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
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 greenery, 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.”
“Devereaux.” Hanley choked; he could not conceive it. The Section was not just an agency tucked into the budget of an obscure Cabinet department; it was Hanley and part of Hanley’s being.
He finally found a voice: “If that were so, why would you tell me?”