strange dreams - of the Great Majority, talking about him but not to him - and as he focused his eyes on his traveling clock, so the time clicked over from 9:44 to 9:45. The telephone extension beside his bed continued to ring, and Harry reached out and picked it up. He had long since lost his .actual terror of the thing, despite that it still conjured fleeting, disturbing motifs. Now, as his dreams faded away and his waking mind sharpened, he grunted, 'Uh?'
'Did I wake you?' For a moment Harry didn't identify the gravely voice on the other end of the line, but then it registered and he said:
'Ben? Ben Trask?' And he thought: E-Branch? Now what's up? But what could be up, except that they'd maybe heard something. And sharper now, giving it al of his atention, he said: 'Ben, is it about Brenda?'
'Sorry, Harry,' Trask answered at once. 'But no, it isn't about Brenda. We're still on it, of course, but... nothing so far. It's just that it's been quite a while now and we thought it was time we spoke.'
'We?'
'Darcy and the rest of us ... to find out how the world's treating you, you know?' It came hard for Trask to lie. A lie-detector in his own right, it went against the grain.
Harry nodded, despite that the other couldn't see him. 'I'm okay, mainly. And you people?'
'Routine,' (Harry sensed Trask's shrug). 'Not that anything ever is routine around here! And apparently there's some weird shit in your neck of the woods, too . .
So, this was something other than a purely social cal. The Necroscope made no atempt to disguise his sourness as he inquired: 'So what is it, Ben? Can we get to the point? And where's Darcy? Shouldn't he be making this cal?' Or are you trying to get at the 'truth' of things, eh? And what would I have to lie about anyway?
'An accident - well, an incident - up there in Jock territory,' Trask answered. 'Didn't you read about it?' But he made no comment on Darcy Clarke's whereabouts.
'I only get Sunday papers,' Harry told him. 'So what are we talking about here?' The Necroscope was curious now, and cautious. Whatever it was, why was E-Branch talking to him about it? Something he might have been involved in? He hadn't robbed any banks in Scotland, had he?
'An incident,' Trask repeated. 'On the Spey, north of the Forest of Atholl, just a couple of days ago.'
'On the river? What kind of incident?' Curiouser and curiouser! Harry and Bonnie Jean had been up that way, until she'd cried off their climb. She hadn't felt up to it. . . or perhaps she'd thought he wasn't up to it.
'Near the river,' Trask said. 'A car went off the road and burned out. Its occupants, too. Horrific! But the police found a weapon, evidence of a fire fight. There were two bodies, members of a Tibetan sect. The Home Office seems to think there's some kind of sectarian war going on. There were already a dozen of these types in England and another six on their way in. They work - carrying 'the word,' or whatever - in teams of six. The ones on their way in have been turned back, six more in London have been told to leave the country. Which leaves four of these people still unaccounted for...'
'And?' the Necroscope said, when it seemed Trask was done. 'What has all of this to do with me?'
A slight pause, and: 'It's for information only, Harry. I mean, since you happen to be up that way ... ?'
'I'm not your eyes and ears in Scotland, Ben. I thought it was understood? Now I'm out of the Branch, I'm gone for good.'
Trask's voice was cooler as he answered: 'We're not asking anything, Harry. Just passing something on, that's all.'
'Well, thanks,' the Necroscope told him, just as tersely. 'And is that it?'
That's it.'
Take care of yourself,' said Harry, and without waiting for an answer put the 'phone down.
At the London end, Trask looked at Darcy Clarke standing beside him and growled, 'I didn't much like that.'
'I could see and hear,' the other nodded. 'I understand and totally agree. Now forget it and tell me what you think.'
Trask shook his head. 'It's a funny one,' he said. 'I got the impression he thinks he's telling the truth.'
Thinks?'
'From his point of view,' Trask tried to explain, 'he was telling the truth - he wasn't involved in whatever it was that happened up there. And yet... I can't swear. I've only rarely come across this complication before.'
'A complication?'
'Where I trust someone's word implicitly, and so must consider my own talent suspect! Still, I agree with you: the whole thing up there, whatever it is, has Necroscope stamped all over it. And by the way: the same goes for you.'
'What's that?' Darcy didn't understand.
That complication I mentioned?' Trask stared hard at him. 'When it comes to Harry, I get much the same feeling about you. I mean, / trust you all the way, Darcy. But somehow I get this feeling that you ... don't!'
* * *
After Trask left his office, Darcy sat at his desk and thought about it, and sighed. For he knew that Trask's talent wasn't in question. The esper had been right: Darcy didn't trust himself. Or at least, he didn't trust the decision he had made that time more than three years ago. His loyalties continued to be divided between Branch security and the well-being of a friend. And Harry was still under those post-hypnotic strictures imposed by Dr James Anderson.
Just how they were affecting his life ... who could say? But on the whole, Darcy liked to believe that his decision had been the right one. This thing with these red-robed priests out of Tibet was a case in point. Okay, so Harry wasn't involved - but supposing he had been? What if these religious fanatics had known about his talents and had been hunting him down for their own purposes? Surely it was better for all concerned that Harry had been neutralized in that respect? Of course it was -
- Yet still Darcy felt guilty. Well, it was something he would just have to learn to live with.
In his house outside Bonnyrig, the Necroscope absent-mindedly heaped pillows and sat back against them, frowned at the telephone, and wondered what all of that had been about. Red-robed Tibetan monks? Of course he knew something about them ... that in some way or other they or their monastery were tied up with his future. But that was all. Maybe in the not so distant future he would try to find out more. But as for the recent past: A couple of corpses in a burned-out car, and evidence of a sectarian war? Was there a connection? If so, it wasn't even beginning to make itself apparent! For the moment at least, he must let it go at that.
It was all he could do, for the fact was that the conscious, waking Harry Keogh really didn't know a thing about it. It had been excerpted from his life like a page lost from a manuscript, and there was only one person who could rewrite it.
Since she wasn't likely to, or wasn't ready to, for now it had become a part of the lost years ...