Billion-Dollar Brain Page 4

  Harvey Newbegin was a neatly dressed man; grey flannel suit, initialled handkerchief in top pocket, gold watch, and a relaxed smile. I had known him for a number of years. He had been with the US Defense Department for four years before transferring to the State Department. I had tried to get him working for us at one time but Dawlish had failed to obtain authority to do it. Under those droopy eyelids Harvey had quick, intelligent eyes. He used them to study me while going to get us all a drink. The music was still thumping out of the radiogram. Harvey poured three glasses of whisky, dropped ice and soda into two of them, then walked across to me and Signe. Halfway across the floor he picked up the beat of the music and did a brief sequence of steps the rest of the way.

  ‘Don’t be such a fool,’ Signe said to him. ‘He’s such a fool,’ she added. Harvey gave her the glass of whisky, let go of it before she grasped it and in mid-fall caught it with the other hand and handed it to her without spilling it. ‘He’s such a fool,’ she said again with admiration. She shook little droplets of melted snow from her hair. Her hair was much shorter and even more golden today.

  When we were all seated Harvey said to Signe, ‘Let me tell you something, doll, this guy is a hot tamale: he works for a very smart little British Intelligence outfit. He’s not as dopey as he looks.’ Harvey turned to me. ‘You’ve been tangling with this guy Kaarna.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘OK, OK, OK, you don’t have to tell me. Kaarna is dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘DED dead. It’s here in the newspaper. You found him dead. You know it, pal.’

  ‘I give you my word I didn’t,’ I said.

  We looked at each other for a minute, then Harvey said, ‘Well anyway he’s joined the major leagues, there’s nothing we can do about that. But when Signe was hustling you yesterday it was because we urgently need someone to carry between here and London. Could you take on a part-time job for the Yanks? The pay is good.’

  ‘I’ll ask the office,’ I said.

  ‘Ask the office,’ he said scornfully. He tapped his toe on the carpet. ‘You’re a big boy with a mind of your own. Why ask anyone?’

  ‘Because your smart organization might just let the word slip, that’s why.’

  Harvey put a finger across his throat. ‘So help me God, they won’t. We are a very neat, tight-fitting department. Guaranteed no snafus. Cash on the barrel-head. What sort of deal have you got with your London set-up anyway?’

  I said, ‘I work on a freelance basis. They pay me a fee per assignment; it’s a part-time job.’ I paused. ‘I could handle some extra tasks if the money was right and if you’re quite sure London won’t find out from your own people.’ It wasn’t true but it seemed a suitable answer.

  Harvey said, ‘You’ll like working with us and we’d be tickled to have you.’

  ‘Then it’s a deal,’ I said. ‘Explain my duties, as they say in domestic circles.’

  ‘Nothing to it. You’ll be carrying materials between here and London. It’ll seldom be anything you can’t declare…’

  ‘So what’s the catch?’

  ‘Valuables. We must have somebody who won’t walk off with the consignment. You’ll have your first-class airfare paid. Hotel and expenses. A retainer and a fee per trip. As one pro to another I’ll tell you it’s a good deal.’ Signe gave us drinks, and as she turned towards the kitchen Harvey gave her an affectionate pat on the bottom. ‘The fat of the land,’ he said. ‘I’m living on the fat of the land.’

  Signe wrenched Harvey’s hand away from her, snorted and walked out with a beguiling movement of the glutaeus maximus.

  Harvey moved his armchair nearer to me. ‘We don’t normally tell our operatives anything about the organization, but I’ll make an exception for you under the old pals’ act. This is a private intelligence unit financed by an old man named Midwinter. Calls himself General Midwinter. He’s from one of those old Texan families that have a lot of German blood. Originally the family came from one of the Baltic states—Latvia or Lithuania—that the Russians now have and hold. This old guy Midwinter has dreams of liberating the territory. I guess he’d like to install himself as a king or something.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ I said. ‘It’s a long time since I worked for a megalomaniac.’

  ‘Hell, I’m exaggerating, but he has got an oversimplified mind. Brilliant men often have. He likes to hear that those poor bastards across there are all set to start a revolution…’

  ‘And you help his illusions,’ I supplied.

  ‘Look, the guy’s a multi-millionaire, a multibillionaire maybe. This is his toy. Why should I spoil his fun? He made his money from canned food and insurance; that’s a dull way to make a billion, so he needs a little fun. The CIA siphon a little money to him…’

  ‘The CIA?’

  ‘Oh, they don’t take us seriously, but you know how their minds work; stealing hubcaps in Moscow is the CIA’s idea of a blow for freedom. And some of the stunts we pull are pretty good. He has two radio stations on ships that beam into the Baltic states. You know the sort of thing: “Stand by for freedom and coke.” They have a mass of computer equipment and a training school back in the States. Maybe they will send you for training, but if they do I’ll make sure it’s kept plushy for you. And the money.’ Harvey poured me a huge drink to demonstrate that aspect of my new employer. ‘When do you plan to return to London?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s great. This is your first task: stay to lunch.’ Harvey Newbegin laughed. ‘When you get to London go to the phone booth in Trinity Church Square, South-east one, take the L to R book and make a small pencil dot beside the Pan American entry. Go back next day and on the same page margin there will be a phone number written in pencil. Phone that number. Say you are a friend of the people at the antique shop and you have something you would like to show them. If anyone at the other end asks who you want to speak to, you don’t know, you were given this number and told there was someone there interested in buying antiques. When the people at the other end make an appointment, be there twenty hours later than that time. Got that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘If there is any kind of snarl up, ring off. Standard control meeting procedure: that is to say, return and do the whole thing again twenty-four hours later. OK?’ Harvey held up his glass of vodka and said, ‘This is something those Russkies do damn well. Pip, pip, down the hatch.’ He swallowed the rest of the vodka in one gulp, then clutched at his heart and pulled a pained face. ‘I have heartburn,’ he explained. He took his wallet out, removed a five-mark note and ripped it into two pieces in a very irregular tear. He gave half of it to me. ‘The man you meet will want your half of this before he parts with his package, so look after it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you will explain what it is I have to collect.’

  ‘It’s simple,’ said Harvey Newbegin. ‘You go empty-handed. You bring back half a dozen eggs.’

  * * *

  *Like many modern espionage terms this comes from the German: ‘die Hosen herunterlassen’—to take one’s trousers off. This means to reveal that you are an agent and attempt to recruit someone into your organization. The older term for this was ‘moment of truth’.

  SECTION 2

  London

  A master I have, and I am his man, Gallopy dreary dun.

  NURSERY RHYME

  Chapter 4

  When I got back to London I put spots in telephone directories and went through the rest of Harvey Newbegin’s party games for the under-fives. A stuffy voice on the phone said, ‘Don’t worry about that twenty hours nonsense that they told you at the other end. You get along here now. I’m waiting to go down to my boat for a couple of days.’

  So I went to King’s Cross; Bed and Breakfast cards jammed into grimy windows and novelty shops that sell plastic faeces and musical toilet-roll holders. There was a brass plate outside number fifty-three: ‘Surgery. Dr Pike.’ The plate was garnished with qualifications. Near the fr
ont door there were two dented dustbins and about thirty old milk bottles. A cold wet sleet was beginning to fall.

  The door was unlocked, but a small buzzer sounded as I pushed it open. The waiting-room was a large Victorian room with a decorated ceiling. There was a wide selection of slightly broken furniture with disembowelled copies of Woman’s Own strategically placed under notices about ante-natal clinics and repeat prescriptions. The notices were penned in strange angular lettering and held in place by crisp pieces of ancient sticking plaster.

  In one corner of the waiting-room, painted white with the word ‘Surgery’ on it, was a hardboard box. It was large enough to contain a desk and two chairs. One chair was large, leather-covered and swivelled smoothly on ball-bearings; the other was narrow, sickly and lame in one leg. Dr Pike counted his fingertips methodically and revolved towards me. He was a large, impeccably groomed man of about fifty-two. His hair was like a black plastic swimming cap. His suit was made of thin uncreasable blue steel and so was his smile.

  ‘Where’s the pain?’ he said. It was a joke. He smiled again to put me at my ease.

  ‘In my hand.’

  ‘Really? You really have a pain in your hand?’

  ‘Just when I put it in my pocket.’

  Pike looked at me carefully and remembered that there are some people who mistake a friendly word for an invitation to be familiar. ‘I’m sure you were the life and soul of the sergeants’ mess.’

  ‘Let’s not exchange war experiences,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s not,’ he agreed.

  On Pike’s desk there was a pen set, a large dog-eared desk-diary, a stethoscope, three prescription pads and a shiny brown ball about as big as a golf ball. He fingered the shiny sphere.

  I said, ‘We will be working together for a long time, so why don’t we decide to get along with each other?’

  ‘That’s a remarkably intelligent idea.’

  Pike and I loathed each other on sight, but he had the advantage of breeding and education, so he swallowed hard and went out of his way to be nice to me.

  ‘This package of…’ He waited for me to finish the sentence.

  ‘Eggs,’ I said. ‘Package of eggs.’

  ‘It may take a day or so to come through.’

  ‘That doesn’t tally with my instructions,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ he said in a restrained way, ‘but there are complex reasons why the timing is unpredictable. The people involved are not the sort to whom one can give a direct order.’ He had the precise, accentless English that only a diligent foreigner can produce.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and why not?’

  Pike smiled while keeping his lips pressed together. ‘We are professional men. Our livelihood depends upon a code of conduct; it’s essential that we do nothing unethical.’

  ‘Are discovered doing nothing unethical, you mean,’ I said.

  Pike did that tricky smile again. ‘Have it your way,’ he said.

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘When will the package be ready?’

  ‘Not today certainly. There are some benches near the children’s sand-pit in St James’s Park. Meet me there at four forty-five P.M. on Saturday. Ask me if my paper has the stock-market prices and I’ll have a Financial Times. I’ll say, “You can read this for a few minutes.” If I’m carrying a copy of Life magazine don’t make contact: it will indicate danger.’ Pike fingered his yellow bow tie and nodded my dismissal.

  My God, I thought, what have these boys been smoking? They’re all doing it. I nodded as though these charades were a regular part of my working day and opened the door.

  Pike said, ‘…carry on with the tablets and come back and see me in about a week,’ for the benefit of a couple of old flower-pots who were sitting in the waiting-room. He needn’t have bothered because he was shouting at the top of his voice as I left, trying to get them to look up.

  In view of the razzle-dazzle these boys were going through it was reasonable to suppose they were having me followed, so I took a cab and waited till we got into a traffic jam, paid off the driver quickly and hailed a cab moving in the opposite direction. This tactic, well handled, can throw off the average tail if it’s using a private car. I was back in the office before lunch time.

  I reported to Dawlish. Dawlish had that timeless, ageless quality that British Civil Servants develop to spread confidence among the natives. His only interest in life, apart from the antiques which littered the office and the department which he controlled, was the study and cultivation of garden weeds; perhaps they weren’t unrelated interests.

  Dawlish had sandwiches sent up from Wally’s delicatessen and asked me lots of questions about Pike and Harvey Newbegin. I thought Dawlish was taking it much too seriously, but he’s a cunning old devil; he’s apt to base his hunches upon information he hasn’t given me access to. When I said I’d told Harvey Newbegin that I only worked for WOOC(P) part-time, Dawlish said, ‘Well you certainly weren’t lying about that, were you?’ He munched into one of Wally’s salt-beef sandwiches and said, ‘You know what they’ll do next?’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, and really meant it.

  ‘They will send you to school.’ He nodded to reinforce his theory. ‘When they do, accept. It’s got seeds in,’ he said. Dawlish was staring at me in a horrified, faintly maniacal way. I nodded. Dawlish said, ‘If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a thousand times.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  Dawlish flipped the switch on his intercom. ‘If I’ve told him once I’ve told him a thousand times. I don’t like that bread with seeds in.’

  Alice’s voice came through the box with all the unbiased dignity of a recording. ‘One round on white, one round on rye with seeds. You have eaten the wrong ones.’

  I said, ‘I don’t like caraway seeds either.’ Dawlish nodded at me so I said it again at the squawk-box, louder and more defiantly this time.

  ‘Neither of us likes bread with seeds,’ Dawlish said to Alice in a voice of sweet reasonableness. ‘How can I get this fact promulgated?’

  ‘Well I can’t be expected to know that,’ said Alice.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Dawlish, ‘that my best plan would be to file it in a cosmic clearance file.’ He smiled at me and nodded approval at his own witticism.

  ‘No, sir, put it into the non-secret waste bin. I’ll have someone take it away. Would you like something else instead?’

  ‘No thank you, Alice,’ said Dawlish and released the switch.

  I could have told him that he’d never win an argument with Alice. No one ever had.

  But it would have taken more than that to upset Dawlish. He had done well that year. The January estimates had been submitted to Treasury and Dawlish had just about doubled our appropriation at a time when many people were predicting our close-down. I’d spent long enough in both the Army and the Civil Service to know that I didn’t like working in either; but working with Dawlish was an education, perhaps the only part of my education that I had ever enjoyed.

  ‘Pike,’ Dawlish said. ‘They never get tired of recruiting doctors, do they?’

  ‘I can see the advantage,’ I said. ‘The waiting-room full of people, the contact has complete privacy when talking to the doctor; very tricky to detect.’

  Dawlish had second thoughts about the sandwich. He picked the seeds out of the bread with a paper-knife, then took a bite. ‘What was that?’ said Dawlish. ‘I wasn’t listening.’

  ‘They are tricky to detect.’

  ‘Not if you get them in your teeth, they’re not, beastly little things, I can’t think who likes them in bread. By the way, you were followed when you left that doctor’s surgery.’ Dawlish made a deprecating gesture with the palm of his hand. ‘But of course, you know that or you wouldn’t have taken evasive action.’

  ‘Who followed me?’

  ‘We are not sure yet. I put young Chilcott-Oates on to it, but apparently our quarry is shopping in Finchley Road and keeping the boy on his toes; he hardly had time to di
al the number, Alice says.’ I nodded. Dawlish said, ‘You are making those scornful noises with your teeth. One wishes you wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Chico,’ I said.

  ‘It’s essential he learns,’ said Dawlish. ‘You won’t let him do anything and that way he will never improve. It will be a splendid success.’

  I said, ‘I’ll go downstairs and try to get a little work done.’

  Dawlish said, ‘Very well, but this business with Newbegin is top priority, don’t let anything interfere with that.’

  ‘I’ll remind you of that remark next month when the Organization Department are making themselves unpleasant.’

  I went downstairs and watched Jean touching up the paint on her fingernails. She looked up and said hello, using the warm breath to dry the paint.

  ‘Busy?’ I said. I settled down behind the desk and began to go through the trays.

  ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic. I spent all day Saturday going through the “information onlys” and making a précis on tape.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love. This Newbegin business has come up just at the wrong time. Without that we could probably have brought all the desk-work up to date. Have you checked out that all these files are ours, as you so cleverly suggested?’

  ‘Forget the flattery,’ Jean said. ‘Yes; we’ve got rid of some of them, but a lot of it comes up here because of your high security clearance. I have a new idea for that.’

  ‘Give.’