by Bill Granger
“But what if they won’t let you in?”
“I’m a priest. He’s dying.”
“But what if they say he isn’t dying?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Of course, Devereaux had thought about that since the night before, from the moment he had studied the girl at the supper table. He had acquired the clerical garb from a religious supply house in the afternoon and the plan had been to replace the regular priest who said mass on Sunday in the chapel inside the grounds. Once inside, he would have improvised.
Using the girl seemed safer. Especially for Hanley.
Mrs. Neumann spoke as softly as the morning.
“The problem with what you want me to do is that it alerts whoever it is that—”
“The mole,” Devereaux said. “It has to be a mole in Section.”
“Yackley,” she said.
“Perhaps. Perhaps it is Richfield—he would have initiated the actual hardware part of the tap on Hanley’s phone. He would have seen the transcript. It doesn’t matter. Whoever it is has had it his own way and you have to flush him. Maybe Nutcracker will do that—”
The fog on the road made the going slower than expected. It was nearly 8:30 when they descended into the steep valley in western Maryland and then took the old road up to the south rim, where St. Catherine’s stood.
Two and a half hours in a car can create a suggestion of intimacy between passengers.
Devereaux drove without much thought. Sunday morning was without traffic and the white fog that clung to the hills, to the meadowlands below the roadway, to the road itself—all hushed the outside world so that it ceased to exist.
“What is my great-uncle like?” She had tried once.
Devereaux glanced at her. She was on the edge of fear, like a doe in autumn at the edge of an Interstate Highway, deciding whether to cross. Her eyes were wide but steady. She had guts, Mrs. Neumann said. Maybe Mrs. Neumann understood these things well enough.
She was dressed in light blue, in a soft business suit that permitted a frilly blouse instead of an old school tie. The blouse had no color and it allowed the color of her face to define her face. She had a round face that might grow rounder with age. Her eyes were good and when she stared straight at you, you had to respond in the same way. She was good at silences.
“I didn’t really know Hanley,” Devereaux said at last.
“You worked with him.”
“In a sense.”
“You don’t anymore.”
“No.”
“Why do this? For him?”
“It’s for me.”
“What did you do?”
“I worked for the government. At jobs.” It wasn’t enough. “Estimates. Field work. Department of Agriculture.”
“No,” she said.
Devereaux glanced again at her. The Buick clambered over the rise and there was a long, blind descent into white fog. Above them, the sun was trying to burn it off.
“No what?”
“This Department of Agriculture stuff. And Mrs. Neumann said that, too. This isn’t about the price of soybeans.”
“In a sense, everything is. About the price of soybeans,” Devereaux said. But with gentleness.
“I ought to be told,” she said.
He thought about it.
There was no more speech for two miles. And then:
“Your uncle is an intelligence officer. A director. In an agency that you have never heard of.”
“Like the CIA?”
“Like the CIA.”
“But I thought that was all there was.”
“No. There are others. And he knows a good number of things. And secrets. So, I suppose, he was committed here for his own good and the good of keeping his secrets secret.”
“But that’s not right,” she said. “I mean, I’m not being naïve. But what’s the point of doing things wrong for all the right reasons?”
Because that is the way things are done, Devereaux thought. Because there is no morality in this, any of this; that morality is something for afterward, the sermons and soda water that follow the frenzy of the game. The politicians who preach about the amoral code of the intelligence establishment don’t believe in what they say but like to hear themselves say it. The morality comes at the end of the game; when it is won.
No, not won.
Merely not lost.
Devereaux drove and said none of these things. The fog pressed against the car and intensified the silence.
“Why would he leave everything he had to me?”
“Because you were all he had.”
“That’s really pitiful, isn’t it? Someone he doesn’t even know? All he had.”
And Devereaux thought of Rita Macklin. There was a conversation they were going to have to have. They both knew the form of the conversation but they never let it play out to the end because the end might really be too bad. What would Rita Macklin think of the morality in this? About rooting out a mole inside R Section for the love of government and country?
She would see through that.
When they had the conversation, they would have to be honest at least. He could never fool her anymore; that’s what made it so good to be with her. Pretense was down and the careful agent could be careless. It was just that good between them.
He rehearsed in his mind: I had to do this. To save myself, to find out what had happened—
And she would say: What will you do now? It’s not enough to go back, is it? You’re going to have to stay inside, aren’t you? Everything we arranged—it’s not enough.
And he would say:
What?
What exactly would he say?
The silences in the car lasted the rest of the morning.
Finch looked at the priest. He saw the nuns on the steps already.
“Look, Father, this is a restricted area here, we are talking about the government—”
“I am a priest. I understand you have a dying man here, and his niece has called me.”
“We don’t have a religious preference on his card and—”
“He’s a Catholic,” Margot Kieker said. “Sister, Sister!” She shouted to the fat nun who waddled over. She saw the nun had cuts on the ends of her fingers and she wondered why.
Finch thought: Terrific.
“Sister, my uncle is dying and I want him to have the last rites. Extreme unction. Father Peterson was his priest, his friend, I had to ask him—”
“I hadn’t seen Mr. Hanley for months, I thought he was out of the country, if only I had known—” Devereaux dithered. He stared hard at Finch and thought about how much Finch knew about anything going on around here.
They were at the main house and the morning fog was still thick and white around them. They might have been ghosts in a Scandinavian film.
Sister Domitilla looked confused. She looked at Finch—a man lately attached to the establishment by the government—and then at Sister Gabriella. “I don’t want… I don’t want to be responsible for denying the last rites to Mr. Hanley.” She bit her lip. “Why can’t they see him, Mr. Finch?”
“There are orders—”
“There is God’s order, which is greater,” Sister Domitilla blurted, surprised by her eloquence. She had felt very badly about Mr. Hanley. He had deteriorated so quickly, especially in the last week after Dr. Goddard began the electroshock treatments. The treatments were designed to help “resettle” the random electrical patterns in the brain. Hanley was sliding now; he would be dead in a matter of days.
“Look, I don’t take orders from anyone but Mr. Ivers—”
Devereaux looked up at mention of the name. Who the hell was Ivers? It was the same name Sellers had mentioned.
“Mr. Finch,” Devereaux said. “I am a priest. I want to help my old friend in his last moments—if these are his last moments. You can come with me. I am a man of secrets, as you are, as poor Hanley was.” He paused, looking at Margot. “This poor creature is worried about
her family. I am worried about my friend. But God is worried about his soul.”
Devereaux’s eyes were mild and he nodded solemnly to Sister Domitilla, who looked as though she might fall on her knees in prayer at any moment. Instead, she did something else.
“Come with me, Father, child,” she said. “And don’t interfere with me, Mr. Finch. This is St. Catherine’s and I am in charge here and not you. You take care of security and Dr. Goddard will take care of the medical ills but I will take care of souls. Even the least of these, the most demented, is a creature of God.”
“Let me see what’s in the bag—”
It was all right, Devereaux thought, as Finch sniffed at the vials and replaced the tops, as he felt in the purple confessional stole for a hidden pocket. It was going to be all right.
Hanley had awakened after dawn and the room was vague in the watery morning light and he thought he might be dead at last. And then he had managed to focus well enough to see the crucifix on the opposite wall, above the place where Kaplan had died.
He felt unusually clear. He had felt this way for days. Ever since the beginning of the electroshock treatment. He was quite certain that he had been in this room all his life. He was now six or seven years old. Kaplan had been an old man. For some reason, he was supposed to die very soon, though he was quite young. His mother was due to visit him any day now. He was in Christ Community Hospital in Omaha and they were going to remove his appendix in a little while. They explained to him that it would hurt afterward but it would hurt much less than the hurt he suffered now. He had tried to explain yesterday—to Dr. Goddard—that he was feeling no pain at all. But Dr. Goddard only smiled at him.
He smiled when the door opened.
It was his sister, Mildred.
“Hello, Mildred,” he said.
His sister seemed strange. As though she had something to say and didn’t know how to say it. That was Mildred. The quiet one. And what was wrong with her eyes?
“Mildred? Is there something wrong with your eyes?”
“What?”
“It looks like someone has given you a black eye,” Hanley said.
“He thinks you’re his sister,” said a nun.
Of course this was his sister. Who did she think it was? He was six years old and he was having an operation tomorrow.
“Hello, old friend,” said a man.
He stared at the man over him.
He blinked and could swear he knew that man. He saw that man and part of him knew him. The man was a reverend.
“Reverend Van der Rohe,” said Hanley. “You came all the way to Omaha for me? Am I going to die?”
“No. You’re not going to die, old friend.”
“I was good. I missed Sunday school that one time but I was really sick, I wasn’t just playing hooky.”
“Go ahead with it,” said another man. He was at the back of the room. “The guy’s crackers.”
“Mr. Finch,” said the nun.
He had not seen a nun until he was twelve. He was certain of that. So how old was he? He couldn’t be seeing nuns now. He was only five or six. No, at the time of the operation, he was seven. A terrible pain in his belly, they had been at the state fair, which is how he came to be in Christ Community Hospital. He didn’t know anyone. They were so kind.
Hanley blinked.
“Mill? Are you there?”
“It’s me, it’s Margot.”
“I don’t know Margot,” Hanley said. He thought of a name on something. What? A form of some sort? Margot Kieker. But this person was Mill. Mildred Hanley. She would marry Frank Knudsen and have a daughter named Melissa and up and die. Cancer. So young. It broke your heart. And then Melissa died. And then there was Margot. Now, was this Margot?
Hanley’s eyes went wide in that moment and the priest leaned close to him.
“Make an act of contrition, my friend—”
Close. So close. He could see the gray eyes above him, feel the sense of power so close to him. He knew that face, he knew the sense of power. The face grinned hideously.
Like a nutcracker.
“Devereaux.”
The name echoed in conscience. What does the brain know?
“Devereaux. I wanted you to come. I called you, damn you! I needed you!”
And the priest did a strange thing. He rolled on the floor and he came up with a pistol in his hand and the man at the door fired into the room.
Can you imagine a reverend shooting a pistol? There were more shots and the room shook.
The fat nun fell down. There was blood and Margot was pulling his arm. It hurt. Was it really Margot?
He was dragged to the floor, atop the woman who looked so much like Millie.
“Get out, get out, get out,” she said, making a litany of the same words.
And he thought he really understood.
There was more firing and the man in the doorway screamed. He screamed and screamed. It was probably one of the patients. They were always screaming. He had to get out of here.
He had to get out of here.
He was up and it was absurd because he was nearly naked, he shouldn’t appear this way in front of his sister. Once, in a bedroom in the old farmhouse, two children of intense loneliness, brother and sister, surrounded by emptiness, filled in by only each other: He had opened her blouse to see her breasts and she had let him and that was all they had done but they had been deeply ashamed for a long time and been bound to each other by the secret.
One man was dead. He was a small man with small eyes and there was the reverend standing at the door and Margot Millie was pushing him—
They were on the grounds and it felt good to be in the air. Hanley blinked at the ghostly fog and inhaled the air and felt lightheaded and nearly fell. The girl held him around the waist. He was so weak and it was cold in the milky-white morning.
Shouts and sounds and sounds of ghosts in the fog.
There were shots again.
Dr. Goddard was on the steps and he had a shotgun.
They heard the blast. The sound of the shotgun firing filled the dense air and exploded so that it hurt their ears. Hanley fell again, this time dragging the girl to the ground. He was so sorry.
“I want to apologize, Mill—”
“Come on, goddamnit!” the girl said with such savage zest that Hanley scrambled up eagerly. She shoved him in the back of the gray car and he felt the seat close to his face and the car was moving, there were shots and the side glass above his head was splattered by gunfire. The glass fell on him. The car shot through the closed gates, driving them off their hinges.
Hanley felt the razor cut of glass on his cheek. He opened his eyes. He sat up. The girl was next to him. He glanced around. The driver was the same; the girl was the same; he was in a car and it was plunging down into a valley and the fog grew around them.
“My face. I cut my face,” he said. His voice sounded numb and strange to him.
In the rearview mirror, he saw the face of the driver.
“Devereaux,” he said. “Devereaux.”
The driver glanced in the mirror once. He saw the gray eyes. He knew the face, the eyes, the voice of that man.
“November,” he said.
It felt such release to say that.
“November came back,” he said.
28
DAMAGE CONTROL
Lydia Neumann sat in her office. Her fingers were poised above the cream-colored keys. The screen was blank save for a flashing green cursor.
The floor was nearly deserted because this was Sunday and her office was in the suite at the west end of the floor where R Section hierarchy had their private rooms and private showers and executive washrooms. Her presence was sometimes inconvenient, especially in managing executive washroom privileges, but there was nothing to be done: She was a woman, and she had risen very high indeed in Section.
The door to her office was open, as always. The office did not have a window; she was the only one of the four di
vision directors without a window. But it was the most cheerful office of the four. There was a sampler on one wall, above the computer screens, that advised: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It had been a gift from some of the staff in division when she made the grade; it was a little joke the women shared and the men in the other divisions would never understand.
Lydia Neumann sat at the keyboard like Stravinsky. She summoned Tinkertoy to life on her screen.
She knew Tinkertoy so well.
Tinkertoy was the computer system used in R Section. It was named for the child’s building toy. Link by link by link. The endless links fit numberless pieces of information together. Tinkertoy reconstructed the universe every millisecond as information poured into the computer from a thousand sources. Each bit of information was not merely added—it was indexed, categorized, fitted with other bits of information. Tinkertoy contained all the secrets of the spies, living and dead.
Tinkertoy was secure. It required a voice print, face print, fingerprint, and heat print.
When Tinkertoy’s monitor flashed: “READY,” she began.
She approached the information she wanted in three ways. Each approach was cautious and it allowed her time to retreat.
In each approach, she signed on at her level but then changed level of access by inserting the correct “add-on” code. This was only possible to her because she had designed the system with the safeguards. Even locked doors in secret buildings have to have keys and, generally, the lowliest worker in the building—the cleanup man—is given all the keys.
In each of the three approaches, she added on at a higher and higher level, to see how high the level of the secret of Nutcracker was kept.
She did not see Claymore Richfield walk into the room.
“Back on it already, Mrs. Neumann?”
She struck “BLACK,” the key that cleansed the screen. She was annoyed; she would have to start over. She turned to Richfield.
Richfield lounged in his jeans and sweater at the door.
“I hope I kept everything in order.”
“I hope you did, Clay,” Mrs. Neumann said.
“I wouldn’t expect you back until tomorrow.”
