“I’m sick of you,” Devereaux said. “I’m sick of the Section. I’ll work out of this and you’ll take the heat from the New Man and you’ll figure out how to survive; you’ve been figuring that out for a long time.”
“And you will quit.”
“We call it retirement, Hanley, with maximum points and payoffs like medical care.” Devereaux smiled. “All the mundane pleasures of the middle-class servant. I want you to fix it.”
Hanley did not speak for a moment and then continued in a soft voice: “I can fix it.”
“I want everything cleaned up after this,” Devereaux said. “I want the break total.”
“I understand.”
Devereaux said coldly, “No hitters after me, after Rita.”
“What are you going to do with her?”
“That’s not your problem anymore. Listen to what I said. No late hits after I cut myself off from the Section.”
“You’ll have a safe-conduct pass,” Hanley said.
“I trust you because you have to trust me. If there is any foul-up after I walk away from the Section, everyone will regret it.”
“There won’t be anything from us, November.”
“Not from you, not from Langley, not from the policemen at NSA. You will have to fix it. For me. And for the woman.”
Devereaux said the words slowly, as though he had thought about them for a long time; in fact, the thought came as the words were spoken. It was the only way out for them, the only safe way to escape the trap. She would have to agree with him to be safe; he needed her to be safe. Neither could survive the matter alone.
“Can you guarantee her?”
“Trust me,” Devereaux said.
Yes, thought Hanley suddenly. It was the only option left to him.
Two hours later, Hanley sat across from Mrs. Neumann in her office in Computer Analysis Section. For a long time, he sat silently and then, with slow and careful words, he told her of the conversation with Devereaux in Helsinki.
Mrs. Neumann did not speak.
Once she got up from her desk and went to the closed door of the small windowless office and opened it as though making certain there was still an outside world and that there were still concerns beyond this time and place and the story that Hanley was telling her.
All was calm outside; women were at rows of video display terminals, punching in endless series of code numbers, creating records and retrieving them, upgrading documents and destroying them at the push of the “permanent delete” series of buttons. All was usual; all was in order.
Mrs. Neumann closed the door and looked around her windowless cell. On the back wall was a sampler done in needlework by one of the women in CompAn and presented to her at a Christmas party five years ago. In archaic lettering, the sampler said, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The sentiment made her frown now. All the information about Helsinki and the prisoner had contained elements of garbage, right from the first lies told the British during the war about the nature of Crohan’s mission. Who was lying now?
“Devereaux is right, in a peculiar way,” she said at last.
“About what?”
“There’s no choice for him. You let him dangle along too long, Hanley — you know that as well as he does. When you were finally ready to tell him what to do, it was too late. He couldn’t leave Crohan or whoever that is or the Russian. It was a trap; you thought he was the only one who might be trapped by it. Now he’s got you.”
“For all I know now, he set up this business with the Macklin woman.”
“Do you think so?” Her eyes were sharp and her voice growled. “She did make request for information under the Freedom of Information Act at CIA and they turned her down. Devereaux was already in Helsinki then.”
Hanley sighed. “Mere paranoia, Mrs. Neumann, I suppose this problem has too many facets to it.”
“There is a moral point,” she said.
“Morality? At this late date?”
“Don’t be indignant, Hanley. We set up Mr. Crohan during the war and essentially condemned him to death. Now he has a chance to come out and we want to kill him again because he is an embarrassment to an organization long since disbanded — the OSS. We want to kill him to save the reputations of a bunch of ghosts. The moral choice seems clear to me.”
“Mrs. Neumann, we are not speaking of morality or ethics; we are talking of practical things.”
“Shoes and ships and sealing wax,” she said.
“This is not a matter of levity. I will have to cover for him, put my neck under the New Man’s ax.”
“Everyone is expected to make sacrifices,” Mrs. Neumann said.
Hanley was annoyed by her words and her tone. “I don’t know what I am going to do.”
“Bullshit,” she said in her hoarse whisper. “You know exactly what you’re going to do and so does November. He’s got you, Hanley, and you just want to talk to me about it, have me talk you into doing what you’re going to have to do anyway.”
“It is still a trap, a Russian trap.”
“Not anymore,” she said. “A trap only works when it is unexpected.”
“I wish this wasn’t happening,” Hanley said, a child caught in a bad dream.
“You made it happen.”
He seemed surprised. “Me? But I never wanted to do anything,” Hanley said.
Mrs. Neumann nodded. “Exactly, Hanley. And you waited too long.”
28
Stolinaya knocked at the door of the third director of the Committee for External Observation and Resolution and waited for a response. It was usual for visitors to go through the elaborate security gauntlet through the main entrance but Stolinaya — and a few other privileged bureaucrats inside the Committee — could reach the third director through the back door, as it were.
Stolinaya was director of classification and identification of foreign agents for the Committee. His job was the most creative inside the vast records department because he was the man who decided at last what the enemy was and who he was.
Or, in the present case, who she was.
Stolinaya was a tall, thin man with a bristling black mustache and large, luminous eyes. He was a perfect bureaucrat and a perfect Muscovite: The former description suited his careful, cautious way of dealing in an area where too much creativity could pull suspicion upon him; the latter description suited his easy arrogance, a sense that the Soviet peoples were damned lucky to have Muscovites at all, lest they disintegrate as a union.
There was a muffled response to his knock.
He opened the door and entered the room. The steam pipes were banging up heat; the single window in the large room rattled with the wind and the rhythm of traffic beyond the window.
He sat down at the secretary desk next to the large desk assigned to the third director and opened his files without preliminary remarks. It was the weekly updating of the lists of enemies and a formality in a sense because Stolinaya was a trusted man. Still, the third director took some pleasure in altering the status of the unseen people contained on Stolinaya’s list.
“The first is Abdul Raj-Hassadi of Sudan,” began Stolinaya in a perfect Moscow accent. He continued the description and then precisely explained why the second deputy of the Ministry of Transport in Sudan was now to be considered a paid espionage agent of Colonel Khaddafi of Libya. The third director listened and then nodded and Stolinaya entered the change of order in the files. Thereafter, until another status change, Abdul Raj-Hassadi would be elevated from the rank of “Bureaucrat/Foreign/No Political Status” to the rank of “Bureaucrat/Mole/Intelligence Agent 4th class/Political Status Questioned.” Stolinaya had devised the elaborate coding system of the four hundred thousand names of foreign agents and politicians contained in the vast computer files of the Committee; he was proud of them.