As the precog paused, Trask levered himself off the desk, stood up straight and closed his eyes. He breathed in until his lungs couldn't take any more, then made for the door. And no one said anything until he had made an unsteady exit.

Covering for his superior - though in fact Trask needed no such excuse - Goodly said, 'Did you hear the chopper?' (No one had.) 'Ben will want to see it safely down, and maybe ...

maybe talk to the pilot?' He offered a shrug which was followed by an awkward silence, until Jake said: 'lan?' It was the first time he'd used Goodly's first name. 'Will you finish it?'

Goodly looked mildly surprised as he answered, 'Of course. All of this is for you, after all. But in any case there's not much more to tell.' And in a little while: 'We had radio and telephone links to the Refuge,' the precog went on. 'Well, we should have had, but not that night. We tried but couldn't get through. And because of what Nathan had told us, we feared the worst. But Ben - denying, or even defying his own talent - he had to know for sure, of course.

Several means were to hand.

'We called in our espers, everyone who was available, and put them to work. But long before the first of them arrived at the HQ, Nathan was volunteering his services. He'd been to the Refuge before and its coordinates were locked in his mind. But if Ben was right and the Wamphyri had come through the subterranean Gate - and if they were still there - what then?

'For Ben, the next hour was an endless anxiety attack; he sweated and agonized over danger-fraught decisions and equally painful but inescapable truths. Having faith in his talent, he knew it was already too late - but it was Zek who was there at the Refuge! And Nathan: he would have gone at the snap of Ben's fingers - indeed, he was the only one who could go, along that special route of his. And in fact we had to restrain him, order him not to. And Ben weighing all of this in his tormented mind, all the time knowing in his heart that it was too late, that it had been too late from the moment he'd started awake in a cold sweat at his home in Kensington.

'Then Millicent Cleary arrived; Milly is - now she is - the very best of our telepaths. And right on her heels our locator of long standing, David Chung. I'll never forget the scene in the Ops Room that night: Chung standing before the illuminated wall map with the tip of his index finger touching the location of Radujevac, and his left hand holding Milly's. We frequently work in tandem that way. And after only a second or so, their reactions: 'How David s.n.a.t.c.hed himself back, away from the wall. And how Milly s.n.a.t.c.hed back her hand from his! For the locator had sensed something - something at Radujevac, at the Refuge - and she had picked it right out of his mind: the clammy feel of it, its evil taint. Mindsmog!

'Milly had hoped to contact Zek; firm friends and colleagues, they knew each other's minds. But now, there was simply no trace of Zek's telepathic aura, no indication of life. Hers was a "flatline" on the monitor of telepathic awareness. And as for the overwhelming presence of mindsmog: it couldn't be denied or mistaken, and Ben's worst fears were corroborated.

'Of course, the Necroscope had his own way of looking into matters of that sort, but... no need to go into that here.

'Well, just like last night I blamed myself. Why hadn't I seen it coming? What good is a talent that only reveals itself when it wants to? Why is the future so b.l.o.o.d.y devious? I blamed myself that I hadn't foreseen it, while Ben was in h.e.l.l for having seen it! And the rest of the team, they were depressed that they'd had to confirm it. While at the Refuge, the mindsmog was rapidly dispersing ...

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'After that, there was no holding Nathan. His father, Harry Keogh, had owed Zek favours. And Nathan himself was in her debt... not only was she a friend, one who had fought alongside him in Starside, but she'd even been involved with his discovery of the Mobius Continuum. No less than Ben, Nathan knew he wouldn't rest until he - until they - were sure. Not sure that Zek was dead, for all of us knew that by then, but sure that she would never be wndead.

'And so we armed ourselves, and Nathan took us to the Refuge.

But a refuge no longer, for now it was a charnel house...

'Ben, myself, Chung, and Lardis - huh! Try keeping the Old Lidesci out of it; he'd loved Zek dearly - Nathan took us along the Mobius route to Radujevac. It was some two hours, maybe two and a half, since Ben had come awake from his nightmare. More than enough time for the ... the slaughter of the staff and children. From what we saw, twenty minutes had been enough!

'Those poor kids, and the people who had looked after them; their torn, sometimes shrivelled bodies were already cold.

They had been dead before Ben had driven his car even halfway in to the HQ. And I believe that seeing that for himself- that knowing there was nothing he could have done - was the only thing that kept him sane.

'There were no survivors. Thirty-six kids and eight staff, dead or... or disappeared. Gone from us, anyway. For you see, we knew only too well that the ones who weren't there ... that they weren't survivors, either. And certainly they'd have been better off dead. For they were now undead, or if not now, then soon.

There was no other explanation for their absence; unless they had simply been taken as food, for later. But if that was the case, why only adults, when the children had been murdered out of hand and left behind? Anyway: 'The missing staff, three of them - or rather two of them, since last night - were Denise Karalambos, a paediatrician from Athens, Andre Corner, a psychiatric specialist from London, and ... and someone who isn't any longer a problem: Bruce Trennier, the engineer. As for why they were singled out, there are theories but we can't be sure. Trennier, as we'v e seen, found favour as a lieutenant. Perhaps the others are similarl y situated. But anyone who feels sorry for them can forget it. They'd be better off dead - they're going to be better off dead. At least, that has to be our point of view. Not to mention our intention.

'But about Zek - and excuse me if I seem offhand; it's simply that I find it best to be cold about certain things, for I'm sure my emotions would be just as fragile as anyone else's if I were to forget myself and let them hold sway - Zek hadn't suffered.

When that blast hit the sump, she hadn't felt a thing. Down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, everything was askew. The reinforced concrete floor had buckled upwards; the turrets had been blown off their bases like popping a pair of corks; the cave of the resurgence ... simply wasn't there any more! The walls and roof were completely caved in, and it's a wonder that the rear end of the Refug e hadn't followed suit.

'The Wamphyri and their lieutenants must have felt it, too: that awesome blast. Indeed, any creature in that bas.e.m.e.nt - any creature of normal flesh and blood - would have been stunned by the concussion or even killed by the shock of it. But then, the Wamphyri aren't human, and in all probability it only served to enrage them further. Certainly they raged through the Refuge.

'The only good thing to come of it all, as far as I could tell, was that one of those b.l.o.o.d.y awful Gates was now well and truly closed. Oh, the Gate itself was still there, miles up the underground river, under the Carpathian foothills, but its single exit was finally blocked by two thousand tons of fractured concrete slabs and G.o.d only knows how much solid rock.

'So much for that, but what about the three creatures who had come through and were already in our world? What about them and their lieutenants, and now a trio of new thralls to aid and advise them in their Earthly ventures? And three very intelligent thralls, at that, who knew the ways of Earth?

'That, we believe, i s the main reason why those three were 213.

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spared ... or cursed, depending on how you see it: because they could add to Malinari's intelligence of this new and potentially dangerous world. And we also see something of his cunning - and of his ruthlessness, too - in the murder of the innocents. It was simply a matter of leaving no one behind to speak about what they had witnessed.

'For you see, only six of the victims appeared to have ... to have been used. And where they had been fairly well drained, the rest of them were just dead. But horribly dead. For most of them it had been instantaneous: stiffened fingers with nails as hard and as sharp as chisels had chopped through their backs or into their chests, to break their spines or crush their hearts. The terrible strength of the Wamphyri! But others ... we don't think some of the others had it so, well, so "easy".

'I said that certain corpses were shrivelled. But "shrivelled"

doesn't say it all by any means. Lardis, when he saw those bodies, said it was Szwart's work. It wasn't simply a reduction of bodily fluids but of... I don't know, of the substance, the essence - the soul? - of the victims. The destruction of whatever it is that makes a person human, giving him shape, character, humanity, for Christ's sake.' These pitiful things, they no longer had any of that. Picture the last apple on the tree, all wrinkled and dried out by the sun, all fallen in, with the last of its juices fermented and sick inside it. When it falls or if you touch it, its skin splits, and deep in its core the pulp is rotten and black. That's what they were like ... 'And there were others whose eyes were open, staring, quite empty, and for all that they were dead I couldn't help but feel that they hadn't known very much about it. Their bodies weren't shrivelled like those of Szwart's victims, no, but it seemed to me that their minds had been. And Lardis told us Malinari would have been responsible for that.

'As for the female victims: their pale dead faces were full of awe, amazement ... rapture? Some kind of exquisite, delicious agony? It's true that I don't have the words for it, but I might have a name: Vavara....'

Well, enough. There are no words that can say how we felt.

Appalled doesn't nearly cover it. And nothing we could do about it, not then, not immediately. What, we should alert the a uthorities, shout it to the world, initiate total panic and put the fear of G.o.d and all the devils of h.e.l.l into every mortal human being on the entire planet ... if we were believed? We couldn't do any of those things, and for obvious reasons. Can't you just picture the witchhunts? G.o.d, but we'd be back in the Dark Ages! Witch-p.r.i.c.king and human bonfires, and licences to torture and kill handed out w.i.l.l.y-nilly, free to anyone with a grudge. 'Medical research would stop, stop dead - or undead! The laboratories would search for cures, of course they would, and spread the thing faster than a plague. Blood donors? You think we're short of blood now? But blood would become the most precious of commodities, and keeping it the first priority.

People locked in their homes, making them impregnable fortresses, defending them with guns, silver, stakes, crossbows and whatever. And the filthy rich with their private armies, making the odd, eccentric hermit of, say, Howard Hughes's meager stature seem like a high-profile socialite by comparison.

'Borders. In the last fifteen to twenty years we've seen them open up. Britain has been cagey about controls, pa.s.sports and such, thank G.o.d - but Europe? Can't you just imagine the panic, see the chaos as all the old rules and statutes were reinstated, the checkpoints rushed back into being, with armed guards at ports and airports, and not forgetting the reservoirs, farms, fisheries, and ... and anywhere where food is processed?

And how long before countries started blaming each other?

'When the s.h.i.t - excuse me, the accusations - started flying, Russia and Romania would probably take the brunt of it, if only because the Gates are on their territory. But what about the UK, Great Britain? We've known about the Gates for thirty-odd years! Or am I just talking about "we," the team, the organization - E-Branch itself, for G.o.d's sake - and our involvement? As for our Minister Responsible, the "Invisible Man" at the top: hull t 214 215.

But haven't we all hea rd about this - er, how does it go? - this "culpable deniab ility," or some such gobbledygook? "Damage limitation," and the like? Does anyone care to guess what those things really mean? They're just ways of carrying on lying to cover up unpalatable truths that weren't told the first time around, that's all. And folks, what that boils down to is we would get crucified! The end of E-Branch ... and who would look after the shop then?

'And that's not the end of it. h.e.l.l, I've barely started! Sooner or later the world would find out that the Russians had actually made the Gate at Perchorsk, an experiment that didn't work out. And the same world would demand that they destroy it.

Too d.a.m.ned late, of course, but destroy it anyway. Oh, really?

What, with Mikhail Suvorov's henchmen in Moscow still waiting for it to pay off) They should shut down a potential goldmine just because the gold-greedy West couldn't stand the compet.i.tion? And can't you just see the old Iron Curtain slamming shut again, and that old red flag flying as before?

'Oh, they might get the message eventually - when nights turned to nightmares - and then they'd destroy it quick enough. But how? As they were ready to do it the last time around, with nukes? For just like the rest of us the Soviets have made "progress" in the last quarter-century, and I really don't care to speculate about what they might do now ... but I will, if only to make the point and get this over and done with: 'Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; missiles with multiple warheads, launched through the Gate at Perchorsk.

The total devastation of a world - Nathan's world - and Nathan and all his people, all the Szgany, with it. Neutron bombs, yes, so that all life would die but the gold would still be there, with no one and nothing to deny its plundering, its ma.s.sive, planetwide tomWooting! Which is fine, or not, except we don't even know if neutron radiation will kill the Wamphyri. Only that it will kill everything else.

'And meanwhile the vampires would be raging on this world.

Because if we killed a couple of thralls, the Lords would make more. Survival, people: the d.a.m.ned survival of the d.a.m.ned!

And how long before total embargoes - in effect, sieges - were laid on entire islands, nations, continents, as the terror overtook them one by one? And how long then before the missiles and the neutron bombs were flying again, this time on our world? We've had "final solutions" before, but there are holocausts and holocausts.

'I mentioned the Dark Ages, but I think we could probably go back, oh, a couple of centuries earlier than that...

'... So, you see, we couldn't tell anyone. It was our baby, and we'd just have to handle it ourselves. BUT ... if we handled it our way-E-Branch's way, the right way-then we might have a chance. And in fact there were several clues that indeed we had a chance. 'It was a question of thinking it all through, then using our combined talents to check on our conclusions. Very well, so why had Vavara, Szwart, and Malinari left Starside to come venturing in our world? Where were the benefits for them? What was wrong with Sunside that they'd left it to their lieutenants and burgeoning vampire army in favour of Earth?

'But they were known on Sunside, indeed they were figures from legend there, and the Szgany knew how to fight them; fight them with alien weapons and the incredible skills of the Necroscope, Nathan Keogh. Also, these vampires were ambitious beyond the bloodiest dreams of almost any other Lords or Ladies of the Wamphyri before them. Perhaps the world of Sunside/Starside was too limiting in its scope. But Earth...

'They'd learned of Earth from Mikhail Suvorov and his ill- fated team of explorer-prospectors. They knew us: that without our weapons we were softer far than the Szgany of Sunside.

And there were millions, indeed billions of us, spread out in many different nations across a world that was as wide as its horizons. Not merely a single strip of habitable woodlands between barrier mountains and burning deserts, but a huge and thriving termite's nest of sprawling humanity! A land of milk and honey - and blood, of course - stretching out forever.

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'Better far, we didn't believe in vampires! In our world a vampire was a fiction , a creature in a book, a myth out of our superst.i.tious pas t. Even in Romania, Hungary, or the Greek Islands, you'd have trouble finding more than a handful who truly believe in vampires today. In E-Branch, however, we have known for a long time that they never were a myth, that indeed there were vampires in our world once before, and maybe more than once.

'And Zek, she knew it, too, and knew it better than most. She had actually lived in the Lady Karen's aerie, on Starside.' So perhaps the mentalist Lord Malinari took something from her after all, the fact that earlier invaders had learned an important lesson: in this world longevity is synonymous with anonymity.

But having faced - or having sent their thralls to face - Mikhail Suvorov's firepower on Starside, maybe they'd known that before they set out.

'There's evidence of that last, too. Suvorov's party went through from Perchorsk, emerging into Starside through the surface Gate. But the Wamphyri chose the other route, the original or natural Gate into our world, probably because they knew that Perchorsk was once again a semi-military base and defended, and all of its weapons concentrated in one spot, the Perchorsk Gate itself. Hardly a good place to commence a covert infiltration.'

'But the best evidence that Malinari and the others intended to keep their presence secret, at least for the time being, lay with those poor dead kids and murdered staff. For they had not been vampirized! No vampire essence - nothing of that sort - had been allowed to get into them. So plainly it wasn't the intention of the Wamphyri to start a plague. Not yet, anyway.

'But people had been killed, murdered by vampires, and the Old Lidesci wouldn't be satisfied until the bodies were burned.

While he had found no trace of infection in them - not even in the six who'd been used, drained - still he was insistent.

And since no one in this world has Lardis's experience in such matters, the experience of so many years, no one argued the point.

'What was more, the ... the cremation that Lardis insisted upon fitted pe rfectly with a plan we were shaping, however gradually. For not only were we unable to bring the presence of the Wamphyri into the open, but we must actually disguise it, cover it up, a.s.sist them in their efforts to remain secret! Secret to the world in general, at least, but not to us, not to E-Branch.

No, for we knew our enemy of old.

'There was fuel oil, plenty of it, at the Refuge. Ben saw to it that the entire contents of a fifty-gallon drum went down the wrecked inspection ducts, then we punctured the rest of the drums and let the fuel leak through all the ground floor rooms.

And finally we stood off while Nathan struck a match. That one match was all it took.

'It could only be the act of a maniac or group of maniacs, some kind of crazed sect. Or perhaps sabotage, the work of some anti-British terrorist organization? Or maybe a band of utterly ruthless criminals, determined to cover up their crime. At any rate, that was how it would look...

'Well, Romanian rescue services are notoriously slow, and where the Refuge stood across the Danube from Radujevac ...

it wasn't the most populated or accessible region. The Danube itself was the most frequented route through the countryside. Fortunately for us there were no landing stages, wharves or docks on the Romanian side, and the nearest fire engine was all of a hundred miles away!

'So we watched the Refuge burn, and eventually Nathan took us home again. But back in London we took our time before calling the authorities in Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, to tell them we'd had an SOS, a Mayday, from the Refuge, that a gang of raiders was sacking the place. It took them a couple of days to get back to us with their condolences; their security forces would do all they could to bring the unknown marauders to justice, of course, but since the Refuge had been gutted there was precious little to go on ...

'And meanwhile, we were busy. / was busy, bending all my efforts to scan the future as never before. But... the simple fact 218.

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is I can't force what I do, can't control it. I see what I see when I see it, and that's it. And our locators were busy, none more so than David Chung. But where to look? There was no more mindsmog, and there were no borders in continental Europe.

The three invaders, their lieutenants out of Starside and their "raw" recruits, they could be anywhere. They could have crossed the river west into Yugoslavia, gone east into Bulgaria, headed north into the Carpathians, or caught a boat up-river for Hungary. In daylight hours they'd go to earth, or to any dark, safe place. But at night... no one travels as fast as the Wamphyri.

'Nathan suggested returning to Sunside for Anna-Marie English, but to what purpose? The invaders were leaving no "blight" behind them. As yet, they weren't vampirizing anyone.

Murders? But there are always murders, and there are always missing persons. No, we couldn't hope to track them that way.

In any case, Anna-Marie wouldn't have come back; she has dedicated her life to the orphans of the bloodwars, and to her man in Sunside.

'The mindsmog thing puzzled us a while: the lack of it. For where there are vampires, and especially Lords of the Wamphyri, there is usually mindsmog: a tainted, impenetrable cloud on the psychic aether ... unless that was something else that Malinari had stolen from Zek's mind? But of course it was!

He had also been about to learn something of E-Branch from her - until she had deliberately shortened his interrogation by showing him his intended doom, which had precipitated and mercifully shortened her own.

'But just how much did he know? How much had he sapped from Zek's mind, her memory, he r knowledge in general and especially of the Branch? We had no w ay of knowing. But it must have been sufficient that he and the others felt the need to lie low and control their alien mental emissions. Or perhaps we were wrong and they were simply being cautious, biding their time.

'Nathan stayed with us for five days, just long enough to look up a few old... well, acqua intances? But he was needed in Sunside and dared not delay any longer. And remember, his problem was as great if not greater than ours: a small army of aspiring Lords lieutenants, thralls, and warrior creatures, left behind by our trio of Wamphyri invaders; an army which now inhabited the toppled ruins of Starside's ancient aeries, from which they raided on the Szgany as before. No, we had no claim on Nathan; indeed, our long-term debt to him could never be repaid. And so we had to let him go, with our best wishes - and as many weapons as he could take with him - back along the Mobius route to rejoin the battle for his vampire world.

'And through all of that time, that terrible, frantic week, the only one of us who wasn't busy was Ben Trask. He had simply withdrawn from a world that would never be the same again, and I admit that I thought E-Branch had seen the last of him.

Fortunately I was wrong, and when he returned he was stronger than ever - well, in some ways - but in his resolve, for sure.

'And now I'll tell you something that even he doesn't know. I was Duty Officer that night at E-Branch HQ - that night when Nathan brought Lardis through from Sunside, and Ben nightmared about Zek - and the moment that Ben came in and I saw the state he was in, I... I knew about Zek. I mean, I knew!

'Oh, I couldn't tell him, but where he was uncertain and daren't allow himself to be sure, I knew and hated myself for knowing.

Just seeing him like that, Ben's future was immediately apparent to me. In one way it was the clearest picture of anyone's future that I'd even seen, yet in another it was the vaguest - which was how I knew.

'For all I saw was how cold and lonely that future would be...'

Goodly's delivery, the way he had told the story of the events of that night at E-Branch HQ from his own personal viewpoint - the obvious pa.s.sion and compa.s.sion in this apparently reserved, indeed phlegmatic man - had brought him into far greater definition in Jake's perception; or rather, it had brought him 220.

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into focus as a three-dimensional character in his own right.

Previously a shadow or a soft-voiced cipher, he had somehow filled out. And Jake understood now that the precog had been a major part of this scene for a very long time.

Now, too, and also for the first time, Goodly's physical person had impressed itself upon the Branch's most recent however hesitant rec ruit. lan Goodly: all of six feet four inches tall, skeletally thin and g angly, grey-haired and mainly gaunt-featured. His expression was usually grave; he rarely smiled; only his eyes - warm, brown, and totally disarming - belied what invariably const.i.tuted an unfortunate first-impression appearance, that of a cadaverous mortician. Except, and as Jake was suddenly aware, you can't always tell a book from its cover. He would have done better to take more notice of Goodly's eyes than his outline.

Outside the Ops truck, he cornered the precog and drew him away from the others into the shade of a tree.

'What is it?' Goodly asked, though he believed he already knew well enough. For just like Trask and Lardis Lidesci before him, he'd left several blank pages in his telling of the story.

Jake was still fishing for the bits that would bring the whole thing into focus.

'Just you and me/ Jake answered. 'Just the two of us, and no one else to confuse the issue. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions? I mean, right from square one I've had this feeling that you're on my side, that you think I should be told the whole thing. The others are holding stuff back, but you're reluctant to do so. Am I right?'

Goodly smiled a wry smile, sighed and said, Til tell you what I can. But even though you're right about my being on your side - or rather, about my talent being on your side - still I won't be abl e to answe r all of your questions. The Branch comes first, and Ben Trask is the Branch. What Ben says goes.'

'Some of my questions, then,' Jake pressed. And he quickly went on: 'So you're a precog, right? And this talent of yours, this precognition, it lets you see into the future?'

'That's the general idea,' Goodly sighed again. 'But only a very rough idea, for it's not nearly as simple as that. Haven't I made that plain?' And now he was frowning.