Better the Devil Read online

  Finally, the priest stirred, and Hannah would have hugged him if she hadn't thought he'd had enough of that kind of thing already. "Never, ever, ever suggest that to me again," he said.

  "Stay off Doom Bang-a-Bang 3 for a week, you got yourself a deal," Hannah countered.

  "Very impressive!" a voice shouted from the far end of the corridor. "But would you care to do something about those last two guns?"

  Hannah sighed and picked herself up, the priest following. The end of corridor guns klak-klaked on their mounts as they attempted to train on them, but they had been fitted to fire ahead only. Hannah neutralised them, and Ravne picked his way gingerly towards them.

  "I believe we have beaten the last of the bunker defences," he announced generously. "The point at which Capek Construction broke through should be nearby."

  Verse regarded both branches of the T-junction. The corridors seemed identical. "Which way?"

  "There are only storerooms to the right," Ravne said without hesitation. "The main laboratory is this way."

  He moved on without further consultation, and Chapter and Verse stared at each other, the same question in both of their minds begging to be answered.

  The main laboratory is this way, Ravne had said. But how in hell did Ravne know?

  Ravne stopped suddenly, and turned. "Near the end of the war these bunkers were by necessity constructed in something of a hurry," he explained to their suspicious stares. "The interior layouts became fairly standard, almost the prefabs of their day." His defence had a certain logic, but Verse got the impression that Ravne had simply realised he'd made some kind of faux pas, and if he were the kind of man who would uncomfortably finger his collar and tie, then that was what he'd be doing at that very moment.

  It wasn't something to concern themselves with, however. First they needed to find out whether all of this shit had been worth it.

  "There," Hannah said. She indicated the closed halves of what looked to be a solid iron door that curtailed the corridor about fifteen yards in. It was locked, and faded letters on the semi-rusted metal spelled the word "Verboten".

  "So the main laboratory was prohibited," Verse observed. "I wonder why." He extracted a tool kit from a pocket in his voluminous leather coat and, kneeling, set to work on the seal. It took some time - in all likelihood the door hadn't been opened in decades, and it would have been difficult enough when new - but as Verse continued to apply skilful pressure to the central niche containing its magnetic clamps, it partially freed itself suddenly with a judder and a hiss. Tainted air rushed out through a thirty centimetre-wide gap.

  "Knock, knock," Hannah said, sticking her head into the silent darkness beyond. "Anybody order a pizza?"

  "Be careful!" Ravne chided. He pointed out a chandelier of tangled metal, beams and wiring that marked a spot just beyond the door where Capek Construction had accidentally collapsed the roof. "You'll bring the whole lot down."

  "Looks safe enough," Verse said. He motioned to Hannah, and together they forced back the two halves of the semi-jammed door. They locked in their apertures with a clang that echoed down the corridor.

  The three of them stepped through the rubble and shone torches around.

  "What the hell...?" the priest said.

  The laboratory was dominated by five upright glass tubes, human-sized, and containing within four of them the naked and mummified remains of figures, three men and a woman. Though they appeared to have been imprisoned and presumably to have died in these strange glass coffins, they seemed not to have struggled as they did, and simply lay half-collapsed within the displays like willing specimens in a grotesque museum of mankind. But this was no simple exhibit. An assortment of pipes leading into the tubes looked as though they had at one time fed them some kind of fluid, but most of this had leaked through fractures in the glass and all that remained now was a dried caking on the outer and inner surfaces.

  Hannah ran her hand across the base of one of them and revealed what appeared to be some kind of identifying plaque. It read: "AH/2".

  Just like an experiment, she thought, and something stirred in the back of her mind. "I think I know what these are," she said. "I once saw something in a captured Sonderkommando Thule file."

  "It's a homunculus laboratory," Ravne cut in, saving her the trouble. "An alchemical facility for the creation of artificial humans."

  "Or doppelgangers," Hannah nodded. "Like the failed Churchill transplantation in the forties."

  "More Sonderkommando Thule tricks?" Verse mused. "But this place looks as if it were just abandoned. Why? Who were these people?"

  Hannah rubbed more of the plaques and read out the codes - JS/1, LPH/0, RB/3.

  "Richard Brown?" Verse offered. At Hannah's questioning look he held up a handful of passbook-sized objects. "Identity cards, circa 1944," he said. "Looks like the place was abandoned, papers and all. Unfortunately, only Mister Brown's here is legible."

  "So who the hell was Richard Brown?"

  "I think a more pressing question is who the hell was EK/5?" Ravne said. He was kneeling before the fifth, empty glass tube and running his hand across it as Hannah had with the others. Only his hand came away wet. He sniffed the viscous fluid that stuck to it. "Nutrient bath, fresh," he said. "The inhabitant of this tube was still preserved. What's more, I think the inhabitant has recently been removed."

  "Somebody took EK/5?"

  "I believe so. And so I repeat..."

  "Jesus Christ," Verse interrupted. Along with the identity cards he had picked up a file, and he slung it open now to reveal a photograph to the others.

  It was of a bearded, gaunt-looking man they all recognised. A man who had disappeared after the Second World War. A man who had been a shadowy and potentially dangerous sometime member of Caballistics, Inc's government-funded predecessor, Department Q.

  His name was Emmanuel Konterman.

  Chapter Two

  "Ten sticks o' dynamite standin' on a wall," the thickly-accented Scots brogue sang slowly through the ether, sounding very bored. "Ten sticks o' dynamite standin' on a wall..."

  "Ness..."

  "And if one stick o' dynamite should accidentally fall..."

  "Mr. Ness..."

  "There'll be no sticks o' dynamite..."

  "MR. NESS!"

  "...an' no fookin' wall."

  There was a dry cackle, a distant whistling of wind. "Boom, bloody boom," Dr. Jonathan Brand responded flatly. Caballistics, Inc's resident boffin - at least according to Hannah Chapter - sighed. "Mr. Ness, you do realise that you are transmitting, do you not?"

  A momentary silence was followed by the amplified thud, thud of a fingertip on a jawslung microphone head, and Brand pulled his earpiece away, wincing. "O' course ah realise, ya perpetually pissed wazzock," a voice blared, though now tinnily. "Dah yer tek me for some kind o' amateur?"

  Ness gave Brand the long-distance finger and through slimline binoculars the academic watched the Scotsman grinning broadly to himself, the flashing of teeth and his rearing scarred face as insane as that of a horse, rolling eyes and all. He shook his head wearily, having long since given up on challenging the Glaswegian psychopath who, at the invitation of the company financier Ethan Kostabi, had been an unexpected addition to their ranks. "I wouldn't dream of it."

  "Very wise. 'Cause all ah'm tryin' to do up here is pass the bleedin' time."

  "Fine. We're all bored. But it's been over two and a half hours now. Don't you know another song?"

  "Another song, is it?" Ness said, feigning amazement. "Ah got jus' the thing." He cleared his throat with a me-me-me and sang, "TEN LUMPS O' SEMTEX SITTIN' ON A WALL..."

  "Will somebody shut that bastard up!" another voice interjected forcefully - female, and with an American accent. "Jeezus H Christ, I wish I'd been shot dead in Peenemunde."

  "I have him in my hairs, Brand," a deeper voice rumbled from nearby. "Just give the word."

  Despite himself, Brand smiled. "Thank you, Mr. Verse, but sadly that would leave u
s a man down. Miss Chapter, hang on, I'll see what I can do."

  Brand tapped keys on the laptop in front of him and the communal audio feed from Ness was silenced, though on the screen his input graphics continued to bounce up and down while he tortured another verse or six. Meanwhile, the data on the remainder of the screen showed precisely what it had shown since being set up two hours earlier. There were further comms feeds from Hannah Chapter and Lawrence Verse, as well as one each from Jenny Simmons and Solomon Ravne, though the latter only undulated gently as he was busy mumbling ritual mantras to himself. In addition to the team feeds, an EK/EM monitor wave pulsed slowly across the horizontal, unexcited and listless for now, but hopefully due to pulse into life some time soon. Complementary wavelines, running parallel to it, monitored air density, atmospheric pressure and the like. But the main part of the screen, divided into six, displayed the images relayed by the digicams perched on the wall, next to which Jonathan Brand stood. Apart from slight variations in perspective, the images from these were virtually identical, differing only in resolution, and being shot variously in broad spectrum, infrared, blacklight and Wyrd Light as well as a unique psychosphere sensitive image capture system developed by Brand himself. Basically, they were looking for the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, the normal and the paranormal, and the coordinates of the focus of their attention were clearly delineated at the base of the screen.

  51°30'12"N, 00°07'11"W.

  It was the home of one of the largest fairground rides in the world.

  The London Eye.

  The London Eye, Brand repeated to himself. It was a big job. In every sense of the word. One that they had been recommended for by Conrad Capek, who had a small interest in the site, in thanks for their work in Germany. Brand wasn't sure why he should be so grateful - four weeks after the fact, he was no closer to finding a link between the mysterious homunculi, the remainder of the papers that Verse had found too badly damaged to establish positive IDs. As for the Emmanuel Konterman doppelganger, it remained at large. Whoever had removed it from the bunker it hadn't been Conrad Capek's people - or at least that was what the man said, and Brand had no reason to think otherwise. The whole Peenemunde affair was therefore on the backburner, and here they were earning their pay on a brand new gig.

  Also known as the Millennium Wheel, the London Eye was the first and largest observation wheel in the world when it was officially opened by Tony Blair on New Year's Eve, 1999, though Brand knew that technical difficulties had delayed the public opening until March the following year. A hundred and thirty-five metres high and weighing in at 1,700 tonnes, it was situated in the Jubilee Gardens on the south bank of the River Thames, between Westminster and Hungerford bridges, where it had been delivered by barges and then assembled flat on pontoons before being raised to vertical in two stages over two weeks. Attached to the wheel's external circumference were thirty-two sealed and air-conditioned capsules, known as pods. Each could carry twenty-five passengers who, in the course of their revolution, were treated to unprecedented panoramic views of the so-called heart of democracy as well as the rather more dubious pleasures of a good many concrete roofs, aluminium chimneys and the occasional foetally writhing, broken-limbed urban adventurer, or whatever they called those people who leapt from roof to roof for their kicks. It was also an excellent venue for those wielding the I-Spy Book of Birdshit. Still, up to one and a half thousand passengers an hour patronised the thing, though Brand himself never had and never would be one of them.

  It wasn't that he didn't trust the Eye as such, though the excuse that like many Londoners he had never gotten around to visiting one of the major tourist attractions of his home town was simply that: an excuse. Because as the last nominal incumbent of Department Q at the time - and therefore privy to certain more revealing government information - he was well aware that the "technical difficulties" of 1999 were caused by something more than frozen hydraulics and jammed gears. Construction vibration from the site had, in fact, reactivated the suspended intelligence of an escape pod jettisoned from the Mars-ship disturbed beneath Hobb's End underground in the late 1950s. The discovery of this second ancient and previously unsuspected OEO had actually been something of a thrill for Brand, though for a while there he and the surviving members of the British Rocket Group had been looking at a possible resurgence of the Wild Hunt, which, for those who remembered it, was not a nice thing at all. Needless to say, the hunt had been halted, but a side effect of the psychic surge then triggered the stone tape of the area, manifesting a ridiculous number of previously unrecorded - or, Brand suspected, publicly undisclosed - hauntings per hectare for the land involved. The spirits had been laid to res,t but it was obvious that there was something wrong with the area, something bad about the ground it sat upon or near. Someone somewhere had to have known that the area was hot, because Brand remembered that the old Greater London Council had sold that part of Jubilee Gardens on which the Eye stood to the South Bank Centre for a quid.

  Oddly enough, though, these things did not worry Brand quite so much as a more contemporary and very clear and present danger. Frankly, he had difficulty imagining a more visible and high profile target for international terrorism than the Eye. Simplistic, maybe, but he couldn't rid himself of the image of a few strategically placed packs of plastique - yup, ten lumps o' semtex - or a suicide bombing passenger leaving the Eye rolling away into the Thames, taking worldwide tourist confidence with it to its spectacular watery grave. Still, site security assured him that such potential threats were adequately policed, so... that was all right, then.

  What, in fairness, site security could not adequately police, was that earlier on this particular evening, for no apparent reason at all, the wheel would suddenly blurt out a bubble of unstable matter that had apparently originated in the infernal plane and brought with it all the horrors it contained.

  Christ, what a bloody mess it had been, Brand reflected as he checked the readings once again. Quite literally. A bloody mess. The clean up had still been going on when he and the rest of the team had arrived, and no wonder. The bubble, though it manifested for less than ten seconds according to eyewitness accounts, had encompassed all of the pods in its brief lifetime, but it had ended or - how could he put this politely? - radically changed the lives of all within them. He couldn't even begin to list all of the deformities, or worse, that had occurred as a result of its appearance, but a few of those who had been unlucky enough to survive were worthy of comparative note. The pod full of strangers who had been permanently fused together as if indulging in some mass orgy; one couple inexplicably transformed into haemorrhaging pig-like things; and at least ten individuals who were now nothing more than shapeless blobs of flesh utterly devoid of any skeletal structure at all. The anatomy of one poor bastard they found sweating and shuddering in the midst of a body-stuffed pod had simply been rearranged, most graphically in the externalisation of his major organs ,but perversely not least in the respect that his testicles had been socketed where his eyes should be, and vice versa. Less than interested in the strategic deployment of such things, Hannah Chapter had commented that at least he had been lucky enough to retain the relevant bits, even if he now possessed two sets of eyeballs in more ways than one.

  This comforting thought hadn't stopped the man screaming like a maniac as he had been led away from the pod. The attending paramedics thought it best not to tell him that their next job would be getting his wife out - at least they thought it was his wife - with a powerhose.

  How to prepare for a possible resurgence of the bubble, and then return it whence it came, was the task that Brand had had to hand. All of the horrific deformations appeared to be random, he had thought, but in his experience nothing ever truly was. There was always some kind of intelligence behind such things, and in this case it appeared to be infernally based. The peculiar variations reminded him that demons liked nothing more than to twist people's fears and perceptions and, after running some initial psychom
etric resonance tests, he had found that the victims' fates appeared quite literally to be in the terrified eyes of their beholders. For that reason he had concluded that what he was dealing with was a Rorschach Rift. That was good. He knew where he was with a Rorschach Rift.

  Brand had ordered the area cleared, which Verse had done with aplomb, telling the overly curious there was nothing to worry about, they were only making a movie - amazing what you can do with CGI these days, isn't it? With Eye security keeping the rubberneckers back, he had then deployed the others accordingly, each of them with their own assigned task. Verse was further along from him on the roof of County Hall, the building adjacent to the wheel, armed with a phased-matter sniper rifle primed to take out any unwanted demonic visitors that might want to come along for the ride, while Hannah Chapter and Jenny Simmons - his ex fiancée possessed by the demoness Baarish-Shammon, the bitch - were on the ground, mounting guard on the perimeter of a defensive pentagram nest that had been designed to withstand the planar blip. Solomon Ravne, in the meantime, sat robed and cross-legged in the protected pentagram itself, mouthing his mantras in preparation for a ritual assault that would, hopefully, weaken the rift when, and if, it returned.

  That, of course, left Mikey Ness. Everybody knew where Ness was, because he wouldn't let them forget. But he, too, had a task, possibly the most dangerous of all considering his position. Because the Scotsman was actually riding the otherwise empty Eye on the roof of one of its pods, an escort for the device that had been lashed within, the Carnacki-Silence spectrum generator known as the Matheson Machine.