Trask was his own man again, although his voice was still a little shaky. 'Put it this way,' he said. 'I won't be volunteering for the Mobius route again!' Then, seeing the look on Nathan's face: 'But that was only one bad thing, and there's much worse.'
Nathan took it up. 'We had to get out of E-Branch HQ in a hurry. I would have come here directly, but you weren't in situ. There are a good many places I could have gone to, but I wanted to see Perchorsk again. So we went there, and . .. we saw -' He looked at Trask.
The older man cleared his throat. Turkur Tzonov and, oh,
I don't know, maybe a full platoon of his men? - maybe more - have gone through the Perchorsk Gate. When we got there, there was a small war going on! Premier Turchin must have decided to pull the plug on Tzonov, but Tzonov had wind of it. Being who he is, the talents he employs, that wouldn't be too hard. So no more softly, softly, catchee monkey. Tzonov is on his way to Sunside/Starside right now, with enough men and firepower to blow hell out of just about anything that gets in his way!'
Nathan gave him a strange, knowing look - perhaps a look of derision, certainly of denial - but said nothing.
'Which means,' Chung said, 'that Nathan will be wanting to get on his way, too. And as soon as possible.'
And another voice, female, said, 'Maybe even sooner than that.'
Anna Marie English, an ecopath (and probably the only ecopath, sui generis, because for all Trask's years with E-Branch, he had never come across another talent like hers), had entered the room silently. Looking at the two arrivals, she said, 'Ben. Nathan.' Then, speaking directly to the former, and with a deal of urgency in her voice: 'Have you talked to David? Do you know about the problem at the airport? CMI?'
Trask looked at her and thought what he'd thought so often before. Anna Marie was a Branch esper: English by name and nationality, but scarcely an English rose. She was invariably ... what, lacklustre? Well, that would be putting it mildly. Enervated, pallid, dowdy; even this current bout of urgency seemed a strain, almost too much for her to handle. It was her talent, Trask knew, and felt sorry for her. But on the other hand, maybe he shouldn't. At twenty-four the woman had looked fifty, and now, at forty, she still looked fifty! Which had to be good news for Mother Earth.
Ecologically aware, Anna Marie's premature aging had been held in abeyance by the planet's partial recovery from the industrial and nuclear ravages of the last century. As the Earth shrugged off its illnesses, so she caught up with her true age - but in reverse! She had been 'worn out' as a teenager, and was now an 'old' forty. But at the current rate of remission the day might yet dawn when she was a 'young' sixty!
As for her talent (could it really be considered a 'talent', Trask wondered, or was it more properly a curse?): as an empath feels for others, so Anna Marie felt for the world; she was as one with Mother Earth. As Antarctica was drained of its mineral wealth, so she was drained of energy. As the rain forests were raped for workable timber or even fuel, she too felt violated, burned up. She knew a little of the agony of every dolphin still being killed illegally by the Japanese, and could count the number of kills in the liver spots or wrinkles on the dry, desiccated skin of her spindly arms. When a huge, nuclear-powered cargo vessel sank in the Pacific, her bones ached to the slow seepage of radiation outwards across the ocean floor. And as fresh holes gaped in the ozone layer, so her ulcers ate their way through Anna Marie's guts.
But working out here at the Refuge in Romania, at least she was doing something good, worthwhile. And as well as helping these poor kids and young people, she was also helping herself. They were Earth's children, after all, and she was caring for them. Trask liked to think that maybe, in its own way, the Earth was returning the favour . ..
'CMI?' Finally he answered her. 'I know about them in London. But .. . have I missed something?' He looked ques-tioningly at Chung.
'CMI were at the airport in Belgrade, too,' Chung told him. 'And they were obviously disappointed that I'd showed up without Nathan - very disappointed. They questioned me for quite some time. It's why I was late getting here.'
'It could mean a lot of trouble still to come.' Anna Marie took it up. 'And then of course there's Turkur Tzonov. He has men in Romania too. So the way I see it, we can't keep Nathan here too long. He won't be safe here. Not if CMI or the Opposition - or both - are desperate enough.'