Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

'And of course it would have to be worse for you than for me. For I only find things. I don't read minds.'

'Do you want to explain?'

'What's to explain?' Layard looked smug. 'Your tourist's map of the Old Town is the same as mine. Except you probably haven't read it. OK, I'll put you out of your misery. There's an insane asylum on the hill.'

'Wha — ?' Jordan started, then put down his binoculars and slapped his knee. 'That has to be it!' he said. 'We're getting the echoes of all of those poor sick bastards locked up in that place!'

'It looks like it,' Layard nodded. 'So now that we know what it is we should try to screen it out, concentrate on the job in hand.' He looked out to sea through the mouth of the harbour and became serious in a moment. 'Especially since it appears the Samothraki's just a wee bit on the early side.'

'She's out there?' Jordan was immediately attentive.

'Five or ten minutes at the most,' Layard nodded. 'I just picked her up. And I'll give you odds she's in and dropping anchor by quarter past the hour.'

Both men now took to watching the entrance to the harbour, so missing a sudden burst of activity aboard the big, privately owned motor-cruiser. A canopied caique ferried out a small party from steps in the harbour wall; two men went aboard the sleek white ship, which soon weighed anchor; powerful engines throbbed as she turned almost on her own axis and nosed idly back along the deep-water channel. Black awnings with fancy scalloped trims gave her foredeck shade, where a black-clad figure now lounged in one of several reclining deckchairs. A tall man in white stood at the rail, looking towards the harbour mouth. He wore a black eye patch over his right eye.

The white leisure craft was very noticeable now, but still it hovered on the periphery of the espers' vision, its screw idling where it waited in the deep-water channel. Both of them now held binoculars to their eyes, and Jordan had stood up, was leaning forward against the harbour wall as the Samothraki came chugging into view around the mole.

'Here she comes,' he breathed. 'Right between the Old Boy's legs!' He sent his telepathic mind reaching across the water, seeking out the minds of the captain and crew. He wanted to know the location of the cocaine… if one of them should be thinking about it right now… or about its ultimate destination.

'What Old Boy's legs?' Layard's voice came to him distantly, even though he was right here beside him. Such was Jordan's concentration that he'd almost entirely shut out the conscious world.

'The Colossus,' Jordan husked. 'Helios. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. That's where he stood — right there, straddling that harbour mouth — until 224 b.c.'

'So you did read your map after all,' breathed Layard.

The old Samothraki was coming in; the sleek white modern vessel was going out; the former was obscured by the latter as they came up alongside each other — and dropped their anchors.

'Shit!' said Jordan. 'Mindsmog again! I can't see a damn thing through it!'

'I can feel it,' Layard answered.

Jordan swept his glasses along the sleek outline of the white vessel and read off its name from the hull: the Lazarus. 'She's a beauty,' he started to say, and froze right there. Centred in his field of view, the man in black on the foredeck was seated upright in his chair; the back of his head was visible; he was looking at the old Samothraki. But as Jordan fixed him in his binoculars, so that oddly- proportioned head turned until its unknown owner was staring straight at the esper across one hundred and twenty yards of blue water. And even though they were both wearing dark glasses, and despite the distance, it was as if they stood face to face!

WHAT? A powerful mental voice grunted its astonishment full in Jordan's mind. A THOUGHT-THIEF? A MENTALIST?

Jordan gasped. What the hell did he have here? Whatever it was, it wasn't what he'd been looking for. He tried to withdraw but the other's mind closed on his like a great vice… and squeezed! He couldn't pull out! He flopped there loosely against the harbour wall and looked at the other where he now stood tall — enormous to Jordan — in the shade of the black canopy.

Their eyes were locked on each other, and Jordan was straining so hard to look away, to redirect his thoughts, that he was beginning to vibrate. It was as if solid bars of steel were shooting out from the other's hidden eyes, across the water and down the barrels of Jordan's binoculars into his brain; where even now they were hammering at his mind as they drove home their message:

WHOEVER YOU ARE, YOU HAVE ENTERED MY MIND OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL. SO… BE… IT!

Layard was on his feet now, anxious and astonished. For all that he'd experienced little or nothing of the telepath's shock and, indeed, terror, still he could tell by just looking at him that something was terribly wrong. With his own mind full of mental smog and crackling, buzzing static, he reached to take Jordan's sagging weight — in time to guide and lower the telepath to the bench as he collapsed like a jelly, unconscious in his arms…

4. Lazarides

That same night:

The Lazarus lay moored to a wharf in the main harbour, entirely still and darkly mirrored in water smooth as glass; three of the four crewmen had gone ashore, leaving only a watchkeeper; the boat's owner sat at a window-seat upstairs in the most disreputable taverna of the Old Town, looking out and down across the waterfront. Downstairs a handful of tourists drank cheap brandy or ouzo and ate the execrable food, while the local layabouts, bums and rejects in general laughed and joked with them in English and German, made coarse jokes about them in Greek, and scrounged drinks.

There were three or four blowsy-looking English girls down there, some with Greek boyfriends, all the worse for wear and all looking for the main chance. They danced or staggered to sporadic bursts of recorded bouzouki music, and later would dance more frantically, gaspingly, horizontally, to the accompaniment of slapping, sweating, ouzo-smelling flesh.

Upstairs was out of bounds to such as these, where the owner of the taverna carried out the occasional shady deal, or perhaps drank, talked or played cards with some of his many shady friends. None of these were around tonight, however, just the landlord himself, and a young Greek whore sitting alone in the alcove leading to her business premises — a small room with a bed and washbasin — and the man who now called himself Jianni Lazarides, occupying his window-seat.

The fat, stubble-chinned proprietor, called Nichos Dakaris, was here to serve a bottle of good red wine to Lazarides, and the girl was here because she had a black eye and couldn't ply for trade along the waterfront. Or rather, she wouldn't. It was her way of paying Dakaris back for the beatings he gave her whenever he was obliged to cough up hush-money to the local constabulary for the privilege of letting a prostitute use his place. If not for the fact that he felt the urge himself now and then, he probably wouldn't let her stay here at all; but she paid for her room 'in kind' once or twice a week as the mood took Dakaris, on top of which he got forty per cent of her take. Or would get it if she only used her room and wouldn't insist on freelancing in Rhodian back-alleys! Which was his other reason for beating her.

As for Jianni Lazarides: he also had his reasons for being here. This was the venue for his meeting with the Greek 'captain' of the Samothraki and a couple of his cohorts, when he would look for an explanation as to how and why someone had been selling tickets for their assumed 'covert' drug-running operation. Actually he already knew why, for he'd had it from the mind of Trevor Jordan; but now he wanted to hear it from Pavlos Themelis himself, the Samothraki's master, before deciding how best to detach himself from the affair.

For Lazarides had put good money into this allegedly safe business (which now appeared to be anything but safe), and he wanted his money back or… payment in kind? For money and power were gods here in this era no less than in all the foregone centuries of human avarice, of which Lazarides had more than an obscure knowledge. And indeed there were easier, safer, more guaranteed ways to make and use money in this vastly complex world; ways which would not attract the attention of its law-keepers, or at any rate not too much of it.