Brainfire Page 29

  “I’ll try,” the kid said. “That’s the best I can do.”

  2.

  When she opened her eyes she realized that the pain was gone now from her body; through glass she saw rain sweep across a stretch of concrete and she understood that sometime during her sleep she had been moved from the bus to a plane—a plane coming down now through the sloughing rain. The young men were reaching up into racks for pieces of baggage. She watched them, feeling oddly liberated for a while, as though the end of pain was an exultation, a kind of rejoicing even if she knew it would come back again and bring the weakness with it. So many young men—they had everything to live for. Everything. The bald one, Koprow, was coming up the aisle, pushing through the throng. She felt herself shiver. He sat in the seat next to her and reached out and took her hand gently, holding it between his own. She looked at him, but there was something, an essence to this man, that she didn’t comprehend. It wasn’t anything she might easily penetrate; he was locked inside himself, tight, like wax that had hardened. An absence of love and loving. Even the way he held her hand suggested cruelty. She removed her fingers slowly, hiding the hand under her travel rug.

  “How are you now?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer. Across the wet, glistening concrete she could see a building, people passing back and forth behind windows. Shadows. Shadows in the rain.

  Koprow sighed. “An unpleasant day,” he said. “Do you know the name of this city?”

  She said nothing.

  “Washington,” Koprow said. “The capital of the United States.”

  She remembered, like a flash of light that suggested a candle blown out abruptly, Aaron: I’d like to go to America one day to live. To emigrate, build a new life. A different life. But it might have been a voice in a tomb coming to her through damp distances, tunnels.

  The capital city of the United States of America.

  Koprow took something from his pocket. It was a photograph, a small snapshot he held in the palm of his hand. She looked at it slowly. It was of a young man, a face that was in some fashion familiar to her, as if she might have seen it in a newspaper once. But what was she to know? A peasant—what was she supposed to know?

  “This man is Mallory,” Koprow said.

  She opened her mouth. Young. Dear God, help me, help me now, for this is the time of my need, this is the time. How can the killing stop? She shut her eyes. A young face, a kind face.

  “I show it to you because I don’t want you to forget your final task, my dear.”

  My dear, she thought. At the heart of the phrase there was poison. The final task.

  “And then, of course, I will sign your papers.” He patted her knee quickly a couple of times. “You will be free, Mrs. Blum. Free. Think about that.”

  Free—like the Chinese soldier they took to the wire and shot with their rifles, or like the young American who died, or like Andreyev, who had never returned, or Domareski, who was dead. Free—was that what he meant by freedom? The way he patted her, the sense of his touch—she could feel a chill across the surface of her flesh.

  “I think we’re ready to disembark,” Koprow said, rising. The bald head, like some tiny dome, shone in the white overhead lights. “It has been arranged that you will fly directly from Washington to Israel tomorrow. This has all been taken care of.”

  Tomorrow!

  She looked up at him, searching his face for a lie, for a sign of a lie she didn’t want to find; no, she thought, you want to believe it, you need to believe it, you need to know that tomorrow will come and with it the end of all this nightmare, this long nightmare. He was smiling at her. Mallory. Why was his face so familiar? Why? A young man with a kind look. Was she supposed to destroy that on the basis of a promise she had heard over and over again? Was she supposed to do that? Tomorrow. In Koprow’s world it was never tomorrow, was it? Tomorrow didn’t come. Tomorrow was never the time.

  She watched him turn away and push busily through the crowd of young men. Then she looked through the window at the rain falling across the airport.

  3.

  Between Stafford and Triangle there was faraway lightning to the east, forking over the mouth of the Potomac. Then thunder he could hear even through the closed windows of the car, through the noise of the wipers slipping back and forth on the glass. In the rearview mirror he saw how quiet the kid had become, sitting now with her eyes shut, her hands clasped in her lap, and he wondered where she was at that moment, where her mind might have wandered. Isobel opened the glove compartment and took out the pistol, turning it over slowly in the palm of her hand.

  “Nasty,” she said. “Very nasty.”

  He glanced at it. She put it back, slamming the compartment shut. Up ahead traffic was slowing in a series of bright-red brake lights that flashed as if they were pulses.

  “You’re determined to go through with this?” she asked, although it wasn’t so much a question as a statement of fact, despairing fact.

  He nodded. She looked at him briefly. “Maybe the game will be canceled,” she said. “Maybe you don’t even need to do this.”

  This, he thought. Whatever it is.

  “Maybe all this crazy rush through the rain isn’t worth the effort, John.”

  And maybe there isn’t a plan to kill Mallory. Maybe, maybe—you could say it often enough and reduce the whole world to a sequence of conditionals. Maybe the earth is flat. Maybe Chip Alexander has the number of this car. Maybe my brother took his own life, after all. Maybe, too, all the dead are brought back to life.

  “John, seriously,” Isobel said.

  “I’ve been listening.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Maybe this isn’t even necessary—”

  He looked at her a moment, then back to the road. “Maybe it isn’t. You could be right.”

  “And I could be wrong.”

  “Yeah. Somewhere between the two there’s an absence of hard options, Isobel.”

  She sat upright, stretching her legs. “The difference between you and Richard is that he wouldn’t have dashed through the rain like this. He would have picked up the telephone and called a couple of numbers. That way, at least, he would have stayed dry.”

  “The difference is that he had the numbers to call. I don’t exactly have choices.”

  She was silent for a time. She rubbed her knees with the open palms of her hands. “Did they train you for this, John? I mean, did they sit you down in a classroom and explain what the procedure is when you stumble onto a plot to kill the President? How To Prevent Assassinations 101? Was is like that?”

  He pulled the Pinto out into the fast lane, passing a truck, an ice-cream van, and a bookmobile with a Prince William County sign. That tone in her voice: how quickly incredulity yielded to heavy sarcasm. He couldn’t think of what to say; all he wanted now was silence, quiet, an end to her disbelief.

  “Maybe they called the class How To Be a Hero and Get a Pretty Medal?” she said.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said.

  “You tell me, then. You tell me what they called it.”

  It came out before he could stop it. “I often wondered what drove my brother to death. Now I know.”

  She twisted away from him. There was an odd silence punctured by the noise of the car, the wipers, the rain on glass. It was a goddam stupid thing to say. Cut out your tongue, Rayner. If she doesn’t believe, then who are you to force it on her? Take it from her perspective and see how it looks. A gunman tramples through her garden, she has to run, she hasn’t stopped running—how could you blame her?

  “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  Suddenly she was laughing, a muffled sound made against the palm of her hand. It was the kind of laugh that cuts ice, dissolves tensions. She put her hand on his shoulder and said, “I’m sorry too. Really. I was just suddenly … bewildered. I mean. My whole life. I was thinking about my life and I was looking out of this window and it occurred to me that I w
as being hauled through the countryside for God knows what.… Shit, I don’t think I’m making sense. I still haven’t managed to inter the old self, John. Sometimes she comes out with claws on, that’s all.”

  He touched her hand. Tension, a rope stretched between two points and tightened, and you wonder how long it will hold. Her old self. He tried to remember his own old self, as if what he was seeking had been broken apart in a prism. London, reading the telexes, interviewing the hopefuls—an easy, uneventful life, a nice life. And then a man leaps through a window and some part of that old self jumps alongside him: a tiny suicide all your own.

  “Forget it,” he said. “You’re doing okay.”

  She brushed hair from her forehead. “I wonder.”

  The kid leaned forward from the back and tapped Rayner lightly on the shoulder and said, “If you two don’t quit arguing you won’t notice the fuzz directly behind.”

  Rayner looked in the rearview mirror. There. Immediately behind him—the flashing lights of a car of the Virginia Highway Patrol. Without thinking, he slowed the Pinto to the side of the road.

  “At a time like this,” Isobel said.

  The kid blew an enormous pink bubble that swelled and suddenly popped.

  “At a time like this,” Rayner said, waiting for the cop to emerge, trying to control his own quick rush of panic.

  4.

  Outside the White House Patrick J. Mallory stood beneath a black umbrella held by an aide. Through the rain flashbulbs popped; the damned photographers getting all this bleakness down forever on celluloid, Mallory thought. He looked up at the grim sky, then turned to Callaway, who stood at his side.

  “Is there a hope that the game will be canceled?” he asked.

  “I doubt it, sir,” Callaway said.

  Patrick J. Mallory smiled at the photographers. “What’s keeping the damn car, Callaway?”

  “It ought to be here,” Callaway said.

  Dispersed throughout the group of photographers and quite outnumbering them were the anonymous gentlemen of the Secret Service. Mallory understood that he was known as Hopper to these men, although the implications of this name were lost to him. He looked at Callaway and said, “I’ve heard of men who would give an arm and a leg for this job. You know that?”

  Callaway smiled. “I’ve heard something like it.”

  “If you could take that figure of speech and turn it into a literal thing, you’d see people running on crutches all over Capitol Hill and trying to eat their lunches with little metal claws.”

  Callaway, still smiling, stared through the rain. “A city of amputees. It makes you think. A whole town of Long John Silvers.”

  “The pirate image is appropriate anyway,” Mallory said, stamping a foot with impatience. “You know, I should have sent Lindholm to this soccer game. He would have liked it better than me. Is it too late for me to develop flu? Fall over and sprain an ankle?”

  “It’s never too late, Mr. President,” Callaway said. “The Vice President is in Kansas, however.”

  “Chewing tobacco, I guess. Goddam. He loves to shake hands and have his picture taken. We could have let the old fart meet this soccer entourage.” Mallory turned his head slightly and saw the thickset man with the black briefcase who was forever close at hand. Mallory stared at him for a moment: the black case, and what it ultimately controlled, had come to him in the worst of his dreams. He said to Callaway, “That guy’s like the reaper. Can’t we do something about him? Like give him the slip? He leaves me with bad feelings.”

  The limousine appeared, preceded by a car of the Secret Service and followed by a group of other dark vehicles. Mallory was reminded of a funeral procession. Callaway stepped forward and opened the door and Mallory got in, wearily smiling one last time for the photographers. It was a reward for their diligence in the rain. Callaway got in beside the President.

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do about the reaper, Mr. President,” Callaway said.

  “Like Lindholm, he comes with the job.”

  “He comes with the job, sir.”

  The door was slammed shut by a large man in a navy-blue raincoat; a grim face, grimmer in the wretched weather. The car moved forward.

  Mallory, gazing out at the rain, sighed. “I never asked you if you liked soccer,” he said.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a game,” Callaway said. “But I’m quite looking forward to it.”

  “Then I should’ve sent you, Callaway, and stayed home with some unmentionable ailment—like diarrhea.”

  Mallory shifted around uncomfortably in his seat. The Secret Service ahead, the Secret Service behind: there was no privacy left, only protection.

  5.

  The cop had a thin, angular face such as might have been carved out of a rutabaga for some old Halloween. Rayner rolled down his window and watched the cop blink against the rain that ran across his eyelids.

  “Got your license?”

  Rayner thought about Alexander now; he thought about the humming of wires, the bulletins. He reached inside his jacket slowly for the license and said, “What’s the problem?”

  The cop smiled. “What’s the problem? The problem is you seem illiterate, mister. Illiterate—like an inability to read highway signs. Such as speed limits.”

  Speed limits, Rayner thought. Was that all? A ticket for a moving violation? Was that all this was about?

  “I clocked you at seventy-three,” the cop said, taking the license. “The zone is clearly marked at fifty-five. Not just in the state of Virginia but all across the nation. Step out of the car.”

  “Is that necessary?” Rayner asked.

  “Would I ask?” The cop looked at the license as Rayner opened the door and stood in the miserable rain. “John Douglas Rayner,” the cop said. He stared a moment longer, as if he might find some arcane discrepancy, then walked back to his patrol car. Rayner was cold, shivering now, watching the patrolman reach inside his car for his radio. Into the computer, Rayner thought. A matter of moments. He panicked again, wondering if his name had been marked, if an order to detain for questioning had been registered yet. He looked at Isobel, who shrugged, raised her hand with her fingers crossed: a token of luck, of good fortune. We need it about now, Rayner thought. He watched the traffic slide past, the curious faces pressed to windows, the reflections of the red and blue lights. What was keeping the sonofabitch? You put a name and number over the radio, it slides through the banks of the computer, it comes back clean—a simple electronic operation. So what was keeping him? He saw the patrolman put the radio mike back inside his car and walk toward him. The ticket book was out now and Rayner felt a sense of relief. Okay, give me my ticket, let me get on my way. If I’m clean, if I’m clean and clear and free.

  “Headed for D.C.?” the cop asked.

  Rayner nodded. That chill in the rain.

  “Take it easy, fella. It isn’t going anywhere so far as I know.” He began to write the speeding ticket. A joker, Rayner thought. A clown in a patrol car. He took his license back and stuffed the ticket inside his pocket. The cop, as if there remained some slight suspicion still, crouched and looked inside the Pinto.

  “Driving too fast in this weather.” The cop shook his head. “You ought to have some consideration for your family.”

  “I appreciate it,” Rayner said, opening his door. He had to get away before any kind of lecture started. I’ve kidnapped a kid, I’m being looked for by a certain Government agency with headquarters in Langley; what do I need with your lectures now?

  The cop stepped back from the Pinto. He watched Rayner close his door. “Take it easy,” the cop said.

  “I promise,” Rayner said. He slipped the car back into the stream of traffic, conscious of time again, of his own damp clothing; time and weather, a twin conspiracy. He put his foot hard on the gas and swung out into the fast lane.

  The kid sat forward. “Just for a minute I thought that was it,” she said. “My father must be climbing walls.”r />
  “More than your father who’s climbing,” Rayner said. He passed a truck filled with damp timber precariously stacked. “More than just your father.”

  6.

  She felt sick again on the bus from the airport. Even as she had been wheeled past the men with cameras at the airport she had experienced a dark wave of nausea, of weakness. Strength—it was something that flew out of you, a vulture that came and went. She opened her eyes a little and looked out into the rain. There was a stretch of swollen gray water beneath a bridge. Beside her, Katya rose and went down the aisle of the bus to talk with Koprow. Koprow, who raised one hand dismissively in the air as if whatever the woman was saying to him had no relevance whatever. The woman stood and looked down at him—a picture of tension, of inflexibility, a tightness of face, a hardening in the eyes. They hate each other, she thought. Even from here I can feel it, like a heat. Hatred. She looked down once more at the river and thought: Washington. Pictures from some forgotten picture book, lost frames, flickers. She turned to look back at Katya and wondered where they were going on this bus through the rain—

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, she caught it.

  Where are you where are you

  She closed her eyes. It took a strength she didn’t have to shut her mind; it was like trying to force some heavy door shut with a palsied hand, knowing it couldn’t be done but straining at it anyhow.

  Please

  She opened her eyes and saw Katya sit stiffly in the vacant seat beside her. Katya, she thought. Afraid of me, yes—afraid of what I can do because she has experienced it; but there’s a confidence in her fear, a wariness, because she also knows I can’t hurt her now. I only hurt myself if

  Tell me where

  The old woman looked from the window. This voice, this thin voice. Why wouldn’t it go away from her?

  “How are you feeling?” Katya asked.