Necroscope: Invaders

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Here Be Vampires

That evening at the safe house, when Trask's people had eaten, he got them together in the Ops Room to debrief them and start them working on the correlation of their findings. For he knew by then that they had been partially successful — or at least that they'd detected something out of the ordinary — and that a lot might soon depend on their observations.

For instance, the military contingent: it was most likely that the siting of the SAS back-up teams would be based on the as yet unproven suspicions or 'hunches' of Trask's espers. And in just two days' time those men and vehicles would start arriving and moving into harbour areas whose locations were as yet undecided. Time was of the essence.

After Trask had settled his people down, David Chung described his temporary contact with something during the landing at Gladstone, and went on to talk about the system of triangulation that they had devised.

'Taking Gladstone as the centre of a clock face,' the locator said, 'the first reading would see the minute hand at some thirteen minutes past the hour, or a few degrees north of east. As for the second reading, over Sandy Cape, that would be about twelve and a half minutes before the hour, or north-west.'

Chung stood before an illuminated wall map of the area and used his index finger to point out the coordinates, then traced the directional lines to their junction some sixty miles out in the open sea. 'Which puts it — whatever it is — right there/ he said. But staring at the map, he could only offer a baffled shrug. 'The last place on Earth that we'd expect to find a vampire or vampires. Right in the middle of an ocean, with nothing but water and lots, I mean lots of sunlight, for miles around!'

'But you got readings,' said Trask. 'You got mindsmog. So, how do you explain it?'

The locator looked at him, frowned and said. 'Explain it? But if it wasn't for Liz here I'd probably simply ignore it! A glitch, something out of kilter in my head… a headache? The evidence of the map, the location, it's all against us. I mean, what would a vampire be doing out there? Also, we know that in the past we've puzzled over similar effects from other espers, from talents outside E-Branch giving off vibes they don't even know they've got! So but for Liz I'd probably settle for someone on a ship out there — maybe a cruise liner? — using precognition to place bets in the casino, or maybe telekinesis to drop the ball on his numbers at roulette. Someone who's extraordinarily "lucky," who doesn't even know he has a skill — who thinks he has a "system" — but who's nevertheless been banned from half a dozen mainland casinos. That's what I'd be tempted to think, except…' He paused and looked at Liz. 'Liz doesn't think so. But there again, no matter what anyone thinks, nothing can change the fact that it's sixty miles out to sea.'

Trask said, 'But so were those Russian nuclear submarines, and you haven't been wrong about those. And I remember the time when a certain Jianni Lazarides had just such a ship, The Lazarus, out on the Mediterranean. Yes, but his real name was Janos Ferenczy! He was Wamphyri, too, one of the very worst. And remember: just because there's a lot of sunlight, it doesn't mean our man has to go out in it.'

He turned to Liz. 'David says it might be nothing. But he also says you don't think so. So what do you think?'

Liz looked anxiously from face to face, bit her lip, and said,

'Ben, are we right to place this much faith in my talent right now? I mean, at that kind of range, riding David's probe… I could easily be mistaken. I'm not really sure that—'

'No, no, no!' Trask cut in, waving his hand dismissively, impatiently. 'Just tell us what you got and let us try to figure it out. It isn't the first time we've done this, Liz. And it isn't as if we're vying with one another to see who will be first to find these damned things! But while no shame attaches to being in error, still we do have to find them. Which means anything is better then nothing. So whatever it was you sensed out there, let's have it.'

Liz, Trask and Chung were on their feet; the rest of the team were seated. And now Liz sat down, too, and thought about it for a moment. Casting her mind back, she asked herself exactly what it was that she had experienced when the locator took his second reading from the helicopter as it circled high over Sandy Cape.

Chung sjace — Us slightly damp skin gleaming a pale yellow, his nostrils pinched, eyes slanted more than usual in deep concentration — gazing out of his window, north-west at the distant curve of the world, the horizon, the sea's wide expanse.

Then his gaze becoming a vacant stare, and his eyes almost glazing over as his mind… as his mind went out!

No, not his mind but a probe. And Liz Merrick a part of it — riding it like a carrier wave — sharing telepathically in the emptiness of the locator's search, his far-flung probing of the psychic void… or what should be a void!

But there was something there — faint, so very faint, but definitely there — and she felt it like… like an emotion as opposed to a conversation. Like something spiritual, or lacking in spirit. For it was shivery cold, this thing, where it walked on her spine with icy feet. And now she knew its name.

'Well?' Trask was leaning over her. And:

'Fear!' Liz blurted it out. 'I felt fear!'

The look on her face; her great green eyes wide in sudden knowledge where they stared into his… and Trask took a pace back from her. 'You were afraid?'

'Not me, no,' Liz shook her head. 'He, they — whoever they were — were afraid. That's what it was, Ben: terror, gnawing at them, eating their hearts out.' 'Them?'

'More than one, I'm sure.'

'Uncertain a moment ago, and now you're sure?' She shook her head. 'I just wasn't willing to believe that there could ever be such hopelessness, such utterly black despair. I suppose I thought it was the emptiness, the psychic void before David's probe found — well, whoever they are — and that the fear was in fact mine. But now…' 'Yes?'

Again she shook her head, searched for words. 'I know that I, personally, have never been that afraid — that I couldn't be that afraid — unless something happened to cause me to lose all hope, all faith/

Trask nodded grimly. 'In short, unless you'd been vampirizedf 'I… I don't know. I imagine so.'

But now Trask took a different tack. 'Or could it possibly have been fear of discovery? Had someone detected David's probe and reacted to it?'

Liz shook her head. 'No, I don't think so. It was simply — or not so simply — an aura of overwhelming doom.'

'Good!' Trask grunted. 'And on both counts. One, that you weren't detected. And two, that therefore whoever it was couldn't have been afraid of you. But they were afraid, and I think we can all imagine of what.'

He looked up from Liz, from face to face around the room, and paused at Lardis Lidesci.

And Lardis said, "Thralls. These were thralls, and fairly recent. Thralls who don't have much contact with their master, but who know he's there nevertheless. Aye, and they have every right to fear him!'

'Another nest,' Trask nodded. 'Why not? It's entirely possible. Then he frowned. 'But out at sea?' 'My point exactly/ said Chung…

'Maps/ Trask said, turning to Jimmy Harvey where he sat at a keyboard. 'Jimmy, see if the computer has an even smaller-scale map of that area, and blow it up on the wall there/

'I've been working on it/ said the other, tapping a key. 'Consider it done/

The wall screen turned blue, if not entirely blue. For in the specified area there were the dotted outlines of reefs and other irregular shapes: islands or islets, and a legend identifying them as Heron Island and the Bunker and Capricorn groups, the latter because they lay on or close to the Tropic of Capricorn. Other lettering at the top of the map said that this was The Capricornia Section of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

And very quietly, Trask said, 'So, not necessarily a ship after all/

But, looking sick, the locator David Chung could only shake his head and remark, 'What a fool he is who has no faith in his own God-given skills!'

Trask might have denied it, but lan Goodly beat him to it. 'Not at all/ the precog said. 'When we use talents like these, it's against nature. I mean, even we appreciate that what we're doing isn't, well, mundane. Is it any wonder we're sceptical of our results? Or that we occasionally fail to see their significance?'

And then Trask said, 'You're right, lan, and I was on the point of making much the same remark. But as I've already said, this isn't a skills contest. How we get there doesn't matter a damn, only that we get there. Where these monsters are concerned, the end always justifies the means. Any means/

'Huh!' said Lardis. 'And in Starside, whenever a man ascends to a vampire Lord and becomes Wamphyri, they have much the same saying — it's not the route but the getting there. In that respect, and except that their evil has been made ten times as great, these monsters are much like men, you know/

'Because they were men/ said Trask. 'And God knows we're none of us pure. Very well, now let's get on — but as soon as we're done here I want the Duty Officer to contact our aide in Prime Minister Blackmore's office. We need authority for liaison with someone high in the administration of the reef marine park. We need to know who or what is out there on those islets in the Bunker and Capricorn groups…' A moment's pause and he turned to Goodly:

lan, you and Lardis were in the other chopper party. And just like David here I know you, too, have a problem. Time now to have it out in the open, get it cleared up.'

The precog stood up, tossed a pamphlet attached to a tourist map onto the table. 'I picked this up at the Skytours helipad,' he said. It's a freebie: a give-away route map into the Macpherson Mountains, and a colour brochure describing the wonders and benefits of the Xanadu health and pleasure resort. But that's not all I picked up. There was — or I should say there may have been — something else, when we flew over the place.'

Sitting at the table (feeling more than a little useless, and wondering what he was doing here), Jake remembered the odd, strained look on the precog's face — the way his hands gripped his seat's armrests — after they'd descended to have a closer look at the resort. And now his interest focussed more definitely on Goodly as he saw once again the same nervous tension in the man's face and attitude.

'The thing is,' Goodly went on, 'I have precisely the same problem as David. The location: all that unhampered sunlight. I just can't see how the kind of creature we're looking for could exist up there… if that's what it was about.' Seeing Trask's face, he held up a hand placatingly. 'Yes, all right, I promise I will get on with it. But there are complications…

'First: as we were descending toward the place, so that we could get a better look at it, our pilot/tour-guide mentioned a fire that occurred during the El Nino back in 1997. And I found some of his descriptions vivid and perhaps evocative: the place was like a tinderbox… it went up like so much kindling, et cetera.

'Also, while we've been here I've heard quite a lot of talk about the Great Fire of Brisbane, and what with this awful heat and all—'

'You saw a fire?' Trask cut in.

Goodly nodded. 'But I didn't see its cause, and I couldn't tell when it was happening. I mean, it could have been a mental response to what the pilot had said. For example, when someone says "do you remember" this or that other thing, you are made automatically to see it, relive it, in your mind's eye. Do you see? It could be that our pilot had evoked just such a response in me. And Ben, if this was one of my things, then it was only the very briefest glimpse. Smoke, and leaping flames… gouts of yellow fire roiling up to a night sky, and a full moon hanging there… and someone shouting, "To me, to me!"'

Listening to him, Trask displayed a kind of amazement, as if he'd only just realized something that should have been obvious for a long time. 'How long have I known you?' he said. 'It sometimes seems that I've known you forever. And yet I've never thought to ask you — do you sometimes see the past?'

The precog raised an eyebrow, said, 'I remember the past, just like anyone else.' And then a wry chuckle. 'It's just that I sometimes remember the future, too!' But he was serious again in a moment. 'That's what we have to consider, Ben. The future. And we know just how devious that can be — or is it perhaps my talent that's devious? I've never been able to figure it out.'

'Okay,' said the other, 'so you don't know whether it was the past or the future. It's just one of those times when your talent leaves you in doubt. But there's one clue, at least.'

'Oh?' Again Goodly's eyebrow.

'You said it was night-time when Xanadu went up in flames, and—'

'Not Xanadu,' Goodly stopped him. 'Just a handful of weekend or holiday homes, on the false plateau where Xanadu stands now.'

'Whatever,' Trask waved a hand. 'But you did say there was a full moon?'

'Yes.'

'Well, that… is one hell of a clue!' He turned to Harvey where he sat at the computer keyboard. 'Jimmy, can you get into the local libraries on that thing?'

Harvey looked up from where he was working and smiled. But before he could say anything Trask said, 'I know, don't say it: you're way ahead of me. The newspapers? For the fires of'97?'

Harvey nodded towards the wall screen. 'On the screen, just about any time… now!'

And: Gadgets and ghosts! thought Jake, as headlines sprang into life on the big screen, and Harvey brought the small print into focus. The location, date, and time, everything was there, written into the report. And Trask said:

'Good! Now then, Jimmy, can you cross-reference that date with phases of the moon?'

It took but a moment, but then Trask's shoulders sagged as he slumped into a seat and said, 'Damn it all to hell! The last thing I wanted. A bloody full moon!' And looking at the precog: 'So maybe you can see the past, and not just remember it, after all…'

'And maybe he can't/ said Jake. It was the first time he had spoken, and now everyone looked at him. And after a while:

'Well, go on then,' said Trask.

'Shouldn't we take the next step?' Jake said. 'The same as we did with David Chung? I seem to have been hearing about synchronicity, coincidence, and what have you ever since I collided with this outfit. So couldn't this be exactly the same thing? I mean, just because there was a full moon on the night in question back in '97, that doesn't mean the precog wasn't seeing the future up there at Xanadu. Or aren't there going to be any more full moons? Me, I'm wondering when the next one is due.'

Trask frowned, stared at Jake, then turned again to Jimmy Harvey. 'Do it,' he said.

And in a very short time the answer was up on the screen.

'Three days' time!' Trask husked then, open-mouthed, staring at the date and full-moon symbol. And Goodly cautioned:

'But does it mean what we're thinking? Are we going to do it, or is it our old friend El Nino again? Will it result from us attacking the place and burning out a nest, or from a freak of nature, a terrible disaster? I still can't see how it's possible for our quarry to exist up there.'

And Jake said, 'Neither could the locator see how a vampire could live out on the ocean. And maybe I'm stupid, or a lot less bright than you people, but I can't see there being a fire up at Xanadu without we're the cause. Surely the first thing we do if Xanadu isn't what we're looking for, we'll warn whoever's responsible about the fire. And we'll be able to tell him when, so there'll be no loss of life.'

The precog shook his head. 'You're not at all stupid, Jake. In the dark it's always the blind who see best. But believe me, you don't understand the future. I don't understand the future! And I say again: it's not knowing what will happen that counts, but how it's going to happen. The only sure thing is once it's foreseen, then it will happen. As for loss of life: I did hear that voice calling, "To me! To me!"'

'Rescuers?' said Liz.

'Or one of us, pulling the teams out,' said Trask. 'Didn't you recognize the voice?'

Goodly shook his head. 'Not over the roaring of the flames, the shattering of glass.'

'Glass?' said Jake. 'Did I miss something, or is that something you didn't mention before?'

'I just this minute remembered it!' said the precog.

'There was plenty of glass in that topmost dome,' Jake said 'In the pleasure dome itself. Black glass, from the look of it, covering everything but the windows.'

'No/ said the precog. 'Not black glass but solar panels — a sort of glass, I suppose. The upper dome was covered in them: a very startling effect. But the windows themselves, they were glass, certainly, and they circled all three lower floors.'

Trask was looking at the colour brochure. 'You think that the casino's going to burn?'

But Goodly could only shrug his defeat. 'It's all speculation. Don't ask me what I think. I still don't know for sure if the fire was in the past or the future. And I'm damned if I can see how any kind of vampire could live up there!'

'But I can,' said Jake, watching Harvey searching for Xanadu, and finally putting that area of the Macpherson Range onto the screen. And, as before, Jake was suddenly the centre of attention. 'It was something Lardis said that got me thinking about it,' he explained.

'Me?' said Lardis, looking surprised.

'When you said, "Now wouldn't this make a wonderful aerie, without all this sunlight, of course."'

'That's right/ said Lardis. 'I said that.'

'Look at the map,' Jake told them. 'That dog-leg fold and the false plateau sitting in the middle. The mountains are much higher, and steep-sided. The fold goes north to south, and then backtracks. Certainly Xanadu gets plenty of sunlight, from, say 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 in the evening. But the rest of the time it's in the shade, and during the night the darkness must be utter — except for electric lighting, of course.'

'Artificial lighting can't harm them/ said Trask. 'Szwart doesn't like it but it can't kill him. Only natural light, sunlight itself, can do that.'

'Not quite true/ Lardis barked. 'The Dweller, Harry Hell-lander's changeling son, used artif— er, artificial light, yes — in the form of ultra, er, ultraviolet lamps, when he battled the Wamphyri in his garden in the mountains west of Starside.'

'But that's sunlight, Lardis/ Trask told him. 'Artifical, I'll grant you, but sunlight nevertheless.' And to Jake: 'Maybe you're right. For sixteen or more hours a day, the sun isn't in fact shining directly onto that place. When it is shining, however, it's doing it very brightly/

And Jake answered, 'But don't they sleep during the day?'

And again Lardis: 'In Starside, when the sun's rim came up over the barrier mountains, the Lords and Ladies usually ran to their northermost apartments. And there they slept — but even there with drapes at their windows! But if they were caught out in the open Sunside of the mountains, as occasionally happened, then they had to find caves or deep holes in the earth 'til nightfall/

Jake nodded, and said to Trask, 'So, do you think there are no "deep holes in the earth" in Xanadu? But that brochure says it all. Fancy fountains, swimming pools, saunas and gymnasiums. An aerial monorail, and a casino. I mean, do you think that all of that stuff is above ground? No, a complex like that is like an iceberg: you only see its tip. All the cellars and conduits; the pipelines, tunnels, sewerage, and water systems; the reservoirs, pump-, boiler-and storage-rooms, and refrigerators — they're all underground — or rather, they're on the old bed of the plateau, while the resort has been built above them. That's why the place looks so clean and uncluttered.. p>

Trask blinked, shook his head as if to clear it, and said, 'Do you know, I believe you could be right? This creature we're looking for could be right there, in or under Xanadu!' He tossed the brochure onto the table. 'A place like that, where we would least expect to find him!' Then once more he said, 'Three days, and we have a lot to do… not least to prove our point, clear the way before we can take any real action/

'Prove our point?' Liz looked at him.

'Make sure we're on the right track/ Trask nodded. 'So we can be certain when we go in that what we want is there. And as for clearing the way: well, the Gibson Desert job was one thing but Xanadu is quite another. All of those people; we'll have to find a way to get them out of there before we go in — and without arousing anyone's suspicion.. Then, offering another curt nod: p>

'Right, so let's get to it. This night is still young, but there may be only three of them left.'

Heading for a door leading to an outer room, where the SAS Commanders were poring over their maps, Trask's heart was a little lighter; for now at least he had something to tell them. But before leaving, he turned and said, lan, David, Liz — and you, too, Jake — I'm very grateful. You've all worked well, despite initial doubts. But today was only your first time out and you're not finished yet. I want you all back in those Skytours choppers again tomorrow. So, maybe we have struck it lucky this first time, but who knows what else could be hiding out there?' Then he looked at his technicians: the gnomish Harvey, and the gangling Paul Arenson.

'But there are more skills than this freaky stuff that we espers use — or that uses us, whichever,' he said. 'Our ghost-talents may serve us well, but without your gadgets for back-up they wouldn't be nearly as effective. So well done, all of you. And now get your thinking caps on and try to look ahead. Jimmy: dig up some plans of Xanadu, its subsurface systems, et cetera, lan: please draft a comprehensive record of this meeting. Paul: it's late now, but first thing tomorrow ensure I have access to Prime Minister Blackmore's office so that I can organize a liaison with someone on this marine park thing.'

Turning away, he offered one of his rare smiles and said: 'And that, I think, is that. Now I have to speak to our Australian friends. I'll see you all in the morning…'

The next day, a Saturday, they split the teams up. Lardis, Jake and Liz were together on the northern routes (Trask didn't want Liz anywhere near Xanadu); Goodly and Chung flew south, each of them hoping to complement the other's strange talent.

The trips were mainly uneventful; the precog's mind was a frustrating blank — at least where the future was concerned — and the locator daren't get too close to Xanadu in case someone, or something, should locate him! But in any case and as per Trask's orders, they were looking at different mountains this time out. As for Trask himself:

He had a very satisfying day, and when the teams returned to the safe house he was waiting to speak to them. This time he brought the SAS in on it — at least for the first stage of his briefing. For while it wasn't his intention to explain his findings in their entirety (the way E-Branch had used its combined paranormal talents to discover their targets) still he did have to display those targets, and advise these men as best possible on what they would be up against.

This was done with the aid of the wall screen; Trask supplied the narrative:

'This island in the Capricorn Group — its grid reference is shown alongside — is our secondary target. Now, I've called it an island, but in fact it's little more than a rock or coral reef. It has a few trees, some other tough vegetation; nothing much to mention. It was a marine park conservation station some years ago but that moved to Heron Island, forty miles away. All that's there now is the reef, a shallow lagoon, a private villa on the island, and, we presume, our enemies. But I have to emphasize that they are probably lesser enemies, which is to say we don't think they're of the order of unpleasantness that we were obliged to deal with in the Gibson Desert. However, and having said that, you should remember that they will be vampires.

'How many of them? No more than five or six, which is six too many. But with a chopper, a hired vessel, and half a dozen or so of your men — along with Jake Cutter here and Lardis Lidesci from our side — that should be sufficient. You, which is to say the military, will have command; but you'll listen very carefully to Lardis, and you'll take his advice in the… the handling of whatever you find on that island. Take my word for it, Lardis is the foremost authority in these matters.

Very well, what can you expect to find in the villa? The master of the house for one, a man of some fifty-eight years of age. Easy? But he'll be a vampire, and as strong as any four or five of your men! Then there'll be his married daughter and her husband, also his son and possibly a woman friend. The worst of them will be a fourth man, not family, who we think will be acting in the role of their keeper. And he will be dangerous, much more so than the others.

'Now, the problem is this: some if not all of these people will look and act perfectly normal. A bit edgy, perhaps. But if you were to strand your boat on the beach there, they'd probably help out; they might even call the coastguard for assistance. That's because they want to appear normal, because they daren't be discovered for what they really are — not until their master decides they're no longer of any use to him, or her. So, assuming it's a "him" for the time being, what use are they to him?

'Well, for one, the island is a bolthole: it's a place for the Vampire Lord to hide in the event he gets driven out of his aerie. So in fact it's much similar to the Old Mine Gas Station in the desert. You must plan to take it out accordingly and, if necessary, in exactly the same way. With an air strike, yes, if it comes down to that — though of course we'd vastly prefer the kind of hit at which you people so excel: seek and destroy, and as quickly and quietly as possible.

'And that's about it, all you need to know about this secondary target for the time being. But I would like to take this opportunity to remind you: you won't be taking any prisoners…

'Which leads me to your main target. Xanadu, the so-called "health and pleasure resort" high in the Macphersons. And so it is a resort, but only as a front for the ugly Thing that's runing the show.

'And here's another problem: this time we don't know — we have no idea — how many men he's vampirized. The only thing we can say for sure is that when they know they're being hit, then they'll protect their master with all that's left of their miserable lives.

'Oh yes, and one other thing. When the Wamphyri came into our world, they brought thralls or "lieutenants" with them. Now, an original lieutenant out of Starside is a very dangerous creature, much more so than our old friend Bruce Trennier, and you know what he was like. So I'm just reminding you, it's possible that one of these things is up there, too.'

The map on the big wall screen had changed. Trask pointed to it again, said, 'Here's Xanadu; you know where it is, for of course you've all flown over it and seen it for yourselves. And anyway the bloody place is signposted! A resort, as we've seen. The perfect cover, yes. Which also makes it difficult for us to deal with the creature or creatures that we'll find there. Why? Because this time the master vampire is hiding in a crowd!

'That's my next job: finding a way to get the people — I mean the ordinary people — out of there before Monday night.

'And so, gentlemen, that's it for now. Now you can go work out your harbour areas, decide where you'll locate your men and vehicles as they start to come in. The one good thing about it: they won't have much spare time on their hands, won't lose their edge or get bored. They'll no sooner be in situ than they'll be in a firefight. And I think I can promise you that where Xanadu is concerned, that last is guaranteed. Take it as a foregone — or at least a foreseen — conclusion.'

The SAS Commanders left the ops room, and Trask was alone with his own people.

'So, as you can see,' he said, 'the techs and I have had a busy day. But fruitful? Judge for yourselves.'

He gave Jimmy Harvey the nod, and the big wall screen displayed the group of islets again. And Trask continued:

'This island in the Capricorn Group — it's such a rock it doesn't even have a name — is the home of wealthy philanthropist Jethro Manchester. Like many another rich do-gooder before him, he's something of a recluse. Five years ago, in return for his patronage and a whole lot of money, the Barrier Reefs Marine Park Commission gave him the island to live on. He owns it, or as good as. But that's not all he owns.. '

Trask paused and glanced at Harvey, whose fingers tapped at his keyboard. And now the big wall screen was divided centrally between the islands and a map of the dog-leg fold in the Macpherson Range. Trask glanced at the screen, and nodded his curt nod. 'Hands up who knows what I'm talking about.'

And Liz said, 'He owns Xanadu, too?'

Trask looked at her. 'Used to,' he said. 'But now he has a partner. Nine months ago Manchester signed documents that transferred fifty per cent of Xanadu to one Aristotle Milan, an alleged "shipping magnate" of mixed Greek and Italian descent. We might perhaps assume — or rather, I believe we're supposed to assume — that his surname derives from the city of his origins in the old Italian fashion. But I don't think so. The coincidence is just too great, not to mention the rest of the story.

'First: there is no record of any Aristotle Milan as being the owner of any ships! Ergo: the man isn't a tycoon — though I can easily understand how the idea of being one would appeal to such as him — and as for his name…'

'… Not Milan but Malin,' Jake came in. 'Instead of using "ari" as a suffix, to denote "son of," he's using it as a prefix, denoting "first of. Meaning that on this world, he's the first or highest of his kind. And so for Aristotle Milan, read Malinari. Malinari the Mind!'

'Exactly,' said Trask. 'What's in a name, eh? So, how did Malinari make his connection with Jethro Manchester? Ah, well, here's another name for you: Martin Trennier. Bruce Trennier's brother, a marine biologist employed by the Marine Park Commission until Manchester — our philanthropist, conservationist, recluse, and latter-day Jacques Cousteau — stole him away from them to be his very well-paid odd-jobs man, skin-diving companion, and general dogsbody. This happened about the same time that Manchester and his family got away from it all and retired to the island. Bruce Trennier would have known all of

this when Malinari vampirized him at the Romanian Refuge, the said knowledge going second-hand to The Mind himself. Which begs the same question we've all worried about before: what else did Malinari learn on that… on that terrible night?'

Trask's face was grey now, and all of his people knew why: that his concern wasn't just for Zek — who was gone now — but also for them. For Zek Foener had known as much as anyone about E-Branch and its workings.

And Malinari?

lan Goodly determined to change the subject, take Trask's mind away from it. 'What if we're wrong and it's all coincidental, circumstantial? This pseudonymous-names business, our various hunches and observations, and everything else we've come up with?'

'A hell of a lot of coincidences, I'd say!' Trask frowned at him.

'But what if)'

Trask shuffled notes he'd made earlier, and said, 'Well, there is one more thing. In Xanadu, the pleasure dome or casino has a smaller, uppermost dome like a blister on top of the main structure. It sits on a spindle and revolves like certain fancy restaurants on their high towers. But in the nine months since Mr Milan moved in half of its windows have been painted black, both inside and out. Oh, and incidentally, the dome's rotation was originally designed to track the sun, letting in the light that the higher solar-panelled surfaces necessarily exclude. So it would appear that our Mr Milan has an aversion to strong sunlight…' Pausing, Trask looked at Goodly.

The precog was quiet now, saying nothing, but his alleged 'concerns' hadn't fooled Trask one bit. For in its way Goodly's subterfuge had been a lie, a diversion to take Trask's mind off his lost Zek and get it back on track, and of course Trask knew it. A lie, yes, but a white one. And:

'So thanks, anyway,' he finally continued, looking directly into the precog's eyes, 'but I think we can safely conclude that here…' he pointed a steady, resolute finger at the locations displayed on the wall screen, '… that here be vampires!'

When no one had anything further to say, Trask finished up with: 'Very well, and now we have plans to make…'

Later that evening, Jake was sitting on a bench in the cool of the garden, lost in his own strange, meditative thoughts, when Lardis found him and sat down beside him. After he had sniffed at the air for a while, the old man said, 'Carypsu?'

Oddly enough, Jake understood. 'Eucalyptus?' he answered. 'It's a tree, growing outside the wall.'

'Yes,' Lardis nodded. 'Carypsu. We have them on Sunside.' And, after a moment or two's thought: 'May I ask a question?'

'What's on your mind?' said Jake.

At which Lardis smiled. 'But I might ask you the selfsame thing! What's on, or what's in, your mind?'

Jake frowned. 'Some kind of word game?'

'No,' Lardis shook his head. 'No word game. But I have to admit, I'm curious.'

'About what?'

'About you. About how you knew that in Starside in the old days a Lord of the Wamphyri might occasionally add "ari" to his father's name, denoting that he was his father's son.'

'You mean like Lord Malin was Malinari's father?'

'Indeed. And now that you mention it… how you knew that, too?'

Jake frowned again, deeper this time. But then he relaxed, and shrugged. 'You must have told me,' he said. 'Or maybe I've read of it somewhere. In Ben Trask's files, perhaps?' But:

'No,' Lardis shook his head, smiling in that knowing way of his. 'No, I haven't told you. I've had no reason to mention it to anyone. And as far as I know it isn't written anywhere.'

Then, creaking to his feet, the old man yawned and said, 'Well, goodnight, Jake. And pleasant dreams…'

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE A Dream And A Word-Game

But in fact Jake's dreams were anything but pleasant…

It wasn't so much what had happened, though that was bad enough, but that he had been made to watch it happening. More than anything else, that was what had preyed on his mind… until he'd made it up to put things right. Perhaps he'd hoped that by killing the cause he might kill the memories, too.

But such a lot of memories, burning,like acid in his head, until he'd thought they would burn his brain out.

Memories, yes.

That fat, pallid, slimy-looking bastard — the second one of those pigs that Jake had got back at — the way he had taken Natasha in the classical or orthodox position, but scarcely an act of love. Rape, yes, and his long, slender grey dick in her rectum according to his taste.

Memories, those Godawful memories…

They'd piled pillows under her, raising her hips, and two of the others had held her legs under her knees, to allow this fat slug standing at the side of the bed to get into her. That had made it easy for him, because unconscious as she was — or between bouts of consciousness and unconsciousness — she'd been likely to flop and eject him. But holding her like that, Natasha had been a lot more accessible; accessible to viewing, too, for Jake had been tied to a chair where he could see all of the action. Of course, he could have closed his eyes, and from time to time he did just that, but he could still hear it even if he couldn't see it.

That grunting pig! His dick like a long finger poking into her, in and out with the heaving and clenching of his fat backside. And this sweaty, grunting, slug-like slob — this giggling queer — oh, it was obvious why he liked it like this. With any normal woman in any natural act of intercourse he'd be lucky if that pencil penis of his touched the sides. But this way… at least he would get some satisfaction, however minimal At least he would know he'd had it into something.

And Jake had to watch, he had to, because long before that too-long night was over he'd known that if it was the very last thing he did he would avenge her.

But the worst thing was when it was over, and the fat bastard zipped his fly and waddled over to Jake, saying, 'A shame she wasn't awake, eh, English? It would have been so sweet to know she'd felt that last big bang, and to feel her guts spasm as I greased her dirt chute! Ah well, there's time yet. Oh, ha, ha, ha?

He had a strong German accent. And when he laughed he put his face close enough to Jake's to cause him to recoil from the stench of cigar smoke and senf, hot German mustard…

But Jake didn't even know the pig's name — didn't know any of their names — except Castellano's and Jean Daniel's.

Well, Jean Daniel was dead now, of an unequal argument between his soft guts and the alloy core of a plastique-propelled steering column.

And the fat faggot had been number two…

Jake knew the route the fat man took from Castellano's place on the northern outskirts of Marseille to a gay bar on the Rue de Carpiagne which he visited regularly on Friday nights. He knew, too, that the fat swine was a little shy to admit openly of his predilections (that it didn't sit too well with him that he was both a hoodlum and a pervert), which was why he invariably approached Le Jockey Club down a narrow side street.

It was raining on the night in question, and Jake had parked his car so as to block off one side of the rain-slick cobbled alley on the fat man's approach route. The other side was liberally sprinkled with inch-and-a-half spikes which Jake had laid down with malice aforethought and in great deliberation.

Jake was waiting in a recessed doorway when the fat man's fat tyres blew, and he was quickly into the alley as the expensive Fiat slewed to a halt and its cursing driver slammed open his door, got out, and creased his belly as he bent to hear the front nearside's last gasp. A moment more and Jake was standing over him.

The fat man was suddenly aware of him; he had time to say, 'Uh? Bitte? Was istP' before Jake sapped him behind the ear…

In a deserted copse on a wooded hillside over the motorway near St Antoine, Jake wafted a small bottle of smelling salts under his victim's nose until he twitched, moaned, and came out of it with a series of useless, spastic jerks. Useless because he was tied up — literally tied up — and spastic because he was tied by his ankles and wrists, so that all he could do was shake and shiver like a great, globular white spider in its web.

Jake had woken him up because in his position, upside down, the fat Kraut might easily die without ever regaining consciousness of his own accord. And that was the last thing Jake wanted… that he should die easily.

The man's legs were spread wide; at a height of about seven feet, his ankles were roped to a pair of springy saplings which were just strong enough to hold him in position. His wrists were likewise tied to the bases of the twin trees, which formed his body into a fat, totally naked 'X'. He was gagged with his own underpants, tied off at the back of his neck, and the rest of his clothing lay in a neat pile close by.

At first the fat man struggled a little, but since that was pointless he quickly gave up and hung still, watching Jake pour a hip flask of fiery Asbach Uralt brandy over his heaped clothing.

'A waste of good German liquor, eh?' Jake said. 'But that's not the only German thing I'll be wasting tonight.' Then, stepping closer: 'You don't remember me, do you?'

The fat white spider had begun to shake its web again, however hopelessly, but now it paused to say, 'Umph? Uh-umph?'

'But I'll bet you remember the girl. That night at Castellano's place? The Russian girl, Natasha?' Hearing that name, and finally recognizing his tormentor, the fat man commenced yanking on his ropes with a vengeance, his eyes blinking rapidly in a face as round as the moon, all bloated with pooling blood.

'Oh, sure, you remember her,' Jake said, as he got to work.

Though it had stopped raining, he was still wearing a lightweight raincoat. From one side pocket he took out a small paper parcel, and from the other several indeterminate items. The fat man, being inverted, couldn't make out what they were; but perhaps he recognized a certain marzipan smell when Jake unwrapped the stained paper parcel and weighed a blob of grey, dough-like stuff in his hand. At any rate he began shaking the trees furiously, and did a lot more serious umph-umphing.

But Jake wasn't listening; he wasn't the least bit interested in his victim's complaints. Stretching a pair of thin surgical gloves onto his hands, he stepped closer and began molding plastic explosive into the fat man's anal cavity. And:

'I might have expected it,' he said, finishing the job just as quickly as possible, 'that a fat, ugly thing like you would have a hole like a horse's collar. You've done your fair share of time in the barrel, right? But this time -1 mean this last time — it's a little different, eh?'

He showed the fat man a small brass cylinder the size of a pencil-slim torch battery, with copper wires protruding from one end, said, 'Detonator,' and rammed it home. And connecting the wires to a miniature timer, he said, 'Which gives you maybe, oh, fifty seconds? As of right… now!' And he pressed a tiny button.

Then, in no special hurry, he stepped to the neatly piled clothing, stooped and applied the flame of his cigarette lighter. The pile caught with a small whoosh! and blue flames flickered on the hillside.

And starting to count, 'Five, six, seven…' Jake set off through the damp undergrowth, down the uneven, wooded slope to where his car was parked on a rutted farm track.

'Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…' He looked back up the slope. Thirty or thirty-five yards away, the fat white spider-thing vibrated in its web, looking luminous in the darkness of the wooded hillside. And Jake — who had fairly danced down the slope, his face fixed in a mad grin as he counted off the seconds through clenched teeth — suddenly Jake felt nauseous.

But at a count of thirty-two he realized he was probably too close and couldn't afford to be sick. It had been his intention to stand there and shout back up the slope, remind that poor fat sod of what he'd said that night: something about Natasha feeling the last big bang? And her guts going into spasm? But there wasn't enough time left — and maybe not enough hatred left — for any of that now. Or could it be simply that he didn't want his car covered with… with whatever.

Feeling his gorge rising, but still counting, he started up the car and nosed off down the track. 'Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty…' And when he was on the level, heading for the motorway, he applied the brakes and looked back — felt obliged to look back — like the night when he had looked without wanting to at something else. Looked back because this was what he thought was needed to burn that memory out of him.

'Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-…' But that was as far as he got. Obviously he'd been counting just a little too slowly.

Jake saw the ball of fire leap up and out from the trees on the hillside, pictured in his mind's eye a hideous rending, and then heard the bang. The only mercy was that the fat queer himself couldn't possibly have heard it, and there had been no time at all for a spasm…

Then for a time Jake just sat there in his car, until the sweat began to turn cold on him. But damn it to hell, the horror and the hatred were already creeping back, sated for a while but by no means done with. And Jake knew that they always would be there, until he tracked down the rest of those bastards and finished what they had started.

He gave himself a shake, put the car back in gear and made for the motorway. But—

— something was obscuring his interior mirror, something that had got itself stuck to the rear window.

Something round, that once was fat but now was flat, dripping scarlet from its ripped rim. And its eyes hanging out, and its mouth still stuffed with its own underpants!

A face. But just a face!

Jesus God!

Jesus—

— God!'

Jake came "awake with a small cry and a massive start, the sweat still dripping, and that mask of a face still printed on the darkness, but fading as he realized it was only that awful nightmare again, and that while the rest of it was all too horrifyingly real, the last part had never happened except in the dream. It always happened in the dream. Every time.

But then, while he sat there trembling, his heart hammering in his chest, utterly alone in the darkness of his cubicle, someone very close quite clearly said:

Ahhhhh! What stuff you are made of, Jake! And what a host you would make! But together we'll make a very fine pair, you and I…

Jake recognized the voice at once — only this time he was awake, had been shocked awake — and the knowledge saw him fumbling for his bedside light switch with rubbery fingers, as the damp short hairs at the back of his neck stiffened into spikes.

But as the light came on, so that evil, chuckling deadspeak voice was already receding, was being driven away. Because acting instinctively — almost without knowing he had done it, and certainly without knowing how — Jake had erected mental shields against intruders, blocking them from his mind. For as well

as Korath Mindsthrall, he had sensed someone else there, and possibly many someones, listening to his thoughts.

Or was it all a bad dream? For now that they were gone, he couldn't even be sure that his intruders had ever been there in the first place. And Jake flopped, panting, back onto his pillow, wondering if perhaps it had only been a part of his dream after all. One of those dreams that crashes the barrier of consciousness, however momentarily, to cross over into the waking world.

He wondered about it, but was by no means certain…

… While just a few feet away, trying desperately hard to keep still as a mouse, Liz Merrick crouched shivering and shuddering on her bed, in the farthest corner of her cubicle, with a sheet drawn up under her chin. She hung on tightly to that sheet, and even more so to her thoughts (so as to keep them to herself, but in any case as far away from Jake as possible), and tried to forget what she had seen. But much like Jake himself that night at Castellano's place, gripped by some kind of morbid fascination, voyeurism of a sort, she'd found herself unable to look away'… until now.

Damn Ben Trask that he had ordered this surveillance! But it wasn't only Trask, for Liz, too, had 'had' to know.

Well, and now she knew. She had seen — she'd even 'experienced' Jake's passion, his hatred, and the resultant nightmare — and knew how far he would go in his vendetta, and just exactly what he was capable of (literally anything), in his craving for justice. Or for a kind of justice, at least.

But such justice!

On the other hand, perhaps that was why Harry had chosen him: because an eye for an eye had always been the Necroscope's motto. The eye, yes: that most vital and vulnerable part of the body. An eye for an eye. Why, the thought itself was horrific! But now, as Liz was witness — and as it had been brought forcefully home to her — she realized that other parts of the body could be just as vulnerable, and their use or misuse even more horrific…

Jake hadn't thought he would sleep again, but after tossing and turning for an hour — and listening, though for what he wasn't quite sure — he did in fact sleep.

And as he relaxed his shields — a natural, necessary relaxation born of mental fatigue, from listening so intently for an unidentified something — so Korath Mindsthrall was alert and waiting for him. Jake felt the ex-vampire's gradual insinuation like a slimy, creeping mist, or a damp shroud settling over his mind. But at the same time he also sensed something of urgency, a desire to speak, to communicate with him. And if for no other reason than his own curiosity, he allowed it.

'I know you're there,' Jake said, as the other's hesitancy, his too-cautious approach began to irritate him. 'So why do you hold back? If you've got something to say, get it said.'

For answer there came a sensed 'sigh' of relief, and: But I thought that you would shut me out, send me away. I thought you would reject me, Korath said.

'That didn't stop you the last time/ Jake said. 'When you spoke to me after my nightmare? You seemed to have enjoyed spying on me, as if you approved of what you had seen, of what I'd done. Or perhaps you got carried away and broke your silence in error, when I wasn't supposed to know you were there?'

was in fact… well., speaking to myself, said the other, defensively. We might even say that you eavesdropped on me!p>

'Speaking to yourself?' Jake answered. 'Deadspeak? In which case you're as new to it as I am. For a thought is just as good as the spoken word, Korath, to such as you and I.'

And to all of the teeming dead, said the other. Which makes you the odd man out.

'But as for eavesdropping…' Jake continued, 'it sometimes has its uses. What was it you said? That together we would make a very fine pair? What exactly did you mean by that? That we're alike in certain ways? No, I don't think so. Or did you perhaps mean that you'd like to team up with me?'

But that is precisely what I meant! Korath answered, just a little

too eagerly. For after all, if you're intent on tracking down and destroying the treacherous Malinari, who could possibly be of greater assistance than one who was as close to him as Korath MindsthrallP

'So close that he killed you?' Jake's sarcasm dripped.

Exactly! And I know what you are thinking: that the Necroscope Harry Keogh found it peculiar that The Mind should murder his first lieutenant out of hand, as if it were nothing to him. But it was in fact… something.

'He had good reason? Is that what you're saying?'

Well, he thought he had! said Korath. He was concerned that one day I would usurp him, that I might have the means to usurp him!

'Yet when Harry questioned you, you said it was just Malinari's nature. You were there to be used, and so he used you.'

And so it was his evil nature, which caused him to so use and abuse his righthand man, aye, Korath answered. But in addition, there was this other thing. Something of his own making, which given time he feared would turn on him. And it might yet.

'So why do you mention it to me — this thing, whatever it is — when you withheld it from Harry?'

Because it was my secret, said Korath. And even a dead man should have something he can call his own — something private? — which might even be of value to the living, and with which he might seek to bargain? Ah, but Harry Keogh is one thing, while you are something else entirely, Jake. And it was never my intention to keep anything secret from you. Not if you require it, and if it should prove… useful to you?

'Something you have,' Jake mused, 'Which might benefit me, but not Harry…' And in a while, when Korath remained silent: 'So what's the difference? Why would you help me and not him?'

The difference? But isn't it obvious? The Necroscope Harry Keogh can

do nothing for me. And even if he could he wouldn't — you have seen that

for yourself! He is obstinate: despite that I never harmed him and he never

knew me, still he hates me! But the greatest difference is this: that he is dead!

While you—

'While I'm alive,' said Jake.

And you walk among the living. My only possible instrument of revenge against him who put me here, and the others who have gone out into your world with him, aye.

'And that's all you'd expect out of it? All you'd want for yourself?'

All? But it is everything! said the other. Through you, I would live again — er, metaphorically, of course. Through you, I would strike back from beyond the grave — or in my case from this dank and dreary pipe, in the bowels of a strange place, in a foreign land far from Starside. What more could I, poor dead thing that I am, ask of you? And. what more could you give?

'What more, indeed/ said Jake, who hadn't forgotten Harry Keogh's warning, that even dead vampires are dangerous. And:

Well, and perhaps there is… something, said Korath.

'And now we get to it,' said Jake.

Hear me out! said the other. Is it too much to ask that in return for my gift to you, you shall give me your companionship — albeit rarely, however infrequently — when little else intrudes upon your time?

'A word-game?' said Jake. 'Is that what this is? The devious nature of vampires? For here I find myself bargaining — all caught up in it, beginning to go with it — when as yet I don't even know what's on offer!'

Then let me tell you! Korath was eager, barely able to contain himself. But in the next moment he slowed down, paused and said, And yet… how best to explain? Now listen:

Do you remember I told you, that in our Icelands banishment when food was short and Malinari thirsted, he supped on me? But it was no mere sip! He drank deeply, so deep indeed that I was weakened nigh unto death. Aye, that was how much my master took from me. But in taking, he also gave!

Now, Malinari is special even among the Wamphyri. His bite is virulent; well, so are they all, but his even more so. Under normal conditions a man is recruited, becomes infected, in the space of a single Starside night — or two or three days of your time — following which he is his master's thrall, in thrall to whichever Lord or Lady seduced his blood. But when Malinari bit deep it was a matter of hours! He could turn a man in hours!

It was in his essence, his strong Wamphyri essence. And it was the same with the making.

'The making?' This was a new one on Jake.

The making of creatures, Korath explained. Monsters! Why, things waxed in The Mind's vats of metamorphosis in days rather than weeks and months! I have seen flyers Jlop from their stone wombs in the space of a single day and a night— a Starside day and night,you understand — and even an ugly warrior wax mewling in its vat, its armoured scales hardening to chitin in little more than four sunups. So efficacious is Malinari's essence of metamorphism! And all of his men and creatures alike stamped with something of The Mind himself, imbued of his arts, made in their master's likeness. Do you see?

'Imbued of his arts?' Jake repeated the other's words, and tried to fathom his meaning. 'Are you saying you got Malinari's skills?'

Something of them, aye, said Korath. And, after a moment's pause:

And you will also recall the reason why my master found it so easy to talk to me: because as you have inherited the Necroscope Harry Keogh's mind~shields, so I had inherited my bestial father's. Malinari found little to fault in my thinking because I was able to keep him out. Which suited both our purposes: The Mind's because while by nature he's suspicious, still he needed a strong first lieutenant; mine because even the most loyal and obedient of thralls may on occasion harbour this or that small grievance against his master…

'Or, on occasion, a not-so-small grievance?' said Jake.

He sensed Korath's shrug. In my case, not so much a grievance as an ambition. That was it: I harboured an ambition, and looked for an opportunity. For that time in the Icelands, Malinari had gone too far. Oh, he had glutted on me… but what he had given back — albeit involuntarily, for in his hunger he was made careless — would soon be much stronger than what he took! From which time forward I knew that I was different. I felt the germ of a leech growing in me, but daren't disclose it. I could not admit that soon I would be… Wamphyyyrrriii!

The pain — the terrible longing — of Korath's cry shocked Jake to his very soul. Like a shovel in cold ashes, or chalk on a new blackboard, it grated on his nerve-endings, set his scalp tingling. And it brought him a new awareness, the certain knowledge that what he was dealing with here was far from a simple, uncomplicated creature. Dead it was, yes, but it hadn't by any means accepted that fact; it resisted death with every fibre of its long-since sloughed-away body, and would cling to life — to any life, to his life — with that same tenacity! And:

'I think… I think it's time you were out of here!' Jake said, his voice shuddering as the echoes of Korath's cry of anguish did a drum-roll in his near-metaphysical mind. 'You or me, but one of us has to go.'

Aye, go if you will, said the other. But best that you go bravely to your death, Jake, not whimpering as you whimper now. Go on, face Malinari the Mind, for you may be sure it is him in the mountains! Go against him with nothing but your puny human muscles, nothing but your puling, childlike mind — which even I can enter, as stealthy as a thief in the night. Oh? Oh really? And how do you think you'll fare against such as Malinari, eh? And. this woman who you keep in your mind, this Liz of whom you sometimes dream — what, a mentalist, you say? But how unfortunate! For how will she fare against such as him? As for Vavara… ah, but she has her ways with pretty women, aye. Vavaaara! Oh, ha ha ha haaaaaaa!

Korath's deadspeak laugh reverberated into a throbbing silence, but Jake knew that he was there, waiting. And Korath knew that Jake was hooked. To a point, at least. And he was right.

'How can you be sure that it's Malinari in the mountains?' Jake said, in a little while. 'What can you know of that?'

Ah, no! Too late! the other cried. was the fair one and told you a secret. Now you would have more. But what is my get out of all this?p>

'But you still haven't told me what you want!' Jake answered. 'Not everything that you want. And until you do, I'm not going to be signing any blank cheques, Korath.'

And because deadspeak conveys more or other than is actually said, because it translates much as telepathy translates, Korath understood him well enough.

You are afraid that I would take advantage? But how may I take advantage? I'm only a dead thing drowned in a pipe! Korath Mindsthrall

is no more except he acts through you. Ah, but Jake… the acts we can accomplish, and the things I have to offer!

'Such as?'

Everything I know about Malinari, Vavara, Szwart.

'You've already told me those things, both me and the Necroscope, Harry Keogh.'

But can you remember them? When you're awake? I think not. For I have crept into your waking mind, too, Jake, and found it blank of all such knowledge, of everything I told you. Now tell me: who do you suppose it was reminded you of how Malinari came by his name? Did you really think you were so clever as to work it out all by yourself that the name Aristotle Milan was a disguise, a pseudonym?

'But it… it was obvious,' said Jake, caught momentarily off guard.

As it must also be obvious that I was there with you! Korath pounced. Else how would I know it ever happened? And when we flew together, you and I, in that aerial machine, that helicopter with its twirling wings: did you once suspect that I was there with you? No, never, not for a moment. But I was…

Jake was shaken, but he was also Jake. 'So you're a sneaky bastard!' he said. 'What does that prove — except I can't trust you?'

It proves that I can help you — as I helped you with Malinari's name. And then, grudgingly: Also, it proves that you are no slouch, no easy adversary, when it comes to word-games. More of the Necroscope's inheritance, I should think.

And Jake wondered, could Korath help him? What harm could it do to call on the vampire for advice in a tight spot? Surely it wouldn't be that much different from calling on Harry, whose help was uncertain anyway? And these thoughts, too — unguarded as they were — were deadspeak.

Exactly! said Korath. And at all times I would be on hand to… to advise you, aye.

'Not at all times!' said Jake, hearing warning bells. 'For when we started this conversation you were happy with "rarely," or "infrequently," when little else was "intruding on my time". So how come you now arrive at being on hand "at all times?'"

A figure of speech! Korath protested. meant whenever you called for me, of course.p>

'And how would I do that? I mean, call for you?'

Why, by thinking of me, of my situation down there in that cruel conduit, and by calling for me by name, Korath.

But the dead vampire was getting ahead of himself; believing that he was winning Jake over, his deep Voice' had become semi-hypnotic, more phlegmy, glutinous and sly than ever. Jake gave himself a shake and 'woke up' to that fact.

'What, like rubbing a lamp to call out the genie?' he said. 'And what happenes when I've had my three wishes, eh?'

He sensed the sad shake of an incorporeal head. Jake, Jake! Were you always this ungrateful, this misgiving?

'No,' Jake answered. 'Not misgiving, not yet. Just cautious. But let's get on. What else is on offer? For after all, you did say "things," in the plural.'

So, said the other, esoteric knowledge is not enough. It is too ethereal — too immundane — for a clod-hopper such as you. You would have something more physical.

'No small feat/ said Jake, feeling stung and retaliating, 'for someone as far removed from physical things as you are.'

Hurtful! said the other. Hah! And you accuse me of taking advantage! But argument gets us nowhere, while what I'm proposing would be of mutual benefit. Very well, you ask what else is on offer, what other 'thing' I have in mind. And that is exactly where it is: in my mind. Now say, do you remember the Necroscope asking you about your numerical skills?

'In connection with the Mobius Continuum? Yes,' said Jake.

5o then. And how are your numbers, Jake?

'I'm not innumerate, if that's what you mean.'

Odd, said the other, for I was. In my world, Jake, mathematics went no further than the count of a man's thralls or the beasts in his pens. Numbers? I had no use for them, nor have I even now, though I may have shortly. But in

Starside, addition was a recruitingforay into Sunside. And division was what happened to the spoils.

'What are you getting at?'

We come to it, said Korath. Do you remember those numbers that the Necroscope showed you before he took his leave of us? And do you know what they were?

'They were a formula,' Jake answered. 'They were the numbers that govern all space and time, Harry's gateway to the Mobius Continuum. But do I remember them?'

He thought back on it:

That incredible wall of numbers — like a computer screen run riot, evolving in the eye of his mind — its symbols, calculi, and incredible equations marching and mutating until they achieved some sort of numerical critical mass… and formed a door. A Mobius door.

Remember it? He would never forget it! It was like watching creation itself. But duplicate it?

No, you can't, said Korath. But I can! I can make it, but I can't use it. Not without you. And you can't make it without me. And there you have my offer…

'Tempting, if it were true,' said Jake.

It is.

'But how? You said yourself that numbers were practically unknown in your world.'

Just so. But didn't I also say that Malinari's essence is strong in my blood?

And now Jake understood. 'His photographic memory? That's what you got from him! And it's why he killed you, because one day you might know as much as him.'

Now you have it all, Korath said, and I await your answer. What's it to be? Can we work together, for Malinari's downfall?

'But there's something else.' Still Jake was cagey.

And Korath sighed his frustration. What now?

'The secret that Harry Keogh was searching for, or in your own words "the crux of the matter", which is probably more important than all the rest put together. The Wamphyri — Malinari and the others — have been here for some time now, but it seems they've achieved very little. So like the Necroscope before me I'm asking you: what are they up to, Korath? What's their plan? You were one of theirs and so you must know.'

Oh, I do, I do. But as you have repeated the Necroscope's words, now I shall repeat mine. That is for me to know, and for you and yours to discover

— through me. It is my only remaining bargaining point, the last trick up a poor dead thing's sleeve. And before I give you that, — we must be far, far better acquainted, you and L That said, I can tell you this: there isn't too much time left, and what they have started will run its course. Unless it is stopped. Before you can stop it, however, you must know what it is.

Jake pondered that a while, then said, Til have to think it over. All of it.'

But try not to take too long over it, said the other. Your world hangs by a thread, and the thread is unwinding.

Til keep that in mind,' said Jake. 'But for now leave me be. There's something I must do before I awake, or all this has been for nothing.'

5o be it, said the other without further comment. And Jake sensed his departure like a waft of fresh air, the way the shadows crept back from his mind.

Then, experimenting — making sure that Korath was gone — he attempted to close his mind to deadspeak and turned to telepathy instead:

'Liz, if you are there, and I think you probably are, try to remember this name: Korath. If it's possible, you might even write it down. But in any case remember it, and tomorrow remind me of it. It could be very important.'

That done, Jake relaxed and let himself drift free on the tides of his own subconscious mind.

And in a little while he felt himself buoyed up, taken by far less ominous dreams, the disjointed, meaningless flotsam of his waking hours…

CHAPTER THIRTY The Lull…

Sunday was a busy yet paradoxically quiet time; work was being done, but in a kind of vacuum chamber. People moved about with purpose within a oddly surreal atmosphere of near-silence. It was, Jake thought, a sensation similar to being on an airplane during its descent, in the moments before your ears pressurize, when sounds are flat and distant and you feel as though you've suddenly gone deaf. In short, it was the lull before the storm, when the hatches are battened down, and Jake (who seemed to be the only one with no hatches to batten) felt completely out of it. Apart from an o-group he'd been scheduled to attend in the evening, he had nothing to do.

Which was as well, for he didn't think he would be able to concentrate on anything much; there was something on his mind, in the back of his head, desperately trying to push its way to the forefront. It had to do with last night — something lingering over from his dreams, perhaps? — but apart from that he was at a loss.

Jake remembered his nightmare, of course. He always remembered that. It was a recurrent thing (a thing of conscience, he supposed), that came back to haunt him maybe two or three times a month. It had used to be far more frequent, but time is merciful and was doing its job. This thing in the back of his mind, however, was other than that; he found himself listening for an unknown something, and at the same time dreading it. So much so that he was shielding his mind to shut things out, and doing it consciously, holding at bay those whispering voices of which he was becoming ever more frequently aware… which might perhaps explain something of the eerie atmosphere: he was in fact isolating himself. And also from the living.

It was a shuddersome thought, and deadspeak was a terrible thing. Jake found himself wondering if perhaps that was it: was it Harry he was listening for? Harry Keogh and the Great Majority? Was his neurosis growing, spreading out of control? Or was it something else, not fear at all but the simple need for privacy? Some kind of persecution complex, with Liz Merrick — his 'partner' — taking on the role of the Inquisition, or of a spy at the very least. But in any case, she was giving him the cold shoulder this morning. Odd, because he also felt that there was something she might want to tell him.

Jake wandered about the safe house, through the Ops Room and other rooms, trying to interest himself in something — in anything — that was going on around him, and feeling more and more the outsider… at least until Lardis Lidesci joined him and Jake saw that he was in the same boat.

Jake really felt for Lardis, because he was a genuine outsider, not even of this world! On one occasion when they spoke to each other, the old man told him:

'Don't fret so! We're men of action, you and I. That's all it is. But we'll get to it, never fear.' Unlike Jake, however, the Old Lidesci made no complaint. Instead he prowled the safe house in tandem with the younger man, and kept his feelings to himself…

The long hours passed slowly; hours of tactical and logistical planning and correlation, concentrated poring over maps, and the making of battle-plans in general. The techs were feeding questions to the computers, and supplying Trask and his SAS Commanders with the answers; apart from catching the occasional break, they would probably still be working well into the eleventh hour. Surface plans of Xanadu — together with schematics of

the resort's subsurface labyrinth — littered tables in the central Ops Room. Detailed diagrams, ordnance survey maps, and aerial photographs of Jethro Manchester's island in the Capricorn Group were scattered over the floor of a room with tightly drawn curtains.

Warrant Officer Class Two Joe Davis was on a radio in the Ops Room, logging in the task force's vehicles as they arrived in groups or as individuals across the mountains and down onto the coastal strip. They had kept radio silence until now; even now they voiced only their call-signs — and then just the once, — received coded grid-references of their destinations, verified their receipt, and disappeared again into the aether. Soon they would be arriving at the designated operational locations, in which they would maintain low profiles and wait for orders. The big articulated Ops Truck wouldn't be in until the dead of night or early morning. But everyone would be, and must be, in situ by midday tomorrow, Monday, the night of the full moon…

By six in the evening Ben Trask was about ready to start pulling his hair out over his main problem with Xanadu. It was the one thing he couldn't request help on from higher authority (indeed, it was the one thing he daren't even mention to higher authority): how to evacuate the 'civilians' from the resort before attacking the place. For lan Goodly had forecast blood and thunder in Xanadu, and whether or not this was an accurate prediction or some scene from the past that the precog had somehow witnessed, Trask wasn't about to risk having his operation compromised, delayed, or possibly even shut down by the objections and vacillations of jittery political powers.

It was nerve-racking; for from Trask's own point of view, and while it had been one thing to personally authorize, coordinate, and take part in a firefight in the badlands of the Gibson Desert, setting fire to Xanadu would be something else entirely! And since he didn't have time to argue the toss with the powers that be, it meant that, should anything go wrong tomorrow night, he would be the one to carry the can.

Trask was desperately in need of a plan of evacuation, and it would have to be one that wouldn't alert Nephran Malinari to E-Branch's or any other enemy's hand in things. But with little more than twenty-four hours to go, no such plan seemed likely.

Then came the televised evening news report — of the first cases of Asiatic Plague showing up in Brisbane and half a dozen other Australian ports — and with it the germ of an idea and a possible reprieve. It was Liz Merrick who heard the report, formulated the idea, and brought it to Trask's attention. At first he was doubtful; the notion seemed too contrived, too Hollywood… but it was the sort of idea that can grow on you. And as it grew on Trask, so he got to work on it.

For after all, it was all that he had to work on…

Later, in the early hours of the night, when it was cooler and Liz went outdoors for a breath of fresh air, Jake took the opportunity to corner her and have a word in private.

'You've been avoiding me all day/ he said. 'Sort of peculiar behaviour for a partner, partner. Or is it wearing off?'

Seated together on a bench, they were close but not touching. Liz gave him a wary look, and said. 'Umm? Wearing off?'

'I thought we had something special going,' Jake said. 'Er, business-wise, that is. I mean, psychically if not physically.'

She smiled (a little ruefully, he thought) and said, 'Perhaps physically, too, under different circumstances. So don't underestimate yourself, Jake Cutter. But you're carrying a lot of baggage around with you, and the extra weight is taking too much of a toll on you. You haven't been the most sociable type, you know? And even if you were, this isn't the best of times.'

'Which disposes of physically,' he said. 'But there's still psychically to consider. I thought you were interested in that side of me, too — or should that be "at least?"' With which he

felt her shy away from him, as her expression became a lot more serious. But then she gave a shrug, and said:

'Out in the desert, that first job of ours was like an initiation, a baptism by fire — for both of us. As we were working together and it was part of our job, it seemed only fitting and sensible that we develop something of a rapport. But—'

'Which we did,' he cut her off. 'So, is that finished now?'

'—But,' Liz went on, 'for this thing tomorrow night we've been split up, and since we're not going to be working together there seemed little point in us, well, working together! I mean, with this twin operation about to go down, Xanadu and the Capricorn Group island thing together, letting anything else get in the way would have been too much of a distraction. So I haven't been trying to avoid you, Jake. It's simply that we've all been very busy.'

'You have all been busy!' said Jake, moodily. And abruptly: 'I'm not… not having a good time of this.'

'Of this conversation?'

'And of everything else,' he answered. Then shook his head and said, 'Christ! Do I come off sounding like a cry-baby?'

And suddenly Liz found herself melting. It was the first time that Jake had shown any open wounds — in his waking hours, anyway — and here she was pouring salt in them with her deliberately detached, overly cool attitude! And so:

'What is the problem, Jake?' she said.

With which he felt that oh-so-tender telepathic aura probing in his direction, and immediately raised his shields.

She knew it, drew back from him, said, 'Is that what it's about? But I can't help what I am, Jake! If someone close to me is hurting, surely it's only natural that I should want to know why? And anyway, isn't it a contradiction? You were the one who brought up our telepathic rapport, this special "thing" that we have going! But you can't expect anyone to be close to you, concerned for you on the one hand, while deliberately pushing them away on the other. You're shielding yourself— and from contact with me, Jake!'

He nodded, and said, 'And if contact -1 suppose we can call it that for now, instead of spying — if contact gets to be a habit, what then? Look, Liz, last night I had a bloody awful nightmare, a piece of the extra luggage you were talking about, that's the result of something I've done. It was an act of vengeance, but a very terrible act. You say it's only natural you should want to know what's hurting, but please believe me, you really don't want to know about something like that!'

At which she scarcely managed to keep from biting her lip. For she already knew about that — all about it. But before she could say anything and perhaps give herself away, Jake went on: 'I think… I thought, that maybe you were there with me, that you had seen, and that was why you were avoiding me.'

'No,' Liz shook her head. 'I wasn't, I didn't, it isn't.'

And she thought: Damn you, Ben Trask! I know it's your job, but this is killing me! And at the same time she knew how fortunate she was that it wasn't Trask himself she was talking to!

But even so (she tried to qualify her deceit), what she had told Jake was only a half-lie, or at worst a white one. For the real reason she had been avoiding him was because she knew that sooner or later she must remind him of that name, Korath.

It would be the right and proper thing to do after all, for with all the emphasis that Jake had placed on it, it might well be important to everyone. But now she had gone and complicated matters, making herself an even bigger liar. For as soon as she mentioned that name to Jake and he remembered it, he would know that she really had been there after all, sneaking in his mind, like a thief!

Right there and then she might have done it, blurted it out and accepted the consequences… except at that precise moment Ben Trask appeared in the door to the house, calling, 'Liz? And is that you, Jake? O-group time. Come and get your orders.'

Heading for the house, suddenly Liz found herself hating it all. But especially hating her weird talent, her telepathy. And more clearly than ever she understood why most E-Branch espers thought of their skills as curses. Again and again her condemnation of herself rang in her mind, but she heard it as an accusation, as if spoken by Jake:

'Sneaking in my mind like a thief! — like a thief! — like a thief!' And she hated it, yes. For the fact of the matter was that

Liz valued him far too much for that. And not only psychically,

either…

Then it was Monday.

By midday an observation post had been set up on the single approach road that angled up the mountain to Xanadu. In a tree-shrouded lay-by, it looked like a party of picknickers was enjoying the view and the mountain air. A table had been set up, and a small barbecue stand sent up smoke from where it stood on the stump of a tree. Cubes of meat sizzled on skewers, and a camera and six-pack of beer sat on the table. Two of the cans had been opened, one of which lay on its side. All very 'casual.'

Three men in light summer clothes ran the show. One of them was sitting in the car with the windows rolled down, apparently listening to the radio. In fact he was using a radio, or would be when it was required. Another soldier sat at the table, 'casually' watching the road where it zig-zagged up into the wooded heights. He wore binoculars round his neck but only rarely used them. The third member of the team carried a guitar. He perched on a stool in the shade of a pine, his broad-brimmed hat giving him a little extra cover as he strummed an inadequate, mainly tuneless tune out of his instrument, which was in fact capable of far more serious music. He was the team's 'minder,' and the sound-box of his guitar housed a deadly 9mm machine-pistol.

So far, the man in the car had registered their call-sign and reported their situation only once, clearly and succinctly stating that they were 'In situ…'

Also at midday, Liz's Warrant Officer Class Two 'Red' Bygraves, and the tech Jimmy Harvey, had bought 'day visitor' tickets at Xanadu's gatehouse reception desk. By I p.m., having 'cased the joint' but oh-so-carefully, they were sunbathing on opposite sides of the main pool. Both men had taken an armful of local morning newspapers with them, with front-page spreads that dealt with the incursion of Asiatic Plague; these had been left in strategic locations where they were bound to be picked up and read. Of course the resort had its own newsvending outlets; Trask's news-sheet ploy was intended as a supplementary incentive once his evacuation scheme got in gear.

As for the scheme: that was simplicity itself.

At precisely 1:15 p.m. Bygraves got up and strolled round to Harvey's side of the pool, stepping carefully around or over the many tanned bodies lounging there. The two men were 'total strangers/ of course. Jimmy Harvey saw Bygraves coming, adjusted his dark glasses, and stretched his arms up above his head, letting the sun caress the pale underarm areas. And:

'Christ!' said Bygraves, going down on a knee beside him, staring at the dark, purplish blotches under Jimmy's arms.

'Eh?' Harvey sat up. 'What?'

'Sir/ said Bygraves, 'would you mind if I examined those marks, that pustule?'

'Marks? Pustule?'

'Under your arms, sir. Because if they're what they look like…'

Harvey glanced under his arm, looked concerned. 'Is that something new?' he said. And, 'Who are you, anyway?'

'Doctor Bygraves/ said the other, prodding beneath Harvey's left arm where he obligingly lifted it. And by now the people at the poolside were interested in what was going on.

'A doctor?' Harvey was starting to look worried.

'Specializing in communicable Asiatic diseases/ Bygraves nodded. 'I'm up here for the day, before reporting for duty in Brisbane. And while I don't want to frighten you, right now it looks like I'll have my work cut out!' He pushed Harvey's arm down by his side and asked: 'How long have you been up here?'

'Just a fortnight/ Harvey was on his feet now. Tm taking my summer break. So what the hell's wrong?'

But 'suddenly' Bygraves became aware of the people gathering to watch the show. And he leaned closer to Harvey, bending down to whisper in the smaller man's ear.

'What?' Harvey yelped.

'But haven't you heard the news, read the newspapers?' Bygraves looked astonished, and more than ever worried. 'You say you've been up here for two weeks? Then it's here. It has to be here! Have you seen any rats? Have you noticed any other people with these marks? Jesus, it could be in the water!'

'Plague?' The word burst loudly from Harvey's mouth. 'Hey, did you say plague? But how in hell can I have—?'

'Don't say it!' Bygraves cut him short, glancing anxiously at the concerned faces all around. 'Listen, we have a serum. It isn't that serious if you get it seen to early — but I do mean right now! All of the medical facilities in this area have been supplied with the antidote. Unfortunately I don't have any with me, and this isn't a registered medical centre. So I can't give you any shots that will help here in Xanadu, but—'

As he set off in a hurry, with Harvey in tow, back around the pool to his sunbed, a small, anxious crowd began to follow on behind. Harvey caught up, grabbed his arm and said:

'But?' His jaw was beginning to flap. 'But what?'

Bygraves picked up a briefcase, went to open it and 'accidentally' spilled some of its contents: pamphlets describing the symptoms of Asiatic Plague, a new strain of bubonic. They fluttered to the crazy-paved pool surround and were quickly picked up by the gathering crowd.

And looking hopeless, frustrated, Bygraves said, 'Look, I think we're probably too late to stop it spreading through this place, but you are already short on time.' Pulling on a pair of shorts over his swim trunks, he said. 'I have to get you out of this place now. And as for the rest of you people/ he glanced at the milling, gawping faces all around. 'This thing will work its way through this place like wildfire! So pass the message: you should all get out, go home, report to your hospitals, doctors, medical facilities — and you should do it now!' Then, to Harvey: 'My car's this way.'

'But my clothes…!' Harvey, whose clothes were in fact in their vehicle, started to protest.

'It's your clothes or your life!' said Bygraves, pushing a way through the crowd.

Ten minutes later they were out of there, and fifteen minutes after that the general exodus began. And Red Bygraves was right: the thing worked its way through Xanadu like wildfire…

By that time Ben Trask and David Chung were at the observation point. They were on hand to greet WO II Bygraves and Jimmy Harvey when they came tearing down the road from Xanadu in a cloud of dust and heat-shimmer, pulled into the lay-by and braked to a halt behind the other car.

'How did it go?' Trask was anxious; he sluiced sweat from his brow, glanced up and down the road. Up there the mountains, and down below the coastal plain reaching to the vastly curving horizon of the South Pacific. Normally it would be a beautiful, exhilarating view, but Trask had no time for that right now.

'Some people were piling into their cars even as we pulled out of the place,' Jimmy Harvey said, keeping well down and out of sight inside the car. The dust was still settling. 'I think we made a good job of it. Thank God for amateur dramatics, eh? Would you believe I once played Romeo?'

Trask looked down at him and couldn't help but smile. 'No, but I'd believe a munchkin!'

'Eh?' Harvey grimaced as he pulled a blob of purplish cosmetic putty from under his left arm.

' The Wizard of Oz,' Trask answered. 'Probably before your time. How about the place? How did it look?'

'Like a resort.'

'Nothing odd about it?'

'No.' The other shook his bald dome of a head. 'Unless you

consider all those well-heeled people and all that tanned flesh odd. But me? I felt like a right whitey from Blighty!'

Trask shook his head, chewed on his upper lip. 'Why is it I'm not happy?' he asked of no one in particular. 'Why is it so quiet? I don't know… but something doesn't feel right.' And to Jimmy: 'Time you got some clothes on, and wear a hat. We're out of here as soon as people start to exit the place, or we'll get snarled up in the traffic. That is, if people start to exit the place!'

The locator David Chung was at the side of the road. Lowering binoculars from his eyes, he called out, 'Ben, here they come! A whole stream of cars on the high zig-zag up there. Ten minutes and they'll be here.' He came at a run across the lay-by's gravel surface.

WO II Bygraves had changed his T-shirt, put on a baseball cap and sunglasses. He slid out of the driver's seat and Trask got in. Now Bygraves would take over as the commander of this sub-section, making its numbers up to four. And they'd be here until they were ordered on up to Xanadu. There were sufficient armaments in their vehicle to start World War III.

Trask spoke to Chung. 'What do you make of it?'

'He's up there, definitely,' said Chung. 'At this range I can't be mistaken. Mindsmog, and dense. But it's so steady — I mean, it registers like steady breathing, you know? — that at a guess I'd say he's asleep. Which at this time of day shouldn't come as a surprise. But Ben, hear me out: I think there's more smog than just his.'

Vampires!' said Trask, emphasizing the plural. 'Lieutenants? Thralls? How many?'

'Him, and maybe two others. I can't be sure. But they're weak, too weak to be lieutenants. Again I'm guessing, but I'd say they're raw recruits, thralls.'

Trask shook his head. 'It still feels wrong. Too easy. I have this feeling he knows about us, that this whole scenario is — I don't know — a lie?'

Chung shrugged, but not negligently. 'That's your department, boss. I can't help you.'

Trask gave himself a shake, tried to tell himself he was wrong. And anyway, there was nothing he could do about it now. Tonight was their window of opportunity, and it had been 'foreseen' by lan Goodly. So from now on it was all go, go, go.

'David,' Trask said. 'I won't be seeing you until I come in with Chopper One, after dark. Take care to stay tuned, old friend. And lead these people right to their target, right?'

'You've got it,' Chung answered, as the first car out of Xanadu sped in a cloud of dust past the lay-by and on down the often precipitous road.

'You'd better be on your way,' Chung nodded. 'Good luck, Ben.'

But then a strange thing. A car coming in the other direction, up the mountain road, pulled in sharply onto the lay-by's gravel surface and skidded to a halt.

The driver cursed out of his open window, said, 'Did you see that? If it wasn't for this lay-by I'd be over the fucking edge! I mean, God damn it to…!' He had been forced off the road by someone trying to overtake the lead cars in the exodus from Xanadu. 'What the fuck is going on up there?'

Trask stared hard out of his own vehicle's window at the speaker — at his angular, somehow spidery figure, that seemed crammed into the seat of his battered, blue-grey, Range Rover-styled vehicle — and for a moment knew a sensation of deja vu. The man wore an open-necked shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, and the way he crouched over the steering wheel like that, he had to be pretty tall.

Tall and spidery, and his vehicle was…

Trask stared harder, and the tall thin man stared back — but only for a moment. Then his eyes went wide and the back of his vehicle fishtailed as he slammed her in first, revved up, and slewed back out onto the road. And:

'Damn!' Trask shouted, getting out of his car as the dust of the other's departure drifted back to earth. 'Deja vu nothing! That car, and that man — they fit Liz Merrick's description of the watcher at the airport where we came in!'

Even as the suspect car had fishtailed out onto the road, so the SAS type with the guitar had yanked open the boot of the observation post's vehicle and hauled out an evil-looking piece of artillery. Quickly assuming a firing stance behind a stunted pine, he rested the rifle's long barrel on the gnarled stump of a branch. And sweeping the steeply snaking road, he made adjustments to the telescopic sights. Then:

'Mr Trask,' he shouted. 'Up there where the road zig-zags. I can take him out as he rounds that last bend. The range isn't too much, maybe five hundred yards, and this weapon is lethally accurate to fifteen hundred. That's to assume a stationary target, of course. But I'm qualified with this gun and won't miss. Once he's over that ridge, though, he's gone with the wind. You have maybe thirty seconds to think it over.'

Trask thought it over. He knew he was right — but what if he was wrong? What if the spidery man was an innocent? But then again, why had he taken off like that? And the look on his face — probably shock as he'd realized he was face to face with his master's enemy. In which case he'd be on his way to make report to Malinari even now. But if Trask was wrong… how to balance one life against the security of a world?

The man with the sniperscope yelled, 'He'll be coming into view any time now!'

And Trask thought: The die is cast. We've got Nephran Malinari trapped up there. He can't come out until sundown, and Lan Goodly has forecast shit and hellfirefor tonight, the night of the full moon. So what difference does this make one way or the other?

What was it that the precog was always saying — something about the future being as immutable as the past? 'What will be has been,' and all that? Yes, that was it… but it was always coupled with, 'There's no way of telling how it will be, that's all…'

Trask started towards the marksman's position, and in his mind's eye he saw the knuckle of the man's finger turning white on the trigger. As if that were some kind of invocation, the marksman called out, 'I have him in my sights now, Mr Trask.'

There was no time left, and Trask skidded to a halt shouting, 'Do it! Take him out!' But:

'Skit!' said the other. His finger went slack on the trigger, and beads of sweat sprang into being on his forehead. Letting his weapon slump, he said, 'Cars out of Xanadu, a fucking convoy! They were in my way, shielding him. Ordinary civilians. No way I was going to risk firing on them.'

Trask had been holding his breath. Now he let it out in a long 'Phew!3 and then said, 'Take it easy. It isn't your fault, and it wasn't meant to be. The future can be like that.'

'What?' said the other, relieved but frowning. 'Some kind of fatalism?'

'Forget it,' Trask told him. 'But tonight, if you see that car or its driver in the resort, then you can fire on them with all you've got. And ditto should they try to come back down out of there.'

Then it was time for a final word with Bygraves and Chung, before the downhill traffic got too heavy. Even now the thunder of fleeing vehicles was becoming deafening.

'It looks like our little scheme is going to work,' Trask told Bygraves. 'Stay on it, and when the traffic thins out flag down a car. See if you can get some idea of how many people are still up there. As for that fellow who slipped through our fingers a moment ago: don't let it worry you. I'll do the worrying for all of us. And anyway, what can he tell Malinari other than what he's already figured out for himself— or will figure out just as soon as he pops up from his hidey-hole?'

Then he turned to Chung. 'David, stay tuned. If that mindsmog gets active, starts moving about, let us know at once. But whether it does or doesn't, and unless something really drastic happens, we'll probably be going in as planned. Okay?'

After the WO II and Chung had nodded their understanding, Trask got back into the car with Jimmy Harvey and drove to the side of the road. There he waited for a break in the stream of traffic, gave a final wave and set off downhill.

The vast bulk of the exodus was still to come…

And in a Xanadu that would soon be empty of entirely human life, there were just three and a half hours of life-giving, or wn-life threatening, natural light left. Then the sun would dip westward, the shadows of the mountain range would lengthen, and Xanadu's lights would blink on one by one, holding the darkness and the long night to follow at bay.

Or at least, that was how it would be under normal circumstances…

It was some eighty miles back to the safe house. Along the way Jimmy Harvey radioed ahead to give the people back there their ETA. He also passed a brief, coded message concerning Liz Merrick's watcher, and likewise passed on the locator David Chung's expert opinion that Lord Nephran Malinari was indeed in Xanadu. At which the team at the safe house held a final o-group, then went into action to ensure that everything would be fully operational and ready for Trask on his return.

Radio messages went out. With the exception of the Xanadu observation post, the various SAS units began converging on the flying club where Chopper Two had been checked over, refuelled, and was warming up for the long flight to Gladstone. The other machine stood idle for the moment; its flight to Xanadu would be of much shorter duration. Meanwhile, in the harbour at Gladstone, a fully-fuelled coastguard vessel and pilot had gone on immediate standby. And every man who formed a part of the team was fully aware of the details of the job in hand…

5:15 p.m. in Xanadu, and for more than three hours now private eye Garth Santeson had been trying to get to see his employer, Aristode Milan. But Santeson wasn't the only employee, and the two well-built young men who saw to Milan's privacy in daylight hours had been proving obstinate. For three hours and then some Santeson had prowled the casino and watched it emptying of punters, hostesses, croupiers and their overseers, and finally and most tellingly the tellers. For when the people who handled the cash moved out, then you knew for sure that something was about to go down.

Half an hour ago, turned back yet again by Milan's single-minded minders from his daytime sanctum sanctorum, Santeson had gone out from the almost deserted Pleasure Dome into the resort proper. By then the pools had been empty and the last cars were straggling out through the departure gate. The private investigator was no fool; he had long since found out what the alleged problem was, but he'd also made the connection between that and what he'd bumped into on the mountain approach road. And it was just too much of a coincidence. So how come Milan — who had definitely been on the alert for unfriendly visitors and suspicious activities for as long as Santeson had been with him — how come he wasn't up and about, checking things out for himself?

Or was he simply unaware that there was a problem…?

The trouble with Milan's goons was that they had insufficient grey matter between them to realize they should at least be doing something, if it was only to let their dodgy employer know what was happening here. This was Santeson's opinion, anyway, which seemed borne out by the dumb, unswerving obstinacy of the pair.

Normally he would have been able to contact Milan by telephone; the photophobic, night-dwelling boss of the resort would usually accept calls through the dark hours from four-thirty or five in the evening until nine in the morning, but not tonight And when Santeson had tried to impress something of the urgency of an audience with Milan upon his watchdogs — the fact that he must see him, that his information was of the utmost importance — it had seemed to him that they couldn't care less! He'd simply been informed of Mr Milan's instructions: that he wasn't to be disturbed under any circumstance until 6:30 at the earliest And that had been that. But now, with the time approaching 6:00 p.m. and the resort already dark, cooling under the swift onset of a Tropic of Capricorn night, Santeson was determined to have his way.

He had last tried to call Milan just ten minutes ago from the deserted booth at the monorail boarding stage close to the casino's

entrance… but the phone had only buzzed annoyingly at him, because by then there had been no receptionist to transfer the call! And now Santeson was very angry, for as the minutes had stretched into hours his sense of urgency — the anxious frustration of knowing that while something was definitely and dangerously out of kilter here, still there was nothing he could do about it — had increased in commensurate degree.

Garth Santeson had his own ideas as to what was happening or about to happen; it seemed obvious to him that the long arm of the law was reaching for Milan, and his oh-so-shady employer was about to get himself arrested (probably for skimming casino profits); in which case Santeson's monthly and more than adequate pay cheque would disappear with him. It therefore followed that the longer he kept the boss out of trouble, the better his chances of collecting his next cheque, due in a few days' time. Which in turn meant he must speak to Milan about the people he had seen on the approach road, at least two of which he'd recognized from the party that had flown in a few days ago in those paramilitary jetcopters.

Santeson knew where Milan was — his approximate location, anyway — but couldn't get to him. On any ordinary night Milan might be found in the casino for an hour or two, but much preferred the privacy of his rooms in the solar-panelled bubble on top of the dome (which on rare occasions he would also use during daylight hours). Santeson had a special elevator key, given him by Milan, which would take him to those topmost rooms when he was summoned into the man's presence. But generally, during the day, Aristotle Milan stayed well out of sight, down in the subterranean bowels of the place. Santeson understood that his employer had private apartments down there, to which he wasn't and never had been privy. To his knowledge, only Milan's goons had ever got that close—

— Well, until tonight, anyway…

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE… Before The Storm

It was almost as dark inside the casino when Santeson re-entered the place. Some electrical failure, which had taken out most of the lights, and no one left to fix it. But even if it was black as night in there he would know where to find Milan's minders.

Surrounding the Pleasure Dome's central spindle, six elevators formed a hexagonal tube of glass and stainless steel. Four of these serviced the casino's upper levels, excluding Milan's bubble. The fifth was for the use of casino personnel only and gave access to the basement and the almost literally bomb-proof Fort Knox-like accountancy vaults. As for number six: that was exclusive to the persons of Milan himself, his minders, and anyone else who he might choose to entertain, either in the bubble or in certain unknown regions in the belly of the place.

But associates? Visitors?

Huh! Damn few of those! Santeson thought as he approached the central area where, sure enough, Milan's bouncers were waiting to intercept him. Flanking an elevator door marked PRIVATE (the door to Milan's elevator, of course), they were seated in pink-marbled leather armchairs beside slender, urn-shaped ashtrays. But as Santeson came hurrying between the unlit rows of sullenly silent slots, so the minders came smoothly yet indolently to their feet, and stood side by side, their arms folded on their chests, like a matching pair of eunuchs.

Their expressions remained blank, but the positions they had adopted said it all: they were blocking the elevator doors.

Santeson shook his head, wondering, What is it with these two? Apart from Milan himself, they were the only ones who had keys to that subterranean level housing what Santeson supposed would be sumptuous apartments. His key would only take him up, not down. But in any case he wasted no time in argument; these zombies always reacted precisely the same way no matter who it was who approached these doors.

'I have to see Mr Milan,' he told them. 'And I have to see him now. So don't go fucking me about, because it's too important.' They looked at him, then at each other, and back to Santeson. And he looked at them.

They could be twins, he thought, and changed his mind. No, it wasn't that they looked like brothers but that they had like looks. The way they stood there — smartly outfitted, well-built six-footers in their mid-to late-twenties, with sallow complexions that looked sort of grey in this indoor dusk — they could almost be tailor's dummies, motionless yet somehow threatening. Only their eyes moved, and their eyes… were weird!

Santeson was sure he'd never noticed it before, but now he saw a kind of yellowish, almost feral luminosity in those eyes. It must be the light, or lack of it, and he was further galvanized by that thought.

'Look,' he said, 'all shit could break loose any time now, and Mr Milan has got to be told about it. Now, I don't want to see him on my own… hey, boys, if you're that concerned over security, you can escort me! I mean, you'll have to go with me anyway, 'cos I don't know where he is or how to get there. But you do. And believe me, if you don't take me to him right now, tomorrow you could be out of work…'

And then, losing it a little when their expressions didn't change: 'Er, helloP' he said. 'I mean, am I getting through to you, or would you like me to draw some pictures? Maybe your on-switches are off or something, or I don't know the secret code that could lead us to a basis for some kind of mutual, kindergarten understanding!'

But in fact he had never had anything of an 'understanding' with them, not with these two. The rest of the Pleasure Dome's workers were regular folks, but these two… everyone avoided them like the plague. Hah, even an Asiatic plague! Santeson thought.

It was a funny thing, because when they had come here looking for jobs a couple of months ago, they had seemed like regular people, too. But now: they never strayed far from the elevators, and Milan wouldn't go anywhere without them. But come to think of it, he never went anywhere much anyway! And there was the same kind of look about him, too. So maybe they were blood relatives, but Santeson didn't think so.

Finally one of them spoke. 'Mr Santeson/ he said. 'We've already told you three or four times — Mr Milan won't see you. He isn't seeing anybody. He's expecting a busy night and wants to get some rest. If we take you to him, it won't be you he'll get mad with — we'll be in trouble. So why don't you take some good advice, and…' Pausing in mid-sentence, he gave a small but violent start, and a facial tic began jerking the flesh at the corner of his mouth. Then his face took on an odd attitude of listening.

From the first word out of the minder's mouth, the spidery Santeson had backed off a pace… mainly from his breath! The man had the worst case of crotch-or armpit-mouth that the private detective had ever come across. His breath was so vile it literally stank like a cesspit, or maybe like a slaughterhouse? And now this. He stood there as if he'd been struck dumb, with his head turned a little on one side and his strange eyes rapidly blinking. But what was bothering him? What was he listening to?

It lasted for maybe twelve to fifteen seconds, until suddenly he gave his head a shake and straightened up. And smiling in a twitchy, nervous sort of way, he said, 'Mr Milan will see you now. We're to take you to him.' His eyes had stopped blinking.

Earphone! Santeson thought. Direct communication with the boss. This guy is wired, definitely, and in more ways than one! But at least it gets the job done.

The other minder thumbed the button and the elevator doors opened. Santeson got in and the goons followed on. Then the one with the earphone used his key, and the glass cage descended — down past the basement level, then to a sub-basement level (the last stop marked on the internal indicator)… where to Santeson's surprise the elevator didn't stop! Not until the next sub-level, which wasn't even registered on the indicator. And Santeson had to admire the brilliance of it, for anyone who wasn't wise to the system wouldn't even know that this nethermost level existed.

The elevator had lights, but as the doors hissed open Santeson saw that the corridor outside didn't. Well, it did, but so low-key, so subdued, he might easily be in some ultra-low-class Hong Kong brothel.

"This way,' said one of the minders… and something else that had been niggling at Santeson at once crystallized. It was their voices. Voices that rumbled out of them; they coughed, or growled, their words. They fired them at you; speech came bursting from them, literally impacting on you, or at least that was how it felt. Up in the casino, in some kind of decent light, the effect was lessened — lessend by the light, maybe, the accustomed surroundings — but down here in the near-darkness…

… It was like these people belonged down here in the dark. Almost as if they were made for it.

The minders led the way. Santeson couldn't complain about that; it was oddly reassuring to have these two in front of him and not behind. But he'd only taken a few paces when he stumbled. And now that his eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom he saw why, and also why the place had reminded him of a brothel. It was the lighting.

The corridor was lit by a string of small red light bulbs, well spaced-out on a cable that was hooked up to a low ceiling. But the ceiling was of stone, likewise the walls and the floor. Natural stone, hewn stone. And this wasn't a corridor at all — except in the most primitive sense of the word — but a tunnel. A tunnel carved from the bedrock, and the floor was ridged and uneven.

So? Santeson asked himself. What did you expect down here? You go far enough down and there's rock, for Christ's sake! And as he stumbled a second time:

'Mind the floor/ one of the minders grunted, half-turning to glance back at him.

Only half-turning, but Santeson got a glimpse of his eyes. And he saw that they burned like sulphur in the dark! He began to panic, and immediately got a grip on himself. It had to be a chemical reaction, some kind of gas down here. For all he knew, his eyes might be burning yellow, tool Or perhaps — again perhaps — it was the lights. Like those fluorescent lights in the disco, that made his false front teeth glow.

'How f-far is it?' he heard himself say. A stupid question, stupidly put. How long is a piece of string? But for no reason at all that he could give name too, Santeson's nerve was going, and all of the smart talk lay dead in him. And in front, one of Milan's minders chuckled like a file on broken glass, and answered:

'Not very f-far at all!'

The walls had widened out, disappeared into gloom; the ceiling was higher, and the light correspondingly dimmer. Ahead of Santeson, the broad backs of the minders were twin black silhouettes, moving unerringly, relentlessly through the darkness and leading him on like…

… Like what?

For suddenly, out of nowhere, there was this picture in his mind of a lamb with a noose round its neck, and in his nostrils a waft of slaughterhouse breath that stung like a slap. And as he tried to shut these scenes and sensations out, still he wondered: How do these people see in the dark?

'Now be very careful how you go,' one of them said, and his voice echoed in what was obviously a large space, but one that

was filled with a powerful musk and a strange rustling. And his colleague advised:

'Step where we step.'

'I can't see a f-fucking thing!' Santeson husked, his voice a whisper in the darkness.

Abruptly, the minders paused, so that he almost bumped into them; they looked at each other questioningly, then turned as a man to Santeson. And: 'Would you like to?' One of them coughed a query.

'Eh?' Santeson stood there trembling. 'L-like t-to?'

'Would you like to see a f-fucking Thing?' said the minder, tilting his head in inquiry, his face gaping into such a grin as Santeson just couldn't believe.

'Lights,' said his partner, moving swiftly — with a flowing motion — away into the darkness.

'Camera,' said the one with the yawning cavern mouth, giving Santeson a small push in a certain direction. And:

'Action!' came the other's gurgling answer from some short distance away.

Santeson's balance was shot anyway. Weak as a baby, stumbling away from the one who had pushed him, he flailed his arms, fought to stay on his feet. But then he stepped on something — something that writhed or slithered underfoot — and at the same time was momentarily blinded as several neon tubes in the ceiling buzzed into life.

After that… madness!

Santeson no longer believed any of this. It had to be dazzle from the sudden glare, or his imagination, or anything. But it couldn't be real. What lapped at his feet… that couldn't be real. And what humped in one corner of the cave, tossing and heaving… that wouldn't interface with reality at all—

— Until it looked at him and said, 'H-h-help meeeee!' And then he knew it was real!

As his eyes rolled up and he flopped, so the minders were there beside him, taking him under the arms, bearing his weight as easily as if he were a child. Tall, thin and spidery as Santeson was, his knees scraped along the stony floor as they bore him up and away, out of the cave of the seething Thing, to Malinari…

Three hours earlier:

Crouching low under the circular shimmer of the jetcopter's fan, and calling Jake's name, Liz Merrick was buffeted by a blistering whirlwind of heat where she ran across the helipad to where Chopper Two was making ready to take off. Jake shouldn't have been able to hear her over the high-pitched whining of the engine and vanes, but he 'heard' her anyway.

Sliding a gunner's door halfway open, he clung to a strap, leaned out and down, and took the fluttering envelope that she passed up to him. And with a last long look into her eyes, seeing the pain in them, he felt the slight tremor that warned of imminent take-off and closed the door to the merest crack. The chopper lifted off, rose up and turned once, slowly, through a hundred and eighty degrees.

Liz came back into view. She'd moved into a safe position at the edge of the helipad and was waving up at him. He opened the door a fraction more, waved back. But then, as the chopper gained altitude, keeled on its side a little and headed north, she was lost to sight.

Jake closed the door and took his seat beside Lardis Lidesci. And thinking hard — thinking about Liz, and thinking at her — he said:

Take care of yourself, Liz. You be sure to take very good care of yourself.

You too, she told him, quite clearly. And also: … I'm sorry, Jake.p>

It was in Jake's mind to ask her what about, but since he believed he already knew, there wasn't much point in it. Moreover, he knew that it wasn't her fault, that she really didn't have anything to be sorry about. It was the job that kept coming between them — Ben Trask and E-Branch — and E-Branch would always come first.

But a picture of Liz stayed in his mind — her night-black hair, cut in that boyish bob; her intelligent, sea-green eyes; her curves, of course, and her smile like a ray of bright light — standing there at the edge of the helipad, waving, and gradually dwindling into the distance. And despite that it was all in his mind's eye, Jake knew that in fact she was still there, watching the jetcopter right out of sight.

He had put the envelope in his pocket. Now, as the rumble of the chopper's jets took over and he felt forward acceleration, he took it out to read what Liz had written on the single leaf of paper that was folded inside. But as he unfolded it:

'From Liz?' Lardis grunted.

'Mind your own business,' Jake answered.

'She thinks a lot of you.'

'That cuts both ways,' said Jake. 'Can you read our language?'

'Some,' said Lardis. 'When it's printed. But handwriting? Not a chance. It looks like spider shit to me!'

'Good!' said Jake. And despite the Old Lidesci's sideways squint, he read what was written:

Jake-It's a bit late, but you asked me to remind you of a name — the name was KORATH. You may not remember it, but if you do you'll probably think I'm a treacherous bitch. If so, well, there's not much that I can do about it. But it seemed to me you thought this was pretty important. And since we don't know what's coming, it could be a question of now or never, my one chance to put things straight—

— Or to mess them up completely. I care for you more than you know, and a lot more than circumstances have let me show.

Please take care. Liz.

Jake read it through again. Korath? The name rang a bell, but it was a far and almost forgotten clamour. Something he'd dreamed? Well, that was what she was talking about, obviously: the fact that she'd been snooping on him again, when he slept. But so what? It was her job and he would simply have to learn to accept it — and Liz would have to learn to accept whatever she found in there, in his subconscious mind, like it or not.

His recurrent nightmare? Well that would explain yesterday's coolness, certainly. But Korath…?

Again Jake heard the ringing of that distant bell — perhaps a warning bell? And this time more insistently — and he frowned as he tried to recall whatever it meant back into the focus of his memory. Was it something that he'd dreamed?

Jake had read a few things about dreams, and he knew that to many others they were of special significance. To him, however, dreams had usually been trivial, easily forgotten things, the scurf or sloughed-off skin of more fully fleshed-out ideas and concepts from his waking hours. And he wondered: How often does a man retain detailed memories of what he dreams, and for how long?

Nightmares were one thing (for they left lasting impressions, if only through the emotion of fear), but common or garden dreams? And again he thought: Korath? But this time it was a very deliberate thought, and unguarded.

And it was deadspeak.

Immediately there was someone — or some Thing — there in his mind. Shadows sprang into being, and It came with them.

You called! said a glutinous voice that was both surprised and pleased, causing Jake to start. And you remembered. But how much have you remembered? It's all there, Jake, just waiting to come back to you. But I feel your sense of shock — the way you recoil from me — and I wonder, do you really remember? What is it, Jake? Why did you call out to me?

'What in the name of…!?' said Jake, and at once, instinctively, brought mental barriers crashing down to shut whatever it was — this thing, this Other, this Korath — out of his mind.

The other fled or was banished at once, and Jake heard him

go: his frustrated cry of rage, denial, as he disappeared into the deadspeak aether:

No, Jake, no! Don't send me away! You'll know soon enough how much you need me. And you must always remember: I have the numbers! I have the numbers, Jake, and I know the waaayyy!

Then he was gone…

'Eh?' said Lardis, staring hard at Jake, at a face turned pale and gaunt. 'Eh, what? Is there something? You gave a start just then. You said something. And the way you look…' But:

'Shhh!' Jake shook his head, concentrated, and remembered! Remembered it all, but most of all that he'd almost made a deal with a vampire. And he remembered something else: Harry Keogh's warning, that even a dead vampire is a dangerous thing that you should never, ever, let into your mind!

'You look peculiar,' said the Old Lidesci.

Jake looked at him, swallowed hard, and slowly got a grip of himself. 'It was… it was nothing,' he said. 'Nothing that I want to talk about now, anyway. Later, maybe — to Liz and Ben Trask — when tonight's business is over.'

And between times… he dug out a ballpoint and began to make shaky notes on Liz's scrap of paper.

For while he still hadn't quite come to terms with everything that was happening to him, and whether or not this latest manifestation was some kind of daydream, mental quirk, evidence of a dual personality, or whatever, still Jake knew that it was something he must remember in detail, something that he really couldn't afford to forget…

Chopper Two disembarked its task force in Gladstone and refuelled. Earlier that day, three SAS men had made the long drive up to Gladstone to check that all was in order with the coastguard vessel. Now the two units met up for a final briefing.

The attack on the island would be two-pronged. Along with WO II Joe Davis and four NCOs, Jake and Lardis Lidesci would be airborne; four more NCOs would be in the boat.

Zero Hour — the time scheduled for the launch of simultaneous attacks on both the Capricorn Group island and the mountain resort of Xanadu — had been set for 6:30 p.m. The weather was good and the sea flat calm, and with just ninety minutes to go to Zero Hour, the boat cast off.

And an hour later, with the light failing as the sun sank down behind the Great Dividing Range, Chopper Two got airborne again…

At the same time, at the Brisbane flying club, Chopper One was warming up ready to go. Ben Trask and the SAS Major, joint operational commanders, were in a hangar using a radio in one of the vehicles. The precog lan Goodly, Liz Merrick, and the rest of the SAS men were trooping out to the jetcopter, their combat suits fluttering in the bluster of disturbed night air that stank of hot exhaust fumes.

At 6:15 Trask transmitted: 'Callsigns One, Two, and Three, signals — over?'

And the answers came back: 'One, okay — over,' (the locator David Chung's voice, from the Xanadu approach road).

'Two, okay — over,' (Joe Davis's voice from Chopper Two).

'Three, okay — over,' (the senior NCO on the boat).

'Sitreps/ said Trask.

And three identical answers came back one after the other: 'On schedule, and all systems are go.'

'Synchronizing watches,' said Trask, then waited a second. 'Set your watches to 6:17. I say again figures sixer, one, seven. Counting down, I now have — three, two, one, zero — 6:17 precisely. Good hunting, and good luck. Over?'

'Roger that, and out,' (from the same three sources). And:

'Let's go,' said Trask. He and the Major ran out under the gleaming vanes of the jetcopter and boarded her. Moments later she took off and headed south for Xanadu…

In Chopper One Trask had just minutes left to talk to Liz,

lan Goodly, and the Major. 'I'm concerned/ he said. 'There's something wrong and I don't know what it is. It's a feeling that — I don't know — that everything we've done or we're trying to do is somehow misguided, as if we're on the wrong track, or we've been misled, or there's something we've overlooked.'

'That sounds like your talent at work, Ben,' said the precog. And then he sighed. 'Well, I'm glad that someone's talent is working!'

'And you?' Trask looked at him. 'Nothing?'

'Just trouble,' Goodly sighed again. 'Just problems, frustration, confusion. But as you know, I can't force it; it comes when it comes. But in your case… is it anything specific?'

'No,' Trask shook his head. 'So it seems we're in the same boat — or airplane! It's a.feeling, that's all. I had it today up at the observation post on the mountain road. When I looked up the road, toward Xanadu… it was all so quiet, so normal. Perhaps too quiet, too normal.'

'A lie?'

'More like I was deceiving myself,' said Trask. 'This is a covert operation, but it didn't feel like one. Especially after that incident with Liz's watcher.' He glanced at her — a guilty look, she thought — and said, 'I should have paid more attention to you.'

'But I wasn't that sure myself,' Liz said. 'And anyway, I'm the new kid on the block; I could have been wrong.'

'That's what I mean/ said Trask. 'We all have our talents, and I should have listened to yours. If we had turned back and I had seen that fellow, I would have known at once. But we didn't, and I didn't. I blame myself.'

At which the Major, looking more than a little concerned, came in with: 'Miss, gentlemen, I have some difficulty following you — these skills of yours, you understand — but are you saying the operation is in jeopardy?'

Trask shook his head, then changed his mind and said: 'Any operation concerning these creatures is hazardous. But we have to go in, no matter what. It's all set up, and we mightn't get a better chance. But with our weapons, and providing everyone remembers the drills, I can't see what can go wrong.'

Liz glanced at her watch. 'Five minutes/ she said. And as at a signal the intercom began buzzing.

The pilot was on the earphones saying: 'Message from Callsign One. The mindsmog has been "awake" but more or less static for some time. Now it's on the move, but only locally. Callsign One is also mobile. His ETA the target area is five minutes.'

Trask answered, 'Tell him roger that. We'll see him there, and not to forget his nose-plugs.' Then, turning to the bulk of the helicopter party, 'And you mustn't forget yours.'

They hadn't forgotten. Aerosol sprays were hissing; a fine garlic mist filled the air, settling on everyone's clothing; it was almost a pleasure to insert filter plugs like fat cigarette tips deep into their nostrils…

In Xanadu, from a position some two hundred feet up the almost sheer rock wall of the mountainside, Lord Malinari of the Wamphyri looked down on the sprawling dark cobweb of the deserted resort, and at the single road that wound its serpentine route up the steep mountain contours to Xanadu's gates.

Malinari's vantage point was a roughly-hewn 'room' carved from the solid rock at the head of a natural chimney. When Xanadu was being built, it had been Jethro Manchester's intention to create a special entertainment here. There was to have been a ski-lift or cable-car from the gardens up to this point, and a series of aquachutes back down to the pools. The chimney had been fitted with a spiralling service-and/or emergency-staircase behind a facade constructed to match the flanking cliffs, so disguising the chimney's vertical fault, and work had commenced on this room or landing stage. At which point technical difficulties had caused the project to be abandoned.

Now the chimney was Lord Malinari's bolthole from Xanadu. From this window he would fly out on the night

wind, and glide down to a place in which he had long since secreted a cache of clothing, money and other necessaries to speed him on his way to his next venture. But not before he ensured that the chase ended here, and that this E-Branch had suffered such losses as to finish it forever, or at least slow it down until his, Vavara's, and Szwart's greater scheme was brought into play…

Malinari looked down on Xanadu and smiled a hideous smile. If only he could be down there to see the mayhem. But that way he might find himself caught up in all of the destruction, and that was out of the question. As for Xanadu itself:

Oh, he might bemoan a very little the waste of this place… but not for very long. For the world was a wider place far, and his plans of conquest of far greater scope.

A shame that his 'garden' with its special 'crop' must be discovered — especially now that it had been nourished so recently. Or then again, perhaps it would not be found; for it was after all hidden away, in the subterranean darkness that suited it so very well. In which case it would lie there, all unattended and dormant for now, only to flourish later in its own good time. For what Malinari had seeded would not die unless it were put down, deliberately and utterly destroyed. Ah, the tenacity of the Great Vampire, and of his works!

As for the last of Malinari's human watchdogs: the spiderlike, gangling Garth Santeson was by now no more. He had served his purpose the moment he warned of E-Branch's arrival here, an intrusion that Malinari had been expecting ever since his lieutenant Bruce Trennier died the true death some few days ago far in the western desert, and of which he'd had warning apart from and since Trennier's demise, not alone from Garth Santeson.

A warning, aye, and delivered by a seeming idiot! But even an idiot may have his uses. Malinari had certainly found a good use for that one…

But poor Trennier, the manner of his passing. Malinari remembered it well, those last few moments of the man's miserable life: the faithful servant crying his agonies, and Malinari the Mind, the master, feeling something of those agonies even here, in Xanadu:

The/ire! That awesome, all-consuming, withering fire that melted even metamorphic flesh, exploded bone, liquefied sinew, and reduced all to ashes! It had lasted a while — the pain, too, Trennier's pain — until Malinari had been obliged to shut it out of his mind. But through the jet of blistering heat that stripped Trennier's flesh from his body and finally blinded and destroyed him, Malinari had recognized some of the faces of his lieutenant's tormentors. The face of Ben Trask, remembered from the mind ofZek Foener, and that of lan Goodly, yet another man of weird talents…

But if only Malinari had had longer with the Foener woman. There had been so much more that he might have learned (such as the nature of their skills, these men of esoteric talents), and so very much more that he would have enjoyed… of that beautiful woman herself, perhaps, and not only her mind.

Well, too late for that now — too late from the moment he hurled her down that shaft into oblivion — but at least he had fathomed something of the dangers of this world. Especially the greatest danger of all, which was E-Branch.

And now they had found him… as he had known they would, against which inevitability he'd long since taken ingenious and even marvellous precautions.

On a board bolted to the wall close to Malinari's 'window' (which was simply a large hole in the moulded concrete facade), a master switch stood in the 'off position beside a series of smaller electrical switches set in a roughly oblong array. The array was a precise match for Xanadu itself, its concentric pattern of switches duplicating the cobweb design of the resort in the gloom of the mountain saddle.

Now, waiting there in his secret bolthole, Malinari threw the master switch. There was a low, answering hum of power, but nothing more. And his slender fingers were impatient where they fluttered over the smaller switches — those electrical messengers of instantaneous death — as he gloatingly rehearsed a certain sequence:

'First the outer chalets, to close them in. Then the inner structures, to catch them where they run. And when finally they think they have me "trapped" in my night-dark dome…' His hand trembled with pent anticipation over the central switch.

'A pleasure dome, aye. But for my pleasure, not theirs!'

He laughed a coughing laugh, long and low… then paused abruptly. Down there, coming into view along the approach road toward Xanadu's gates: a vehicle. The night was dark now — but night and darkness were Malinari's greatest allies — and that vehicle with its lowered, carefully probing lights; the coiled-spring tension in its vengeful passengers!

Malinari sensed it, their human bloodlust — or what passed for bloodlust in men — and laughed again. Bloodlust? Why, Nephran Malinari had pissed thicker blood than coursed through the veins of whelps such as these!

And with his telepathic probes concentrating on the vehicle, he felt what its occupants felt:

Fear, of the Great Unknown that was Malinari. Oh, he recognized and relished it! Primal fear of the night and what the night might bring, its roots burrowing like worms in every human fibre, revenant of cavern-dwelling ancestors. Fear in the face of an alien threat, the menace of the blood-beast!

But tempering the fear, holding it at bay, there was also a wall of grim determination. And bolstering that blind determination, the sure knowledge of vastly superiorfirepower.

Oh, really…?

And again Malinari laughed, but a second later hissed and grimaced, and clasped his handsomely alien head in wildly trembling hands. It was the pain — those lightning-flashes of terrible pain which ever accompanied any excessive use of his mentalism — the pain that came from searching out or listening to the thoughts of so many others, and of suffering the tumult of their massed emotions, their thronging dreams and fancies. For weirdly mutated minds were gathering here now, and the greater their talents the more piercing the pain in his head.

Cursing vividly, in the tongue of Starside, Malinari swiftly withdrew his probes. And as the pain receded, so he relaxed a little and gave vent once more to strained, broken laughter.

But strained? And broken?

He had thought often enough about that before — even Malinari — finding cause to wonder: The laughter of a madman? Well, perhaps it was at that, though he preferred to think of himself as merely… eccentric? And anyway, what of it? When a man is unique, surely he has a right to such small idiosyncrasies…

Drawing him back from his musing, the fading pounding in Malinari's temples was suddenly matched by a stuttering in the sky: the mechanical throbbing of jets, as their power diverted to whirling, fanlike vanes. And though momentarily startled — sufficiently so that he lifted his crimson gaze to the dragonfly shape that blurred the stars — still he felt no real concern or threat. His plans were laid, and every eventuality had been anticipated. Even this one.

Down in the gardens, in front of the casino, that was the most obvious of the few places where the jetcopter could land. But it was also one of the many places that Malinari had mined. And:

Hah! So be it! he thought. Now let this game commence.

The car at the gate issued a single man; equipped with a heavy, deadly automatic weapon, he crouched low and ran to the small, open-fronted chalet that housed reception. A rearguard, of course; also a guard against anyone trying to escape. These guileless fools! No one would be trying to 'escape' from Xanadu — well, except for these ridiculous invaders themselves! As for Malinari quitting the place… but that was the plan! And in any case, what would it serve to stay? When this was all over, there would be nothing left to stay for.

And now the flying machine was settling towards the garden, its searchlight beams flickering over the dark casino, the chalets, the pools. And suddenly the car's lights were blazing bright, lighting the way as it sped to its rendezvous.

Its rendezvous with certain death… but not just yet.

First let Trask and these E-Branch people taste something of what they had brought down on themselves when, of their own free will, they had chosen to pursue Nephran Malinari.

Lord Malinari, aye, of the Wamphyyrrriiii!

The coastguard vessel made smoke where she lolled port-side on to the narrow strip of sandy beach that fronted Jethro Manchester's island. Apparently crippled, she rocked this way and that in the gentle wavelets of the night surf. On her starboard side, hidden by the cabin, an SAS man aimed his flamethrower at the sky and fired short-lived bursts of flame above the cabin's roof. As viewed from the island, it would seem for certain that the ruddily lit boat was on fire; even as her keel bit into the sand, so a signal flare made a starburst high in the sky.

Also in the sky, but not so very high now — indeed, wheeling in low over the ocean's horizon — Chopper Two's pilot saw the starburst and told his crew:

'We're over the island. I can see the boat "burning" down there, and the lights of the villa in the trees. So this is it. Jump to it as soon as we touch down. I'll be airborne and waiting for you when you get done. You can whistle me down. I mean, you know how to whistle, don't you? Good luck, guys!'

Dark figures were running up the beach as the chopper came down, and a faint waft of garlic tainted the night air…

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO The Storming

Situated one hundred and sixty yards from where the coastguard vessel had beached, and set well back from the high-water mark behind massively thick, fortress-like rock walls in four acres of landscaped rockeries and gardens watered from a small desalination unit, Jethro Manchester's two-storey villa was a luxurious, custom-built dwelling.

Standing central on a jutting promontory, the house was of timber and natural stone, mainly fossilized coral. It had been built from imported teak and dynamited rubble from a channel blasted through to a rocky inlet on the other side of the promontory. In style it was part sprawling Roman villa, part Austrian chalet. Manchester's yacht — by his standards a 'modest' thirty-five footer — was moored in a roofed-over lock in the artificial channel, midway between the villa and the sea.

These features were visible from the air, where at five hundred feet Chopper Two's pilot stood his machine off like a hawk and viewed them through its eyes, sensitive night-vision scanners. Every few seconds he would flip a switch to convert his screen to infrared and thermal imaging. All of the men on the ground were wearing headsets; the pilot was able to talk to them individually or as a group.

All subterfuge had been thrown to the wind now; the airborne party was safely down, and the boat had landed its

crew without hindrance. Now the task force would deploy into a semicircle to isolate the promontory, and move in on the house. If the target group had seen the boat's 'fire' or emergency flare — or if they had heard the chopper's low, prowler-mode throb and came out of the house to see what was happening or perhaps to take defensive action — then the men on the ground would be able to answer the threat without fear of firing on each other.

With his machine on autopilot, the pilot's attention was rapt on his viewers. For now, in addition to the central, gently fluctuating orange glow of the house, the dark-green terrain of his screen was lit by smaller blobs of human heat.

He saw two figures, fast-moving and crouching low, about to leave the narrow strip of beach and enter an area of landscaped rocks and foliage east of the villa. They were heading for one of the regular breaks in the wall. And the pilot knew that the four-man boat party had split into two two-man teams. This was one of them; they would be equipped with their usual weapons, and one of them would be carrying a flamethrower.

But as the pilot scanned ahead of them, suddenly, as if from nowhere, he picked up two more figures. They were in the shrubbery or under cover of the trees, but they were making a lot of heat! The writhing, blob-like shapes on the screen merged, drew apart, melted together again… a repetitious, oddly sexual-looking activity. The men from the boat were heading directly towards it and at some speed, and the pilot was almost too late to advise them:

'Boat party east of the house. There's some fucking thing directly ahead of you!' He couldn't know it but he was absolutely right.

On the ground, the NCOs spied sudden, apparently startled movement. It was dark, but not that dark, and the almost luminous tangle of flesh on a blanket under the bower-like branches of a tall, flowering shrub was unmistakable: the naked figures of a couple making love. Or they had been but now sprang apart.

'What the… P'The man sat upright, and the girl tried to cover herself and gave a small, warbling cry. The scene was so authentic and natural, and the couple seemed so vulnerable, it was the SAS men who were taken by surprise.

'Bloody hell… I' said one of them, his jaw falling open. And his companion actually turned aside the barrel of his weapon a little, deflecting it from the pair and easing his finger off the trigger. Surprise, yes — momentary disorientation and confusion — the only advantage a vampire could ever ask for or require. And:

'Oh, thank God!' cried the girl, as she threw herself forward and sprawled at the feet of one of the soldiers. 'Help me! Please help me! He was raping me!' A lie, which of course fell naturally from her lips.

But at the same time the naked man's arm swept up, to aim and fire a short-barrelled, compressed-air speargun. The spearhead was a trident with four-inch tines; all three of them took the off-guard soldier in his throat. And gurgling, clawing one-handed at the short spear in his crimson-spurting neck, he fell over backward and let loose a burst of automatic fire uselessly into the sky.

The other soldier had reached down almost instinctively to lift the girl to her feet. But even in the act of gathering her up he saw his colleague shot, and simultaneously the feral yellow fire in the naked man's eyes as he flowed sinuously upright and drew back his arm to use the speargun as a club.

No further reminder was necessary. The soldier cursed and put the naked girl aside, then opened up with a burst of explosive shells that lifted the vampire from his feet, ripped into him in mid-air, and threw him backward into the shrub. There he hung in a tangle of crushed foliage, until branches snapped and he fell to the ground. And as he sat there — groping among his own intestines and mewling his undead agony — so the gibbering NCO cursed again and put a single shell right between his eyes.

The contents of the vampire's head went every which way as the shrub collapsed on him.

Meanwhile the downed man had stopped writhing and tugging at the spear in his throat; he lay dead still, dead of shock or from choking on his own blood.

And the girl had disappeared into the night…

Fleeing, sobbing, gasping for air — with her sliced feet leaving a trail of blood on the often jagged stones — Julie Lennox somehow managed to avoid the second pair of men from the coastguard vessel, and came across Jake and Lardis instead. With her night eyes, the eyes of a vampire, she saw them before they saw her: an old man and his younger colleague, in the garden, keeping low and making their way silently toward the house. And she remembered some advice that she'd been given:

'When they come, and they will come,' (Martin Trennier had told Jethro Manchester and his small family group just an hour or so ago), 'there won't be any mercy. They'll come to kill you. And while you might not believe it now, you won't want them to! For you have a Great Vampire's blood in you, and in its own way it is alive, too. It wants to live, and it won't let you commit suicide — which means that you can't simply give yourselves up to these men. Ergo, you'll fight. And the more of them that you kill, the longer you'll stay alive.'

With which he had rammed a handful of shells deep into the magazine of an ugly pump-action shotgun, and jerked once on its heavy wooden stock to arm it, before continuing:

'Now, while I know that some of you are still fighting the good fight, the fact is we can grow strong on our enemies — on the blood of our enemies — and the stronger we grow, the better our chances of survival. So that's it, now you know what to do. I have nothing more to say, except that I for one intend to survive. So go on, get busy. Prepare yourselves with whatever grit or cunning your vampire blood has bestowed, arm yourselves with whatever weapons you can find, and wait. It's just as simple as that.'

But in fact it wasn't simple at all. Simple, perhaps, for Martin Trennier, one of the first taken by Aristotle Milan and utterly in thrall to him, but not for Julie; not now that Alan Manchester, Jethro's son, was dead. Julie and Alan… how they had loved each other, and how desperately hard they had fought to cling to their humanity. But all in vain.

Alan had turned first, and now he was dead and gone, taken from her, and these merciless invaders were responsible — weren't they? Deep in her heart, she knew they weren't; and yet, as moment by moment Trennier's words made more sense, so the vampire essence in Julie's system worked on her, turning her, too.

Trennier had done it to her, done it to them all: a simple bite was all it took — and time. For Trennier was barely a lieutenant himself, and a weak one at that. Made by Milan, he had been given a minimum of essence, and so he'd been a thrall for long and long. But as the evil had grown in him, so he'd taken on stature, guile, strength. And thus he'd become Milan's lieutenant, to watch over the Manchesters on their island retreat. Or as it was now, their prison.

When they had known their end was near, Julie and Alan had come out into the night, into the garden, to make love just one last time. They hadn't reckoned on being found so quickly, that was all. Not in their own secret place, in the garden, on their prison island. Their prison, yes… indeed, their death cell.

Or perhaps not. For as the blood is the life, so there was plenty of hot blood in these two men. And without warning, suddenly Julie caught herself licking her lips in anticipation. At which she knew that it was too late for her, and that it always had been. But strangely — and as swiftly as that — she no longer cared, for she was now awake! As for what had awakened her:

Perhaps it had been the sight and salty smell of Alan Manchester's blood, or that of the soldier whom he'd shot with his speargun, or both. Which-, or whatever, it had acted on Julie as a catalyst, and now the 'good fight' was over. She was what she was and would do what she must do. She moved like a wraith towards the two men, got behind them where they crept carefully forward, making for the villa's lights.

She got closer and closer to them, her hands raised, with nails like poisonous claws — indeed, they were poisonous claws — poised and ready to strike…

… But in that same moment Julie found herself betrayed, and by three things:

One, the full moon, emerging from behind fleeting clouds, to sweep a silver swath over the sea and the land. Two, by the sharp stutter of automatic gunfire, sounding from a short distance to the west. And three, by a watchful, dragonfly spy-in-the-sky, hovering on high as it sent an urgent message to Julie's would-be victims:

'Central team. Why are there three of you? Do you have a tail?' Fading in and out, the pilot's words were hard to read.

Lardis didn't understand the message, but Jake, startled by the gunfire and the near-distant cries that accompanied it, turned and saw…

… A girl? A distraught, naked girl?

For seeing him beginning his turn, Julie had drawn back, shrunk down into herself, begun to sob and scream. 'I was in the house,' she sobbed, trying to cover herself as if ashamed of her nakedness. 'They kept me prisoner there. But when they heard your helicopter they stopped watching me, and I… and… I… oh!'

She feigned a swoon, and Jake — forgetting all that he'd seen, all that he'd been told — put up his weapon and stepped forward.

She clung to him for a moment, this beautiful girl, who was naked and frightened and so pale in the flooding light of the moon… so pale and so cold. This girl whose grip on his combat suit was like iron, and whose nose was suddenly wrinkling suspiciously as she smelled garlic, and whose eyes were a reflective yellow, sulphurous in the night!

Julie held the front of his jacket bunched in one hand, drew back the other hand until Jake saw its nails, sharpened and bevelled to gouges that would cut bloody channels in his face as easily as a routing machine! And her awful smile: the way her lips curled back from gleaming teeth.

Jake tried to bring his machine-pistol to bear, to centre its muzzle on Julie's body. But she was faster; she knocked it away, out of his grasp. And now her 'smile' was a fixed, nightmarish grimace — but whether of horror or of pleasure in her own terrible strength, Jake couldn't say. Nor could he do anything about it.

But Lardis could.

An 'old man,' Lardis Lidesci had been ignored and almost forgotten by the girl. A mistake, for he was an old man with a difference. He was the Old Lidesci, and not nearly as naive as Jake. Not in the ways of vampires.

Jake saw that slender, incredibly strong hand lift up before his face, tried to draw back from it and couldn't. He saw the fingers crook, could almost feel their rake, and knew that he was going to feel it. But then, in a moment, the look on her face changed. And she sighed.

She sighed, then smiled again, but a real smile now. And a dribble of blood spilled from the corner of her mouth. Her hand straightened out — reached out to touch his face — but just a touch, almost a caress. Then her grip relaxed, her eyes rolled up, and she toppled away from him.

Lardis Lidesci stood ten feet away, but his machete stood much closer than that; it stood up from the girl's back, where it had split her spinal column.

'Get your gun,' Lardis growled, and Jake began to breathe again after what had seemed like an hour of holding his breath. 'Get your gun and put it in her mouth… and finish it.'

Jake was numb; his hands were numb as he took up his machine-pistol. 'But…' he started to say.

'But nothing!' Lardis snarled. 'Do it, and be sure to turn your face away.'

Just before Jake did it, Julie stopped her fitful, agonized writhing, saw the weapon's muzzle approaching her face, said something that Jake couldn't hear, just a breath of air. But he was sure that her lips formed the words, 'Thank you…'

By then there was plenty of shouting and shooting, the hissing of flamethrowers, great gouts of fire and columns of smoke, all of it towards the centre of the promontory, at the villa itself. And full moon or none, it would have made no difference; bright orange and yellow flames were leaping, and all the shadows cast back in Jethro Manchester's gardens and rockeries.

Lardis and Jake were the last to get there, but two of the SAS men would never get there. Close to the house, itself burning, they came across W.O. II Joe Davis and one of his men. The NCO had a flamethrower and was watching the house. Davis was on one knee, looking at a pair of crumpled figures. His hands kept reaching, and drawing back without touching. And his hands were trembling.

'Get up from there,' said Lardis. 'Back away. Let me see.'

Davis looked up at Lardis through moist eyes; he was holding on, but only just, to would-be runaway emotions. His Adam's apple rose and fell, rose and fell, as he fought not to betray himself. 'Old man,' he said, his voice on the point of breaking. 'I trained this man, this boy. He was one of mine. But I didn't train him for this.'

Lardis pulled him away, muttering, 'What could anyone have taught him? There is no training for this kind of thing, except on the field of battle. The trouble with that is we only learn when we lose.'

He looked at the mess on the ground. Part of it, the body of a mature woman in a once-white dress, was a mound of raw red flesh. Riddled with bullets — some of which had exploded — she had been torn apart from within. Her face wasn't there, and her lower body seemed to have burst outwards. Lying under her where she'd fallen, a young soldier in combat clothing stared blindly up into the sky. His brains had been split by a bright shining cleaver that was still buried in his skull.

But even as Lardis looked, the woman's arms twitched where they clasped her victim, and one foot shuddered and vibrated in a shoe with a broken heel. Jerkily, spastically, her chest rose and fell, as bubbles formed in the liquid red mask of her face.

'Did you touch… any of this?' Lardis looked up at Davis. The other shook his head. Then Lardis stood up, stood back, and turned to the man with the flamethrower. 'Burn it,' he said.

The man looked at his leader, who in turn looked at Lardis almost pleadingly. And Lardis said, 'Their blood is mixed. Your man's corpse is contaminated. Take no chances. Burn it all…'

As they moved away from the heat and the stench, Davis got hold of his emotions and said, Tve got men on both sides, in front and at the back of the house. No one's getting out of there. As far as I know that woman was only our second kill. My kill. God help me, I did that to her!'

'No/ Lardis shook his grisly head. 'Don't ask your god for help. She needed help, and you gave it to her. Also, it was the third kill. We've done one, too. A girl, back there in the garden. So you're not the only one who's feeling sick.'

And Jake said, 'Who was the other?'

'When I killed… that one,' Davis answered, with a glance over his shoulder, 'there was a scream from the house. A man in a gable window; he ranted and raved at us, tore his hair like a madman. Can't say I blame him. I think the woman must have been his wife. One of my lads fired a grenade in there with him, and it blew the gable to hell. Whoever he was, I'm guessing he went with it. But if he didn't he'll burn anyway. Look.'

They looked back, and by then the front of the villa was an inferno. 'It'll be the same at the back,' said the Warrant Officer. 'They have orders to raze it.'

'But that still leaves three to go,' said Jake.

'Two/ a voice called out, as a man came stumbling from the shadows. He was very pale, and he was carrying his own weapons, someone else's, and a flamethrower. 'I got a young guy — I blew the fucker's head off! — but not before he got Bill Powers. My old mate's dead!… But there was a girl, too. She got away.' 'No/ Jake shook his head. 'She didn't.' And: 'Two to go/ said Lardis. 'But where are they?' Right on cue, their radio headsets came alive in a crackle of static like frying bacon. And: 'Shit, shit, shit!' a frantic voice called. 'Can't anyone fucking hear me?'

And Davis said, 'Hawkeye, this is Road Runner. Where've you been?'

'Where've been?' the pilot at once came back, his relief plainly audible, despite that his voice kept fading in and out. 'I've been sitting up here listening to you! The radio's on the blink. I'm receiving but having difficulty sending. Now listen, I've also had problems with the thermal imaging… the heat from that bonfire down there. I sorted that, but now there are life-signs at the boat, two of them. If they're not your people, they have to be the ones you're looking for

'Show us the way to the yacht/ Davis snapped, now fully in command again. 'But if it gets away from us and makes a run for the sea, take it out. Bomb the bastard right out of the water!' 'Roger that/ and the signal faded to nothing — But in another moment searchlight beams lanced down from on high, pierced the night and converged, swung west and traced a path along the channel to the sea…

In Xanadu, fifteen minutes earlier:

Malinari had been tempted from the moment Chopper One descended into the garden. The way it hovered, mere feet above the ground, with its pontoons occasionally touching down, while its task-force contingent rapidly disembarked, regrouped into pairs and fanned out toward the casino: all it would have taken was a little pressure — literally the flip of a switch — and Malinari's worst enemies in this world would have been gone forever. Or most of them. Only the group from the vehicle would be left alive, to be dealt with at his convenience.

The way his fingers had caressed the array of switches — almost lovingly, certainly lustfully — it had been a moment of great temptation, yes. But no, it would have been too easy, and this Trask and his men would have learned nothing of terror, or the merest moment of terror, perhaps, before oblivion. And that just wasn't good enough.

Malinari wanted them to understand something of his superiority, wanted them to know they were trapped, even as they had thought to trap him. Then, if there were survivors of his holocaust, and when the flying machine returned to pick them up… time enough then for the grand coup de grace, the final stroke of genius.

And meanwhile, things had progressed more or less as planned, and Malinari employed his mentalism (but as little as possible) to stay in touch with events as they unfurled.

For his telepathy wasn't without its own problems. Indeed, it was a two-edged sword. For one thing, it brought pain: listening to the thoughts of others was painful. And for another — and most importantly — Lord Malinari himself, his location in the face of the mountain, might be detected and jeopardized if he were to give full rein to his mentalism. For he had learned something (not enough by any means, but something) of the esoteric talents of Trask and this E-Branch from the Foener woman before he'd killed her in the sump of that watercourse. And he had found out a lot more since then, mainly by trial and error.

But it had been ngreat error to open his mind and accept Bruce Trennier's agonized communication — his final communication — when these people had tracked him down to the Gibson Desert. For, even as Malinari had felt the heat of his lieutenant's funeral pyre, so he'd known a different kind of heat: that of discovery, when a probe reached out from halfway around the world to seek him out, zeroing in on him like a Starside bat searching for a juicy moth, or a Sunside hawk stooping to its prey.

A mind had touched his, and left its fingerprint, its signature there, so that he would know it again. And in this last few days he had come to know it only too well. Now it was here in Xanadu, but if he studied it too closely, and if it were to lock on to his location—

— That flying machine, that jetcopter, was equipped with armaments that could cut through the false facade of this hollow chimney like a battle gauntlet through the ribs of a disobedient thrall! But it all added to the excitement, the thrill of the game, what little it afforded him: their weird talents, and their puny human minds, against The Mind himself…

So, this seeker, bloodhound, locator, or whatever he was, was one problem — and his talent was one that Nephran Malinari understood readily enough, for he had used just such skills in Sunside four hundred years ago to seek out the Szgany in their hiding places — but the locator's wild talent wasn't the only one that this E-Branch commanded, and it wasn't the only problem. Zek Foener's mind had been full of such things.

A man who could see the future, for example (though obviously he couldn't see it too clearly, else he would never have come here to die), and Trask himself, to whom a lie was like a slap in the face… there would be no deceiving that one! And as for mentalists: no lack of those. Well, that last wasn't so rare; even the Szgany had something of that in them. It was in their blood, a legacy of their centuries under Wamphyri domination. But these E-Branch people weren't Szgany. No, they were adepts, much as Malinari was an adept, but lacking the advantage of his several… refinements? And of course without the ultimate advantage of being Wamphyri!

Take Zek herself, for instance. What? A woman who could reach out her thoughts across the whole world with such crystal clarity as to be able to speak to a man like Trask — not himself a mentalist — and make him to understand? Oh, he was a loved one, and so there had probably been an element of rapport in it, such as is found in twins. But still and all, that was a talent!

Or it had been…

Adepts, rivals, enemies, and bloodhound trackers who would never let go. All the more reason why they must go, and tonight. But it would have been so useful to know more about them first. Such people as this precog, and this locator, and Ben Trask himself… and this girl.

The girl, yes…

She wasn't an adept, not yet; she hadn't attained Zek Foener's level of achievement. But to another telepathic mind (for instance, Malinari's mind) she was like a small flame guttering in the psychic aether, and he had sensed her there from the moment these people arrived in Brisbane. But at such close proximity — because she was close now, and inexperienced — he might perhaps intrude for brief periods without fear of her detecting his presence. Of course, that would leave him open to the locator. But only introduce some small diversion into the game, and that would take care of that. Men, even talented men, when they are concerned for their own skins, have little time for casting about with their minds. Except that they look for boltholes, of course.

Very well then, a diversion. For, in any case, the game was moving far too slowly.

From his high vantage point, Malinari looked down on Xanadu and the Pleasure Dome casino (dark in the night but clearly visible in every detail to him) and chose a switch on his array. Down there, his enemies had deployed into first-phase positions. There were men held in reserve, four of them, evenly spaced out at the rear of the leisure area of gardens and pools that surrounded the casino. These four would believe they'd 'secured' or 'made safe' their strategic positions behind low walls just forward of the innermost circle of chalets. Equipped with superior, heat-seeking, image-enhancing weapons, they would consider themselves 'ideally situated' to engage an enemy in flight from the central area.

And so they would be — if not for the fact that two of the four locations were mined.

Malinari's hand lingered over the chosen switch, while his scarlet night-vision eyes swept over, scanned, and committed to memory the second phase of the enemy's deployment.

In the last few minutes a large vehicle — an articulated truck marked with the symbols of a well-known beer manufacturer — had climbed the access road, entered through Xanadu's gates, turned about, and hissed to a halt in the otherwise empty parking lot. A party of four heavily armed men had issued from the rear of the truck and were hurrying forward into the resort in the direction of the Pleasure Dome.

Inwards — at the inner edge of the gardens toward the casino — five NCOs from the helicopter fanned out to surround the huge rotunda of the central dome itself. The men from the truck were now replacing the four in their rearguard positions behind the low walls, which allowed them in their turn to move forward and reinforce the assault force around the dome's perimeter.

Now, or when they were so ordered, three of these Special Forces men would go in through the Pleasure Dome's main doors; the rest of them, dispersed around the perimeter, would create individual points of entry. The casino's curving fa£ade of interlocking concrete panels, glass, and reinforced plastic would scarcely suffice to stop them, Malinari was sure. It was, after all, a Pleasure Dome, not a fortress!

So much for the fighting men. And Malinari presumed correctly that their commander would be with Trask's E-Branch party where they were now gathered in a group behind the smaller vehicle on the main esplanade some seventy or eighty feet in front of the steps to the casino's canopied entranceway. He knew that this was them because of their mental emanations. Hah! Rut they might as well be carrying illuminated signs! They were as Visible' to him as they must be to the pilot of their flying machine… as indeed he would be, if he were down in the resort.

So, they were all set to go, and the onset of hostilities, which must be imminent, might create sufficient of a diversion in itself, allowing Malinari to insinuate himself into the mentalist girl's mind without alerting the locator to his presence — but he thought not. Much better to be safe than sorry.

Let them be the sorry ones.

Earlier, before these people got here, Malinari had started a mist. His body and being — even his existence here in this or any world — these things were all contradictions of Nature. He was a poison that worked like a catalyst on and against any natural or mundane surroundings.

When he opened the pores of his metamorphic body and willed it, his pores would breathe a mist. Not only that but Nature would be made to respond, to answer his call. And even from the dry earth Malinari could call up a writhing mist like vile, airborne sweat, to disguise his presence. In Sunside it had served a dual purpose: to carry his probes more surely to their target (for the mist was like an extension of himself, or a medium for his mentalism) and also to hide him away should he have reason to make a covert exit — in short, a smokescreen.

But this time, so as not to draw attention to himself, he had merely started the thing, set it in motion. And now a fine, milky mist lay on the surface of the pools, and formed a barely visible ground mist in the gardens. But only let Malinari will it, it would spring into being at his command. And in the holocaust to come he would call it up in earnest to carry his mentalism, instil its primal terror, and add to the general confusion.

So then, it was time to set the wheels in motion. Time for his diversion. Time to let these fools know who he was.

He risked a quick, guarded probe, found one of his thralls inside the open doors to the casino, issued a command and withdrew… but with no time at all to spare! And even as Malinari felt his probe seized upon — and as he 'heard' Chung's gasp of startled recognition: 'What the…?' — so he tripped the first of his switches…

Six or seven minutes earlier:

Inside the innocuous-looking, in fact armoured estate car,

Ben Trask, David Chung, lan Goodly, Liz, and the SAS Major were each in their own way concerned. The Major because the articulated ops truck and its back-up party were some minutes late.

Chopper One had relayed the reason for the delay: the big vehicle's engine had developed a fault; that and the steepness of the climb had combined to slow her down.

'The gradient,' Trask said, 'but it could have been any of a hundred and one other logistical problems. Well, we made allowances for this kind of last-minute difficulty. It's why we're made up of three contingents: chopper, car, ops truck. Okay, so we're four men short for the time being. But assuming our estimate of Malinari's manpower is accurate, we still outnumber him three or four to one. And our firepower is awesome.'

And Chung said, 'That bothers me a lot: what you just said about our estimate. For the fact is it's my estimate, so really it's all down to me.'

'No, it isn't,' Goodly denied it. 'It's our best estimate, and we're each of us equally involved in this. Or we should be. And anyway, it's like I told Ben earlier: at least your talents are working for you.'

Trask looked at him. 'Still nothing?'

'Just confusion/ the precog answered. 'And a feeling.'

'You and me both,' Trask said, and the others saw that he was actually chewing his top lip. 'A feeling, yes… that this is all wrong. Okay, in a deserted resort we'd expect the lights to be out — why waste the energy? But the silence of the place, this feeling of a pent-up something, and this inactivity…'

'Ours, or theirs?' said Liz.

Trask shook his head. 'I don't know — really can't say — what I was expecting. But it certainly wasn't this. I mean, he must know we're here, he has to. So what the hell is he up to? David,' he turned to the locator, 'got any ideas? Is there any movement? What's going on?'

Chung's high brow was etched into deep lines of concentration. It's weird as hell/ he said. Tm getting these momentary flashes. It is mindsmog, definitely, but from three or four different locations, and I can't pin them down. Up there in the dome, that's one of them for sure. But the others…' He looked out of his wound-down window at the night-shrouded cliffs where they climbed to the heights behind the resort, and frowned. 'Up high, and down below… that's as much as I dare venture.'

'Up high would be the bubble on top of the Pleasure Dome,' lan Goodly came in. But Chung only frowned.

'Well, possibly,' he said, 'for it's as strong a source as any. But there are shields in use, I'm sure of that.' And:

'Malinari!' Trask grunted, grimly. 'His aerie. Solar-panelled on the outside, painted black and probably curtained on the inside, for his protection. Well, the murdering bastard will be needing all he can get of that!'

'So that's up high,' said Liz, 'but what about down below? It looks like Jake was right, and according to the plans of the place it's a real maze down there.' And turning to Trask, 'Ben, I wish you'd let me try to corroborate David's—'

'—No way!' Trask snapped, turning on her at once. 'That's right out of the question. No telepathic contact, not with Malinari. Only if it becomes absolutely necessary, maybe I'll use you then — but not until, and only if I have to. Liz, this is a mentalist who ranks alongside Janos Ferenczy. And it's one mind you're not going to enter of your own free will!'

Trask and his team were without radio headsets. As espers they needed clear heads, and were better off without the encumbrance of technical equipment. This was a time when the gadgets would only get in the way of the ghosts. And anyway, since they planned on sticking close to the SAS Major throughout the operation, radio contact seemed superfluous to requirement.

But they did hear the faint crackle of static as suddenly the Major held up a hand. And a moment later: 'The big

artic is in sight.' He sighed his relief. 'They've had a long hard haul, but they're getting here.' As he got out of the car he went on, 'It's time we had a little fresh air, but take cover behind the vehicle. We're in a direct line of fire from the casino.'

'Absolutely!' Chung agreed, choking on the word because of the sudden dryness in his throat. 'And up those steps, right in through those doors, that's another source!'

'You're sure?' The Major grasped his elbow.

'In there,' Chung began to sweat. 'Somebody — something — is waiting!' And in fact, and despite that it was cool and even chilly now, they were all sweating.

Abandoning radio procedure, the Major spoke into his headset. 'You men on the doors had better be aware. There's a reception party waiting for you. Before you go in there, a couple of stun grenades might help clear the way a bit. The rest of you: if you missed it from Hawkeye, here's a sitrep: the back-up has arrived. The next time you hear from me it will probably be the go-ahead. Stand by for that, over?'

'Roger that,' a multitude of terse, tense replies came in, then more static and radio silence…

Seconds ticked by, but oh-so-slowly. Then:

There came the rumbling growl of a straining motor, a hissing of air-brakes, and finally the message that the Major had been waiting for: 'Zero, this is the back-up squad. Sorry we're late. We're moving into our locations now.'

The Major turned to Trask, said, 'The show's about to commence. Anything you'd like to say to them?'

'Your men?' Trask shook his head. 'Just wish them the best of luck.' And the Major did it.

And Trask thought, Damn it! I don't even know this bloke's name! Some of his men, but not him. But that's how it goes with these people. In their way they're much like E~Eranch: the less we know about them, the better their security.

There was swift, sporadic movement in the night: the shadowy figures of men, keeping low, moving forward, strengthening the assault force surrounding the casino. Using nite-lite binoculars, the Major watched them take up their positions, turned to Trask and said, 'Are we ready?'

Trask nodded. 'Let's do it,' he said. 'Christ, the longer we wait, the worse it feels!'

'Right,' said the Major. And then, into his headset, 'This is Zero to assault group. We're going in. Attack! Attack! Attack!' At which all hell broke loose — if not exactly as expected — and it all seemed to happen at once.

The locator David Chung gave a massive start. As his eyes opened wide, he pointed at something — some non-specific point high on the face of the cliffs at the rear of the resort — and gripped Trask's elbow. And as Trask looked at him in astonishment, Chung gasped, What the…?'

At the same time:

Fifty or so feet behind the group where they sheltered on the 'safe' side of the armoured car, a ball of brilliant light lit the night; following hot on its heels, there came the deafening roar of an explosion, and the death cry of a soldier.

The savagery of the blast was such that it hurled them all against the side of the car and rocked the vehicle on its shock absorbers. All eyes blinked, and hands were thrown up to shield startled faces. Then, as debris began to rain down, they looked back. The SAS man was in mid-air, a human Catherine wheel spinning there — torn almost in half, black and burning — and quite obviously dead.

Bricks from the low wall where the NCO had taken cover — which had at least sheltered Trask and his group from the worst of the blast — were showering down; a jagged half-brick struck Chung on the forehead, threw him a second time against the side of the car. He slid to the ground in a hail of lesser debris.

'Jesus Christ!' the Major straightened up, went to stagger toward the spot where his man's body lay in a crumpled, smoking heap. Trask stopped him, croaked:

'You saw what I saw. You can't help him now.'

'But what the hell…?' The Major asked helplessly, of no one in particular. 'A mortar, a grenade — an accident? Jesus, it must have been a fucking accident!'

And meanwhile, the night had come deafeningly alive.

From the casino, a withering stream of automatic fire sent bullets ricochetting off the far side of the car, and from somewhere in the night a soldier shouted, 'I'm hit! God — I'm hit!' It hardly sounded like the cry of a man, but more like that of a small, bewildered child.

Then the casino's entrance was lit by twin balls of brilliant white light — the blinding flashes and shattering reports of stun grenades — and figures were glimpsed briefly, silhouetted in the swift-dying glare.

There were explosions from all around the Pleasure Dome as two-man units hurled grenades to breach the outer wall and gain entry, and covering fire as men went in through smoking holes.

'We have to go in, too,' said the Major. 'We need to know what's going on. But first let's see to your man.'

They laid Chung on the rear seat of the car. Mumbling to himself, the locator was already regaining consciousness. The Major gave Liz a field dressing, said, 'Staunch the blood. He looks okay, but stay with him. Where's your gun?'

Liz took out her Baby Browning, cocked it and laid it on the rear windowsill of the car within easy reach.

Trask leaned inside the car to touch her shoulder. 'You'd better do as he says,' he said. 'And when we're gone, lock the doors.' For the moment shaken, disoriented, and concerned for Chung, Liz did as she was told. Through the window, she watched the Major, Trask, and Goodly move off towards the casino.

In a little while Chung opened his eyes, looked up at Liz and said, 'He's up there… up high… Malinari!' He managed to lift himself up a little as she applied the field dressing. He was looking at (or perhaps looking beyond?) the casino. The way he rolled his not-quite-focussed eyes, it was hard to tell.

'The bubble on top of the dome?' Liz answered, and nodded an affirmative. 'We know. They're going in after him now.'

No!' The locator tried to shake his head. 'Not the Pleasure Dome, but up there! Up… up there…'

'Up there?' Liz had the dressing in place now. Tying off the bandage, she looked where Chung pointed a shaky hand. 'The mountain?'

'The cliffs,' he mumbled. 'He's… he's in the cliffs!'

After that it was all instinct, and almost instantaneous. Liz didn't think twice but sent out her telepathic thoughts to follow Chung's line of sight, to be guided like a laser-assisted missile to his target. Except that in this case the target was far more dangerous than the missile. And:

Ahhhhhhlsaid a voice in Liz's mind — a voice like steam escaping from a kettle, or the hiss of a volcanic vent — It's the sweet little telepath herself! And Liz could actually feel the patterns of her mind being scrutinized, fingerprinted, and memorized. She erected shields and felt the hideous, slug-like presence of Malinari withdrawing, dwindling, gone! Then:

'My God!' She exploded into frantic activity, grabbed her gun, scrambled backwards out of the car. 'I have to tell Ben!' But then, pausing to lean back inside: 'David, I—'

'It's okay.' Chung was really coming out of it now, beginning to make good sense. 'Go find them, Liz, and tell them Malinari's in those cliffs. If they call the chopper down, and get the pilot to use thermal imaging, he'll spot the bastard easily enough.' He managed to sit up, however groggily.

'Lock the doors when I've gone,' she told him. And, crouching down low, she ran for the casino…

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Trapped!

Chopper one's pilot had heard the Major's call for action, seen the explosions, heard something of the messages passing between the men on the ground. The assault on the Pleasure Dome was proceeding just a few minutes behind schedule; it was time to give the ground forces a little aerial support. Bright searchlight beams — aimed inwards on the casino, to blind anyone trying to escape from that place — swept down from above.

Like all the rest of the attacking force, Liz wore phosphorescent patches front and rear of her combat suit. It wouldn't do for anyone to be shot dead by 'friendly' fire. Lit up like a human neon, gun in hand, she ran towards the doors at the top of the steps. Hanging askew, the doors were still giving off smoke from the grenades. Of soldiers there was no sign, but she could hear the occasional burst of gunfire from within…

A few minutes earlier, not far inside the same shattered doorway, Trask, Goodly, and the Major had found a wounded NCO sitting on the floor with his back to a slot machine. He had taken a bullet in the leg but had seen to the wound himself. 'This'11 keep,' he told them through gritted teeth. 'I'm okay here — but you should take this with you.' Trask accepted the man's flamethrower and pack, and the precog helped him into the gear. The wounded man retained his machine-pistol; when they left he was slapping a fresh clip into the magazine housing.

Then, moving deeper into the smoky gloom of the place, the Major spoke into his headset: 'This is Zero. My group is inside the main doors and advancing. Sitreps, over?'

And the answers came back:

'Zero, this is Alpha Group. We're on the stairs on the far side, going up one level. No opposition.'

'Zero, this is Bravo Group. Stairs your side, going up one level. No opposition.'

'Zero, this is Charlie. We're ahead of you toward the central spindle. We have a man down inside the doors — and we just found something nasty.'

'Zero for Charlie, how nasty?'

'Charlie for Zero, not life-threatening — but nasty.'

'Zero for Charlie, we saw your man,' said the Major. 'He's okay… but you should have taken his flamer.'

'Charlie for Zero, we couldn't stop. We're in hot pursuit. Our target is still in here somewhere. Towards the elevators, we think.'

'Zero for Charlie, wait there/ said the Major, and moved on with Trask and Goodly close behind.

Throughout the casino's ground floor, mainly on the perimeter, several hissing phosphor flares had been lit; they gave light but also made smoke, which in turn made for a very eerie, shadow-etched atmosphere. Charlie group (which was now made up of just two men, WO II Red Bygraves and an NCO) was waiting midway between the doors and the central column of elevators. And indeed they had found something nasty. Zeroing in on their reflective patches, the Major's group of three found the soldiers keeping well back from their gruesome discovery.

Hanging by its ankles, upside-down from a chandelier, the corpse of a thin, spidery male figure turned slowly on a triple loop of electrical cable. The man's throat had been cut ear to ear, and his flesh was like snow, drained of blood.

But on the floor, only a very few scarlet droplets had been spilled…

Despite that the body was inverted, Trask recognized him at once. 'Liz Merrick's watcher,' he said grimly. 'So much for working for a vampire! This will have to be burned. On our way out we'll burn this whole fucking place!' And the Major turned to him and said:

'Trask, steady up now, okay? Now listen, all of you. This group is now five strong. We're all armed and we have a flamer. We have men climbing the perimeter stairs, closing them off. We know our main target's trapped in the bubble on top of the casino, and that he has at least one soldier, guardian, or—' He looked to Trask for help.

'Thrall/ Trask told him hoarsely. 'Call him a thrall/

'One thrall/ the Major went on, '—the one you men were pursuing — watching his back down here; which might mean that he was guarding the elevators to keep his boss safe. So that's where we're heading, the elevators. But remember: this guy has the advantage of being able to see in the dark, and your flak jackets only give you so much protection. So spread yourselves out, but stay well within sight and sound of each other.. As he finished, the Major turned and headed deeper into the casino. And the others spread out on his flanks…p>

Shortly, the central hexagonal column of elevators became visible, and at the same time the stutter of automatic gunfire sounded from ahead. Ripping into a row of silent slot machines, the stream of bullets was like an invisible buzz-saw that gutted them and spilled their coins on the floor. Then the raking fire found Bygraves and lifted him clean off his feet. Shot in the right shoulder, injured, but by no means fatally, the W.O. went down in a stream of bright silver, a splash of blood red, and his own cries of disgust and frustration.

And in the central area, close to an elevator door marked PRIVATE, there stood a flame-eyed Thing in human form, cradling a gun that spat fire one more time, before the Major sent a single bullet in through his left eye. Swatted, the vampire thrall thudded backwards against the elevator doors; his feet slid out from under him, and he sank down onto the floor in a seated position.

While Bygraves's subordinate went to his aid, Trask and the others approached the vampire thrall. One of Malinari's pair of minders, he must obviously be dead… but wasn't. As his right eye opened, burning yellow in the gloom, so he toppled onto his side, turned himself face-down, and began to claw his way erratically away from the elevators. In another moment, however, the effort became too much for him. He came to a halt, coughed once or twice, and slurred out the words, 'Oh, fuck it!'

He had dropped his gun and no longer posed any real threat. He looked up at Trask and his colleagues, and his clenched left hand jerked and twitched where he reached out towards them. His left eye was a gaping black hole oozing blood and pulped brains, and the rest of his face was a red-and grey-smeared mess.

But as the Major stood back a little and took careful aim, so the thrall's hand opened and he dropped a metal key onto the floor. Then he gurgled, 'This is wh-what you want, right? So go on, f-finish it. Then find that fucker and f-finish h-h-him.'

The Major didn't have to finish it. For as the man's head slumped to the floor, so a gush of blood and morbid fluid erupted from his ruined eye, and he jerked once more and was done.

Trask had called the elevator; as the doors opened, Goodly picked up the key, and the Major called out to Bygraves's subordinate: 'Try to get the Warrant Officer out of here. And see if your number three is okay. We're going upstairs.' He got in the elevator with Trask and Goodly.

The push-button control panel in the rear wall of the elevator had buttons for two basement levels, the ground floor, and floors one and two; plus two keyholes, one of which was marked, PRIVATE — UP. The other keyhole was unmarked. The precog looked at the key in his hand and said, 'Couldn't be simpler… could it?'

'Too simple by far,' Trask growled. 'And we've been losing

men left right and centre.'

'Your talent?' said the Major. 'You're still uneasy?' 'Worried sick!' Trask answered. 'The whole thing is wrong.

But we're committed now.' He gave Goodly a nod, and the precog put the key in the UP hole and turned it…

Liz had found the wounded NCO inside the Pleasure Dome's main doors and helped him out of the casino into the fresh air. She had thought he might be able to call down Chopper One, but his radio had been damaged when he was hit. When she'd left him to go back inside, he had told her that when he'd last seen Trask and his party they'd been heading towards the central elevators. Then he had warned her that for all he knew the vampire sniper who had shot him was still on the loose in there.

Going back into the casino, and knowing what might be waiting for her, Liz hadn't dared to call out after Trask. By that time some of the flares had burned out, leaving it much smokier and a lot darker in there. So that when she'd heard noises from deep inside — shouting, shots, and crashing sounds — then she'd taken a circuitous route in the hope of avoiding trouble. In so doing, she had somehow managed to bypass 'Red' Bygraves and his man on their way out.

But intent as Liz was on what she was doing — finding Ben Trask, and relaying Chung's message — her telepathic guard was down. Which was precisely the opening that Nephran Malinari had been waiting for.

Ben, where are you? she anxiously wondered, as she saw the hexagonal spindle of the elevator column looming ahead. But of course Trask wasn't a telepath, and Liz's probe (if she'd actually sent one, if she had even tried to, for in fact she'd simply been talking to herself, a natural response to her circumstances, like whistling in the dark) would go unanswered.

Or it should have gone unanswered. But:

Liz? (it was Ben Trask's voice — his telepathic voice? — in her head!) Is that you, Liz? But… can you hear me? If so, please listen. You've got to kip us. We've got ourselves trapped down here, behind a bulkhead that only opens from the other side. Your side, that is. But there's been shooting and now the place is burning. We'll burn, too, Liz, if you can't reach us!

She could actually feel the heat behind his mental SOS, could almost see the flames, it was so brilliantly clear. Clear like never before. So perhaps Jake was right: her talent really was growing stronger minute by minute! Yes, it must be so. And:

Ben, she sent. But how can I reach you? Where are you?

Down here, he answered. Down in the guts of the place. You can reach us via the elevators. It's the only way.

In the guts of the place? Underground in that maze of tunnels and pipes? At which she instinctively glanced at the floor… and at the ghastly figure of a dead man, who lay there with his brains trickling out through his eye.'

Liz jumped a foot, but Ben had obviously seen through her eyes and quickly said: We got that one, and followed the others down here. But you'll he safe because they're on the other side of the fire. Use the elevator, Liz, the one marked PRIVATE. But please hurry!

She had already called the elevator, and anxiously watched the tiny indicator lights bringing it down to the ground floor. But bringing it down? Well, the military must have used it. For of course, the whole place would have to be checked out.

The doors opened and she got in, and the voice — Trask's voice, in Liz's mind — said: Is there a key in one of the keyholes? He sounded even more anxious, urgent now, and his voice was tinged with something else… anticipation, maybe? But of course it was! She had given him hope, and he was looking forward to being rescued.

A key, yes, she told him. In the UP slot.

Take it out, he said. Use the other keyhole. Turn the key ninety degrees clockwise. But quickly, Liz, quickly!

She did as instructed. And the cage descended, taking her down, down, down…

On Jethro Manchester's island, Jake Cutter, Lardis Lidesci, and Joe Davis arrived at the open-ended, roofed-over section of the man-made channel that housed the millionaire's yacht — in effect a boathouse — midway between the villa and the sea. Hearing voices in heated argument, they split up and Davis took the far side of the structure, while Jake and the Old Lidesci crept up on that end of the boathouse closest to the burning villa.

The lock gates were open, but the yacht was still tied up. Both the boat and the ceiling of the flat-roofed structure were illuminated by their own lights. On the canopied deck, just aft of the cabin, two men faced each other down. The one was older, taller, white-haired and — bearded. Dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, he looked almost military in his proud, upright stance. This was Jethro Manchester himself, Jake knew. The younger man, who was holding a shotgun on the first, was shorter, stockier; but his hard, leathery, sun-beaten features were very much similar to Bruce Trennier's, his older brother's, which Jake would never be able to forget.

'Martin,' Manchester's voice rang out in the night, 'can't you see it's all over and you can't run from these people? Man, you're like a walking plague, a pestilence — you and me both — but a far worse pestilence than any in the Bible! And would you take that among the people? I see that you would. Well, and why not, for you brought it down on me and mine! That was sheer treachery, Martin! So say and do what you like, you won't be taking my boat. She's mine and she goes with me… wherever.'

Manchester held a jerrycan with both hands; as he had spoken, so he had been splashing its contents on the deck. The smell of diesel was unmistakable.

'Jethro, I'm not forgetting that I owe you,' Martin Trennier spoke up. It's the only reason you're still alive while we stand here and argue like this. But you're wrong to think this is the end of everything. It's only the beginning! You were the last to be taken — after he'd used your family to get his way — after he'd promised that he would give it all back, and cure us of this thing.

Well, he's a liar, as we've seen, and he made me take you, too. But you were the last and it's still taking hold of you. When it does, and when it has fully taken hold — which it will! — then you'll know I was right. So stand aside and let me get on. Or better still, come with me and let's see what we can make of things together.'

As he had spoken, Trennier had stepped to the port side of the boat to cast off a rope. But Manchester had taken the opportunity to pick up a second jerrycan. This time, before he could begin spilling its contents, Trennier stepped close and knocked it out of his hands. And now he trained his weapon dead centre on Manchester's body.

'I've no time for this, Jethro/ he growled. 'You can come with me now, or stay here. You can live or you can die. One way or the other, it's your choice. So what's it to be?'

Manchester took out a cigarette lighter from the pocket of his shorts. He flicked it once — and it failed to spark! Trennier cursed, but he wasn't about to give the older man a second chance. Sending the butt of his weapon crashing to Manchester's face, jostling him to the side of the boat, finally he succeeded in knocking him overboard. And as Manchester swam towards the side of the channel, so Trennier clung to the deck rail, leaned out over the water, and fired his weapon at almost point-blank range.

Which was as far as Jake was willing to let it go. He and Joe Davis acted together. Davis ran in under the far end of the boathouse, firing on the yacht as he came, and Jake ran to meet him, skidding to a halt on his knees to play the roaring, searing lance of his flamethrower on both the vessel and the man on her deck.

Trennier fired another shot, and another — fired blindly, through the shimmering fire that enveloped and ate into him — while the boat literally erupted in flames and he turned into a jet-black, shrieking silhouette, dancing in agony until finally he crumpled down into himself and lay still.

As Jake shut off his lance, there came the sound of feeble

splashing from the channel. It was Manchester. The flesh at the back of his head, his neck and across his shoulders was a livid, liquid red. 'Let me out!' he cried, climbing sunken steps. 'Let me out and finish it then, but not in the water. I lived in the water — lived for the water — so I don't want to die in it.'

And when he was out, and staggering on dry land, Jake told him, 'Mr Manchester, we heard everything. And we're sorry.'

'I know you are,' Manchester nodded his bloody head. 'Yes, and I'm glad you came. My family… is no more, and I… have no reason or right to be here.' With which he held out his arms in the shape of a cross, stood there and closed his feral eyes.

Then Joe Davis gritted his teeth, and cut the old man down with accurate, merciful shooting; the Old Lidesci went in close and used his machete; and finally, making absolutely sure, Jake finished it with roaring fire. By which time both the yacht and the structure that housed it were a mass of leaping flames, and the three backed away, leaning on each other while they watched it all burn…

In a little while Davis's radio crackled, and call-signs began asking him was it all over? He told them yes, called down Chopper Two, told everyone they could start mopping up. But as he and his party began to make their way back towards the villa:

'What?3 said Jake, whirling on the balls of his feet. His eyes were wide and darting, searching here and there across the sculpted landscape of the gardens, and his ruddily-lit face was shocked and puzzled. 'Liz?' But then his eyes went wider still, in sudden understanding.

It was Liz he'd heard calling for him, yes, but she wasn't here… she was in Xanadu!

Jake! Jake, if you can hear me (her telepathic voice was a tiny, terrified whisper huddling in a corner of his mind), then please, please come and get me out of here!

And behind her sweet voice another — but a loathsome, gurgling thing — like hot tar bubbling in some medieval torturer s cauldron: Ah, no, my little thought-thief. No one can help you now. You though to use your mentalism against me, but Malinari has used it against you! I have lied to Ben Trask — impossible, but I have done it — and I've located and lost your locator. As for your marvellous precog: le senses nothing but confusion, for the death and destruction that he foresaw was his own and yours and Xanadu's, but never mine! And now there's this Jake — your lover, perhaps? But where is he? Oh, ha ha haaaaaa!

'Jesus!' Jake moaned. But he knew what he must do. Korath! he called out into the deadspeak aether. And:

About time, said that one. Butjirst tell me, do we have a deal, you and I, as prescribed? Do you wittingly give me access to your mind?

There was no way around it, and no time to argue. And so: Yes! said Jake. Anything! Only show me those numbers.

So be it, said Korath. And Jake's inner being lit up like a lamp, as those impossible numbers scrolled in not-quite-endless progression down the computer screen of his mind. But not quite endlessly, because he instantly recognized a pattern and suddenly, 'instinctively' knew where to freeze it. Then:

A door! And:

Go! said Korath. And I go with you…

Jake went — stepped in through the door — vanished from the view of Lardis Lidesci and Joe Davis, and was gone.

'What?' Davis stood stock still, frozen in his amazement. And for a moment even Lardis was lost for words, astonished as ever by this thing. But then he recovered and said:

'Pay no attention. It's a trick he does. Just an optic — er, an optical — er…'

'An optical illusion?' Davis's jaw hung slack.

'Aye, something like that,' Lardis said, gratefully. 'Er, but we needn't expect him back. He has his own ways of getting about, that one.' And once again, with a knowing, emphatic nod of his grizzled head, 'Aye!' he said…

In the ultimate, primal darkness of the Mobius Continuum, Jake whirled like a leaf in a gale. 'BUT WHERE TO?' he said, and

was nearly deafened as his words gonged like the clappers of a mad, gigantic bell!

The thought itself would appear to be sufficient, Korath told him, awed in his own right. For I sense this place is the very essence of nothingness, wherefore physical speech — which is something — is forbidden here. But deadspeak, being as nothing, is permissible.

Jake steadied himself— discovered that he could actually steady himself — and repeated, Where to? He could feel the Continuum tugging on him, and believed he knew where it would take him if he gave it the chance: Harry's Room, at E-Branch HQ. But that wasn't where he wanted to go.

Who is it you are concerned for? Korath remained logical.

Liz, of course! She had called out to Jake — asked for his help — and her telepathic voice had been a beacon. Now he remembered it, remembered its coordinates, and went to her. It was as simple as that. At least the going there was simple, but the rest of it wasn't.

When the door formed, Jake didn't know how to make an exit and so simply crashed through it. Into a living nightmare!

It was a room, shaft or cavern, but its lighting after the Stygian darkness of the Mobius Continuum was glaring, brilliant, blinding. Overbalanced as gravity returned (by the sudden, unaccustomed weight of the flamethrower), tripping and flying headlong into a wall, and rebounding, Jake landed on something soft and squirmy…

… Something that cried its terror, and two seconds later wrapped its arms around him.

'Jake, oh Jake!' Liz gasped, holding tightly to him on the one hand, but wriggling and kicking desperately away from something on the other. Her Baby Browning was clenched in her fist, and she kept aiming it and pulling the trigger — click! click! click! — as the firing pin fell on blank space. A pair of empty clips lay on the sandy floor where she'd discharged and discarded them.

It was the strip lighting that had blinded Jake, that and his dizzying, head-over-heels emergence from the Mobius Continuum. Now, as his head stopped spinning, he saw what had turned this determined, self-possessed, assertive woman into a frightened little girl again: weird, morbid motion.

The floor of the place was alive… or undead!

Jake could scarcely take it in — scarcely believe what he was seeing — but he had to, and quickly.

The cavern was the size of a large room. A planked walkway crossed the centre of the floor and disappeared into tunnels at both ends. On the other side of the walkway, maybe fifteen feet away, the floor was… different. It was humped, veined, corrugated… and mobile. And it wasn't the floor!

Something tossed and turned — or churned — there. Something throbbed and gulped and gasped. It was a fleshy, flopping octopus of a thing; an immense doughy pancake of metamorphic flesh, throwing up purple-veined extrusions that groped blindly in the air before collapsing back down into the bulk of… of It! The colour of dead flesh in its main mass, it squelched, fumed, and stank like gas bubbles bursting in a swamp. And mindlessly, aimlessly, it worked at fashioning its ropy extensions.

Or perhaps not mindlessly. For as Jake sat there cradling Liz, so the thing extruded a tentacle that came whipping across the walkway to rear before them in a questioning, semi-sentient fashion. It pulsed, vibrated, and an eye formed in its tip! The eye was a uniform red, lidless, apparently vacant — yet it must be seeing or sensing something. For as Liz shrilled and started pulling the trigger again — click! click! click! — so a second tentacle emerged and lengthened in their direction.

As it came, a row of greedy, suctorial mouths rippled into metamorphic being along its length. They slobbered and grimaced, those mouths — and they had human teeth! But far worse, some of them were reforming, shaping themselves into tumescent, purple-veined penises!

Jake felt rooted to the spot, for the moment paralysed. It seemed to him that the whole mass of the thing beyond the

walkway was now on the move, edging towards him — and certainly towards Liz! And that was enough.

He unfroze, fought Liz off, brought up the flamethrower's nozzle and squeezed the trigger to get its pilot light going — then cursed vividly as nothing happened, and squeezed it again, and again, and yet again, before it lit — then gripped the firing lever and applied a steady, deadly pressure.

First Jake aimed down between his spread legs, aimed at the rearing pseudopods, to drive them back, and his relief was immense as he watched them burst into flames and shrivel in the incandescent, pressured heat of his lance. Then he scrambled to his feet, and with Liz dancing close behind, clutching his combat jacket and urging him on, so he advanced towards the walkway and the bulk of the thing that hissed and steamed and shuddered its agony there.

And as the tentacles writhed, dripped their fluids, blackened and shrank — and as the main body withdrew into itself— there, sprouting in the floor where its bulk had protected them, clusters of small black mushrooms, dozens of them, were melting in the chemical fire. Their smell was nauseating, but Jake kept on firing; kept cursing, too, as Malinari's 'garden' burned.

But this was vampire stuff, tenacious and defiant.

The shrinking body of the mass burst open, and a steaming head — a human, or almost-human head, and shoulders — grew out of it. Again Jake felt himself gripped by a paralysis of disbelief. Yet the nightmare was here and undeniably real.

But so was Korath here, and so was he real. And in Jake's mind as the livid vampire head took shape: It is him! Korath's deadspeak voice hissed. Demetrakis Mindsthrall, who was Malinari's lieutenant, second only to myself! Because he had been a vampire for long and long, Malinari used him to make this garden. It must be so, for only the most contaminated flesh could ever have produced a crop such as this! Ah, but just think. If there had been no Demetrakis, then this would be me! And so it seems I got the better of the bargain after all…

'Whoever it was, it's time he died,' said Jake. And:

Aye, Korath agreed. The true death. I know he would thank you for it. And Jake hosed fire on the terrible thing where it mewled and melted, until his torch began to sputter.

Then he eased back on the flamer's lever, to see what damage he'd done, and if he had done enough. The cave steamed and smoked but was mainly still — except in one badly-lit corner. There was some slight movement there, and Jake advanced across the smoking floor, making sure as he went that he stepped only where there was no sign of contamination.

But as he approached the corner: 'H-help me!' the faintest of whispers reached out to him. 'H-h-help me, pleeeease!'

A single short burst of fire from the flamethrower chased back the shadows, then a longer burst, to allow for confirmation of what Jake had seen. And, indeed, he needed such confirmation.

From the heck up the thing in the corner was a man… and from there on down it had been a man. But now the eyes in that purple, once-arrogant, once-querulous face were bulging, staring, terrified — and they were filled with such agony as Jake could only imagine.

As for the 'body' of this thing: that was a slumped, naked heap of limbless, alien flesh similar to the composition of the monstrous guardian of Malinari's garden. And Jake couldn't stop his gorge rising — felt sick to his stomach — as it dawned on him in a sudden burst of loathing that this mutated abnormality had once been a man, and that it or he had been converted into live nourishment for the garden and its guardian!

Finger-thick, pulsing, translucent arteries — like fleshy worms — even now connected the two forms, and towards the centre of the cave where Jake's fire had seared and split the guardian open, spurts of yellow and crimson plasma went to waste, fountaining uselessly in the smoky air.

All of which was bad enough, but worse by far was the fact that Jake knew who this travesty of a human being had been.

That Peter Miller 'lived' in his condition — if this could be called life — and that he was capable of realizing his fate and

asking for help, was a miracle in itself. But it was also a curse that Jake would wish on no man, not even on his worst enemy.

For this was worse than any death, compared to which death would be a blessing. And when Miller found strength to ask once more, 'Please… please help me!' then Jake was happy to grant his request. It didn't take long, but it used up the last dregs of the flamer's fuel.

When it was over, Jake steadied himself and turned to Liz. But still his face was ashen as he asked, 'Where now?'

'You can actually do it?' Almost back in possession of herself, still Liz clutched his jacket. 'The Mobius Continuum?'

'Yes,' he told her. 'We… I mean I, can do it.'

'The bubble dome,' she told him. 'Ben is up there. There's something I have to tell him. We walked right into a trap, Jake, all of us, and I think that we're still in danger. Malinari was in my mind, imitating Ben! But at the end — just before he left me in this place — then for a moment I was in his mind! Telepathy is a two-way thing, but my forte is as a receiver. And Malinari… he was oh-so-sure of himself! I think that maybe he's sabotaged this place! I sensed it there, in his mind.'

'When you called out to me,' Jake answered, 'I heard something of what he said to you. You're right: he seemed very sure of himself. Perhaps too sure.'

And Liz nodded and repeated, 'The dome, on top of the casino. Take us there.'

'Hold on to me,' Jake told her, for he had flown over Xanadu and knew the coordinates. And Korath knew the numbers…

In his vantage point in the cliff, Malinari allowed his fingers to drift over the array of switches and pondered his choice. By now the girl was being absorbed into his garden, and that was a shame… that he hadn't been able to stay with her, within her mind, to explain what was happening to her and feel her terror; but no, for he had other things to do.

His mist was up; it lay knee deep, swirling through Xanadu from one end of the resort to the other. It was like a spider's web, that mist, carrying every faintest tremor back to its master and maker. A medium for his probes, it allowed him to touch the human flies who were 'trapped' within it; he knew the location of every man in Xanadu. But there were those for whom no mist was needed.

The locator for one: injured, holding his head, he sat inside that car down there… such a pity the area wasn't mined. Then there was the so-called precog, and Ben Trask, together in the bubble. At this close range their talents were like magnets drawing Malinari's attention to the topmost dome; he could feel them there! But the bubble was mined; all it wanted was a touch on a certain switch in his array.

And again his hand hovered tantalizingly over that central switch… But no, he must stick to the original plan, let them know the error of their ways before they died. First the perimeter, to let them see how truly he had trapped them, and then he would work inwards, leaving the bubble itself until the last.

And now his fingers were sure and fast, as one by one they tripped the outer ring of switches…

Through the wound-down window of the car, the locator was suddenly aware of a strange figure approaching out of the mist. The mist was very bad here, drifting over the car and obscuring his vision. But Chung had been in far worse places, and he was equipped with a machine-pistol.

The strangely lumbering, mist-wreathed figure came closer, and the sights of Chung's weapon were centred upon it. Then he saw the blaze of a reflective patch, sighed and allowed himself to slump a little. It was a soldier — an NCO, carrying another soldier in the fireman's-lift position, which accounted for the many-armed, monstrous silhouette. As that fact dawned, so Chung was out of the vehicle, calling out:

'Over here! Bring him to the car.' Then, behind the two, a third figure came weaving, on his feet but barely so. Recognizing the staggering loner as Warrant Officer 'Red' Bygraves, the locator went to meet him. 'Are you okay?' He got under the other's left arm, took his weight. 'Can I help you?'

'I'll live,' Bygraves growled. And then, seeing the eagerness, the urgency in the locator's eyes: 'What is it?'

'Your radio,' Chung said. 'Is it working, and can you call the chopper down? I know where the bastard is! I know where Malinari's hiding!'

Bygraves's eyes lit up with a fierce, fighting light. Gritting his teeth, and flicking his face mike with a fingernail to get Chopper One's attention, he told the locator, 'Oh, I'll get him down okay. Just tell me where you want him to lay down his fire, that's all…'

From what little Trask, Goodly, and the SAS Major could see of the interior of the bubble dome, it was a sumptuously-appointed split-level affair of marble, chrome, and tan-coloured leather. Five marble-clad stanchions surrounded the single elevator tube and supported the high ceiling. The elevator opened into a central well, with concentric steps climbing to the living or work area. The place was lit, however dimly, by a sprinkling of tiny blue lights which formed, against the ceiling's jet-black backdrop, miniature constellations in a fair imitation of the night sky. Blue-tinged, the dusky velvet atmosphere reminded Trask of nothing so much as a Starside night, which made the bubble seem even more an aerie.

That, however, was the extent of Trask's and his colleagues' knowledge of the place; for from the moment of their arrival when the elevator doors had hissed open, they had been under fire and pinned down. In fact their exit from the elevator cage — which in any event had been planned as a rapid deployment — had been hastened by a volley of shots that had sounded as soon as the doors were fully open, and a spray of bullets that chipped splinters from the marble columns where the three had taken shelter. All of which had felt very wrong to Trask.

He and the others had made such ideal targets in the elevator's confined space, he just couldn't imagine anyone missing his aim… especially someone who had been waiting for them to emerge from that precise spot! Yet no one had been hit, though for several nerve-racking minutes now they had been obliged to keep their heads down to avoid sporadic single shots.

Thus, deep down inside Trask sensed (or his talent advised him) that he and his colleagues were being played with; or that they were simply being played, reeled in, like so many sardines on a single line. And he knew they daren't allow this stalemate to continue to the enemy's prearranged conclusion.

Now, as he glanced across the well of curving steps at the dark figures of the precog and the Major crouching behind their individual columns, he wondered what to do next.

As for the sniper (if anyone so inept was worthy of such a title), it seemed that he must be a man or a vampire alone. All of his weapon's muzzle-flashes had been sighted in just the one location on the higher level, and there had been no other sound or movement from anywhere else. And Trask sensed, he just knew, that whoever this was it wasn't Malinari.

But then it came to him that indeed there had been another sound: muted, repetitious music that came from one glowing spot, an antique jukebox, in the velvet darkness of the higher level. And the music — a plaintive song — was only repetitious in that it had been playing when first they'd arrived, had played again while they were pinned down, and was now into its second encore, curtain call, or whatever.

But curtain call? A farewell? Some kind of message, maybe? And for the first time Trask listened to the song. A moderately fast-paced and yet bluesy ballad, it was sung by Ray Charles, a favourite from Trask's youth:

'Sunshine, you may find my window but you won't find me…'

And now it seemed to Trask that the coffee, sex, and cigarettes voice mocked not only the sun but also Ben Trask himself. For indeed sunshine might find the high blind windows of Malinari's aerie, but it certainly wouldn't find Malinari! Nor would Trask. The song was a message; but more yet, it was the mocking laughter of a monster! It mocked Trask, E-Branch, the military, and all their combined efforts.

So that now, in the heightened anxiety of this sudden knowledge, he used the temporary lull between shots to shout across to the Major: 'We have to get done here. So what's next?'

The Major had not been idle; he'd been working out the sniper's position for himself, and now believed he'd got it right. Lighting a flare, and a moment later pulling the pin on a grenade, he called out, 'This is what's next. Hit the deck — now!'

The warning was timely. Even with his eyes tightly closed, and sheltered by the column, still Trask saw the blinding white light blossoming through the membrane of his eyelids… and at the same time he heard and indeed felt the terrific report that shook the floor and shattered glass fixtures into flying shards. Then there was a stunned silence and cordite stench, and at the last a mewling whimper rising to a scream.

A tattered male figure came staggering, wreathed in smoke, himself smoking. His eyes were feral in the gloom. And the Major, Trask, and Goodly didn't wait to see what he would do or if he was capable of doing anything, but cut him down in a withering crossfire.

'We got him! We got Malinari!' The Major stood up, started forward up the marble steps. But as the precog and Trask joined him, the latter was already shaking his head.

'That isn't Malinari,' Trask coughed a denial into the now smoky atmosphere. 'And this isn't over yet. The elevator's gone and we're trapped. Trapped by the very creature we're trying to destroy…'

His words were portentous of the sudden thunder, the gouting fire and blazing light that at once rocked the night beyond the shattered windows. The three men looked at each other, then hurriedly crossed the floor to look out and down on a scene out of Dante's Inferno. On the far perimeter of Xanadu, disintegrating chalets erupted in red and yellow ruin, and fireballs lifted dieir mushroom heads to the night sky. But Trask was right: it wasn't over yet.

For as the three stood there watching, impotent to act, so midway between the burning perimeter and the casino a second series of terrific explosions, then a third, ripped through the shattered resort. Concentric rings of destruction were closing in on the Pleasure Dome, hurling flaming debris aloft and turning night to day.

'Now he springs the trap,' Trask husked. 'Xanadu is no use to him now and he'll destroy it, and us with it. So this is it. We're next!'

'The place is wired, mined!' The Major's face was ashen. 'I should have know it from the very first explosion, the one that took one of my men.'

'Don't blame yourself/ said Trask. 'We've all been equally stupid. And that bastard is sitting somewhere watching us, knowing that by now \ve know. I don't suppose there's any point asking you to call the chopper down?'

'Wouldn't if I could,' the other shook his head. 'No way — not into this lot. But in any case my radio's been out since we got into the lift. Some kind of electrical interference.'

As he finished speaking, so lan Goodly reeled and caught at the Major's arm to steady himself. And, Jake!' the precog gasped. 'My God, Ben — it's Jake!'

'Jake?' Trask repeated him. 'What about him?'

'He… he's on his way here,' Goodly answered. 'But so is the elevator!'

'Jake's in the elevator?' Trask failed to understand. But:

'No,' Goodly shook his head. 'Jake is in the Mobius Continuum. The bomb is in the elevator! When I staggered just now, it was because I'd seen it going off— but seen it at close range, even this close — and it's due to happen any time now!'

The Major might have asked what they were raving about but didn't have time. In a sudden stirring of smoky air, Jake stepped out of the Mobius Continuum with Liz clinging to him like a leech — and at the same time the elevator pinged and its doors hissed open.

Jake and Liz were staggering, disoriented; the Major didn't know what was going on; and the precog, knowing he was about to die, couldn't take his eyes off the elevator. Ben Trask was the only one who saw the 'truth' of it and knew what to do.

'To me!' he shouted. 'To me!' And without waiting he swept them into his arms, bundled all four of them close to himself.

'What?' Jake said, completely out of the picture.

'Make a door!' Trask shouted at him. 'For God's sake, make a goddamned door! Make a big one, and I mean right now!'

And Jake, and Korath, they made a door.

The blast took them right through it, all five of them (or six, with Korath), through the door into the Mobius Continuum. And in the hot blast and the fire that followed them, Jake knew only one safe place to take them. He remembered those suntanned, near-naked bodies sprawling indolently, and the shadow of the helicopter dark on the sparkling water. And he knew the coordinates.

Down they went in one of Xanadu's pools, and coughing and spluttering they surfaced…

… In time to see Chopper One at an altitude of one hundred and fifty feet, wheeling to face the backdrop of cliffs, steadying up and sitting like a hawk on the air, and opening up with its nose cannons on no clearly discernible target.

In his once-secret hiding place, Malinari saw it, too, and didn't believe it. But as cannon-fire ripped the chimney's facade to shreds he had to believe it. And while he still had time he tripped the rest of his switches. Then, with his thin clothing tearing under the pressure of madly metamorphosing flesh — and his bolthole hideaway collapsing around him — Malinari made a headlong dive through his window of observation, out into the night.

For a moment the pilot of Chopper One saw him: the jetcopter's thermal-imaging highlighted a shifting, flattening, morphing blob of a figure that at first plummeted, quickly adopted a manta-like shape, and finally glided from view. The pilot might even have taken a shot at the thing, but powerful updraughts from the blazing hell that was Xanadu were rocking his machine, forcing him to take action and climb out of danger.

And as Jake and the others left the pool, so Nephran Malinari shot like an arrow overhead. He might easily have been some primal pterodactyl out of Earth's prehistory, but was in fact a predatory creature from an alien, parallel world. Trask saw him — his crimson eyes, the dark blur of his passing — and a moment later heard his taunting laughter echoing from on high.

Hearing that laughter, and remembering Zek — unable to forget her, ever — all Trask wanted was to stand there and let his hate out, and will this monster to a terrible death. He knew he couldn't, but he had never wanted anything so much in his life.

In close proximity like this — so intent upon each other — Malinari had 'heard' Trask and sent back:

Hatred such as that is catching, Mr Trask. It breeds hatred! As for willing me to death: we must see whose will is the strongest, ehP Not here and now, no, but in another place, another time. This was nothing hut a skirmish, to get your measure. But if you would live tojight another day, first you must survive the night. Alas, I don't think so. If you survive, however, do not despair. For I shall he waiting, Mr Trask, I shall he waiting…

All of them with Trask heard it — that dark voice in their heads and its taunting message — but especially Liz. She heard it, and saw beyond it. Malinari's plan: flight, to a safe haven in another place, another country.

She might even have discovered which one, but Nephran Malinari recognized her presence and withdrew snarling into mental obscurity. Where his evil telepathic voice had been, only mindsmog remained, spiralling after him into a mental void.

And Malinari was gone…

But to Trask and the others it seemed the danger was still present. Xanadu was burning end to end; a series of devastating

explosions continued to rock the place; Malinari's bubble aerie on top of the Pleasure Dome was no more, and showers of plastic and glass were still raining to earth. Scraps of blazing debris drifted across the night sky, and clods of earth and grass were fountaining in the garden where Chopper One had made its initial landing. A lucky mistake on Malinari's part, that last. One of his few errors.

But the Pleasure Dome itself, the casino, was still standing, and now the precog lan Goodly cried, 'The big one is still to come. It's the casino. A set piece of delayed action — like the pause before the last big firework at the end of the show!'

Fortunately WO 2 Bygraves had taken the initiative. Thinking he'd lost his commanding officer when the Major's radio had gone down, he had called the rest of the platoon out of the casino. Now they came running, gathering at the pool. But from the pool on outwards to the perimeter of the resort, it seemed that the whole of Xanadu was an inferno. Even if there were no more explosions, the sheer heat would certainly kill everyone before they made half the distance. And meanwhile the precog, in a fit of delirious anxiety, was turning this way and that, repeating, 'It's going to blow! It's going to blow!'

Then a piece of burning debris from the bubble came drifting like a kite, weighed down by and trailing a length of electrical cable. No one noticed it until it struck the monorail's overhead power grid. There was a flash that sent blobs of molten copper skittering, and the kite and cable fell to earth.

Trask and the Major glanced at each other, headed for the boarding platform no more than fifty feet away. The rest followed them, and Jake quickly caught up. 'What are we doing?' he asked Trask breathlessly.

'The elevated monorail,' Trask gasped. 'It has power. Maybe we can drive out of this, or over the worst of it, at least as far as the main parking lot and the big ops truck.'

His idea was as good as any other; in fact it was the only idea, for the armoured car had been blown over onto its side by the blast from the garden. Fortunately the locator David Chung, along with Bygraves and his men, had already vacated that area; like Jake they had seen the pool as the only sanctuary from the bomb blasts and the fires that licked closer with every passing moment. And by now the heat and smoke were suffocating.

Dragging Liz behind him, Jake was the first into the leading carriage of two articulated, open-sided cars. Climbing into the driver's seat, he hit the red power button and, as the motor throbbed into life, grabbed the drive lever.

The system could scarcely be simpler: push forward to go, pull backward to stop. And ahead the single overhead rail climbed and curved outwards towards the perimeter parking lot, the reception area, Xanadu's gates and safety. But while the motor warmed up, still the precog was shouting. 'It's going any minute now.''

Men ran, limped, or were carried; they bundled each other into the cars. Until finally Trask yelled, 'That's it. Now get us the hell out of here!' And Jake pushed the lever forward.

Slowly — agonizingly slowly, or so it seemed — the cars climbed to their elevated height and started along the spiralling, pylon-supported rail. Fifty feet, a hundred, and gathering speed. And then the Pleasure Dome went.

The blast was awesome as the casino literally lifted into the air, sank down into itself, split asunder under the irresistible pressure of expanding gasses, and blew apart in red and yellow streamers of flame. The whole thing disappeared in dust, rubble, and gouting fire, and in the next moment the hot blast of its passing reached out and rocked the monorail's carriages, causing its passengers to grit their teeth and hang on for dear life. But then the cars steadied up and the danger was past.

So everyone thought—

— Except lan Goodly. 'There's one bomb left!' He suddenly cried. 'It's in the reception area, the gatehouse!' He was right and just like the bomb in the Pleasure Dome, this too was a delayed action device. When it went it took a good man, their rearguard, with it — but it also took out the last elevated section of the monorail!

Liz was behind Jake, shouting, 'Look! Look!' and pointing ahead. But he was already looking. All he could see through the smoke and the fire was a mass of slumping, buckled metal — the wreckage of the tower that had borne the weight of the monorail — beyond which there was empty space and a drop of some thirty odd feet into a red, roaring death!

Jake slammed the drive lever into reverse… and nothing happened. The power had gone along with the overhead gantry and power line, and the cars were free-wheeling down a gentle gradient at some thirty miles an hour.

But lan Goodly's talent was back in force. Suddenly he was there, leaning over Jake and shouting, 'Jake, listen! There's a way out. I can see it. We're going to make it!'

And he told Jake what he had seen, shouted it into his ear as the articulated cars went lurching into empty space, heading for the inferno that waited below.

Korath knew what was required and set those fantastic formulae rolling yet again down the screen of Jake's mind — until Jake froze them and conjured a door that even Harry Keogh would be proud of. Then:

Darkness surrounded the cars — the Ultimate Darkness of a time before time — and in a single moment which might yet be as long as forever, light, gentle moon and starlight, blinked into being as Jake made his first perfect three-point exit from the Mobius Continuum at well-known coordinates.

The cars were boat-bottomed. They didn't dig in but rode across the dry grass and sandy soil of the safe house's garden, quickly slowing until, with scarcely a jolt, they were brought up short by the stout wall. Then the rear car slewed a little — but not enough to spill anyone — and both cars rolled sideways through forty-five degrees and came to a rocking standstill…

For a long time there was silence. Until Jake and the E-Branch