“That was very unwise,” Hanley said with dejection.
“Any action would have been.”
“Yes. I suppose you’re right.” He paused. “I will tell you, November. Now. I’m sorry.” The apology surprised him as much as the slang, as though he no longer controlled his words. He had done nothing wrong but he felt shame, deep and heavy, inside himself.
“Tomas Crohan was a Fascist sympathizer to the point of forming a neo-Nazi splinter of Fianna Fáil in the late 1930s in Ireland. He came from wealth, mostly in land. He and his father visited Hitler in 1938 before Czechoslovakia. You understand the position of the Irish government in those years… new state, somewhat shaky, depression, determined to steer a course away from British domination. Lots of admiration for the Nazis in Ireland simply because they were anti-English—”
“I understand.”
“When the war came, Ireland opted to be neutral. Both sides used the country to their advantage. Nazi spies in Dublin, just as they were in Portugal and Sweden and Switzerland during the war. The OSS came in with a scheme to turn Crohan, use him behind the Nazi lines, promise him some great reward after the war.”
“What was the promise?”
“The usual thing we offer dictators in Latin America. We said we would give him the country after the war. He would become taoiseach of Eire.”
“Could we reasonably promise that?”
“That is the wrong question. Could Crohan believe it was in our power to do it? He was already in government, was wealthy, was well known and admired in the country for his anti-British stance. The British had a positive paranoia about him, feared he might become prime minister in Ireland—”
“What did he do for us in Austria during the war?”
“How do you know that?”
“Rita Macklin told me.”
“A journalist? Are you sure that’s all she is? How did she know—”
“I’m not sure of her, of you, of any of this.”
“You have to be careful.”
“No, Hanley. It’s time for you to be careful. The puppet cut the strings, Hanley. You tell the New Man that.”
“If you release any of this, you’ve breached security at the highest level. I can cover the use of the special phone by that journalist. She could be in trouble if she revealed information about internal security… not to mention you, November. But any of this about Crohan is classified—”
“You stole it from the CIA.”
“Damn you—”
“No more threats, Hanley. Threats and promises don’t mean very much to me anymore.”
Another pause. “We needed British cooperation. After all, they had the Senior Intelligence service and part of it was keeping an eye on Ireland, even during the war. We got their permission to put Crohan into a black job for us; we told the Brits he would arrange passports and passage out of Vienna for a group of Jews we were interested in saving.”
“Not cleaning women or peasants,” Devereaux said.
“There are always priorities. Scientists mostly—”
“Go ahead.”
“That’s what we told the Brits, as I said. But Crohan wouldn’t have lifted a finger to save Jews. Besides, we knew the Jews had been killed already in the camps, the ones we named. We knew that.”
“Then what did we want from Crohan in Austria?”
“An incident,” Hanley said vaguely.
“What sort?”
“To push Ireland into our arms, out of neutrality. We set him up to kill Hitler.”
Devereaux blinked. The line crackled but there was no other sound. Tartakoff still stared at him. He was in the present, in Helsinki, waiting to get out and yet he felt disoriented, as though half of him were now in wartime Austria with Crohan, setting up a hit. An impossible assignment.
“That’s absurd. We wouldn’t have sent in an amateur to set up a hit like that.”
“Even if we contemplated such a hit,” Hanley said. “Once the war had started, Hitler was his own worst enemy. We never wanted him dead until the war was over and won.”
Devereaux felt burdened by Hanley’s revelations; it was too much dirty knowledge, too cynical to want to know, too true to keep from haunting his unconscious thoughts at night, too awful not to be the stuff of nightmares.
“We wanted the Abwehr to seize him in good time, try him, and kill him. The charges against him would be fantastic. No one would believe them.”
“That’s madness. Why not tell the Brits what we were doing?”
“Security,” Hanley said, as though that explained everything.
“It couldn’t have worked.”
“Madder plots worked. Remember the pilotless gliders bringing saboteurs into Norway in the war?”
“They crashed; the men died for nothing.”
“And a woman called Madeleine who was dropped into France and who unconsciously betrayed one network before she was picked up by the Nazis and killed?”
“So your scheme didn’t work.”
“It wasn’t mine; it was OSS and it was a long time ago. Unfortunately, our Irish Fascist went into Austria just before the generals decided to kill Hitler and blew up his meeting room. Crohan was trapped in Vienna and tried to survive the war. We left him dangling. He might have survived it, too.”
Devereaux understood. “Which would have been embarrassing to us. In case he blames us for his predicament.”
“He was certain to blame us.”
“So we betrayed him.”
“We told our allies, the Russians, by circuitous means, that he was a spy working for us.”
Devereaux felt so tired. He closed his eyes a moment. He opened them and nothing had changed. Tartakoff stared at him still.
“We let the Russians get rid of Crohan,” Devereaux said.
“But they didn’t get rid of him, did they, November? And now you have him and what are you going to do with him?”
“He is still an embarrassment.”
“Yes. We have our leverage with the Irish Republic. We have certain… needs. Oil off the coast. And now this business of the Russians negotiating for use of a naval refueling base.”
“Is that true?”
“We don’t think so; but paranoia demands we believe it sometimes.”
“So this was a trap after all,” Devereaux said.
“Yes. It appears so.”
“You could have avoided the problem from the beginning.”
“Damn it, November, we didn’t know what the problem was. Langley told us nothing. There is too much security sometimes.”
“We have to work our way out of this.”
“I don’t see how.”
“The New Man wanted me out of Helsinki.”
“Yes.”
“You told him I was out.”
“I thought you were.”
“No,” Devereaux said. “You knew I was still inside. You knew it and you lied to him, deliberately.”
Hanley gasped. “I did not.”
“This time, you did. This time, you’re going to have to save my neck to save your own.” The voice had changed again; it was low and harsh, like the growl of a hidden animal on a dark night. “You’re going to have to take the heat on this.”
“Why would I?”
“Because I can’t go back on any of this. Because I have Rita Macklin and I have Crohan and I have Tartakoff. Your solution is to walk away from it. What do you think Rita will do then? This is a story and even if she doesn’t have all the answers, she has the questions. And she knows about Crohan.”
“And you,” Hanley said. “She knows about the Section and she knows about you. She knows too damned much.”
“So hit her? And Crohan? And Tartakoff? And then who should be next, Hanley? Me?”
Hanley said nothing; the possibility had occurred to him and he was not certain he had rejected it.
“If I work out of this, I’m through,” Devereaux said. “If I don’t, I’m dead.”
“Yes,” Hanley said. “Those might be the only choices.”