Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton Page B

down and confess.
    ‘On my honour,’ I said.
    ‘Good,’ said Harvey. ‘Because New York were giving me hell about employing you and I’ve goneout on a limb. You see, we have a special operation coming our way tomorrow.’
    It was getting very hot in the room. Even Harvey—who had a dark complexion—had gone the colour of a boiled lobster. Outside in the snow two men had climbed out of a Renault van with saws and ropes and were tapping one of the trees.
    ‘I didn’t want to handle it,’ Harvey said. ‘Are you getting too hot?’
    ‘No, I’m fine. Why didn’t you?’
    ‘Wrong time of year for one thing.’ He smacked his legs with a birch branch. The smell of the leaves was suddenly very strong. I wondered how they preserved branches complete with leaves until this time of year. ‘Oh, there are a thousand reasons why I wanted them to wait.’
    ‘They wouldn’t?’
    ‘They have their reasons. They want him in and out within a month at the very outside. He’s a technician taking a look at some technical stuff. Machinery or something. It’s Pike’s brother: you met him?’
    ‘I see,’ I said. I didn’t see anything except a man tying a rope around the large upper branch of a tree.
    ‘It’s dangerous,’ Harvey said. Even Harvey was feeling a little discomfort now. He was sitting very still and his breathing was shallow.
    ‘In what way?’
    ‘These drops. I hate them.’
    ‘Drops?’ I said. I had a nasty little feeling in my inside that was nothing to do with the sauna. Ihoped very much that Harvey didn’t mean what I thought he might. He stood up and went across to the stove. I watched him dip into a bucket and throw a scoopful of water on to the hot stones of the fire. He looked up at me. ‘Drop from a plane,’ he said.
    ‘Parachute into the Soviet Union?’ The man at the base of the tree had begun to operate the electric felling-saw even before the other one began to descend.
    ‘They don’t use a ’chute. They drop them from a light plane into snowdrifts.’
    ‘You had me worried for a minute.’
    ‘I’m not kidding. I’m serious,’ Harvey said, and I could see that he was.
    The bottom end of the rope was fixed to the back of the van and it took up the slack and held the tree in tension to give the saw ease of movement. Suddenly I felt the change of temperature. A thousand pinpricks of scalding steam grew to knife-points and the knives twisted. I opened my mouth and felt the scalds on the mucous membrane inside my throat. I closed my mouth and felt as though I had gargled with barbed wire. Harvey watched me closely. He said, ‘It’s only fifty miles to the coast of the USSR. If we went high enough to use a ’chute we’d be picked up on radar immediately after taking off.’
    It was still hot, but the pinpoints of scalding water had changed to steam. My skin was burning. I avoided looking at the thermometer.
    ‘What’s the difference?’ I asked. ‘If you are really dropping people anywhere along that coast I wouldn’t give them forty-eight hours before they are signing a statement for the public prosecutor. That’s the Baltic Military District * over there: one of the most sensitive areas in the world. It’s full of missiles, airfields, sub-bases, the lot; and what’s more it’s full of guards and patrols.’
    Harvey squeezed the sweat from his face with the edge of his hand and then he looked at his hand as though trying to tell his own fortune. He stood up. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ve been too long with this screwy outfit; I’m beginning to believe that stuff they are handing out from the New York office. Let’s get out of here, huh?’ But neither of us moved. Outside the van revved up. The spine of the tree curved like a man stretching tall after a heavy sleep. Its arms flicked snow loose in a final fastidious gesture of contempt, and then the whole thing began to tilt. It was a slow graceful fall. There was no sound through the