Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  2.

  Koprow sat at the front of the bus, directly behind the driver, watching the countryside pass. Frame houses set in the kind of green one knew would be rich during summer and fiery when autumn came. He pronounced the unfamiliar names of the towns that lay off the highway. Strange names he had trouble turning over on his tongue. Walnutport. Schnecksville. Catasauqua.

  The woman, Katya, came and sat down in the vacant seat beside him. For a time she said nothing. She simply gazed out at the landscape. This one, he thought, has no time for landscapes, for the relationships of nature, for reflection. A world of color blindness. He wondered if she ever thought of Andreyev, if in her private darkness she ever speculated on his disappearance. No, she would seal herself off from the memory, disappear inside whatever protective casket she had devised for herself. Emotions were games played only by fools.

  “She has lost a lot of blood,” the woman said finally. “Her pulse is weak. Her heartbeat is irregular.”

  Koprow, who didn’t want to know these things, looked briefly at the woman. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I am trying to tell you that if she lives another day it will be some kind of miracle, Comrade.” The woman’s voice was sharp and angular, grating.

  Koprow did not like the slight accusatory note in it. “If she dies before our task is completed, my dear woman, you will be held personally responsible. I will see to that.”

  Katya was silent for a time. “She needs expert medical help. The bleeding, for example—”

  Koprow waved his hand. “Keep her happy on her drug. Show her some photographs. Make promises. Sing songs. I don’t care what you do. I need one more day of her life. Do you understand me?”

  “The bleeding—”

  “No more. Please.”

  Katya stared through the window for a while. “I’m not a doctor, Comrade. If there’s internal bleeding, which is obvious from her excrement, then it must be clear to you that there’s danger.”

  “Give her morphine,” Koprow said. “Keep her alive. That’s all I require of you.”

  The woman rose from the seat, stared at him, then walked up the aisle to the back seat where Mrs. Blum sat, slumping against the window, her body wrapped in blankets. She had her eyes closed; her head, touching the glass, vibrated slightly. Katya sat down beside her and opened a small dark bag of medical supplies. Epinephrine, amyl nitrate, morphine. She filled a syringe and lifted the old woman’s arm, which was slack and lifeless, like formless putty in her hand.

  3.

  There was a weakness she had not felt before, not even in the worst of times. She had not thought before of dying as something that would involve weakness, but rather as an energetic movement, a confrontation, a rush into darkness. I don’t want to die, she thought. I don’t want—and she remembered, as if it were all a dream, an illusion, the thin voice that had come to her—when? last night? She wasn’t sure because time held no meaning; time was like mercury slipping across a surface, shapeless, impossible. The voice had been that of a child. A young girl. Another, she thought, with this wretched ability. Another with this malformation. When she grows—how terrible it will be for her when she grows. She was aware now of movement and she opened her eyes a little way. A road, white houses, trees. Confused again, insensible to place, to surroundings, to why she was moving: was this her Palestine?

  No. There wasn’t such a place. She had invented it for herself.

  You couldn’t find it on any map.

  She tried to remember, but even memory had slipped. The man had come to her this morning. He had come to her with a name. Her final task. And she tried to remember the name, to keep it in front of her mind and out of the dark places. Mallory. Somebody called Mallory.

  The final killing.

  She tried to imagine praying, praying even silently to herself, but she understood that it would do no good because wherever God might be he had stopped listening to her now.

  If there was one worthy act, one last act of value, one thing that might cause God to reconsider, what would it be? What could it possibly be? But she was so tired and thought was so terrible; and sleep—sleep was the only profound thing left.

  4.

  Rayner woke, startled, remembering what he had worked out, recalling his determination not to sleep—yet he had drifted off, and when he opened his eyes he thought of the nonsensical conclusions of his own notions. Weary, he sat up. He got up from the bed and went to the window, which was bright with early sun.

  Somebody is going to kill Mallory, he thought.

  Suppose it’s true. Suppose.

  Who do you tell? Where do you go with this brilliant information? Do you call the White House and warn Mallory’s people? He laid his hand flat upon the pane of glass.

  Saturday in D.C. Stadium.

  He heard Isobel move, and when he turned to look he saw she was awake, watching him. “I dreamed I was back in my own house,” she said. “Only it was different somehow. There were all these people sitting in my front room and I didn’t know any of them. But I did know them somehow. When I tried to talk they just ignored me like I wasn’t even there.”

  She sat up, pushing aside her pillow.

  “Anyway, it wasn’t an accurate dream. I notice I’m still in the same grubby motel room with you. And I haven’t changed these clothes in—God, I’ve even lost track of time.”

  She rose, went inside the bathroom. He remained by the window, listening to the sound of running water. This is John Rayner of the United States Embassy in London. I must warn you, Mr. President, sir, that an old woman is about to kill you. Jesus Christ. He looked out across the parking lot at the trash cans by the wall and he wondered how he could even begin to explain to Isobel, where it could lead. I first really began to doubt the defendant’s sanity when he developed this insatiable obsession with newspapers picked out of trash cans. I thought it somewhat odd.

  Today. Saturday, Rayner thought.

  What did you do? You could buy a shotgun in Virginia Beach, then rent a car, drive to Washington, get through the security guards somehow at the stadium, and shoot every old woman in sight. Sure. Sure you could.

  Isobel came out of the bathroom, drying her face with a towel she dropped on the bed. He thought of how he had slept beside her, his body twisted away from her at some prim angle: a degree of morality.

  “So,” she said. “When do we check out of the Hotel El Dumpo? And what happens next?”

  She stepped across the papers, grimacing at them, as if she wanted to put that memory from her mind. He watched her as she approached the window and stood beside him. She looked out at the flood of sunlight a moment.

  “I fell asleep before I heard your explanation,” she said.

  “Explanation?”

  “This weird thing you have about the Russian team.” She shrugged, hands in the pockets of her jeans.

  “That kid,” he said.

  “Fiona?”

  He nodded. He thought all at once of Sally. You can’t go through it again with Isobel; you can’t drag her toward the same destiny.

  “What about Fiona?” Isobel asked.

  “If your little friend is on the level, I think we have a situation …” He paused. What was the point in saying it out loud? He could already anticipate her look, the distance in her eyes, her discomfort. The mad brother-in-law.

  “A situation like what?” she asked.

  “Like the death of Patrick J. Mallory,” he answered.

  She was quiet for a time. She moved away from him now, circling the room in the manner of someone stalking. “How is he supposed to die, John?”

  “By assassination.”

  “And what has this got to do with a teen-age girl in Virginia Beach?”

  What indeed? Rayner clenched his hands together. He watched the expression on her face: dark, opaque, something he couldn’t read.

  “The connection is that the same power she talked about last night is the one that will be used to kill Ma
llory.”

  There. It was out in the cold, shivering.

  Isobel sat on the edge of the bed and stared at him. She was running her fingers back and forth through her long hair. “I have this feeling of a gulf, John,” she said slowly. “A distance between your world and mine. I have the feeling of—how do I describe it?—the distance growing wider. And I don’t much like it. Do I make myself plain? Maybe in your world—all the codes and secrets and locked rooms and whacky little games of power—maybe in your world there are assassination conspiracies and dark plots, but mine isn’t like that, John. Mine’s different.”

  “It’s the same world,” he said.

  “It’s night and day,” she said, rising from the bed. “It’s the sun and the moon, John.”

  “You take the long route to telling me you don’t believe me—”

  “Did you expect me to believe?”

  He shook his head. He watched her come toward him. She pressed her face against his shoulder, sighing. He could hardly blame her. Maybe on the spiral down, he thought, you were bound to encounter the resistance of cold sanity. For her it was a matter of dabbling in the inexplicable possibilities of the mind—harmless, comforting, puzzling; it was no more than a jigsaw of psychic pieces. For him it had become something different, something threatening.

  “John,” she said. “John, look, I would like to believe in your …”

  “Sanity?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “I want to believe in it. You sure as hell make it damn hard.”

  She was staring at the pages of newspaper now, as if this were further evidence of his disintegration. She moved away from him, bent down, picked up a sheet with a look of distaste.

  He had the feeling of a curious solitude, rather like a mist, moving in on him. The kid, he thought. Maybe she was making it all up, dreaming it; maybe it was just a part of her general tease. He watched Isobel crumple a sheet of paper in her hand, making a ball of it, weighing it in her open palm.

  He had a sense now of a delicate shift in the nature of things: it was as if his own skepticism had eroded completely and he was defending that which he had scorned before—defending it against one of its own converts.

  “Mallory will be at D.C. Stadium this afternoon,” he said.

  “I read it.”

  “The game begins at three.”

  “You think that’s where the event will happen?”

  “If I’m right, yeah. I think that’s where it will happen.”

  “If you’re right,” she said, in the manner of somebody talking to herself. She aimed the ball of paper at the wastebasket, missing her shot.

  “And there’s only one person who can tell me if I’m right,” he said.

  She looked at him. “The girl?”

  “The girl,” he said.

  He was quiet for a while, conscious of time passing in the silence. Three o’clock. Only the kid, he thought; who else could lead him to the core of this? If there was a core, a center, a heart he could penetrate. If. Who else could take him there?

  5.

  Chip Alexander was wakened by the sound of the telephone in his room at the Holiday Inn. For a moment he had trouble adjusting to his surroundings. It was the sound of the sea that momentarily threw him; then he remembered and reached out for the receiver. When he spoke into it his voice was hoarse.

  It was some dummy from the Virginia Beach Police Department. Alexander sat upright and stared at the slit of dawn that hung between the draperies. He scratched his head, then fumbled for a cigarette, knocking over a plastic tumbler filled with stale water. He listened to it drip from the bedside table to the rug.

  “Inspector Crabbe?” the voice asked.

  “Yeah,” Alexander said, “this is Crabbe.”

  “This is Scully,” the guy said. “I just came on duty and I picked up on a complaint that I guess might interest you.”

  “Yeah,” Alexander said. That first cigarette: Christ, it was a killer.

  “You asked Captain Ettinger about a character called Rayner, right? John Rayner? Is that right?”

  Come to the point, Alexander thought. How did these small-town stiffs contrive to beat around so many bushes? It was one thing to impress them with fake FBI credentials—they looked at you like you were Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., coming down for the big kill—but it was quite another to have to deal with them.

  “What’s the story?” he asked.

  “Some guy called Ferguson Fox called in a complaint at midnight—”

  “Midnight?” Alexander picked up his watch. “Well, you guys are really on the ball. I mean, that’s only just over seven hours ago. I’m impressed.”

  There was a heavy silence on the line.

  “I don’t think your inquiry was circulated, Inspector,” the cop said. “It was only when I came on duty and saw the complaint that I put the things together.”

  Give yourself a medal, Alexander thought. “What did you put together, Scully?”

  “Okay. This Fox called in a complaint about your man Rayner. Seems Rayner was at his house with a woman—a friend of this Fox character’s. Anyhow, Fox has the feeling that his friend, the woman, is in some kind of trouble with your man. He called in. He was worried about her.”

  There was a precision here that Alexander loved. It was the geometrical exactitude of a fog. Some kind of trouble, he thought. Feelings. Goddam.

  “Your people check it out?” Alexander asked.

  “Uh-huh. As soon as I looked at it I called the number you left the captain.”

  “Address?” Chip Alexander found the stub of a pencil and a sheet of Holiday Inn notepaper and wrote the address down.

  “Seems Rayner and the woman left some time before the guy decided he was worried enough to call,” Scully said.

  “Does your Fox know where they went?”

  “I guess I don’t know for sure,” the cop said.

  “Thanks for everything.” Alexander put the receiver back, crushed out his cigarette, blinked into the bedside lamp. He shoved his sheets aside and, groaning in the fashion of one who would prefer to stay in bed, stepped out; he drew the draperies and looked out across the gray tide. There was the relic of some faint mist along the shoreline.

  Sunlight, he thought. The new day begins. He pulled on his clothes and left the room. He knocked on the door of the adjoining room. After a moment his young colleague appeared. Dressed, shaved, keen as mustard, Alexander thought. With that kind of eagerness you had to be convinced that behind everything you did there lay some holy purpose. Maybe he was young enough to learn otherwise.

  “News of our friend,” Alexander said. “Gimme a minute to grab my shoes.”

  The young colleague, whose name was Love, followed Alexander back into his room. Like a shadow, Alexander thought. Like some fucking extra extension of yourself, a limb you don’t need, an additional orifice somewhere on your body. He sat on the edge of the bed and started to lace his shoes. He watched Love, fretting with impatience, stride to the window, where he tapped upon the glass with his fingertips. Love turned and looked at him, and Alexander wondered if there was a hint of accusation in the expression. Maybe he blames me for failing to give the order in the coffee shop of the Ramada. Maybe that’s what’s bugging the hell out of him. Gunned-up and nothing to shoot. Why didn’t I just give him his damn signal?

  He was irritated more than a little by what he thought of as his own softness; it was like finding a shadow on your lung in an X-ray when you had assumed your body was in excellent health. John Rayner, for God’s sake. Was he supposed to go through the pantomime that climaxed in Rayner’s death? And the appearance of the woman—well, he could always say he’d been knocked off his stride by the way she had steered John out of the coffee shop. When you had a chit for one corpse, you didn’t want to bring home two. Nobody liked that very much. Besides, Rayner was to be hospitalized; he was to be killed only in a situation of extremity.

  One chance, John, he thought. I can’t give you an
other one.

  6.

  Rayner used a credit card to hire a car from a company called Tidewater Rent-a-Car, Inc. It had taken him and Isobel almost an hour to walk from the motel, by way of back streets of quiet houses, alleys, lanes, to the office of the car rental firm, which didn’t open its doors for business until eight. They had been obliged to linger in the street for several minutes before the clerk, a young woman with a painted-on face that made her appear years older than she was, unlocked the door. She immediately went into a sales performance as if her voice issued from a looped tape at the back of her throat. Rayner interrupted: it didn’t matter whether the car was a subcompact, a compact, whether it was foreign or American. He settled in the end for a Pinto. The young woman walked with them across the parking lot and handed him the keys. He wondered if the car had the exploding-gas-tank option but he didn’t ask.

  He drove out of the lot, listening to Isobel’s directions. The car was sluggish. How could he drive this damn thing to Washington in time? Work it out. From Richmond, on a good day, a day without traffic jams and accidents, it was two hours to Washington; from Virginia Beach to Richmond, if he went through Newport News, it was—what?—a hundred miles at the outside. But then he had to hope for a clear run through the Hampton Roads area; he had to hope there wouldn’t be a snarl-up of weekend traffic, of station wagons stuffed with kids, moms and dads transporting their broods to sight-seeing tours of the Pentagon, the Smithsonian, the National Geographic Society, or whatever other treats lay in the capital. He had to hope. And even as he thought about it he was assailed by a sense of having let reason slip, of some mental dislocation: a tightrope snapping in the mind. What I should do, he thought, is get out of this damn car and turn myself over for that period in the West Virginia facility. What I should do is let them take me.

  “Turn here,” Isobel said.

  He went right, remembering now the street where the Foxes lived. It was quiet and hushed and almost indifferent in its silence; gleaming cars sat behind thick trees in a state of camouflage. He stopped the motor and took the ignition key out and looked at Isobel. She was biting a fingernail.