Len Deighton Billion Dollar Brain Section One: London and Helsinki Section Two: London Section Three: Helsinki Section Four: Leningrad and Riga Section Five: New York Section Six: San Antonio Section Seven: New York Section Eight: London Section Nine: Helsinki and Leningrad Section Ten: London Appendices Spring is a virgin, summer a mother, autumn a widow, winter a stepmother. RUSSIAN PROVERB Two mythical countries (Kalevala and Pohjola) fight a perpetual war. They both want a magic mill that grinds endless; salt, corn and money. The most important figure in this conflict is an old man named Väinämöinen. He is a wizard and wise man. He is also a musician and plays tunes upon the bones of a pike. Väinämöinen woos a lovely young girl, Aino, but she drowns herself rather than marry an old man. KALEVALA (a Finnish folk epic) Mr Paul Getty... is quoted as having said that a billion dollars is not worth what it used to be. NUBAR QULBENKIAN Section 1: London and Helsinki See-saw, Margery Daw, Jacky shall have a new master. NURSERY RHYME Chapter 1 It was the morning of my hundredth birthday, I shaved the final mirror-disc of old tired face under the merciless glare of the bathroom lighting. It was all very well telling oneself that Humphrey Bogart had that sort of face; but he also had a hairpiece, half a million dollars a year and a stand-in for the rough bits. I dabbed a soda-stick at the razor nicks. In the magnifying mirror it looked like a white rocket landing on the uncharted side of the moon. Outside was February and the first snow of the year. At first it was the sort of snow that a sharp P.R. man would make available to journalists. It sparkled and floated. It was soft yet crisp, like some new, sugar-coated breakfast cereal. Girls wore it in their hair and the Telegraph ran a picture of a statue wearing some. It was hard to reconcile this benign snow with the stuff that caused paranoia among British Railways officials. That Monday morning it was building up in crunchy wedges under the heels of shoes and falling in dry white pyramids along the front hall of the Charlotte Street office where I worked. I said 'Good morning' to Alice, and she said 'Don't tread it in' to me, which summed up our relationship nicely. The Charlotte Street building was an ancient creaking slum. The wallpaper had great boils full of loose plaster and there were small metal patches in the floor where the boards were too rotten to repair. On the first-floor landing was a painted sign that said 'Acme Films. Cutting Rooms', and under that a drawing of a globe that made Africa too thin. From behind the doors came the noise of a moviola and a strong smell of film cement. The next landing was painted with fresh green paint. On one door a dog-eared piece of headed notepaper said 'B Isaacs Theatrical Tailor', which at one time I had considered very funny. Behind me I heard Alice puffing up the stairs with a catering-size tin of Nescafe. Someone in the dispatch department put a brass-band record on the gramophone. Dawlish, my boss, was always complaining about that gramophone, but even Alice couldn't really control the dispatch department. My secretary said, 'Good morning.' Jean was a tall girl in her middle twenties. Her face was as calm as Nembutal anil with her high cheekbones and tightly drawn back hair she was beautiful without working at it. There were times when I thought that I was in love with Jean and there were times when I thought that she was in love with me, but somehow these times never coincided. 'Good party?' I asked. 'You seemed to enjoy it. When I left you were drinking a pint of bitter while standing on your head!.' 'You do exaggerate. Why did you go home alone?' 'I have two hungry cats to support. Two thirty is definitely my bedtime.' 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Don't be.' 'Truly.' 'Going with you to a party is to be there alone. You plant me down, go around chatting with everyone, then wonder why I haven't met them all.' 'Tonight', I said, 'we'll go to some quiet place for dinner. Just us.' 'I'm taking no chances. Tonight I'm cooking a birthday feast at the flat. I'll give you all your favourite things.' 'You will?' 'To eat.' 'I'll be there,' I said. 'You'd better be.' She gave me a perfunctory kiss - 'Happy birthday' - and leaned across and put a glass of water and two Alka Seltzer tablets on my blotter. 'Why not put the tablets into the water?' I asked. 'I wasn't sure if you could bear the noise.' She unlocked my trays and began to work steadily through the great pile of paper- work. By midday we hadn't made much impression upon it. I said, 'We aren't even keeping up with the incoming.' 'We can start a "pending" tray.' 'Don't be so female,' I said. 'All that does is call some of it another name. Why can't you go through it and handle some of it without me?' 'I already did.' 'Then sort out the "information onlys", mark them for return to us and pass them on. That would give us a breathing space.' 'Now who's kidding himself?' 'Can you think of something better?" 'Yes. I think we should get a written directive from Organisation to be sure we're handling only files that we should handle. There may be things in this tray that are nothing to do with us.' 'There are times, my love, when I think none of it is anything to do with us.' Jean stared at me in an expressionless way that might have indicated disapproval. Maybe she was thinking about her hair. 'Birthday lunch at the Trat,' I said. 'But I look awful.' 'Yes,' I said. 'I must do my hair. Give me five minutes." 'I'll give you six,' I said. She had been thinking about her hair. We lunched at the Trattoria Terrazza: Tagliatelle alia carbonara, Osso buco, coffee. Pol Roger throughout. Mario complimented me on having a birthday and kissed Jean to celebrate it. He snapped his fingers and up came Strega. I snapped my fingers and up came more Pol Roger. We sat there, drinking champagne with Strega chasers, talking, snapping fingers and discovering ultimate truth and our own infinite wisdom. We got back to the office at three forty-five and I realised for the first time how dangerous that loose lino on the stairs can be. As I entered my office the intercom was buzzing like a trapped bluebottle. 'Yes,' I said. 'Right away,' said Dawlish, my boss. 'Right away, sir,' I said, slowly and carefully. Dawlish had the only room in the building with two windows. It was a comfortable room, although overcrowded with pieces of not very valuable antique furniture. There was a smell of wet overcoats. Dawlish was a meticulous man who looked like an Edwardian coroner. His hair was grey moving towards white and his hands long and thin. When he read he moved his fingertips across the page as though getting a finer understanding from the sense of touch. He looked up from his desk. 'Was that you falling down the stairs?' 'I stumbled,' I said. 'It's the snow on my shoes.' 'Of course it is, my boy,' said Dawlish. We both stared out of the window; the snow was falling faster, and great white snakes of it were wriggling along the gutter, for it was still dry enough to be lifted by the wind. 'I'm just sending another 378 file to the P. M. I hate this clearance business. It's so easy to slip up.' That's true,' I said, and was pleased that I didn't have to sign that file. 'What do you think?' asked Dawlish. 'Do you think thai that boy is a security risk?' The 378 file was a periodic review of the loyalty of S. ls -important chemists, engineers etc. - but I knew that Dawlish just wanted to think aloud, so I grunted. 'You know the one I'm worried about. You know him.' 'I've never handled his file,' and as long as choice was concerned I'd make damned certain I didn't. I knew that Dawlish had another nasty little bomb called the 378 file sub- section 14, which was a file about trade union officials. At the slightest show of intelligent interest I would find that file on my desk. 'Personally: what do you feel about him personally?' asked Dawlish. 'Brilliant young student. Socialist. Pleased with himself for getting an honours degree. Wakes up one morning with a suede waistcoat, two kids, job in advertising and a ten-thousand-quid mortgage in Hampstead, Sends for a subscription to the Daily Worker just so that he can read the Statesman with a clear conscience. Harmless.' I hoped that reply carried the right blend of inefficient glibness. 'Very good,' said Dawlish, turning the pages of the file. 'We should give you a job here.' 'I'd never get on with the boss.' Dawlish initialled a chit at the front of the file and tossed it into the out tray. 'We have another problem,' he said, 'thai won't be solved as easily as that." Dawlish reached for a slim file, opened it and read a name.