Kolymsky Heights (5 page)

In April Lazenby was into a fish, and it was a magnificent one.

The salmon had actually looked at him as it leapt. It was as big as a big dog and all the way through its long arc it had looked at him. Then it hit the water and went deep, into the Long Pool, taking Lazenby’s enormous Bloody Butcher with it.

Last year he had caught nothing at all, but already this season he had had several splendid touches. The river was in spate, red-brown with peat, and roaring like an engine. It was full of fish. The water boiled over the rocks, spray dashing high, and wherever he looked there were fish. The very air was full of them. He’d seen nothing like it! An incredible spring run!

He had tried all his normal flies, big sunk ones for the coloured water, Thunder and Lightning, Childers, Ackroyd. And they’d gone for them, oh yes; some heart-stopping tugs. Tugs only, but they couldn’t make out the flies in all the peat. For the fish to
take
it needed something flashier, a big old-fashioned Butcher, so he had tied one on, and right away had the rod nearly snatched out of his hands. He backed up the bank now and scrambled along it, letting out line. He could feel the fish on the end, very strong, twisting and turning.

It was snowing slightly and already getting dark. But what a
wonderful brute – thirty pounds if it was an ounce, maybe even forty! He couldn’t leave it sulking in the pool, had to get it out of there and into fast water. But careful now. Getting dark. Beyond the deep pool he would have to clamber back into the river again. Racing water, slimy rocks. Careful. For now just keep pressure on him. Let him know he couldn’t stay there in the pool. Out now, come on, out. Yes, he was out! Coming over the lip into white water – a gorgeous brute, silver, tail flipping, very strong, not long in from the sea.

Lazenby let him take line, keeping on pressure, slithering down the bank. He entered the water carefully, feeling his way between the rocks, the current dizzying. The salmon had commenced a long dash upriver and the reel was whirring. Good, let him run, just a little pressure. He steadied himself against a rock, got both feet planted firmly, and started playing him, real pressure, the rod bending.

The fish zigged and zagged, trying to get free of the line. It leapt again, miles off, but he saw it through the spray, the line coming up with it, dripping. He pulled in line fast as it turned, and played it all the way back, too. And by God, he was a fast fellow, and lively, and educated, trying to snap the line on the rocks. Keep him under pressure, tire him.

Minute by minute he tired the salmon. For forty minutes.

He was as exhausted as the fish when he guided him gently into the shallows at last. He had the net there under water, the long rod crooked under his arm so he could get both hands to it He was so tired he nearly fell over the fish in the water, trembling as he awaited the final leap when the fish felt the mesh.

But there was no leap, just some threshing in the net and then he had hauled it out and up on to the bank and he collapsed himself. He pulled the Priest out of his pocket and despatched the salmon and sat a while longer, panting. His gear was some way back, and when he reached it the light was too bad for him to see the gauge on his weighing hook. He got the fish, and his gear, back up to the car and drove to the hotel,
and went right to the fish room through the garage block at the rear.

There, to his slight disappointment, it went nineteen pounds.

‘But yon’s a beauty, Professor – fresh in! This here you can call a
fash
!’

‘Yes, not a bad chap, is he?’ Lazenby said modestly, and waited to see his prize sacked and labelled for the smoker’s at Aberdeen before going through to clean up and change. The passage led into the reception lounge and there, to his astonishment, he saw waiting for him Philpott and a grave fellow in a three-piece suit.

‘Hello, Prof. I don’t think you’ve met Mr Hendricks – Mr W. Murray Hendricks. He’s got something very interesting for you.’

Up in Lazenby’s room, after dinner, Hendricks opened his briefcase.

Twenty hours after the first satellite, another one had overflown the site, its cameras specially switched on. The first Bird had captured its images from 300 miles away at three o’clock in the morning; the second was directly overhead at eleven the same night. The fires were out, a gale was blowing, and masked figures in protective clothing were working under floodlights. They were working on the structure with the blown-off roof.

Military biology of
some
kind had been going on in the place, that was certain; despite the wind, a number of elements had been identified still escaping into the air. What had produced the explosion it was not possible to say, but the
nature of the work in the establishment had certainly been very varied.

Lazenby was shown some shadowy prints: a jumble of wrecked equipment photographed through the hole in the dome. Transparent overlays with sketched-in lines helped to clarify the mess, but Lazenby still couldn’t make it out.

A
ducting system
, Hendricks explained. It had been identified as part of a layout internationally designated ‘P4’.

‘Ah, P4. Not my field,’ Lazenby said. ‘That’s rather a high security label, the highest actually. It’s a system for the containment of tricky bacteria –
E-coli
, I believe, normally. They use it to replicate cells, for gene-splicing.’

‘Yes, E-coli is what they were using, and it was for gene-splicing,’ Hendricks said. ‘This is the remains of a genetics lab – quite a large one.’

‘Is it, now? What would they want with that?’

Hendricks probed in his briefcase again and showed him the photographs of the individuals in line. There were over a dozen prints now, some sections having been detached and enlarged. These images were also muzzy but again overlays had been provided to outline the limbs.

Lazenby examined them. ‘Apes,’ he concluded.

‘No, they aren’t apes. Not now.’

Lazenby peered again. ‘Improved apes?’

‘Yes, these can talk and read. This one can, anyway. He is reading a list and calling out names, and the others are answering him. It’s clearer on the movie.’

Lazenby looked at him over his glasses for some moments.

‘You’re not supposing this is Rogachev’s work?’ he said.

‘Well, it’s his place. There’s no doubt about that. I can show you.’

He showed him a map. It was a section of a large-scale sheet of the Kolyma region – some thousands of miles, he said, from where they had previously been looking. Ringed on it was the spidery symbol for a weather station, and close by the weather station a lake.
Blackpool
had been handwritten over the lake.

He explained this, too. The name came from a book, one of a collection gathering dust in the department’s library; the cross-referencing system, though improved, had not caught it.

Lazenby looked at the sheet of paper handed to him.

‘Here’s Green Cape,’ Hendricks said, unfolding a further section of map. ‘It’s a port, on the Kolyma river, exactly thirty miles from the lake. That’s how Rogachev’s cigarettes came out.’

Lazenby looked from the map back to the prints.

‘You
think
this is what he’s trying to get out?’ he said.

‘No. I don’t. What would be so secret about it?’

‘This isn’t startling enough for you?’

‘Yes, it’s startling. But more startling is why they’ve kept quiet about it for so many years. Also where it’s going on. Would you experiment with apes in a place like this?’

‘Well, the Arctic isn’t their environment,’ Lazenby said.

‘Right. It isn’t. And this isn’t just the Arctic. It’s the most secret place they have – the remotest, the least accessible. There’s hardly any information on it. On this place itself there’s none. We knew nothing about it. Now
that’s
startling. It’s disturbing. We’re pretty well up on Russian science. People change jobs, news gets around. But nobody has changed jobs here. That is, if you get a job here you evidently
don’t leave. And work has been going on in it for a long, long time, we can see that. Which raises another long-time question. What do you know of a fellow called Zhelikov?’

Lazenby looked at him. ‘Zhelikov the geneticist?’

‘That’s right. L. V. Zhelikov.’

‘Well, I knew
of
him. Who didn’t? He was the favoured student of Pavlov, the dog man. He’ll have been dead, what – thirty, forty years?’

‘Nobody knows when he did die. They didn’t tell anybody. We think because he died here. We think this was his place, and Rogachev took over from him. Which would make it about seventeen years ago. You’re right that Zhelikov went out of
circulation
some forty years ago. He was in a camp then, in the fifties. We think they let him out and offered him this, and he took it. Rogachev was in the same camp with him. Did you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Well, he was. They knew each other. Anyway, this place was here when
Zhelikov
arrived. At least forty years ago, and probably established a lot longer. After all, they wouldn’t have sent a guy of his class up to Siberia to
start
something going there. Something must already have been going, probably involving animals, since that was his field. But not just animals. Animal work isn’t secret. This is secret. It’s very secret – they’ve put it in their most secret place. So yes, the pictures are startling. But more startling is what else is going on there. And why he’s trying so hard to tell us about it.’

They looked at each other for some moments.

Philpott discreetly collected the papers and returned them to the briefcase. He took another one out.

‘We need your help,’ Hendricks said.

‘Well, anything I can do, of course – although exactly what −’

‘Would you go on a trip for us?’

Lazenby stared at him, and his mouth dropped open.

‘No, not Siberia.’ Hendricks’s own small mouth curved
wryly. ‘Somewhere else. We think we’ve traced the young man you mention.’ He held a hand out and Philpott placed an enlarged photo in it. ‘Would he look anything like this?’

Lazenby gazed at the photo. The young Asiatic of his nightmare evening stared sullenly back. Broad, high cheekbones, eyes glowering from under a heavy fringe of hair.

‘Well – that is him!’

‘Could you put a name to him now?’

‘Raven!’ Lazenby said. The name had swum suddenly into his mind. A number of other things had also swum there. Whisky after whisky. Staggering down a road, the whole bunch of them. Red-haired Rogachev joking away. Then round a corner, up against a wall – a familiar corner, a familiar wall … It was Oxford, damn it! It had been in Oxford.

He looked up to find Hendricks and Philpott gazing at each other.

‘Raven?’ Hendricks said. ‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Almost sure. Also a Goldilocks. There were several people … it was all very – confusing.’

‘Goldilocks
?’ Hendricks and Philpott were again exchanging glances. ‘Look, Professor, if you were maybe into – nicknames – could Goldilocks have been
Rogachev
–a
red
-haired sort of fellow?’

‘Nicknames, ah. Yes, I suppose it could be.’

‘With the other fellow as Raven because he was
dark
, very dark, in fact black – his hair?’

‘Possible. Raven doesn’t
sound
too Russian, does it?’

‘No. This fellow isn’t Russian. He’s an Indian.’

‘An Indian?’

‘A Red Indian. Canadian. His name’s on the back there.’

Lazenby looked at the back. The caption read:
J. B. Porter
(
Dr Johnny Porter
).

‘Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?’

‘I can’t say it does, no.’

‘Riots in Quebec?’

‘Oh, him. Well, I Well, wouldn’t have connected –’

‘No. He doesn’t look like that now. That’s the way he looked at Oxford. We think that’s where you met him.’

‘Yes, I think so too.’

‘Can you remember
how
you met him?’

‘Well, during a conference. At a reception, I think. For the delegates.’

‘He wasn’t a delegate. What was he doing there?’

‘That I don’t know.’

‘Did he seem to know Rogachev already?’

‘I don’t know that, either. They were just talking away about Siberia.’

‘About what aspects of it – do you remember?’

‘Well.’ Lazenby thought. ‘Languages, people, physical impairment of some kind – blindness? Snow blindness, perhaps. Something of the sort. About Siberia, anyway. Rogachev had worked there, of course, and I thought this fellow some kind of native. They were talking Russian rather a lot, and he certainly seemed to know the place so I assumed –’

‘Yes, he knows Siberia. He’s been there. There isn’t any doubt this is who Rogachev wants. He won’t talk to us. We think he might talk to you. Will you talk to
him
now?’

Lazenby stared at him. ‘You don’t
mean
now, of course,’ he said.

‘We know where he is now. He’s a difficult man to pin down. Now we’ve pinned him down. He’ll be there for the next four days.’

‘Where?’

‘Montreal.’

‘Montreal.’ Lazenby thought of his fish on the way to the smoker’s. He thought of the whole river full of fish. ‘Well, damn it,’ he said, ‘I hardly know the fellow really.’

‘That’s right,’ Hendricks said. ‘Nobody does really.’