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

he'd been sucked in by the vacuum that was Kyle's vacant head, without which the world would have
been in dire straits a long time ago.
And on and on. Sandra Markham, a neophyte telepath who had been the love of Harry's life during
the time of the Janos Ferenczy affair. But Janos's metalism may even have been as great as Nephran
Malinari's, and when he'd got into Sandra's mind . . . that had been the end of that. The end of
Sandra, too. The Necroscope himself had put the vampirized woman out of her misery, which only
increased his own. But the list didn't stop there . . .
The twice-dead Trevor Jordan, another telepath tangled in a vampire's web of mentalism. Jordan had
put a gun to his own head and pulled the trigger- at the "behest" of Janos Ferenczy. The
Necroscope had brought Jordan back from the dead (God, that such things were or had been
possible!) only to have E-Branch kill him a second time, believing that Jordan, too, must be a
vampire. For when a man has died he should stay dead. Unless, of course, he's undead.
And Ken Layard, a Branch locator who had located something best left undiscovered, whom certain of
Harry Keogh's "friends" from beyond the grave had been obliged to deal with in the Zarandului
Mountains of Romania.
And Zek Foener, whose lost but beloved face had firmed up on the neck and shoulders of Millie
Cleary. They were so different, those two, and yet in Trask's affections alike in so many ways.
Telepaths, for one thing, and loyal and true, for another. But Zek, poor Zek! Gone from him these
three years and still unavenged: her eyes seemed to stare at him from Millie's ever innocent face.
And finally the Necroscope-Harry Keogh himself-lost in time, space, and the Mobius Continuum.
Dead, but not in the way we understand death. Gone . . . but not quite. Harry, wearing the face of
Alec Kyle as he had worn it in life and somehow made it his own.
But here lay a problem, because Harry's face simply floated on the eye of memory, drifting there
and refusing to settle on anyone else's shoulders. And then, as Trask searched through those
suddenly real faces looking back at him, he knew why Harry's face didn't fit. It was because no
one in his audience, in that small crowd of faces, would ever be able to accommodate it. And the
one face he was searching for was missing.
With that realization the poignancy of Trask's mood gradually turned to anger, a slow burn that
began to twist his lips into a grimace-

-Until the door to the ops room quietly opened, and Jake Cutter and Liz Memck stood there for a
moment in the ominous, brooding silence and the knowledge that everyone's eyes were on them.
Especially on Jake
Irask was scarcely surprised to note, in those same frozen seconds that Harry Keoghs phantom face
fitted Jake to perfection. Which only served to make him more angry yet...

2
OF THE FUTURE
Trask's thoughts, his reflections, had taken a few seconds. But they had felt like hours, and he
coughed to cover his lapse-also to choke back some of his anger. For this was perfectly
(imperfectly?) typical of Jake: insubordinate, contrary, and dilatory to the last. And he had Liz
warming to him all the way, so that Trask was bound to think:
If we can't change him, turn him, make him wo percent ours, it won't only be the waste of one man-
one esper and all his incredible potential-but he'll take Liz with him, too! And I'm still not
absolutely sure of him. He looked good out in Australia, but ever since then . . . what is it with
Jake? I mean What the hell is it?
Thoughts, that was all, but in this place, with people such as these, thoughts had weight no less
than in the Mobius Continuum. And Liz Merrick was a neophyte telepath. She couldn't send (unless
it was to Jake, or to some other mentalist deliberately scanning her mind), but she was a damn
good receiver. And despite E-Branch's code of not PSIing (or, as some might irreverently have it,