“I don’t go to church anymore.”
“This has nothing to do with church.”
“I need payment in advance,” Matthew O’Day said.
“Twenty-five,” she said.
He shook his head.
“Don’t regret it,” she said.
“Listen, girlie,” he began. He got very close to her face. His fine tenor voice dropped a note and was grouchy around the edges of the words. “It makes no difference to me, girl or boy. If you got to be killed, you’re dead. I’m not a sadist, the business has to be done and sometimes it’s rougher than I might like it. So don’t threaten me about regrets.”
“All right.” Soft. “This is Tuesday. You’ll want to make contact with me Thursday. This place again, it seems a good place for us to meet and not make stupid threats to each other.”
“I won’t want to contact you ever again, girlie,” he said.
She blinked.
He saw the change in her eyes in that moment.
They weren’t cynical at all.
He thought they were full of regret.
12
“Rehabilitation,” Hanley said. “Dr. Krueger says it will have to be extensive.”
“The operative word is expensive, not extensive,” Devereaux said. “I want to get out of here. I don’t have access to a telephone, I can’t even call Rita—”
“Miss Macklin doesn’t know about you,” Hanley said. The smell of the hospital room overwhelmed him. It brought back the horrible memories of Saint Catherine’s in Maryland where a high-placed Soviet mole in the intelligence service had committed Hanley long before and where he had nearly lost his mind. Devereaux had saved him from that fate. He didn’t want to think about it. “Dr. Krueger says it would do her no good in her present state to know that you had been injured. Besides, he advised that your access to a telephone be limited, for fear you would do exactly what you intended, to call Miss Macklin.”
“Dr. Krueger gets around,” Devereaux said.
“He’s one of the finest neurologists—”
“ — money can buy,” Devereaux said. “He’s a very strange man.”
“The explosion that caused you other injuries also caused trauma to your head severe enough to count as a concussion. You suffered brain damage, to what extent it’s up to Dr. Krueger to learn,” Hanley said. He fell back on the words he uttered with the abandon of a tired man flinging himself on a bed.
Devereaux waited a moment. The silence of the hospital was a palpable buzz. “Do you believe any of that or are you just comforting yourself?”
“We have to face unpleasant facts,” Hanley said, turning toward the window. “You’ve been injured before. That time in Bruges.… The scars of previous traumas are evident on your body. But what about the scars on your mind?”
“What has that got to do with getting out of here?”
“Dr. Krueger is a fine neurologist, one of the best. We wanted the best,” Hanley said.
Devereaux said, “I’ve concluded a neurologist is roughly a psychologist with a machine to back him up.”
“You were… damaged. Your brain suffered injuries that cannot be healed. The brain cells do not regenerate.”
“Then let’s not worry about them,” Devereaux said. “I can’t recover if they keep me on dope twenty-four hours a day. I don’t want any more dope. I’d rather learn to live with the pain.”
Hanley said, “I want to assure you that you will be taken care of. That we don’t intend—”
“Henry McGee,” Devereaux said for the first time.
Hanley blinked.
“Henry McGee,” Devereaux said. “He called me in the hotel before he blew up my room. He shot Rita Macklin. I want you to find out about him. Is he still in the country?”
Hanley wiped his hand across his mouth.
“Devereaux. This borders on obsession. Henry McGee is dead or gone. KGB went after him. We gave them all the clues they needed on that matter of the translator.”
“It was Henry McGee,” Devereaux said. “What does Section want to do about it?”
“Section has no interest in chasing ghosts,” Hanley said. “Do you see what I mean? You bring up a dead man’s name to explain something that you can’t explain otherwise. In all these weeks, you never mentioned that name. Why do it now?”
Devereaux tried a smile. There was absolutely no mirth in it. “Are you saying I’m wrong? I’m one of your agents. I don’t guess about things. I thought Section had an unwritten rule about dealing with acts of terror against its own. It kept the balance in the cold war, one side knowing what the other side would do about a wet contract on one of its own.”
“Devereaux.”
“Of course, perhaps there’s no cold war anymore. I haven’t read the papers lately.”
“The papers assure us we have come through apocalypse unsinged,” Hanley said in the same tone of sarcasm. “These are difficult times in intelligence. We have no need for spies when the world is suddenly so open and honest.”
“It’s the Santa Claus factor,” Devereaux said.
Hanley blinked.
“All the adults thought he really didn’t exist and now they say they were wrong.”
For a moment, they shared the silence like comrades. Hanley was always the control, the puller of strings in Washington, the man who made marks on the map that represented agents and safe houses and operations carried out both legal and black. Devereaux had been code-named November, one of the tacks on the map. And then one day, the world realized the Mercator projection of the earth was distorted and began to question the tacks as well.
“Devereaux. It’s time to talk about some things. Unpleasant things.”
It was the moment he had avoided for the past three weeks. In the beginning, it was simple. There was a question of whether Devereaux would survive at all. If he had not survived, the problem would not have come up. But now he was hallucinating about KGB agents and he needed reality. Dr. Krueger had been firm about that: Mr. Devereaux needs to be reminded of the reality of things so that he does not escape into his other world, the one that is not real. Dr. Krueger said Devereaux was a difficult patient but that he, Dr. Krueger, understood this because people wanted to deny their incapacities in the area of intellect and memory. He saw it all the time with Alzheimer’s patients who wanted to deny that they were suffering from the disease. Did that mean Devereaux had Alzheimer’s disease? Hanley had asked. Dr. Krueger had merely smiled a sad professional smile and spread his hands and said, It’s only a label, it can’t work miracles.
“Devereaux,” Hanley began. He looked at his hands. “Devereaux,” he began again.
Devereaux waited.
“You recall you attempted to retire from active service six years ago. The matter was aborted. It was a different time then. A different world. You came back inside because there was a wet contract on you and because you needed the… security of being part of Section.”
Devereaux said nothing. His large hands were spread on the hospital sheet. This was a private room because intelligence demanded it. There was a twenty-four-hour police guard on the door and the policemen had been screened by both the FBI and R Section, though R Section did not, strictly speaking, have the authority to operate in a security field inside the United States. Devereaux even had a private bath, adjacent to the room. He was sealed from the world.
“We think it is time to consider your retirement again. As I said, this is a different time and a different world,” Hanley said. He wiped his hands on his trousers and looked down at them as he finished the job.
“Why?”
“You were terribly injured,” Hanley said. “Dr. Krueger confirms that you have suffered brain damage that will affect your ability to function effectively in a field environment.”