“Drug dealing is also a crime. The jails and the parks are full of dealers.”
“Dr. Krueger was found in his study. He was hallucinating. He is now in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, in the psychiatric ward. They say he took LSD, they don’t say how much, they don’t even know if his sanity will return. He stabbed himself, they said, he stabbed himself in the palm of his left hand with some kind of spike, the sort they use in offices. The police found that in his study as well.”
“Those who live by the sword,” Devereaux said.
“You’ve become a philosopher. The director of the sanitarium where you… abducted Miss Macklin… he identified you.”
“And Dr. Krueger. We did it together.”
“And Dr. Krueger then decides to OD on LSD.”
“Did they find drugs in his house?”
“A lot of them. A cornucopia of pharmaceuticals. But he is a doctor.”
“He’s a drugstore with two feet,” Devereaux said.
“God, you are a bastard, a murderous bastard,” Hanley said. “It’s good we’ve separated you from Section. You’ve gone too far.”
“Too many times.”
There was frustration in Hanley’s voice and in the tremble of his hand.
The barman came up.
Hanley said, “Beefeater martini, straight up. With an olive,” he said.
The barman turned away.
“It’s not even noon yet,” Devereaux said.
“You’ve interrupted my lunch hour.”
“No. It’s your turn.”
“We’ve cleaned up the mess you’ve made. You knew we would.”
“Yes.”
“We can’t be caught in a scandal. You’re blackmailing Section.”
“My loyalty is unquestioned,” Devereaux said.
Hanley frowned at the sarcasm.
The martini came and Hanley sipped it. It wasn’t the same as the martini he had every day at lunch in his usual place where they always made him a well-done cheeseburger with onion and a martini and a little kosher dill on the side. He had taken to onions in recent years. Hanley loved his routine and felt lost without it today.
“Where is Miss Macklin?”
“Safe.”
“But where?”
Devereaux stared at him. “It’s none of your business. Your business is giving me a trail to Henry McGee.”
“I told you yesterday that he didn’t exist.”
“That was yesterday.”
That was the morning when the police found the raving Dr. Krueger in the study of his home. That was the morning of inquiries from police about a former patient of Dr. Krueger’s named Devereaux who had been released the day before from hospital and who had appeared with Dr. Krueger at a private sanitarium about eight P.M. the previous evening and secured the release of another of Dr. Krueger’s patients. The police wanted to question someone in authority inside R Section and Hanley had pulled strings and blown whistles until the lower-level cops were squelched by the higher levels. There would be no inquiry; there would be no pursuit at any level. Until and unless Dr. Krueger recovered his senses and could tell coherently and believably how it was that he ingested a controlled substance at home and why his house was full of other controlled substances, including cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and even a small quantity of crack.
“I made a scan,” Hanley said.
“I don’t understand the term.”
“We’re in the computer age. There is too much information. It floats around the world like a cloud. A scan is the act of penetrating the cloud for a specific raindrop.”
“You’ve become poetic in your declining years.”
“The Irish special branch made known to the SAS in Britain the description of a suspected terrorist who killed another suspected terrorist in a public house in the west of Ireland. It was a ghastly crime in its details, involving sexual mutilation.”
“Why did it become a matter big enough to circulate to England?”
“Because of what happened two hours after this murder. Two hours later, a public house was damaged when a police car parked outside it was bombed. In the Republic of Ireland, not the north. Two policemen were killed and a number of people in the public house. Yes, the inevitable eyewitnesses said they saw a man who had visited the public house earlier. An American, they thought. They described him. Guess who he looks like? The man who had killed the terrorist earlier. And guess who they both looked like?”
“Henry McGee.”
“They don’t have a name because they don’t know he exists. They think he might be Irish or English. Being an American doesn’t seem to fit for them; apparently, Americans are supposed to be the victims of terrorism, never the perpetrators. But they routinely put the description on the scan for American eyes. I picked the description out of the scan. We should inform them.”
“We should not.”
Hanley stared at Devereaux for a moment. Then he looked around the large, dark room, Erin Go Bragh, said one sign on a wall, left from Saint Patrick’s Day. English Out said another, more heartfelt, scrawled on plaster. It was a dreadful saloon.
“Why did you choose this place to meet?”
“It has a front door and a back door. In case you weren’t friendly and had second thoughts. Besides, I like the beer.”
“You have caused me great professional discomfort. These are trying times for Section. Budgets are to be cut; manpower is to be cut. The world of espionage and intelligence is under siege because the world has become a nicer place.”
“So it seems. All those smile buttons in the seventies finally had some effect. Like prayers for the conversion of Russia that Catholic schoolchildren recited after Sunday mass in the fifties.”
Hanley didn’t know what to say. He looked at his drink. He looked at the wall filled with whiskey-company mirrors.
“So Henry McGee exists,” Hanley said. “More important, he seems to be involved in terror.”
“He has always been involved in terror. I tried to tell you that from the beginning. And he worked for R Section once and it would be a terrible embarrassment to Section to have a terrorist traced back to it. Especially at a time of budget cutbacks and such.”
“You are being sarcastic,” Hanley said.
Devereaux smiled. It unnerved the other man.
Hanley said, “We bit the bullet on that long ago. We went after him when he defected to the Soviets. We took our heat and we put him in prison. But he escaped and—”
“Yes. That’s the big and, isn’t it? He collaborated with us again. That’s the part Section can’t allow to get out. And it might get out as long as Henry McGee is alive and there’s a chance that someone might catch him. The Irish. Or the Brits. If SAS used some of their preferred methods of torture, they might accidentally trip across information they didn’t know Henry had. And where would that put you, Hanley?”
Why was this man shoving him into a corner? Hanley looked around wildly for a moment, as though he contemplated physical escape. But the doors were all there for the opening and closing. He could leave any time he wanted.
“You said he existed. You said he tried to kill you and Miss Macklin.”
“But you didn’t believe me for a long time. Now you believe me. And it frightens you.”
“I cannot authorize a sanction. We do not sanction people.”
“I know. It’s the reason we had to use boom boxes to attack Noriega in the Vatican embassy in Panama. When all else fails, make noise.”
“The business in Panama was botched from the beginning. That wasn’t the fault of R Section. The Langley firm fucked up that intelligence. He was their man, not ours.”
“But Henry is our man, Hanley, isn’t he?”
“What do you want? A piece of paper that says you have been hired by the government of the United States to find and kill Henry McGee, a former employee turned traitor twice?”