LITMIR.BIZ

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as she stood beside him at a hotel bar and talked in a dead monotone about the weather.

      But he had never, in all his travels through the dark underbelly of the world, seen madness as plausible and self-contained as he had in the face and voice of Albert Harker. What the man had told him was nothing short of lunacy, the fantasies of a child or a conspiracy fanatic, but there had been absolutely nothing crazy about the man’s delivery. He had, in fact, been horribly convincing.

      A shiver ran through Johnny as he walked slowly back into his living room and looked at the tape recorder lying on his coffee table. The small black machine seemed disconcerting, almost dangerous, and, for a moment, he considered smashing it to pieces, ridding himself of it, and the story it contained, forever. But something made him hesitate. His last commission had come in almost three months earlier, and the money he had been paid for it was long spent. He doubted anyone would take Albert Harker’s clearly delusional story seriously, but he had learnt never to say never; maybe he could work it up into something about fathers and sons, about brothers and the upper-class obsession with family and tradition.

      Johnny picked up the tape recorder and ejected the tiny cassette. He placed it in one of the two slots on the recording deck that stood on a shelf beside the window, inserted a blank tape into the other, and pressed record. His friends and acquaintances were often surprised to discover that Johnny Supernova was extremely diligent where his interviews were concerned; paper notes were scanned and backed up on his laptop, and tapes were duplicated and labelled with his own code, meaningless to anyone else.

      The tapes whirred inside the high-speed deck, until a loud beep announced that the copy was complete. Johnny ejected the new tape, scrawled an apparently random combination of letters and numbers on its label, and placed it on to a shelf below the deck containing several hundred identical-looking cassettes. He put the original back into his portable recorder, then made his way to his flat’s small kitchen. He brewed a pot of tea and was carrying it back into the living room, intending to listen to the interview again, when his doorbell rang.

      Johnny frowned. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and made a point of keeping his home address a closely guarded secret. There had been too many crazy fans over the years, people who turned up on his doorstep at the end of some weird pilgrimage, wanting to party with him, or in many cases just be in his presence. In the early days, he had invited these men and women in, given them beer and wine, occasionally drugs, and let them hang out for as long as they liked. In later years, he had given them a cup of tea, let them get warm for a few minutes, then sent them on their way. Now he simply told them they had the wrong address and closed the door in their faces.

      He set his tea aside, walked down the stairs and out into the communal corridor that served the whole house. Johnny suddenly wished, not for the first time, that he had an entry-phone system; he could have checked who was outside from behind the safety of two heavy locks. But he didn’t. He reached the front door and leant his face close up against the wood.

      “Who is it?” he shouted, and felt a stab of shame as he heard the tremor in his own voice. “Who’s there?”

      “Metropolitan Police, sir,” replied a flat, metallic voice. “Open the door, please.”

      Johnny paused. It was far from the first time the police had been at his door.

      “How can I help you?” he shouted.

      “We need to talk to you regarding a matter of national security, sir,” replied the voice. “You can help by opening your door.”

       National security?

      Still Johnny hesitated; something didn’t feel quite right. He wracked his brains, trying to identify the source of his unease; when he failed to do so, he took a deep breath and opened the door.

      It was barely clear of its frame before it burst open, sending Johnny stumbling backwards. He lost his balance, twisted round, and planted one hand on the worn carpet of the hallway. By the time he had pushed himself back to his feet, the front door was closed and locked, and two figures in black uniforms were standing in front of him. Their faces were hidden by purple visors that emerged from the black helmets they were wearing; Johnny couldn’t see a single millimetre of exposed skin. One of them stepped forward, raising a gloved hand, and terror exploded through him. He turned and ran for the open door of his flat.

      He didn’t make it.

      As Johnny stretched for the door frame, intending to fling himself through the gap between it and the door, fingers closed in the hair at the back of his head, then whipped him sharply to the right. His balance left him and his head thudded into the wall. He saw stars and fought to stay upright, his brain screaming a single coherent thought.

       Have to get away. Have to get away. Have to get away.

      He threw himself forward, feeling an explosion of pain as a handful of his hair and scalp tore loose, and staggered through the door. He pushed weakly at it, but a heavy black boot had already been wedged against the frame, and it wouldn’t close. He turned and stumbled up the stairs towards his kitchen, his mind reeling with panic. Footsteps thudded on the stairs behind him, horribly slow and calm, and Johnny realised there was nowhere to go. Then hands grabbed at him again; he was pushed through the kitchen and into the living room, where he was thrown on to his battered sofa. He stared up at the black figures. One of them appeared to be looking down at him from behind its impenetrable purple visor, while the other had picked up his tape recorder and pressed play. Albert Harker’s voice instantly emerged from the small speaker.

      “… is the biggest secret in the world, a secret that my family and others have kept for more than a century. And I’m telling it…”

      The figure clicked the stop button, opened the recorder and took out the tape. It passed it to its colleague, who held it up in front of Johnny’s face.

      “This is the recording of your interview with Albert Harker?” it said, in the same empty voice he had heard through the front door.

      Johnny nodded. He was literally too frightened to speak.

      The figure slid the tape into a pouch on the side of its uniform.

      “Where are your notes?” it asked.

      He pointed with a trembling finger. His notebook was lying where he had left it, on the arm of his chair. The second figure picked it up, leafed through it, then pocketed it.

      Johnny managed to find his voice. “Hey,” he shouted. “There’s other stuff in there.”

      “Other stuff?” asked the figure.

      “Normal stuff,” replied Johnny. “Work stuff. The Harker notes are only the last two pages. Let me keep the rest. Please?”

      There was a long pause. Then the dark figure pulled out the notebook, tore out the last written pages and threw the rest down on to the coffee table.

      Johnny was about to crawl across the floor and grab it when a black gloved hand gripped his face and turned his head. The purple visor was millimetres away from his face and he fought back a new torrent of panic.

      “Mr Supernova,” said the black figure, and the flatness of its voice made him want to scream. “It would be extremely inadvisable to attempt to publish what you heard today. The unsubstantiated ramblings of a man with both a long-standing substance addiction and a well-known grudge against his family will be of little interest to anyone, and cannot possibly be claimed to be in the public interest. To publish such a story would in all likelihood result in the death of your career, a career that is already ailing badly. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

      Johnny nodded rapidly. For a long moment, the visor didn’t move; he could see his own terrified face reflected in the purple surface. Then the figure released its grip and stood up.

      “We’re done here,” it said. The second figure nodded, strode back into the kitchen, and opened the door.

      A second later they were gone.

      He stared after them for a long moment, then burst up from

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