Billion-Dollar Brain
Len Deighton
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0586044280
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The classic spy thriller of lethal computer-age intrigue and a maniac’s private cold war, featuring the same anonymous narrator and milieu of The IPCRESS File.
The fourth of Deighton’s novels to be narrated by the unnamed employee of WOOC(P) is the thrilling story of an anti-communist espionage network owned by a Texan billionaire, General Midwinter, run from a vast computer complex known as the Brain.
After having been recruited by Harvey Newbegin, the narrator travels from the bone-freezing winter of Helsinki, Riga and Leningrad, to the stifling heat of Texas, and soon finds himself tangling with enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
The RFE has twenty-eight transmitters and employs well over one thousand persons. Some people think that RFE was too provocative in its broadcasts to Hungary during the revolt. Another organization is the International Service of Information Foundation Inc. which is run by Air Force Reserve Colonel Amoss on a grant from a millionaire businessman. Information Bureau West is a private news agency which concentrates upon building a minutely detailed picture of the DDR (East Germany) from press,
took them back to that quiet and picturesque corner of old England at five o’clock that morning, using a blanket and hot-water bottle to keep them warm and alive. For my trip to Helsinki Dawlish and I put six medium-grade new-laid into the metal box. We got them from the canteen, but had a terrible job removing the little lion stamp-marks that guarantee purity. 7 The West London Air Terminal is stainless steel and glass, like a modern corned-beef factory. Passengers are felled, bled,
She was wearing a man’s sweater back to front, and under her hair – cut high and short now at the back – there was a triangle of white skin as soft and fresh as a newly broken bread-roll. I fought down an impulse to kiss it. ‘You have a lovely trapezius,’ I said. ‘Have I? How nice.’ She said it automatically. She poured out the coffee and presented it to me like John the Baptist’s head. ‘I have a flat in New York,’ she said. ‘It’s much nicer than this. I spend a lot of time in New York.’
The rhythm and movement became more orgiastic until both ended in a sudden breathless silence. Another girl stepped out. The bartender said, ‘What you think of the show?’ He gave me my drink and a membership card. I said, ‘It’s like eating chocolate with the wrapper still on.’ ‘That’s the trouble,’ said the bartender. He nodded. I said, ‘Did you have a blonde girl in here about nine thirty?’ ‘Hey is your name Dempsey?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. He passed me a note that was propped behind a bottle of
in Battery Park. Down in Washington Produce Market they are huddled round the oil-drum fires. The news desks have released their radio cars, it’s so cold even muggers have stayed at home, to the regret of patrolmen longing to thaw their ears in the precinct house. The city’s seventy thousand wild cats have pounced upon pigeons in Riverside Park or Norwegian wharf rats in Washington Market and now they too are asleep under the long line of still cars. Even the Spanish-speaking radio stations are