Chameleon

Chapter 6

Payne sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. He cleared his throat and began to speak.

'Once upon a time, there was a war. The second of its type actually, and, as in the first such conflagration, the forces of good won the day. At least, that's what we told ourselves. One officer returning home from the war was Colonel Johnathan Ridley. A veteran of the First World War, he had one leg and was as mad as a hatter. Everyone called him Colonel Johnny. Not even the allied high command was desperate enough to let him go into battle a second time, so they gave him a pet project to run. Rumours were rife at the time that Uncle Adolph was using psychics to spy on allied shipping. Colonel Johnny believed in all that sort of thing, he was even a character witness at the trial of Helen Duncan. She was the last woman to be tried for witchcraft. That was in 1944. Colonel Johnny thought he could help because of his position. Not that he could reveal what that was in open court, too hush-hush, so it was all a bit of a farce. His position, you ask? Well, the powers that be had him set up his own group of spiritualists and psychics to try and turn the tables on the Nazi's. They called themselves the Psychic Investigation Executive. P.I.E. Another acronym. All pie in the sky if you ask me, but Winnie, bless him, didn't want to miss a trick. Whether PIE ever delivered any useful information has not been recorded, but after the war was over, the question remained of what to do with Colonel Johnny and his merry band. Couldn't just release them into the wild, it wouldn't be fair. Then someone had the bright idea of setting up a peacetime equivalent to the Special Operations Executive. No acronym there, you see, that was a proper organisation. They saw it as a sort of dirty tricks brigade, someone to do all the mucky jobs nobody else wanted, staffed with people nobody would miss if it all went tits up. Colonel Johnny was the ideal man to put in charge.

They gave him a bundle of cash and told him to go to it. They were surprisingly generous with funds. It was enough to buy the Denby estate from some broken down toff whose great grandfather had once bedded one of the royal family and got a knighthood for his prowess. Everyone thought Colonel Johnny would just sweep up all the dross that had been left over from the war. Put them on constant manoeuvers, training courses, that sort of thing, generally keep them out of trouble. But Johnny had other ideas.

He set up a sort of commune, long before the hippies commandeered the phrase, and set his PIE chums up in cottages dotted about the estate. Lebensborn is what the Germans called it. An experiment to produced superior offspring as the result of indiscriminate shagging. Johnny's psychic chums thought all their birthdays had come at once. He arranged for a constant supply of sexual partners, both male and female, mostly willing by all accounts, to see if he could breed superior psychics.

But that wasn't all he got up to, oh, dear me, no. He also set up a laboratory. Recruited mad scientist types and tried to develop a chemical that would alter the DNA of the psychic shaggers in order to guarantee offspring with enhanced abilities. Like I say, he was mad as a March hare. It all ended in disaster, of course. Most of the babies aborted. Those that didn't were born with terrible deformities. But still he persevered.

Why did no-one put a stop to it, I hear you ask? Good question. The thing is, nobody really knew what he was up to. To be honest, he also recruited some normal, and bloody effective, operatives to carry out the dirty work the Government wanted doing and as long as he did that, they left him alone.

Things would probably have meandered along quite nicely if Johnny hadn't let the constant failure get to him. He took it as a personal insult. Thought the universe was shitting on him from a great height and when he couldn't take it anymore, he committed suicide. They found him hanging in a wardrobe, stark naked except for a pair of pink, frilly ladies knickers. Could have been an auto-erotic escapade that went wrong, but I doubt it. Colonel Johnny was never meant to have a peaceful end, it was just one of those things.

Of course, that's when it really hit the fan. With Johnny out of the picture, someone from Whitehall had to step in and mop things up. That's when they found out what he'd really been up to. They couldn't let it continue, obviously. They told all the psychic shaggers to bugger off and never to speak a word of it to anyone under threat of the most dire consequences, but, Whitehall being Whitehall, they didn't want to squander the legitimate service that Johnny had managed to put together over the years. They just needed someone to take over who would put the boat back on an even keel. Guess who they chose? Any ideas? No? All right, I'll tell you. It was Warlord, of course. Bright young spark he was in those days. Tipped for the top and no mistake. He seemed the obvious choice. What they didn't realise was that they had just put a sly old fox in charge of the hen house.

On the surface, he did exactly as he was asked. Recruited more agents, maintained a small scientific unit to conjure up all sorts of counter terrorist paraphernalia and carried on taking care of the Government's dirty laundry. But on the sly, oh, he was doing much more than that.

Colonel Johnny had left some pretty comprehensive records about everyone who had taken part in his experiments. They might have been kicked out of the nest, but that didn't mean they couldn't be useful. Warlord monitored them. He wanted to see if the drugs they'd been stuffed full of would have any lasting effect, and he put his pet scientists to work on perfecting the formula for future use.

Turns out that Johnny had been on the right track after all. Just needed a longer gestation period, that's all. Now that they weren't being topped up with the wretched stuff every day, their bodies absorbed it properly. Absorbed it and passed it on to their children. That's why you two specimens are different to your run of the mill homo sapiens. They may not talk about it at Christmas gatherings, but your parents or grandparents were part of the Denby commune, that's a certainty.

Even so, the success is only relative. A slight enhancement of the physical and mental acuity, nothing more. But you do get the odd anomaly that proves great things might just be possible. I'm talking about myself, of course. And that's the ironic thing, you see. I was born at Denby. My father was one of his mad scientists. My mother, never strong, bless her, had been fed the same chemical as all the other guinea pigs in an effort, however misguided, to make her strong enough to bear children.

Colonel Johnny departed this world as I entered it. If he'd only held his nerve a few months longer, he would have been ecstatic to see me. All his hopes and dreams wrapped up in one tiny bundle. But, it wasn't to be. Sometimes fate can be so cruel, don't you agree? But I won't bore you with my problems, I can see you're anxious to get on with your job. Oh, and let's keep this little chat just between us, shall we? Warlord would be terribly vexed if he knew I'd given away all his little secrets.

I'm going to clap my hands now and you will awaken with no memory of what I've just told you. No conscious memory anyway. But sometimes, at night, when you dream, you will remember. What you do with that knowledge, I leave entirely to you.'

Payne clapped his hands.

Stevens and March shook their heads as if coming round from a deep sleep.

'Well, gentlemen,' Payne said, 'we mustn't sit here chatting all day. You said something about my being needed at Denby? What could they possibly want with me at Denby?' he mused. And then he laughed, a short, barking sound.

'Charlie,' he said.