Simon Green - The Spy Who Haunted Me

“So only scientists lived here?” said Peter.

“Scientists and their families and enough people and infrastructure to support them,” I said. “And a military presence, to keep an eye on everyone. Most of the people who lived here probably never knew what horrors were being perpetrated in the strictly off-limits laboratories. Curiosity was not an encouraged trait in Soviet Russia.”

“What kind of . . . experiments are we talking about, exactly?” said Walker.

“Nasty ones, from the few files I’ve seen,” said Honey. “Early organ-transplant technology, using criminals and dissidents as sub jects. I once saw some disturbing black-and-white film of a man with two heads, both of them very much alive and aware. Other subjects were exposed to radiation at varying doses, just to see what it would do to them. They were a long way from any kind of protection or cure in those days. They needed data to work with.”

“Then there was chemical warfare,” I said. “Biological, psychic, and supernatural: all the officially forbidden weapons of war. The Geneva conventions didn’t reach out here. But . . . as the years passed and the pressure of the Cold War intensified, the research in these completely deniable cities took stranger and more dangerous turns. City X17 was tasked with trying to open gateways into other dimensions. They must have had some success, because the whole city vanished in 1966. That did leave a crater. X35 specialised in making superhumans out of ordinary people, using drugs, radiation, tissue grafts, and implanted alien technology. All they got for their trouble was a series of very expensive monsters. Who broke loose, in the end. The military hit the whole area with a thermonuke in 1985. No one got out.

“X48 produced cloned duplicates of important personages, with organic bombs hidden in their bellies. The ultimate suicide bombers, and the very best unsuspected assassins. My uncle James terminated that programme with extreme prejudice back in 1973. But X37 . . . was the worst of all by far.”

“Did your family shut this city down?” Honey said suddenly. “Did you do this?”

“No,” I said. “The Soviets hid what they were doing very successfully, until it was too late. By the time we got a whisper of what they were trying to do, it had already blown up in their faces. All we could do was send in a couple of agents to watch from a safe distance and stand ready to contain it, if necessary. It wasn’t. X37 ate its own guts out.”

“What the hell did they do here that was so terrible?” said Peter.

“Yeah,” said Honey. “I’d like to know that myself, before I take one step farther.”

“X37 specialised in genetic research and manipulation,” I said. “Ripping human DNA apart to see what made it tick. Cutting-edge stuff, in the early 1990s. They were looking for secrets, for marvels and wonders, and they found them. Poor bastards.”

The others waited, but that was all I was prepared to say for the moment.

“If I remember correctly, most of these science cities were shut down or abandoned in the nineties,” said Honey. “Too expensive to run in the more austere days of the new order, with the economy crashing down around everyone’s ears. A lot of scientists weren’t being paid, so they voted with their feet and walked out. The soldiers didn’t try to stop them, because they hadn’t been paid in months either. A few cities survived for a while by switching over to commercial research, with corporate or mafiosa backing, but by the turn of the century all of these backwater places were deserted and abandoned. Expensive leftovers from the Cold War, pretty much forgotten in the new corridors of power. No one cared. No one even remembered what most of them had been working on.”

She stopped and looked at me. So did Peter and Walker. I sighed and reluctantly continued.

“X37. Genetic research and manipulation. And not the kind you stumbled across, Peter. No Frankenfood, no goldfish that glow in the dark, no mice with human ears growing out of their backs. And no alien intruders going skinny-dipping in our gene pool, either. No . . . the scientists here were exclusively interested in uncovering the secrets of human DNA. It makes us who and what we are, but we still don’t know what most of it does. What it’s for; what it was intended to do. The Soviet scientists approached the problem in their usual blunt and pragmatic way. They experimented on people. Criminals and dissidents, Jews and homosexuals, anyone who spoke out or just wouldn’t be missed. There was never any shortage of unpeople, in the bad old days of Soviet Russia. No one knows exactly how many people suffered and died in the secret laboratories of X37. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands . . . no one knows.”

“Why didn’t your family do something about it?” said Walker.

“Most of what we know, we only found out afterwards,” I said. “When it all went bad, and the Soviet military tried to shut the place down and failed. It’s a big world, and even the Droods can’t be everywhere at once. Though I understand we’re working on that . . .

“The scientists working here were struggling to identify, stimulate, and just plain poke with sticks every part of human DNA they didn’t understand. All this information coded into each and every one of us on the most basic level. If they could access and learn to control even a part of it, maybe they could produce something more than human. So . . . here they were, working blindly in the dark, pushing buttons pretty much at random. Like walking into a room full of gas and striking a match to see where the leak is.”

“What happened?” Peter said impatiently.

“We don’t know, exactly,” I said. “The first clue the Soviets had that something had gone terribly wrong was when X37 suddenly went quiet. No comm traffic at all. No answers to increasingly urgent inquiries. The Soviet authorities followed their usual procedure and sent in the military. And not just soldiers either; these were Spetsznaz, their equivalent of the SAS. Hardened veterans of hard fighting on the Afghanistan front. They were ordered to go in, restore order at any cost, and ask pointed questions until someone provided answers.

“But even they couldn’t deal with what was running loose in X37.

“Five hundred heavily armed men went in; nineteen came out. Broken, hysterical, traumatised. Screaming about . . . monsters. The Kremlin was preparing to nuke the city, but by then we’d picked up on what was happening, and we stepped in to stop them. It hadn’t been that long since Chernobyl, and there was no way the world would have stood still for another travelling radioactive death cloud. World War Three was a lot closer than most people realised, in those days. We were run ragged, stamping out bushfires and making people play nice. Anyway, we sent in two of our local agents to look the place over from a safe distance, but the city was, to all extents and purposes, quite dead. So we just declared the area off-limits to everyone, on pains of us getting really peeved at them, and let sleeping dogs lie.

“And now here we are, breaking every rule there is just by being here. If we had any sense we’d get the hell out while we still can.”

“And go where?” said Honey. “There is nowhere else.”

“And the teleport bracelets won’t move us on till we’ve solved the mystery,” said Peter.

“I don’t like this city,” said Walker. “It’s unsettling.”

We all looked at him. “Oh, come on,” I said. “You police the Nightside! One of the most dangerous and distressing locations in this or any other universe. And you’re . . . unsettled?”

“Something bad happened here,” said Walker. “I can feel it. I feel . . . vulnerable. Not something I’m used to feeling. It’s . . . invigorating, I think. Yes . . . Been a long time since I faced a real challenge, with no backup, no Voice, just . . . me. The fate of the whole world could be resting on our shoulders, depending on what we do next. Isn’t it marvellous?”