So… these two were in the pockets of the KGB, who in turn would have a section working with Harry's old 'friends' at the Soviet E-Branch HQ in Moscow. It was the Russian espers who were raising their ugly head again; they remembered Bronnitsy too well and desired to pay Harry back for it. Yes, and they must fear him mightily! First Wellesley's crazy plot in Bonnyrig, and now this. He would be smuggled quietly out of Romania and into the USSR, handed over to Soviet E-Branch, and simply… disappear. Or at least, that was the scenario as they had worked it out.
But it told Harry quite a lot. If he was to be smuggled out of Romania, then patently the actual Romanian authorities didn't know about him at all. To them he was simply what his passport said he was: Hari Kiokis, a perfectly legitimate businessman from Greece. It made sense. The KGB (or E-Branch) had contacted their own in Romania, men who could be trusted to expedite the job — because to try to arrange any other kind of extradition would only prove to be lengthy and frustrating. So maybe there was something to be said for Ceausescu's way of running the show after all.
'Er, Eugen?' he said. 'It seems to me that your main task was simply to pick me up. So why didn't you do it yesterday, at the airport? Because you needed to avoid publicity?'
"That was one reason,' the tall one answered over his shoulder. 'Also, we thought to kill two birds with one stone: tail you and discover your contact. You must have come here to see someone, after all. So we simply followed your taxi. But alas, a puncture! These things happen. Later we picked up your taxi driver and he showed us where he'd dropped you off. Also, he said you'd be catching a bus back into the city in the morning. Now that was frustrating! All that driving up and down since dawn, waiting for you to put in an appearance. As a last resort, of course, we would be obliged to return to Bucharest and wait for you at the airport. There is only one flight to Athens today. As it happened, however, that wasn't necessary.'
'There was no contact!' Harry suddenly blurted it out. 'I was just… just supposed to leave certain instructions, and pick up certain information.' He was taking a chance they knew almost nothing about him, except that he was to be detained for their Russian bosses. Also, time was getting shorter. By now his friends in the cemetery back there should be very nearly ready for him.
Eugen applied the brakes, slowed the car to a halt. 'You left instructions? There's a drop, back there?'
'Yes,' Harry lied.
'And the information you picked up? Where is that?'
'It wasn't there. That's why I waited all night, to collect it this morning. But it still wasn't there.'
Eugen turned around in his seat and stared at Harry with narrowed eyes. 'You are being very open, my friend. I take it this all has to do with our peasant fifth-columnists, right?'
Harry tried to look frightened, which wasn't at all hard. He knew nothing about Romania's peasant fifth-columnists, but he did understand something of the psychology of thugs such as these. 'Something like that,' he said. 'But… you said you have a room at the airport? Well, I think I'd rather tell you everything now, than have comrade Corneliu here beat it out of me in private later.'
'A great shame,' Corneliu grunted, and shrugged. 'Still, I might beat you anyway.'
Eugen said: 'You will show us this letter drop?'
'If it will make life easier for me, yes,' Harry answered.
'Hah!' scoffed Corneliu. This one, tough?' And to Harry: 'Are they all girls, your British spies?'
Harry shrugged. In fact he knew very little about standard British spies, only about espers: mindspies.
Eugen turned the car around and backtracked; there was no more conversation until Harry called a halt at the entrance to the graveyard. 'It's in here,' he said then. 'The letter drop.'
They all got out of the car and Corneliu used his gun to prod Harry on ahead. As he went he sent his deadspeak before him: We're here. One of them at least has a gun — trained on me. In the moment that he sees you he'll be distracted. That's when I plan to disarm him. Is everything OK?
We're OK, Harry, the Zaharias answered at once. And there are several others who wouldn't be dissuaded. We don't know if they'll be much good. But… strength in numbers, eh?
I don't see you, Harry looked worriedly all about. Are you in hiding?
The others are just under the soil, Harry, Ion Zaharia told him. And we're out of our boxes, in our sarcophagus.
Harry remembered: the Zaharias had been buried in the same plot and had a joint sarcophagus, its heavy, beautifully veined lid standing some eighteen inches above the surrounding marble chips of their plot. They hadn't seemed to mind him sitting there for a few moments while he was talking to them. So, they were waiting under the lid, eh? Well, and that should come in very handy.
'Move, Keogh!' Corneliu growled, shoving him forward down an aisle between rows of leaning headstones. 'Where is this drop, anyway?'
'Right there,' Harry pointed ahead. He moved to the huge tomb and stood looking down at its massive lid. 'I had to lever it to one side, but together we should slide it easily enough, once we lift it from its groove.' He hoped that the thugs hadn't noticed how ripe the air was, and how much worse the smell was growing from second to second, but this was something he dare not ask.
'Oh?' Eugen grinned mirthlessly. 'Desecration, too, eh? Why, you should be ashamed of yourself, Harry Keogh, posting letters to the dead! They can't answer you, you know.' And to Corneliu: 'You hold your gun on him, while I give him a hand.'
How wrong you are! Harry thought, as he and the tall agent strained at the lid — which suddenly, and very easily, slid to one side. The Necroscope had expected that, certainly, and held his breath; but Corneliu and Eugen had not, and didn't. Nor were they expecting what happened next, in the moment after the tomb's trapped gasses whooshed out.
'God!' Eugen staggered back, his hands flying to his nose and mouth. But Corneliu, standing back a little, simply gasped and bugged his eyes. And the weapon in his hand seemed to automatically transfer its aim from Harry's back to what was first sitting up, then standing, and finally reaching out from the shadowy mouth of the tomb!
Before he could squeeze the trigger, if indeed sufficient strength remained for that, Harry broke his wrist with a kick he seemed to have been saving for years. The gun went flying, and so did Corneliu — directly into the burned and blistered, blue and tomb-grey hands of the Zaharias! The brothers grabbed and held him, stared at him with their dead bubble eyes, and threatened him with blackened bone teeth in straining, scorched cartilage jaws.
The other agent, Eugen, gibbering as he crashed through the ancient bramble-grown plots towards the graveyard's exit, didn't even pause to look back… until he ran into what was waiting for him. Those others of whom the Zaharias had reported: 'they wouldn't be dissuaded'. And for all that they were mainly fragmentary — or possibly because that's what they were — these crumbling, crawling, spastically kicking parts of corpses stopped Eugen dead in his tracks.