As for INTESP: Foener was now privy to that entire organisation's machinery. Nothing remained secret. Kyle had been the controller, and what he had known Zek Foener was heir to. Which was why, as the technicians dismantled their instruments and left Kyle's body naked and drained even of instinct, she hurried to report something of her findings — and one thing in particular — to Ivan Gerenko.
Zekintha Foener's father was East German. Her mother had been Greek, from Zakinthos in the Ionian Sea. When her mother died, Zek had gone to her father in Posen, to the university where he worked in parapsychology. Her psychic ability, which he had always suspected in her when she was a child, had become immediately apparent to him. He had reported the fact of her telepathic talent to the College of Parapsychological Studies on Brasov Prospekt in Moscow, and had been summoned to attend with Zek so that she could be tested. That was how she had come to E-Branch, where she had rapidly made herself invaluable.
Foener was five-nine, slim, blonde and blue-eyed. Her hair shone and bounced on her shoulders when she walked. Her Chateau uniform fitted her like a glove, accentuating the delicate curves of her figure. She climbed the stone stairs to Krakovitch's (no, she corrected herself, to Gerenko's) office, entered the anteroom and knocked firmly on the closed inner door.
Gerenko heard her knock, forced himself awake and struggled to sit up. In his shrivelled frame he tired easily, slept often but poorly. Sleep was one way of prolonging a life which doctors had told him would be short. It was the ultimate irony: men could not kill him, but his own frailty surely would. At only thirty-seven he already looked sixty, a shrunken monkey of a man. But still a man.
‘Come in,' he wheezed, as he sucked air into his fragile lungs.
Outside the door, while Gerenko had come more surely awake, Zek Foener had broken a trust. It was an unwritten rule at the Chateau that telepaths would not deliberately spy on the minds of their colleagues. That was all very well and only decent in normal conditions, normal circumstances. But on this occasion there were gross abnormalities, things which Foener must track down to her satisfaction.
For one, the way Gerenko had literally taken over Krakovitch's job. It wasn't as if he stood in for him at all, but had in fact replaced him — permanently! Foener had liked Krakovitch; from Kyle she had learned about Theo Dolgikh's surveillance activities in Genoa; Kyle and Krakovitch had been working together on —‘Come in!' Gerenko repeated, breaking her chain of thought, but not before everything had fallen together. Gerenko's ambition burned bright in her mind, bright and ugly. And his intention, to use those… those Things which Krakovitch was quite rightly bent on destroying.
She drew air deeply and entered the office, staring at Gerenko where he lay in the dark on his cot, propped up on one elbow.
He put on a bedside lamp and blinked as his weak eyes accustomed themselves. ‘Yes? What is it, Zek?'
‘Where's Theo Dolgikh?' she waded straight in. No preliminaries, no formalities.
‘What?' He blinked at her. ‘Is something wrong, Zek?'
‘Many things, perhaps. I said —‘
‘I heard what you said,' he snapped. ‘And what has it to do with you where Dolgikh is?'
‘I saw him for the first time, with you, on the morning that Felix Krakovitch left for Italy — after he left,' she answered. ‘Following which he was absent until he brought Alec Kyle back here. But Kyle wasn't working against us. He was working with Krakovitch. For the good of the world.'
Gerenko swung his brittle legs carefully off the cot onto the floor. ‘He should only have been working for the good of the USSR,' he said.
‘Like you?' she came back at once, her voice sharp as broken glass. ‘I know now what they were doing, Comrade. Something that had to be done, for safety and sanity. Not for themselves, but for mankind.'
Gerenko eased himself to his feet. He wore child's pyjamas, looked frail as a twig as he made for his great desk. ‘Are you accusing me, Zek?'
‘Yes!' She was relentless, furious. ‘Kyle was our opponent, but he personally had not declared war on us. We aren't at war, Comrade. And we've murdered him. No, you have murdered him — to foster your own ambitions!'
Gerenko climbed into his chair, put on a desk lamp and aimed its light at her. He steepled his hands in front of him, shook his head almost sadly. ‘You accuse me? And yet you were party to it. You drained his mind.'
‘I did not!' She came forward. Her face was working, full of anger. ‘I merely read his thoughts as they flooded out of him. Your technicians drained him.'
Unbelievably, Gerenko chuckled. ‘Mechanical necromancy, yes.'
She slammed her hand flat down on the desk top. ‘But he wasn't dead!'
Gerenko's shrivelled lips curled into a sneer. ‘He is now, or as good as.
‘Krakovitch is loyal, and he's Russian.' She wouldn't be stopped. ‘And yet you'll murder him too. And that really would be murder! You must be mad!' And in that she had hit upon the truth. For Gerenko's warps weren't only in his body.
‘That — is — enough!' he snarled. ‘Now you listen to me, Comrade. You speak of my ambition. But if I grow strong, Russia herself grows that much stronger. Yes, for we are one and the same. You? You've not been Russian long enough to know that. This country's strength lies in its people! Krakovitch was weak, and —,
‘Was?' Her arms trembled where she leaned forward, knuckles white on the edge of his desk.
He suddenly felt that she had grown very dangerous.
He would make one last effort. ‘Listen, Zek. The Party Leader is a weak old man. He can't go on much longer.
The next leader, however —‘
‘Andropov?' Her eyes went wide. ‘I can read it in your mind, Comrade. Is that how it will be? That KGB thug? The man you already call your master!'
Gerenko's faded eyes suddenly narrowed, their slits blazing with his own anger. ‘When Brezhnev is gone —‘
‘But he isn't, not yet!' She was shouting now. ‘And when he learns of this.
That was an error, a bad one. Even Brezhnev couldn't harm Gerenko, not personally, not physically. But he could have it done for him — at a distance. He could have Gerenko's state flat in Moscow booby-trapped. Once a booby-trap is set, no man's hand is involved. From then on the thing is entirely automatic. Or Gerenko could wake up one morning and find himself behind bars — and then they could forget to feed him! His talent did have certain limitations.
He stood up. In his child's hand was an automatic, taken from a drawer in the desk. His voice was a whisper. ‘Now you will listen to me,' he said, ‘and I will tell you exactly how it is going to be. First, you won't speak of this matter or even mention it again, not to anyone. You've been sworn to secrecy here at the Chateau. Break your trust and I'll break you! Second: you say we are not at war. But you have a short memory. The British espers declared war against E-Branch nine months ago. And they came close to destroying the organisation utterly! You were new here then; you were away somewhere, holidaying with your father. You saw nothing of it. But let me tell you that if this Harry Keogh of theirs were still alive…‘ He paused for breath, and Foener bit her tongue to keep from telling him the truth: that indeed Harry Keogh was still alive, however helpless.
‘Third,' he finally continued, ‘I could kill you now — on the spot, shoot you dead — and no one would even question me about it. If they did, I would say that I had had my suspicions about you for a long time. I would tell them that your work had driven you mad, and that you threatened me, threatened E-Branch. You are quite correct, Zek, the Party Leader puts a deal of faith in the branch. He is fond of it. Under old Gregor Borowitz it served him well. What, a woman, mad, running around loose here, threatening irreparable damage? Of course I should shoot her! And I will — if you don't mark each word I say most carefully. Do you think anyone would believe your accusation? Where's the proof? In your head? In your addled head! Oh, they just might believe, I'll grant you that — but what if they didn't? And would I sit still and simply let you have it all your own way? Would Theo Dolgikh sit still for that? You have any easy time here, Zek. Ah, but there are other jobs in other places for a strong young woman in the USSR. After your — rehabilitation? — doubtless they'd find you one.
Again he paused, put away the gun. He saw that he had made his point.
‘Now get out of here, but don't leave the Chateau. I want a report on everything you learned from Kyle. Everything. The initial report may be brief, an outline. I'll have that by midday tomorrow. The final report will be detailed down to the last minutia. Do you understand?'
She stood looking at him, bit her lip.
