by Bill Granger
“Henry wants to make a deal.”
“A deal? A deal? Are you sure you’re all right? What does Henry have to do with this?”
“Yes. I’m curious about that, too. We’re working out an arrangement. It doesn’t involve you, Hanley, it doesn’t involve Section.”
“Stop it. Stop it now. If you were close enough to talk to him, you were close enough to sanction him. Or do you have scruples about that as well?” His voice was rising.
“No scruples. Curiosity. I want to see where he’s going to run to next.”
“You can’t compromise Section—”
“I have to go now. I’m in an airport.”
He heard the announcements as background noise to the conversation.
Hanley held his forehead. “Devereaux. You must not compromise Section.”
There was silence.
Hanley closed his eyes to hear better. But there were no more sounds.
29
COPENHAGEN
Number 9, Krystal Gade, was near the university. It was a typical Copenhagen apartment building, with a wedding cake façade above the roofline and tall, narrow windows.
Devereaux entered from the rear because he was expected at the front.
The apartment was in darkness, and the man sat at the kitchen table with his back to the back door.
He put the muzzle of the pistol in Henry McGee’s right ear. Henry did not even flinch. “I figured you to come in the back. Contrariest man I ever met. Won’t believe a thing till he’s taken it apart three or four times.”
“Where is she?”
“Rena, honey, come here.”
Rena Taurus entered the kitchen. She was dressed as she had been in Bruges. Her eyes looked tired.
She stood at the door and stared at them. She saw the gun in Devereaux’s hand and Henry McGee’s leering grin.
“He said you worked together.”
“That’s right. That’s what I told her, Devereaux. Just being proleptic, I guess. I told you you could trust me.”
Devereaux unsnapped the safety on the automatic. He stared at the dead eyes of the girl. He had so long controlled himself that he was always surprised when this gut feeling began to overcome him. He had lived with disappointment and defeat all his life, but they could not suppress him; once he had been in love, and that had nearly destroyed him. What was this other stranger rising in him? It was the uncontrolled emotion of the street kid he had long suppressed. He was angry.
Henry felt it. Felt the cold muzzle of the pistol press his ear, press to enter, press to block out any sound or sensation but the thought of death.
Devereaux stared at Rena as though he wanted her to say it. To say, “Kill him,” and it would be done. But she did not speak or move. All his senses bristled to pick up a signal from her. A word, a gesture, the way her eyes would signal him by their mere color. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.
“Rena is all right. I didn’t hurt her.”
She stared at Henry because the grin was fading.
“She’s all right. Tell him, honey.”
“Tell him what?” The dead voice almost did it.
“I’ll kill you,” Devereaux said. What did it matter if he killed Henry McGee? McGee was an escaped prisoner, a former spy against his native country. He had no scruples; he had assured Hanley of that.
And he thought of the two CIA agents in the trunk of the snow-covered Saab on the street in Malmö.
Rena stared. “I told him about you, Devereaux. I told him about Michael. I told him everything I knew. He didn’t hurt me very much. I thought it was bad at the time, but he scared me. That’s what he did, he scared me. I’m not a child. I don’t want to be afraid. I’m not afraid of things, you know.” She said this in a monotone.
“Rena, sit down.”
She sat at the table. Devereaux still stood with the pistol muzzle in Henry’s ear.
She stared right through Henry McGee. The eyes seemed so wet that there would never be fire in them again.
Devereaux said, “How did he hurt you?”
“Why? So you can do the same thing?”
“How did he hurt you?” He had to push the anger down or he was going to blow out Henry’s brains. He had to talk to her. Words would numb anger.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me.”
“He slapped me. He slapped me in the face. He did it until I was crying, and he kept doing it very slow until my head was ringing and my face was hot, and it hurt so much and he kept doing it.”
And she started crying, and Devereaux saw the fire burn again in her eyes, saw they were not dead pools. She was alive and there was anger and there would be all other things again.
Eased the trigger.
Pulled the muzzle from Henry’s ear.
Henry felt tension drain from his shoulders. He sighed and turned to Devereaux.
“It wasn’t that much,” he said.
Devereaux brought the pistol muzzle across Henry’s face once and then twice and then again. The muzzle made marks, and they all heard a tooth crack and they all saw the blood from Henry’s nose.
Henry wiped at his nose but did not speak for a moment.
“Well, I had to take my chance on you,” Henry said. He said it wetly through the blood on his lips. He smiled at Devereaux. He had all the balls in the world.
“Just knew you had to go sweet on a sweet girl like Rena, so I had to take my chance that you’d kill me when you heard I beat on her. But that was just professional, Devereaux, same as you’d do. Just beat on people till they tell you what you want to know. It ain’t the approved way of interrogation—and God knows the United States of Lovely Fucking America would never sanction such a thing—but it is the most efficient way of finding out what you want to find out, ain’t it? You beat on me, Devereaux, that time. You beat on your share of people. What makes it so different if I do it?”
“Because you’re on the wrong side.” There. The anger was back in its cage, back down in his belly where it belonged and where it could do no harm. If her eyes had stayed dead he would have killed Henry.
“Only side I ever been on is Henry McGee’s side,” Henry said. He was still bleeding, but it was as though nothing had happened. Rena stared at his face with fascinated horror.
“So what do we do, partner?”
Rena looked at Devereaux. “Is this true? Are you partners after Michael? You let him take me and rape me—”
Devereaux went very cold. Even Henry became still.
“You weren’t supposed to tell him that, Rena, honey. It wasn’t exactly rape, Rena, honey. I asked you for a straightforward fuck and you agreed. A bargain, Rena, wasn’t it?”
Rena saw it in the gray eyes of the tall, gray man. This time it was not anger. It was as though Devereaux had decided something, and Henry McGee saw it, too.
“Who are you men?” she said. She looked at McGee, at Devereaux, angry and confused. “Why must you hurt Michael? Hurt me?”
“Michael was attacked in Berlin,” Devereaux said. “That’s Soviet. He knows about it. He’s a Soviet agent.”
Henry smiled. “That’s right, Rena. Soviet agents wanted to waste your boyfriend. Except I’m in the process of changing sides again because there’s more involved here than your toy-boy.”
Again Devereaux pressed the muzzle against Henry’s right ear. Henry stopped talking and waited.
“You have to have proof, Henry, you know that. No stories this time. Proofs, bona fides.”
“Like that message the sailor on the Leo Tolstoy brought?”
“Like that.”
“But it could be just a plant, just like that was.”
“That’s your version of history, Henry.”
They spoke as though Rena was not in the room. “I guess I cried wolf once too often,” Henry said.
“I guess so. It has to be very good, whatever you bring out. Then we’ll talk.”
“I told you Rena was safe. I did my bargain. Wha
t does it take?”
“Effort,” Devereaux said. “You have to keep trying.”
Henry said nothing for a moment. He stared at Rena. Then he started to grin again, and she looked away.
“I get up now?”
Devereaux pulled the pistol back.
“Where and when?” Henry asked. “I don’t have much time.”
“No. You don’t. The changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Forty-eight hours.”
“Damn. That cuts it close,” Henry said.
“I don’t really give a fuck,” Devereaux said.
Henry considered that and decided it was the best he could do. He buttoned his seaman’s jacket and smiled again at Rena. “I enjoyed it, I surely did,” he said.
“You are a monster.”
“That too, honey,” he said and threw the grin at Devereaux. “I reckon I can make some money out of this.”
Devereaux said nothing.
“Everything has a price.”
“Including your life,” Devereaux said.
Henry stared at the man and the pistol for a moment and then shrugged. What the hell, it was worth a try. He closed the door and went down the steps. It wasn’t much time, but Devereaux had known that, didn’t want him to get the time he needed.
Upstairs, Rena stood at the window. The streets were wet. It had rained, it would rain again.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Make you safe. This apartment isn’t safe. Their watchers are out looking for you if Henry double-crossed me.”
“Why do you trust him?”
“I don’t.”
“Why do I trust you? Tell me one reason.”
Devereaux touched her shoulder. She turned to him. She had never seen his eyes so cold, distant, almost like the eyes of another form of life.
“Tell me one reason,” she said again.
He looked at her for a long moment and then turned. “Come on. We’ll have to find a safe place for you.”
“Tell me one reason to trust you.”
He smiled then, but there was no pity in it. And no answer to her question.
30
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The secretary of state was a lean, dark man with a soft Southern accent and the reputation of a man of confidence. He and the president sat in the Oval Office because the president liked to work there and not just use the office for ceremonial occasions. It was turning to dusk, and the sky was brilliant with orange city lights reflected on low clouds.
The president sipped tea laced with honey because he had a bad throat.
“We’ve notified the Israelis. They aren’t that crazy about that many people, but they’ll have to go along with it. We’ll take our share as well,” the secretary said.
“But it will mean something. Getting out that many Jews from Russia. My God, this is something to pull off,” the president said. “Every time we meet with Moscow, we get a new surprise.”
“See it from their point of view. They get a chance to be the good guys, letting all those Jews out of the country, and they strike a blow against Star Wars at the same time.”
“Do we really want this Skarda thing, this security computer thing?”
“We’ve known about it for two years. We want it, believe me. National Security Agency can’t wait to examine it.”
“How can Moscow be technologically ahead of us? Especially in computers?”
“Thanks to our Japanese friends, who sold them computers they weren’t supposed to have,” the secretary said. “And that spy ring in Silicon Valley that sold out. What they never had before was a certified genius to put the things together, make the software work. That’s what Skarda is. A program and a man behind the program. Emil Skarda. Born in Prague. A fucking genius. We give up information on Star Wars, they give up information on Skarda, and we program it through the computers to see if it’s bona fide.”
The president sipped his tea and frowned. “The one thing that bothers me is about this aid thing.”
The secretary waited. The president was always talking about “things,” and he had to know which thing the president meant now.
“We cut off our funding into Lithuania, what happens?”
“Nothing is forever, but Moscow has a point. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—the Baltic states—are never going to leave the Soviet Union, no matter what. Like the vice premier said, ‘You wouldn’t let your Southern states secede, we will not let our Baltic states secede.’ So instead of letting CIA throw money down an aid rathole, we agree to something we might have decided on just for budget reasons. We can’t get enough aid to Nicaragua, where we have real interests. What’s our aid reason to channel money into the Lithuanian dissidents’ movement?”
“It must bother Moscow, though. Throwing that in at the last minute.”
The secretary smiled. Sometimes the president didn’t understand those people. “Soviets. It’s the Soviet mentality, Mr. President. They bargain like Persian rug merchants—you forgive the slur. They do tit for tat, and just when you figure you got a deal, they throw in one little thing to show that they’re really getting the best of you. It’s the Russian psyche, it can’t be helped. How much aid does CIA channel into Lithuania? Two hundred mil a year. So CIA has its nose out of joint, so who gives a shit? They’ve got a few measly networks in Lithuania and a couple of smallish independence movements. I mean, if they told us to cut off our channels to Poland, that’s a different kettle of fish. But Lithuania?”
“That’s what Moscow keeps saying, no matter what they say in Lithuania,” the president said. The tea felt good, and he wondered if he should ring the kitchen for another cup. “Well, two hundred million is not that much, I suppose.”
“A drop in the bucket,” said the secretary of state.
Douglas Court and Vaughn Reuben sat together in the backseat of the limousine in the driveway of the big house in Chevy Chase. The limousines of powerful and rich people lined the curb. The driveway curved across the expansive lawn to the columns of the portico, where the party was in full motion. The Washington Post reporter had just arrived in her satin gown. The social season was at its most intense now, and there were parties like this every night.
Douglas Court and Vaughn Reuben wore black tie, though Reuben’s tie was a bit careless, rather in the way a professor might wear it. The purposefully rumpled look was a prop too important to Vaughn Reuben not to carry it over into formal settings.
There was no one else in the car. The drivers were all gathered at a side entrance, smoking cigarettes and commenting on their masters.
“State will fumble this, I got a feeling. Our little courier is about to deliver his message,” Vaughn Reuben said. “I was amazed that blowhard you work for decided he would finally take over the chase of Michael Hampton.”
Douglas Court smiled in the darkness. He had traded his hickory stick for a more formal cane of polished black wood with a silver-inlaid handle. “I suggested it to the Big Fellow,” he said.
“It was smart, very smart.”
“Thank you.”
“Two days and this thing is a done deal. The tape gets in the right hands and then to the world. The secret agenda is quashed. We save our Lithuania network and keep out that horde of refugees. Christ, can you imagine the security problem in checking through ninety thousand people, looking for a few spies.”
“Of course, we don’t get Skarda.”
“That’s all right. I’m not as convinced as everyone else that Skarda is such a neat computer program. Our people are working on it. We’ll have our own version of Skarda before long.”
“In a way, I feel we’ve betrayed something,” Douglas Court said. “But then I think of the alternatives. We can’t have the secretary chop into CIA operations in Eastern Europe. We can’t let this glasnost wool be pulled over the eyes of the president.”
“No, we can’t. Someone has to stand at the bridge and deliver for him.”
“And get no credit for it.”
“None at all,” Vaughn Reuben agreed. He felt ennobled to be so anonymous in such an important matter. Perhaps in a few years, the truth would come out. Perhaps he would be honored then.
He felt very warm and very pleased with himself in that moment.
31
ROME
Michael and Marie abandoned the stolen Fiat after dusk across the street from the Spanish Steps. There was a McDonald’s open, and they grinned at the familiar grease smell. They went inside and ordered a Big Mac, fries, and a shake. Berlin had McDonald’s.
The gamine was smiling at him. In the intimacy of the last two days, they had understood each other in ways that years of words could not improve upon.
“Is your name really Marie?”
“Do you like it? Does it matter?”
“No.”
“You like it?”
“I like you. I kept thinking of the look on their faces in the galleria—”
They laughed like old lovers whose laughter is triggered by a single word, a glance, a remembrance of shared intimacy. “They never would expect we would make it to Rome. Now what do we do?” Marie said.
“We go to see Cardinal Ludovico, just like before. You have to trust. There’s a bond between us. He’s a churchman, for God’s sake,” Michael said.
“Hopefully ‘for God’s sake,’ ” she said.
“You don’t trust him.”
“I trust no one, lamb. That’s why I have survived.”
“You trust me.”
“I could not help myself. You are too honest not to trust. We reach Rome, and you buy me an American hamburger.”
“Not like the ones we had in Wyoming.” But he blushed anyway. A babble of Italian surged around him and even the clerks could not control their expansive gestures.
“What is Wyoming?”
“Where I came from. Originally. A state. Cowboys. State symbol is a cowboy on a bronc.”
“What is that?”
“A horse. A wild horse.”
“A cowboy on a wild horse.” She stared at him, saw the gentle eyes and gentle face. Gentleness was not weakness, not at all. It was the edge of civilization. Marie saw this in his eyes, saw the kindness that did not seek any reward at all or any advantage. She had seen it before, in the coal cellar, in the light of a flickering candle. Held the knife to his cheek and saw the eyes. There wasn’t fear in them—though he was afraid—but a curiosity that bordered on gentleness. He had made love to her in a shabby room in Paris. He was strong, stronger than he knew, and he gave her his body as a gift. She was a young girl in a pretty dress, sitting in the parlor. He was the young man in a bow tie, on one knee, offering her flowers. Offering love. Offering a ring and marriage. Offering faithfulness and a house with pretty wallpaper.
