Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  Zubro thought of Dubbs and the association with John Rayner and realized that the death of the defector might not simply be limited to British intelligence. He could easily imagine the wires humming over in Grosvenor Square, a noise that buzzed, like a trapped fly, in his head. Should he tell Koprow of this? Of the meetings between the two men?

  “You aren’t a stupid man, Anatoly. It has presumably crossed your mind that our physician was a little more than what he seemed to be.”

  Zubro contrived to look suitably surprised. He shrugged.

  “The authority for his presence here came directly from Secretary Maksymovich. I argued, without success, that you should be made fully cognizant of Domareski’s real identity and the purpose of his visit. Containment, however, was thought to be the best policy. The fewer people privy to a certain secret, the more that secret stands a chance of success.”

  “Indeed,” said Zubro.

  “This policy, despite Domareski’s death, remains in effect.”

  There was a momentary silence in the room. Koprow, rubbing his hands together, created a faint friction that suggested to Zubro the scampering of a mouse behind the walls.

  Then Koprow said, “My immediate problem is to ascertain how much British intelligence may have discovered concerning Domareski’s real identity. If they have gone too far, then the matter will have to be aborted. If we can, as it were, clear our tracks, then we can continue with our purpose.”

  Purpose? Zubro wondered. He was remembering now a strange absence of purpose in killing the physician—how perfectly the man had made a target in his white shirt caught in the lights of the car. Frozen, immobile, simply standing there at the top of the steps like someone anxious to welcome death. The sitting duck. Who was he? Who was this dead man? And why was anything so important that Koprow himself had to make an appearance in London?

  Zubro sighed and got up from his chair and stood by the desk. It was as well to say what he had in mind now. “It had been brought to my attention, Comrade Koprow, that Dubbs was keeping company with a young American, connected with the Central Intelligence Agency, called John Rayner.”

  Koprow’s expression underwent a quick, dramatic change. He glared at Zubro, and for a moment Zubro wondered if he was to witness Koprow’s infamous wrath. “Rayner?”

  “His brother, it seems, committed suicide in Moscow.”

  Koprow took a silver pencil from his pocket. “The apparent association between Dubbs and Rayner troubled you?”

  “It made me curious that Dubbs would ask questions about the dead man.”

  “What course of action did you take?”

  “Surveillance. Eavesdropping devices.”

  It was like an examination, Zubro thought, feeling himself perspire; he might have been a candidate taking the preliminary entrance test for the university.

  “What did you discover, Zubro?”

  Zubro shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “There are tapes, I assume?”

  “A few. Harmless things. The young American had a girl in North London. A mistress. Unfortunately, he discovered and destroyed the devices. As did Dubbs—”

  “Careless,” Koprow said. “Damned careless.”

  “Unavoidable—”

  “No, Zubro. Nothing is unavoidable.” Koprow, still tired from his journey, stretched his arms and yawned. He tapped his silver pencil on the desk a few times, creating a small drumlike noise. Then he rose and stared at Anatoly Zubro. Suddenly he smiled. “You have a good nose, Anatoly. I have often thought that your detailed work left something to be desired. But your intuitions are good ones.”

  Was this praise? Or was damnation about to follow? Zubro wondered. But Koprow said nothing more. He went out of the room slowly, closing the door behind him without a sound.

  7.

  “The man who died,” Dubbs said, lighting a cigarette, looking across the failing light in Regent’s Park, “the man who died was Victor Andreyev. A parapsychologist.”

  Rayner thought he felt a spot of rain in the air. He turned up his coat collar. He watched the little man shield his colored cigarette from the moisture. Dubbs was silent for a time. Across the park some enormous spotted hound was bouncing after a tennis ball. A woman was calling in a shrill way, “Over here, Randolph! This way! There’s a good lad!” Her head scarf flapping, her solid brogue shoes pattering the turf, she went off in a headlong chase of the silly animal.

  “The English have a traditional love of mutts, my dear,” said Dubbs. “But once upon a time, you know, parrots were more popular than they are now. Something about a parrot has always appealed to me. Of all birds, they most resent being caged. You can see it in their eyes.”

  Dubbs was walking now. For a time he puffed his cigarette quietly, then dropped it underfoot and crushed it. “Victor Andreyev. Odd you couldn’t contrive to pilfer the whole print-out. Still, your bloody Embassy’s like a fortress, Rayner. I can’t understand how you manage to leave at night without having to show several passes, turn various electronic keys, and know the Marine sentries on a first-name basis.”

  They were moving, Rayner saw, in the direction of Bedford College. Dubbs paused; a few raindrops sparkled on his astrakhan collar. “Why would a para-psychologist come to London dressed as a physician, my dear? Don’t even bother to answer. You’ll catch a headache. Sometimes, with the Russians, you wonder if they can fathom even their own deviance. I’ll say this—they take their parapsychology seriously, which always strikes me as a paradox, given their political system. Religion is kaput, but not the possibility of the ghost in the machine.”

  “Why are we going to Bedford College?” Rayner asked.

  “To ask a few questions, John.”

  They walked a little way in silence. Rayner wondered now about the dead man who had come to Dubbs’s home the previous evening. It didn’t seem to have had any profound effect on the little man, but there were times when you couldn’t tell what was working inside Dubbs, what was ticking away at the deeper levels.

  Outside the gates of the college, Dubbs stopped and smiled at Rayner. “That other matter—”

  “Which?”

  “The one you were mentioning about this young lady giving you the old heave-ho,” Dubbs said. He appeared sympathetic, frowning slightly. “Passe, I daresay, but time is the great physician. Remind me to recount the saga of a rather boring affair of the heart I once had with a girl whose name—of all possible names—was Rita Happeny. It sounds like a name that should be filled with the possibilities of joy, doesn’t it? Happeny. However, she gave me a rather hard knock and eventually settled down with a mechanic called Charlie. They live, as I understand, in Radnor, surrounded by a brood of nippers. In other words, don’t take it too badly.”

  Dubbs put his hand on Rayner’s shoulder a moment; a tender gesture, reminding Rayner of Gull’s outbreak earlier. Rayner felt the sincerity of the little man’s sympathy: it was for real, it was on the level. Fuck Gull, he thought. Gull, who didn’t know an expression of sympathy from a hole in the head.

  They went inside the grounds of the college. In a corridor Dubbs approached a porter and asked the way to Professor Chamber’s office.

  “You’ll like Maggie Chamber, I think,” Dubbs said. “Her colleagues think she’s batty, but I know better. At a time when everybody is so damnably busy measuring gloop in test tubes, Maggie is pursuing immeasurable things.”

  They paused outside a door and Dubbs knocked, then without waiting for an answer went inside the room. Rayner followed, seeing a middle-aged woman with thick glasses look up from behind her desk.

  “Dubbsie,” she said, smiling widely. “What brings my favorite civil servant to these halls of higher learning?”

  Dubbsie, Rayner thought. It sounded funny.

  “My dear Maggie. Meet my young American amigo, John Rayner.”

  “Any friend of the little Dubbsie person is a friend of mine, of course. Why don’t you both sit down? I can get you some utterly insipid tea, if you
’d care for that.”

  Dubbs shook his head. “I wish the call were social, my dear. But the business of running the country goes on at such a wretched pace that even a break for tea does seem a needless luxury.”

  The woman took off her glasses. She had eyes that were so brown as to be almost black: eyes, Rayner thought, of some rare intelligence. She glanced a moment at Rayner, then returned her gaze to Ernest Dubbs.

  “In your line of work, have you ever run across the name of Victor Andreyev?” Dubbs asked.

  “Of course,” the woman said.

  “You see, Rayner. Professor Chamber has encyclopedic knowledge and a memory that is nothing short of photographic.”

  “I wish,” the woman said. “What can I tell you about Andreyev?”

  “Oh. Publications. Line of professional interest. Anything.”

  Maggie Chamber looked at her glasses, blinking. “I never met the man. Something of a recluse. He was supposed to address a symposium I attended in Moscow in 1968, but for reasons that were never explained he didn’t show up.”

  “His line is parapsychology,” Dubbs said.

  “That would be rather like saying that Newton’s line was apples,” the woman remarked.

  Dubbs made a strange little snorting sound, as if he were deeply impressed.

  “If any one figure has contributed to the new respectability of what you call parapsychology, Dubbsie, it would have to be Andreyev.”

  “Despite his reclusiveness?”

  “Despite, too, his lack of publications. There’s one monograph, available only in a Russian-language edition, concerning the results of his experiments in psychokinesis. An enterprising publisher should bring it out in English, if you ask me.”

  Someone like Sally, Rayner thought.

  “Why is he so wonderful?” Dubbs asked.

  “I can answer that easily. For one thing, he had some of the most remarkable subjects any researcher could wish for. For another—unlike some of his Western colleagues—he was more interested in results than in analysis. You know how it goes in the old ivory tower,” the woman said. “This works. Let’s have fun and take it to pieces and see just how it works. I find it somewhat boring. Andreyev accepted the phenomenon. Measurement didn’t enthrall him. Only possibilities. Only how far it might lead.”

  “Have you any idea what he’s been working on recently?”

  Maggie Chamber shook her head. “I haven’t heard about Andreyev in five or six years, Dubbsie. So far as I could understand it, he had either fallen from favor and vanished inside some Soviet black hole, or else he had become involved in something rather hush-hush.”

  “Like what?” Dubbs asked. “Something that might have strategic significance?”

  Maggie Chamber laughed. “Your guess, my dear, would be as good as mine.”

  Dubbs put his hands in his pockets and looked around the office. “What are you working on these days, Maggie?”

  “Did you come here for a laugh, Ernest?”

  “Of course not—”

  “Well, if you really must know, I’m examining the relationship between ESP and the effects of marijuana.”

  Dubbs smiled. “Am I to believe in such a relationship?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  Dubbs was silent for a time. He took his hands from his coat and said, “You must turn me in sometime, Maggie.”

  “I understand the expression is turn you on, Ernest.”

  “Whatever,” said Dubbs, looking at Rayner. “Time, my friend, to hit the road.”

  “Why all the questions about Andreyev anyway?” the woman asked.

  Dubbs winked secretively. “Idle curiosity, whatever else?”

  8.

  Koprow, who never felt entirely easy outside of the Soviet Union—for reasons that had more to do with his social distaste for English life than his problems with the language—stepped out of the Temple underground station and walked away from the Law Courts in the direction of the Embankment. It was dark now. He stood and gazed down into the Thames, watching the play of lights on the water. A barge, long and flat, skimmed downriver; a single figure could be seen standing on deck, a lantern in his hand. Koprow broke open a new packet of Polos and put one into his mouth. There were considerations here, he thought. Maksymovich’s scheme, for one thing, was the most important. Abandonment would most assuredly put the old man in a bad light; it was his baby, after all—and there were those, amongst them the doves, who had considered the matter preposterous to start with. No, Koprow thought, abandonment would be a last resort. For the present, it only mattered how much of Andreyev’s identity had been revealed—and whether the breach was narrow enough to be healed with a minimum of effort.

  He looked toward the monolith of the Battersea Power Station; a pall of gray smoke hung over it. Beyond, the lights of South London shimmered through smoke and trees. Elsewhere in the night he could see the floodlit pylons of a stadium, blinding globes of white light. He tapped his hands rhythmically on the low stone wall, then turned his face along the Embankment. Cold now—a splitting March wind that stung his face and eyes. He bit on the white mint, swallowed, and then saw a figure come down toward him from Temple Station.

  He listened to the clack of footsteps coming across the concrete. Then they stopped. Without turning, Koprow said, “It has been a long time, my friend.”

  The other man, dressed in a lightweight raincoat that had a blue sheen in the lamps, coughed into a handkerchief and leaned against the wall alongside Koprow. “Long time,” he said.

  “You heard of Victor Andreyev’s death, of course?” Koprow asked. Grinning, looking ghastly in the lamplight, he swung around to stare at his companion. “The years have been good to you, I must say that.”

  The man shrugged. “I live on my nerves. It keeps me fit.”

  “In the matter of Andreyev’s death …” Koprow was silent a second. He could hear, in the distance, the mournful sound of a horn. The barge, trailing a thick wake, was going out of sight. “What do the British know?”

  The man shook his head. “Next to nothing.”

  “Next to nothing is not quite nothing,” Koprow said.

  The man reached into the pocket of his raincoat and took out a folded piece of paper, which he gave to Koprow. The Russian smoothed it out and looked at it, holding it obliquely toward the nearest lamp.

  “If they knew anything, they would hardly be asking for this information,” the man said.

  “Perhaps,” Koprow said. “Tell me about John Rayner.”

  The man groaned. “That was a bad mistake, Koprow. Didn’t it ever occur to your people that Richard Rayner’s brother works, in a sensitive position, in the United States Embassy? If you had to test this woman, why was Richard Rayner chosen?”

  “I am not here to debate the decisions of Secretary Maksymovich, my friend.”

  The man was quiet for a time. Again, the horn sounded downriver. The smoke, rising from the power station, was disintegrating.

  Koprow shredded the sheet of paper methodically and let it slip from his hands toward the dark water. It fluttered away in the manner of small, dying seabirds. “Did John Rayner see this paper?”

  “He must have.”

  “Did he pass the information on to Dubbs?”

  “One can assume that. They met tonight.”

  “What else can one assume?” Koprow asked wearily, in the fashion of someone sick unto death of a world where assumptions replaced verifiable facts. “Did he speak to his young woman about it?”

  “It’s possible,” the man said. “They had lunch together.”

  “Bad, bad, bad,” Koprow said. “It could be worse.”

  The man stepped back from the wall.

  Koprow looked at him curiously for a time. “You’re scared, no? It scares you to meet like this?”

  “It puts me in a bad place, Koprow.”

  The Russian smiled cheerlessly. The wind, throwing itself up from the river, blew at his collar. He stamped his fee
t a couple of times for warmth. “We can assume, Mr. Gull, that at least three people may have information concerning Andreyev’s real identity?”

  George Gull nodded. His nose, blistered by the wind, was a deep red. He appeared anxious, ready to leave as quickly as Koprow dismissed him.

  “You’ve been very kind to us in the past, George. Very kind and helpful. Naturally, you haven’t gone unrewarded.”

  Gull looked this way and that up and down the Embankment. “What do you do now?”

  “We save the day,” Koprow said. “Isn’t that how the saying goes? We save the day.”

  “Something like that,” George Gull said.

  “A world of assumptions,” said Koprow. “Then we work on the assumption that we can contain this thing. What else?”

  George Gull was already moving away. “This is the part I don’t need to hear about.”

  Koprow shrugged his shoulders lightly. “You’ll read about it in the newspapers, no doubt.”

  9.

  Despite his bulk, Mark Wellington was a tender and considerate lover. Sally was not passionately aroused by him, but she enjoyed his attentions. Simple things. The way he would get out of bed and fetch glasses of wine; the way he always made sure there was a supply of good dope on hand for her. Now, as she lay beside him, she was trying to get John Rayner from her mind. How long could you carry an invalid around? That was how she had come to think of Rayner: an emotional invalid. She struck a match and lit the thick joint Wellington had just rolled.

  “Don’t know how you can do that stuff,” he said.

  “Here. Try it.”

  Mark Wellington shook his head. Sally puffed on the joint loudly. “Higher and higher,” she said, turning her face against the author’s chest and giggling at something she couldn’t have explained in a million years.

  “What’s so funny?” Wellington asked.

  “I don’t know. Lying here, I suppose. Your bedroom. All those funny little things you collect.”

  “The china pieces? They’re an investment.”

  “Poor Markypoo. I hurt your feelings.” She tickled him under the armpits and he turned, laughing, away from her. When he was silent again, she said, “Do you know we’re going to print fifty thousand copies of your new book? Have you considered the enormity of that? All those glossy books all piled up in a warehouse, waiting to go out to bookstores and libraries. Isn’t that amusing?”