He had scrambled at the sandy earth to bury the child; he had said prayers that were only words to him. No, they told him, do not do this.
They had taken the body of the boy from him, placed it on leaves and grass, and they had burned it.
May his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.
They sang their songs against his prayers.
The woman was too sick to pray, to sing, to cry. To see her son turned to ash and float away in clouds of smoke rising from the clearing. They had been kind to them, strangers in their midst. The village headman was a Viet Cong, but that was only politics. The bombs fell all day.
She had been so sad, grown from a child to a woman by her grief. Her baby, her baby, she crooned to herself, turning her face to the wall of the hut.
No, it will be all right, he had said. But her sadness was killing her.
Only the second child brought her back to life. Only the second child gave her a new sense of hope.
A beautiful child.
Tunney’s child.
9
When Devereaux awoke, it was nearly noon, and despite his instructions to the desk and the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, he had been awakened twice by maids who wanted to clean the room. He had told them to go away both times but the subsequent sleep had been that much less restful for his feverish mind and his exhausted body.
Still, there was nothing more to do; he had to get out of the hotel and down to Washington. During the last hour of sleep, he had dreamed of Rita Macklin.
Hanley had given Devereaux a photograph of the reporter from the article on her “adventures with FBI agents” in the New York Times. She had guessed correctly that the man named Smith was not really “Smith” and that he had produced phony identification; but she had affiliated the burglars with the wrong federal agency.
He had studied the photograph briefly before falling into bed. He had dreamed of other times at first — one dream piled on another, faster and faster — and then the dreams had died as a deep blackness descended over the vision of his mind. He had been an agent with R Section for fifteen years, since they recruited him out of Columbia University where he had taught Asian politics and history. He had been moved by some sense of idealism then, by both a vague patriotism that had been stirred in him by President Kennedy and a belief that problems begat solutions, that by working at difficulties one solved them.
He had a heavy load of dreams to drag around with him now, from capital to capital, from room to room in anonymous hotels. He had killed twelve men in those fifteen years, each killing (except the first) done without anger, without remorse. Killings that needed to be done for the sake of the mission.
He had to dream those faces of dead men; and dream the other deaths he saw; and dream the agents from the Opposition he had faced in his time; and dream the innocent ones, always the innocent ones, caught in the deadly game without understanding it or escaping it.
Along the way, patriotism had not served him well, nor had any vague sense of idealism or faith in final solutions. Only a stubborn sense of his own survival had pulled him through because he never asked the final question of himself.
For a moment after he awoke, Devereaux lay in the tangle of sheets, listening to the sounds of the city beyond his window. In these rooms, so uniform and clean and bare in their modernity, he always awoke wondering where he was for a moment and then wondering at what stage of the game he was.
Rita Macklin. She had a thin, attractive face, wide green eyes and prominent cheekbones; a generous mouth that was not smiling in the photograph.
Hanley had wanted him to run to Florida ahead of Tunney’s release. It was typical of Hanley to throw him headlong into a problem without any idea of how Devereaux was supposed to get out.
He could have argued with Hanley but it would have been pointless. The bureaucrat would have bristled, become stubborn, cited regulations, cited his authority. It would have blown up if he had tried to explain it to Hanley. But Devereaux would do it his own way, nonetheless.
He pushed his feet off the bed and sat for a moment, staring bleakly at the floor and his feet and at the prospect of the day to come, and then he got up and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.
Twelve minutes later, he was out of the room, his bag in hand.
Two hours after that, he got off the shuttle at National Airport in Washington, D.C. Hanley, he thought with satisfaction, would not have approved.
He stopped at a bank of telephone booths in the waiting room and removed a small code box from his baggage. He eschewed gadgets but when the National Security Agency had come up with this gimmick a year ago — after five years of research, arm-twisting, and coordination — he had acknowledged its usefulness. He dialed an 800 number and waited as the relays were completed. Finally, a voice identified herself as an operator; in fact, the voice was made by a machine. He spoke three words and four digits. Another relay was tripped. Then he held the code box up to the receiver and pressed the button. The box emitted a high-pitched whine that triggered still another relay and this time, a real human voice.
Devereaux wanted two telephone numbers. He gave the names to the woman and she gave him the numbers. They were not listed in any telephone book.
Devereaux broke the connection and replaced the black box in his bag.
He dialed Rita Macklin’s home telephone number and waited while her phone rang fourteen times. Then he hung up and dialed the second number.
“W.I.S., Kaiser,” came the male voice.
“Rita Macklin.”
“Who is it?”
“You don’t get a name,” Devereaux said.
“She isn’t here.”
“When’s she gonna be here?”
“She’s out of town for a day or two.”
“Okay, I’ll call back.”
“You leave your name, I can get a message to her.”
“I don’t even know you.” Devereaux hung up. Out of town. It was worth the risk.
He arrived in Bethesda in a rented car in late afternoon and drove past the apartment complex on Old Georgetown Road twice. On the second pass, halfway up the street from the apartments, he saw the Agency car, with two men in it.
He pulled down a side street, parked the car, and got out. He crossed the street, went down to a second crossing, and then, abruptly, started across a small open lot that led to a stand of trees. He descended the slight knoll to the concrete parking lot of the apartment building. He went in and punched an elevator button after reading her apartment number on the mailbox: R. Macklin.
The halls were empty; Devereaux thought the Agency had been too frightened by its last encounter with Rita Macklin to have a man in the building itself.
He found the door of her apartment and entered it within seconds. The apartment was empty and still in disarray. Some of the books remained stacked on the floor, not yet replaced on the shelves.
In the little kitchen, reached by pushing through swinging doors trimmed with painted flowers, a jar of peanut butter sat on the table. There was always a jar of peanut butter on the table in the apartments of single people, Devereaux thought. He had gotten into Arthur Bremer’s apartment in Milwaukee the night Bremer shot George Wallace. He got there before the FBI, before the police, and among the few scattered, confused furnishings, he remembered seeing a peanut butter jar on the kitchen table.
Milk in the refrigerator; a can of coffee. A jar of instant coffee, nearly empty. White bread. Ginseng tea in a jar.
Devereaux always searched the kitchen first. It was the last place touched by professional burglars, the first place searched by those who wanted information about the person who lived there.