The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  “Life is full of surprises,” Mrs. Neumann said.

  “No, Mrs. Neumann, it is not. It is terribly predictable.” He placed his forearms on either side of his coffee cup and leaned forward across the soiled plates and bowls. “When the unexpected happens, it is always a nasty shock. That is why I did not expect Crohan. Now I know that it presages something bad.”

  “You’re a pessimist.”

  “A realist, Mrs. Neumann, and a careful one. There is the smell of a trap in all this.”

  “A trap for who? For your agent? For the Section?”

  “I don’t know. Why this reluctance at the Competition? The OSS file is their responsibility only insofar as they have it. Langley has no reason to obfuscate—”

  “It’s the nature of the beast, Hanley, you know that.”

  “I never expected anything out of Helsinki.” Hanley bit his lower lip and chewed on it a moment like a schoolboy faced with a difficult mathematical puzzle in an examination. Mrs. Neumann studied him not unkindly. Something in her dark brown eyes suggested amusement at his problem.

  “I sent November there,” he said at last.

  For the first time, Mrs. Neumann appeared startled. She knew the identity of “November.” In fact, some of the code names were a bit of a joke inside the Section because of the way they had come about. All the prime functioning agents and stationmasters in the field had been coded by name after months, days of the week, and other elements of time. There was a Winter, a Summer, a March, a Twilight. After the system was in place and working, it was discovered that the GS-11 inside the Section who had provided all the new nomenclature was a practicing astrologist and had consulted charts and dates before matching the code name with the real agent. He explained that such names would “augur good vibrations for the Section.” In any case, there was no money that fiscal year to change the system and then a sort of indolence set in. November remained November because no one thought it worthwhile to change anything again.

  “What was he supposed to do there?”

  “Nothing, Mrs. Neumann. We had a flutter a few months before that a KGB sort wanted to come to our side. I thought there might be something wrong with it. Langley was burned last year, you know. I told November to check his bona fides.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Neumann said harshly. “You could have sent anyone from the Scandinavian station. That fellow in Copenhagen, he’s competent for a job like that.”

  “It was a legitimate mission. I wanted evaluation.”

  “Not for November.”

  Hanley flushed. “Yes, damn it. I wanted to get him out of the way.”

  She was startled. “What on earth for?”

  “Out of harm’s way.”

  “How touching of you,” she said. “What were you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” he said.

  “You wanted to get Devereaux out of the way,” she said, breaking security by uttering his real name in a public place. The cafeteria was rapidly clearing out. Plates were being scraped noisily at the serving counter and banged into dishwashers. Nine-to-five official Washington was finishing lunch.

  “I put him on ice as far away as I could. Some of the headhunters can’t forget that Devereaux cleaned up that business in Paris last year despite Galloway and that Galloway lost his job because of it.”

  Galloway was Rear Admiral Galloway, who had been the Old Man at R Section until he stubbed his toe on the business of the Paris terrorists and the plot to subvert the computers inside the Section.

  “Who wants to get him?”

  “The New Man for one. I stashed Devereaux in Jamaica for a year to watch the new government. Devereaux was a good man once, but the ambition has gone out of him.”

  “This doesn’t sound right,” she said.

  “All right, Mrs. Neumann. I’ll give you another story. He wants an Asian posting.”

  “So?”

  “The New Man says no.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants Devereaux to quit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Devereaux is what he is. He is dangerous.”

  “Nonsense. We’re not running a day camp.”

  “I put him in Helsinki because I had to put him someplace.”

  “You put him in Helsinki so that nothing would happen and eventually Devereaux would realize that he was never getting out.”

  “Never is a long time.”

  “You were his rabbi; you were supposed to take care of him.”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Cover your ass,” Mrs. Neumann said. Hanley appeared shocked for a moment but it passed.

  “Now this Crohan business. It needs an answer.”

  “No, that’s not it. You’re afraid Devereaux is going to act without an answer.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Pull him back. Have a heart-to-heart. Lay out the feelings of the New Man. He can ride it out, he’s a big boy. Send in Solstice from Copenhagen to relieve him and tell Solstice not to do a damned thing.”

  “Solstice is out of pocket,” Hanley said, slipping into more slang. “He went deep cover on that Soviet matter at Nordkapp. For all I know, he’s in the black now, in Russia. I can’t alert Norwegian Intelligence about it without alerting everyone else up there, including the Swedes.”

  “The Swedes couldn’t find their ass with a flashlight and a map,” Mrs. Neumann snorted in her rough voice. “The Soviets practically ground submarines on their beaches and they can’t see them.”

  “They see what they want to see,” Hanley said mildly to counterpoint her raspy whisper.

  “So you’re stuck with Devereaux for now.”

  “For the moment. I just don’t want him to do anything.”

  “Tell him.”

  “No. Then he will know it has all been for nothing. Besides, there’s a trap working here. I can feel it.”

  “Your bones? It’s merely old age, Hanley.”

  “No. First the defector. Then he offers a gift and when we start poking at the gift, it begins to smell. There is a trap working here. I can smell it.”

  “So what are you going to do then?”

  “Nothing, Mrs. Neumann. Nothing at all.” It was all he could think to say.

  8

  HELSINKI

  Nothing.

  Devereaux waited in a doorway across the wide plaza near the bus depot. He was watching the entry of the state Alko store across the way. In the afternoon, the Finns, numbed by winter and the dark days, pushed into the stark large store and bought inexpensive vodka that was still too costly. In the evening blackness, they could numb their minds as their bodies had been numbed by cold. The windows of the store carried posters warning of the dangers of alcohol abuse. The posters were to salve the conscience of the state that derived vast revenues from controlling the liquor trade. State taxes made the alcohol so costly that few Finns could afford to drink their own famous Finlandia vodka, which was mostly exported. The vodka they consumed was not made for taste but for effect.

  An hour passed and still there was nothing.

  If there was a contact, it would be signaled here in front of the Alko store—contact from either Tartakoff or Hanley. Instead, for the eighth day, there was silence.

  Not for the first time in the past two months, Devereaux felt trapped in a state that was neither certain nor real. The quality of a dream infected his waking moments in the frozen city; perhaps it was a nightmare. Sometimes, after a night of dreams that tormented him with memories of dead men and nightmares survived in his past, Devereaux would awake and think he was still sleeping.

  He had noted contact with an agent in his last message to Hanley, posted the day before. He guessed the agent was British but he didn’t know. He told Hanley in the note that his cover had been blown but still there was silence.

  Four P.M. The city was growing dark. The lights were flicked on in the streets but they seemed pale. People began to leave the stores and offices alon
g the main shopping thoroughfares. In a little while, the center of Helsinki would be wrapped in silence.

  Contact with Hanley was complicated by official Washington’s distrust of both the Swedes and Finns. It was assumed all telephone lines were routinely tapped. The usual routing of messages was by mail, anonymous drop, to the safe house in Copenhagen. The mail normally took a day. From Copenhagen it could be sent to the States by pouch or by scrambled radio signal.

  He had done one other thing. He had addressed Hanley in a separate open telegram sent to the address in Fairfax, Virginia, that was the last desperate expedient of desperate agents needing to contact the Section through extraordinary means. The addressee was “Mr. Dougherty” who lived in a seedy rooming house in that Washington suburb.

  MR. DOUGHERTY. NEED IMMEDIATE DECISION ON ARABIA PURCHASE FOR CALIFORNIA STORE. DIXON.

  The California store was the place in Santa Barbara where defectors were “stored” after the first debriefings in Maryland, before they were given new identities and scattered to safe sites throughout the United States. “Arabia” was the trade name for the Finnish glass-and-dinnerware company and the message sounded sufficiently like a business inquiry that Devereaux thought it would escape the special study of the Finnish censors.

  Darkness at four fifteen.

  Devereaux gave it up for the day. He bent his head into the face of the perpetual wind that howled off the plaza between the Presidentti Hotel and the office complex across the way. If there had been contact by the Russians, the signal was to purchase a bottle of Finlandia vodka in the Alko store between three and four in the afternoon and then leave the bottle on the walk in front of the store. It had not happened.

  He pushed through the front doors into the vast square lobby of the dark modern hotel. He felt cold. He always felt cold now, as though a perpetual chill had taken root in his bones.

  He walked to the left of the elevator bank and took the stairs down to the sauna rooms.

  Behind the wooden desk, a pregnant woman nodded to him in greeting. She was dark and her eyes were a very dark blue; she wore thick glasses as did many of the women in Helsinki.

  She handed him blue bathing trunks and a locker key and towel.

  “Cold today, Mr. Dixon?”

  “No. Warm. People were wearing bathing trunks outside,” he said. She smiled because the exchange was ritual and he had developed an odd fondness for the pregnant women whose name was Ulla. It was the only warm contact in Helsinki for him and he maintained it with the care of a man who blows on a small flame to keep it from dying in a frozen camp.

  The sauna was usually empty at this time.

  He found comfort in the ritual as much as in the physical warmth of the basement rooms. He would sit in the sauna and become lost in the luxury of the heat as it soaked into his cold bones; when he was sweating, he would go into the next room and plunge into the small swimming pool and swim himself into exhaustion. And then he would return to the sauna and fall asleep and invariably he would be refreshed at the end of the ritual.

  He undressed and pulled on the blue trunks in the changing room and then padded across the floor in bare feet to the shower room that led to the sauna. There were bloody prints of feet on the floor.

  He stood still for a long moment.

  The prints were prints of shoes and what appeared to be a bare foot. The shoe prints led to an outside door that in turn led to a hall. He opened the door to the hall. The bloody shoe prints continued for six feet and then stopped. The blood had dried on the shoes. The shoes belonged to the killer.

  Devereaux knew it was a killing.

  He turned on a shower in the shower room and the water beat down harshly against the tile in the open stall.

  Devereaux then opened the door of the sauna.

  It smelled of warm blood.

  A single light lit the wooden room. Warm blood—it reminded Devereaux of a battlefield in Vietnam a long time ago—warm, sickly sweet smell of blood.

  The wooden walls were splattered with blood that still ran on the wood.

  Propped on a bench above the heater, facing the door like a macabre butler, was the naked body of the Englishman called Sims who had made contact with Devereaux the night before.

  From nipple to bladder, the chest had been opened. All the blood was draining from the body. Gray guts were splattered on the bench.

  Devereaux stared at the dead features. The eyes were open, the mouth lolled open. A pail of water was next to the body; it was tinted red by the blood that had spilled into it.

  Devereaux looked for the weapon but it was not there. He leaned across the body and pulled a locker key from a pair of swimming trunks cast aside on the bloody bench. Locker 112.

  Devereaux stepped out of the sauna. He was sweating but he felt cold. He stepped into the running shower and bathed the blood from his legs. He stepped out of the shower and let the water keep running. He went into the changing room and pulled his towel from the locker and dried himself while he considered the possibilities.

  The pregnant woman named Ulla at the front desk had seen him enter. Was it the only way in or out of the sauna? Had she seen the killer? But he knew that sometimes Ulla worked sorting clothes in a back room behind the desk where she dispensed towels and bathing garments and, oddly, beer from a tap. The killer could have slipped in and out without being seen if he was willing to take the chance.

  Ulla had seen him. She would have to tell that to the police. Was Devereaux intended to be trapped by this? Was the dead man a British agent? Had he been set up to be killed here, in this time and place, because of Devereaux’s habit of using the sauna in the afternoon?

  Which would mean that someone had an interest in Devereaux enough to follow him every day, until his routine was established.

  Devereaux put down the towel and used the key found in the sauna to open locker 112.

  Trousers, shirt, sweater. No outer jacket. He had stayed in the hotel. Devereaux fished through the pockets for identification. None. Three hundred-markka notes, some Finnish change, a single British ten-shilling piece. And a key to Room 612.

  He dressed quickly. After seven weeks of inaction, the discovery of the body of the dead Englishman had curiously energized him. He felt no horror. He had seen such dead men before. It was a peculiar sort of professional killing, used by some hired hands in the Mediterranean area.

  He put the key to Room 612 in his pocket. He threw his outer coat over his arm and carried along his dripping trunks and the towel he had taken from the locker of the dead man. He left his own towel at the entrance to the sauna, on the sopping floor where the shower still played against the tiles.

  He went down the hall.

  Ulla was looking at a glossy Swedish magazine. It had a lurid cover and the headlines were bright red.

  “Mr. Dixon. You are finished already?”

  “No, Ulla,” Devereaux said gently. “There is a dead man in the sauna.”

  Her face paled. “I will go to him, perhaps he is not dead, I can resuscitate.”

  “No. It’s not that. He was killed. Murdered. No, sit down.”

  “But I must go to him.”

  “You must not. Did anyone else come into the sauna this afternoon besides me?”

  “No. Except Mr. Sims.”

  “Yes. That’s who’s dead. Anyone else?”

  “No. I was in the laundry room for a while.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. Again, the flat cold words carried an edge of gentleness to them. She was not involved in this, he thought. He would not involve her to get out of it.

  “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “My duty is to go back.”

  “No. Don’t do that. You’re pregnant; think about that. Just call the police.”

  “I will—” She reached for the phone but Devereaux put his hand over it. He needed time but he did not want to leave the woman alone in case she did investigate and saw the body.

  “We�
��ll go upstairs. I want you to call from the lobby. We can lock the door on the way up, can’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone down here.”

  She followed him reluctantly up the stairs and they locked the door at the lobby level. “Use the phone at the front desk.”

  “Where are you going, Mr. Dixon?”

  “I don’t feel well. I have to go to my room for a moment. I’ll be down.”

  He left her as she was crossing the lobby. Just a little time, time to call, time to explain to the front desk what happened, time to summon the police, time to unlock the door and go back to the basement sauna. Just a few minutes of extra time, but enough to go to Room 612.

  Devereaux pushed open the door. There was a small piece of Scotch tape at the bottom of the door which broke as he pushed it open. A simple device to see if your room had been disturbed.

  The radio was on, playing American rock songs.

  Devereaux looked around the room. The window drapes were open on the frozen building site across the street that was Devereaux’s own view of Helsinki and where it was said the body of a dead woman had been found two nights before.

  Devereaux opened the clothes bureau. There was a leather bag on the top shelf. Devereaux opened the bag and felt along the seam inside the bag until he came to what he wanted. He opened the seam with his finger and pulled out the wafer-thin wallet. Inside were Bank of England notes in large denominations totaling two thousand pounds. He put the notes in his pocket. He opened the wallet. A face was on a card.

  Anthony Sims. Trade representative. British-Suomi Exports Ltd.

  He put the card in his pocket.

  Another card was below the first. It was shaped like a credit card but it lacked printing or raised numbers. The card was gray. Devereaux knew what it was used for. When it was slipped into a machine like a transfer punch, the card came to life and put a message on a screen. The message was the identity of the British Intelligence agent.

  Auntie. An agent from British Intelligence had tried to make contact with him. Why? Why had he been killed less than twenty-four hours later? And why would suspicion fall on Devereaux?