Hanley was the Second Man in R Section, a title made powerful by all that it did not say about his job, just as R Section itself, a complex cog in the sprawling intelligence establishment of the United States, was powerful in its peculiar, obscure way.
R Section was established in 1961 following the Bay of Pigs fiasco. President Kennedy had depended on the single accuracy of Allen Dulles and the CIA for the success of the invasion of Cuba, a plan hatched in the last Eisenhower year. The CIA had guessed wrong. R Section partially answered the question Kennedy had posed then: Who will spy on the spies? Who will gauge the accuracy of their information? Who will find their moles, their double agents? Who will be a check on their covert operations? Written into the budget of the Department of Agriculture, R Section became a field reporting service established to determine mundane matters like crop yields in the Warsaw Pact countries and grain expectations within the Soviet Union.
It performed these functions — and others that were never named. Hanley called the KGB the “Opposition.” He never called the CIA the “competition” but that was what it was. R Section and the other agencies under the umbrella of the intelligence establishment — including the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence Operations (which had its own espionage staff) — were all competing with each other for federal favors and moneys. There was no charter for R Section to mount the operation just launched in Tehran, but nonetheless it was part of Devereaux’s job.
“It’s been a long time,” said Hanley. He frowned. “I had no idea the drinks were so expensive here.”
Devereaux wrested a smile from his cold face. Hanley was notorious to the agents in the field. For twenty years, he had routinely eaten lunch in a small bar and grill down Fourteenth Street from the Department of Agriculture building in Washington where R Section kept its headquarters. The bar was like a hundred other cheap places clinging to life at the fringes of official Washington. Lunch was always the same for Hanley: a cheeseburger without onion and a dry martini, straight up. Hanley lived alone and had not bought a new suit for six years. He seemed the kind of man who carried a small change purse, though he did not.
“Yes,” Devereaux agreed. “An expensive drink on an expensive expense account. It makes the drink more enjoyable.”
Hanley made a face and sipped his rye. He always drank rye in New York because he had decided ideas about the city, gleaned from a childhood of watching movies about it at the neighborhood movie house in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where he was raised. New York was fixed in his memory at a time just before the Second World War. He was a dull man, in appearance and speech, and he had never traveled outside the triangle of Nebraska, Washington, D.C., and Boston. He lived a vicarious life through the lives of the agents he directed in the elaborate network of R Section.
Devereaux closed his eyes for just a moment, as though sleep could be snatched in seconds. The vodka was not working for him; he knew nothing would work anymore to flog the tired body back to life. When he was like this, at the point of full exhaustion, he could only find a safe place, take a pill, and sleep around the clock.
“There is some urgency to this,” Hanley said then, because Devereaux’s appearance finally betrayed his exhaustion.
“So you said.”
“A priest named Leo Tunney. A Catholic priest.”
Devereaux waited, staring at Hanley, his mind a blank slate, waiting to be filled in.
“This developed in the past week but we didn’t know what to do. And then you came out of Tehran ahead of time.”
“I’m tired,” Devereaux said. “I need a rest, starting with a good sleep.”
“You drink too much. It takes your energy.”
“Can we forget the health message?”
“Tunney. Do you remember the name at all? You’re the man for this.” Hanley raised the glass of rye.
“There are still others in the section.”
“Tunney. You remember the name, don’t you?”
A reluctant flicker of recognition crossed Devereaux’s winter-hard face.
“Eight days ago,” Hanley continued. “He came out of the jungle in Thailand, literally walked into the embassy. Eight days.”
“There was a Leo Tunney in Asia,” Devereaux said. “Before my time. Around 1960, I think.” For a moment, he saw it clearly — the blood-red Asian sun across the paddies, men squatting in their pajamas, talking and smoking like farmers at rest the world over. He had never gone back to Asia after 1967, after he filed his famous memo on the coming Tet offensive that everyone in the bureaucracy ignored; because they were all embarrassed by it, they found it convenient never to return Devereaux to the East. It was like exile for Devereaux because he had considered Asia his home, the only home he had ever wanted to know; instead, for more than fourteen years, they had cast him adrift in this hostile Western sea, a cold world he had been born in but which he had never wanted to be part of. Now, as he remembered the name of the missionary priest, he was warm again, in Asia again.
“A missionary in Laos at first,” Devereaux said slowly, like a man describing a dream. “The Pathet Lao overran the village he was in, and he was either killed or captured. No one ever saw him again.”
“And?”
“He had been a stringer for the Agency. Very low-level stuff.”
“Yes. The Langley Firm used him.” Hanley was into all the jargon of the Washington intelligence establishment; it made him feel he was part of the field, part of the wider operation, and not just a clerk who ate his lunch every day in the same place and lived alone and wore neat, old suits. Thus, “Langley Firm” for the CIA.
“Out now? Tunney came out?”
“Yes. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”
“Where is he?”
“Langley is playing a game with him,” Hanley said in his dry, flat Nebraska voice. “They have him in a box.” “Box” was more slang, for “deep custody.” “Two days ago, a reporter found him in the Watergate Hotel with two of their field men.”
“Why do they have him? He can’t be working for them.”
“They moved him after the story came out but they can’t keep him buttoned up much longer. The news people are hounding them.” Hanley, who detested reporters himself, seemed pleased however by the thought of discomfort in the senior branch of the espionage service.
“And what am I supposed to do?”
“Devereaux, you can see the question as plainly as we can. Why did he come out? How? What does he know? And why did Langley keep him under wraps for more than a week?”
“Was there a peep when he came out? In Bangkok?”
“A UPI stringer. Talking to one of the men in the embassy, the acting ambassador at the time. Taubman.”
“Victor Taubman. Still in service.” Devereaux spoke the name softly because the memory was tinged again with nostalgia for other days in Asia.