Brainfire (44 page)

11.

It was the smell of burning that made Rayner open a particular door. It was the scent of flesh burning. Even then he opened the door hesitantly, letting it swing slowly inward to the room. Half-lighted, white tiles, shadows, fluorescence burning from another door beyond. He stepped inside the room, trying to make out shapes from shadows, conscious at the same time of a soft sighing noise coming from a dark corner. In the doorway that faced him there was somebody—something—lying. At first he couldn't make it out. He thought: You read of strange things in weird books; you read of unexplained phenomena—a woman in Florida disappears in some wildly improbable outrage of spontaneous combustion. You read it, you forget it, then it comes back to you—all the strange things you've read: objects falling out of the sky, blue sunsets, a man in Kansas disappearing from sight in full view of his family. Other dimensions, they say—as if that explained a goddam thing. The mysteries of living and dying. He bent down over the shape. Startled, he backed off. A man. Maybe. Maybe once. You couldn't say for certain that this had been a man—this blackened object that lay in the doorway, this charred form: a Frankenstein gone wrong. Burnt clothing; was that skin that had been scorched? He shut his eyes a second. A trick of the mind, a delusion, another sign of your condition. But it was still there when he looked again. Blackened bone, that was what he could see. Bones broken and protruding through flesh the color of cinders. A man, something that had once been a man. He felt sick as he stood up and stared at the thing.
She could break your mind
. What was more terrible—the ability to reduce a man to this condition or the capacity for taking a mind and driving it toward a total destruction? He didn't want to look—but he couldn't prevent it. And still, from the dark corner of the room, there was the same soft, sighing sound. He stepped over the body and into the inner room, where the lights made him blink. His eyes watered—from what? Fear?

A cubicle door was open. He went toward it. Like a child crouching in the distant corner of a room, like a child fending off the nightmare monsters of the imagination, there was a middle-aged woman covering her head with her hands, her knees bent, her body doubled. She was trembling. He reached out to touch her and wondered: Is this the one? Is this the kid's woman? Did she just get the age wrong? He turned her face toward him and immediately, as if something had stung him, he backed away, sickened, sickened again. The facial skin was scorched, bloodied, the eyelids swollen—the eyes themselves red and blind as if they had been rubbed constantly for years, rubbed and pushed and pressed to the point of sightlessness. He backed out of the cubicle and the woman turned her face away, once again covering it with her hands.

In the doorway he paused. You reach a point, he thought. You think: I can't deal with it anymore. It's beyond what I know. It's beyond simple torture, simple violence—a place where you dare not go. He listened to the same quiet, sighing sound as he had heard before and he stepped over the charred thing in the doorway and back into the other room, his eyesight darkened and dimmed by the fluorescence. He waited, listening, hearing other sounds now from along the corridor. But it was the sighing that drew him to the corner of the room.

He saw the wheelchair first. Then he made out, through the dimness, the shape of the woman—and he realized he had never seen anyone so close to dying, anyone who looked so utterly close to death. An old woman, sparse white hair, body covered over with a blanket. The old woman, he thought. How could you, in all your most disorganized dreams, ascribe terror to this woman who sat, sighing, sifting mindlessly through a little pile of colored snapshots? How could you do that? He approached her and, kneeling, looked at her. She stared at him and he was momentarily afraid, but the feeling passed: an intuition, a way of knowing, that something had ended here. That she intended no harm to him. He reached out and touched her arthritic hands. Raising her face, she looked toward the doorway, then back at Rayner.

“Mall-ory,” she said.

The tone of voice—Mallory, he thought. Mallory is safe. How did he know that? The smell of burnt flesh came to him again. Mall-ory. She watched him a moment in a curious way and he experienced a faint passing headache, as if something had brushed briefly against his brain.

“Rayner,” she said.

That tone—what was that one now? Some kind of … sadness? Some kind of
apology
? He looked away from her. Richard, she was speaking about Richard, she was trying to explain her sorrow. She held out the snapshots to him and he glanced at them quickly. He saw unrecognizable faces in a sunlit place. What did they mean to her? She smiled at him and he thought: This is the woman who killed my brother. This is her. This is the woman I've been chasing through my own dreams of insanity, pursuing through my obsessions, my fears. But now he felt nothing. No sense of achievement, no desire for vengeance, nothing. You come to a point and after that there's nothing but a dying old woman dreamily sifting through her snapshots. Go to any old house in America where a widow would sit behind her lace curtains, listening to the clocks of her own loneliness, and you would find the same pitiful scene.

He stood upright.

“Rayner,” she said again, and her voice was hoarse.

The woman who killed Richard. This is her.

And then there was confusion, the room suddenly filled with men, raincoated men, men who had expected to trap and corner a free-running madman—but not this, nothing like this. The crackle of their little radios, the noise of their feet, the sounds of their voices. There was silence. I mean nothing to them now, Rayner thought. I mean nothing. Nothing compared to what they have found in the doorway.

He looked at the old woman one more time, then slipped out of the room toward the corridor, listening to the babble of voices behind him. Let them find their own explanations, he thought. The way I found mine.

12.

The whistle blew for half time. The players ran through the rain toward the locker rooms. The American team had finally managed to score just before the interval, a goal that MacMillan described as spectacular—coming, as it had, from thirty yards out from the Russian goal. “A thunderbolt,” MacMillan said.

Mallory sat back in his seat. What had happened to him? He felt weak, but everything else had gone now—the panic, the pains, the sense of dying. He would have to see about a checkup as soon as possible or spend the rest of his life wondering if the lunch had been poisoned.

Leontov turned to him and asked, “How are you feeling now?”

Mallory nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Just fine.”

MacMillan looked happy. “I don't care what wonder drugs they discover, Mr. President. Common aspirin is a miracle in itself.”

“Indeed,” Mallory said.

Leontov rose, excused himself, and slipped along the row of seats. Mallory wondered about that dollar. Was the little shit afraid of an American revival in the second half of the game?

“Do we stand a chance, MacMillan?” he asked.

“That goal has put a different perspective on things,” said MacMillan.

13.

Rayner left the stadium and went across the parking lot in the rain. Overhead, in the dismal sky, there was the white shadow of a watery sun. He looked up a moment and then he thought: I'll walk to D.C. General. Get Isobel and the kid. Make sure they're okay. He felt a strain of some deep fatigue as he passed among the rows of parked cars. Sleep, he thought. And then what? Do you return to London? Pick up the pieces? Look into the situation with Isobel? Or were the ghosts still too strong for that? The cars gleamed in the rain, row after row after row. He paused, shaking his head, trying to get rid of his tiredness—and with it the memory of what he had just seen. Priorities, he thought. You need some semblance of order first of all. Later, you can sit down and try to figure your way through it all. Coffee. Maybe at the hospital. The first thing.

“John?”

It surprised him to hear his name being called in that familiar voice; it was like a voice in some shallow dream. He turned around and saw George Gull standing some yards behind him. George Gull, he thought. You could have picked a better time. He watched Gull come toward him and all at once he was conscious of the vast emptiness of the parking lot, the silence from the stadium, the soft sound of the rain. Gull was smiling—and for a moment, a fleeting time of small hope, Rayner wondered if he had attributed all the wrong things to Gull, if wires had been crossed somewhere along the way and mistakes made. But Gull had in his hand a silenced pistol, and Rayner thought: You come all this way, cover all this distance, you cross the barricades of your own incredulity—and for what? To die in the fucking rain? He looked at the muzzle of the silencer. To die quietly in the fucking rain.

“Close, John. But no cigar,” Gull said.

Rayner said, “I hope they made it worth your while. Or was it a question of ideology, George?”

Gull laughed. “You can't put ideology in a Zurich numbered account, can you now?”

The finances of treachery, Rayner thought. He stared at the gun. To end like this. To find it wasn't worth shit. Immortality in a parking lot. In the rain. Worthless.

“You knew about this nutty plan all along,” Rayner said.

Gull was still smiling. “You can't bitch, John. I tried to warn you off. You can't say I didn't try. I warned you off Dubbs. I didn't want you drifting into the Andreyev business.”

“It didn't work,” Rayner said. “Your little old lady turned around, Gull.”

“I can't take the blame for that,” Gull said. “It wasn't my scheme. I only pulled a few necessary strings, John. Who do you think arranged their fucking visas, no questions asked? They're not uncharitable. A piece of paper here, a piece of info there—I was an
impeccable
source. Isn't that the phrase?”

“Words to that effect,” Rayner said. Fatigue and death. Maybe it's better to take your leave when you're not wide awake; maybe you don't feel it quite as much. “What about my brother? Did you know about him?”

“After the fact, John. It was the big mistake in my book. Working the old woman on your brother when they could have chosen
anybody
, and you'd never have been involved. I'm sorry about that.”

“Sorry,” Rayner said flatly. He could smell it still in his nostrils: burning meat over cinders. The old woman. The goddam rain. The silence in the rain. “Killing Mallory—did you ever think about the consequences, George?”

“Consequences? Look, I'm eligible for retirement next year. I intend to take it. I've done my time, John. So I retire—then what? A trailer park in New Jersey? Living on a Government pension? A pittance? Maybe a job like a broken-down store detective? Fuck that. I've lived on my nerves long enough. Sure, I thought about consequences—but only in terms of my own well-being.” Gull paused. He raised a hand to wipe a slick of rain from his forehead. “Anyway, is there a difference between one man in the White House or another? Is there any goddam difference? Right now, John, I'm only interested in saving my own ass.”

Rayner looked once more at the gun. Gull's pathetic little speech—was it some desperate plea for sympathy, for a belated understanding?
Sorry, John, but now you know why I have to kill you
.

“It doesn't hang together, Gull,” he said. Useless words now. “You sent Chip Alexander after me—how could you have been so damn sure I wouldn't tell him about Mallory? How did you know he would swallow that shit about me having a breakdown and stealing classified material? It doesn't jell for me, George.”

Gull looked pale. “I took a calculated risk. I thought the Soviets would get to you first. Anyway, I wasn't sure then that you had put the Mallory pieces together, John. I just figured you wouldn't, it was too far-out, unlikely. But when I knew you had the pieces, when I knew that for sure, it became a different game.… But none of this matters much, does it?”

“How did you know, George?
How did you know for sure
?” Rayner asked. A different game. It didn't work, it didn't have rules, an internal logic.

Gull shook his head. He appeared to be in some pain. “It doesn't matter now.”

Rayner looked at the gun. What would it feel like?

Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing at all. He stared across the rain toward the stadium; the Stars and Stripes fluttered in a restless way. Something, he thought. It still doesn't fit. Something he didn't want to think about. He saw George Gull lift the gun.

“How did you know, George? How did you know I had figured out the Mallory thing? How did you know I'd be here?”

George Gull was sweating.

It doesn't add, Rayner thought. It doesn't add and it doesn't matter that it doesn't add, that the equation is screwed up all over again. He wondered desperately about running, just turning and running, taking whatever his chances might be. Where was that goddam instinct for survival you read so much about? Where was it when you needed it?

“How, George? Tell me.”

Gull looked as though he was trying to speak. He opened his mouth soundlessly. Rayner stared at the gun. Why was he having so much trouble firing it? Has some great god of luck jammed the trigger for you? No, you've used up all your luck, Rayner. This is the place where the well of good fortune finally runs dry on you. This is the place. He saw how Gull was straining with the gun, holding it now as though it was an object over which he had no control, straining as his arm rose. There was a look of panic on his face.

Christ, Christ
, he was saying. Over and over and over.

Christ, Christ, Christ
.

Rayner didn't move. He saw Gull's arm continue to rise, he saw the nerve moving in the jaw, the streaks of sweat on the forehead, he saw the gun come up.