36
“I told you, Hanley, I wanted to see him.”
“Yes,” Hanley said distractedly. He had been staring at the same spot on the top of his government-issue desk for the past five minutes. He had looked up only once when the New Man, Yackley, entered his windowless office without knocking. The New Man had taken the uncomfortable straight steel chair across the desk from the director of operations.
“My God, he doesn’t own this place,” Yackley said. “He can’t just waltz in and out—”
“Devereaux resigned thirty minutes ago.”
“I thought you told me he wasn’t going to resign.” Yackley said.
“So I thought. We all make miscalculations.”
“After you convince me he’s valuable to us, how could he walk out on us?”
“It’s a free country,” Hanley said with a bitter smile. “At least it is some of the time.”
“But he needs us—”
“No. Not anymore. And we don’t have any way to stop him.”
“We didn’t have any way to stop him before,” the New Man said with a puzzled tone. He felt uncomfortable, in the chair, in the little molelike office, uncomfortable dealing at all with Hanley who never said exactly what he meant.
On the desk between them was a copy of the New York Times with a photograph of Sir Adrian Hugh-Fuller above a story noting that the famous director of intelligence at Cheltenham in England had been shot to death by a disgruntled employee the day before on the steps of his home. It was a slow news day, otherwise the murder would not have been given prominence; the story hinted that the killer might have been in the employ of one or another terrorist groups, including the groups used by the Soviet KGB. Nowhere in the story did it mention that a four-hundred-year-old oak in Hyde Park had been struck by lightning on the same night and destroyed by fire.
It was the last hold Hanley had on Devereaux and they had both known it.
“Now I will be left alone,” Devereaux had said.
“Yes. And what are you going to do with her?”
“That’s none of your business. Don’t involve yourself in my life anymore,” Devereaux had said. He had removed the plastic card without photograph or identifying mark on it from his pocket. He had placed it on Hanley’s desk. Then, as though giving it a second thought, he had broken the card in half and then again in quarters and thrown the pieces on the floor.
“I suppose I should apologize about Helsinki,” Hanley had managed.
And Devereaux had only stared at him for a moment, without expression, the cold eyes boring into the pasty features of the little clerk. He had said nothing. He had walked out the door of the office and said nothing.
“Lucky for us, about this killing,” the New Man said suddenly, changing the point. Hanley glanced up at the newspaper on his desk. Lucky, he thought dully.
“Now you won’t have to proceed with that… little plan,” the New Man said.
“The plan was completed four days ago. We had the highest-level code access to Seeker and Mrs. Neumann put in the incriminating information herself,” Hanley said in the same flat voice.
“Do you think this was intended then? I mean, by British Intelligence?”
“No. The information we inserted into the Cheltenham computer against George is useless now, but there’s no point in retrieving it. George is dead and he’ll get a very nice state funeral out of it and this poor wretch who murdered him will get life at Wormwood Scrubs.” Hanley paused and thought mundanely of the best-laid schemes of men; a stupid little accident by a stupid little nobody who hadn’t the faintest idea of what George really was and who by killing George had stripped Hanley of his last hold over an agent called November.
Well, Hanley sighed. It was over at least.
At the same moment, as another cold, clear night wrapped itself around the city of Moscow, in an operations briefing room inside the Committee for External Observation and Resolution — which was the passively named section of the KGB in charge of foreign operations against American Intelligence — a Red Army colonel passed a briefing paper across a wooden table to two men who studied the Cyrillic letters for a moment and then asked two questions in bad Russian. Both men were Bulgarians.
“Will the woman be with him?”
“We don’t know. It is not relevant to us.”
“If she is with him, what do we do with her?”
“Obviously, you must judge that for yourself,” said the Russian colonel. The matter was not routine but it did not interest him greatly; he was only a messenger from Gogol’s office to the subsection of the agency in which the assassination bureau was housed. He had never heard of Rita Macklin or this man Devereaux. He was only following orders even as he contemplated a late supper that evening with a woman he knew who had arrived that morning from Leningrad and was now patiently waiting for him in bed in his apartment on the south side of the city.
The next morning, while Hanley worked on a new plan to revise the code names of field agents and to change the control system used in eastern Europe and a Russian army colonel slept naked in a rumpled bed next to a woman he had known all night, the ME strolled down the carpeted hall from his office to the cubicle where Rita Macklin was cleaning out the last drawer of her desk.
Rita closed the door and dropped the keys for the desk and the office on the desktop. “That’s it,” she said.
“You sound like you’re going away forever,” Mac smiled.
“Just three months, just to write the book about the old man,” Rita said, and her returning smile was too quick and they both thought she had lied.
“I’d hate to lose you, Rita. I get the feeling you’re really not coming back.”
The ME stood like a little boy with his hands in his pockets, staring at the blank screen of the word processor at the side of her empty desk. She had piled her junk in a cardboard carton that had once contained laundry soap boxes.
“Thanks, Mac, but I’ll keep my word.”
“Okay, kid,” Mac said in an awkward voice. “Don’t forget we always need fast writers.”
“Sure, I’ve got most of the transcripts from the old man. It’s hard to believe you can remember so many horrible things so clearly.”
“Ghosts,” the ME said. “You never forget ghosts or bad dreams.”
“You can try,” Rita said.
“Sure. But the ghosts are always waiting for you. The old man has ghosts and he can’t get rid of them.”
“Maybe he’s too old.”
“It’s not a matter of age,” the ME said and he realized Rita was not looking at him but looking somewhere in her own memory. He smiled again and said something neither of them heard and shuffled back down the silent corridor to his office.
Rita left the building before eleven o’clock. The sun was shining but it didn’t matter; she didn’t need sunlight to add to the feeling that had come over her in the past few hours. Since he had talked to her; since he had told her what he had done.
37
The mountains were green again and the morning fogs burned off by midday so that you could see the top of Skyline Drive that ran along the Blue Ridge Mountains down the central spine of Virginia, down to the Tennessee line.
In the mornings, they would go into the woods together and find the trees that had fallen in the winter and they would drag them back to the cabin where he would cut them with a chain saw. If the fallen trees were too large, he would cut them on the spot where they had fallen and drag them back to the cabin in pieces.
It was hard work but she saw that it seemed to please him and that the longer he was in the cabin, in the mountains, the more he seemed to be content with himself. He still dreamed, violently, and the dreams he would not speak of frightened her most of all. She would shake him and say his name over and over until he would awaken and realize she had witnessed him dreaming. That had made him ashamed at first, as though he had revealed a weakness to her that they would never speak of. He would not tell her of the demons or ghosts of dead men who inhabited the violent dreams.