Turning it over in his mind, Trask stroked his chin. 'That doesn't sound like Gustav Turchin to me/ he said. 'Long before he made Premier he was a diplomat, could talk his way through a minefield. Something like this happens… I just can't see him letting it happen.' He shook his head. 'Not unless he wanted it to happen. In which case… it has to be a ploy.'
'A ploy?' Goodly looked surprised.
'An excuse to get him out of here,' Trask said. 'He has a couple of things to organize in Moscow. I made a deal with him, gave him one or two problems to solve on our behalf. It's possible that the only place he could work on it is back in Russia. And isn't there another Earth Year Conference starting in Oslo in just a few days time? Acid rain or some such? I'll give you odds that's his next stop. He's something of a fox, Gustav Turchin. I'm betting he'll go home, set a few wheels turning, then head for Oslo. And of course, with the rest of the world baying at his heels, it will make him something of a hero with his own people. A temporary thing, but it ought to distract his enemies a while. Anyway, and whatever's going on, wish him luck. Gustav has come through for us in the past and he probably will again. I'll brief you on our conversation later.'
'Gustav?' said Goodly. 'First-name terms?'
'Right,' said Trask. 'It's called detente, my friend. And with the Opposition, as it happens. Well, it won't be the first time.'
'Tell me more,' said Goodly, wide-eyed.
'Later,' Trask said again, as they headed back towards the house…
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Mindsmog!
In general, Trask's briefing would be the very simplest thing. As yet he wasn't speaking to a full team — and he wasn't about to mention his private arrangement with Premier Gustav Turchin to any others than core members of E-Branch — but in the current lull he knew that he needed to keep his people sharp, keep them in the picture and give them some sort of incentive. Thus, while he intended to stick to a loose broad-screen scenario or overview, still he would remind them of what they were dealing with here, emphasizing the extreme dangers of the job in hand.
His audience included everyone available, which left only the technician Jimmy Harvey doing Duty Officer in the Ops Room; but in fact Trask's words were directed mainly at the Australian Military contingent. Dressed in casual, lightweight summer 'civvies/ and while for the moment they didn't much look like soldiers, in fact these young special-forces officers were the best that their vast country had to offer. Which was to say (in their own down-to-earth terms, and as members of an elite Australian regiment) they were 'bloody useful in a scrap, mate'.
'I know we've been over some of this before/ Trask began, 'but I just want to make it plain what we're dealing with. That job we did in the Gibson Desert — Bruce Trennier and his creatures — it wasn't big stuff. Trennier was a lieutenant, a righthand man, but he wasn't the boss by any means. Just what he and those others were doing out there in the middle of nowhere, we still aren't sure. Maybe that entire set-up was just a bolthole, somewhere that the big chief could run to if things went wrong. But as for the boss himself— who incidentally could as easily be herself — he or she is here, not far away from us even as I speak. At least that's our belief. It's what our experts are telling us.
'Now, that night when we camped out in the Gibson Desert. After the fireworks were over, one of you — no names, no pack drill — asked me a question. Normally it would be a perfectly reasonable question: why couldn't we take a lesser creature, a thrall, captive in order to talk to him, study him, and try to see what makes him tick? Which as I've said would seem reasonable… if we were dealing with an entirely human enemy. But circumstances being what they are, and our enemy being what he is, your question told me that you were either poorly informed, or you hadn't understood your original briefing, or you really didn't appreciate what you'd been dealing with that night. And for all I know, it mightn't be just one man I'm speaking about here, but all of you could have the same problem.
'So, despite that I've had experience of these things in the past — or maybe because I have — and you people are newcomers to the game, I tried to put myself in your shoes. Maybe it had seemed too easy. Unpleasant, yes, but not really difficult. And I began to see what the problem was. You've probably seen yourselves as men with a nasty job to do… but someone has to do it, right? I mean, maybe it seemed to you that these people you were killing were like, what — escapees from an isolation ward somewhere? — and you were putting them down simply to ensure they didn't pass on the infection. A pretty effective preventative measure, certainly, but perhaps a bit drastic to your way of thinking.
'So, let's go back to that perfectly reasonable question: why don't we just immobilize these things, lock them away, and study them? And wouldn't that be a far less drastic solution?
'Well, let me tell you again — let me remind you — about vampires:
'Oh, they can be downed. Shoot at them with bullets, especially silver bullets, and you can knock them down… even if they don't always stay down. Burn them — burn them entirely — and they die. Lock them up in silver cages, and keep their systems topped up with garlic so that they can't work up a head of steam, and you might even manage to confine them — for a little while. But as for studying them…
'Only make a mistake — your first mistake, just one — and you become the prisoner. And you don't get a second chance.
'Think of it this way. Men have devised chemical and biological weapons, toxins and living viruses, that could wipe us all out — destroy Mankind itself— if they were to get loose. We keep these things in secure laboratories where we study and even develop them. Well, when I say "we," I mean men: "scientists," in outlawed lands mainly, dabbling in a mainly outlawed science. For happily a majority of governments have long since banned all such agents; they deem them simply too terrible for study or development, and they're right.
'But the unpleasant fact is that because some people continue to experiment with this stuff, our people are obliged to follow suit in order to find vaccines and antidotes. They don't want us to be caught with our immune systems down, as it were. So yes, these terrible poisons still exist in just about every country that's capable of handling them. But by God, you'd better believe they take damn good care not to spill this stuff!
'So then, why am I bothering to tell you what you probably already know, and what does it have to do with vampires and the Wamphyri? Well, it's this simple:
'If you think of the Wamphyri and their works in just such terms of reference you won't go far wrong. That is, you have to think of them as something that must be destroyed. But whatever you do don't think of them on the same scale of danger! I mean, we all know that the Richter scale is a yardstick for the power of earthquakes. But if it was a scale for all potential disasters, then to cover man-made biological weapons it would have to stretch from the current nine to ninety, and to cover the Wamphyri it would need to carry on from ninety to infinity! That's by my personal scale of reckoning, and I am not wrong.
'And remember: our man-made toxins and viruses aren't bent on escaping; they can't think!Rut only imprison a vampire, and from that moment on he's thinking of ways to get free. He wants to be free, like you, and wants you to be a prisoner, like him. The prisoner of something growing inside you, that will gradually make you someone — something — else. Something other.
'So then, now maybe you can see why we can't suffer a vampire to live. The point being, we really won't suffer a vampire to live. Be sure of this: if you get infected, there's no cure. Which means we'll kill you. Oh, it'll be clean, but it will happen.