Brainfire (27 page)

“Don't tell me, Mr. Ambassador, that you don't grasp my meaning, please. You have human resources.”

“You're asking me to send a man—”

“You know what I'm asking. Let's not labor the point.”

Leontov looked upset. “Is this where Rayner is to be found?”

“It's a logical deduction,” Koprow said. “If your man fails, if the Americans fail too, I still wouldn't worry myself sleepless over Rayner. Imagine, by some slight miracle, he finds out what's going on—what do you think? Do you think people are going to believe him? That they'll be falling all over themselves to believe his wild tale?” Koprow laughed. “No, the young American isn't even a
nuisance.
” Koprow picked up a pebble and threw it into the stream. It was meant to skim the surface, but it sank at once. He looked at the Ambassador. “Don't concern yourself, Leontov. Accept my word. Your main responsibility was that of issuing an invitation and of making certain it was accepted. Have you done that?”

Leontov took off his gloves and scratched his beard. He was shaking his head from side to side, as if to rid himself of an ambassadorial migraine. “The invitation has been issued.”

“And?”

“So far as I can tell, it will be accepted.”

So far as you can tell
, Koprow thought.
Which isn't very far at all
.

“I want assurances, Ambassador,” Koprow said. “You can save your twisted diplomatic bullshit for state functions.”

Leontov studied his leather gloves for a moment; they might have been the open pages of a book written in an inscrutable language. “We do what we can, Koprow—”

“No,” Koprow said. “We do
better
than that. Don't we?”

5.

On his second night at Isobel's it rained—a sweeping rain that fell in wind-driven patterns from Chesapeake Bay all across Tidewater. They had eaten a supper of salad, watching the flow of rain from the window of the kitchen. Now, with a single lamp barely illuminating the kitchen, they were drinking Californian sauterne. Rayner could hear the tide, not as some intermittent rumble crossing the sand but as a constant symphonic thing. Amongst the leftover food there lay a scattered deck of ESP cards; they had been testing each other, lost in the circles and squares and stars of the pack.

Rayner's best score had been eight out of twenty-five, after a half-dozen runs through the deck; Isobel had managed ten on her first run, but nothing more than five afterward. Rayner poured more wine, rose, went to the kitchen window, and watched the rain run down the glass. He understood he was vaguely drunk, slightly distanced from himself—and yet not absolutely so: some small area of his brain was clear and hard and brilliant. In the distance, by what little moonlight lay behind cloud, he could see the surf rise in broken white walls.

“But you've no idea why she was killed?” Isobel asked.

Rayner, turning, shrugged. “Not really. Somebody … What the fuck. A jealous lover? A lunatic? I don't know.”

Isobel was silent a moment. She picked up the deck and shuffled it slowly, quietly. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm really sorry.”

Rayner walked back to the table and sat down, looking at his sister-in-law, thinking of Dubbs, wanting to say something about the death of Dubbs. Security: even this blind wall remained impenetrable in front of him. Talking of Sally was a way of talking about Dubbs too, as if in his mind they had become one corpse.

“From what you've told me, she sounds …” Isobel, smiling, something a little sad in the expression, paused. “She sounds like the kind of person who would have led you a dance, John.”

“Maybe,” Rayner said. He touched the rim of his wineglass. “Maybe what it comes down to is my pride was hurt. Maybe I thought I was of some importance in her life. Then to find out otherwise … It doesn't make much sense to talk about it now.”

“I guess,” Isobel said. She began laying the cards out in random rows—stars and boxes and squiggles and circles and pluses. As if they were a form of tarot deck, she looked at the design for a time. “There's a kind of woman who is known commonly as a cunt. I think your friend Sally and I had that in common, John.”

Rayner started to say something, to protest in some feeble way, but she interrupted him. “What kind of life did I give Richard? Did he ever really tell you? I guess he didn't. I guess he was too discreet, too polite, too well-bred. When we were married, I used to think of my body as a system of rewards. When he was a good boy, he got a shot at it. When he was out of favor—wham, down came the old portcullis. I had more headaches of convenience than there are Bayer aspirin in the world.”

There was something in this confession that Rayner found slightly embarrassing. She was turning the cards over and over in meaningless gestures. He reached over to stop her, feeling that somewhere at the back of all this empty behavior there were tears—but not the kind that might be shed openly. Momentarily he held her hand; the cards slid on the table.

When she took her hand away, she smiled. “I'm glad you're here, John. Really. I think I wanted somebody to look at me and say, Jesus Christ, you've really changed. And then you wonder if the change is anything more than just a few different behavioral attitudes. Skin-deep? I don't know.”

Rayner listened to the rain again. Squalls, breaking off the ocean like cannon shots, rattled the glass panes. He said, “Jesus Christ, you've really changed.”

She laughed quietly, then began to gather the dishes to dump them in the sink. “In the house in Georgetown we had a dishwasher,” she said. “A woman came in every morning to vacuum. My whole goddam life was a clutter, when what I really needed was space and light. Does that make sense?”

Rayner waited as he felt he had been waiting now for two whole days to hear about Richard, about what had happened that night. He watched Isobel dry her hands with a dish towel. The knuckles, he noticed, were slightly red.
Tell me
, he thought,
tell me what happened
.

“Do you like walking in the rain?” she asked.

“Sure I do.”

“Without umbrellas?”

“Any way you want it.”

“There's something good and clean about seaside rain,” she said.

He put on his raincoat. She wore a plastic mac, blue jeans, no shoes. Outside, wind and rain had conspired to fill the air with grit that stung their eyes. They walked toward the beach, where the spray was violent, vicious. In the distance, far beyond the lights of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a crack of lightning opened a hole in the night sky; thunder drummed miles away. Rayner could feel the salt in his eyes. In a blurry way he saw a thin figure sprinting along the edge of the rough tide. A middle-aged man, arms and legs pumping, was jogging his way out of the coronary season of the heart.

“Didn't anybody tell you about Virginia Beach, John?” Isobel asked.

He could hardly hear her words. They were torn by the wind. Like the music, he thought, the music through the loudspeakers at Wembley, ripped by the wind and blown away.…

“The place is filled with mind readers, palmists, spiritualists, UFO believers, psychics, food fanatics, health nuts. It's the freak capital of the eastern seaboard, I swear it.”

Rayner watched the man turn some distance away. He was barely visible now, far beyond the reach of the lights that burned in the huge hotels. He stopped, lay flat on the sand as if to do push-ups, then jumped once again into a standing position. He began to jog back again in the direction of Isobel and Rayner. He passed them, close to the ragged edge of the tide. Then he was gone down the beach and out of sight.

“I feel damn tired just watching him,” Rayner said. “Is there someplace we can sit?”

They found shelter alongside a broken seawall. They sat on the wet sand, and Isobel tried, wasting match after match, to light a cigarette against the squall. Rayner watched her flip the sodden, broken cigarette into the wind.

“Tell me about this ESP business,” he said. “The cards, I mean.”

“What can I tell you?”

“Do you believe in it all?”

She was quiet for a moment. “A month or two ago I would have said it was garbage. Even now, for someone like me, it's just a kind of parlor game. I don't have any talent for it. I play with the cards, like some kind of solitaire or whatever. But I've met people who can predict them accurately—”

“You mean
guess
them, don't you?”

She shrugged in the dark. “No, not guess. It isn't guessing when you can predict with terrific consistency, is it?”

Rayner thought for a moment of Dubbs's friend Professor Chamber. And then of Andreyev. Worthy academics in hot pursuit of the indefinable: the magic of mind. “You say you know people who can predict the cards?”

He felt her hand touch his sleeve. “One day I'll arrange a demonstration for you, if you like.”

He wasn't sure suddenly; he wasn't sure if he wanted any such demonstration, any kind of proof. The idea of Andreyev nagged him again, the unsettling intuition that if he hadn't acquired a certain computer data sheet, Dubbs might still be alive.

He laid his head back against the damp wall, conscious now of the runner coming back along the tide. There was no holding the guy back, he thought. A gluttony for punishment; or fear of an early eclipse? Rayner watched him through the dark. Another sliver of lightning, forked, misshapen, broke above the bay. In the stunning silvery light, brief as the flash of a malfunctioning firework, Rayner could see the man's face—the gaunt jaws, the shadows of the eyes. It didn't make sense to him all at once: there was something absurdly out of place, so ridiculously incongruous that he wondered if he were hallucinating. He reached across to touch Isobel. “Did you catch a glimpse of that guy?” he asked.

“I couldn't help it exactly—”

“Did you ever see somebody jog in a suit before?”

“No—”

“I mean, an average two-piece off-the-peg behind-the-desk suit? Did you ever see that before?”

Isobel shrugged. “I told you, John. It's a funny town.”

“Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is.”

He watched the man, still running, disappear in the spray ahead. No, he thought, it doesn't make the best possible sense. Figure, maybe, a drunk. A guy who's just had a knock-down rolling-pin fight with the wife. Somebody working off the heat, the anger. He narrowed his eyes and tried to see through the spray—but the figure was out of sight now, and so far as he could tell, the beach was empty. Relax, Rayner. Too many deaths make you suspicious. Too many upsets and sadnesses and you dwell on them—which only leads you to reach for Dr. Whatsisname's downers. He took Isobel's hand and hauled her to a standing position. A fraction away, he thought, from an embrace.
That close
. He stepped back, feeling wet sand clinging to his hands, inside his shoes. The wife of your dead brother, for God's sake. Okay, she isn't the old Isobel, she's going through the changes—but some things you don't touch, after all.

“You want to get back?” he asked.

“If there's wine to finish,” she said.

“We've got lots of wine,” he answered.
We
, he thought. Don't take it this far; it's almost as if you've moved in on the ghosts.

They walked back quickly, bent against the rain, toward the house. Shivering, Isobel opened the front door and Rayner followed her inside.

“Don't you ever lock up when you go out?” he asked.

She laughed. “What's to steal? A few plants? Some cushions? I don't even have a key for the place.”

They went into the kitchen and opened a fresh bottle of sauterne. Isobel poured two glasses and they sat at the kitchen table. They knocked their glasses together and she said, “I forget, don't I? Your world's filled with keys and locks and secret combinations. Like Richard's used to be. You know, he had this briefcase with a combination lock. I'm not laughing at him, John, just at the world that makes these things so godawful necessary.”

“Sometimes—”

“Ah, sometimes, of course, the other team might actually filch a few of the game plays, right?”

“Something like that,” Rayner said. He wondered why he felt a sudden sense of shame. It was as if she had punctured the surface of him, revealing something of almost inestimable worthlessness. Or was it what he had felt a moment before on the beach—the closeness of her, a nearness that in itself had seemed immoral to him? He looked across the kitchen, thinking again of the running man on the beach. And then he was beset by the strange feeling that there was somebody else, other than Isobel and him, in the house. No, he thought, you're trying to get away from that world of bugs and eavesdropping devices and gadgets. Why the fuck can't it leave you alone?

He stood up. Isobel opened her mouth to say something and he pressed his index finger against her lips for silence.

Puzzled, she pushed his hand away. “John—”

“It's nothing,” he said. The layout of the house, he thought. Remember it. A living room they had just come through. This kitchen. A bedroom. A bathroom. The basic accommodations of life. Shit, Rayner, there's nowhere for someone to hide.

“What's up?” she asked.

He shook his head. A man running in a storm. A man in a two-piece suit. Street clothes. The equations that never made sense until the last possible moment. Someone on the stairs outside Sally's flat. Figure it out, he thought. Make it work somehow. Why was Dubbs killed at Wembley? Why had they been followed to Wembley? And by whom? You know a man's name, his identity, you understand he wants to switch sides. Where does that take you?

“John, for God's sake,” she was saying.

It was against the glass, briefly, quickly, nothing more than a shadow that interfered with the dripping of rain upon the pane. He had forgotten how quickly he could move. He pushed the woman out of her chair and lay on top of her, all this in one fast move, one continuous chain of activity. He heard the glass shatter and then he rose, ducking, rushing to the kitchen door, feeling the rain break hard and cruel against his face, blinding his eyes. The running man. Now, turning, barely visible in the light, the man fired a second shot. It was with a silenced weapon, an automatic that in the reflection of the kitchen light looked like stainless steel. Rayner threw himself forward but the man was moving backward already, retreating across the garden, trampling over the wooden stakes, breaking them, clumping through the shrubbery that lay beyond the vegetable patches. Rayner watched him go, then hurried inside the kitchen again, where Isobel was standing beside the fallen chair. There was an expression on her face: not fear, for he would have recognized fear. Not anger. He could read it anyhow:
When does it ever stop? Does it ever stop
?