“My God.” Hanley paused. “There are difficulties.”
“Our people are out.”
“You were supposed to come home.”
Devereaux did not speak.
“You know the lines from Helsinki aren’t safe,” Hanley said.
“That seems to be the last consideration of anyone here. Why didn’t you answer all those weeks?”
“There was nothing to say,” Hanley said. “You defied your orders.”
“No, goddamn it, now you listen.” Devereaux spoke low and harsh, an undercurrent of anger in his flat voice like the undertow of a placid sea. “For nine weeks you let me dangle because nothing was supposed to come of this. You thought Tartakoff was a trap and it was convenient to get rid of me for a while.”
Silence crackled on the international line; the silence confirmed everything Devereaux said and both men knew it.
“But mention Tomas Crohan and everything began to change suddenly. Hanley finds a voice at last, just to cover this thing up. ‘Get out, November.’ But now I can’t get out.”
“Where is Tartakoff?”
“Ten feet away from me. I’m watching him drink a glass of beer.”
“My God. Where are you?”
“In the Helsinki train station.”
“It… It’s a public place—”
“Everything has changed, I told you that. There were two murders here. One was the British agent, Sims. I think the other one was a mistake, but the point is, I was set up. I’m being set up now—”
“You know it’s a trap—”
“I’m not a fool, Hanley,” Devereaux replied. “But I need some backing from your end.”
“I can’t do anything. The New Man—”
“Fuck the New Man,” Devereaux said.
“I have my orders.”
“And I have Tomas Crohan,” Devereaux said. “And Tartakoff.”
“Leave. Leave now. Walk away from it and get on the first plane back home.”
“I can’t do that.”
“That’s an order.”
“No. Not this time.” Softly now, with an edge of menace. “Do you remember a woman named Rita Macklin?”
“What? You mean that reporter? In the Tunney matter?”
“Yes.”
A long silence followed. “What about her?”
“She’s here.”
“What did you say?”
“She’s here. She wants to know about Tomas Crohan.” Devereaux paused. “So do I, Hanley.”
“I don’t know anything.” Hanley considered the lie and revised it. “The information is not…” Again, the lie was altered. “Information is not germane to your mission now that your mission is terminated. You have no need-to-know.”
“You aren’t listening to me, Hanley.”
Indignation sputtered on the international line but Hanley’s tone was too tinny to carry it off: “Damn it. Are you blackmailing me now, November? Have you lost your senses? This is the Section—”
“Fuck the Section,” Devereaux said. His voice was calm, low. “And fuck you, Hanley.”
It was suddenly open between them; loyalty had cracked.
Devereaux spoke again in the same calm, surging voice; his voice was like a river in flood, inexorably spreading across barriers. “You let me dangle for the past two years, since the business in Paris. I wanted to wait you out; I didn’t see any other way. But I won’t be the dead puppet anymore, not for you, not for the New Man. It comes down to my survival now, Hanley, and you don’t really have any choice but to help me.”
Silence on the line.
“November,” Hanley began. But Devereaux interrupted:
“I want to know about Tomas Crohan and I want to know what has been going on from the beginning…”
Hanley’s voice was suddenly tired. “We don’t know that. Not all of it. Can’t you get rid of them, even now?”
“I’m not your hitter, Hanley,” Devereaux said. His voice had become weary in that moment as well; the two voices, like two old friends meeting at the end of a long day. Or two old enemies. “I won’t hit Tartakoff for you.”
“An attack of morality?” Hanley probed.
That would be a joke, Devereaux thought. He saw all the killing in all the years, hits seen and unseen, and he had gradually frozen his soul until the little deaths around him did not touch him. But he was not a hitter, not for Hanley, not for the Section, not for a little game they were playing which he did not understand. He stared out the telephone booth at Tartakoff sitting calmly at a table, sipping beer, staring back at him.
“I’m not talking about the journalist,” Hanley said. “But she is a major part of the problem.”
“Not of my making,” Devereaux said.
“Things have gotten out of hand.”
“You want Tartakoff hit and then the old man and then Rita Macklin—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You make vague suggestions and shuffle away. You don’t want to know the details.”
Hanley’s voice was cold. “Exactly.”
“The details can’t be taken care of so easily this time.”
“You are not in a position to make bargains with us, November; we can forget this conversation occurred. Walk away from it. We can send in… someone… to solve the problem of the Russians.”
“And ‘solve’ the problem of Rita Macklin.”
“We’re not barbarians, November. She is an American citizen.”
“A small protection. Will she show her blue passport to the hitter?”
“Get out, November. Walk away from this.”
“Why? Why is that important?”
“We can’t be involved.”
Devereaux sighed. There were never any answers, never facts, never connections of logic. Classified material in the government was even called Sensitive Compartmented Information to emphasize that each secret must not be connected to the secret that came before or the lie that would come after. He could not argue with Hanley anymore.
“Who called you on the special phone, Hanley?”
Hanley, nearly five thousand miles west, held the phone tightly and did not speak.
“Was it a woman? Who said, ‘We are coming out’?”
“The call came from Paris.”
“I know,” Devereaux said.
“My God, what have you done? This cracks security, this—”
“There is no security left in this, Hanley.”
“It was that woman, Macklin. You’ve opened up our operation to a… to a goddamn journalist.”
“She went to the CIA two months ago to look up files on Tomas Crohan and she wasn’t allowed to see them. The newspaper morgues had been stripped of references to him. She tracked the matter to an old priest in Dublin but he was killed before she got to him. Does it surprise you that she became curious about Tomas Crohan?”
“Sarcasm,” Hanley identified.
“What are you going to do?”
“What is she going to do?”
“The secrets are safe with me,” Devereaux said gently, irony coloring the words.
Hanley thought then of the humiliating interview with the New Man the previous afternoon. Yackley said the Section would cooperate with the CIA, that the trust would all be placed on one side. But he couldn’t trust his own agent dangling in Helsinki for one long winter.
“Mrs. Neumann got the file from CIA. On Crohan.”
Devereaux smiled. “If anyone could, she could.”
“I saw it. I destroyed the copy after I saw it.”
“Where is the original?”
“In the OSS Section. At Langley.”
“Why are they involved?”
“I don’t know.” Hanley paused and then rushed ahead as though the words washed away some stain that had nagged him. “The New Man is sucking up to Langley.” The slang surprised them both. “I don’t like any of it.”
“But it doesn’t matter now,” Devereaux said.
“No. No, I don’t suppose so. Not if you’re unwilling to come out alone—”
“I couldn’t walk away from it from the moment I sent Rita to Paris.”