or I blow your English friend and Gulharov to bits!' He gave the T-shaped handle two savage right-hand twists. The box was now armed; only depress the plunger, and —‘Dolgikh, are you mad?' Krakovitch called back. ‘I'm here on official business. The Party Leader himself—'
‘— Is a mumbling old fool!' Dolgikh finished for him. ‘As are you. And you'll be a dead fool if you don't do exactly as I say. Do it now, and bring that lumbering engineer with you. Quint, Mr English mind-spy, you stay right there.' He stood up, took out his gun and the nylon cord. Krakovitch and Volkonsky had put up their hands in the air, were slowly leaving the area of the ruins.
In the next split second Dolgikh sensed that something was wrong. He felt the tug of hot metal at his sleeve before he heard the crack of Sergei Gulharov's automatic. For when the others had gone forward to the ruins, Gulharov had stepped into a clump of bushes to answer a call of nature. He had seen and heard everything.
‘Put up your gun!' he now yelled, coming at Dolgikh at a run. ‘The next shot goes in your belly!'
Gulharov had been trained, but not nearly as thoroughly as Theo Dolgikh, and he lacked the agent's killer instinct. Dolgikh fell to his knees again, straightened his gun arm toward Gulharov, aimed and squeezed the trigger of his weapon. Gulharov was nearly on him. He, too, had fired again. His shot went inches wide, but Dolgikh's was right on target. His snub-nosed bullet blew away half of Gulharov's head. Gulharov, dead on the instant, jerked to a halt, then took another stumbling step forward and crashed over like a felled tree — directly on to the firing box and its extended plunger!
Dolgikh hurled himself flat, felt a hot wind blow on him as hell opened up just one hundred yards away. Deafening sound blasted his ears, left them ringing with wild peals. He didn't see the actual explosion, or simultaneous series of explosions, but as the spray of soil and pebbles subsided and the earth stopped shaking he looked up — and then he did see the result. On the far side of the gorge the ruins of Faethor's castle stood much as before, but on this side they had been reduced to so much rubble.
Craters smoked where the castle's roots were bedded in the mountain. A landslide of shale and fractured rock was still tumbling from the cliff onto the wide, pitted ledge, burying deep the last traces of whatever secrets had been there. And of Krakovitch, Quint and Volkonsky — Nothing whatsoever. Flesh isn't nearly as strong as rock.
Dolgikh stood up, brushed himself down, heaved Gulharov's corpse off the detonating box. He grabbed Gulharov's legs and dragged his body to the smouldering ruins, then toppled him from the cliff. An ‘accident', a genuine accident.
On his way back down the track, the KGB man rolled up what was left of the cable; he also collected Gulharov's gun and the box. Half-way down the ledge where it hugged the cliff he threw all of these things into the dark gurgling ravine. It was finished now, all of it. Before he got back to Moscow he would have thought up an excuse, a reason why Gerenko's supposed ‘weapon', whatever it had been, no longer existed. That was a pity.
But on the other hand — Dolgikh congratulated himself that at least half of his mission had been accomplished successfully. And very satisfactorily.
8.00 P.M. at the Chateau Bronnitsy.
Ivan Gerenko lay in a shallow sleep on a cot in his inner office. Down below, in the sterility of the brain- washing laboratory, Alec Kyle also lay asleep. His body, anyway. But since there was no longer a mind in there, it was hardly Kyle any longer. Mentally, he had been drained to less than a husk. The information this had released to Zek Foener had been staggering. This Harry Keogh, if he had still lived, would have been an awesome enemy. But trapped in the brain of his own child, he was no longer a problem. Later, maybe, when (and if) the child had grown into a man.
