He leaned forward to replace the receiver, speaking to the driver as he did so. "Straight to the Air Force base. They've got a jet waiting there for him."
He settled back comfortably and looked at Lenny. "You could at least tell people where you're going."
"Very well," said Lenny. He folded his arms, closed his eyes, and relaxed. "Right now, I'm going off to dreamland."
He waited a short while to see if the other would say anything. He didn't, so Lenny proceeded to do exactly what he had promised to do.
He went off to dreamland.
He had not been absolutely sure, when he made the promise, that he would actually do just that, but the odds were in favor of it. It was now one o'clock in the morning in Moscow, and Lenny's brother, Raphael, was a man of regular habits.
Lenny reached out. When he made contact, all he got was a jumble of hash. It was as though someone had made a movie by cutting bits and snippets from a hundred different films, no bit more than six or seven frames long, with a sound track that might or might not match, and projected the result through a drifting fog, using an ever-changing lens that rippled like the surface of a wind-ruffled pool. Sometimes one figure would come into sharp focus for a fraction of a second, sometimes in color, sometimes not.
Sometimes Lenny was merely observing the show, sometimes he was in it.
Rafe! Hey, Rafe! Wake up!
The jumble of hash began to stabilize, becoming more coherent—