The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  For a long time, they did not speak.

  “I never thought I would see you again,” she said at last, almost sadly, as though it would have been better to have a memory of it than to see him now.

  “No,” Devereaux said. He went to the window and looked down at the construction pit.

  It was nearly three in the afternoon. He should be waiting across from the Alko store for the signal. He felt the press of time after feeling timeless for all those weeks in Helsinki. He was free now but he felt more a prisoner than he had felt during those weeks. He felt her presence in the room.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “The game,” she said.

  He turned.

  “The game,” she repeated. “It was always a game.”

  “Not with you,” he said, gently. His voice was flat, uncolored like springwater, still, but it yearned to speak more plainly to her. He could not.

  “I had forgotten you.”

  I had never forgotten you, he thought.

  Three years before. She had been a reporter for a second-rate news service working for a man named Kaiser. There had been a priest named Tunney who had come out of Asia after twenty years. He had used her to find Tunney’s secret and, in the end, he had saved her life. A simple matter except that when he had used her, he had fallen in love with her. He could not remember having loved anyone in the cold, shallow life he had lived for the past two decades. Yet he had loved her and in the end, he had left her because it could not have been a good thing between them.

  He had told himself that.

  It didn’t matter after a time. After a little while, she only came to him in dreams or nightmares.

  “Why are you here, Rita?”

  “Vacation.”

  He turned from the window and smiled. “It’s a nice time of year.”

  “It reminds me of Wisconsin. You remember I came from Wisconsin.”

  He didn’t speak.

  “And you. You’re here for the game,” she said. Her voice was a little too brittle; it betrayed her feeling beneath the cold words.

  “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” Devereaux said.

  “Sure. That’s fair. Will you be fair?”

  He waited.

  “Fourteen hours ago, in Dublin, I was picked up by a British agent.”

  “Do you have the right country? I thought Dublin agents were Irish.”

  “He was British, all right. And he wanted to know about someone named Tomas Crohan.”

  She watched him for the effect. Her green eyes narrowed shrewdly in the dim light of the afternoon hotel room. The bed still was not made and it bore traces, in the thrown-back sheets, of a restless night.

  He did not move a muscle. He waited with seeming patience.

  “So I told him what I knew. It was either that or get thrown in the clink. Or maybe something worse, though I don’t think they would have killed me over this. Is that why you’re here?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m going into Russia as soon as I get a visa through Finnair tours. I think this guy Crohan is a prisoner in Leningrad.”

  Again, a cold ghost of a smile crossed Devereaux’s face and the gray eyes flashed like winter ice in an Arctic ocean pack.

  “Be sure to arrive on visiting day,” he said.

  “Why would you be interested in this?” she said, ignoring the sarcasm.

  “I might be here on vacation, too,” he said. He realized that, except for the interrogation by the policeman, it was the first extended conversation he had had in nearly two months. He had never forgotten the low, husky sureness of her voice; never forgotten the slight overbite that gave her mouth an aggressive, sensuous look; never forgotten the presence of her—antithesis of warmth and open life to his thesis of gray, of uncertainty, of frozen indecisions.

  She had nearly been murdered twice during the Tunney business and he had saved her life. And then, when she had said she loved him, he had retreated from her openness and certainty back to his own shadow world of muted lights, of grays, of cold.

  “I showed you mine,” she said and smiled. Conversation had brought back the color to her face. She leaned forward in the chair to see him better outlined against the light streaming through the window. It was always so hard to see him, she realized, even in the same room.

  Devereaux decided something.

  “You won’t have to go to Leningrad,” he said slowly, flatly, his voice surging like the lazy ice breaking up in spring.

  Now Rita Macklin did not speak and sat perfectly still.

  “I don’t know what any of this is. A British agent questioned you in Dublin? About this?”

  “He kidnapped me. He was nice really.”

  “Yes. He sounds nice.”

  “You’ve done worse things,” she said.

  He ignored her. “Why were the English interested in him?”

  “He didn’t say. Your kind of people don’t usually reveal their motives easily.”

  “Not to reporters, anyway.”

  “He said I was a spy. For CIA.”

  “Are you?”

  “Not very likely.”

  “There are stranger things.”

  “I work for—”

  “I know who you work for, Rita.” The voice was still flat, without emotion, but softness had come to his words and curled up at the edges of them.

  “I never expected very much out of this story. I wasn’t even sure it was a story,” Rita said after a moment of silence in the room.

  Devereaux glanced down again at the construction pit where they had found Natali. “Would you believe me if I said there were worse things than being arrested by a British agent?” he said, still staring out the window.

  “Like what?”

  “A couple of killings. One, a woman. One, another British agent. At least I think he was. And now something is going to happen. This afternoon. I don’t know what but I know it is going to happen now. Did this agent in Dublin, did he know about you going to Helsinki?”

  “Yes. In fact, he told me. He knew a lot, and a lot of what he knew he got wrong about me.”

  “Facts and lies, all mixed up,” Devereaux said, not to her but to himself. “And who is Tomas Crohan? I’m the only one who doesn’t know.”

  She told him, simply, as much as she knew about the man who had been an American agent behind Nazi lines in 1944 and 1945 and been captured at last by the Soviet army sweeping into Austria. She told him about Mrs. Fitzroy and then about the priest in Dublin who had once been part of the Irish government and who had been hit and killed on a Dublin street the day Rita Macklin came to Ireland to see him.

  “What do you think?” she said at the end of her narrative, but he did not speak for a moment.

  She stared at him and saw the logic behind the confusing events of the past days. If Devereaux was here waiting, then he was waiting for Crohan; if Devereaux thought something was about to happen, then Crohan must be here. The thought terrified her momentarily, the way a skier feels both exhilaration and terror as the descent begins and all the mundane plodding up the slope to reach this moment is forgotten.

  “Is Crohan here?” she asked at last.

  “I think so.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No. I wouldn’t know what he looks like.”

  “There don’t seem to be photos of him. Mrs. Fitzroy had a childhood photo and there was one in Father Cunningham’s possessions of someone I guess is Crohan. It was taken about fifty years ago.”

  “Odd, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  But he did not answer. He was thinking furiously for the first time in more than two months; he was shaking himself out of the lethargy of routine, of waiting, of enduring day by day without word from the East or the West. No wonder he had felt himself a prisoner; it was exactly like prison, like the nine months he had endured in the St. Charles Reformatory for Boys west of Chicago when he w
as thirteen, nine months that had seemed like nine years. He had grown up rough on the streets of the South Side of Chicago, had grown up with a sense of survival and brutality, and he had only been rescued, from the reformatory and from the direction of his life, by his Great Aunt Melvina, who had suddenly given him a home, and by his intellect, which had given him a new life away from the streets. Now thought would rescue him again; he felt the thoughts connecting inside him like a string of lights rescued from an old cardboard box and suddenly given light and new life.

  “Dev,” she said, softly, standing up, walking across the room.

  He turned and looked at her. His eyes were ice, his hair patches of white and black mingled, his face rugged and crosshatched with deep lines that did not reflect age but experience.

  “There is some danger in this,” he said quietly.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Will you trust me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I think from their point of view, without knowing who they are, you will have to be killed before it is all over,” Devereaux said. She shivered. He did not touch her.

  “I think that is the way it will have to be played. Something is wrong at both ends, and I cannot understand the British involvement at all.”

  “But what is this about?”

  “The last thing it’s about is an old man coming out of the Soviet Union. There’s a trap working here but I don’t know against whom and why. I was called home yesterday. I was supposed to go home in the morning. This afternoon, I got my call; I am sure that Crohan is in the city now.”

  “Are you supposed to do something?”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said. “I should be out in the plaza on the other side of the hotel right now waiting for a signal. To make contact.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing. I have to get a message out.”

  “Out? Out of where?”

  “Helsinki is a sieve for spies,” Devereaux said. “Everything can be tapped, everything can be listened to—”

  “Some democracy,” Rita said.

  “It’s the only one they can afford sitting next to the Soviet Union,” Devereaux replied. He was surprised by his answer; he thought he had no opinion of the Finns at all.

  “Why are you waiting instead of making your contact?”

  “Because I think they’ll give me an extra day,” Devereaux said ironically. “I’m sure of it.” He went to the desk and opened up a Finnair timetable. “Are you tired?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a plane for Paris in two hours. Will you go to Paris, spend the night, send my message, and come back in the morning? I will meet you at Stockmann’s at ten in the morning.”

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “The taxi driver from the airport will know. Go to the fifth floor where the souvenirs are—knives, furs, cloth. I can meet you there.”

  “Is this all necessary?”

  “Getting the message out is necessary. Something is wrong, something is wrong with the signals I’ve sent from here and from the station in Stockholm. If the English know about you, I’m pretty sure the Soviets don’t yet. You’ll be safe enough.”

  She smiled at him. “You want me to be a spy.”

  “I’m afraid there aren’t many choices. Not in this place, not with Crohan. The English think you’re an agent.”

  “Disinformation from someone.”

  “Yes. But who? And if someone killed the priest deliberately, they did it more for what he knew than for his political beliefs.” Again, Devereaux permitted himself a frosty smile. “You, Rita. You are the target again.”

  “But who do I send this to?”

  “I will write it down. There’s a number in the States. Call by seven tonight, that’ll be one in the afternoon in Washington. Don’t answer any questions and don’t repeat. Just speak clearly and then hang up and then go and get a good night’s sleep and be back in Helsinki in the morning.”

  “Dev,” she began.

  He looked at her.

  “I never got over you.”

  He said nothing.

  She touched his hand.

  “It was easier for you,” she said.

  No, he thought; but any admission would reveal too much of the truth. What could he tell her that would not lacerate her again, that would not tear the bandages from the dry wounds?

  She felt intensely ashamed in that moment, in his silence. He should have said something. He should have comforted her. He had let her speak her heart and he had revealed nothing again. She felt like a schoolgirl. She withdrew her hand and looked away to the window. Why did she speak when he could answer her with silence? But that had always been the agreement between them.

  He touched her.

  She turned back to him.

  He touched his lips with the tip of his finger.

  She understood.

  He folded his arms around her and held her then and she let her weight sink against him and she felt the warmth of his embrace; for a moment, they held each other without movement, without words, without any sounds.

  “There is a lot to be afraid of now,” Devereaux said, very close to her, still holding her.

  But she only felt his arms around her and buried her face in the shoulder of his jacket. She only held him for a long time.

  20

  DUBLIN

  Sparrow sat on the bed in Ely’s hotel room. He had a pistol in his hand. He had been waiting for six hours. In some ways, he hoped Ely would not come; that Ely had left the assignment and the country. He didn’t want to kill Ely.

  The woman was already flown, to Helsinki. Rita Macklin. It was as George had guessed. Sparrow would max both the woman and the American agent in Helsinki and that would tidy up the business.

  Sparrow had thought about a dozen things during the six hours of silence, of waiting.

  He agreed with George that Wickham had gotten off lucky. Wickham would keep his mouth shut as well because he knew what George could do to him if he didn’t.

  The only thing that bothered Sparrow was Crohan. What was it all about except a Mick working for the Yanks in the war? Sometimes these people at the top got all excited over nothing, Sparrow knew, and it was always little fellows like Ely who ended up having to pay for it.

  He pitied Ely, he really did.

  Sparrow was tough, of course, and he could afford pity. He came from Liverpool and his old da had been half Irish. Liverpool was a tough enough town, then and now, though it didn’t have the nigs the way it did now. Sparrow had been a contract employee for the Service for six years before they took him on. Sparrow had been very tough about it: “I got a better offer if you don’t want to take me on the rolls permanent like.”

  “A better offer?” It had been some goddamn supercilious little clerk just like Wickham, all nose and looking down at you and soft hands. They were all the same.

  “Yeah. From the IRA,” Sparrow had said and that had shaken them and they did one of those conferences they do and they had vetted him back and forth for a month and then they had taken him on. Three years ago, George had come to see his talents. He had come to rely on Sparrow, George had.

  Sparrow smiled at that. It was nice to be needed.

  He had decided the easiest thing was to wait for Ely in his room. He had not checked out, his bag was still in the wardrobe on the wall away from the single window. Ely lived frugally, Sparrow noted, even on an expense voucher. Maybe he was saving up a little for his old age.

  Which would not come in this case, Sparrow thought. At least he didn’t have any orders about Parker, the stationmaster. Parker was out of it, filing his little reports about Russian submarine sightings in the western ocean off Ireland. George said he didn’t really seem to understand what the Crohan business was all about.

  Which was no surprise to Sparrow. He didn’t understand it either. He only understood that Ely was going to have to be taken out. A nice clean hit after he got him ins
ide the room.

  He heard steps outside the door. He tensed and reached under his jacket for the handle of the Walther.

  The door lock tumbled and the handle was turned. The door opened quickly, so quickly that it startled Sparrow, who had expected some caution from Ely.

  But it wasn’t Ely at all.

  The man in the doorway was dressed in black, his face was dark and recessive, his black eyes glowed hideously. He was bare-headed and his hair was black, pasted by rain against his scalp.

  Sparrow noticed one other thing, the last thing he noticed in his life. The man framed in the door, which was banging in that instant against the inner wall, held a very large, black pistol in his hand and he was firing it even as the door struck the wall, even before Sparrow could pull down the Walther out of its holster.

  The entire action took less than a second but it was so filled with details that Sparrow even had a moment to wonder about the complexities of life. So it would not be Ely after all, he thought slowly, as though he had all eternity to contemplate the matter.

  He never heard the shot because his brain exploded as the bullet shattered his face and drove through his skull.

  Antonio fired a second time before turning away from the door and the bloody scene. He even brushed past a man with a ginger mustache coming up the stairs but did not pause to beg pardon.

  Which is why Ely discovered the bloody remains of Sparrow seven seconds after the murder.

  21

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Mrs. Neumann had been wrong after all.

  Hanley sat at the conference table set up in the corner office inside the building in Langley, Virginia, which housed the Central Intelligence Agency. The building was quite ugly and functional and resembled a motel raised on spider legs of concrete supporting the main structure. Unlike the headquarters buildings of Auntie in London, which were themselves meant to be a disguise, the Central Intelligence Agency proclaimed its presence boldly in the great seal imbedded in the lobby floor and visible to all who came to the front door.

  Hanley had never been inside the building.

  He felt uncomfortable as the director of Central Intelligence smoked his sixth Camel of the hour and stared at him silently. Of course they had traced back the stolen data to R Section, as Mrs. Neumann had expected; but she had not expected confrontation on the matter because it would make the CIA look foolish.