so to speak, couldn't a far less friendly agency just as easily find him?
For example the Russians. By now they must be keenly interested (to say the very least) in Harry's kind of ESP. It was a weapon he had used against them to devastating effect. Even though Harry 'himself was or might appear to be dead and gone, still the atention of al surviving members of the Soviet ESP-organization would be riveted upon their British counterparts' every move from this time on.
It was even possible (barely, but possible) that the Russians already knew about British E-Branch's 'new' Necroscope! And wouldn't that be causing them some concern! ? What, the ex-Head of Branch, Alec Kyle, back in business? Not brain-dead, or physicaly dead and blown to bits along with the Chateau Bronnitsy, but alive and wel and living in England? Not drained of al inteligence on a slab in some necromantic ESP-experiment, or pulped in a holocaust of almighty proportions, but sound as a bel and consorting with his old coleagues in London? Good God! By now they'd probably be thinking that every Englishman was indestructible ... and they'd be wanting to know why! And how ...
Darcy found himself grinning at his own flight of fancy, but of al men he knew that there had never been so fanciful a flight as that of Harry Keogh, Necroscope.
And the grin died on his face as he considered other possibilities.
Assuming that the Russians knew nothing - that they were still recovering from the Necroscope's onslaught - still there were other ESP-agencies in the world and Harry could conceivably fal into their hands.
And not only mindspies but crime syndicates and terrorist organizations, too. What a thief he'd make, what an assassin or terrorist!
Barriers, borders and brick walls couldn't stop him; he could disappear almost at will; the teeming dead were in his debt and would go to any lengths, literally, to advise and protect him. And all the knowledge of Earth had gone down into the soil or up into the air, where it was written like lore in some mighty volume in an infinite encyclopedia for Harry to open and read. If he had the time, but he didn't because of his search.
Oh, yes: Harry would be invaluable in the hands of any one of a score of criminal elements. And it was still possible that his wife and child's disappearance was connected in some way to just such an organization. Which was why the Branch was indeed working flat out to discover their whereabouts. Oh, they were doing it for Harry, too, who had done so much for them and for the world, but they were also doing it for themselves, for 'the common good.' And it was for that same common cause that Darcy had called in Doctor James Anderson.
Anderson was the best, the very best there was: a hypnotist without peer in all the land, as far as was known.
Working without anaesthetics on patients lulled to a painless immunity under the weird spell of Anderson's eyes and systems, surgeons had carried out the most delicate operations; women had given effortless birth in exceptionally awkward circumstances; mentally traumatized and schizoid cases had shed their delusions and extraneous personalities to emerge whole and one from his healing gaze. And far more importantly where Darcy was concerned, Anderson was a master of the post-hypnotic command.
Darcy remembered how it had gone that night...
By the time they had entered Harry's room using a master key, the Necroscope had been dead to the world, and probably to the dead, too! The drug Darcy had given him had been a sleeping pill, but a pill with a difference. Distilled from the oriental yellow poppy - and as such an 'opiate' - the principal active ingredient had the effect of opening the mind of the subject to hypnotic suggestion while he slept on. The hypnotist would then insert himself into the subject's dreams, his subconscious mind, implanting those commands which the subject would act upon and accept as routine long after the drug had dispersed and he was awake.
Darcy had obtained the pills from Anderson, who used them when he was treating mental cases. Not that Harry was a mental case, but it had provided an easy method of bringing him under Anderson's control without the Necroscope himself knowing what was happening. Since he wasn't a patient as such, it was imperative that he did not know what was happening. For rather than being a curative treatment,