Simon Green - The Spy Who Haunted Me

“And I’m still cold and I’m still hungry,” said Peter. We looked at him. He sniffed loudly. “Well, I am.”

“We should have left you in the car,” said Honey.

“There has to be some way we can cut to the chase,” said Walker. And then he gave me a hard look. So did Peter. Honey turned around, just so she could join in.

I sighed and armoured up. The golden armour slipped over me in a moment; immediately I felt sharper, stronger, better able to cope. I hadn’t realised how much the city was affecting me until my armour protected me from its malign influence. Interestingly enough, the armour still fit me like a second skin, with no sign of the bulky fur coat beneath. Interesting, but a thought for another day. I looked around me, focusing my Sight through my featureless golden mask.

At once, the street was full of ghosts. Men and women and children, running and screaming and dying from no obvious cause, all of them trapped in repeating loops of time. Images, echoes, from the past. People, terrified, howling like animals, dying . . . Images imprinted onto the surroundings, repeating over and over again. Even with the Sight, I couldn’t see what it was that scared them, what was killing them. Just . . . glimpses of something at the corner of my mental eye. Quick impressions of something unbearably awful hanging over the city like a storm, running wild in its streets, close and threatening and utterly unstoppable. Inside my armour, my skin was crawling.

As though the Devil himself had come to X37 and was standing right behind me.

I sent my Sight soaring up into the harsh gray sky and looked out over the woods, miles and miles away, to where the terrible old thing lay buried, deep and deep under the permafrost. I could feel his presence, like a wound in the world, but he was still sleeping soundly, hopefully till Judgement Day itself. I looked down at the city spread out below me, and my Sight immediately picked up strange emanations blasting up into the sky from one untouched research building only a dozen or so streets away from where we’d stopped. A shuddering, staccato glare of unnatural energies stabbing up into the sky like a stuttering searchlight. Pure psychic energy spiking up from a single location as though to say, Here I am! for anyone with the Sight to see it. So there was at least one survivor left in X37, after all.

I dropped back into my head, shut down my Sight, and sent my armour back into my torc. The cold oppressive gloom of the city weighed down on me again. It was actually harder to think clearly . . . I told the others what I’d seen and pointed out the direction, and we all set off immediately, glad to leave the street of blood behind us.

The atmosphere of the city seemed to change subtly as we closed in on its secret heart. There were shadows everywhere I looked, dark and deep and threatening. The light seemed to be fading, even though the painfully bright sun was still directly overhead. The streets became narrower, closing in on us, and the buildings all leaned inwards, as though the brick and stone walls might bulge forward and engulf us at any moment. There was something in this city that didn’t want to be found. I increased the pace, striding down the increasingly narrow streets with a confidence I wasn’t sure I felt. I’ve always been happiest with menaces I could hit. The sooner we got to the heart of this mess and did something about it, the better.

“What’s the hurry?” Peter complained. “Whatever happened here, it’s over and we missed it.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t over. It’s still happening. The beast is waiting for us to come to it. I think it wants to show us things.”

“Beast?” said Honey. “No one said anything to me about a beast.”

“Oh,” I said, “there’s always a beast. Come along, Peter. Don’t lag behind. That’s a good way to get picked off. Besides, the exercise will do you good.”

“Oh, God,” said Peter. “Someone shoot me now and put me out of my misery.”

“Don’t tempt me,” said Honey and Walker, pretty much in unison.

I looked at Honey, and she caught my eye and inclined her head slightly. I fell back to walk beside her, letting Walker take the lead. Peter just trudged along, head down. Honey started talking without looking at me directly.

“I always knew there were places like this. Hidden places, secret cities, where the Soviets did terrible, unspeakable things to their own people, in the name of patriotism and the all-powerful State. It never occurred to me, until now, to wonder if there might have been secret cities in other countries. If everyone had them, including America. I never even heard a whisper that there were, but we all did terrible things in the Cold War, in the name of security. Not just my people, the Company; there was a whole alphabet soup of secret departments in those days. Very covert, very specialised agencies, doing necessary, unspeakable things that were always strictly need-to-know. Officially they were all shut down after we won the Cold War. But in these days of terrorist atrocities and rogue nations . . . who’s to say someone hasn’t set up an X37 in America? What monsters might we be producing right now just so we can feel a little bit safer?

“Eddie, if there were such places, cities like this, on American soil . . . You’d know, wouldn’t you? You’d tell me, if there were?”

“I don’t know,” I said carefully. “Not my territory. For years I was just a field agent based in London. Hardly ever left the city, never even went abroad till the Hungry Gods War. Field agents are only ever told what they need to know, when they need to know it. It’s your country, Honey. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Eddie. It seems to me . . . the more I learn from solving these mysteries, the less sure I am of anything.”

She leaned in against me, and I put an arm around her. Our heavy furs rather muffled the gesture, but she cuddled up against me anyway. For warmth, or comfort. Or perhaps something else entirely. We were both professionals, after all.

We came at last to the building blasting psychic fire into the heavens. The street seemed very dark, the shadows deep and furtive. We stood close together, alert and ready for a covert attack that never quite seemed to materialise. From the outside, the building we’d come so far to find didn’t look very different from all the others in the street. Stark and brutal, smoke-blackened and bullet-holed, but the front door was still firmly in place, and the windows were unbroken. There were no signs anywhere to tell us what went on inside.

Presumably because either you already knew, or you had no business asking.

“Are you sure this is it?” said Honey. At some point in the journey she’d pushed herself away from me and made a point of walking alone. Whatever moment of humanity or weakness or affection had moved her, she was over it now.

“Something bad happened here,” said Walker. “I can feel it so strongly I can almost smell it. What were they doing in this place?”

“Beats me,” I said. “But it left a hell of a strong impression on its surroundings. Bad things linger; really bad things sink in. And they can take a hell of a lot of shifting.”

I moved forward for a closer look at the ordinary, everyday door that was the only entrance to the building. A big block of badly stained wood with a surprisingly complicated electronic lock.

“Primitive stuff,” sniffed Honey. “I can crack that, easy.”

I armoured up and kicked the door in. Honey glared at me as I armoured down.

“Will you stop doing that, Eddie! The rest of us do like to contribute something now and again!”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Men like kicking things in,” Peter explained to her. “It’s a guy thing.”