Devereaux caught the blow on his arm and it numbed him for a moment. He stepped inside the lunge and drove his fingers into the big man’s throat. The big man went down hard and Devereaux caught him with a knee to the chin as he fell.
The big man was on his hands and knees, choking.
Devereaux went to the side door of the middle shack and kicked it in. The hinges were rusty; they made a squeak and the dry wood cracked with the force of the blow. The door banged open with a start.
Two rats, in the corner of the empty, dirty room, were startled by the light. One of them hissed; the other ran.
The moonlight was sufficient to distinguish forms in the shadows. An old chair stood by a boarded-up window.
The big man went inside and sat down on the floor.
“I’m bleeding,” he said quietly. The voice was hard, as hard as Devereaux’s own; he spoke as a surgeon speaks of a tumor, without emotion or pity.
“Who are you?”
“You know I can’t tell you.”
Devereaux waited.
The two men stared at each other, understanding what roles they would now have to play.
Devereaux felt the coldness envelop him, numb him, protect him. In a moment, he felt nothing and saw nothing but the problem at hand. The patient on the table.
“Who are you?” Devereaux said again, quietly. Sometimes even the professionals, like this one, understood that there was no point to delay, that they had to speak sooner or later, that pain could be so great that loyalty would be betrayed.
Some of them, given the chance, decided it was not worth it.
And others, like this one, had never taken pain before and so they could not understand how it broke all bonds, all loyalties, all secrets.
Devereaux brought the pistol barrel back down very hard against the right cheekbone. It broke and blood spurted anew from broken teeth. The head was a bad place to administer pain — there was a danger of killing accidentally but it was a psychological necessity, at the beginning, to let him taste his own blood.
Devereaux stepped on his left hand very hard.
The big man passed out. When he awoke, he retched on the dirty dry wood floor, staining his own clothing.
Devereaux said nothing for a moment.
They considered the silence. And then Devereaux kicked him precisely in the ribs beneath the sternum. The big man fainted again.
When he awoke the second time, Devereaux was still there, the silence was still around them, the pain was still throbbing through him.
The big man considered it again, from the standpoint of pain; pain made loyalty distant, made secrets seem less important: a brutal and direct principle.
But there was a certain strength to the adversary. He fought against the nausea and pain, he tried to fix his thoughts clearly.
“You should have gone away from this. Even now, you could go away from this. Walk away.”
Devereaux waited.
“You were warned.”
Devereaux stepped on the broken hand again. Pain like a burst of sunlight flooded the big man’s vision and then darkness interceded. In a moment — a minute later, an hour later — he awoke and nothing had changed. He understood now, as a professional, that nothing would change: not death, not escape, not an end to the pain.
“My name is Petersen.”
Devereaux stared at him impassively, standing away from him, waiting.
“I have responsibilities for global security for a bank.”
Devereaux waited still. He considered the voice, which was hard, and he considered the words. What was the truth, what was a lie? But that could be determined later.
The big man stared at him. “That’s the truth.”
Devereaux’s gray eyes were unyielding. “The truth is everything. You haven’t said everything.”
“This doesn’t involve you—”
“It involves me now. Why did you kill the priest?”
“He was a complication.”
“Both of them?”
“No. Not both of them.”
Devereaux waited, puzzled.
“Not both of them,” the big man named Petersen said.
“You killed Foley.”
“No. We followed him. I was behind him. And then this other man — came from nowhere. It was unseen.” The voice choked a moment and Petersen spit out blood on the dry floor. “Not one of our men. We weren’t supposed to kill anyone. It became complicated then.”
“You didn’t kill Foley.”
“No. We were following him.”
“Who killed him?”
“A man. We didn’t even know what he had done.”
“Who was it?”
Petersen shook his head and grimaced with pain. “A big man, too. He wore glasses. He had an umbrella, he bumped into—”
“Glasses?”
“You know, the kind without any rims. Old-fashioned glasses.”
“And blue eyes.”
“I didn’t see his fucking eyes, for Christ’s sake. I was a hundred feet behind him. It was raining.”
Denisov.
“Who are you?”
“I told you.”
“A bank, you said.”
“Yes.”
“What bank?”
“Look, you don’t want to be involved—”
Devereaux made a small movement.
Petersen’s voice broke. “Don’t hit me.”
“What bank?”
“InterComBank in New York.”
“Why? What did you have to do with Leo Tunney?”
“Everything is connected,” Petersen said. “You don’t want to examine this. You weren’t supposed to be here.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you say?”
“The second priest was a mistake. It should have ended with that.”
“You wanted to kill Tunney. You thought Tunney was in the confessional. You killed the wrong man.”
Suddenly, the pain welled up in Petersen and his eyes glazed. He reeled as though he would faint. He closed his eyes and blood foamed at his lips. He opened his eyes and hell remained: Devereaux; the room; silence.
“Yes. The wrong man,” Petersen said.
“Why did you want to kill him now?”
“I don’t know. I have orders.”
“That’s a lie. You said I wasn’t supposed to be here.”
“Yes.”
He knew the order from Hanley. Where was the leak? At what level?
“Who are you with?” Devereaux began again, patiently, probing like a dentist.
“InterComBank.”
“A cover,” Devereaux said. “You know too much about me. Don’t play games. Now is not the time.” Said patiently, an adult talking to a child.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why didn’t you just kill Rita Macklin? In her room? Shoot her on the beach?”
“We weren’t supposed to shoot her,” Petersen said. His voice had no tone; it was as flat as a shallow sea in a calm. “She was a reporter, that was more of a problem. We were going to feed her to the fishes.” He looked at Devereaux. “You were fucking her this morning. Maybe you would have taken the fall for her; maybe the Agency. It didn’t matter.”
“Sure, it mattered. Your outfit thought about everything until they panicked. I want to know who you work for.”
“I told you. I want to sit down. Can I sit down?”
Devereaux stared at him.
Petersen scrambled to his feet and took the chair and leaned against the back of it. His face was flushed still but the blood on his chin was congealing.
Devereaux stood in front of him, holding the pistol lightly in his hand.
“We didn’t even figure the big guy with the umbrella killed Foley until we read the paper the next day about him going crazy on the causeway. Then we figured it out. The big guy did the London Touch.”
London Touch. The trick of the trade developed by the Soviets first and most successfully used in London in the mid-1970s. Drugs secreted in a hypodermic needle that can be injected from the point of an umbrella on a London street. It was used to induce fatal heart seizures in various KGB targets in that city, including dissidents who were broadcasting anti-Soviet programs on BBC World Service as well as the CIA’s Radio Free Europe.