I said, “The reason I want to know is because I have some property that belongs to the Ministry of Defence. Part of a set of wartime equipment. And what I’m doing is bringing it back.”
“I see,” said the young man. “And would you mind telling me what this piece of equipment might be?”
“Do you have a superior officer here?” I asked him.
He gave a patronising grimace. “I haven’t even said this is Ministry property yet.”
“Okay,” I told him. “If it is Ministry property, and you do have a superior officer, tell him we have Adramelech’s thirteenth friend. Right out here, in the back of the car.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Just tell him. Adramelech’s thirteenth friend. We’ll wait here for five minutes.”
The young man pulled a very disconcerted face, and then he said, “I suppose you’d better wait inside. I won’t be a moment.”
He opened the door wider, and we stepped into a musty-smelling hall with an olive-green dado that was worn shiny with age. I lit another cigarette and passed one to Madeleine. She wasn’t an experienced smoker, and she puffed at it like a thirteen-year-old with her first Camel, but right now we needed anything that could steady our nerves. On the peeling wall just behind us was a mildew-spotted photograph of Earl Haig, and if that wasn’t an out-and-out admission that 18 Huntingdon Place belonged to the Ministry of Defence, I don’t know what could have been, apart from a tank parked outside.
I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose. What with losing two nights of sleep, and chasing around in the bitter winter weather, I was beginning to show all the symptoms of a head cold. Madeleine leaned tiredly against the wall beside me, and looked too drained to say anything.
After a few minutes, I heard voices on the upstairs landing, and then an immaculately-creased pair of khaki trousers came into view down the stairs, followed by a crisp khaki jacket with a Sam Browne belt and medal ribbons, and then a fit, square face with a bristling white moustache and the kind of eyes that were crows footed from peering across the horizons of the British Empire.
The officer came forward with a brisk, humourless smile. He said: “They didn’t give me your names, unfortunately. Remiss of them.”
I flipped my cigarette out into the snow. “I’m Dan McCook, this is Madeleine Passerelle.”
The officer gave a sharp, brief nod of his head, as if he were trying to shake his eyebrows loose. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Thanet, Special Operations Branch.”
There was a silence. He was obviously expecting us to explain why we were here. I looked at Madeleine and Madeleine looked back at me.
Lieutenant Colonel Thanet said, “They tell me you have something interesting. Something that belongs to us.”
“I guess it does in a way,” I told him.
He gave a tight, puckered smiled. The kind of smile that my grandfather, who came from Madison, Wisconsin, used to describe as “a close view of a mule’s ass.” He said, “Something to do with D-Day, if I understand correctly.”
I nodded. “You can threaten us with the Official Secrets Act if you want to, but we know what happened anyway, so I don’t think there’s much point. We know about the thirteen ANPs that you British loaned to Patton, and we know what happened to them afterwards. Twelve of them came here, and were sealed up, and the thirteenth one was left in a tank in Normandy, and conveniently forgotten. What we have out here, in the back of our car, is your thirteenth ANP.”
The colonel looked at me with those clear, penetrating eyes. I could see that he was trying to work out what kind of a johnny I was, and what official category this particular problem fitted into, and what the correct follow-up procedure was going to be.
But what he said wasn’t army jargon, and he didn’t say it like a man whose decisions are usually taken by the letter of the military rulebook. He said: “Are you telling me the truth, Mr. McCook? Because if you are, then I’m very seriously worried.”
I pushed the door wider so that he could see the Citröen parked at the curb. “It’s in the trunk,” I told him. “And it’s the real thing. Its name is Elmck, or Asmorod. The devil of knives and sharpness.”
He bit his lip. He was silent for a while, and then he said: “Is it safe. I mean, is it sealed up, in any religious way?”
I shook my head.
The colonel asked, “Do you know anything about it.” Anything about it at all?”
“Yes. It told us it was a disciple of Adramelech, the Grand Chancellor of Hell. We took it out of the tank in France because it was disturbing the people who lived near it, and because Mile Passerelle believed it was responsible for killing her mother. But since then, it’s killed three other people, and it’s threatened to do the same to us.”
Madeleine said to the coloneclass="underline" “Monsieur Le colonel, you don’t seem at all incredulous. I would even say that you believed us.”
The colonel managed a twisted little grin. “It’s hardly surprising, mademoiselle. It has been my particular brief for the last six years to look into that ANP business after D-Day. I probably know more about that special division of tanks than anybody alive.”
“Then it’s true?” I asked him. “The other devils are really here?”
“Who told you that?”
“An American gentleman named Sparks. He was one of the people involved in the special division during the war.”
Lieutenant Colonel Thanet sighed, as if he expected that kind of behaviour from Americans.
“Is it true?” I questioned him. “Are they really here?”
Thanet said, “Yes. They’re sealed in the cellars. All twelve of them. It’s been part of my job to work out a way of using them again.”
“Using them again? Wasn’t once enough?”
“Probably. But you know what departments of defence are like. Anything cheap and unusual and lethal always appeals to their sense of humour. And these days, they particularly like nasty alternatives to nuclear weaponry. So they dug out the file on the ANPs, and sent me here to see what I could do.”
“And have you done anything?” asked Madeleine.
“Not much so far. We’ve had a couple of beggars out of their sacks and had a look at their bones and their general physiology, and we know that as long as their seal is broken, they can take on flesh again, and live. That was how it was done in World War Two, and that’s why we haven’t broken any of the seals. But we’re planning on greater things, once we’re sure we can keep them under control.”
“Greater things?” I queried. “What does that mean?”
“Well,” said the colonel, with a furrowed frown, “we were going to try to conjure up their master, because he’s supposed to be several thousand times more powerful.”
“Adramelech?” breathed Madeleine, her eyes wide.
“That’s right. The great and terrible Samarian deity. Well, I wouldn’t have believed it back when I was at Sandhurst, but once they showed me what that special division had done under Patton…”
He looked at me with a meaningful inclination of his cropped and white-haired head.
“There were photographs taken after D-Day, you know,” he told us. “Photographs and even colour films. They were quite extraordinary. I should think that, apart from the H-Bomb, they’re unquestionably the most spectacular and most secret things that NATO have got.”
I said, “How can we control something like Adramelech, when we can hardly control these thirteen devils of his?”
Lieutenant Colonel Thanet rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, that’s a tricky one, and that’s why I’m rather worried that you’ve brought our friend Elmek over. We don’t know how to control these devils for certain, and we certainly have no idea what to do with Adramelech. We don’t even know what Adramelech could possibly look like, and that’s always supposing one could actually see such a thing with the human eye. One way we’ve kept the situation under control is by leaving the thirteenth devil where it was, in France. Oh yes, we knew it was there. But we wanted to leave it there—at least until we worked out a foolproof way to prevent these other twelve beggars from setting fire to us, or giving us leprosy, or strangling us with our own guts.”