'If we can get the girl, Harry and Jordan all at the same time — especially if we can get them on their own, as individuals — that's when we'll move on them. Which might possibly be precipitated if or when Harry and Jordan decide to take out Found. Ideally, we'll wait until we can move on all three of them simultaneously. That way they don't get any warning. What we mustn't do is try to pick them off one by one, which would be to alert the others. Are we straight on that?
'Lastly — or rather before we go on to examine the tools of our trade — I have something to tell you that I know won't go down at all welclass="underline" namely that the Minister here has confided in Soviet E-Branch on this thing.' Trask stared into the small sea of astonished faces, but no one spoke.
'The point is,' he went on, 'that even if we find a way to trap the Necroscope, which won't be easy, still he'll have a bolthole into a place he could conceivably come back from — bringing God-only-knows what back with him! Yes, I'm talking about the Gate at the Perchorsk Projekt under the Urals. We've kept tabs on that nightmare ever since we found out about it, and we know that the Russians are managing to contain it while they decide on a more satisfactory solution. If we make life intolerable, hopefully impossible, for Harry here, he might just try heading for Starside. So that's why we've confided in the Russians, because we daren't let him go back there. Fine if he wanted to stay there, but monstrous if he ever decided to bring anything back here with him.
'What makes us think he might hide out in another world? A notebook we found an hour ago at Clarke's flat, that's what. Darcy had been jotting down a few thoughts, but that must have been before Harry got to him. It may even be why he got to him. The notes are only a mess of scribble but they make it plain that Darcy thought Harry would skip to Starside. Well, now the Soviets know about Harry, as much as we could tell them, anyway, and they'll be looking out for him. So it looks like the Perchorsk Gate is closed to him.
'OK, so now let's consider our… equipment. And how to use it. Then we'll get round to breaking you all down into balanced teams and doing a preliminary itemization of your tasks.'
Trask removed a blanket from various pieces of equipment laid out on a stout folding table. 'It's important you learn how to use this stuff,' he said. 'The machetes speak for themselves. But be careful with them — they're razor-sharp! As for this: I suppose you all recognize a crossbow when you see one? This third item, however, might not be quite so familiar. It's a lightweight flamethrower, a new model. So I think maybe we'll take a look at that first.
This is the fuel tank, which sits on your back like so…'
And so it went on. The briefing lasted another hour.
Right after sunset Harry made his way to Darlington via the Möbius Continuum. He left Trevor Jordan sleeping (not surprisingly exhausted; his return from Beyond was still like the very strangest dream to him, from which he still feared he might suddenly awaken) in a secret room under the eaves of the house on the river. From the attic room there was a way into the deserted, crumbling old place next door, so that if anything should happen Jordan might use this route to effect something of an escape. But both espers had checked out the psychic 'atmosphere' of the locality and there didn't seem to be anything happening; and in any case Jordan had been busy rationalizing his fears in that respect and really couldn't see E-Branch doing a Yulian Bodescu on him. And in any event, he was satisfied that they wouldn't do anything rash.
Johnny Pound's address in Darlington was the ground-floor flat in an old, four-storeyed, Victorian terrace house on the outer edge of the town centre. The old red bricks had turned black from being too close to the mainline railway; the windows were bleary; three steps led up from a path in the tiny, overgrown front garden to a communal porch. And behind the fagade of that porch — behind the flyspecked, dingy windows, there in those very rooms — that was where Found lived.
In the twilight Harry's skin tingled at the thought and he felt his eager vampire senses intensifying as he walked the street first one way, then the other, past this gloomy street-corner residence of a twentieth-century necromancer. The murderer of sweet young Penny Sanderson.
Simple confrontation would be the easy way, of course, but that wasn't part of the Necroscope's plan. No, for then the result could only be precipitate: the accused would either 'come quietly', in the parlance of the Law, or he would react violently. And Harry would kill him. Which would be far too easy.
Pound's way, on the other hand, his modus operandi, was cruel, creeping, designed to terrify even before the terrible act — the monstrous crime itself — was committed. And Harry was concerned that in his case the punishment should fit the crime. Except… there should be something of a trial, too. But trial as in ordeal, not as in examination as a precursor to judgement. For if Johnny Found was in fact the man, then the sentence had already been passed.
The working day was over; traffic was thinning in the darkening streets; people wended their ways home. And some of them entered the house of the necromancer. A middle-aged woman with a bulging plastic carrier-bag, letting herself in fumblingly through the front door; a young woman with straggly hair and a whining child pulling on her arm, calling out after the woman with the bag to wait for her and hold the door; an older man in coveralls, weary and slump-shouldered, carrying a leather bag of tools.
A light came on in a garret room under steeply sloping eaves. Another winked into being on the second floor, and one on the third. Harry looked away for a moment, up and down the street, then looked back -
— In time to see a fourth, much dimmer light come on in an angled corner window in the ground-floor flat. But he hadn't seen Found go in.
The house stood on a corner; there must be a side-door; Harry waited for the traffic to clear, then crossed to the other side of the road and turned the corner. And there it was: a recessed doorway at the side, Johnny Pound's private access to his lair. And Johnny himself was in there.
Harry crossed the cobbled street away from the house and merged with the shadows of the building on the far side. He turned and leaned back a little against the wall, and looked at the light where it shone out on this side, too, from a tiny window in Pound's ground-floor flat. And he wondered what his quarry was doing in there, what he was thinking… until it dawned on him that he didn't have to just wonder. For Trevor Jordan had given him the power to find out for himself.
He let his vampire-enhanced telepathy flow outwards on the night air, out and away into the dark and across the road, and through the old brickwork into the smoke-grimed, stagnant house of evil. But the probe was aimless, unpractised and lacking authority, spreading out like ripples on a dark pond in all directions. Until suddenly — the Necroscope found more than he'd bargained for!
His telepathy touched upon a mind — no, two minds — and he knew at once that neither one of them belonged to Johnny Found. They weren't in the house, for one thing, and for another… they were already intent upon him! Upon Harry Keogh!
Harry drew breath in a sharp hiss of apprehension — fought hard against the urge to crouch down, which would only serve to illustrate his awareness — and looked this way and that along the dark alley. E-Branch? No, for there was no strength there, no talent, no metaphysical power. So who and what were they? And where?