He decided something.
“Did it occur to either of you to wonder why someone in the Soviet Union would let out a prisoner like Crohan just now?”
“Yes,” Hanley said, though it was a lie.
“Good. What conclusion did you reach?”
“What conclusion have you reached?” Hanley continued the defense.
“Ireland.”
“I don’t understand,” said the New Man.
“The Irish are cash poor and resources poor and the Irish currency is tumbling.”
“So it says in the newspapers,” Hanley said.
The director ignored the remark. “For six months, there has been Soviet submarine activity off the Blasket Islands in the Atlantic off the western coast.”
Hanley did not speak.
“The Soviets want very much to acquire a lease to one of those islands. As a refueling station.”
Hanley was silent but the New Man spoke up. “And why would that involve releasing a prisoner held forty years in the Gulag? That would be rather stupid of them, wouldn’t it? I mean, if our information is correct, wouldn’t the release of Tomas Crohan go against them in the public favor?”
“Eire is a neutral country. Not part of NATO. The Soviet Navy would love just a small toehold for its fleet in the North Atlantic.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Yackley said.
“Yes he did,” Hanley said dully.
The director smiled. Yackley merely gaped.
God, Hanley thought. What a mess, what a dirty tangle it had become. But now he understood.
“We used Crohan,” Hanley said. “We promised him things. In exchange for his doing some dirty work for us.”
“In Austria,” prompted the director.
“And if he comes out, he can be expected to be less than grateful to us.”
“Yes,” the director continued. “And tell the world about the dirty Americans. More particularly, tell the Irish.”
“At the same time the Irish government announces a leasing arrangement for a worthless island with the Soviets which will provide jobs—”
“I think they are also arranging a grain and cattle importation deal,” the director said.
The New Man understood vaguely and, at such moments, found silence a useful retreat.
“Would it work?” Hanley said.
“Like all of the best plans, it depends on timing. It’s not terribly sophisticated but it might. At the very least, they can claim some propaganda value in the business. The more we push the Irish, the less they like to be pushed.”
“That’s why the British agent was killed in Helsinki.”
“Yes. We knew about that, listening in at Cheltenham. We’re allies, you know.”
“And we’re working for the same government,” Hanley said bitterly. “You could have solved this earlier by telling us—”
“Secrecy,” the director said, stubbing out the cigarette in an overloaded ashtray. “Everything is a secret. We got inquiries from a journalist who had worked with you. Three months ago.”
Hanley looked up.
“Rita Macklin. Ring a bell?”
“She doesn’t work with us.”
“She did a good imitation of it on that Tunney business.”
“What did she want to know?”
“About Tomas Crohan,” the director said. “And you don’t need to tell me the name of your agent in Helsinki. I know it already. The same man involved in the Tunney matter. How coincidental, Hanley.”
“It was a coincidence,” Hanley said sharply. “We inquired because we were afraid we were being set up.” He dug it in. “As you were, last year, on the cipher clerk. If you had cooperated.”
“That’s water over the dam. The point is, secrets must remain secrets.”
“I don’t understand,” the New Man said.
“Your man has to come out. And Crohan has to be refused. Beware Russians bearing gifts.”
Silence filled the office. Thin sunlight streamed through the double windows and covered the book-lined walls. There were photographs everywhere of the director with the President, the director with various generals, the director with senators. He was a man of some influence.
“This is all the fault of November,” the New Man said at last, trying to reestablish himself in the two-way dialogue.
Hanley shuddered. Never speak the name of an agent. Never.
The director frowned. “He is coming out, isn’t he?”
“As far as we know,” the New Man said. “Hanley?”
“I sent the message openly.”
“You talked to him.”
“Yes.”
“There was no misunderstanding.”
Hanley shook his head. He felt miserable and terribly isolated. Two days had passed. Where was Devereaux?
“He understood his orders?”
Hanley glared at the New Man. Damn him. Devereaux was the best man of the old crew left. Damn him and his plans and his reorganizations and his determination to break down the old order in the Section.
And now this. If only they had found out earlier about Crohan and about the Soviet talks with the Irish government.
Because he could not tell them the message he had received two hours before.
A woman’s voice, speaking clearly, saying the message only once over the transatlantic line and then breaking the connection. Hanley had taken it alone in his bare office hidden deep in the Agriculture Building on Fourteenth Street.
“Mr. Hanley?”
“Yes?”
“From Helsinki. We are coming out, all of us.”
And nothing more.
Could he not tell them this?
But the director said there had to be secrets.
Hanley sat and stared at them and felt nothing but cold seeping into him though the pale sunlight had lightened the room.
22
Rita Macklin stared out the circular port as the plane arched lazily up through the clouds covering Belgium below. She did not see the clouds or the patches of land that appeared between them; she was staring only at the thought of what she had done. Of what he had made her.
Are you a spy, now?
Rita closed her green eyes for a moment. The silent question might have been asked by Kaiser in his mocking gravelly tone.
No, she would answer. And it would be a lie.
None of them would have understood her or why she had agreed to the mission for Devereaux.
She was a journalist, not an agent for her country. She had no causes but the truth—
She smiled because she heard Kaiser’s laughter at that answer. It isn’t good enough to retreat to principles, little Rita, he would have said. Principles are thin reeds to hide behind.
“Do you see anything?”
For a moment, the voice confused her — it might have come from her thoughts. Rita turned in her seat and saw the dark man sitting next to her. The seat had been empty at takeoff. He had chosen to sit next to her. She stared at him.
“Do you see anything?” The Italian accent was not very thick but she understood what it was. “No,” she said in icy politeness and turned back to the window. Her thoughts had been scattered by the intrusion of the stranger’s inquiry and now they crept back to her like cautious forest animals.
I did what he wanted me to do because it was him, she said in her mind to Kaiser, to Mac, to the professor at the University of Wisconsin who had led her first to the idea of journalism and who had given her her first principles. Principles didn’t count now.
No rational argument could have persuaded her to help Devereaux; patriotism had nothing to do with it.
“My name is Antonio,” the dark man intruded. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
Annoyed, she glanced at him. “Don’t bother me, please.”
His dark face darkened; the dark eyes turned mean. “I thought to be polite.”
She didn’t answer.
He shrugged and lit a cigarette. The smoke curled in the thin air of the cabin and was sucked up into the vents.