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

will by now have read up on the initial report. Well, as reports go it isn't a bad one, but it was
very quickly prepared and obviously doesn't tell the entire story,- that will come later and I
won't waste time on it here. So this isn't so much a debrief as my opportunity to reiterate, to
tell you what we've achieved and what we failed to achieve, what little we learned and a lot more
that we can only 'guess' at-though usually our guesswork is closer to the mark than most. "First
what we did:
"With all credit to David Chung-for picking up the first whiff of mind-smog-we successfully
located and destroyed Nephran Malinari's bolt-hole in the Gibson Desert. We also took out one of
his lieutenants, the engineer Bruce Trennier, who Malinari had recruited at the Romanian Refuge.
He had only had Trennier for three years, but he'd done a good job on him.- that one was . . .
nasty! There's no question in my mind that Trennier was well on his way to becoming Wamphyri! This
time the credit goes to Liz Merrick,- she challenged Trennier-called on him to draw, as it were-
lured him from his hole, and faced him down. And we, the rest of the team, finished it off, cut
him down, and bunted the poor bastard to a black, smoking crisp!" Trask took a deep breath,
grunted his satisfaction, and continued:
"We also took out his thralls, an entire nest of them well gone into vampirism. But as you are all
well aware, there isn't any point of no return for victims of vampirism; even part-gone is way too
far gone. So we did them a favour, for there was no hope for any of them.
"But Trennier and Malinari were linked telepathically. In the moments of Trennier's dying he
contacted his master, which David Chung likewise picked up,- a momentary contact, which
nevertheless led us to Brisbane and the Macpherson Range, and also to a second bolt-hole.
"Malinari had taken control of Jethro Manchester's Xanadu, a holiday resort in the Macphersons.
The place was an up-market aerie, somewhat removed from any manse that he'd ever inhabited in
Starside! In fact, his seat was a luxurious bubble apartment over Xanadu's central 'Pleasure
Dome'. . . would you believe, a casino? Now, if we were cynics-which I know we sometimes are, by
virtue of our talents-that sort of thing might even give us pause about Las Vegas, right?"
Trask appeared to have lightened up a little,- his audience appreciated it, and there were even
one or two wry smiles, nodding heads. "But hey, let's not go into that!" he jokingly went on.
"Lord knows that place has always had its bloodsuckers!"
(Some muted laughter now, from Trask's audience.)
But as they settled down again, the smile was gone from his face as if it had never been there.
He'd simply been setting them up. And now the punch line:
"Xanadu is in ruins, gutted like a fish!" Trask rasped, no slightest trace of humour in his
sandpaper voice. "Gutted, yes, which wasn't down to us but to

Malinari. He did it to us, or he tried to, and we were damned lucky he didn't pull it off!
"Likewise on Jethro Manchester's island: his thralls there knew we were coming, even though they
weren't any too well prepared. But then again, maybe they hadn't wanted to be ready for us, for


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after all, they were just people, dupes, victims.
"So what I'm telling you is this: that Nephran Malinari-this bloody vampire, this Lord of the
Wamphyri-that he knows about us! He probably got quite a lot from . . . from poor Zek, a little
from Trennier, and God only knows how much from us-when we were out there in such close proximity
to him. He's a telepath,-no, more properly a mentalist, a fabulously talented creature with vast
reserves of what we call ESP, and he's our deadliest enemy since . . . well, since the day we
caused the vampire world to turn on its axis and destroyed Devetaki Skullguise and her brood in