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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.
CHARLES FORT,
The Book of the Damned
PART I
January
All would be well.
All would be heavenly—
If only the damned would stay damned.
—CHARLES FORT, 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 froz
en 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.
Hua Tse-Ling did not look at her, did not answer her questions, gave no impression of understanding where he was or what was happening to him. The reel of the old Grundig recorder turned stiffly, squeaking.
“What good are these questions?” the Politician asked. He was nibbling on his flask again; which, given the KGB presence, was perhaps a reckless thing. Andreyev could imagine the report, something turning up one day in the Politician’s file—drinks too much. The KGB man stared momentarily at Andreyev and there was something of impatience, even a slow-fused temper in the look.
“He doesn’t understand,” said the Politician. “Anybody can see that. Shit!” He spoke in a brusque way, someone accustomed to barking questions and getting immediate answers; but there was a defensiveness too, as if he were accustomed to having his own blood drawn in the pecking order of things.
Andreyev turned back to the Chinese soldier: what lay inside that dark-blue head? If he could lay bare the scalp and probe the brain, what ruptures and crevices might he find? What disturbances?
There was a silence in the room now.
Abruptly the KGB man came to a personal decision. In a move so quick that nobody in the room could quite follow, he whipped the back of his hand, a pallid but forceful blur, across Hua Tse-Ling’s face. The soldier slumped sideways. A line of blood, the color of a dark rose, broke the surface of his lip.
“Was that necessary?” Andreyev asked. He felt disgust: in his world of research papers, graphs, laboratory techniques, electroencephalograms, alpha and beta waves, in this controlled world of hieroglyphic and symbol, each loaded with a precise significance of its own, he did not encounter the randomly violent. And now it appalled him. He looked at the figure of the soldier with pity.
“He doesn’t fucking talk,” the Politician said. “Why doesn’t he talk?”
Andreyev said nothing. Kneeling, he took a piece of tissue paper and dabbed the blood on the soldier’s upper lip; he noticed the glazed reflection in Hua’s eyes. The mind has gone, he thought. Just like a match blown out.
“Now he’s the fucking Red Cross,” the Politician said, searching the room for some support of his bluster. But the KGB man was turned away and the Colonel was moving restlessly around the walls of the room in the manner of one who expects to discover the beauty of a hidden window, a view, a fine sunset taking him unawares. Outside, the wind was high again, shaking the silences, creating new drifts of snow and delightful aesthetic accidents.
The room, Andreyev realized, was filled with eddies of tension, little currents of vested interest, rivalries: they had not expected the experiment to work—but now they were more interested, each for his own reason, than they wanted to be. Take your pick, Andreyev thought: the military, the intelligence community, or the Politburo itself: it was like a lottery, the suspense of waiting for the winning ticket to be drawn. He stood up, stepping back from Hua TseLing.
“Hua Tse-Ling,” he said.
The soldier showed no interest, no recognition.
“Hua Tse-Ling,” he said again. Nothing, no response, zero. A little frustrated, Andreyev longed for them all to leave the room so that he could get on with his work.
The Politician was laughing. “Big deal,” he said. “Big fucking deal.”
The KGB man switched off the tape recorder: “Let’s stop all the talk,” he said, confident in his world of bizarre secrecies, hidden dossiers, codes, smug all at once with the knowledge of a darkness nobody else in the room could penetrate, not even the Georgian. “Stop all the talk and do your damn tests.”
Andreyev looked at him: the broad face you would not remember from a crowd, the pendulous lower lip, the bottom jaw that jutted like a fleshy hook. Intelligence, he thought: how easily a word is misapplied. He was cold, suddenly colder than he had been in the snow.
“Do your tests, do your tests,” the KGB man said, now smiling slightly, the fleshy hook wobbling; but it was a parody of mirth—for the smile concealed myriad sins of both the past and the future; it secreted inquisitions, interrogations, all the arcane terrors of an unfathomable craft—and Andreyev realized suddenly that he was afraid of the outcome, that whatever lay ahead would have the insignia of the man’s smile, that mirthless terror, stamped upon it.
“Do your tests,” he was saying again. “Then we can shoot the bastard and get a good night’s sleep.”
3.
The tests—Andreyev thought at once of how comfortable he was with his world of tests; it was a battery that recharged him, a tranquilizer that soothed him; it was a place without conflict and stress. That it was also stripped of human connotation, rendered manageable by figures on charts, graph paper, made it somehow complete for him: a world without love and envy, without passion and rage—the benumbing clinicality seemed to him a wonder. Muscular reflex and coordination; examination of gross motor responses; an EEG that revealed only a slight irregularity of pattern in the soldier’s brain—all this had nothing to do with the grubbiness he had felt before; it wasn’t connected with fear and loathing, or sullied by paranoia: even the needle that carried sodium pentothal to Hua Tse-Ling’s circuitry shone with an awful cleanliness. Even the fact that the tests revealed nothing of any significance did not unduly worry Andreyev; and the failure of the SP to alter the soldier’s condition in any remarkable way—it was a chemical fact, a gospel of the blood. Andreyev was happy in this small world of balances and measures and quotients.
Katya said, “There’s hardly any muscular reflex.”
Andreyev, who had been looking at Hua TseLing and sipping hot tea from a plastic container, was abruptly pulled back by the sound of his assistant’s voice. He watched her a moment, remembering with some small shame the only time he had achieved intimacy with her—too many glasses of vodka at some scientific dinner, the ride through the streets of Moscow, the tiny rooms of his small apartment (cluttered; he had been embarrassed by his discarded underwear lying by the unmade bed); the drunken fumbling with her clothing and how, with an eagerness that appalled him to recall, she had assisted him with the clips and snaps and hooks of herself until she was naked in the cold bedroom, her gaunt figure reminiscent of a pioneer photograph, sepias shading into mists, an obfuscat
ion of imagery and clarity; and the lovemaking, if you could call it that, a fumbling of octopi unexpectedly swept up on a beach, her arms and legs creating more limbs than merely four in his memory now. And as he looked at her across the room he understood that she was ready for him again, that he had only to say the word; a comprehension that moved him to sorrow, an insight into the loneliness of her life.
“Did you hear me?” she asked. She was smiling. A quite unpredictable glow touched her face when she smiled.
“I heard you,” he answered. He had an image of himself from a point outside, a flash: forty-three, a small man, his flesh chalky, an impression of somehow crumbling, of coming apart at the seams. He shut his eyes and when he opened them again he looked at Hua Tse-Ling; a part of the soldier was already dead; deep inside, some kind of congealing.
“They’re going to kill him,” Andreyev said quietly.
Katya looked at him, raising her head quickly from her notes. “Does it surprise you?”
Don’t, he thought. Don’t let that sense of pity come, prevent that simple extension of humanity. But what could you do? There were times when the protective veneer he was supposed to wear like a suit of armor simply cracked open; and when he looked at Hua Tse-Ling he saw more than a laboratory study, he saw a man whose death warrant had already been signed. He wished he could reach inside the skull, understand the lacerations of consciousness; but there was inaccessibility—the very nature of the thing you studied was elusive as your own shadow: a whole box of tricks you could not open.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me.”
“What does?” she asked. She put one hand up to her brown hair, an imaginary curl. “Doesn’t the success of this surprise you?”
Andreyev thought of success: Hua Tse-Ling had crossed the river—and at what cost? Was it just a freak show? After all, was it just that? Then he was thinking, despite himself, of how power operated, the ways in which it would try to make use, for one vicious reason or another, of all this success—a concussion of forces, the military and the scientific in a lamentable collision. It’s the way of things, he thought. A simple justification: the way of things. What could one do? You could not live your life in a preserve jar, could you? It was important to go on, to continue work and ignore that other world—let it all slide away from your mind, the Kremlin summonses, the quickened interest in the eyes of generals, the inquisitions of the KGB. Let it all slide, it was the way of things: what could you do?
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