by Bill Granger
“I am skinny, I really am,” she said.
She slipped off her sweatshirt and jeans. She wore no underwear. She was skinny and her ribs showed. Her breasts were small. She put her arms around him again, and he surrounded her with his arms. He bent and kissed her neck, and then she pushed him back on the lumpy bed, was on top of him and taking his desire in kisses. She covered his body with kisses and licked his nipples.
He groaned and wrapped his arms around her small body. His hands rested on the curve of her buttocks and she was over him and they were making love. Thoughts of all lovemaking past flooded him. He closed his eyes and smelled the peculiar smell that was Marie Dreiser and remembered the smell of Rena and the other women.…
They made love for a long time. They made love as never before, because every experience of love is different, with its peculiar odors, noises, touches, even in this different place of a shabby hotel room in the middle of Paris. They made love until exhaustion made them lie still on the bed, touching body to body, breathing together, eyes closed, dreaming of lovemaking.
21
THE ARDENNES
Rena Taurus said, “Where is Devereaux?”
“Looking for Michael, honey,” Henry McGee said. They sat in a cabin in the deep black woods of the Ardennes. The rain had changed here to a tentative snow, falling with majestic silence in the forests around the cabin. Rena was terribly afraid, had been terrorized since the moment they shoved her into the car on the street by the canal. When she had asked a question, they had told her to shut up.
Rena said, “This was a trap after all. A trap for Michael. I was part of it.” Her voice carried the dull tone of confession.
“That’s it, honey. Now where did he tell you he’s going?”
“He didn’t say.”
“I see.”
Rena sat in a straight chair at a wooden table. No one else was in the cabin. The other two men had driven away.
Henry McGee said, “I really enjoy certain things—I want you to understand that, honey. It’s nothing personal, but I like to get information from people who really think I’m not going to get it. Some people are into torture and all that, but that doesn’t do much for me. I like to be a little rough sometimes, but the rest of it doesn’t do anything for me.”
He talked like this for a while, letting the words make the matter clear to her.
There was still a ringing in her ear from Michael’s slap.
She had betrayed him.
She shivered at the things this strange man was saying. He was walking back and forth in front of her. She had no restraints, but her hands were rigid on her lap. She was tired and hurt and confused and she felt very alone.
“So that’s the commercial, honey, and this is the meat of the program: where was it that Michael said he was going?”
She shook her head.
He hit her more than once. She fought back, and he hit her until she rolled into a fetal ball on the wooden floor to stop the blows. Then he stopped and asked again.
She said, “Rome.”
“Where in Rome?”
“He didn’t say.”
He hit her some more until she passed out. When she woke up, he asked her again. She pleaded with him, she said she was telling the truth. After he hit her some more, he believed she was telling the truth.
“What are you going to do?”
“Do? Nothing,” Henry said. He was smiling at her. “You are a pretty thing. Not delicate, but you got a delicate face. And pretty hair, reminds me of Narvak’s hair, she was a native girl up in Alaska, just sixteen and could kill a man just like that.” He traced her chin with his fingers. She trembled. “You ever kill anyone?” He smiled.
“Why don’t you let me go?” she said. She strained to keep her voice under control though it was just on the rational side of hysteria. “Let me go.”
The fingers paused. She felt the pressure of his fingers against her flesh. He smiled down at her. “All right,” he said. His smile was wonderful.
She blinked. She really had heard that.
“You. All of you were in this. Devereaux—”
“Sure, sure. Working for Uncle Samuel, we’re all one happy bunch. Devereaux was supposed to get Michael, and we were supposed to back him up—snatch you in case Michael got away. Well, now we know where Michael is going, so it ought to be a bit easier. The next trap. You’ve done your part for us and we’re grateful, and I hope you won’t take offense at my beating on you. It wasn’t personal.”
He said it flat. She didn’t know what to say. She was beginning to think he was crazy because his black eyes held the light in a funny way.
She realized he was staring at the wall and she no longer existed in this room. “You start to smell it when someone is setting you up. Ain’t Devereaux this time, no sir. Someone is setting up ol’ Henry McGee, and it seems a shame because he’s just gonna end up hurting himself because he’s so damned clever. Devereaux wants you and Michael and the tape. We want the tape, and you and Michael dead. That’s the way I figure it.”
She said, “You are not on his side, then?”
He blinked; they were back in the present, and she was in the room again.
“I was in prison nearly two years, had to do hard time,” he said.
She stared at him.
“Before you go, I’d like to fuck you, if that would be all right.”
Rena stared at him.
“Would that be all right by you? I mean, you aren’t a virgin or anything, are you?”
She stared at him.
“Just a straightforward fuck,” Henry McGee said. “I can like variations, but I appreciate you might not stand for that, and I just figure we should all be friends from this night on. Especially later, when I got to figure out about Devereaux and what he wants. So how about a straight fuck, for all those lonely prison nights when I was keeping myself heterosexually chaste?”
“Then you’ll let me go.” Voice dull, accepting the nightmare, waiting for morning.
“That’s the deal,” he said. Grinning.
“But what if you don’t let me go?” she said.
“Then you will have fucked in vain,” he said.
“Should I believe you?”
“Honey, I haven’t told you a lie yet.”
And she sat in silence a moment and felt his fingertips on her chin. She stared at him and felt loathing and shame. She had no loyalty; none of this should have happened.… She saw Michael so clearly, saw the sudden, confused hatred. This is the price for betraying Michael.
“Take your sweater off,” he said.
She stood and began to undress.
22
LONDON
Devereaux sat in the window of the coffee shop and watched the figures in the fog on the Strand. The fog was illuminated by a liverish sun of green and yellow colors. Passersby moved in and out of the swirls of fog like ships entering uncertain harbors.
Devereaux tasted the coffee again. He felt hungry but resisted the urge to order one of the sandwiches already growing stale beneath the cover of a plastic cake box on the counter. The room was damp and shabby. Old men sat at other tables, solitary lumps of clothes, hoarding brown paper packages at their feet.
Hanley came out of the fog, stared at the door of the place for a moment. It was festooned with decals that said it accepted Luncheon Vouchers and was approved by this or that restaurant ratings guide. He opened the door and a bell sounded.
He took his coffee to the table next to Devereaux and sat down facing him. He had no packages with him or old newspapers; otherwise, Hanley might be one of the solitary old men.
“Damned cold. Every damned day it rains.” He blew his well-worn red nose and shoved the handkerchief into his pocket. “Morning fog, afternoon rain. I have listened to the weather on the telly. It’s always about ‘bright’ patches, but it just means it rains and rains and rains.”
Morning traffic rattled the windows of the shop. Devereaux sipped at his coffee and
noticed a thin, crazed crack that ran from the handle up to the lip.
“Why do we meet here? Where’s the woman?”
“Rena Taurus. She’s gone. She was taken.” Slowly, Devereaux gave his oral report on the failure of the mission. He almost told everything, but there is an instinct in the field agent never to give headquarters or control every advantage; it is like the instinct not to be naked. The woman at the hotel in Bruges had a good eye; she had once been an artist. She described the man with black eyes and darkened skin, and Devereaux knew who it had to be. But Hanley did not need to know.
Hanley said nothing. The coffee gave color back to his cheeks.
Devereaux said, “Who authenticated the message that Viktor Rusinov took off the Russian radio operator on the Leo Tolstoy?”
Hanley blinked. There was no context to this question. For a moment, he was silent as the juggernauts of memory lurched into reverse. “Is this a trick? You did. You examined Viktor Rusinov.”
Devereaux said, “But who authenticated the message? We authenticated the messenger, but who examined the message?”
“Actually, the Puzzle Factory authenticated some things. The paper used, it was standard—”
“Who said the message had been sent at all? I mean, to the ship?”
Fog pressed against the glass. The world was shadows and vague forms, buses and cabs looming along the wide street.
“Why did we have to meet here?” Hanley said. It was an annoying habit to push aside questions with irrelevant questions, but it aided his memory.
Devereaux did not answer. He’d spent another sleepless night after deciding to get back to London, to Hanley, to see where the real trail lay and not the damned trail that had led to Bruges and to failure. It should not have been so difficult, but Rena had failed to reassure Michael and enlist his cooperation. What could have been on the tape to make him so full of suspicion? To not trust Section? But then, no one trusted Section at the moment, not in Moscow, not in Washington. He had thought of Rena all night, and it kept him awake with the gnawing edge of worry. He saw her sitting in the window of the Hotel Adomes, brushing her hair. She had brushed her hair and her eyes were wide and full of clouds that turned to blue as the sea shifts its colors during a storm. What was Michael and the memory of him that could make her lose herself in thoughts that changed the color of her eyes? He saw her over and over, brushing her hair, staring at the rain on the canal.… He could touch her hair in memory; she was that close.
“We presume it was sent to the ship and not fabricated on board. What reason would they have to make a false message?” Hanley asked. “Or perhaps it was prepared to be sent and had not yet been transmitted. That was never determined. There’s so damned much radio traffic, you know we can’t possibly monitor it all. It could have been sent days ago, weeks ago, months ago. Checking the paper was not exactly a matter of carbon dating. The point was to check out Viktor Rusinov. To make a human judgment. The judgment you made that he was genuine.”
“But the message itself…” Devereaux let the sentence fragment hang in the air. “Viktor Rusinov and then Rolf Gustafson, and in both cases the messenger becomes the way to guide us to the message.”
Hanley put down his cup.
“Why did Rolf Gustafson make a mistake?” Devereaux asked. “And why was Michael Hampton chosen to receive the mistake?”
“What’s important is the tape,” Hanley said.
“Who said that?”
“The Russians. I spent an unpleasant hour with a disagreeable man from Langley named Vaughn Reuben. They have put Langley on our case, Devereaux. It is unthinkable, but there it is. He wants to know why you did not off the woman and why you killed two Soviet agents.”
“I told you: I don’t kill people,” Devereaux said.
“The Russians think this is a trick, that we’re doing the old cold-war booga-booga.”
“It is difficult to have difficult friends.”
“Are you telling me all of the truth? Is there trickery involved?” Hanley asked.
“Whose trick?”
“You’re asking questions without answers.”
“We just don’t know the answers yet,” Devereaux said. And then he decided to tell Hanley part of it, part of the larger puzzle that had occupied him since his interview with the woman who ran the Hotel Adornes. “Who resembles a slight man with very black, very mean eyes and dark hair and large hands? And a scarred cheek where some shotgun pellets embedded themselves?”
“Henry McGee,” Hanley said in the way of a man acknowledging a death.
“They took Rena. Henry is working.”
“He had a witness,” Hanley said.
“And didn’t seem to care. What do you think Henry is in all of this?”
“Henry was one of the names on the message the sailor stole from the Leo Tolstoy. Our genuine sailor,” Hanley said. “Linked to something called Skarda.”
“And he escapes from a federal corrections center,” Devereaux said. “And now he’s involved in this tape business. We have to find out what was on the tape.”
“That’s why we’re after—”
“No. It has to go back. To Sweden. We have to go back and find out what was on the tape.”
“There’s no way. Mrs. Neumann is finding out how little clout she has. National intelligence is getting squashed by the secretary of state. He has become bigger than God, and I think the president sleeps with him. They won’t tell us what’s so damned important about what we’re looking for, but they’re going to hold us to blame if we don’t find it. I want to save Section, Devereaux—that’s the only important thing. And if we can get our tit out of this wringer by murder, we will do it.”
Devereaux had decided something. He had decided it on the plane from Brussels to Heathrow. He could not explain it to Hanley, because Hanley was at the other end of things and this was something Hanley could not approve. Covert actions in intelligence are done all the time, but there is an understanding in intelligence that they are not spoken of. Covert operations are performed by intelligence agencies because they are the garbage men of government, the ones left to clean up the messes and take the garbage away and bury it.
“I have to do some things,” Devereaux explained.
“You have a trail?”
“Two of them,” Devereaux said.
“The girl. And Michael Hampton.”
Devereaux shook his head. “I don’t have a clue on either of them right now.”
“Then what’s the trail? I have to tell Mrs. Neumann something.”
“Tell her to hang on,” Devereaux said.
“I can remove you.”
“You can do whatever you like,” Devereaux said. “The point is, it won’t solve your problem.”
“We can involve Eurodesk,” Hanley said.
“Eurodesk handled security at the Malmö conference. It was so successful.”
“Sarcasm,” Hanley said.
“I have to go.”
“I’m supposed to tell Vaughn Reuben we met and that you told me nothing?”
“We didn’t meet,” Devereaux said. “Hold him off, tell Mrs. Neumann to hold them off. There were two or three things, things said and things left unsaid. There was carelessness at Malmö.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I can’t tell you yet. In a little while.”
Hanley watched him get up and go to the door. He wanted to say something. He was control, not Devereaux. This was his mission. The day was past when agents…
He said nothing.
The door opened and fog swirled in and swallowed the man he had not come to meet and did not see.
23
MALMÖ
The two men were named McCarthy and Weiss. They were both case officers inside Central Intelligence with a combined total of nine years of experience. McCarthy had been recruited into Langley from the campus of Notre Dame, and Weiss had been persuaded to join the service by his political science professor at Geor
getown University. They had never worked together.
McCarthy worked days, Weiss worked nights. Watching Rolf Gustafson was not very difficult. They used an apartment window down the block and two floors up. Vaughn Reuben himself had put them on it. Make sure that no one bothers Rolf Gustafson.
Rolf Gustafson had two jobs and did not work very hard at either one. In the first job, he was “equipment manager” at the Malmö city hall. In the second job, he was a procurer.
He had a list of women who were willing to make money on the side. Three were secretaries in the city hall, one lived in Helsingfor and worked in a small grocery, another was happily married to an engineering consultant with a Saab who was always out of town. In his way, Rolf knew everyone in Malmö and a good number of people in Copenhagen. Of course, it was impossible to compete with the organized prostitution rings that inundated the pleasure-loving Danish city across the Kattegat, but Sweden was a different country. It was true that Swedes had an open attitude about casual sex, but there was just enough tourism in Malmö—lazy tourism, as Rolf put it—to arrange contacts between sensible, quite attractive professional women and men who could afford them. The police knew about it, of course, but like police everywhere, they were not interested how Rolf made money as long as he made it quietly.
McCarthy and Weiss were not at all interested in Rolf’s role as pimp. They recorded everything and gave it to Vaughn Reuben through an eyes-only courier.
Rolf’s rooms above a bicycle shop were also bugged. They had been bugged since the conference. McCarthy and Weiss had a telescopic camera on a tripod as well as continuous reel-to-reel tape.
Each agent was armed with the standard 9-millimeter Beretta. When they relieved each other—the shifts were six hours long—they ate sandwiches, drank beer, and talked about sports.
It began to snow lightly on the fifth morning of their watch, when they saw the man in the street outside Rolf’s apartment. The apartment entrance was to the right of the bicycle shop. It was just after dawn, and Weiss had come into the room with coffee and sandwiches.
