Borowitz’s office was a spacious affair of great bay windows looking out and down from the tower’s curving stone wall over rough grounds towards the distant woodland. The windows, of course, were of bullet-proof glass. The stone floor was covered in a fairly luxurious pile carpet, burned here and there from Borowitz’s careless smoking habits, and his desk – a huge block of a thing in solid oak – stood in a corner where it had both the
protection of thick walls and the benefit of maximum light from the bays.
There he now seated himself, sighing a little and lighting a cigarette before pressing a button on his intercom and saying: ‘Come in, Boris, will you? But do please see if you can leave your scowl out there, that’s a good fellow . . .’
Dragosani entered, closing the door a little more forcefully than necessary, and crossed catlike to Borowitz’s desk. He had ‘left his scowl out there’, and in its place presented a face of cold, barely disguised insolence. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m here.’
‘Indeed you are, Boris,’ Borowitz agreed, unsmiling now, ‘and I believe I said good morning to you.’
‘It was when I got here!’ said Dragosani, tight-lipped. ‘May I sit down?’
‘No,’ Borowitz growled, ‘you may not. Nor may you pace, for pacing irritates me. You may simply stand there where you are and – listen -to- me!’
Never in his life had Dragosani been spoken to like that. It took the wind right out of his sails. He looked as if someone had slapped him. ‘Gregor, I – ‘ he began again.
‘What?’ Borowitz roared. ‘Gregor, is it? This is business, agent Dragosani, not a social call! Save your familiarity for your friends – if you’ve any left, with that snotty manner of yours – and not for your superiors. You’re a long way off taking over the branch yet, and unless you get certain fundamentals sorted out in your hot little head you may never take it over at all!’
Dragosani, always pale, now turned paler still. ‘I … I don’t know what’s got into you,’ he said. ‘Have I done something?’
‘You, done something?’ now it was Borowitz’s turn to scowl. ‘According to your work sheets very little – not for
the last six months, anyway! But that’s something we’re going to remedy. Anyway, maybe you’d better sit down. I’ve quite a lot of talking to do and it’s all serious stuff. Pull up a chair.’
Dragosani bit his lip, did as he was told.
Borowitz stared at him, toyed with a pencil, finally said: ‘It appears we’re not unique.’
Dragosani waited, said nothing.
‘Not at all unique. Of course we’ve known for some time that the Americans were fooling about with extra sensory perception as an espionage concept – but that’s
all it is, fooling about. They find it “cute”. Everything is “cute” to the Americans. There’s little of direction or purpose to anything they’re doing in this field. With them it’s all experimentation and no action. They don’t take it seriously; they have no real field agents; they’re playing with it in much the same way they played with radar before they came into World War Two – and look what that got them! In short, they don’t yet trust ESP, which gives us a big lead on them. Huh! That makes a nice change.’
‘This is not new to me,’ said Dragosani, puzzled. ‘I know we’re ahead of the Americans. So what?’
Borowitz ignored him. ‘The same goes for the Chinese,’ he said. ‘They’ve got some clever minds over there in Peking, but they aren’t using them right. Can you imagine? The race that invented acupuncture doubting the efficacy of ESP? They’re stuck with the same sort of mental block we had forty years ago: if it isn’t a tractor it won’t work!’
Dragosani kept silent. He knew he must let Borowitz get to the point in his own good time, then there’s the French and the West Germans. Oddly enough, they’re coming along quite well. We actually have some of their ESPers here in Moscow, field agents
working out of the embassies. They attend parties and functions, purely to see if they’re able to glean anything. And occasionally we let them have titbits, stuff their orthodox intelligence agencies would pick up anyway, just to keep them in business. But when it comes to the big stuff – then we feed them rubbish, which dents their credibility and so helps us keep right ahead of them.’