As for the current state of the world:
Communist China was slipping fast on the worn-down heels of Russia into a bog of stagnation and economic decay, and the USSR itself was much less unified. Internally, Russia was still recovering from seventy years of self-inflicted wounds, but its occasional haemorrhages were all on the inside now, and issued from vastly reduced lesions. There was no longer even a remote threat of global conflict; the last remaining Superpower, the USA, was ultimately potent and alert, as were her allies. But more importantly, theirs was a generally benign alliance. And just as Ben Trask had once forecast, the world was a much safer place now; so much so that it had become a fad among political and historical commentators to attempt to identify the turning point and name the prime factors and movers:
The microchip; Lech Walesa; giant technologicalspin-offs from the space race and the Star Wars programme; spies in the sky; Chernobyl; the total collapse of European Communism; President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and to some extent Premier Gorbachev; the war in the Gulf, where the entire world had watched with fascination, astonishment, and more than a little horror as uninspired warriors with outmoded, outgunned weapons were mown down under the previously unimaginable onslaught of outraged passions and superior technology.
And through all of this, no one except perhaps a handful of E-Branch members remembered Harry Keogh, Necroscope, or attributed anything of the current world order to his works. And other than that same small handful, no one credited the Great Majority, the teeming dead, with even the smallest part in it.
Which was the way things stood on that Monday morning in January 2006 when Trask arrived at E-Branch HQ in the heart of London, and found David Chung prowling to and fro in the foyer with a cellphone, waiting for him. Except it wasn't the cellphone which brought Trask up short as he entered the building but the look on Chung's face, and what he was holding in his other hand: an old hairbrush.
Harry Keogh's old hairbrush ...
Before Trask saw that, however, he recognized Chung's urgency and commenced to say, 'Sorry, David, my earphone is on the blink. And anyway there's so much interference these days a man can't even think, let alone speak! Is there a problem? Were you trying to ... contact... me?'
By then he'd seen the hairbrush and jerked to a halt. The occurrences of that night sixteen years ago had all come rushing back in a flood of vivid memories, and the beat of Trask's heart had picked up speed to match the
sudden flow of adrenaline. 'David?' he said, making it a question.
Chung answered with a grim nod, simply that, and whisked him into the elevator. But as the doors slid shut on them and they were alone, he uttered those words which Trask had most dreaded to hear: 'He's back.'
Trask didn't want to believe it. 'He?' he husked, knowing full well who he must be, the only one he could be. 'Harry?'
Chung nodded, shrugged helplessly, seemed lost for words. 'Something of him,' he answered at last, 'who or whatever he is now. But yes, Ben, I'm talking about Harry. Something of Harry Keogh has come back to us ..."
II
Harry's Room
From the hotel manager's point of view, E-Branch didn't even exist. He occasionally forgot that the hotel had a top storey; which wasn't strange, for he'd never seen it. The occupants of that unknown uppermost level had their own elevator situated at the rear of the building, private stairs also at the rear, even their own fire escape. Indeed, 'they' owned the top floor, and so fell entirely outside the hotel's sphere of management and operation.