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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing's best-kept secret.” —
The Sunday Times

“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —
GQ

“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —
Daily Mail

“Armstrong's skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —
The Scotsman

“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —
The Daily Telegraph
on
Agents of Darkness

“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —
Books
on
Heat

“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on
Jig

“A full throttle adventure thriller.” —
The Guardian
on
Mambo

“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —
Publishers Weekly
on
Mazurka

Brainfire

Campbell Armstrong

For John Sterling

and for the late Peter Watts,

with great gratitude

And for Jeffrey von Durstewitz,

Freund, Ratgeber, und Flüchtling aus Oswego

It is not possible to define.

Nothing has ever been finally found out.

Because there is nothing final to find out.

C
HARLES
F
ORT
,

The Book of the Damned

PART I

January

All would be well.

All would be heavenly—

If only the damned would stay damned.

—C
HARLES
F
ORT
,
The Book of the Damned

1

1.

It was snowing. Winds had blown great drifts, surreal sculptings that lay, pockmarked and powdery, along the bank. The early-evening sky was already black, the moon a vague configuration of silver broken by heavy cloud. Starless, cold: a landscape of colorless disenchantment. Beneath the heavy artillery, under fortifications where infantrymen moved back and forth, several figures stood knee-deep in snow. Pale lamps had been rigged below the guns, throwing weak lights in the dark.

The Scientist, Andreyev, a small man in a greatcoat so copious that it might have been wrapped several times around his body, raised one hand in the direction of the Ussuri. Faintly, by what little moon broke the cloud cover, ice slicks could be seen.

“He'll come from that direction,” Andreyev said. He looked at his three companions. The Politician, a squat figure shaped like some heavy bookend, wiped a layer of snow from his moustache and blinked down toward the river. The Colonel was smiling in a chilly way, the expression apparently frozen to his face. Only the KGB man appeared to have any unskeptical interest in the sequence of events—but that, after all, was his job: watching, listening, like someone forever scrutinizing the hand movements of an internal clock.

“If he ever fucking comes.” The Politician was a Georgian and liked to think of himself as a realist, a man with a private connection to the core of truth.

Andreyev looked quickly at him, conscious from the corner of his eye of the Colonel stamping his feet for warmth. There was a silence interrupted only by the wind pushing through snow. The Politician spat and beat his gloved hands together. Andreyev turned his face back toward the river, sensing the massed Chinese presence on the far bank. He was cold, cold to the bone. The wind came again and he thought of it blowing from the Sea of Japan, scouring the streets of Vlad, diffusing itself in its interminable journey somewhere in the Dzhugdzhur.

“I think this is a fucking sideshow,” the Politician said, and spat once again, rather deliberately, as if he imagined specific targets in the snow. “A carnival. A freak show. That's all.”

In the background the KGB man coughed quietly. He had a face of almost irritating anonymity: he was the person you meet at a party and escape from on the pretext of finding another drink. Andreyev watched him a moment, then looked away; he was afraid of being caught in a conspicuous stare.

The Politician had taken a small metal flask of imported malt liquor from his greatcoat and was swigging from it—his personal defense against the ravaging virus of climate. Andreyev saw the metal glint in the reflection of the lamps. A freak show, he thought. What else? There could not be a place for uncomfortable shadows in a world of strict materialism. Strip the mysteries away one by one and you are left holding a hard kernel that is the ordinary, the known. A carnival, a freak show. He was sorry for the Politician's limits, the lines he had inscribed about himself. Even the way he stood in the snow with the flask tilted to his mouth seemed to Andreyev a form of definition; and what was definition but a trap, a circumscription in which you found yourself well and truly caged?

“Colonel,” the Politician was saying, his voice rising through the wind, “what do you make of all this? Don't you feel idiotic standing out here? Eh?”

The Politician nudged the Colonel, who turned his frozen smile to the man: “I retain a certain open mind about this,” the Colonel said.

“An open mind!” The Politician began to laugh, shaking his face from one side to another. “An open mind! When a man talks of having an open mind, my friend, I know he's scared shitless about something!”

The Colonel smiled, this time with obvious uncertainty. From behind, the KGB man cleared his throat as if he were about to say something; but he was silent. The Politician stopped laughing and corked the metal flask, shoving it back into his coat.

“Where is the wonderwoman?” he asked of Andreyev.

“She isn't far away,” Andreyev answered.

“I bet she's fucking warm, eh? She's not standing around freezing her ass off, is she? I don't see her standing out here suffering—”

Andreyev was embarrassed suddenly for the man. He had been shaped, molded, by the dictates of the official line, the Party pamphlets, the behavioral manuals, the strange etiquette of power that distilled itself in an ignorance of personal conflicts, permitting you to think one thing while you uttered another, as if what it came down to was a series of secrets you kept from yourself: the paradox of orthodoxy, Andreyev thought. He shivered now: the wind was a serrated blade of ice rushing through him. He turned once more to the river, seeing how slicks of ice, buffeted into phantasmagorical shape by the force of the wind, gleamed like white metal in the pale moon.

And then he thought of Mrs. Blum and of how the Physician was always reminding him of her fragility, always, a constant litany of possibilities.
Too old, too damned old. You'll kill her yet
. Monitoring pulse and heart, listening to the faint life meters of the old woman as if they were poetry of an ancient kind, ready at all times with the capsules of amyl nitrate, the phials of epinephrine, the Physician reminded Andreyev of some solicitous nephew with an expectancy of an inheritance.

Mrs. Blum—how very easy it would be to lose her, to see her slip over that precipice she always seemed on the edge of; he thought of how her skin appeared to have been walked upon by a hundred small birds, the thinning of her white hair, the cloudy dark eyes.
You'll kill her yet
. No, he thought.

He watched the Colonel, who was staring through field glasses in the direction of the river. Was it happening? he wondered. He looked toward the river. He thought he saw something move. A wind flurry? What was it?

He started forward a couple of feet. Yes: he is coming, he is coming. Dark, indistinct now against the black frozen trees, something was moving. Andreyev felt a sense of triumph that he knew was less than objective; but just the same he could not resist turning to the Politician and smiling, as if to say, Well then? Well then?

Below, from the riverbank, the figure was moving haphazardly through the drifts, moving with no particular sense of direction or purpose—save, like that of some mindless moth compelled by the chemistry of its own perceptions, the attractive warmth of the lamps.

2.

The Chinese soldier was taken by Jeep to a room in the base hospital, a windowless cell containing tables, chairs, a filing cabinet. He did not respond to the questions of Andreyev's assistant, who spoke to him quietly in both Cantonese and the official Mandarin—languages, Andreyev realized, that might have meant nothing to the soldier anyhow. He was a small man with a broad Mongol face, hair so black as to be almost navy blue; he simply sat and stared at the Grundig tape recorder as if with astonishment. But you could not tell from the face what was going on inside. The ID papers, taken without protest from his tunic, established him as one Hua Tse-Ling, a low-ranking soldier of the Chinese regular army. Andreyev handed the papers to the Colonel, who perused them slowly and then passed them to the Politician. The latter, who had no knowledge of Chinese and whose personal alliances within the Politburo were hawkish in matters pertaining to China, gave them quickly to the KGB man, who placed them inside a manila folder.

“Why did you come here? What brought you here?” Andreyev's assistant was a woman of forty with cold eyes and a heartless quality in her voice. It was hard to imagine her in any intimate way, even in such a forsaken place as this outpost where eligible women had the rarity of tropical fruit. In her curiously sexless clothes, a heavy coat worn over long colorless boots, she had the appearance of an androgyne.