by Bill Granger
Hanley.
The trap was set not only to tear apart the counterintelligence life of R Section but the head of Operations. Let Congress start rooting for a mole that did not exist and it would not be stopped until everything was in shreds and R Section had no secrets left for anyone.
The thing had worked for a while in the Marine Corps when a nest of “traitors” was found in the U.S. Marine Corps staff at the American embassy in Moscow. Except it turned out there was only a single traitor and he had given away few secrets. One marine had cast suspicion on the whole corps and embassies from Moscow to Mexico City had worked for more than a year under expensive, clumsy alert that their security staffs might be traitors. It could be done just that easily in a paranoid world and Devereaux knew it. Henry McGee would have finally planted some evidence with Patricia Heath to show her that the mole inside Section was the director of Operations. It was all a lie but it was buttressed by so much truth that the bigger lie would be believed.
“Can I make you one last offer?”
Devereaux blinked. Then he refocused on the man in chains at the table beside him.
“I can go up to three million dollars. Just give me twelve hours. You almost didn’t catch me the way it was.”
“Where will you get the money?”
“Delivered here in two hours.”
“Is it that easy?”
Henry smiled. “Money is always the easy part. The guys who don’t have it think it’s hard but that makes it easier on the guys who do.”
“But, Henry, I need you.”
“You got the tapes—”
“What did I do? Turn my head and you knocked me out? Did I let you use the bathroom and you escaped through the transom? Do they still have transoms in bathrooms?”
“You could become head of Operations yourself, you could work it such a way that the mole, Hanley, was trying to frame you and—”
“You have good stories, Henry. Hanley isn’t a mole. You make everyone want to follow your trail.”
“Three million—”
“Watch television for a while, Henry, I have to make some telephone calls.”
“I’m disappointed in you,” Henry McGee said.
Devereaux stared at him. “Not disappointed, Henry. Surprised by the ending. Because you didn’t write it.”
42
THE TRADE-OFFS
Waverly from FBI and Hanley from R Section and Captain T. C. Neal from the Office of Naval Intelligence shared a table in a glass room inside R Section. The room was a totally clear glass chamber with a clear table and clear bench seats located in a conventionally soundproofed room. The clear room, as it was called, was used for the most secret conversations and proved to the three occupants that each of them could be certain of speaking without being picked up by an enemy electronic receiver because the glass produced almost no vibrations from their voices.
Captain Neal said the submarine was Soviet T-class and was outfitted with the new Japanese turbines. Once the navy cruiser had adjusted the radio sonar beams to the new and subtle sounds, it could follow it easily. The chance encounter with the submarine off the Seward Peninsula was a coup for the navy. And yes, in the most secret of reports, the navy would acknowledge the work in the matter by R Section.
The trade-offs with the FBI went nearly as smoothly.
Waverly said, “Special agents in San Francisco arrested Robert Wilson Wagner and, with the cooperation of Mr. Wagner and the work done by Karen Elizabeth O’Hare in the office of the Witness Relocation Program, we have managed to penetrate into the organization of Alberto Spiloggi Antonius, alias Mr. Anthony, a major supplier of narcotics in the northern California area. We have made a number of arrests, including Mr. Wagner’s contact, Rudolph Edward Pell.”
Hanley closed his eyes for a moment. It was always like this dealing with any level of the FBI above the rank of field agent. They all still talked like J. Edgar Hoover and they always insisted on using middle names, even in quiet conversations. They sounded like public relations announcements.
“And the murders,” Hanley prodded in a quiet voice.
“Yes,” Waverly said. “We accept your work there.”
It was a relief. The murders were very important because that was the province of the FBI and that was the deal with Devereaux. Denisov would get off for the murder of Pierce. It was the only way to keep the whole matter secret, including the capture of Henry McGee. Henry McGee could still cut either way with Section because he had been a Soviet agent inside Section for a decade before he went back across. How could he be revealed to Congress, to the FBI, without tearing Section apart?
Hanley said, “Then you’re satisfied.”
“You had information on a pipeline conspiracy of terror for nearly a year without revealing it to the proper authority. In this case, us,” Waverly said in that ball-bearing voice. He wore a dark suit and a blue television shirt and a rep tie.
“And you didn’t have the information,” Hanley said. “The matter cuts both ways. You accuse us and you accuse yourself. Accept the deal: We were working together on the matter and the terrorists killed Pierce in Anchorage, a crime you have solved. We were sister agencies, cooperating with each other.”
Waverly looked at the navy captain and looked at Hanley. “All right,” he said.
“Now the matter of Henry McGee.”
“The matter of Henry McGee,” Waverly said.
“A spy in the United States,” Hanley said.
“A Soviet agent. Exactly like Karpov.”
“Dropped by a Soviet submarine on the Seward Peninsula,” agreed Captain Neal.
“Detected by the American navy,” agreed Hanley.
“A spy ring broken up with valuable overseas help from R Section and the combined special forces of R Section and the FBI cooperating in the United States,” Waverly concluded in his long-winded way.
The three of them stared at each other. No one wavered. The story was good and it held water. It was the kind of story that is better than the real thing sometimes. Especially when agencies want to get out of something.
“Is everything buttoned up then?” Waverly said.
“I think so,” Hanley said.
“The Office of Naval Intelligence is satisfied, especially with the results. We knew they’d been testing that goddamn sub but we couldn’t get a handle on the frequency of the turbines. It was going to take us another eighteen months.”
“Then we’re agreed,” Hanley said.
The three men stared at each other for a moment.
“Agreed,” they all said, almost with one voice.
43
MAKING HER UNDERSTAND
There were no secrets in the middle of the Alaskan spring night. The sun shone down on the eternal glaciers in the panhandle and on the white mountains across the Brooks Range that led down slowly to the North Slope, where all the oil was buried beneath the Arctic Sea.
The sun slowly moved around the top of the world in the position of three o’clock in the sky. The world was bathed in eternal afternoon. The clouds and winds conspired across the top of the Soviet Union, across Alaska and the Northwest Territories and Labrador in the east of Canada, across the little bit of water to the top of frozen Greenland and the top of Scandinavia, where Norway and Sweden and Finland and the Soviet Union meet again.
The tourists were in Alaska now, picking through the souvenirs shops on Fourth Avenue in Anchorage or watching the islands from the blue Marine Highway ferries from Seattle to Haines. The tourists flew into the bush by private carriers from Merrill Field or went by trains up to Fairbanks from the First Avenue station. They climbed the mountains in the Chugach; they rode on the rickety old buses down gravel trails through Denali, past the grizzlies and caribou grazing, until they could see the slouched shoulders of Mount McKinley, glittering with snow.
The country was too large and it was full of illusions that were incomprehensible and the tourists came in this season to find something. They saw th
e bush, they saw the valley full of smoking springs, they saw mountains and fierce seas like the ones off Kodiak Island. It was too much to understand, what this country was. It was the savage place left in the heart and because it was so savage, the people who came to Alaska in this season thought they saw it as pure and good, as they imagined they had once been or could be again.
The man came in the morning when the house was silent and when the sun was already full of strength on the glittering shallow waters of Turnagain Arm. The hillsides were full of green firs and the thin roads full of campers going to some new place.
She opened the door for him because she expected him.
He was an anonymous man in a light, soiled coat with the pasty look of the traveler.
“I don’t really understand this,” Senator Heath said in her not-to-be-trifled-with voice.
Devereaux said nothing.
“We can sit here,” she indicated the living room of the pretty house.
He went into the kitchen instead and sat down at the kitchen bar. The bar top was made of a single piece of walnut. Patricia Heath was dressed in slacks and a light cotton sweater and she frowned because he had chosen the place.
She sat down.
He told her the truth, from the beginning. He told her where the truth came from. He told her the proofs of the truth that were in R Section. He told her about Henry McGee and the native called Kools and about the pipeline deal approved by a man in Chicago named Clay Ashley, who had paid blackmail and had ordered the death of two saboteurs.
“Who are you?” she said at one point.
“The agent terrorist,” he said. “The agent who supposedly went to Russia. By the way, Mr. Denisov is in Santa Barbara. A woman named Alexa is in Los Angeles. There was no porn ring, no terrorism by an agent of the government.”
“You’ll have to prove it,” she said, just beginning to be afraid.
He stared at her.
“The plot was by a Soviet agent named Henry McGee directed against an intelligence department of the government,” he began again. “And you were an unwitting part of it.”
“You can’t prove it.”
“We can prove it. Believe that if you are going to believe in anything.”
“What about Crowder?”
“We have to leave that part of the story alone. Someone has to swing for being a bad boy. We are just not interested in going after a bad girl. That’s you, Senator. You were a bad girl.”
She thought about it.
If she could get away with it, scot free, why go on? They had things on people, these intelligence agencies. “But he told me he was CIA,” she said. “The man who came to see me.”
“I’m Santa Claus,” Devereaux said. “Do you want to see my sleigh?”
“He wasn’t,” she said, putting on a dull voice and a blank face. “CIA, I mean. It’s very confusing.”
“He wasn’t.”
“Where is he?”
“In federal custody. He was arraigned this morning.”
“What do you want?”
“Drop it,” Devereaux said.
“All of it? How can I do it?”
“Convene a closed-door session of your committee. A man named Hanley will testify.”
“Will you testify?”
“I don’t exist,” Devereaux said.
“You…” She didn’t know what to say.
“I’m a story invented by Henry McGee. It was part of the conspiracy against the United States and against R Section. He used you to advance disinformation.”
“You do exist,” she said.
“I’m an illusion,” Devereaux said.
“I can’t go along with this.”
“Do what you want, then. That was the easy approach. The hard approach will be much harder.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“You’ll be in jail in eighteen months. What Henry knew, we know now. About you, about Malcolm Crowder. About the half-million payout. You can get out of part of it, but not all of it.”
“Why give me any break at all,” she said.
Devereaux paused. It was the hardest thing to say and the words stuck in his throat for a moment. It had not been his decision. That had been decided in one of those quiet rooms in Washington.
“Because it’s for the good of Section,” he said.
44
THE RELUCTANCE OF NOVEMBER
“Is it safe now?” Mrs. Neumann asked Hanley.
They sat in the quietest room of all, the secret room in R Section. It was raining in Washington. On the Fourteenth Street Bridge, two cars had decided to run into each other and the traffic was backed up on both sides of the Potomac River for miles. The cursing of horns in the streets was just a low squeak in the room.
Hanley was pleased with himself. He made another tent of his fingers and did not speak for a moment. “It is reasonably safe. The National Security director is not displeased with events. I even think there will be congratulations for Section for a job well done in apprehending two agents from the Opposition.”
“Then it’s safe enough,” she said.
“Safe enough.”
There was another long silence in the room. Morning was somber against the windows of the room. Mrs. Neumann thought well of Hanley in the light of morning; he had advised the right thing at the right time, he had taken the right action. The expected bureaucrat, of course, had taken the credit for the various operations that resulted in the arrest of Henry McGee in a Seattle hotel room.
As he had told Devereaux in private: “My neck was on the line if you had failed.”
Devereaux replied, “You’re very brave, Hanley. I admire you.”
Sarcasm, Hanley had thought, but said nothing.
“There is another matter,” Hanley began, opening the tent to find the palms of his hands.
“In connection with this?”
“Yes. It’s November.”
“What about November?” The raspy voice dropped a note to a whisper. Mrs. Neumann admired the agent. Hanley knew this. Hanley decided to risk a few points of credit in the light of the general good feeling in Section at not being torn apart after all.
“He sat in on some initial interrogation of McGee—”
“You mean in Alaska the first time fifteen years ago or now in Maryland?”
The point stung Hanley. He opened his eyes wide and gazed at Mrs. Neumann as if a dragon had entered the room.
“I mean now. The problem is in his reports. I really am disappointed in them.”
“How are you disappointed?”
“We have some very good people at the complex in Maryland.”
There was a place in the panhandle of western Maryland, in those rugged Appalachian hills and quiet, fog-shrouded valleys thick with trees. It contained a half-dozen buildings of Korean War vintage—two-story, frame, with wooden firestairs—where defectors and sudden witnesses and captured spies were taken for debriefing. The days were long and the nights were quiet in this place. It was removed from the world, the only access a guarded dirt road that ran up a steep hillside. The “good people” were the questioners, the seekers of truth in the answers of the defectors.
“I would suppose so.” Mrs. Neumann had learned faint sarcasm as part of her elevation to chief of Section.
“Devereaux has been a naysayer. He’s going against the grain in the questioning of Henry McGee. Frankly, I think it may be something personal between them, something that happened in Alaska. Devereaux can have a… visceral reaction at times,” Hanley said.
“The word is well chosen,” Mrs. Neumann said in a whisper. “What are you getting at?”
“Henry McGee is a realistic man. He has one hope—cooperate with us for light treatment and wait until he is traded out to the Soviets for someone we want.”
“So he cooperates.”
“He cooperates. It is wonderful stuff, Mrs. N. The matter of the agent in Berlin is all confirmed. He knows things we still didn’t know. He has a won
derful rundown on the bureaucracy inside the Committee for External Observation and Resolution inside the KGB. More updated than the stuff we got seven years ago from Denisov. There is a lot more. Matters we should investigate, particularly in our Pacific desk. He has some pretty damning proofs that our man in Dutch Harbor might not have been all he seemed.”
Pierce, the man in Dutch Harbor, had been given a quiet funeral in Arlington National Cemetery. The president had authorized the Distinguished Service Medal to be awarded posthumously. Everything had been done, in records and memory, to enshrine Pierce as a hero of Section who fell in the line of duty.
“What is November in this?”
“Against the grain,” Hanley said. He began a frown. Some of the secretaries inside Section thought Mr. Hanley had the cutest frown they had ever seen.
“In what way?”
“He says Henry McGee should not be believed. Not in anything. He says it is all part of the same continuing story. I think November has become paranoid on the subject; I think we should ‘retire’ him again, give him a rest, let him think about other things. Spend time with his ‘woman.’ ”
“He says this totally?”
“Totally. He says the other questioners are letting the stories get in the way of what the purpose of the stories is. I don’t understand that at all. He said ‘the facts are getting in the way of the truth.’ That’s a quote. That doesn’t make any sense at all. I think he’s positively… demented on the subject of Henry McGee.”
“He was close to the subject.”
“Henry McGee is a gold mine. He helped us shut down Patricia Heath and that Senate investigation. He gave us the traitor in the witness program in San Francisco. He has, in a real sense, helped us cement a better relationship with our sister agency on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“Why not just say ‘the FBI’?”
Hanley flushed. He had the jargon all down; it made him part of the great game. He spoke of the “Opposition” and “Competition,” the “Langley firm” and the “people at Meade,” and it was to make certain to everyone that he was a man who kept secrets.
“The point, Mrs. Neumann, is that November is no good right now, not in connection with Henry McGee. Henry McGee can help us go through our cases, find out where we have made a mistake or miscalculation. The information is valuable.”
