"George Cowley, you are called to account." The voice boomed out, reverberating through the cool, smoky air of the vast space he stood in. The dim reddish light penetrated the hazy atmosphere reluctantly, revealing little save the monolithic block of darkness before him and the shadowy figure seated behind it.

"Account?" he said, his voice sounding thin and attenuated.

There was movement far above him, shrouded by darkness, as of immense shapes passing; he had the impression of distant, condescending amusement. Pull yourself together, man! The admonitory words in his mind, as always, were those of his father, though he'd not heard the man's voice in thirty-five years. He took a deep breath of the thin, unrewarding air, squared his shoulders. Known for being ruthlessly pragmatic, he refused to be otherwise in this situation.

"Account?" he said, his voice firmer this time. "For what?"

"For your life, George Cowley, for the evil and any good you may have done. The first charge," there was the sound as of thick paper being drawn across something faintly abrasive--Snakeskin, something within Cowley insisted, "is that of misfeasance. It is charged that by the abuse of your authority, you have caused grievous harm to the lives of the men under your command. How answer you this charge?"

"I will answer, but after I hear the particulars of the case." Best not to deal with generalities; difficult to refute with any degree of conclusiveness.

"You wish specific instances? Very well. Observe, then, death--as your men may meet it."

A wash of light, heat and motion rushed over him. No longer in the dimness of wherever he'd been, he stood now on a hot, dry, dusty plain, the morning sun slanting across the trampled ground, the sound of small arms fire crackling in his ears. Men ran past him, in no semblance of an orderly retreat. A rag-tag assortment, their varied clothing nothing so defined as a uniform; the men who fled by him were identifiable as a group only by the coloured patch each wore on his left sleeve and by the fear and defeat which marked each face. Tall and short, thin and stocky, white and black and brown, pitiably young and middle-aged: they ran, stumbled and limped past Cowley. He saw several fall to the ground as the sound of gunfire grew closer. The last of the defeated company had scarcely gone past before their pursuers came into view before him.

Travelling at a quick march, they followed their quarry, passing by Cowley in a compact, deadly group. At intervals, two of the group would pause, take careful aim, and fire ahead at the fleeing men. They did not stop otherwise, though as one of them trotted along, he took a step sideways and kicked one of the fallen men solidly in the groin before passing.

The prone figure moaned, though Cowley had thought him dead from the stillness with which he had lain. The low sound rose to blend with the retreating footsteps of the victors, and as the man rolled over to face him, Cowley saw revealed a face he recognised.

Older, lines in his face not only from pain, grey in his hair beneath the dust, yet Cowley knew him. Bodie. He tried to take a step towards the fallen man and found that he was seemingly rooted to the spot; an observer, then, enjoined from participation. He spoke.

"Bodie." The word was clear enough to his own ears, but Cowley knew the sound reached no further.

The man on the ground uncurled from his agonized huddle, took a painful breath, and as he did so, Cowley saw the spreading scarlet staining the fabric over his abdomen. Bad. Very bad.

Bodie looked down, touched the wet cloth, and his face twisted into a grimace. "So," he breathed, and there was finality in the word. He looked about and half-crawled, half-dragged himself over to a fairsized boulder and leaned himself up against it. He looked around himself once, as if missing something or someone, then closed his eyes.

It took the whole of the long day for him to die. Cowley stood there, helpless to do anything, and watched him. As the sun set, Bodie's chest rose and fell one last time, then did not rise again.

Darkness, chill, damp, and the noises of a city at night replaced the hot, dusty scene Cowley'd inhabited the instant before. It was a moment before he could place himself, still off-balance from the effects of what he'd just witnessed. As his eyes adjusted, he found himself at the rear of a sleazy pub, the little space there largely taken up by dustbins which reeked of weeks-old garbage and other scents less benign.

The door banged open, then slammed shut again as a figure reeled out and stumbled down the first two steps, then missed the third, falling to its knees on the filthy concrete with a jolt which made Cowley wince despite himself. The curly head lifted, and Cowley was somehow unsurprised to recognise the uneven features of the face thus revealed. It was Doyle, but a Doyle he had not seen before. The sharp intelligence usually resident in the green eyes was not to be seen, a dull weariness there instead.

Noting the sleeves drawn up above Doyle's elbows, Cowley was briefly amused. He'd roll up the sleeves of a tuxedo if left to himself. Then all amusement was banished as he watched the lean hands pat at a pocket, then pull out a small vial, a matchbook, a spoon, a bootlace, and a syringe.

Crouching, leaned back against a dustbin, Doyle manipulated the tools of the intravenous drug-abuser with the skill of long practice. The needle slid into the bruised flesh at the crook of his right elbow, the plunger was pressed home. He had untied the bootlace about his biceps and had withdrawn the needle before he was seized by the first convulsion.

Too-long familiarity with the myriad ways in which humanity chooses its own self-destruction told Cowley what had happened. Drug dealers and sellers care little for the health of their customers, often gripped too firmly in their own habits even to consider it; they cut the drugs they sell with whatever is to hand. Talcum powder and powdered milk were two of the more innocuous adulterants. Scouring powder was not infrequently used. Occasionally, the drug would be cut with something deadly. This time, by the symptoms, it had been strychnine.

He watched as Doyle's body bent into an agonized bow, watched some minutes later as it stilled and relaxed, watched as its breath stilled as well.

The clangour of many people, all talking too loudly and at once, nearly deafened him. Cowley looked about, almost numb beyond shock by now. Inside a pub this time, and a decidedly low-market one, at that. He'd just recognised the tall, dark-haired figure serving behind the bar when the concussion of a shotgun blast assaulted his ears and there wasn't anything left of Murphy's face to recognise.

Cowley closed his eyes, not wishing to see what scene would be shown him next. All he heard was silence, and a faint susurrus which might have been the wind. There was only darkness against his eyelids. After a while, with no other choice, he opened his eyes. He was once more where he had been before.

The-shadowy figure behind the bench said nothing, waiting for him to speak first. Cowley knew that psychological game, but in this case, he was in no way reluctant to speak.

"I know you, Father of Lies," he said with cold fury. "I know my men. I know what they may and may not do. Don't show me what they might have done if I had not known them. Don't show me what they may decide to do some day. That, if it should happen, would be a matter for their accounting, not mine." He paused. There was rumbling as of reluctant agreement from the figure behind the bench. "Show me what damage I have done to them, how I have caused them harm. If you wish to make your case, show me my men as they are now."

"Very well." There was a nasty kind of amusement in the sonorous voice. Cowley had a half-second in which to worry about that, and then he was elsewhere.

It was a room, quiet, dimly lit, and peaceful. He heard a low murmuring and turned towards it, then quickly away, the darkness preventing him from discerning more than vague outlines, shadows amid shadow, but that was sufficient. A bedroom, then, and occupied by two people. Cowley almost smiled. If this was the result of the harm he was supposed to have caused, the Adversary of all men had misjudged both the situation and him. Eyes politely averted from the intimacy before him, Cowley heard the murmuring become distinct speech.

"No, I want to see you." Bodie's voice. Cowley did smile at that. It was so like the lad, and it was also, he had to admit, much more to his own taste to know Bodie was in bed with some girl--even if the union hadn't been sanctioned by clergy or by ceremony--than to know he was lying gutshot and dying.

The light beside the bed clicked on. Cowley found his glance drawn that way, either by the natural impulse to turn to the light and what it would reveal out of the darkness, or by the wish to see Bodie, alive. There was not an instant in which Cowley denied what his eyes showed him, though the shock of it put everything he'd thought he knew about 3.7 and 4.5 in doubt.

Unclothed, lying next to an equally unclothed Bodie, in a bed which showed clearly the use to which it had recently been put, Doyle reached a long arm out and pulled his partner back down into an embrace. "There. Look just the same as ever I did, don't I?"

Bodie grinned. "Dunno. Got a kind of glow about you just now, sunshine. Can't think why we didn't do this sooner."

Doyle returned the grin, then sobered. "Because we never needed each other this much before. That's why. 'M not sayin' we never would've got here otherwise--thing as good as this and both of us bein' as clever as we are, we'd 'ave worked it out eventually--but there was always the job to consider."

"Fuck the job. Fuck Cowley."

"Yeah."

After a pause, Bodie said thoughtfully, "Know what you mean, though. Always thought I could trust the old bugger. Trust him to do what was right, at least. Now there's just you. Only you." He pulled away slightly and looked Doyle in the eyes. "Always?"

"Yeah. Always."

Cowley looked away, both to avoid intruding upon the scene more than he had to, and because it made him uncomfortable, only to find that, with no transition whatsoever, he was once more in the presence of the one whose identity he now knew.

"So, you know your men, do you?" Sly malice now in the voice.

"I know they're good men."

"You say that, after what you've just seen?"

"Yes. They are good men. What they are to each other is their own business--and in this life, they'll be the ones to decide whether that's right or wrong for them." Cowley looked up at the dark form. Was that a hint of horns he could see through the gloom, or only his imagination?

"Just as," he continued defiantly, his voice ringing out into the darkness, "I must decide whether what I do is right or wrong--until in the end, I am judged by the One who defeated you. You have no place here!"

---

He sat up in bed. The glass of water still stood on the nightstand, as unaffected by the phantasms of the night as the rest of the furnishings in his bedroom. He took a sip from the glass, the water slipping down a throat which felt much drier than usual. Bits of the dream rearranged themselves in his head. Transparent, when one had the key. He had wondered in passing about that particular teaming recently. Still, if they did nothing to bring disrepute to CI5, then it was nothing requiring his action.

The rest of it? There had been some...difficult items to deal with of late. He'd heard doubts expressed over CI5, about its relative freedom from review, about the potential for abuse in the power it wielded. What the speakers probably didn't realise was that George Cowley shared those doubts.

The greater the power, the greater the harm when it is misused, and therefore, the greater the need for whoever wields that power to be aware of what he does. When a man starts to lie to himself, then he takes the first step down that slippery path to perdition. As controller of CI5, George Cowley had difficult choices to make every day, and frequently had to decide which of two evils was the lesser, but if he were to begin to pretend to himself that the lesser of two evils is no evil, then he would have taken that first, most dangerous step.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In this case, the keeper was going to watch himself, with a sharp eye indeed, for if he failed in his duty to guide the force which was CI5 for the good of the nation, he failed also the trust which his men gave him, and he failed himself as well. And a man who had done that might as well be living in Purgatory.

Not yet. Cowley nodded abruptly to himself and got out of bed, though it was only half-three. Given an extra hour or two, he could review the files on that last case, and perhaps see where it had gone wrong.

-- THE END --

Originally published in Chalk and Cheese 12, Whatever You Do, Don't Press!, 1993