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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: The Source
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It doesn't feel like a room in a hospital. Hospitals feel artificial, unreal, at best. But this one feels like fake artificial …
Then the door opened and the light came on.
Jazz squinted straight up; only the fact that his eyes were shuttered saved them from dazzle from the naked light bulb where it hung on its flex from the ceiling. As for that ceiling itself: that was of dark grey stone, pocked from blasting and patterned with folded, tightly
packed strata. Jazz's hospital room was a man-made cave, or at least it was part of one!
Too stunned to move, he lay there frozen as his nurse came to the side of his bed. Then, fighting the anger and revulsion he felt welling inside, he slowly turned his head to look at her. She scarcely glanced at him, merely reached down to feel his pulse. She was short and fat, wore her hair straight and short-cropped, like a medieval knight, also wore the uniform and starched cap of a nurse. But not a British nurse. A Soviet nurse. And all of Jazz's worst fears were realized.
He felt her fingers on his wrist, at once snatched his hand away. She gasped, took a pace to the rear, and the heel of one of her square black shoes came down hard on something that crunched. She stood still, glanced at the floor, looked hard at Jazz and frowned. Her green eyes narrowed where they tried to penetrate the slit in his bandages. Maybe she saw the steely glint of his grey eyes in there; anyway, she gasped a second time and her hand flew to her mouth.
Then she went down on her knees, gathered up fragments of tablet, came upright with fury written right across her pudgy face. She glared at Jazz, turned on her heel and headed for the door. He let her get there, then called out: “Comrade?”
She paused instinctively, whirled and thrust out her jaw, glowered her hatred of the spy, then rushed out and slammed the door behind her. She had left the light on in her hurry to go and report all of this.
I have about two minutes before things start to warm up,
Jazz thought.
I suppose I'd better put them to some use.
He looked to his left, his alleged “dead” side, and saw a deep saucer of pale yellow fluid standing on a bedside table. Inclining his head and stretching his neck as far as he could in that direction, he inhaled deeply, smelled a strong antiseptic odour. How easy it was to create a hospital atmosphere: rubber tiles on the floor to
deaden footfalls, a saucer of TCP for the too-clean smell, and a constant flow of sterile, temperate air. Simple as that.
The walls of Jazz's room (his cell?) were of corrugated metal sheets bolted to vertical steel stanchions. There'd be laminated padding, too, Jazz supposed, to keep the room soundproofed and isolated. Or it could be the case that in fact this entire area
was
a hospital, built to serve the staff of the Projekt. After the Perchorsk Incident, they'd probably decided it was advisable. A hospital area would be handy for periodic check-ups and would probably be situated alongside a decontamination facility—assuming, that is, that there was still an atomic pile down here. Back in the West they were pretty sure that there had been one. Anyway, Jazz had already spotted an excess-radiation warning device on the wall; at present it was green, with just a tinge of pink showing in the aperture.
The uneven rock ceiling was maybe nine feet high on average; it looked very hard stuff and there were no fractures, not even small ones, that Jazz could see. Still (and even taking into account the massive steel stanchions) he felt just a touch of claustrophobia, something of the enormous weight of a mountain pressing down on him. For by now there was no doubt at all in his mind but that that was where he was: under the Urals.
Running footsteps sounded and the door was thrown open. Jazz lifted his head as far as restrictions would allow and stared at the people who came panting into the room. Two men, and behind them the fat nurse. Hot on their heels came a third man; his white smock and the hypodermic in his hand gave him away at once: Jazz's favourite pulse-feeler, the clucking doctor. Well, and maybe now he'd have something worth clucking about.
“Mike, my boy!” the man in front, dressed in casual civilian clothes, motioned the others back. He approached the bed alone, said: “And what's all this that Nursie's
been telling us? What? You didn't take your pills? Why ever not? Wouldn't they go down?” The ingratiating voice was that of Jazz's DO.
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. “I'm 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 Perchorsk Projekt
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-maché. 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.
“As for your ‘debriefing,'” said Khuv, shrugging, “well, there's high-tech and there's high-tech. The West has its miniaturization, its superb electronics, and we have our—”
“Bulgarian chemists?” Jazz cut him short. The tiled walkway at the side of the pool was wet and his feet were slipping; he stumbled, and Vyotsky caught his arm in a powerful grip, steadied him. Jazz cursed under his breath. “Do you know how uncomfortable it is walking round in this thing?” He was talking about his strait-jacket.
“A necessary precaution,” said Khuv. “I'm sorry, but it really is for the best. Most of the people here aren't armed. They're scientists, not soldiers. Soldiers guard the approaches to the Projekt, certainly, but their barracks are elsewhere; not far away, but not here. There are some soldiers here, as you'll see, but they are specialists. And so, if you were to get loose—” again his shrug. “You might do a lot of damage before you met up with someone like Karl here.”
At the end of the pool they passed out through another door into a gently curving corridor which Jazz recognized as the perimeter. That was what they called it, “the perimeter”: a metal-clad, rubber-floored tunnel which enclosed the entire complex about its middle level. From the perimeter, doors led inwards into all the Projekt's many areas. There were still a few doors Jazz hadn't been through, the ones which required special security access. He'd seen the living areas, hospital, recreation rooms, dining hall and some of the laboratories, but not the machine itself, if there was such a
beast. Khuv had promised him, however, that today he was to visit “the guts” of the place.
Khuv led the way, Jazz following, with Vyotsky bringing up the rear. People came and went around them, dressed in lab smocks, overalls; some with millboards and notes, others carrying pieces of machinery or instruments. The place could easily be some high-tech factory anywhere in the world. As Jazz and his escort proceeded, so Khuv said:
“You asked me about your debriefing. Well, you're right about our Bulgarian friends: they really have a knack for brewing potent stuff—and of course I'm not just talking about their wine. The pills were to cause you pain; they cramp muscles, heighten sensitivity. The shots are part truth-drug, part sedative. They have the effect of making you susceptible to suggestion. It's not so much that you can't refuse, more that you're far more likely to believe—anything that we tell you! Your Debriefing Officer not only speaks very good English, but he's a top-rank psychologist, too. So don't blame yourself that you let your side down. You really had no choice. You thought you were home and dry, and that you were only doing your duty.”
Jazz merely grunted for reply. His face was void of emotion, which was the way he'd kept it most of the time since discovering he'd been duped.
“Of course,” Khuv continued, “your own British, er, ‘chemists' are rather clever men in their own right. That capsule in your mouth, for instance: we weren't able to analyse its contents here at the Projekt. Hardly surprising; we aren't equipped with a full range of analytical facilities—mat's not what the Perchorsk Projekt is about—but even so we were at least able to conclude that your little tooth capsule contained a remarkably complex substance. That's why we've sent it to Moscow. Who can say, maybe there's something in it we can use, eh?”
While he spoke to Jazz, Khuv kept glancing back at
him, checking him up and down as he'd done so often during the course of the past few weeks. He saw a man only thirty years of age, upon whose shoulders his secret service masters in the West had placed an awesome weight of responsibility. They obviously respected his abilities. And yet for all Simmons's training, his physical and mental fitness, still he was inexperienced. Then again, how “experienced” can a field agent in the secret service be? Every mission was a flip of a coin: heads you win, and tails … you lose your head? Or as the British agent himself might have it, a game of Russian roulette.
For all Simmons's expertise in his many subjects, still they were only theoretical skills, as yet untested under “battle” conditions. For on his very first assignment the dice had rolled against him, the cylinder had clicked into position with its bullet directly under the firing pin. Unfortunate for Michael J. Simmons, but
extremely
fortunate for Chingiz Khuv.
Again the KGB Major's dark jewel eyes rested on Simmons. The Englishman stood just a fraction under six feet tall, maybe a half-inch less than Khuv himself. During the time he'd spent in his role as a logger he'd grown a red beard to match his unruly shock of hair. That had gone now, revealing a square jaw and slightly hollow cheeks. He'd be a little underweight, too, for apparently the British liked their agents lean and hungry. A fat man doesn't run as fast as a thin one, and he makes a much easier target.
For all that he was young, Simmons's brow was deeply lined from frowning; even taking into account his present circumstances, he did not seem a particularly happy man, or even one who'd ever been especially happy. His eyes were keen, grey, penetrating; his teeth (with the exception of the ones Karl had removed) were in good order, strong, square and white; about his sturdy neck he wore a small plain cross on a silver chain, which was his only item of jewellery. He had
hands which were hard for all that they were long and tapered, and arms which seemed a little long, giving him a sort of gangling or gawky appearance. But Khuv was well aware that appearances can be deceptive. Simmons was a skilled athlete and his brain was a fine one.
They reached an area of the perimeter Jazz had not seen before. Here the coming and going of staff was far less frequent, and as the three turned the curve of the long corridor so a security door had come into view, blocking it entirely. On the approach to this door the ceiling and walls were burned black; great blisters were evident in the paintwork; closer to the door the very rock of the ceiling appeared to have melted, run down like wax and solidified on the cool metal of the artificial walls. The rubber floor tiles had burned right through to naked metal plates, which were buckled out of alignment. It seemed somehow paradoxical that a Russian Army flame-thrower stood on a shelf against the exterior wall, clamped in position there. In surroundings like these Jazz might well have expected a fire extinguisher—but a flame-thrower? He made a mental note to ask about it later, but right now:
“The Perchorsk Incident,” he said, watching Khuv for his reaction.
“Correct.” The Russian's expression didn't change. He faced Jazz eye to eye. “Now we are going to take that strait-jacket off you. The reason is simple: down in the lower levels you will need some freedom of movement. I don't want you to fall and hurt yourself. However, should you attempt anything foolish, Karl has my permission—indeed he has my instructions—to hurt you severely. Also I should tell you that if you got lost down there, you could well find yourself in an area of high radioactivity. Eventually we may get around to decontaminating all the hotspots, but it's unlikely. Why should we when we won't have cause to use those areas again? And so, depending on how long it took you to surrender, or how long it took us to flush you out, you
would almost certainly jeopardize your health—perhaps even fatally. Do you understand?”
Jazz nodded. “But do you really think I'd be stupid enough to make a run for it? Where to, for God's sake!?”
“As I explained before,” Khuv reminded him while Vyotsky unfastened the restraining straps on his straitjacket, “we aren't too concerned that you'll try to escape. That would be sheer suicide, and you no longer have reasons to wish to die—if you ever did. What we are concerned about is the damage you might do, maybe even large-scale sabotage. And that could have very grave consequences indeed. Not only for everyone here, but for the entire world!”
For once Jazz's expression changed. He slanted his mouth into a humourless smile, laughed gratingly. “A bit melodramatic, aren't we, Comrade? I think maybe you've been watching too many decadent James Bond films!”

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