On the morning it began, Devereaux was outside on the flat ground beyond the cabin, splitting firewood against the threat of snow later in the day.
He had not expected Hanley because Hanley had never come to this place in the Virginia mountains where Devereaux had his house. “Not a house exactly,” Hanley had once joked to the Old Man. “More like the place where Devereaux goes to ground.”
The mountain was not very high but it had the virtue of being deserted, penetrated by a single-track dirt road that steeply scaled the hill to the place where Devereaux’s house was buried in the forest. From the simple cabin you could see the only approach to the mountain, up the only road, but the one who approached could not see you at all.
Devereaux had put down his ax when the black car began its slow ascent off the main highway that led to the little town of Front Royal, snug at the entrance of the Blue Ridge Mountains six miles beyond.
The car worked slowly up the snow-packed road. Once it nearly slid sideways into a shallow ravine broken with birch and pine trees. When it seemed certain that the black car would reach the summit of the mountain, Devereaux went inside the cabin. He removed the Remington double-barrel from its place on the stone-covered wall and broke it open. He shoved two red shotgun shells into the chambers and closed the piece. He took a box of similar shells from a drawer in a small pine cabinet on the wall.
Devereaux waited outside for the car grinding up the treacherous road. It stopped fifty feet from the cabin. After a moment the rear door opened. Devereaux cocked the shotgun.
It began to snow gently.
Hanley closed the rear door and made his way across the slippery ground to the cabin. He wore a black overcoat, a small black hat, a white woolen muffler and he wore black gloves. His face was pale and even the exertion of walking across the sloping, uncertain ground to the cabin did not give it color.
At ten feet, he stopped as though he saw Devereaux’s shotgun for the first time. He blinked and did not speak.
Devereaux uncocked the rifle and pointed to the car.
“He’s Henderson,” Hanley said, understanding the silent question. “He hasn’t the faintest idea what this is all about.”
“And me?”
“No. He doesn’t know it’s even you. If I had known about that road, I would have insisted you meet me in Front Royal. Why don’t you improve it? A car can barely make it.”
“That’s the idea.”
“So this is where you come to ground.”
Devereaux said nothing. They stood beneath the shelter of a wooden porch roof on the bare, frozen ground. Hanley slapped his gloved hands together. “Are you going to invite me inside?”
Devereaux said nothing. He had worked for Hanley in R Section for nearly twenty years. The time had not softened Devereaux’s contempt for his control; nor softened Hanley’s perplexed distrust of the agent he ran. They existed in a symbiotic balance that teetered back and forth on a thin wire, suspended above a black gorge without a net.
“Then should we stand out here and freeze to death?”
Hanley attempted to force a smile as he said it, but Devereaux did not respond for a moment. Then he said: “Why did you come here?”
“It must have been important.” Hanley said it with a note of sarcasm. The mountain was winter silent in the falling snow; the larger animals were asleep or dead; the deer had gone to lower ground; the bears snored in filthy dens; the birds were gone; only the ground squirrels and the possums, still foraging for food, left tracks in the mountain snow.
Devereaux decided. He held the shotgun loosely in his right hand. He pushed against the rough wood door. Hanley followed. The room was lit at each end by two small lamps and illuminated by a fireplace where logs spit and crackled and the flames licked at the edge of the stones.
Devereaux turned and waited while Hanley carefully removed his gloves and took off his hat and coat. He folded the coat precisely and laid it across a table behind the large red couch that faced the fire. Devereaux stood at the stone wall and put the shotgun back on the wall. He turned to a small kitchen-bar and poured a glass of vodka.
Hanley was thin, precise, small. His hands were calm and white, like ivory sculptures. His fingers were very long. When he spoke, his flat Nebraska voice surged without emphasis, as though there could be no depressions or elevations coming from the man. He was a winter pond, flat and still.
“We’ve had a probe from someone in the Opposition.”
Devereaux did not speak. He sipped the Polish vodka from the glass; the bottle had been cold an hour before but it had warmed while he had worked outside. The vodka warmed him.
“One of their boys,” Hanley said. He did not sit down because Devereaux stood. “One of their boys wants to become one of ours.”
Devereaux put down the glass. He was in his mid-forties but his body was still large, still strong, still carried a sense of power. His face was hard, his eyes were gray and flat and unrevealing. His face was not handsome because it was lined and because of the hardness in it; and yet there was something compelling in it. His hair was mostly gray, as it had been since he was twenty. His fingers were flat and his hands were wide. He did not speak very often because all of his life was part of a deceit and speech betrayed a person too often to be trusted. When he spoke, his words cut like glass; they were remorseless.
He spoke now. “Why did you come here?”
“Because we have a little matter.”
“Asia,” Devereaux said. “You remember that little matter?”
“In time. Everything in time. It’s working.”
“Is it?”
“I haven’t forgotten my promise.”
The promise had come at the time of the Mitterand business. Quid pro quo; Hanley owed him and in his position of acting director of R Section, he had been able to pay his debt to Devereaux.
Devereaux had been an old Asian hand in the beginning; Devereaux had been recruited out of Asian Studies at Columbia University in New York; Devereaux had served in Asia during the Vietnam War until he made a mistake in 1968. He told the truth about the coming Tet Offensive and it was understood that his usefulness was over. He had been sent home and cast adrift in the Western world he despised. Only Asia had been home to him; only the warm jungle nights and the chattering of people in a dozen dialects and languages; only the elaborate courtesy that masked an elaborate deceit, which in turn finally revealed simple truths — and he had been exiled from that world for fifteen years. Until the Mitterand matter when Hanley had finally been in a position to promise him that the exile was over; that he could go back to the only world he had ever wanted as home.
Hanley had promised. Hanley said he had not forgotten the promise.
“I don’t care about your probe from the Russians,” Devereaux said slowly. “We made a little bargain between us.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” Hanley said, and they both knew then that it was a lie.
Devereaux did not speak.
“The Russian business,” Hanley said.
For a long moment, there was silence. What did it matter if Hanley had promised? Or that he lied now? Or that Devereaux could not go back to Asia? The Section had trapped them both in time. Hanley was trapped as his control and Devereaux was trapped as an agent; twenty years and they could only share a lie. Perhaps it was enough. Devereaux stared at the white-faced man with thinning hair and long, pale hands and realized he felt pity for him.
Or perhaps it was for himself.
“The defector. Does he want an assignment?”
Hanley shook his head. “He wants to come out of the closet.”
“Is he in a position to dictate the terms?”
“Not really,” Hanley said. “But we are curious.”
“Why?”