Guy Adams - The Clown Service

She paced the length of the upper floor, listening to the creak of the old timbers beneath her feet. Old ghosts , she thought, I am always surrounded by old ghosts .

As she turned towards the daylight flooding in from the open hatchway, it almost seemed as if she caught a glimpse of one. A figure, dressed in dark fatigues. She held her hand up to her eyes, filtering out some of the sunlight. There was nothing there.

‘Derek?’ she shouted, just to ensure he was where he was supposed to be and all was well.

‘Yeah?’ came his voice. ‘Please don’t tell me you want me to come up there. I don’t think the stairs would take it.’

‘No, just checking on you.’

‘Still here, still soldering on.’ He chuckled at his own joke and returned to a world of fuses and circuit boards.

Tamar, having no idea what he found so funny – and caring even less – walked over to the open hatchway. She supposed it was possible that her eyes had deceived her. The afternoon sun was now catching the open doorway head on and the glare made coloured shapes dance before her. And yet… Tamar knew what she had seen. A silhouette of a man in military clothing. She was not fanciful by nature nor was she easily confused. Things were or they were not . She did not believe in ghosts.

She would have approved of the fact that the boot which collided with her lower back was reassuringly solid, were it not for the fact that it pushed her straight through the open hatchway and into thin air.

It was a relief to get a phone call from April as I needed the distraction. My patience with Gavrill had worn perilously thin but punching him was only going to make both of us feel more miserable.

‘I have to take this call,’ I told him, ‘in private. But we’ll talk some more. Krishnin is active and a clear threat. You will tell me everything I need to know in order to deal with him. Understood?’

‘I’ve told you everything that I can…’

‘I don’t believe that for a moment, but we’ll discuss it in a minute. Can I trust you not to start phoning any old colleagues the minute my back is turned?’

He shrugged. ‘I am an old traitor. Who would I call?’

I took the phone outside. ‘Hi, sorry, I was in mixed company.’

I told her about Gavrill and the little he had admitted to in our conversation.

‘And what is he doing now?’ she asked.

‘I very much hope he’s calling whatever remains of his old contacts within the FSB,’ I said. ‘Shining overheard a Russian being tortured during his original surveillance back in the ’60s, which suggests Gavrill’s telling the truth about Krishnin being rogue even then. I could spend the next hour or so knocking the old sod about a bit until he coughs up everything he knows, but I’d rather not. He’s damned irritating, but beating up pensioners has limited appeal.’

‘Pleased to hear it. Whereas if he’s encouraged to co-operate by his own people…’

‘Who would no doubt want to avoid Krishnin becoming an antique embarrassment…’

‘It’s in everyone’s best interests.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You manipulative little bugger – you’ll be a decent spy yet.’

‘I’m so glad you think that. So, what do you know?’

She gave me a breakdown of what she’d learned at the police mortuary and flicked through the details of August’s original file. It went some way towards confirming what I had just heard.

The operation had been classified as a limited success. Though Shining had failed to get to the bottom of Krishnin’s plan, the fact that he was dead and therefore no longer deemed a threat was good enough for the powers that be. Shining had also believed Krishnin to be acting outside his remit and that it was therefore unlikely someone else would continue his work. All that may have been true, but offered little comfort to us now, fifty years later.

‘They’re still working on the chemical analysis of Reid,’ April said, ‘but some of the ingredients found in the sample O’Dale picked up all those years ago are suggestive.’

‘Go on.’

‘Phenol, methanol and formaldehyde.’

‘Preservative chemicals.’

‘Absolutely. The base ingredients when preparing an arterially administered embalming fluid.’

‘They were injecting this stuff into the dead.’

‘And I think we can hazard a guess as to what the unidentified elements in the sample do.’

‘They make someone like Harry Reid pop up from the ground and forget their condition.’

Neither of us said anything for a moment. ‘Well,’ I finally added, ‘at least I can rest easy that even you find this one hard to believe.’

‘And yet the evidence points to it.’

‘It does,’ I agreed. ‘I look forward to drawing my therapist’s attention to the fact when they lock me up.’

‘On the subject of the embalming fluid, if that’s indeed what it is—’

‘Let’s just throw caution to the wind and accept the fact shall we?’

‘Can we find out how much of it was distributed?’

This was, of course, the most important point. Was Harry Reid a guinea pig? An isolated case? It was doubtful, and when the countdown on the numbers station reached zero I suspected we’d have our answer.

I finished the call with April and went back inside.

‘I hope that gave you enough time?’ I said.

Gavrill had the good grace to smile rather than argue.

‘I may have made a brief enquiry as to how someone would expect to proceed were it true that Krishnin is not as dead as had been assumed.’

‘And the response?’

‘I can tell you anything you need to know, as long as it helps make the situation go away.’

‘Go away?’

‘Nobody wants an international incident. There is no reason for one man’s lunacy to become a serious political issue.’

‘Fine. His actions do not represent, nor did they ever represent, the wishes or intentions of his homeland. A fact that is reflected in said homeland’s generous assistance in bringing the man to justice. Right?’

‘I knew you would understand.’

‘Operation Black Earth.’

‘Yes.’

‘It was an operation designed to reanimate the dead?’

Gavrill gave an awkward shrug. ‘Absurd, I know.’

‘So absurd it appears to be happening.’

That certainly surprised him. ‘Really? It works?’

‘We have a body dating from 1963 that should be nothing but dust and yet has been dangerously active.’

‘How dangerously?’

‘One man dead.’

Gavrill shook his head, got to his feet, topped up his glass and began to talk once more.

‘In its simplest terms the idea was this: what better sleeper agents could we hope for than the dead? People die every day, millions of the population, boxed up and hidden away, from coast to coast. If there was a way of weaponising them, of turning them to our advantage, we could cripple a country in a matter of hours.

‘The principle is sound enough, albeit too macabre for most politicians’ taste. It would be hard to fly the flag of glorious victory when that victory had been won by rotting cadavers. Apparently they would rather drop nuclear bombs.

‘Sünner had developed a serum that he claimed would achieve two distinct things: preserve the body post mortem (it’s all very well using the dead as sleeper agents, but how long are they of any viable use?) and turn the corpse into a controllable shell. The former was achievable, the latter was not. You’re working against impossible factors. The body is dead, its brain nothing more than meat. Even if you could somehow preserve the viability of the nervous system how could you control the body remotely? They still achieved the impossible: they reanimated test subjects, but they could not control them.