“I don’t follow that at all.”
“I stole the information. They’ve probably found the leak by now. It can only work for a couple of hours but it was enough. They know it was us, too, Hanley, so you can expect some flack. But I told you I could get them.”
Hanley blanched. “My God, Mrs. Neumann, are you crazy?”
“No guts, Hanley?” She was smiling in triumph.
“What will the Central Intelligence director tell the New Man?” Hanley asked, referring to the current head of R Section.
“Not a damned thing, if you ask me. Is CIA going to admit they were stupid enough in security to have the file ripped off right under their noses?”
“But how did you know what to ask for? I mean, in computer language?”
“I didn’t. I asked plainspeak,” Mrs. Neumann replied, falling into jargon. “And that’s the way they gave it to me.”
“But it was flagged—”
“Not for the National Security Adviser,” Mrs. Neumann said.
“My God, you can’t do that.”
“Can’t?” she rasped. “I just did it, didn’t I?”
“But the operation is over—”
“Look at it, Hanley. Knowledge is power.”
“You tempt like the serpent, Mrs. Neumann.”
She smiled.
He opened the file and began to read it slowly while Mrs. Neumann sat across from him and waited for him.
He read slowly for a long time. It was a strange thing about secrets, he realized; most of them were not important enough to be secrets at all.
And then there were secrets like the case file of an Irish national named Tomas Crohan who had been seduced into a little job for the OSS at the very lowest sort of level and who had been fortunately scooped up by the Red Army marching into Vienna in 1945.
Hanley felt confirmed as he read on. He had told Devereaux nothing. He had temporized; he had kept Devereaux on ice, even after the Soviet named Tartakoff had tempted the agency by offering to bring out Crohan. It didn’t matter what his original motive was, to keep Devereaux away, to force Devereaux to see that there was nothing more to be done in the Section. He had done the right thing, even if it was for the wrong reasons.
Crohan must never come out, if he was alive at all.
And Devereaux. Hanley had been right after all to do nothing and finally bring Devereaux back home. The bureaucrat inside him was satisfied with himself.
“Great stuff, isn’t it?” Mrs. Neumann said with the interest of a connoisseur.
“You handled this yourself, didn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“So no one else has seen it?”
“Do you take me for a complete idiot, Hanley?”
“No one must see it.”
“I’ll shred it in the corridor. I wanted you to read the whole business.”
“I find it scarcely credible,” Hanley said at last, closing the file.
Mrs. Neumann frowned. “Yes. Who would believe that we knew the Nazis were going to bomb Coventry in the war and did nothing about it for fear that we would be tipping the Germans that we had solved their Enigma code? A lot of people died for the sake of that secret.”
“And this one?”
“No one yet, have they?”
“Unless that British agent in Helsinki was murdered because of it.”
“Do you think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. In any case, Devereaux should be getting on a plane in the morning. I’m pulling him out.”
“And Tartakoff?”
“There was no work at the end. But I’m afraid we will have to leave him dangling.”
“Along with Crohan.”
Hanley frowned. “If he was still alive at all.”
17
The telephone rang in Devereaux’s room. He turned from the packed suitcase and went to the telephone on the built-in desk. He picked up the receiver and waited.
“Mr. Glass,” said the voice at the other end of the line.
“No. I’m afraid my name is Dixon.”
“I beg your pardon,” said the voice. The line was disconnected.
Devereaux replaced the receiver and stared at the black telephone for a moment. And the previous wrong number two weeks before had been for “Mr. Fellows.” It had begun with A and was following the Western Alphabet to Z. Except there should have been no more contacts from Tartakoff before he departed in the morning for the airport.
Hanley had been plain: “Come home.”
“Nothing is resolved.”
“Come home. Leave it. Let someone else sweep up the mess.”
“Tartakoff?”
“No.”
“Crohan?”
“It’s not our matter.”
“Why did someone kill the British agent?”
“I don’t know; I don’t care. Come out.”
He had felt liberated and a little guilty, like a child sent home from school before the class day was ended. Something had not been finished and yet he was being allowed to escape the trap, escape the city.
And now the call. Mr. Glass.
But there was no way to reach Hanley from here. Not with the police monitoring every call. Including the one from the liaison with Tartakoff.
Devereaux went to the window streaked with reminders of yesterday’s snow. The snow had been cleared again. Beneath the window was the construction pit where the police had found the body of Natali.
Two dead and no one understood why. Not Kulak the policeman, not Devereaux.
He touched the glass. It was warm.
Death and death. The policeman had been frustrated. Who had pulled him away from the matter?
Who was Tomas Crohan? And why had Hanley suddenly pulled him back after nearly nine weeks of silence?
This was never meant to be anything. Like the assignment in Jamaica. Devereaux was on ice. Devereaux was locked away in a forgotten closet somewhere because he had embarrassed the administration, because R Section could not afford the truth. And now Tartakoff was making a signal and that meant he was ready to move, perhaps he was already in Helsinki. With a prisoner named Tomas Crohan who had been lost thirty-eight years.
“Damn,” Devereaux said.
The choice seemed too strong for him. The tickets for the Finnair plane to New York were on the desk.
And he would go back to the place in Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and he would wait for a posting to Asia which would never be approved. Nothing needed to be done; no risk had to be run; time would pass, year into year, and he would still be adrift in the West as he had been.
He suddenly felt kinship with the unseen, unknown prisoner named Crohan. Nothing had been done for him and time had passed and the prisoner had survived only to have this last hope extinguished like church candles put out by altar boys.
Devereaux stared at the construction pit. Why should Natali have been killed in the same way that Sims was killed?
Kulak was right.
It was murder; it was not a game. They had been alive and now they were dead.
Devereaux turned from the window and went to his packed bag and picked it up and put it on the shelf of his wardrobe cabinet. He went to the desk and put the tickets for Finnair in his pocket. He left the room. Now, when he moved about, he carried the ugly .357 Colt Python in his waist clip. There was no need for pretense anymore.
He had not wanted a decision any more than Hanley had. But the lack of action had forced him as much as the telephone call from the liaison. If he did not act, if he went home without finishing this business, then he would have made a choice and taken an action as surely as anything he now planned to do.
He walked down to the lobby instead of taking the elevator. He crossed to the reception desk and spoke to the clerk.
“I will stay a few more days,” he said.