“Taubman told the stringer; there was a wire story, an inquiry for more from the New York Times to their Japanese bureau… but then nothing. We suspected Langley had him in a box, the reporter at the Watergate confirmed it. But why on earth?”
“He has something they want to know.”
“Yes.”
“Yet that wouldn’t be logical either. If he had something good, Langley wouldn’t have drawn attention to itself by keeping him in a box. And if it was something against them, they would have erased him.”
“Then what is it?”
Devereaux stared at Hanley, waiting for the computer of brain, memory, senses, to tell him. “He hasn’t told them yet. They don’t know what he wants to tell them.”
“Told them what?”
“And we don’t know. They know one thing and they aren’t sure about the priest. Does he know their secret as well? Does he suspect it? Did he come out to tell the world? The Firm is still dealing in Southeast Asia.”
“They’re in Bangkok.”
“He came out to Bangkok. But before that, he was inside. Somewhere in Cambodia. Laos. Vietnam. China.”
“I can’t follow that.”
“If this man is really Leo Tunney who disappeared over twenty years ago, he came out now because he had to,” Devereaux said. “All the years of the wars, our war, their wars, he stayed. Now he comes out; it must mean he has something to tell us. But for eight days, he hasn’t told the CIA.”
“Yes, it could be as you say.” But Hanley seemed to doubt it. He bit his lip. Devereaux signaled to the waitress for another vodka.
At that moment, a woman came down the sidewalk past the bearded man who still stood weeping, his arms extended. She was dressed conservatively in a brown coat and a green dress and carried a small oil portrait against her bosom. She came to the table where they sat and showed the portrait to Devereaux.
It was a naked woman reclining on a couch in a lascivious pose, her legs open. The portrait bore the face of the woman who now held the painting for Devereaux.
“I’m an artist,” she said, without smiling, without any expression. “Do you want to buy this? I’ll sell it to you.”
Hanley drew back from the table; he felt afraid; he was not a man for the unplanned moment.
“No, take it away,” Devereaux said. His voice was gentle, full of a dirgelike sadness, as though he saw through the portrait, the woman, the moment and was cast into some bleak time that he could not speak of. His stony face was broken, was made not so hard, by the sound of his voice in that moment.
Hanley stared at him. The woman snatched up the portrait and started to walk away. Hanley tried to see the bleak moment in Devereaux’s eyes but they did not reflect any meaning. Devereaux did not show emotion, did not reveal himself.
What did he see now, Hanley thought.
Devereaux continued to stare for a moment, oblivious to the waitress placing a drink before him, oblivious to the street scene, to Hanley, to this moment.
In Tehran, one of the women who was part of the underground had hidden him for three days.
Two weeks later, he had watched them stone her to death in the courtyard outside the old embassy building.
They had buried her up to her neck and the mullah had read prayers and then the words of sentence were pronounced. All the while, she had cried and her eyes had been wide with horror and pleading. She would have done anything to end this moment; she would have betrayed them all. They began to stone her.
Some of the stones were large but most of them were small, like baseballs. She screamed when the first one struck her face and gashed it and then she kept screaming until finally, mercifully, she was not conscious anymore. But not dead. They kept stoning her until she was dead.
And he had watched it all, lying in the shadow of the ledge of the roof across the wide plaza. If he had had a machine gun then, he thought, he would have killed them all.
“Devereaux,” Hanley said.
Devereaux stared at him and finally saw him. New York made sounds around him. He had returned to the present moment but his memory was now a moment older, scarred one more time with the laceration of watching the woman die in Tehran; with the laceration of a woman selling a portrait of her nakedness; of a bearded man crying on the sidewalk.
“What do you want to do?”
“The Agency has him in Maryland. We know that much. They’re talking about moving him.”
“I wish we had moles who worked as effectively inside the KGB.”
Hanley said, like a disapproving schoolteacher, “We think they’re going to dump him. The news people are giving them too much heat. We think they’re going to move him to Florida. That’s where the motherhouse is. The Fathers of the Holy Word. At Clearwater, Florida. Soon.”
“Who’s in the box operation?”
“Rice. Do you know Rice?”
“I know of him. I’ve never crossed paths with him.”
“That’s what the computer said. Another reason to use you. We want you to go down. There’s some delicacy in this.”
“I have no reputation for delicacy.”
“There might be a trick here by Langley. Our side has been sending out feelers to the Opposition. To make an arrangement for a new partial SALT pact, defuse the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.”
“Politics.”
“The Firm is not pleased.”
“By SALT?”
“It’s not that formal a proposal yet. The President wants it. I think détente does not please Langley at all.”
“They’re right.”
“It’s not for us to take political sides, Devereaux. The Section has no political position.”
“Bullshit.” He sipped the vodka. “It was a political creation from the first day.”
“There is a game here,” Hanley said. “Tunney launched the game but perhaps it is out of control.”
“Like a member of the Mafia who decides to go to the FBI?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re dreaming, Hanley. They would have wasted him in Bangkok.”
“Crudely put but not necessarily true. Taubman found him, let the world know he was alive.”
“People die.”
“I still think—”
“What can a man like Tunney possibly know?”
“Why have they kept him for more than a week?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did they risk a lot of embarrassment to send two agents to search a reporter’s apartment and when they were confronted, to actually beat her up?”
“Perhaps she hurt their feelings?”
“Sarcasm, Devereaux. It won’t play.” He stared at the agent, at the crosshatched lines on his rugged face, at the gray eyes that held Hanley in a pitiless gaze. They did not like each other, master and agent, the head of the network and this man who was but a small web in the network. But they had been effective together.
“The Agency fumbles from time to time,” Devereaux said. “They protect secrets that aren’t secrets; they mount foolish operations that aren’t necessary.…”
“Why are you fighting me on this?” Hanley asked.
“Because you’re offering too many suppositions based on your own prejudices,” Devereaux said. “Tunney. What about him? He might just be an accident, like a volcano.”
“Volcanoes are the end result of movements in the earth.”
“Do you think the Chinese kept him all this time, is that it, Hanley? Some sort of Manchurian Candidate, set to blow us up at a given moment?”
Hanley said, “That’s unlikely.”
“Everything you’ve said is unlikely because the central base of your suppositions is the unlikeliest matter of all — that Leo Tunney came back from the dead.”