The Spy Who Haunted Me - Secret Histories 03 by Simon R. Green

Author:Simon R. Green
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy - General, Science Fiction, Fantasy fiction, Mystery & Detective, Contemporary, Fiction - Fantasy, Fiction, Fantasy, General, English Science Fiction And Fantasy, Eddie (Fictitious character), Epic, Drood, Spy stories
ISBN: 9780451462725
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Published: 2009-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

We followed the only road to the main gate set deep into the towering wall. The brickwork was seriously weather-blasted, but it still stood firm and strong, which was more than could be said for the massive main gate. Something had torn the gate right off its hinges and left it lying on the cold featureless ground outside the boundary wall. It could have happened yesterday or years ago. There was no way of telling. Inside the towering walls, the city lay still and open and utterly silent. The streets were deserted, with no signs of life in any of the buildings and not a sound anywhere of men or machines. A brief Cyrillic inscription had been carved deep into the stone above the gateway.

“Cyrillic!” said Walker. “We’re in Russia! Anybody read Cyrillic, by any chance?”

“I do,” said Honey.

“Of course you do,” I said. “Know thy enemy. Well, what does it say?”

“Probably Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” grumbled Peter.

“Well,” said Honey, trying to frown with her frozen forehead. “I can read one letter and two numbers. X37.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“Somehow it always sounds so much worse when he says it,” said Walker. “What’s wrong, Eddie? Are we to take it you know of this place?”

“If there was anywhere else to go, I’d go there,” I said. “Running. I know this city’s reputation. I know what it is and what it was for, and we shouldn’t be here.”

“I want to go home,” Peter said miserably.

“Russia,” Honey said thoughtfully. “I have contacts here, if I can just find a working comm system . . . What’s so bad about this place, Eddie?”

“Who cares?” said Peter. “It looks warm.”

“This is one of the old secret Soviet science cities,” I said. “Abandoned years ago. X37 means we’re in Tunguska territory, in northern Siberia.”

“Wait a minute,” said Peter. “As in, the Tunguska Event of 1908? That must be what we’re here for!”

“I hope so,” I said. “There’s a mystery in X37 too, but I really don’t think I want to know what it is. X37 was a bad place where bad things happened, and just maybe they still do.”

“It offers shelter and the possibility of warm clothes and food,” said Walker. “First things first.”

And so we became the first people to enter X37 for many years, lambs to the slaughter, walking its empty streets looking for a suitable store to break into. To keep all our minds off the cold and to keep the others from asking too many questions about X37 just yet, I did my usual Drood font-of-all-knowledge bit and filled them in on what I knew of the great Tunguska Event.

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