Brainfire (23 page)

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 feet 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?”

“You're stoned, my sweet.”

“Well of course I'm bloody
stoned
.”

Wellington propped himself up with a pillow. Sally, burying her face in the sheets, couldn't stop laughing.

“I say, was that chap Rayner put out the other day?”

“Put out? You make him sound like a cat, Markie.”

“Oh. You know what I mean.”

“I disappointed him,” Sally said. “I hurt him, I think.”

Wellington sighed. “These things happen, after all.”

The author rose, rings of spare flesh falling around him, and went across the room to the table, where he poured two glasses of wine from a decanter. Sally watched him outlined against the glass door that led to the living room. A faint yellow lamp burned; he looked monstrous in silhouette, like a whale. He came back across the floor.

Sally took one of the glasses unsteadily. A little wine slicked down her chin to her breasts. “Oooh, it's so cold,” she said.

“I'll lick it off,” Wellington said, and proceeded to do just that.

She watched his head bent over her breasts, feeling his damp tongue against her nipples. Beyond the glass door, a shadow moved. For a moment she couldn't make a connection; ridiculous thoughts rushed through her head—mainly, that Rayner was out there spying on her. She pushed Wellington away from her.

“Is something wrong?”

The adjoining door opened. Somebody stood there.

“You didn't say anything about a
ménage à trots
, Markie,” she said. “I agree in principle, but I like a little forewarning.”

Mark Wellington, surprised, turned to the glass door. The figure was dark, shadowy.

“I say,” Wellington remarked.

Sally pulled the bedsheets up over her breasts. She saw Wellington step toward the door and then, in a frightful moment, his huge shape was blown backward across the bed. Sally let the joint slip from her fingers and tried to rise. She experienced a searing pain in her ribs, a searing, spreading pain that caused her to twist to one side, as if she might find relief in this position—

The figure moved again. Sally slipped from the bed to the floor, an unpleasant rush, a turbulent sensation of darkness moving in on her irrevocably.

10.

It was a blustery afternoon; an uneven wind, forever shifting direction, swirled around Wembley Stadium. The crowd was low, about fifty thousand people with an inbred suspicion of the weather. Dubbs, panting up the terracing steps, followed by Rayner, clutched the ticket stubs in his hand. When they reached the top, seeing the expanse of the terracings below them, the grass seemed an impossible green, the markings on the pitch a brilliant white. Rayner realized that he was expected to stand throughout the game, a fact that struck him as curious. He followed Dubbs down through the throng to a position near the front.

“The only way to understand this odd ritual is to stand for the entire ninety minutes,” Dubbs said. “If you take a seat in the place paradoxically known as the
stands
, I have the feeling that you lose touch somehow. Self-imposed isolation.”

They leaned against a crush barrier. Dubbs said, “It could be, of course, that the Russians intend to play a psychic game. One never knows. Perhaps they practice mind rather than ball control.”

Rayner looked across the crowds. There were yellow flags waving; the lion rampant on a yellow background. An odd sort of chant had begun to echo around the huge stadium bowl.
Eng-land. Eng-land
. It grew deafeningly, then died, only to grow louder than ever before. It had been Dubbs's idea to come to the game, attracted by the mystery of the dead parapsychologist. But what did he expect to find? Evidence of telepathic communication among the Soviet players? Rayner felt decidedly claustrophobic in this crush. Dubbs, he noticed, wore a black-and-white rosette in his lapel.

“I didn't know you were an aficionado of the game,” Rayner said.

“Normally, no. But the circumstances are somewhat peculiar. And I may as well exercise a little patriotism while we're here.” The little man craned his neck forward, staring across the empty field. Two men in overcoats strolled across the grass. They appeared, at least to Rayner, to be looking for potholes.

Dubbs watched them go out of sight. “A parapsychologist,” he said. “Why go to all the trouble to bring a man like that into England only to kill him as he intends to defect? Trifling puzzles bother me, my dear.”

Rayner leaned forward, catching bits and pieces of conversation from all sides. “I reckon it a bleedin' cakewalk.” “Yeah, except for this Kazemayov bloke.” “We ain't got nuffin' like the forward penetration we need, this fackin' defense is like a bleedin' brick wall.” It was incomprehensible—yet he felt something of the growing tension around him. He watched Dubbs now, who was still trying to peer down toward the field as if he might catch something of interest. But what exactly? A floating piece of ectoplasm? Rayner had never given much credence to parapsychology, perceiving it in terms of card tricks, guesses, coincidences. But Dubbs was behaving as if something unusual was about to take place—

Suddenly there was an enormous roar. Below, Rayner saw a group of white-shirted players come running onto the field. The English team, he thought. How else could that roar be explained? He realized that in all the time he had spent in London, he had never before felt quite so foreign.

Now the Soviet team appeared. The silence that greeted them was enormous. In red shirts and white shorts, they lined up in the center of the field and bowed first in one direction, then in another.

Dubbs nudged him. “They tell me that this Kazemayov chap is the one to watch,” Dubbs said.

“Which one is he?”

“He wears the number nine. See him?”

Rayner looked, but the referee was already calling the captains to the center of the field. A coin was tossed, and for some reason the crowd roared again.

The man who stood next to Rayner, a toothless figure in a checkered cap, appeared beside himself with excitement even before the game had begun. “Here, you a Yank?” he asked.

Rayner nodded. He felt his hand being shaken vigorously.

“Bet you'd like to see the Russians hammered, eh?” The man poked his elbow into Rayner's ribs. “Bet you'd like to see them fuckers
demolished
, eh?”

Politely Rayner nodded. The man took off his cap, wiped sweat from his forehead, then screamed a sequence of abuse at the referee, who, so far as Rayner could tell, had done nothing except blow his whistle for the game to begin. The ball was kicked upfield, hanging in the wind. The Soviet goalkeeper came out and gathered it up safely. When he kicked it back downfield, the wind carried it directly into the English goal area. A scramble took place, a shifting mixture of red and white shirts.

“Fuckin' hell, look at this, look at this shambles,” the man was saying. “You'll see them bastards get a goal before the game's hardly even started. Watch it. Mark my words.”

The ball had broken free and Kazemayov, shuffling forward deceptively, went around an English defender. Rayner could not see how it had happened, but the Soviet player was clearing a path toward the English goal, avoiding a series of wild tackles. The goalkeeper, a blur of yellow, came forward and plunged at Kazemayov's feet—and somehow the ball went bouncing off his arms toward an English player. The noise was deafening: it was like the opening of one massive mouth. Even Dubbs, standing on tiptoe, was excited.

“Fuckin' lucky,” the man said. “They nearly put it away then.”

But now an English counterattack had begun. The ball was moved from one side of the field to the other, passing accurately among players. The Russians fell back into a defensive pattern.

“Fuckin' hell,” said the man, taking off his cap again. His face was covered in perspiration, despite the wind that made ball control almost impossible. “C'mon, Woodsy, you fucker—do something! Fuckin' do something!”

Woodsy, who was clearly an English attacker, had stopped on the edge of the penalty area, where he was faced by a mass of red shirts that blocked his way to the Russian goal. The crowd screamed for Woodsy to move the ball—“pass the bleedin' fing, pass it, you blind fackin' arsehole”—and the Englishman, slipping on the greasy turf, tumbling like a clown, lost his balance and the ball was kicked back down toward the center line. Even Dubbs, waving his arms comically, was shouting now.