Brian Lumley - The Source

Jazz nodded stiffly. 'That's right, "old boy",' he answered harshly, 'they sort of stuck in my craw.' He lifted his right hand and tugged at his fake bandages, tore them from his eyes. He stared at the four where they stood frozen as if they were insects trapped in amber.

After a moment the doctor muttered something in Russian, took an impatient pace forward and gave his needle a brief squirt. The second man into the room, also dressed casually, caught his arm and dragged him to a halt. 'No,' Chingiz Khuv told the doctor curtly, in Russian. 'Can't the two of you see that he knows? Since he's awake, aware and with all his wits about him, let's keep him that way. Anyway, I want to talk to him. He's all mine now.'

'No,' Jazz told him, staring straight at him. Tm all mine — now! If you want to speak to me you'd better let him dope me up. It's the only way I'm going to do any talking.'

Khuv smiled, stepped right up to the bed and looked down on Jazz. 'Oh, you've already talked enough, Mr Simmons,' he said, without a trace of malice. 'Quite enough, I assure you. Anyway, I don't intend to ask you anything. I intend to tell you a few things, and maybe show you a few things. And that's all.'

'Oh?' said Jazz.

'Oh, yes, really. In fact I'm going to tell you the things you most want to know: all about the Perchorsk Projekt. What we were attempting to do here, and what we actually did. Would you like that?'

'Very much,' said Jazz. 'And what is it you're going to show me? The place where you make your bloody monsters?'

Khuv's eyes narrowed, but then he smiled again. And he nodded. 'Something like that,' he said. 'Except there's one thing you should know right from the start: we don't make them.'

'Oh, but you do!' Jazz also nodded. That's one thing we're pretty sure about. This is the source. This is where it was born — or spawned.'

Khuv's expression didn't change. 'You're wrong,' he said. 'But that's only to be expected, for you only know half the story — so far. It came from here, yes, but it wasn't born here. No, it was born in a different world entirely.' He sat down on Jazz's bed, stared at him intently. 'It strikes me you're a survivor, Mr Simmons.'

Jazz couldn't resist a snort of derision. 'Am I going to survive this one?'

'Maybe you will at that.' Khuv's smile was very genuine now, as if in anticipation of something quite delicious.

'First we must get you up on your feet again and show you round the place, and then — '

Jazz moved his head enquiringly.

'And then… then we'll see just what sort of a survivor you really are.'

The complex built into the base of the riven mountain at the bottom of the Perchorsk ravine was vast, and it wasn't without a degree of Russian pride in achievement that Chingiz Khuv took Michael J. Simmons on a tour of inspection — but neither did Khuv lack respect for Jazz's considerable talent for destruction. On their walkabouts, the British agent was literally strait-jacketed in a garment which effectively disabled him from the waist up, and as if that weren't enough Karl Vyotsky was invariably present, surly bodyguard to his KGB boss.

'Blame all of this on the technology-gap, if you must have any sort of scapegoat at all,' Khuv told the British agent. The Americans with their microchips, spy-satellites, complicated and oh-so-clever electronic listening systems. I mean, where's the security if they can tap-in on any phone call anywhere in the whole wide world, eh? And these are only a handful of the ways in which sensitive information may be obtained. The art of spying' (a sideways glance at Jazz, but without enmity) 'takes a great many forms and encompasses some formidable, one might even say terrifying talents. On both sides, I mean, East and West alike. High-tech on the one hand, and the supernatural on the other.'

'The supernatural?' Jazz raised an enquiring eyebrow. The Perchorsk Projekt looks solid enough to me. And anyway, I'm afraid I don't much believe in ghosts.'

Khuv smiled and nodded. 'I know,' he said, 'I know. We've checked on that — or perhaps you don't remember?'

Jazz looked blank for a moment, then frowned. Come to think of it, he did remember. It had been part of his debriefing', but at the time he hadn't paid it a lot of attention. Actually, he'd thought his 'DO' was pulling his leg: to ask what he knew about INTESP, or E-Branch, which used Extra Sensory Perception as a tool for espionage. Indeed ESPionage! As it happened, Jazz had quite genuinely known nothing at all about it, and he probably wouldn't have believed it even if he had.

'If telepathy was feasible,' he told Khuv, 'they wouldn't have needed to send me, would they? There wouldn't be any more secrets!'

'Quite right, quite right,' Khuv answered after a moment's pause. Those were my feelings exactly — once upon a time. And as you rightly point out, all of this,' he waved an arm expansively about, 'is obviously solid enough.'

'All of this' was the gymnasium area, where for the past week Jazz had been getting himself back in shape following the fortnight he'd spent on his back. The fact that they'd so easily emptied him of all he had known still didn't sit too well with him. Here, as they paused a while to let Karl Vyotsky strip off his pullover and work out for a few minutes with the weights, Jazz thought he'd try a little pumping of his own.

He had no doubt that whatever questions he put to Khuv, they'd be answered in a truthful, straightforward manner. In this respect the KGB Major was entirely disarming. But on the other hand, why shouldn't he be open? He had nothing to lose. He knew that Jazz wasn't going anywhere outside of this place, ever. He'd known that right from square one. That's the way they had it figured out, anyway.

'You surprise me,' he said, 'complaining about American know-how. I was supposed to be about 75 per cent proof against brainwashing, but you pulled my plug and I just gurgled away. No torture, not even a threat, and I'm pentathol-resistant — but I couldn't hold a thing back! How the hell did you do that?'

Khuv glanced at him, went back to watching Vyotsky handling weights as if they were made of papier-mâché. Jazz looked at Vyotsky, too.

Khuv's underling was huge: seventy-five inches and a little over two hundred pounds, and all of it muscle. He hardly seemed to have any neck at all, and his chest was like a barrel expanding out of his narrow waist. His thighs were round and tight inside light-blue trousers. He felt Jazz's eyes on him, grinned through his black beard and flexed biceps that would shame a bear. 'You'd like to work out with me, British?' He finished his exercises and dropped the weights clanging to the floor. 'Bare-fisted, maybe, in the ring?'

'Just say the word, Ivan,' Jazz answered, half-smiling, his voice low. 'I still owe you for a couple of teeth, remember?'

Vyotsky showed his own teeth again, but not in a grin, and put on his pullover. Khuv turned to Jazz, said: 'Don't push your luck with Karl, my friend. He can give you twenty pounds and ten years of experience. On top of which he has some ugly little habits. When we caught you on that mountain he knocked your teeth out, yes, but believe me you were lucky. He wanted to pull your head off. And it's possible he could do it, with a little effort. I might even have let him try, except that would have been a terrible waste, and we've already had enough of that around here.'

They began to walk again, passed through the gymnasium and out into a room containing a small swimming pool. The pool wasn't tiled; it had simply been blasted out of the bedrock along a natural fault. Here, where the uneven, veined ceiling was a little higher, several of the Projekt's staff were swimming in the pool's heated water; the room echoed to the slapping sounds of flesh on plastic as two women open-handed a ball to and fro between them. A thin, balding man was practicing jack-knives from a springboard.