Brainfire Read online

  Mallory smiled. “Are you a gambling man, Mr. Ambassador?”

  Leontov shrugged. He looked faintly uncertain.

  “I’ve got a dollar that says you’re on the wrong horse,” Mallory said.

  “A wager?” The Ambassador, smiling, displayed a flake of fish stuck to his upper dentures. “I accept, Mr. President. Gladly.”

  10.

  For the past fifteen minutes or so Isobel had been holding the girl against her body, rocking her slightly, rubbing her forehead with the palm of her hand. “She’s like ice, John. I’ve never felt anybody so cold.”

  Rayner, whose attention had been divided by watching the rearview mirror and glancing at the kid, pulled the camper over to the side of the street. He looked for a moment at Fiona. The stiffness—there was something quite unnatural about the rigidity of her body, as if it were less human than humanoid, something lifeless pressed out of a mold. He reached over and touched the back of her hand, feeling coldness even before his fingers had made contact. What now? Just what do you do now? He had intended to dump the camper, and with it his sense of vulnerability, but how could you walk through the streets with a kid who looked like she was dead and fail to draw some attention to yourself? He had crossed the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge sometime before; now, after a series of turns out of the mainstream of traffic, he realized he was somewhere in the vicinity of the Fort McNair War College and the Anacostia River just beyond.

  He looked morosely through the windshield, tapping his fingers on the rim of the steering wheel. His only certainty now was that the camper had to be abandoned. He wasn’t even sure anymore of his assumption that the kid’s old woman would be in the stadium; why did she have to be anyhow? He had simply assumed it. But whatever her force was, it surely had the capacity to cross distances. Ah, despair—she could be almost anywhere, the proverbial needle in the psychic haystack. Pennsylvania even—what difference did it make? He watched two naval officers cross the street. Crisp movements: they might have been looking for someone to salute.

  Only the kid can tell, he thought. I sit in this hot camper and think: Only the kid can know. He turned to look at Isobel, noticing her weariness in lines around her mouth, in the way her hair hung uncombed.

  “You can’t put her through any more of this,” she said. “There’s a point, John, where you have to pause and wonder if you’re being reasonable—”

  “And I passed that point a while back,” he said. He looked out at the rain. “All I know is I’ve got to get this pile of steel off my back before it’s too damn late.”

  Isobel said nothing. She held the girl’s face to her breasts, an unexpected little moment of maternalism, touching in its fashion if he had had the time to be touched. The kid moaned and moved her head slightly. Rayner slid across the bench seat and put his hands against her cheeks, trying to turn her face this way and that way as if it were possible to massage this dreadful stiffness out of her. Come on, kid, he thought. Come through for me. He was aware of Isobel’s grip on the girl, her defensive hold—another thing he would have to break through.

  “Fiona,” he said.

  Isobel sighed.

  “Fiona,” he repeated. He rubbed the sides of her face gently, noticing how dirty his hands had become along the way, the darkened fingernails, a film of grease. “Fiona.”

  The child’s lips moved. But there was no sound.

  “Fiona, where is this woman? Can you tell me?”

  Nothing.

  “Can you tell me?”

  Again, nothing. He was irritated; despite whatever better feelings might have prevailed—sympathy, a hint of some compassion—he was annoyed by her lack of response. He took his hands away from her and looked once more through the windshield. Christ, what now? What now? And suddenly everything he had pieced together seemed thinly circumstantial, ludicrously fragile, as solid as the filaments of a spider’s web. He started up the motor of the camper and pulled away from the sidewalk, looking for M Street, where a right turn would take him in the direction of the stadium—where else? What else did he have left?

  “It’s all the way then?” Isobel asked. Her voice was flat.

  “It has to be,” he said. “You’ve got a better suggestion?”

  Her silence was a reply of its own, a suggestion more profound than any words might have been. He looked quickly at the kid. Her lips were moving noiselessly and he was reminded of an autistic child foraging through the mysteries of its own condition for the simpler mystery of speech.

  He reached M Street.

  11.

  It was a room of white tiles, cool and dark, filled with smells of wintergreen oil. She could hear the rattle of voices coming from elsewhere, from close by, perhaps even from the adjoining room. There were gray metal cabinets, lockers of some kind, and she thought it funny somehow that she couldn’t imagine their purpose, their function. Another door, halfway open, led into a lit room. Through this space she could see more tiles, gleaming from overhead tubes of light. A shadow moved. There was a noise of running water. Now, rumbling slightly, the voice of the man they called Charek. The other voices were stilled.

  She looked down at her photographs, which she could barely see in the dimly lit room. She shut out Charek’s voice as she had done with that other voice—the sound of the child, the sound that came in a series of plaintive cries. She looked at the snapshots, unable to feel them in her numb hands, yet trying to imagine the contours of flesh from the tips of her fingers. She could hardly hold them, light as they were; she could hardly find the strength to keep them secure in her hands. I mustn’t drop them, she thought. I mustn’t drop them. I have to think of nothing else.

  She closed her eyes.

  Please tell me I need to find

  The persistence of the child. The sheer persistence. She would snap, snap and die, if she went on. She opened her eyes and gazed at the slit of light through the half-open door. That shadow—was it Koprow? The woman? Both of them? She closed her eyes again because even sight was a terrible effort now.

  Help me find you

  God—one of the snapshots, one that depicted her son’s wife, Yael, standing in front of a blue swimming pool with the two children splashing in the water behind her—it slid from her fingers to the floor; it just slipped and fell and she watched it flutter across her knees, over her rug, and touch her foot before it finally landed some yards away from the wheelchair. I have to pick it up, I have to pick it up, I can’t leave it lying there like that, just like a discarded piece of trash. And she tried to move, pressing her elbows against the sides of the chair. But she forgot about the rest of the snapshots she held, and they fell also. The whole floor covered with bright colors—how could she get up and bend and retrieve them? She slumped back into the wheelchair, panicked by the sight of the photographs strewn across the floor, panicked and upset, sickened by her own loss of strength. If I lean forward, if I lean forward and fall, if I crawl, she thought. I could do it that way. I could do it that way, she thought.

  12.

  Koprow put the bar of white soap back in its little tray, looked at himself in the mirror a moment, seeing not only his own reflection but that of Katya—Katya, standing against the wall with her arms folded—and then turned around. He pulled a length of towel from the wall and began to dry his hands. The damned woman, he thought. What right had she to dictate the terms of the thing?

  He looked toward the open door and into the darkened room where the old woman had been placed. Her proximity irritated him. Katya unfolded her arms and pushed herself away from the wall. Bitch, Koprow thought. Skinny, hard-assed bitch.

  “Andreyev understood her powers better than anybody,” the woman said in a low voice.

  “Unfortunately Andreyev chose to take his own route to salvation,” Koprow said.

  “In this situation, he would have insisted that she be kept as close as possible to the subject,” Katya said. “I don’t believe you grasp the intensity of energy that is expended in an act like this,
Comrade Koprow.”

  “She should be in a hotel somewhere. Miles away,” Koprow said. Blue in the face, he thought. One could argue oneself to a standstill against the stubbornness of this woman.

  “In her condition, Comrade, her proximity to the subject is essential. The farther away you put her, the less likely are the chances of success. It’s as simple as that. She’s sick. She’s going to die. I don’t think we ought to delude ourselves. Put her miles away, as you suggest, and you are guaranteed failure—”

  Koprow nodded. He looked at his pink, clean hands. It still galled him to have the old Jewess so close when he had imagined that everything could be accomplished from a far distance—a hotel in the city, a room in the Embassy, another place. Not here, not in the stadium itself. He looked at his own image in the mirror and thought: What difference does it ultimately make? All that the world will know is that the President of the United States died at a soccer match. That’s all. It was the end that counted.

  He turned around, smoothing one hand over the surface of his bald skull, and looked at the woman. “Very well. After all, you’re the expert.”

  Their whispered conversation lapsed into silence. He wondered what he might do to ruin this awful woman when they returned home. Something altogether simple could be arranged, such as the placing of Western propagandist documents in her flat and having them discovered. Then she would see. Then she would truly see.

  There was suddenly a faint noise from the other room, the scratch of a wheel on the floor, the sound of someone sighing, he wasn’t sure which. He watched Katya move to the door and open it, and he saw a flood of fluorescent light fall on the empty wheelchair.

  13.

  Mallory observed that the seating arrangements isolated the Presidential party from the rest of the crowd. A rope had been placed around a block of seats, perhaps about a hundred in all—many of which were unoccupied—and outside the rope there were as many as twenty Secret Service men. He sat with Leontov on one side, Macmillan on the other, and gazed down toward the field. Fresh white lines, obscuring a baseball diamond, had been drawn on the turf.

  Now, as he stared down at the strange markings, rectangles and circles, he barely listened to MacMillan, who seemed intent on explaining the rules of the game to him. He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to three. Twenty minutes of watching the field, peering at the rain, listening to MacMillan drone. Strange, incomprehensible terms—offside, throw-in, corner kick, indirect free kick. Old Kimball, he reflected, was much better at this kind of thing—absorbing, listening, nodding his head; at least, he was better at pretending to be interested.

  He watched rain fall through the goal nets. Twenty minutes of this. Various photographers on the other side of the rope clicked their cameras. Curious onlookers elsewhere strained to get a glimpse of him. The President as object, he thought; would he ever become accustomed to it? Would he ever adjust to the fact that he was as much a part of the Washington sight-seeing tour as the Lincoln Memorial? He looked across the stadium, noticing great spaces of empty seats.

  Politely he asked MacMillan the expected size of the crowd.

  “On a good day we would have drawn, oh, maybe forty-five thousand,” MacMillan said. “In this rain—it’s so hard to tell.”

  MacMillan nervously rubbed his hands together. On Mallory’s other side, Leontov was lighting a cigarette: a distant Leontov, preoccupied with something, brooding, pondering. It could be the prospect of losing a dollar, the President thought. It could easily be that.

  6

  1.

  Rayner parked the camper in the parking lot at D.C. General Hospital. He sat for a moment and watched an ambulance whine through the rain in the direction of Nineteenth Street—somewhere somebody is dying, he thought. The quick occlusion, the diastolic catastrophe, the avalanche in the heart. He turned to Isobel, who was still holding the kid. Fiona, her eyes open, was gazing toward the hospital—mindless, Rayner thought, mindless and empty; what in the name of God have I done? Isobel sat with her eyes shut, rocking the girl slightly. He looked at her wrist-watch; it was ten minutes before three. Ten fucking minutes. What if it had happened already? What if he was altogether wrong? You nurture alternatives like seedlings in a nursery. You erect opaque greenhouses in which to plant possibilities—

  It wasn’t far to the stadium, a matter of some blocks. Isobel opened her eyes and looked toward the hospital, as if she wanted to say, You’ve come to the right place, John. You’ve come at last to the right place—both for the child and for yourself. She licked her lips, which appeared cracked and dry, but she said nothing. It was all in her look, in her eyes. The stadium, he thought. The impossible stadium. He touched the mascot that hung from the rearview mirror of the cab, a dangling plastic spider. Webs, he thought. The struggle of the fly.

  He reached out and took the kid’s cold hands and rubbed them briskly. I must make her warm, he told himself. I must rub the life back into her. That coldness, that chill—it was like running your hands over the surface of frost. She moved her head slightly to the side, and momentarily it seemed to him that she was about to say something, but she didn’t speak. He raised his hands to her face, turning her around to look at him. If the eyes are mirrors, he thought, these eyes have no images to reflect. Please, kid. Is she there in the stadium? Can you take me to her? Can you? Please.

  He watched her. Slowly, stiffly, she lifted her arm and touched the inner glass of the windshield with her fingertips, and it was clear to him that it took an immense effort of will for her to move even that much; it was almost as if the arm had been cranked up by a taut rope.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” he asked. “What are you trying to say?”

  She didn’t move. She blinked her eyes, and the arm that had been raised fell suddenly into her lap. He thought: I need some psychic infusion for myself now; I need something of that gift, that curse, from the gods who dole these things out at random.

  “Fiona, what are you trying to tell me? Is it the stadium? Is she in the stadium? Is that it? She’s in there somewhere?” The girl’s empty eyes looked at him, seeing nothing. In the stadium, somewhere, somewhere in the vastness of that bowl, the moving ramps, the crowds, the tunnels, the press box, the parking lots—where, for Christ’s sake? Where? He switched the ignition on, looking a moment at Isobel; Isobel, who seemed now no longer a part of this venture but someone simply swept along on a tide over which there was no possible control. Not the Isobel he had felt some desire for, the Isobel who had said it was “too soon,” but an absence of that person. Somebody else.

  He swung the camper out onto Nineteenth Street, possessed by the feeling that he had nothing left to lose, that whatever had been lost was gone forever, carried away in a crazy rush—and now all that was important was to get to the stadium in time to do something, something he had not recognized yet, a misty act lying in the immediate future like an object obscured by a veil.

  2.

  “Help me,” Koprow said. “Help me get her back in the chair.”

  They lifted Mrs. Blum, who had been trying to gather her photographs together, and lowered her into the wheelchair. She sat with her head slumped back while Katya, bending here and there in the room, picked up the fallen snapshots.

  “My pictures,” the old woman said.

  Koprow knelt in front of her. He put his hand on the side of her wrist, feeling a skin that had the texture of old newspaper; a touch that appalled him somehow. He smiled reassuringly. “You can have your pictures back when your work is done,” he said. “You frighten us, my dear. You know you shouldn’t try to get out of the chair like that.”

  The old woman didn’t seem to be listening to him. She was watching the photographs in the other woman’s hands. Katya played with them, shuffling them, flicking the edges of them.

  “Please,” the old woman said. “Please. I want my pictures.”

  “Later,” Koprow said. “If you behave yourself.”

  There was silence.
In the corridor a door was opened and there was the sound of feet moving past outside, the players going toward the tunnel that would take them out onto the field. Koprow listened for a moment. He was thinking of the TV cameras that would be recording the game. How could they fail to capture the sudden death of Patrick J. Mallory? On videotape for all the world to see—and not a single gunshot to be heard, not a wound to be found, nothing that all the autopsies in the world could possibly reveal with any degree of accuracy. A rupture of the brain—and they would have words of explanation for that: a blood clot, a cerebral hemorrhage; they would have forensic explanations—and like all such explanations, they would come after the fact.

  He took the little pile of pictures from Katya and glanced at them briefly. These small icons of color—was that all she had to live for? He tried to imagine the emptiness of such a life, that it could be reduced to a series of celluloid fantasies—fantasies that could never be translated into any kind of reality.

  “He is here in the stadium, my dear,” he said.

  The old woman was nervously watching the snapshots. “Please,” she said. “I would like my pictures.”

  “I know you would,” Koprow said. “I understand only too well. But the subject—the man we discussed, the picture I showed you—he is here now in the stadium, not far from this very room. Remember? Remember what we talked of? What you’ve got to do? The last task?”

  He stuffed the photographs into the pocket of his coat and smiled at the old woman.

  “You see how safe they are, Mrs. Blum? You don’t need to worry about them coming to any harm.” He stood upright. There was silence now from the corridor. The players would have reached the entrance to the field by this time. He patted his pocket. “I just want you to think about Mallory now. That’s all. Just like you thought about the Chinese soldier, remember? The American, remember? I want you to think about Mallory now.”