the first wave of a swelling tide, it crumbled like so much chalk. Volcanic fires burned in its guts, and spewed out through its cratered walls; and as the upper storeys and towers fell inwards, so there came secondary blasts to throw them up again. Already the Château was a total ruin, but then the big one in the Duty Room added its voice to the cacophony of destruction.
By this time Zek had managed to climb into the jeep beside Gerenko. They felt a huge fist batter at the rear of the vehicle, shove it forward; felt their ears savaged by the massive detonation, shuttered their eyes against a sudden incendiary glare. A brilliant fireball like the breath of hell turned everything to a negative photograph, blotted out the entire scene and made night into blinding day, then slowly faded and revealed the truth - that the Château Bronnitsy was no more. Bits of it, from pebbles to huge blocks of concrete, still rained to earth. Black smoke curled up across the moon; white and yellow fire seethed and roiled in the gutted ruins; a mere handful of figures stumbled about like crippled flies, trying to make their way outwards from the centre of the inferno.
Gerenko, stunned, had stalled the jeep and it wouldn't start again. Now he got out, ordered Zek out, too. The helicopter had veered sharply away as the first explosion occurred; it circled, came down and landed with a bump on the road near the perimeter wall. Theo Dolgikh spoke briefly to the pilot, climbed out and advanced at a run. Zek Föener and Gerenko made their way staggeringly towards him.
'For Alec,' said Harry Keogh softly to himself.
He stood in the shadows at the foot of the perimeter wall and watched the three people moving towards the helicopter. He took note of the two men - one the mere husk of a man and the other a hulking brute - and the way they manhandled the girl into the chopper. Then the machine lifted off and Harry was alone with the night and his hideous handiwork. But like an after-image, a mental picture of those two men kept superimposing itself over the leaping flames. Harry didn't know who they were, but his intuition told him that these two above all others ought not to have escaped the holocaust.
He'd have to speak to Carl Quint and Felix Krakovitch about them..
Epilogue
Three days later Ivan Gerenko, Theo Dolgikh and Zek Föener stood on the scarred rim of the gorge in the Carpathians and gazed gloomily on a great mound of scree and rubble, where only the stumps of the ancient castle's massive outer walls protruded. The scene was desolate as only these mountains can be, with jagged crests and peaks all around, an eerie wind moaning up off the plain, and birds of prey circling slowly in a sky ribboned with cloud. It was evening and the light was beginning to fade, but Gerenko had insisted upon seeing the site. There was nothing they could do tonight, but at least it would give him an idea of what must be done tomorrow.
Gerenko was here because Leonid Brezhnev had given him one week to come up with the answer - one all-inclusive answer - to the destruction of the Château Bronnitsy; Dolgikh because Yuri Andropov also required answers; Zek in order that Gerenko could keep an eye on her. She said she had lost her talent on the night of the as yet unexplained inferno - and worse, that all memory of what she'd learned from Alec Kyle had also been burned out of her - but Gerenko thought not. In which case he couldn't be sure that if she were left on her own in Moscow she'd keep her mouth shut.
But most importantly, and if she were lying, she was here because she was the world's foremost close-range telepath. If danger threatened from any source, Zek Föener would probably know it first; and so her actions would be Gerenko's indicator that all was well - or otherwise. After what had happened at the Château one must look to one's personal safety, and a mind such as Zek's could well be of the utmost importance.
'Nothing,' she said now, frowning at the grey ruins, her forehead furrowed. 'Nothing at all. But even if there were something here I couldn't read it! Not now. I've told you, Ivan, my talent has been destroyed. It burned up in that great bonfire and now...