The Lost Years Vol 1, page 7
part #9 of Necroscope Series
The Necroscope emerged from the Mobius Continuum at the junction of Oxford Street and Regent Street, and knew that he must be pretty close to the venue. Policemen in uniform were everywhere, working frantically to clear the street. Glancing at his watch, Harry saw the reason why: it was 10:16. If indeed a bomb had been planted, it was due to explode in something less than nine minutes’ time.
Caught in a crush of people being shepherded down Regent Street, he stepped to one side and looked about. Then, just as he was about to be caught up again, he spotted Trevor Jordan on a traffic island in urgent conversation with two uniformed senior policemen. Sidestepping the cordon, he ran towards Jordan, shouting, Trevor, can I be of help?’
Jordan saw him and quickly spoke to the inspectors; one of them waved off a policeman who was hot on Harry’s heels. And as he skidded to a halt, Harry was apologetic. ‘I… just thought it might be a good idea to be in on this,’ he gulped.
Jordan shrugged and said, ‘Right now I don’t see what you can do, but since you’re here…’ He shrugged again. Jordan was the easy-going sort generally, but it was obvious from his tone of voice that in the current situation he saw the Necroscope as an encumbrance. There weren’t any dead people to talk to here… not just yet, anyway.
A seasoned if occasionally variable telepath, Jordan was thirty-two years old. His looks fitted his character precisely: he was usually transparent, open as a favourite book. It was as if he personally would like to be as readable to others as they were to him; as if he were trying to make some sort of physical compensation for his metaphysical talent. His face reflected this attitude: oval, fresh, open and almost boyish. He had lank mousy hair falling forward above grey eyes, and a crooked mouth that straightened out whenever he was worried or annoyed. Mostly, people liked him; having the advantage of knowing it if someone didn’t like him, Jordan would simply avoid that person. But, rangy and athletic, it was a mistake to misread his obvious sensitivity; there was plenty of determination in him, too.
Harry asked him: ‘Is this where it will happen?’ He scanned all about, trying to work out what was going on.
In his time (just seventeen months ago), the Necroscope had been the author of a considerable amount of bombing of his own, but he told himself that that had been different and even necessary. Or was it all in the eye of the beholder? Well, maybe, except this wasn’t a nest of mindspy thugs and megalomaniacs in some nightmare-riddled chateau in the USSR, but a busy thoroughfare in the heart of London. The people who could get involved, hurt, killed here, were innocent of any crime other than being here. And there were still far too many of them.
A flood of shoppers was even now issuing from stores both east and west, adding to the crushes down Regent, Portland and New Bond Streets. And police activity had grown even more urgent. There were dog-handlers, with sniffers straining at their leads; loud-hailers boomed to left and right, issuing raucous instructions; motorists were leaving their blocked-in cars and hurrying on foot in what they hoped was the safest direction.
‘Chaos!’ Harry said, guessing that Jordan hadn’t answered his question because he didn’t know.
The name of the game, sir,’ one of the police inspectors harshly answered. The three “D”s. To cause as much disruption, death and destruction as inhumanly possible. Chaos, yes. But if you’re with Mr Clarke’s Branch - and if this is new to you - where’ve you been?’
‘Oh, places,’ Harry looked at him in a certain way of his, and was glad that Alec Kyle had been the sort who kept himself to himself. And turning to Jordan: There are only six minutes left, and people all over the place!’
But Trevor Jordan wasn’t listening. He was half-collapsed in the back of a squad car parked on the traffic island, with a pained expression on his face and his hands to the sides of his head. The policemen looked at each other, went to question him. Harry stopped them, saying, ‘He’s at work. Leave him.’
The police cordon in Regent Street had let a car through the crush. It slewed across the road, bumped up onto the traffic island alongside the squad car. And Darcy Clarke got out. He saw Harry at once and began to protest, ‘Jesus, Harry—!’
But the Necroscope had gone down on one knee beside Jordan, who was muttering: ‘It’s… it has to be… Sean!’
‘Scan?’ Harry gripped his shoulder, stared hard into his squeezed-up face.
‘Sean Milligan,’ Darcy hissed in Harry’s ear. ‘He’s one of their best, or worst!’
‘Armed,’ Jordan gasped. ‘And with more than just a bomb! He… he hasn’t primed it yet. Too many police around. Sean knows he’ll be spotted, knows they’ll get him. He’s thinking of… of creating a diversion. Yes, that’s it, a diversion!’ Jordan’s eyes blazed open. ‘Oh, fuck! Now he’s primed it!’
‘Primed!’ Darcy snapped at the two officers, who at once turned away and began speaking into walkie-talkies. Up on the roof of a building, Harry caught the glint of metal as a marksman took his position behind a parapet.
‘Primed, yes…” Jordan’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut again, and sweat rivered his face. ‘And he’s set the timer for… just one and a half minutes!’
‘God!’ Darcy was trembling; he looked like he might make a run for it, which told him - and Harry Keogh - a lot.
Trevor,’ the Necroscope spoke softly. ‘With only ninety seconds left, Sean has to be on the move. Which way’s he heading?’
But Darcy Clarke babbled, ‘Oh, I can tell you that!’
And Harry continued to speak to Jordan: ‘Has he still got the bomb?’
‘Yes!‘Jordan’s gasped answer, as he squeezed his temples more yet. ‘But he knows he must get rid of it, and now! Jesus, fifteen pounds of semtex!’
‘Christ!’ Darcy suddenly yelped. ‘Let me in the car. I’ve got to get out of here!’ He made to scramble for his car, tripped and went sprawling across the back of the police vehicle.
And it happened. A tall thin man with a pale, badly pock-marked face, wearing a loosely flapping overcoat and carrying a sausage-shaped holdall, came at a run down the middle of the road. Jordan looked up, saw him, yelped: ‘Sean!’ And the recognition was mutual. Not that Milligan recognized Trevor Jordan, but seeing the squad car, the senior policemen, and three civilians all grouped on the traffic island - and all staring at him - he did know that he’d been made.
The right-hand side of his coat went back and the snout of an ugly, short-barrelled machine-pistol swung into view. Harry sensed hasty movement on a roof, the re-alignment of a weapon; Milligan sensed it, too, and the gun in his hand swept up, his thin lips drew back, and both he and his machine-pistol snarled their abuse! Bullets chewed the high parapet of the building, causing the marksman up there to duck down out of sight. And over the chatter of Milligan’s gun, Harry heard Jordan cry out:
‘Getaway! He’s looking for the getaway car!’
Milligan was maybe forty feet away, pointing his gun here, there, everywhere, trying to choose a main target. A secondary crowd of people had come bursting out of a large store onto the street, but they weren’t a threat to the IRA man. On the other hand, the sausage-shaped holdall in his hand was definitely a threat to them. And it was rapidly becoming one to Sean Milligan, too.
As the Necroscope glanced again at his watch and saw that there was something less than a minute to go, two things happened. Darcy Clarke had finally got into his car, started the motor, and was making to drive away. His car had just lurched off the traffic island onto the street when a second car, low, dark, fast and mean, came careening through a traffic barrier in a tangle of twisted metal. The two vehicles collided; Darcy’s car was thrown back onto the traffic island and the rogue car glanced off, smashed through a pair of bollards, mounted the kerb and nose-dived through a store window. Scan Milligan wouldn’t be making his getaway after all.
He knew it, and it was time to apply the crazed logic of the total terrorist. The sniper on the roof couldn’t get off a shot at Sean because of the people on the street; Sean had to get rid of his holdall in the next twenty seconds and then make one hell of a run for it, but first he had to get these people out of his fucking way and he couldn’t shoot them all. He aimed his gun at the parapet hiding the sniper, pulled the trigger and stitched the wall of the building with a tracery of bullets. Then, as the milling people scrambled for cover, Sean chose his target. Not so difficult, for there was only one target after all: the City Centre itself, and what could only be a bunch of top-ranking officials and police officers.
By now he should have been shot dead, and he knew that, too. Which meant there were no armed policemen on the ground in the immediate vicinity. So maybe he stood a slight chance after all… (/there was still time.
Panting, sweating, cursing, he ran towards the group on the traffic island and, pivoting like a discus-thrower, whirled the holdall. Which was when he saw Harry Keogh. Harry had come forward onto the road, putting himself between his friends and Sean Milligan. Still pivoting, preparing to release his deadly missile, Sean let rip with a burst of wild fire from his gun.
Harry had guessed how the other would react; he’d already conjured a Mobius door between himself and Milligan. Stray bullets ripped past him, but Scan’s arc of fire was restricted by the door, which no one else but the Necroscope could see. The main stream of bullets crossed the threshold and passed right out of this universe. While up on the roof, the sniper finally had Milligan in his sights and fired one hurried shot.
Hit in the hip, the IRA man tripped and went flying. Him and his holdall both, flying right in through Harry’s door!
And the Necroscope knew what he must do. If he simply collapsed the door there’d be questions, because people just don’t vanish into thin air like that. But Harry had a picture in his mind that he couldn’t shift, which told him how it must be. And with only three seconds to go, he tilted the door on its side.
His mind wrestled with the alien, metaphysical math of the thing… and won! And as if the invisible door’s top edge were hinged, it swung upwards through ninety degrees into the horizontal. And the Necroscope hurled himself backwards away from it as it blew!
Fifteen pounds of semtex in the Mobius Continuum, a place where even thoughts have weight, and a spoken word can be deafening. And only the frail however savage shell of a human body to take the blast. With one exception it was exactly as it had been during that split-second of precognition in Darcy’s Clarke’s office; the exception was sound. For even though the Continuum acted as a baffle, still there came the subdued roar of the explosion, as the immaterial frame of the door buckled and warped and finally blinked out of existence.
But not before the Continuum had rid itself of a hideous contamination, and a jet of wet red stinking human debris had erupted like a volcano, flinging the guts and brains and shit and shattered bones of a man up and outwards against the high walls and windows of the street.
And then the slimy, spattering rain, that smelled of cordite and copper and many a crime corrected…
It was over but as yet the street was still and strangely silent. Street-cleaning vehicles had been ordered-up and were on their way; somewhere in the near-distance police and ambulance sirens wailed their unmistakable dirges; a handful of unfortunate uniformed officers were picking up… whatever pieces were large enough to be gathered off the street. A man, staggering and bloody, was being led away from a shattered store window, where the rear of his car stuck up at an odd angle.
‘You,’ one of the police inspectors said to Harry, with a hand on his shoulder, ‘are a hell of a lucky man. You were the closest to it when that bomb went off.’ But suddenly his voice was very quiet. ‘What did you… see? I mean exactly what was it that happened there?’ Carefully, he dabbed specks of blood and other matter from his forehead.
Darcy Clarke was fully recovered. Breaking into the conversation with what he hoped would be a useful lie, he said, ‘I saw everything. When Sean was shot he fell on top of his hold-all. Then there came the explosion. His body muffled the sound but took the full force of the blast. He just… flew apart.’
Harry nodded. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Actually, I was looking away from it.’
As luck would have it, most of them had been looking away from it. But behind the parapet wall of a tall building, white-faced and wondering, a police marksman examined his weapon and thought, what the hell…? For it was one thing to shoot at a man, but quite another to hit him and see him fall - and then watch him disappear right out of this world!
Not fifty feet away from the group on the traffic island, Harry’s Krishna types huddled in a shop doorway. For once immobilized, they stared at the scene of what could have been an enormous disaster. Harry saw them looking. Their sandals might have been stilled for once, but their slanted eyes were still full of the action that had been, and that they’d seen. One of them - their leader? - was lowering a camera. Harry couldn’t help wondering what he’d been photographing, and why…
Amazingly, Darcy’s car looked like it might still drive, however dangerously. The senior lawmen seemed uncertain about it, but before they could advise Darcy against it he’d bundled the Necroscope and Trevor Jordan inside and driven off. On the way to E-Branch HQ, he said, ‘It seems we should never underestimate you, Harry. I don’t know what you did, or how you did it, but I do know it was you.’
And Jordan said, ‘My telepathy seems like a toy by comparison!’
‘We all played our parts,’ Harry shrugged. ‘We’ve worked together before, and it’s starting to look like we make a good team.’ But before they could misinterpret that, and perhaps his future intentions, he added: ‘Well, this time it worked out, at least.’
Darcy made a derisory noise in his nose. ‘But sometimes I feel like such a… such a bloody coward, that’s all!’
‘I shouldn’t if I were you,’ Jordan told him. ‘Oh, it was Harry who saved the day, right enough, but was it all him? How do you know he wasn’t prompted by that guardian angel of yours, Darcy, taking care of you as always?’
Which gave them all something to think about on their way home…
Back in Darcy’s office, after he and Harry had cleaned up and things were quieter, the Head of E-Branch took up the conversation with Harry where it had been interrupted by the Minister Responsible’s call for help:
‘Harry, we know that we can’t overload you. By that I mean we know you could give us the solution to every unsolved murder there’s ever been, certainly to the ones where the victims knew their murderer. Except—’
‘—Where they know their murderers, you mean,’ Harry cut in, correcting him.
And Darcy knew he was right. For Harry was the Necroscope and talked to dead men. To him, when a man died, he didn’t just stop. His body stopped, yes, but his mind went on. And Harry’s talent gave him access to such incorporeal minds. Any ordinary policeman must find clues, discover evidence to bring a killer to justice. But Harry could have it ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’, as it were. To him the dead weren’t, well, departed - not all the way - but moved aside. As if they were in another room, where he could speak to them across the threshold of his amazing talent. He could simply ask a victim who had done it!
… Or perhaps not so simply. No, definitely not simply. This thing he had was almost unique; it would still be unique, if Harry Jr hadn’t come along. Which was the problem in a nutshell: how do you use a unique talent to best effect? For example, you surely wouldn’t employ Albert Einstein as an accountant! And what of the Necroscope, Harry Keogh? In a world where brutal murders and terrorist atrocities were now ‘commonplace’ crimes (God help us), Harry might easily find them his life’s work! Was that why he had been born into this world and time? His only reason for being? Was that all? Darcy thought not.
‘What I’m saying,’ he continued, ‘is that you - we, the Branch - can’t be expected to do the work of the police. Well, not all of their work. We do some: a lot of big-time crime, or the occasional case that’s so abhorrent someone has to be made to pay for it. Or sometimes an “urgent” job, like today’s thing in Oxford Street. But in the main we’re spies… mindspies. It isn’t so much individuals we protect as the country, our way of life - “western civilization,” if you like - from forces that oppose it. But I know you’ve heard all of this before, and from someone far more eloquent…”
Harry nodded, knowing that Darcy meant Sir Keenan Gormley, first Head of E-Branch, who had recruited him into the service. By coincidence, that had been just such a case. Abhorrent, yes, to say the least… for Boris Dragosani had butchered him! But without Sir Keenan, without having spoken to his remains, Harry might never have gone on to his discovery of the Mobius Continuum, and to his re-discovery of life, in the brain-dead body of Alec Kyle. Except he must stop thinking of it in that way, because Kyle was no more while he, Harry Keogh… was.
‘So currently you’re worried I might think that this job of yours, whatever it is, is beneath me, too mundane,’ he said. ‘You think I might reckon it’s just a red herring to divert my mind from other, more personal problems - and that’s probably exactly what it is! But you and I are on the same side in more ways than you think, Darcy. The fact is, I need this job, whatever it turns out to be. That’s why I got myself involved down in Oxford Street today - yes, I know, against your best advice - because it was a diversion… Well, and maybe for a couple of other reasons, too. Okay, so this other job you’re talking about is no big deal. At least it will keep me busy. That’s my reasoning, anyway. And it’s yours, too, I fancy. So why don’t we just get on with it?’
Darcy nodded, seemed relieved. ‘Okay. But it isn’t just a coincidence that I mentioned the police. This time they’ve actually asked us for our help. Oh, we get requests from them… fine! Like today, when they know we have someone who can help. I’m talking about Jordan, whom they’ve used frequently enough in the past. But even to the top brass in the police he’s just someone with a weird knack, a lucky guesser. That’s how they view us: as a pack of fortune-tellers, literally “psychics” in the popular or worst possible meaning of the word. As if they see us sitting around a table holding seances or something - which isn’t too far from the truth, I suppose! Anyway, we’re always their last resort.’
