For a moment, both men stared at each other without speaking.
Devereaux thought again how cold it was although it was really warm for New York in October. Why was he cold? His feet felt numb beneath the table. Perhaps it was only the tiredness that had taken over his body now, the memories that had come back to him in his exhaustion like a recurring fever, wounding him until he wanted to put them to sleep inside himself.
“Here.” Hanley removed an envelope from his suit pocket and put it on the table. “Instructions.”
“Beginning tomorrow.”
“Beginning now, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll leave tomorrow.” He would not tell Hanley why, that he could scarcely stay awake, that an overwhelming sense of despair and dread was visiting him in these last moments of exhaustion. He needed a hotel room, a bed, darkness, sleep.
Devereaux started to pick up his glass of vodka, then put it down. He felt nothing now; no taste or sensation from outside his body could penetrate the veil of gloomy tiredness. He took the envelope and pushed himself out of his chair. The single suitcase of canvas and leather, crushed and old, was next to the chair. He picked it up without a word.
Hanley began to speak again but Devereaux, staggering like a drunkard, had started off. He wanted to impress the mission upon him, but instead said nothing as the waitress approached with the bill. He watched Devereaux turn the corner, lost in the crowd of strangers passing back and forth, disappearing like a shadow at evening when everything became a shadow.
7
The matter had been complicated from the beginning and the Assistant Director had accepted that; it was all part of the job and, if the truth were known, part of his private relish for the game he thought the job really was. People like Rice, now sitting across the desk from him, looking unhappily out the single window of the large room, would never have understood this quality in the A.D., who appeared to be a dull bureaucrat of few words and fewer opinions. The A.D. had risen in the Central Intelligence Agency because he knew when to keep his mouth shut and how to shift the blame for failure or garner the praise for success — and because he knew enough never to let them know he actually loved the complexities of it all, the conspiracies within conspiracies, the secrets.
Sunday in Langley, a faceless Washington suburb that broke the rolling countryside with too many official buildings. The fame of the town — some said, infamy — came from its status as home of the CIA, which occupied an immense, modernistic, low building that seemed to be supported on spider legs. It looked like a big motel.
It was not unusual for the A.D. to be in his big corner office on Sunday; he often came down after church because Sunday seemed the proper day for spies. The corridors were empty, the offices locked, but the message rooms were manned and the cables still came in, word by painful word, from all the watchers and counters and full agents all around the world. Came to him, alone, on Sunday, in the big corner office. He would have been down on Sunday in any case, even if the Tunney matter had not taken a new, ominous turn.
The problem presented by the reappearance of Father Leo Tunney in Bangkok nine days before was in danger of exploding out of control. The problem was no longer an intellectual exercise, no longer amusing and harmless like the Sunday crossword puzzle. The problem grew by the moment, a hopeless cancer in the terminal stage of illness.
Again, for emphasis, the A.D. let his carefully manicured hand fall on the front page of the Sunday Washington Post lying open on his teakwood desk. Rice watched the gesture and knew it was meant to be an indictment of the way he had handled the matter.
“The first mistake was three days ago,” the A.D. said. “How did you let this… this reporter find him? And in the Watergate?”
“We’ve used the hotel before. It’s a good, anonymous place, there’s—”
“And when she did find you, you let the damage go on and on. And Maurice—” The A.D. interrupted himself with silence. He couldn’t start talking about Maurice because it would make him angry. “This should not have been so damned difficult.”
It was not all Rice’s fault but someone would have to take the blame. In twenty-four years with the Agency, the A.D. had never done so.
“If Maurice was going to take her out, it should have been right away or not at all. You should have known that.”
Rice ran his hand through his thick brown hair. He was not a tall man but he had large shoulders and a square, earnest face that was beguiling in its simplicity of expression. He listened as though he had never before heard what he was hearing; it was one of his most useful tricks of appearance. “Maurice. I think a lot of blame here accrues to Maurice making the wrong decision in the field.” He felt the burden the A.D. was shifting to him; he was already beginning the process of shifting it to the absent Maurice. Maurice had decided to go to Rita Macklin’s apartment; Maurice had searched and stupidly not discovered that Macklin had gone to her office; Maurice had been caught in the act of burglary and Maurice had made the decision to bluff it out with his false National Security Agency card and the standard “search warrant” always carried on burglaries.
“What are we going to do to control the damage now?” the A.D. asked.
“We’ve had Tunney buttoned up in Bethesda Naval since the Watergate incident. He’s under fairly heavy medication.” He paused. “His condition could get worse.”
Both men understood the suggestion. The A.D. placed the tips of his fingers together to make a tent and stared again at the story on page one, which pieced together the reappearance of Leo Tunney with the business of Rita Macklin and continued with an analysis of the use of clergy and church organizations by the CIA in past years. Damage, the A.D. thought. And it was spreading.
“No. I don’t think so. If Tunney is permanently controlled now, there would be too many obvious connectors. And there are leaks that can’t be contained, like Taubman in Bangkok. He can’t recant. It’s just too late for a simple solution; maybe there never was time in the first place.”
“Not in Bethesda,” Rice persisted. “We could give him a carrier.”
The A.D. closed his eyes and leaned back in the big leather chair and contemplated it. The “carrier” Rice referred to was an assortment of capsules, bacterial or viral agents in pill or liquid form, or infections transmitted intravenously or absorbed through the skin. The carriers could result in a sudden, unexplained illness a week from now or a cancer six months from now — or a heart attack tomorrow.
“I don’t think so. Not now. It’s an option but not now. We intercepted a cable last night from the Vatican to their man at the United Nations. They’ve sent an emissary to see our patient. Too many, Rice; too damned many people are interested in this.”
And still, that was not all. The A.D. could not tell Rice that he had received a visitor in his home last night, who strongly implied that further inquiry by the press into the matter of Leo Tunney might bring grave damage to a certain long-standing arrangement between a banking conglomerate in New York City and the Agency. But what would be more damaging than Leo Tunney’s sudden death while in Agency custody?
“If we had only controlled him when he came out,” Rice said.
“How? We weren’t aware of… of any problems. Not at first. And our man in Bangkok didn’t box him until that meddler Taubman had already had him for twenty-four hours. Sending uncoded—damn him — uncoded messages about his great find straight back to Ambassador Do-Good and his other friends. They think the reappearance of Tunney is the best thing to have happened since Catholic relief set up a food chain for those refugee camps. ‘Leo Tunney will help focus the problem on the refugees,’ the Ambassador told Taubman. They think it’s all a game, a little publicity stunt. There wasn’t any way to handle Tunney in Bangkok, not as long as people like Taubman made it known that we had him in a box. A box with a thousand holes in it.”