1.00A.M. in Moscow.
At the Château Bronnitsy, some miles out of the city along the Serpukhov Road, Ivan Gerenko and Theo Dolgikh stood at an oval observation port of one-way glass and stared into the room beyond at a scene like something out of a science fiction nightmare.
Inside the ‘operating theatre’, Alec Kyle lay unconscious on his back, strapped to a padded table. His head was slightly elevated by means of a rubber cushion, and a bulky stainless-steel helmet covered his head and eyes in a half dome, leaving his nose and mouth free for breathing. Hundreds of hair-fine wires cased in coloured plastic sleeves shimmered like a rainbow from the helmet to a computer where three operators worked frantically, following thought sequences from beginning to end and erasing them at the point of resolution. Inside the helmet, many tiny sensor electrodes had been clamped to Kyle’s skull; others, along with batteries of micro-monitors, were secured by tape to his chest, wrists, stomach and throat. Four more men, telepaths, sat paired on each side of Kyle on stainless-steel chairs, scribbling in notebooks in their laps, each with one hand resting lightly on Kyle’s naked body. A master telepathist — Zek Foener, E-Branch’s best
— sat alone in one corner of the room. Foener was a beautiful young woman in her mid-twenties, an East German recruited by Gregor Borowitz during his last days as head of the branch. She sat with her elbows on her knees, one hand to her brow, utterly motionless, totally intent upon absorbing Kyle’s thoughts as quickly as they were stimulated and generated.
Dolgikh was full of morbid fascination. He had arrived with Kyle at the château about 11.00 A.M. Their flight from Bucharest had been made in a military transport aircraft to an airbase in Smolensk, then to the Château in E-Branch’s own helicopter. All of this had been achieved in absolute secrecy; KGB cover had been tight as a drum. Not even Brezhnev — especially Brezhnev — knew what was happening here.
At the Château Kyle had been injected with a truth serum — not to loosen his tongue but his mind — which had rendered him unconscious. And for the last twelve hours, with booster shots of the serum at regular intervals, he had been giving up all the secrets of INTESP to the Soviet espers. Theo Dolgikh, however, was a very mundane man. His ideas of interrogation, or ‘truth gathering’, were far removed from anything he saw here.
‘What exactly are they doing to him? How does this work, Comrade?’ he asked.
Without looking at Dolgikh, with his faded hazel eyes following every slightest movement in the room beyond
the screen, Gerenko answered, ‘You, of all people, have surely heard of brainwashing, Theo? Well, that is what we are doing: washing Alec Kyle’s brain. So thoroughly, in fact, that it will come out of the wash bleached!’
Ivan Gerenko was slight, and so small as to be almost childlike in stature; but his wrinkled skin, faded eyes and generally sallow appearance were those of an old man. And yet he was only thirty-seven. A rare disease had stunted him physically, aged him prematurely, and a contrary Nature had made up the deficiency by giving him a supplementary ‘talent’. He was a ‘deflector’.
Like Darcy Clarke in many ways, he was the opposite of accident-prone. But where Clarke’s talent avoided danger, Gerenko actually deflected it. A well-aimed blow would not strike him; the shaft of an axe would break before the blade could touch his flesh. The advantage was enormous, immeasurable: he feared nothing and was almost scornful of physical danger. And it accounted for his totally disdainful manner where people such as Theo Dolgikh were concerned. Why should he afford them any sort of respect? They might dislike him, but they could never hurt him. No man was capable of bringing physical harm to Ivan Gerenko.
‘Brainwashing?’ Dolgikh repeated him. ‘I had thought some sort of interrogation, surely?’
‘Both,’ Gerenko nodded, talking rather to himself than by way of answering Dolgikh. ‘We use science, psychology, parapsychology. The three Ts: technology, terror, telepathy. The drug we’ve put in his blood stimulates memory. It works by making him feel alone — utterly alone. He feels that no one else exists in all the universe