She looked up. The ship creaked and groaned against the tumult of the lake. Her eyes were shining; she stared at him; did he understand?
Devereaux said nothing.
“ ‘They are evil who wish to acquire this journal. They want it in order to suppress its secrets. These Americans. I come from this same race, but I have grown to detest it. Americans! I detest them, I detest their smug hypocrisy, their stupidity, their selfishness and cruelty, their contempt for all but themselves. Am I a traitor then, to Rice, to the others? What would I be a traitor to? To a cause, or to my nature? All these men are evil. Governments oppress; it is written, it must be so. What does Rice want to know? Are there any men in the world more cruel than the Pathet Lao was to me? Or the Vietnamese soldiers who march along the road with their Russian guns and kill old women in the paddies for sport, even as the Americans did? Or let me tell Rice of the Khmer Rouge coming to power in Cambodia. Of how the highways were lined with thousands of the dead, stinking in the sun, and of the crucifixions in the villages. The pain, the screams, the anguish, the bodies hanging and writhing, begging for death as a favor. No dignity left. That is why the Romans used it; it killed but it did far more. It made a coward of the victim in the last moment of his life, so that he would make a coward of all who could hear his anguish: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.’ ”
Again, Rita looked up; she stared at him.
Devereaux gazed back at her for a moment before he spoke: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me,” he translated.
Her hands trembled as she read on again, aloud, in the creaking cabin as the boat tumbled into the waves. A record of death and destruction, of starvation seen and felt. Devereaux listened and did not move.
Page after page. She turned them, reading, pausing, looking up. But not another word from the man with gray eyes, seated across from her.
“This is the last part,” she began. “He must have finished just before he died. This part was written after McGillicuddy was killed.”
Devereaux put his hands on the table. He looked at her so long that she had to look away, but his eyes were still on her.
“ ‘Phuong died in July but I had been aware of these other matters much earlier. There had been rumors from the other villages. Phuong left me alone, without family or hope, and I could not bear it. I could not survive alone. I did not want to survive alone. And yet some instinct in me moved me; now I must go home; now I must end this life in the jungle. And yet, I could not leave just yet. I had to see these things the villagers talked about. To them, they were simply more guns or more tools of war. But I, I was a watcher, I was trained to understand the difference between guns and missiles. I knew what they were building in the jungles of Cambodia. I knew why there were other white men in the jungle and why they spoke another language. I knew who they were.…’ ”
She stopped.
“So,” Devereaux said finally, breaking the spell. “Tunney saw something after all; he had a secret after all.”
She read on, slowly, stumbling over some of the words. There were missile sites, twenty in all, and Tunney described them in detail so that there would be no mistake that he saw what he saw. There were Soviet advisers at the sites. The sites were here and there, in this place and that. Tunney numbered them prosaically, the sites he saw and the sites he was told about. The good watcher. The Agency man.
The villagers said the sites would be in operation by March, at the end of the rains. March. Four months from now.
Missile sites. Nuclear missile sites. Placed in a ring and aimed, unmistakably, at China.
Twenty sites in the necklace. Surface-to-air and ground-to-ground missiles. Offensive; defensive.
She closed the red cover of the journal and put it on the table between them.
They did not speak.
Devereaux stared at the book and then reached for the bottle of brandy. He poured a little into the cup. He took a sip, then offered the cup to her.
“The link,” he said at last. “Everything makes sense now.”
“How?”
“Tunney knew. Tunney knew,” he said. “The Soviets were afraid he knew of the missiles. Russian weapons, manned by Vietnamese crews. Just like in Cuba in 1962. The Catholic Church was pushed into a position of using its agents on the Soviets’ behalf because they had already agreed to recognize Soviet influence in Asia in exchange for the Concordance.”
She gaped at him.
“The Agency was being used. At first, it had wanted Tunney’s intelligence. But then it was called off by the National Security Adviser on behalf of InterComBank.”
“What are you going to do with all this?”
“Tell you part,” he said. “The part you don’t know. And keep part of what you have told me.”
He did then, as they sat at the table in the cabin of the boat, the sea pounding against the wooden hull. Devereaux told her about InterComBank and its tangled history with the Agency going back to 1954. He told her again about the National Security Adviser and his friendship with the chairman of InterComBank. It was information he had plucked from the Section’s computers after asking the right questions.
“Everything goes back to Fraser,” she said at one point. “He is death.”
“He can’t be touched in any of this,” Devereaux said. “When you write your stories or whatever you do, you won’t be able to touch him.”
“But you have proof—”
Proof, he thought. Pieces of paper. “I have no proof. I cannot testify for you or admit anything for you.”
“Loyalty.”
“I’m a cipher,” Devereaux said. “An agent in place and that’s all. I draw the rules to survive but in everything else, I follow their rules. When you write whatever you write, I don’t even exist. Do you understand?”
“No,” she said, her voice hard. “They killed Kaiser.”
“They would have come after him in any case. They had to. In the end, he understood the conspiracy better than anyone.”
“Kaiser,” she said stubbornly. “He cared.”
“And betrayed you.”
“Yes. I can’t understand that.”
“It can happen to any of us,” Devereaux said.
She stared at him and understood.
Rita took his hand in hers and held it, then looked into the gray eyes to see if she could fathom the truth.
“I gave you my secrets,” she said.
“They’re still secrets.”
The steady chugging of the engine was flatter now; the sea was calmed.
She kissed him.
Secrets, she thought. And then she thought of him on the beach as he had been that morning, holding her.
“No more lies,” she said.
He kissed her in return then, held her in his arms as he had before. They huddled against the chill in the wet cabin, beneath the blanket. They held each other for a long time, in the creaking cabin.
Morning streaked a red sky across the lake’s vast horizon.
Red came down from the pilothouse, his eyes bleary and watery.
Rita lay asleep in Devereaux’s arms, wrapped in blankets.
Devereaux looked up, his own face drawn, reflecting the ashen color of early dawn.
“Getting some squawks from the coast guard on the radio. Real mysterious. Keep talking about patrol boats, calling them in and all. Now, I know the coast guard and they’re not about to stir their lazy asses on a morning like this unless there’s something up.”
“Where are we?” Devereaux said.
“Off Waukegan, about four miles. That’d be about forty-five miles above the Chicago breakwater.”
“I suppose we ought to land here.”
“They found your car probably.” Red glanced at Rita. “She all right?”