"Brian Lumley - E-Branch 1 - Defilers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

him, too, and robbed him of his guardian. Some might say it was Harry's fault, but Trask didn't
think so. It was E-Branch, the job, this work that would get them all in the end. Darcy's face
lingered on for a second in Trask's memory, then it was gone. Gone like Darcy himself.
But there were others, far too many others, ready to take its place,- crowding in, they appeared
to superimpose themselves on the new faces in the small crowd of people waiting for Trask to
continue. And he couldn't help but remember them.
Sir Keenan Gormley, first Head of Branch. Trask saw him as he had been: sixtyish and starting to
show his age,- round shoulders on a once well-built but inevitably sagging body, supporting a
short neck and the lofty dome of his head. His green eyes a little muddied but missing very
little, and laughter lines in their corners that belied the weight of his duties,- his greying,
well-groomed hair receding just a little.
Apart from a minor heart problem common in men of his age, Sir Keenan had been good for -a lot
more years yet. . . bad been, until he'd met up with Boris Dragosani and Max Batu, ESPionage
agents for Russian's E-Branch. Dra-gosani had been a vampire and a necromancer, while Batu had
been so deadly that he could kill with a glance. His "talent" had stopped Sir Keenan's heart!
But all of that had been many years ago, and with the collapse of Communism the former USSR had
suffered such turmoil it was still in a state of flux and political disarray even today. And in
any case Dragosani and Max Batu had long since paid with their lives-paid in full, and more than
paid-for all their evil deeds/ they were gone into far darker places than poor Sir Keenan. All
thanks to Harry Keogh.
Gormley's face faded from the eye of Trask's memory, and in its place, in his audience, was the
living face of John Grieve, a contemporary of Sir Keenan's from the old days, whose presence here
had probably invoked the memory in the first place . . .
But that wasn't the end of these faces from the past,- they came in seemingly endless procession.
Faces such as that of the seer, Guy Roberts.
Cursing, irreverent, far-scrying, chain-smoking Guy, who'd been the team leader down in Devon that
time, after Harry Keogh had warned E-Branch about Yulian Bodescu. Trask remembered that time well,-
he still had small white scars back and front, under his right collarbone, where he'd been
skewered by a pitchfork's tine in the barn of Bodescu's country seat.
That had been one bell of a bad time for E-Branch. And hell was the only word that adequately
described it. Bodescu, a fledgling vampire, had killed Guy Roberts (or rather he'd butchered him,
battered his head to a pulp) as Roberts tried to protect Brenda Keogh and her baby son. But Guy
hadn't been alone in paying the price of working for E-Branch.
Their names . . . they weren't quite legion, but that was how Trask thought

I L C IV
of them. So many friends gone from the world forever. Peter Keen, Simon Gower, and young Harvey
Newton: Bodescu had killed them all. And then there'd been Carl Quint, blown to bits in the
Moldavian foothills at the site of an ancient evil. Their faces came and went, and the list went
on.


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Alec Kyle, another ex-Head of Branch: his brain drained of all knowledge by the Opposition's
scientists in their HQ at the Chateau Bronnitsy. Kyle was quite literally dead-kept "alive" on
their machines-until the incorporeal Necroscope had stepped in and inhabited the man's body,
reanimating it. Trask remembered it well: there'd been those who had hinted that maybe Harry had
taken advantage of the situation, but again Trask had denied it. It hadn't been Harry's fault,-