“I don’t really understand you.”
“I didn’t expect to come back to life a second time. But it happened and now I have to find Rita and tell her whatever words will make her well. She won’t be the same but at least she’ll understand why she’s different now. And then I’m going to kill the man who tried to kill her.”
“Who is he?”
“You don’t need to know. He’s a terrorist, I suppose. I mean, I assume that’s what he does now.”
“This is connected to your agency—”
“I don’t work for them anymore.”
“You. And her. You retired once from it—”
“The war wasn’t over then.” Devereaux made a smile that might have meant anything. “Even your magazine says the war is over. Peace and love. The triumph of reason. Men have ceased their quest for domination over other men. Pax Americana, and every day is now officially December twenty-fifth.”
“You don’t believe in what you see?”
“I don’t care.”
“I want her to be back; I love her,” Mac said.
“I thought you did,” Devereaux said. “Let me see her.”
“What if it’s the wrong thing? To let you see her?”
“I won’t hurt her.”
“You said that before.”
“That was before I died,” Devereaux said. He turned from the window and looked at the editor. He smiled as if he regretted his words and wanted to apologize for them. There was something in his eyes and in the smile that touched Mac. Something rueful and very honest.
“What are you now? A reborn Christian?”
“No. I’m just alive again but I remember my previous life.”
“She can’t be hurt—”
“I love her,” Devereaux said. In his previous life, he would not have spoken because he thought all words were lies. He was growing used to words. He could reach out into the world and talk. Everything was changed now, he had lost so much, even a fine, simple hatred for Henry McGee. Henry just had to be killed, that was all, it was like killing the bear that time in the woods on the mountain above Front Royal. He wanted the bear to go away but the bear was lazy or crazy or something and the bear became a threat and he had to kill the bear.
“For Christ’s sake, what am I supposed to do?”
Devereaux stared at Mac and felt the pain in the words. He waited.
Mac fumbled for a piece of paper on his desk. He held it out.
Devereaux looked at the paper. He handed the paper back to Mac.
“You’re going there?”
“Yes.”
“Let me go with you,” Mac said.
“No. I’m going to take her out of there. I don’t really trust Krueger at all.”
Mac bit his lip. “I don’t like him but I don’t much like most medical people.”
“He’s a druggist. Rita won’t get better. Just more addicted. Dependent.”
Mac said, “What are you going to do?”
“Where do you live?”
“In town. I live alone in a big house.”
“Is it big enough?”
Since Margaret died, he had lived in a town house on Rhode Island Avenue. The daughter was married and had three kids and lived in Santa Barbara. He sometimes flew out to the Coast at Christmas. New York wanted to make sixty-three the mandatory retirement age at the magazine. They might even try to buy him out before then, give him a golden parachute, turn over his office to one of the pastel people sitting out there. When he walked out the door for the last time, he had it all planned: He would go to the lobby bar, drink four giant martinis even though it was the middle of the day, go home to the town house, and blow his brains out with the army Colt .45 he had kept from service days.
He wrote down the address and handed it to Devereaux. As he had done before, Devereaux stared at it, memorized it, and handed the paper back to Mac. “I’ll bring her to your house when I get her.”
Mac nodded. He felt strangely exhilarated in that moment. She was important and this would be an important thing. Devereaux had already infected him with the life-celebrating sense of doing something important again. There were only a few points left in the world — the grandchildren growing into a strange, tanned breed of Californians, still showing some affection for the funny pale grandfather of the East, but that would pass, one point; point two was Margaret’s grave in Larchmont; point three was the magazine; and what the hell was the other point? Maybe a giant double martini in the bar at the Willard. Life was boring. Now it would be important again, for a little time.
Mac said, “You’re going to kidnap her.”
“Yes.”
“And bring her to my house?”
“It’s safe. I doubt Dr. Krueger would think you betrayed him. In my experience, he isn’t very smart about a lot of things.”
“He treated you?”
“He put me on a variation of lysergic acid. I recognized the hallucinations. It was the stuff they tested at Aberdeen Proving Ground in the early sixties, though in a safer dose. I wasn’t completely out of my mind, just mildly so. There was heroin as well, I’m pretty sure of that.”
“Why are you sure?”
“I was in Asia for five years, Mac.”
“Is he doing that to her?”
“Sure,” Devereaux said. He said it without any special inflection.
“Krueger will get the police after you.”
“Perhaps. Everything can be arranged if you know the people who arrange things.”
“So you’re still a spook?”
Devereaux smiled. “No. That’s what I was. Now I’m something else.”
“What? What else have you become?”
“The man who loves Rita Macklin,” Devereaux said.
17
The nameless girl was waiting for him when he entered the glittering bar.
He sat down next to her and signaled for a Paddy without ice. He watched the girl in profile. A part of him admired her — she was very cool, she betrayed neither eagerness nor nervousness. He could have used a girl like her. Maureen Kilkenny was pretty good, but he wondered if Maureen could have pulled off something like this — to set out to hire a man like himself by using his own weapons against him.
Another part of him was merely waiting for the moment he would put the barrel of a .45 in her mouth and let her taste the metal for a moment before he pulled the trigger and blew off the back of her head. It would come. Matthew O’Day had every certainty of that.
“Well?” she said at last when the barman moved away. She turned to look at him. Her eyes were flat with cunning.
“You and your fellas put me in a bad way. And did you have to kill Brian? There was no point to that, just senseless.”
“There’s a point to everything,” Marie Dreiser said.
“The problem is you’ve pretty well destroyed my cell, at least for the time being,” Matthew O’Day said. “The coppers raided the farm, they got everyone. No tellin’ how long they’ll be interred. You didn’t hafta bring the whole bloody Garda down on us to get our attention.”
“They didn’t arrest the girl, Maureen. So that’s one. And you’re two. Now one more man, a younger man. Brian was too young to be useful. Someone with a bit of polish, a bit of manners.”
“God, you’re a cool bitch,” Matthew said.
“Listen, love, this isn’t a game. I tried to tell you that Tuesday,” Marie said. Her hand grasped the sleeve of his tweed coat. “Everyone assembles Sunday morning in London.”
“How did you know Maureen got away?”
“We know a lot of things.”
“You’re in with the bloody cops.”
“Tuesday we were SAS, today we’re policemen.” She smiled. “You just can’t get over the fact that we’re very good.”
“But who are you? Who the bloody hell are you?”