The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  The New Man at R Section was also there. He had replaced Rear Admiral Thomas Galloway (USN Ret.), who had been sacked following the debacle of the Mitterand assassination business nearly two years before. Hanley had served as director for a time, but because he was only a civil servant he was passed over for a permanent promotion.

  The New Man, as everyone still called him in the Section to separate him in memory from the Old Man who had been Galloway, was David Yackley. Yackley was an intense, dark-browed man of thirty-five who had been the youngest director of a major intelligence agency in the United States. He was a protégé of an old friend of the president and he had come to the job with new enthusiasms and new ideas and new plans of organization. Unfortunately for R Section, he put all his ideas into operation within six months and within a year nearly all of them had proven totally unworkable. Shambles remained, not only in the Section but in the attitude the New Man brought to dealing with other intelligence agencies under the umbrella of the National Security Adviser. He said the mission of R Section, a much smaller agency beside the Central Intelligence Agency, was supportive; when Hanley had explained to him that the Section had been set up by President Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs fiasco when the CIA had botched the operation, the New Man had treated it like ancient history. Hanley had quoted Kennedy: “Who will watch the watchers? Who will spy upon the spies?” as the reason R Section existed—to provide an independent audit of intelligence so that no agency would ever again become so powerful and arrogant that it could mislead the politicians who were supposed to be in charge of the country.

  Which now led to the meeting with the director of Central Intelligence.

  Hanley was explaining again: “We had need-to-know in this, Mr. Director. We had an agent in place, he had to make a decision. We needed information about Tomas Crohan.”

  “And so you took it with a cheap computer trick.”

  Hanley said, “The cheap trick fooled Langley.”

  The New Man winced. Among things he detested about R Section was the slang rampant in the place. He felt the jargon excluded him, particularly from the club of old-timers that existed in the establishment of the agency. He had begun, carefully, to weed out the old-timers, to separate them from their fiefdoms, to break down power. He had not even neglected the field, though he had learned from the lesson of Stansfield Turner when Turner had thrown the CIA into a tailspin with his wholesale retirements of agents in the field.

  The New Man named Yackley did not move so dramatically. He moved slowly on the sources of his discontent. Slowest of all was his move on Hanley. He would hate to admit to anyone that he still needed Hanley; Hanley had the secrets, Hanley still had the power. But even that would change in time with careful chipping at the secrets; like now. Hanley had stubbed his toe.

  “Who is the man in Helsinki?” the director said at last.

  “We have no one there now,” Hanley said.

  “It was one of our old-time hands,” the New Man interjected and Hanley was plainly shocked. This is the Langley Firm. They are not our friends. They cannot share our operations secrets.

  But Hanley said nothing.

  “Hanley put him there on ice, to cool him down for a long winter’s night in Finland,” the New Man said with pleasure. There was an essential streak of sadism in him which those who admired him called ruthless efficiency.

  “There turned out to be more to the business—”

  “Yes. Director Yackley informed me. So you’ve seen the file on Tomas Crohan. Now do you understand why it must be kept secret?” the director of Central Intelligence said.

  “We are hardly the enemy,” Hanley said with dignity. “Under Section Three of our charter, we are to have free and open access to all records predating the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency under the act of 1947.”

  The New Man turned to him. ”Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “Because you never asked me,” Hanley said with some petulance.

  “Never mind,” the CIA director said. “This is not a law court. What I need to know is what is being done now with the information?”

  “Nothing. I destroyed it in the shredder after I read it.”

  “But what is your operative in Helsinki intending to do?”

  “He has been recalled as of two days ago,” Hanley said.

  “And where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It is difficult to get a safe message out of Finland. You know that.”

  “But two days ago? Is he taking a ship home?”

  “There was no need to hurry.”

  “No need to hurry? What is his normal assignment?”

  Hanley turned to the New Man and refused to answer. The New Man said, “He has been waiting for an assignment. He was on standby.”

  “Is there any chance he might… well… not have received the order?”

  “No,” said Hanley.

  “Do you understand? This would be an embarrassment to us. If he came out of the Soviet Union.”

  “It happened a long time ago.”

  “Damn it, it’s important now,” the CIA director said.

  “Why?”

  The New Man had been looking at Hanley and now he turned to the CIA director. “Yes. Why now?”

  “I’m afraid that’s classified information.”

  “Is it?” For the first time at the meeting, an icy note was sounded in Yackley’s thin voice. “Then there is nothing more to discuss, is there?”

  “This is a delicate matter,” the director of Central Intelligence continued. “It does not involve R Section.”

  “But apparently the Section is intruding upon it. Is that correct?”

  “In a simple way, yes.”

  “Then let us cooperate.”

  The director frowned at Yackley. Yackley was a fool, a puppy. The director felt comfortable with him because he felt certain he could always manipulate him. Not so Hanley. Hanley was an old hand in the Section; Hanley had dealt with the CIA before.

  The director, who was short and fat and had white hair and mottled red skin, lit another Camel and gave his customary cough at the first puff.

  He decided something.

  “Did it occur to either of you to wonder why someone in the Soviet Union would let out a prisoner like Crohan just now?”

  “Yes,” Hanley said, though it was a lie.

  “Good. What conclusion did you reach?”

  “What conclusion have you reached?” Hanley continued the defense.

  “Ireland.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the New Man.

  “The Irish are cash poor and resources poor and the Irish currency is tumbling.”

  “So it says in the newspapers,” Hanley said.

  The director ignored the remark. “For six months, there has been Soviet submarine activity off the Blasket Islands in the Atlantic off the western coast.”

  Hanley did not speak.

  “The Soviets want very much to acquire a lease to one of those islands. As a refueling station.”

  Hanley was silent but the New Man spoke up. “And why would that involve releasing a prisoner held forty years in the Gulag? That would be rather stupid of them, wouldn’t it? I mean, if our information is correct, wouldn’t the release of Tomas Crohan go against them in the public favor?”

  “Eire is a neutral country. Not part of NATO. The Soviet Navy would love just a small toehold for its fleet in the North Atlantic.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Yackley said.

  “Yes he did,” Hanley said dully.

  The director smiled. Yackley merely gaped.

  God, Hanley thought. What a mess, what a dirty tangle it had become. But now he understood.

  “We used Crohan,” Hanley said. “We promised him things. In exchange for his doing some dirty work for us.”

  “In Austria,” prompted the director.

  “And if he com
es out, he can be expected to be less than grateful to us.”

  “Yes,” the director continued. “And tell the world about the dirty Americans. More particularly, tell the Irish.”

  “At the same time the Irish government announces a leasing arrangement for a worthless island with the Soviets which will provide jobs—”

  “I think they are also arranging a grain and cattle importation deal,” the director said.

  The New Man understood vaguely and, at such moments, found silence a useful retreat.

  “Would it work?” Hanley said.

  “Like all of the best plans, it depends on timing. It’s not terribly sophisticated but it might. At the very least, they can claim some propaganda value in the business. The more we push the Irish, the less they like to be pushed.”

  “That’s why the British agent was killed in Helsinki.”

  “Yes. We knew about that, listening in at Cheltenham. We’re allies, you know.”

  “And we’re working for the same government,” Hanley said bitterly. “You could have solved this earlier by telling us—”

  “Secrecy,” the director said, stubbing out the cigarette in an overloaded ashtray. “Everything is a secret. We got inquiries from a journalist who had worked with you. Three months ago.”

  Hanley looked up.

  “Rita Macklin. Ring a bell?”

  “She doesn’t work with us.”

  “She did a good imitation of it on that Tunney business.”

  “What did she want to know?”

  “About Tomas Crohan,” the director said. “And you don’t need to tell me the name of your agent in Helsinki. I know it already. The same man involved in the Tunney matter. How coincidental, Hanley.”

  “It was a coincidence,” Hanley said sharply. “We inquired because we were afraid we were being set up.” He dug it in. “As you were, last year, on the cipher clerk. If you had cooperated.”

  “That’s water over the dam. The point is, secrets must remain secrets.”

  “I don’t understand,” the New Man said.

  “Your man has to come out. And Crohan has to be refused. Beware Russians bearing gifts.”

  Silence filled the office. Thin sunlight streamed through the double windows and covered the book-lined walls. There were photographs everywhere of the director with the President, the director with various generals, the director with senators. He was a man of some influence.

  “This is all the fault of November,” the New Man said at last, trying to reestablish himself in the two-way dialogue.

  Hanley shuddered. Never speak the name of an agent. Never.

  The director frowned. “He is coming out, isn’t he?”

  “As far as we know,” the New Man said. “Hanley?”

  “I sent the message openly.”

  “You talked to him.”

  “Yes.”

  “There was no misunderstanding.”

  Hanley shook his head. He felt miserable and terribly isolated. Two days had passed. Where was Devereaux?

  “He understood his orders?”

  Hanley glared at the New Man. Damn him. Devereaux was the best man of the old crew left. Damn him and his plans and his reorganizations and his determination to break down the old order in the Section.

  And now this. If only they had found out earlier about Crohan and about the Soviet talks with the Irish government.

  Because he could not tell them the message he had received two hours before.

  A woman’s voice, speaking clearly, saying the message only once over the transatlantic line and then breaking the connection. Hanley had taken it alone in his bare office hidden deep in the Agriculture Building on Fourteenth Street.

  “Mr. Hanley?”

  “Yes?”

  “From Helsinki. We are coming out, all of us.”

  And nothing more.

  Could he not tell them this?

  But the director said there had to be secrets.

  Hanley sat and stared at them and felt nothing but cold seeping into him though the pale sunlight had lightened the room.

  22

  PARIS

  Rita Macklin stared out the circular port as the plane arched lazily up through the clouds covering Belgium below. She did not see the clouds or the patches of land that appeared between them; she was staring only at the thought of what she had done. Of what he had made her.

  Are you a spy, now?

  Rita closed her green eyes for a moment. The silent question might have been asked by Kaiser in his mocking gravelly tone.

  No, she would answer. And it would be a lie.

  None of them would have understood her or why she had agreed to the mission for Devereaux.

  She was a journalist, not an agent for her country. She had no causes but the truth—

  She smiled because she heard Kaiser’s laughter at that answer. It isn’t good enough to retreat to principles, little Rita, he would have said. Principles are thin reeds to hide behind.

  “Do you see anything?”

  For a moment, the voice confused her—it might have come from her thoughts. Rita turned in her seat and saw the dark man sitting next to her. The seat had been empty at takeoff. He had chosen to sit next to her. She stared at him.

  “Do you see anything?” The Italian accent was not very thick but she understood what it was. “No,” she said in icy politeness and turned back to the window. Her thoughts had been scattered by the intrusion of the stranger’s inquiry and now they crept back to her like cautious forest animals.

  I did what he wanted me to do because it was him, she said in her mind to Kaiser, to Mac, to the professor at the University of Wisconsin who had led her first to the idea of journalism and who had given her her first principles. Principles didn’t count now.

  No rational argument could have persuaded her to help Devereaux; patriotism had nothing to do with it.

  “My name is Antonio,” the dark man intruded. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  Annoyed, she glanced at him. “Don’t bother me, please.”

  His dark face darkened; the dark eyes turned mean. “I thought to be polite.”

  She didn’t answer.

  He shrugged and lit a cigarette. The smoke curled in the thin air of the cabin and was sucked up into the vents.

  Three winters ago. He had used her, made love to her, and then saved her life when no one could have helped her. She had been fascinated by him at first and then repulsed when she realized he was an agent, when she realized that he had used her as cynically as he had used anyone.

  Why had she gone to that retreat he had on a mountain near Front Royal? It had been dead winter in the mountains, the roads had been slippery, the sky gray as a field of tombstones.

  Three winters ago.

  She closed her eyes. When he had touched her, his touch had not seemed sure at first, as though she had stepped outside the cold world he lived in to come to that place in the mountains and she might not be real to him.

  “Don’t touch me like that,” she had said to him and she had pressed her body against him as they stood in the doorway of the house he had on the mountain. She had held him fiercely and he had known she was real, she was not a fragile shadow, that in or out of his own world, she had decided to love him.

  They had loved but without words. He was immersed in silences in that place, in that season; it was like the time she had gone on a women’s retreat to a place in Minnesota and spent a curiously peaceful weekend in contemplation, in silence, in a world inhabited only by thoughts and prayers. She had been sixteen years old then.

  When she had slept, he stroked her hair; she knew that even though she had not awakened.

  Once she said, “I love you,” to tell him the truth. He had not replied; he had only stared at her, his gray eyes quiet and even a little sad, as though remembering a pleasant time past and never to be had again.

  She lived with him for five days that winter in the silent, snow-deep mountains. She realized at last
it was an idyll and that it was ending and that nothing would be decided at all between them.

  Rita had wanted to ask if he loved her but she could not form the words. She was afraid there would only be silence as an answer or, worse, a spoken lie.

  When she left him that morning, she had known she would never see him again.

  “Damn you,” she had said to him as he stared at her on the path in the snow three winters ago.

  He had touched her hand then, as shyly as he had touched her five mornings before. His gray features were hard and unyielding but in the touch was something like a child’s groping. He had understood and there was nothing they could do about it.

  “I happened to you, Rita, that’s all,” he had said finally.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “No. You know that it does.”

  And she had agreed with the same silence he had rendered her when she had said she loved him. What was he but an incident in her life, an accidental lover? Devereaux. He was alone, from choice or necessity; perhaps it was only the manifestation of survival for him. There was no other way. She had known it when she had driven to him from Washington five days before but she had ignored reason because all love defies logic in the end.

  She blinked now in the plane and found her eyes glazed with tears. Damn, she thought, and opened her purse and wiped at her eyes with a tissue.

  “Are you upset?”

  The dark man’s dark voice hissed next to her.

  “Your smoke,” she said curtly.

  “Oh. My pardon. I will put out the cigarette. I did ask you, didn’t I?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Are you staying in Helsinki? Or are you going on to Leningrad?”

  “Yes. I’m going on.”

  Antonio smiled. “Too bad. We could have such a good time, Miss Macklin.”

  The sound of her name chilled her. She turned back to him.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Antonio,” he said. “I told you.”

  His eyes became flat, like a cat’s. His cheeks were hollow, the ridge of bones beneath his black eyes too prominent. His head seemed a death’s head to her; the skin pressed too tautly over the skull.