Bill Granger
League of Terror
This is for Milt Rosenberg and John Coyne
EPIGRAPH
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time —
To let the punishment
Fit the crime.…
Was blind, but now I see.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The long Iran-Iraq war produced many evil side effects, not the least of which was reintroduction of nerve gas as a routine weapon in battle. Long after intelligence agencies determined Iraq was “equalizing” the war by using nerve gas against its numerically superior foe, gas continued to be dispatched in battle. Arab sympathizers with Iraq — faced with a similar problem of numerical inferiority in future wars — became intensely interested in acquiring the means of producing nerve gas. After the war, Libya — using West German technology and assistance — assembled a production facility to produce mustard gas. It was partially destroyed by sabotage in March 1990. Though use of lethal gas in warfare is proscribed by the Geneva conventions and subsequent protocols, both the United States and the Soviet Union continue to manufacture and stockpile nerve gas whose only use can be as weapons of war. There is evidence that nerve gas was used by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Terrorism for profit is not a new idea — witness the success of extortion by the Black Hand societies and the Sicilian Mafia in the early part of the century. But a new, nonideological terrorism — using new weapons — has risen, threatening the machinery of business, not the specific harm of individuals.
This book reflects these realities.
CAST OF MAJOR CHARACTERS
Devereaux — code-named “November” is the cold, primed-to-kill agent of R Section.
Rita Macklin — a tough, sexy journalist whose only flaw is that she loves the November Man.
Hanley — director of operations for R Section, a bureaucrat to his fingertips and an employer who can’t be trusted.
Lydia Neumann — head of R Section who knows too many secrets to not feel the burden of them.
Mac — Rita’s boss, a newsmagazine editor who feels his career — and life — are ending too soon.
Henry McGee — self-described as “the worst man in the world,” he is a terrorist-for-profit.
“Marie Dreiser” — a Berlin waif and survivor who is used by McGee — and uses him in return. “Marie” may not be her name at all.
Maureen Kilkenny — a fiery red-haired IRA revolutionary who kills better than any man.
Matthew O’Day — the IRA cell leader who is targeted for terror himself.
Dr. Krueger — a neurologist who uses narcotics to enslave Rita Macklin.
Trevor Armstrong — vain, ruthless boss of Euro-American Airlines who has hocked his soul and now faces the bill for terror.
Dwyer — Armstrong’s right-hand man who knows how to use a “horse-killer.”
Juno — a man who sells death in a used vodka bottle.
1
Rita Macklin buttoned her blouse and then tucked it into her skirt. She looked for a critical moment at herself in the mirror of the dressing closet off the bathroom. The blouse was green satin and it complemented her green eyes. She wore her red hair long, as always, and her bangs swept her pale forehead. The bridge of freckles was lesser now because it was fall and she did not have as much time to spend outdoors. She ran every other day but that was early in the morning, before the sun had any power.
She put on a pale lipstick and pressed her lips and regarded the effect of the makeup.
She had not seen Devereaux for a year.
She had called him at the Section more than once and they assured her they had patched her calls through to his apartment. They couldn’t say where until the night she guessed New York and an inexperienced dispatcher confirmed it. But that was all — how did you find a hidden man in the labyrinth of the city? She had even asked once — “Where in New York?” But they would not tell her because the apartment was a safe house and, therefore, was secret. Everything was secret, even his existence. She was outside the shell and could not penetrate it.
She thought about him most in the mornings, like now, when she dressed in the apartment off Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda.
Her apartment complex was scarcely a mile from Bethesda Naval Hospital, and the area had been built up chaotically in the past ten years, from the time she had first come to Washington as a reporter. That depressed her, to think of how much change she had witnessed in her surroundings in what she still considered a short life here. Most of the time, she felt she was still new in the capital; and the rare times she admitted her age to herself, she got a little drunk with friends.
She was thirty-six years old. Her eyes, however bright, told her that. She had welcomed the current fashion to wear eye makeup during the day though she would not have done so if she had been younger. Even before she had known Devereaux.
She paused in the act of dressing and thought of him. The thought was dangerous at a vulnerable time like this, the first thing in the morning. It might stay with her all day.
Devereaux would have stood in the dressing foyer and watched her. He wouldn’t have said anything but he would have smiled at her if she caught him watching her. The smile would have been shy, the merest trace reflecting the pleasure she gave him. It was such a simple ritual they had shared, like all their rituals.
She would have felt comfortable, as though he were complimenting her or making an act of love. He really had loved her and never said it to her. That too was part of the ritual, because words were used for lies in Devereaux’s canon, and what was true must be silent. He had really loved her in all those silences they shared.
At least she thought that when she remembered him.
They had parted reluctantly more than a year ago because she really had to make him understand she couldn’t tolerate life as — she wasn’t even his wife, just his lover — as the lover of a case officer. Case officer. What a mundane term to describe what he really was, an intelligence agent with R Section. Not a clerk deciphering codes in a safe bureaucracy but an agent in the field, one of the tacks on a map of the world that signified operations both legal and black.
He had all the secrets dangerously stored inside him. The secrets made him a silent watcher, even if he was merely watching her dress in the little closet of her apartment. When you have secrets, even those that are dead and buried deep in memory’s backyard, you cannot speak because each word must be a lie or the secrets are revealed. Lies become habit. She couldn’t tolerate his life because the secrets he carried around in him put him apart from her all the time and because she knew he put himself in harm’s way too often. She loved him too much to lose him; so, she had left him.
She folded her arms and hugged herself to stop from thinking about the way he had held her — sometimes in the morning like this, held her a moment before she had to leave — as though he wanted an impression of her to carry around with him during the time they were apart.
He had risen behind her on those mornings and had come to her at the mirror and placed his arms over her, to squeeze her waist, to touch her breasts, to nuzzle her neck so that he could smell her perfume as he tasted her.