The Spy Who Haunted Me

“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.”

The lobby was a mess, with overturned furniture and scattered papers everywhere, none of them in any condition to be deciphered. There were no signs on the wall, no arrows pointing out various departments. Again, either you worked here and knew where your place was, or it was none of your business. The first surprise was that the building’s heating system was working, and the place was warm enough for us to undo our coats. The second surprise came when the lights snapped on without anyone even touching a switch. The lobby immediately looked a lot less gloomy and threatening.

“First time I’ve felt human since I arrived in this godforsaken wilderness,” said Peter. “This ugly pile must have its own generators in the basement. Though I’m surprised the activation sensors are still working after all these years.”

“Russians built things to last,” Walker murmured, peering about him in an absentminded sort of way. “I wonder what else has survived here . . .”

I armoured up and looked around through my golden mask. The others backed away a little.

“Eddie?” Honey said carefully. “What are you doing?”

“Checking for things that might have survived,” I said. “Radiation, hot spots, chemical or bacterial spills . . . But I don’t see anything. Until I use my Sight, and then . . . The whole building’s a repository of past events: ghosts and echoes and memories. Just memories, though; no living presence I can detect. Just a lot of bad feelings. Pain and horror and death. And something very like despair.”

I armoured down. The others made a point of being very interested in something else to show they weren’t impressed by my transformation anymore.

“The generators worry me,” Honey said abruptly. “They shouldn’t still be working after being down for so many years. Soviet technology, for the most part, was never that efficient or reliable. If the city’s designers spent serious money on top-of-the-line machinery . . . what the scientists were doing here must have been really important.”

“The psychic energy source is very definitely upstairs,” I said. “It’s so strong it’s blasting out through the roof. So let’s pop upstairs, people, and see if we can scare up a few ghosts.”

“I never know when he’s joking,” said Peter.

We found the laboratory on the top floor easily enough by following the heaviest electrical cables along the walls. Extra cables had clearly been added later, and somewhat clumsily too, as though the work had been done in a hurry. The whole place seemed strangely clean. No dust, no cobwebs, nothing to mark the passing of so many years’ neglect.

The laboratory itself turned out to be just a great open room cut in two by a huge one-way mirror so someone could observe the scientists. Without being seen themselves. And there you had Soviet Cold War thinking in a nutshell. They even spied on each other. We stayed in the observation room, looking through the one-way glass. I had a really bad feeling about the other room, and others were so jittery by now, they were quite happy to accept that.

The laboratory was packed with bulky, old-fashioned computer equipment, powerful enough in a brutal sort of way. Old and new models were crowded together and sometimes even co