Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [68]
‘‘the other’’. The doctors thought that such a capacity
– or lack of it – might be useful to the army and particularly to the KGB. To cut a long story short, Chagrin was one of a dozen men who underwent brain surgery. Post-mortems of psychopaths had
shown some abnormalities in the temporal lobe. Are you still with me, Bond?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Chagrin’s case the operation was a success. They cauterized an area of his temporal lobe the size of a fingernail. I don’t imagine Chagrin was exactly a bleeding heart before, but afterwards his indifference to others has been total. It’s really quite remarkable. Unfortunately, there was a small side-effect. The surgeons damaged a major cluster of pain-sensing neurons in his brain – quite close to the morphine receptors, as it happens. The brain registers pain in some of the same areas that govern emotion. If you try to stop someone feeling compassion, you may take away other feelings. As a result, Chagrin’s ability to experience pain is uneven, sometimes barely existent. This means he has to be careful. He might jump down twenty feet and not even know that he’s broken his ankle. At other times, of course, it can be an advantage. In combat, he is a formidable opponent.’
‘I see,’ said Bond. It explained the stroke-victim appearance of part of Chagrin’s face. ‘But why the hat?’
‘ The surgeons raised what’s called an osteoplastic flap. They drill holes in the skull, then insert a thin
saw between the bone and the membranes beneath and cut upwards through the bone. When they’ve got three-quarters of a circle, they lift and fold back the skull. But the gentlemen in Omsk were in a hurry and didn’t finish the job properly. The flap doesn’t really fit. Chagrin feels shy about it.’
‘Yes,’ said Bond. ‘But why the cap of the Foreign Legion, when he fought so bitterly against the French?’
Gorner shrugged. ‘I think perhaps the Russian neurosurgeons removed his sense of irony.’
Bond struggled to contain his hatred of this man. Which unwise student, he thought, which unthinking joker at Oxford University had first teased him about his hand and so set his life’s course on this perverted crusade?
‘You must be hungry, Bond,’ said Gorner. ‘But today, as I said, is a day of education. The lack of food is to remind you of how the British systematically starved the Irish in the great potato famine. I think a few pangs of yours don’t really compare to the pain of the millions who died. Do you?’
‘When do I leave on this venture of yours?’ asked Bond.
Gorner was looking through the window at the slave workers on his factory floor and seemed not to hear. ‘I did think of another way of bringing Britain
to its knees,’ he said. ‘I considered investing the profits from my pharmaceutical company in the newspaper business. Suppose I had bought the most distinguished paper of your Establishment hypocrites, The Times. Then I could have put it in the hands of some malleable editor who shared my hatred of Britain and attacked the country from its own mouthpiece. I could have bought television channels, other papers . . . I could have piped in pornography and propaganda through every inlet until . . . But, no, Bond. It would have taken too long. And your ‘‘fair play’’ laws that limit ownership might have stopped me. So I pipe death into the veins, with needles. It’s the same, but quicker.’
Gorner stood up. ‘Enough of this pleasant daydream. Chagrin, take Bond away. Make him work. Remember what the British did to the Kikuyu in the Mau-Mau rebellion. Go.’
Chagrin walked in front of Bond while two armed guards followed. They took the open elevator up to the ground floor, then went by electric cart down a vaulted corridor to a barred iron door. Chagrin went to a keypad beside it and punched in a five-figure code. Bond memorized the sequence of sounds, as each number Chagrin pressed emitted a slightly different note.
The door slid away and Bond was pushed into the open and