by Bill Granger
Faolin took his eyes away from the face and lowered them and struck his breast. When he looked up, the face had turned away and was staring at another part of the church.
The other man was not from the tiny village, Faolin decided.
He looked so sure, so certain that it was his right to stare at people.
A policeman, Faolin thought.
Devereaux had finally decided to act. He knew actions were foolish, but he could not wait any longer.
The afternoon after Elizabeth had come to him, he’d made up his mind. After love and after a kind of trust that comes with nakedness and lovemaking; he had felt her shiver and felt a little of her fear and finally had believed she was afraid of death.
They had stayed in the hotel room all that day, until late afternoon. They had not eaten, only slept and made love. Devereaux knew that was foolish, too; that he must decide about Hanley and R Section and about this double game against him, and now against Elizabeth. He must decide about Denisov and the blond-haired man.
And about Elizabeth.
The computer of his brain broke down; logical sequences did not seem to work; there were too many random facts and conclusions that did not seem to have any connection.
He lay in bed with her beside him. He stared out the window and let his instincts begin to reprogram the computer.
After a long time, he thought it was working again.
He thought he began to understand. Not all the parts. But there was a sort of logic to it if he excluded certain things that did not make any sense. There were always random threads in any assignment, parts that did not make sense. Parts that did not relate in the long run to the problem at hand.
When he thought she was awake, he began: “I want you to go to London.”
“My passport—”
“We’ll go back to the hotel. Before it’s dark. I want you to go to London tonight. To a house. A safe house. Then I want you to—”
“There’s no safe house,” she began.
“Yes.”
“R Section wants to kill me. And you—”
He looked at the dying light beyond the window. “No. Not the Section. Not Hanley.”
He felt her shiver next to him. He had already decided about Elizabeth.
“I thought of everything you told me,” he said. Devereaux was not comfortable with explanations. He did not like to explain the process of his thoughts. When he reported to Hanley at the end of assignments, he only told him what had happened, not why he had chosen to act. But Elizabeth was frightened. He felt it and wanted to make her understand.
“It doesn’t work,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. There is no logic to a double section operated by one man. Therefore, there is no double section. There is a real R Section and then there is your ghost R Section. Your Hanley is a ghost Hanley; the office you saw was another office. I don’t understand it, how they did it, but I think I begin to understand why. And why you were sent here to spy on me. And why Blatchford was sent to kill me. It didn’t have anything to do with this mission.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Neither do I,” he said. “Why wait until now? Why wait to strike in the middle of a mission that is not very important? Unless it is important and I don’t know it yet. Or unless I am so close to the truth of it that they are afraid. There are parts and parts of it I don’t understand. But you didn’t work for Hanley. Elizabeth. Or R Section. You worked for someone else. Something else that intends to destroy the Section.”
“The Soviets—” she said and bit it off.
“Yes. Perhaps. I don’t know.” Denisov would smile at that. Equivocation. Perhaps—what does perhaps mean, Devereaux? Why was Denisov here?
“Then who wants to kill me?” she said. “And you.”
“Perhaps they’re different people,” he said. “Perhaps they are on different sides, have different missions. Perhaps you’ve failed—you have failed, you told me, they may know that. Maybe they had your room bugged—even though I couldn’t find anything. I don’t know. But in London I know a safe house and I want you to go there tonight—”
“But if the blond man is at the hotel?” she asked.
“Yes. He may be there. He may be here. Outside the door. But he has to be dealt with.”
“I want to get away. Let’s get away.”
“No,” he said. “We’ll deal with him first. And then with the other parts of the problem. The parts I don’t understand.”
“Are you sure?”
He looked at her. “Of what?”
“About Hanley? About the Section? Is it safe?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”
“Oh, Dev,” she said. “I’m not sure.”
“I’m sure,” he said again. He wondered if he lied well. He never wondered that before; he always assumed that he did.
They dressed quietly, apart from each other. When it was time to go, he took the pistol from the closet and checked it and unsnapped the safety and held it in his hand.
“Open the door,” he said.
As she pulled it open, he stepped to the door. Right and left. The shadows of the other doors. The end of the hall. He stepped into the hall, feeling exposed. He waited. She stepped into the hall behind him.
No one.
They walked to the elevator; the halls were empty; Devereaux swept his eye up and down the corridor but saw nothing, heard nothing.
When they reached the street, it was nearly dusk and the city looked mean. Faces were bent in the wind. They took a cab to her hotel in the thin traffic and it was dark when they arrived.
As planned, Elizabeth got out first and walked quickly across the sidewalk into the lobby and went to the elevator.
Devereaux waited at the front door.
Elizabeth entered the elevator and doors closed on her. She was to take it to the fifth floor, one floor below her own room.
Devereaux saw the blond man emerge from the bar and go to the elevator after her. Maybe he had been waiting too long in the bar; he was a little slow.
Devereaux walked into the lobby, to the elevator, and stood behind the blond man, waiting for the cage to return.
The man smelled of cologne and whisky. His suit had an American cut.
The doors opened and both men entered. The blond man pushed six.
Devereaux moved to the other side of the small cage.
“Floor?” the other man asked, staring at him.
“Oh. Sorry.” Devereaux pushed the button marked eight. The lift began its ascent.
Careless. Devereaux feared he was getting sloppy.
The doors whooshed open at six and the other man stepped off, slowly, cautiously. The doors closed behind him.
Devereaux quickly pushed seven and got off at the next floor. Moving to the stairs at the end of the hall, he waited a moment. Nothing. He took his gun off his belt as he pushed open the door to the stairs.
The stairwell was dark below.
Had a light gone out?
Devereaux held the pistol in front of him in the darkness.
His step did not make a sound.
On the landing below, the blond man was waiting, in the darkness. But he did not see Devereaux until it was too late.
The single shot from his gun whumped through the silencer and exploded its bullet harmlessly on the plaster wall behind Devereaux.
Devereaux’s pistol did not have a silencer.
The explosion rang in their ears. The bullet flattened as it hit the blond man’s groin and exploded through the fabric and flesh, shattering the bones below. Blood spurted out and stained the lower half of his body as he fell. For a moment, he did not make a sound; shock was protecting him from the unendurable pain.
The man stared at Devereaux and his pistol clattered harmlessly down the steps.
Devereaux put his own pistol into his belt and went to the landing.
The dying man looked at him. “Please help me,” he said slowly, almost dreamily.
&nb
sp; Devereaux reached into the dying man’s coat pocket. He took out a case for glasses and a small, thin wallet.
Devereaux looked at him. “Who sent you?”
“Please—”
“Who are you?”
The man stared at him.
Devereaux pushed him over and felt in his trousers. There was blood. And money. And a room key. And something written on a scrap of paper: ETRAYSDVERDANTYGER
Devereaux stared at the room key.
“Please help—” Suddenly, the voice was drowned in blood. The man shuddered.
Devereaux got up. Ten men now. Ten. He looked at the blood and the body in the darkness. He would have to be very quick. He ran down the stairs to the fifth floor and pushed open the door. Elizabeth stood at the elevator, waiting. She turned and saw him and then saw the bloodstains on the edges of his cuffs.
“Go to your room. Get everything. In five minutes, and go to the lobby and check out. Quickly. I’ll meet you in the lobby. Quickly—”
“The man, the blond man, I—”
“Shut up, Elizabeth,” he said. He looked as though he were in pain. “Do it. Now. Hurry, there’s no time—”
He ran back to the door of the stairs and down again, to the fourth floor. The blond-haired man had stayed in room 487.
Devereaux removed the pistol from his belt again as he opened the door. But there was nothing. No one. A room like his own, like all rooms of men who spend their lives traveling. He noticed the simple suitcase on the desk.
Putting his gun away, he took the little knife from his pocket and slashed at the lining of the suitcase. There was nothing. Going through the clothes he found the man’s passport and stared at the picture for a moment. It was not a good likeness.
Devereaux felt the paper. The passport was real; it had been used. Mr. Johannsen. A salesman for an American aircraft company.
Came to Belfast to sell airplanes.
The exit money was in the hollow of a black leather shoe in the closet. Devereaux took it and counted two thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. He put the wad into the pocket of his brown corduroy coat.
Johannsen. He had a name at least.
Devereaux worked furiously. Who had heard the shot? Who would go to the stairs and see the body? Would anyone stir himself from his own life and own routine to call the police?
Elizabeth was waiting at the desk. Devereaux waved off the bellhop, grabbed her bag and hurried outside. Opening the door of the black cab, he shoved her inside ahead of him.
The city was dark; its slums were hidden by night and rain; Friday night. They passed a fish-and-chips store with a long line of people waiting in the rain. Get your pay packet and down to the fish-and-chips and maybe a pint of beer at home, sitting in front of the telly, getting numb in warmth of it, erasing the day and the week from mind.…
Devereaux told Elizabeth how to get to Blake House and what to say when she got there. He told her they would watch her and make her wait. He revealed the code word for access to the safe house, the word that betrayed the house if she were to betray him.
“The blond man?” she asked as they neared the airport.
Devereaux looked at the driver. He shook his head.
They did not speak again until they stood at the departure gate. Outside, on the wet runway, the last plane of the evening waited to take its load of people from this dismal, dark land of bombs and madness into something like the sanity and safety of England. It was the day’s last direct plane to Heathrow airport.
“Did you kill him?”
“Yes,” he said.
“He would have killed you.”
Devereaux looked at Elizabeth. Her face was anxious, tired. The game had become too great for her. Her eyes were wide.
Distracted, he looked out on the rainy runway. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “He would have died anyway. I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk to him. To find out what was going on.”
She wanted comfort. “This is so bad,” she said at last.
“It always is,” he said.
Elizabeth wanted to kiss him. No, to touch him; to have him touch her. But it was not the same now, in the bright airport, waiting for the gate to open, surrounded by weary travelers in dark clothes who were going back to England.
Elizabeth realized Devereaux only wanted her to go now. She even understood it. He was acting now, moving, going from point A to B to C without consciousness; he did not know it was raining or that it was nearly eight o’clock or that his trouser cuffs were stained dark with spots of rain and spots of blood.
Elizabeth realized all that. And it frightened her.
14
WASHINGTON
Hanley was still there when the call came.
Four o’clock on a languid November afternoon. The trees still held colorful leaves, pasted wet against the branches; there was a light breeze that seemed spring-like. The city had already assumed that ghostly atmosphere it usually donned on Friday afternoons in winter.
Hanley was sure that everyone in Washington took off on Friday afternoons, spending the day in little restaurants with French names; or in dim bars; or in hotel rooms with secretaries who were not reluctant; or on the narrow, clogged highways leading across the river into the Virginia suburbs where townhouses leaned against each other like colorful toy blocks. Senators and congressmen were gone now, flown home on the morning planes, to woo votes or accept memorials or raise money or to work deals; Washington was a weekday outpost.
But Hanley was there, in the cool little office in the Department of Agriculture building. The thermostat was turned down to sixty degrees, which made Hanley comfortable.
At noon, Hanley had gone as usual to the little bar on Fourteenth Street where he had taken his usual lunch: a salad, a very large cheeseburger with a slice of raw onion, and a dry martini straight up.
He returned to his office shortly after one, but Devereaux’s call did not come through till around four Washington time, nine there.
“Yes?”
Hanley waited for the connection. It wasn’t very good and the voice seemed to fade at first from the other end. But it didn’t matter: He knew the voice. In a strange way, he was glad to hear it finally. He waited and listened.
“Thirty. Repeat. Thirty.” Devereaux spoke slowly.
Suddenly, Hanley tensed. He leaned over the receiver to be more private though there was no one else in the room. “Red sky.”
The words were an extra code, one they had worked out themselves at Hanley’s insistence. It was not recorded anywhere, except in their memories. Thirty was “the end,” an old telegraph signal used by newspapermen to sign off their stories; “Red sky” had been Hanley’s contribution to the code—“Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”
Hanley picked up his pen and began to write: Devereaux slowly repeated a telephone number but in such a way as to make the numbers meaningless to anyone listening in; there were six extraneous numbers in the sequence and each real number had a ghost number attached to it, arranged to be recited in a backwards sequence.
It was the most dire of signals. Devereaux had never sent it before.
What had happened?
Replacing the receiver without a word, Hanley got up from his desk and locked it and locked the gray file cabinet behind the desk. He pulled on his raincoat and left the office.
“You’re leaving early, Mr. Hanley,” Miss Dickens said, more in surprise than admonishment.
He looked at her sharply. “What do you mean?”
“I mean just… that you’re leaving early.”
“Yes,” he said. He had never liked her and had never made a secret of it. She was too proprietary for his taste. But he realized too that she adored him; he couldn’t help it.
There would be no taxis, of course. Every available vehicle was in full flight from the capital, funneling into the inadequate bridges across the Potomac.
Hanley left by the Fourteenth Street exit of the Agriculture building. Across the gr
eenery, he could see the Washington Monument, surrounded by a determined, out-of-season gaggle of tourists waiting to go to the top of it. Hanley had lived in Washington for over thirty years and had never felt the desire to see the city from the summit of the obelisk.
He hurried north along Fourteenth Street, past the Ellipse and toward Pennsylvania Avenue. The Commerce Department building loomed up over him, gray and watching, dressed in that pseudoclassical style that made official Washington seem so old and dead.
Hanley was thinking about the message from Devereaux and the numbers.
He finally turned into the pub where he always ate his lunch. It was that sleepy time of afternoon when the last lunchers had left and before the first of the after-work drinkers arrived. The bartender was slowly washing all the ashtrays when he came in.
“Mr. Hanley. This is a surprise.”
Why was everyone surprised by him, Hanley thought. Was he a creature of such fixed habits? Even as he asked the question, he knew he was.
He hurried to the back of the tavern.
“A martini, Mr. Hanley?”
“Yes,” he said and then regretted it; he didn’t want a second drink.
He went to the telephone. It was a modern pay phone of plastic and steel, offering little pretense of privacy with its narrow plastic panels jutting out from each side of the gray metal box.
He looked at the paper, took out his pen, and transposed the numbers, breaking the simple code.
Picking up the receiver, he gave his credit-card number to the operator and then the overseas number. He waited on the line while the call was placed. After four minutes, he heard a voice.
“Hanley,” he identified himself.
Devereaux began without a wasted word. He told Hanley everything. To his credit, Hanley did not interrupt, even when Devereaux told him about the Russian and about the attempt on his life; about Elizabeth and the safe house and the dead man in the stairwell of the hotel on Royal Avenue.
“My God,” said Hanley.
Devereaux waited at the other end of the line, three thousand miles across the ocean.
“What does it mean?” Hanley asked.
“It means that you are the head of a ghost organization, out to kill me and to destroy the Section.”
