Billion-Dollar Brain

by Len Deighton

  ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘We have a saying here in Russia, “the first pancake is always a lump”.’ He kept hold of the shoulder. ‘Sometimes on a cold day I feel a twitch in the muscle. The medicine-men in the front lines were not good with the sewing needle, and you would never believe how cold it was. The fighting went on even at forty degrees below zero. Ice formed across the open wounds. Ice is a terrible thing.’ Stok produced a packet of cigarettes and we both lit up. ‘I know something about ice,’ Stok said again. He exhaled a great billow of smoke. The driver hit the horn. ‘I fought near here during the Great Patriotic War.* On one occasion we went out on skis to take samples of local ice. We needed to know if the Lake Ilmen ice would support the weight of a KV tank—forty-three tons—so that we could take the Fascist 290th Infantry Division in flank. Forty-three tons is three hundred pounds per square centimetre. The Lake Ilmen ice was fine. It was frozen almost to the bed of the lake, but do you know at times it was possible to see the ice bending, bending under the weight. Of course the tanks had to keep well spread out across the lake as we moved. There were two rivers ahead, the movement of the water meant that the ice would never grow very thick. On our reconnaissance we put logs into the water so that the logs would freeze together to make a hard surface. We put steel cables from tank to tank—like men climbing a mountain—and the first four tanks went over the ice and logs without trouble except that there was a crack here and there. Then as the fifth tank was a little over halfway across there was a noise like pistol shots. The four leading tanks revved up and as number five sank they dragged it right through the surface ice—perhaps half a metre of ice—with a tremendous noise. For perhaps three minutes the tanks were not moving, straining at…’ he paused. Stok pressed his enormous hands together and made cracking sounds with the joints. ‘Then with a huge noise, through it came.’

  ‘The crew couldn’t have survived that freezing water for three minutes.’

  Stok was puzzled. ‘The crew? No, there were plenty of crews.’ He laughed and for a moment stared past me at his youth. There are always plenty of men,’ Stok said. ‘Plenty to follow me, plenty to follow you.’ We turned across the traffic at the Winter Palace. There were a dozen tourist buses and a long line of people waiting patiently to view the treasures of the Tsars.

  ‘Plenty to follow Harvey Newbegin,’ I said.

  ‘Harvey Newbegin,’ said Stok, choosing his words with even greater care than usual, ‘was a typical product of your wasteful capitalist system.’

  I said, ‘There’s a man named General Midwinter who thought that Harvey was a typical example of your system.’

  ‘There’s only one General Winter,’ Stok said, ‘and he’s on our side.’ The car was speeding along the bank of the Neva. On the far side I saw the Peter and Paul fortress and the ancient cruiser Aurora through the veil of falling snow. In the Summer Garden the statues had been encased in wooden boxes to prevent them cracking in the cold.

  The snow was getting heavier and visibility was so reduced that I wondered whether the plane would be on schedule. I wondered too whether Stok was really taking me to the airport.

  ‘Harvey Newbegin was your friend?’ Stok asked.

  ‘To tell you truthfully,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He had little faith in the Western world.’

  ‘He had little faith in anything,’ I said. ‘He thought faith a luxury.’

  ‘In the Western world it is a luxury,’ Stok said. ‘Christianity tells you to work hard today for little or no reward, and tomorrow you will die and awake in paradise. Faith like that is a luxury.’

  I shrugged. ‘And Marxism says work hard today for little or no reward, and tomorrow you will die and your children will awake in paradise. What’s the difference?’

  Stok didn’t answer, he tugged at his chin and watched the crowded pavements.

  Finally he said, ‘A high official of your Christian Church spoke at a conference recently. He said what they have most to fear is not a Godless world but a faithless Church. This is the problem of Communism too. We do not fear the petty psychopathic hostility of your Midwinters, if anything they help us, for our people become at once more unified when they understand the hate directed towards us. What we have to fear is the loss of purity within ourselves—the faithlessness of leadership, an abandoning of principle for the sake of policy. In the West all your political movements from the muddled left to the obsessional right have learned how to compromise their original—perhaps naïve—objectives for the sake of the realities of power. In Russia we too have compromised.’ He stopped talking.

  ‘Compromise is no pejorative word,’ I said. ‘If we choose between compromise and war, I’ll take compromise.’

  Stok said, ‘I am not talking about a compromise between my world and the West; I am talking about a compromise between Russian socialism today—powerful, realistic and worldly—and the Russian socialism of my youth and even my father’s youth—uncompromising, idealistic, pure.’

  ‘You are not talking about socialism,’ I said. ‘You’re talking about youth. You are not regretting the passing of the ideals of your boyhood, you’re regretting the passing of your boyhood itself.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right,’ said Stok.

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘Everything that has happened to me in the last few weeks has been due to this sad envy and admiration that old age has for youth.’

  ‘Oh well, we shall see,’ said Stok. ‘In a decade we shall know which system can offer the best standard of living if nothing else. We’ll see who has an economic miracle. We’ll see who is travelling where to get luxury consumer goods.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear you endorsing the idea of a competitive system,’ I said.

  Stok said, ‘You are going too fast,’ to the driver. ‘Overtake the lorry with care.’ He turned back to me and smiled a warm smile. ‘Why did you push your friend* Harvey under the bus?’

  We looked at each other calmly. There were cuts on his chin and the blood had dried in small shiny dark pimples. ‘You tried your criminal murdering activities at the frontier and failed, so you were assigned the murder of Newbegin here in the centre of our beautiful Leningrad. Is that it?’

  I took another swig at the Riga Balsam and said nothing.

  ‘What are you, English, a paid assassin, a hired killer?’

  ‘All soldiers are that,’ I said. Stok looked at me thoughtfully and finally nodded. We were speeding down that incredibly long road to the airport that ends at some strange monument I have never visited. We turned off to the right, through the entrance to the airport. The driver drove up to the wire barriers and sounded the horn. A soldier swung the barrier back and we drove right on to the tarmac, bumped off the concrete and pulled up alongside an IL-18 that had the turbo props spinning. Stok reached inside his black civilian overcoat and produced my passport. He said, ‘I collected this from your hotel, Mr…’ he peered at the passport, ‘…Mr Dempsey.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  Stok made no attempt to let me out of the car. He went on chatting as though the wash of the turbo props wasn’t rocking us gently on our springs. ‘You must imagine, English, that there are two mighty armies advancing towards each other across a vast desolate place. They have no orders, nor does either suspect that the other is there. You understand how armies move: one man a long way out in front has a pair of binoculars, a submachine-gun and a radiation counter. Behind him comes the armour and then the motors and the medicine-men and finally dentists and the generals and the caviare. So the very first fingertips of those armies will be two, not very clever, men who when they meet will have to decide, very quickly, whether to extend a hand or pull a trigger. According to what they do, either the armies will that night share an encampment, exchange stories and vodka, dance and tell lies; or those armies will be tearing each other to shreds in the most efficient way that man can devise. We are the fingertips,’ Stok said.

  ‘You are an incurable romantic, Comr
ade-Colonel Stok,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ Stok said. ‘But do not try that trick of dressing your men up in Soviet uniforms for a second time. Especially in my district.’

  ‘I did nothing like that.’

  ‘Then do not try it for the first time,’ Stok said. He opened the door on his side and clicked his fingers. His driver ran quickly around the car and held the door. I got out of the car past Stok. He looked at me with Buddha-like impassivity and cracked his knuckles. He held out an open hand as though he expected me to put something into it. I didn’t shake hands. I walked up the steps and into the aircraft. There was a soldier standing in the aisle scrutinizing the passport of every passenger. I wasn’t breathing easily until we were out over the sea. It was then that I found myself still holding Stok’s hip-flask. Outside the snow beat around the plane like a plague of locusts. It wasn’t going to thaw.

  * * *

  *Russian name for World War Two.

  *Stok used the word droog. While a tovarich can be anyone with whom you come into contact even if you hate them, a droog is someone who has a special closeness and for whom you might possibly do something against the national interest. E.g. if the police are after you, you would possibly go to a droog for shelter, but a tovarich would turn you in.

  SECTION 10

  London

  There was an old woman Lived under a hill And if she’s not gone She lives there still.

  NURSERY RHYME

  Chapter 27

  ‘Responsibility is just a state of mind,’ said Dawlish. ‘Naturally Stok is going to be furious, all his work has come to nothing, but from our point of view it happened beautifully. Everyone is pleased about it, in fact the Minister used these very words, “The Newbegin business happened beautifully,” he said.’

  I stared at Dawlish and wondered what really went on under that distinguished greying hair.

  ‘The operation was successful,’ Dawlish said as though explaining to a child.

  I said, ‘The operation was successful but the patient died.’

  ‘You mustn’t ask for too much. Success is just a state of mind. We don’t get called in until there has already been a failure somewhere. The trouble with young people nowadays is that they worship success. Don’t be so ambitious.’

  ‘Did it occur to you,’ I asked, ‘that Harvey Newbegin might have been ordered to defect by the CIA or the Defence Department? He used to work for them. It’s a possibility.’

  ‘It’s not our job to calculate the permutations of deceit. If Newbegin was still alive at this moment we’d be sitting here worrying about him. A Newbegin dead means there is no risk.’ He leaned forward to tap ash into the waste-basket and stiffened as a new thought hit his mind. He swivelled his head to look at me. ‘You did see him dead?’ I nodded. ‘It was his body? No chance of a substitution?’ He began to tidy his desk.

  What a convoluted mind Dawlish had. I said, ‘Don’t make it even more complex. The dead body was that of Harvey Newbegin. Do you want it in writing?’

  Dawlish shook his head. He screwed up a couple of memo sheets and threw them into the wastebin. ‘Close the file,’ he said. ‘Check records for sub-files and give anything we hold to the morning War Office messenger for Ross. He’ll probably file it under Pike. Check that by phone and mark our card accordingly.’ Dawlish scooped up a heap of pins, clips and ribbons from the morning’s correspondence and threw it away. He picked up a blackened light bulb from his desk. ‘Why do the electricians leave these dud bulbs lying around?’

  ‘Because they’re not allowed to take anything out of the building,’ I said. Dawlish knew that as well as I did. Dawlish weighed the bulb in his palm, then tossed it gently into the waste-bin. It shattered. I don’t know if he intended that it should, it wasn’t like him to break things, not even a used bulb. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows but I said nothing.

  Of course the case wasn’t over. It never will be over. It’s like a laboratory experiment where some poor bloody mouse is injected and everything is normal for one hundred generations and then they start bearing offspring with two heads. Meanwhile science had pronounced it safe. That’s what we did. We pronounced it safe but we weren’t surprised when the two-headed monster turned up. It was the first thing in the morning; nine forty-five. I had just got to the office. I was reading a letter from my landlord that said playing the piano and singing ‘The Wearing of the Green’ at half past midnight was breaking the terms of the lease. The landlord only mentioned that one song and it wasn’t clear whether his objection was political, musical or social. Furthermore, said the letter from the landlord, there was a small motor vehicle parked outside which had offensive remarks scrawled over it. Would I please clean it or remove it. Jean was saying, ‘It could be the steam treatment but I think it’s the backcombing.’ The phone rang and she said ‘Very good’ and hung up. ‘The car is outside. Hair is very delicate, if you continually brush it the wrong way it begins to break.’

  ‘What car?’ I said.

  ‘Trip to Salisbury. First of all you feel the texture getting rough and stiff and then the ends divide.’ She twirled an end of hair round her finger.

  ‘What car?’

  ‘Trip to Salisbury. And of course it won’t hold a wave. Stringy. I don’t want that to happen.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You’ve got to go and see Doctor Pike in prison. So I had the best man there to look at it. Geraldo. He’s going to reshape it so that it can grow right out.’

  ‘First I’ve heard about it.’

  ‘It’s on the memo under your digestive biscuits. No more backcombing and certainly no more steam until it grows back into a soft texture.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I thought that it would be the first place you would look. Once you break the hair it can be very serious. The actual growth is impaired. Now I don’t know whether that means…’

  ‘All right, I’m sorry. When I said yesterday that I didn’t need you to do anything except type and answer the phone I was hasty. I apologize. You have made your point so let’s not carry the scheme of sabotage any further.’ I got up and stuffed the memo into my briefcase. ‘You’d better come with me. There’s probably all sorts of information that I will need, and you have.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jean. ‘If you would deal with the files in order instead of getting madly interested in half a dozen of them and neglecting the rest you would know your day-to-day schedule. There’s a limit to what I can handle.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And on Wednesday I would like…’

  ‘To get your hair done,’ I said. ‘OK. I get the message. You don’t have to be subliminal. Now let’s go.’ Jean went to her desk and found a sealed file with a code word—Turnstone—and a reference number on it. Pencilled very lightly in the corner was the word Pike. ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ I said, pointing to the pencilled words. ‘They are going dotty over at South Audley Street about two of our files that had names pencilled on the outside. It’s a bad breach of security. Don’t ever do it again, Jean.’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Jean said. ‘Mr Dawlish did it.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. Jean told the switchboard where we would be, told Alice that we wouldn’t be wanting morning Nescafé, locked the carbons and ribbons etc. into the metal cabinet, renewed her lipstick, changed her shoes and we left.

  ‘Why is Pike at Salisbury?’

  ‘He’s being held as a psychotic under treatment at a military prison. He’s tightly locked up, they aren’t very keen on even us seeing him, but Dawlish insisted.’

  ‘Especially us, if I know Ross.’

  Jean shrugged.

  I said, ‘Ross can’t hold him longer than a month. Can’t hold him at all if he’s a voluntary patient.’

  ‘He’s not a voluntary patient,’ Jean said. ‘He’s protesting like mad. Ross gave him a wad of papers to sign and Pike found he had applied for a commission in the RAMC. They commis
sioned him and put him straight into prison. He smashed up his cell and now is held in the mental ward. Ross is holding on to him like mad. It looks as if he’ll be there until Ross is certain that the Midwinter network is absolutely disintegrated. Ross, you see, got the rocket about the eggs from Porton. The Cabinet were very shirty and reading between the lines told him that it was us that pulled the coals out of the fire.’

  ‘Ross must have been delighted,’ I said, not without some pleasure. ‘So what have I got to do, sign something?’

  ‘No,’ Jean said. ‘You’ve got to get Pike to write his wife a letter advising her to leave the country.’

  ‘Ho-ho.’

  ‘Yes. The Cabinet are desperately anxious that we don’t have another big spy trial this year, the Americans are making life difficult enough already. This business—Midwinter amateur spy network—could get colossal exposure in the States and there will be even more pressure about US secrets not being shared with Britain.’

  ‘So Mrs Pike will join that great army of people spirited away to all parts East before the Special Branch boys arrive huffing and puffing with an arrest warrant with its ink still wet, in their hand. It’s only a matter of time before Special Branch tumble to what’s going on.’