“He sounds deranged,” Hanley said.
“Perhaps he is. Perhaps he’s only being normal by Soviet standards. He said the KGB men on the ship suspected him of wanting to defect. He thought he’d killed the first mate when he hit him. He’s a big boy, Viktor. I told him the Soviets insisted he stand trial for mutiny and murder. It scared him, but it also made him angry, and he went on about how unjust the world was to deny Viktor Rusinov his due. Maybe he’s that simple, just crazy.” Devereaux’s voice softened. “He can come to America and join his fellow lunatics living out of their shopping carts on the streets.”
Hanley lowered his eyes and sipped gin. “Which are not made of gold.”
“Viktor’s message had two names. ‘Skarda.’ ‘Henry McGee.’ Viktor simply does not know either name or how they connect. He’s the messenger,” Devereaux said.
Henry McGee. Nothing else in the defection incident had interested R Section as much as the name of Henry McGee.
Henry McGee was now in federal prison, thanks to Devereaux. McGee had penetrated R Section for years as a mole from Moscow — which also made him an American traitor because he was born in Alaska. McGee had been set the task of destroying the credibility of R Section and had nearly succeeded.
When Viktor defected to the American embassy at 101 Strandvägen in Stockholm, the message had been turned over to CIA, which had bucked it to the code breakers at National Security Agency. Very routine. All the intelligence services were alerted to the results: a message fragment in which only the names “Henry McGee” and “Skarda” and the routine wording “no operational difficulty in any connection for penetration of Eagle” stood out. “Eagle” was the current Soviet euphemism for American intelligence. What did the American services make of this message? Was it genuine? Was Viktor genuine?
So Devereaux, because he had broken the penetration of Henry McGee, was the logical man to send to Stockholm to question Viktor, to see if he was genuine, to see if he understood more than the coded message fragment. Henry McGee frightened the brass at R Section, even now when he was buried in a fifty-year sentence in a maximum federal prison.
“Skarda,” Devereaux said, breaking a moment of silence. “Person or operation or both. Unresolved. But Viktor doesn’t know.”
“That is your assessment.”
Devereaux said nothing.
“So,” Hanley said, shifting in his chair.
Silence ticked into the room. The Thurber drawings on the wall next to the bar portrayed the Algonquin lobby with old ladies shaped like overstuffed chairs, wearing lamps for hats. The roar of the street did not penetrate this silence.
Vodka filled Devereaux with false warmth. Autumn was bleak now that he did not live in Washington, where the colors were languid and sullen and suffused with sexual stimulation. It was not the colors, he realized. It was the warm, languid, sullen, sexual remembrance of when he lived with Rita Macklin there. He was certain this final separation was inevitable, which made the separation so much more bleak. Rita Macklin was a journalist, and her name in a magazine or in an op-ed piece in the Times was a constant reminder to him. She never tried to reach him, though it would have been simple. She could call the Section number, and they would patch her through to the safe house in Manhattan.… House, safe house — three rooms in a West Side neighborhood full of shabby, rent-controlled apartments. Orange-lit Manhattan enclosed him, but he had to be here, waiting for the next assignment and the next, away from the color and comfort of the only woman he had ever loved, who could have been his if only he could renounce this bleak shadow life. He could not. He could explain it, the life, but he could not renounce the life.
Hatred was so strange in all its forms. Devereaux had marveled at Viktor Rusinov’s hatred, which spewed out from time to time in words as foul as sewage, blaming this or that circumstance or member of the bureaucracy for his lack of advancement, blaming the American agents for keeping him locked in the velvet prison of the Stockholm embassy. He wanted to go to New York.
Devereaux had no such hatred. Not for Section, not for Hanley. Not for Rita Macklin. Hatred was scorched out of him, twisted as a burned forest, blackened to charcoal into fossil remains of what he had been. The only thing that remained was the pain of separation from Rita Macklin because she could not live anymore with a man of secrets.
He had to stop thinking of her. He turned back to Hanley. “Skarda as a man, not an operation. Think of it.”
“I’ve thought of it,” said Hanley. “We run through files and find one thousand six hundred thirty-four Skardas. Primarily a Czech name. There was a Skarda who was running agents from Berlin in the sixties, during the Dubczeck regime. But nothing in computer links Henry McGee to any Skarda.”
“Then consider it as an operation,” Devereaux said.
“We have no reason to do so,” Hanley said.
“No reason not to. When we put Henry McGee away two years ago, we didn’t get a flutter from the Russians. Not even an informal contact. He was their agent, a ranked agent inside KGB. It’s not like them to not recover their lost lambs.”
“Even Henry expected more,” Hanley said.
“Perhaps they plan to spring Henry,” Devereaux said. He did not look at Hanley but at the room, at the soft light, tried to feel the warmth of the place. “Skarda is some future thing that needs the presence of Henry McGee. Or his cooperation. Or Skarda is some ongoing operation that Henry knows about and they are worried he told us.”
“Why send such a message to the Leo Tolstoy?” Hanley countered. “It’s not a spy ship, just a dirty freighter with no secrets.”
The Tolstoy had “political officers,” of course, as all Soviet ships did, ostensibly to answer questions and provide instructions on matters of faith and morals in the communist religion. They were the KGB men who had spooked Viktor into defecting in Stockholm.
But why this defection by this Soviet sailor? Why in Stockholm? Why was he bringing the gift of a coded message fragment hinting at a link between Henry McGee, a jailed spy, and something or someone called Skarda, and a penetration of Eagle?
“We don’t understand this message—” Hanley began again, signaling for his third drink of the afternoon.
“Therefore, it must contain the germ of truth,” Devereaux finished for him.
Hanley nodded. “Is it disinformation? That seems unlikely, since disinformation must be understood to disinform. We don’t understand. Unless you missed something, Devereaux, and Viktor is a spy and you believed him to be genuine.”
Devereaux took his second vodka. The vodka burned the back of his throat.
“Could you have made a mistake?”
Could he? He made mistakes all the time. He let her go. Now Rita Macklin haunted him in the Manhattan streets in this bleak, treeless autumn. He was certain he saw her on Broadway, hailing a cab in the rain… in the doorway of Lutèce… saw her at a sidewalk table in the St. Moritz, talking to a man.… He knew they were just ghosts, but they were genuine anyway. Yes. He made mistakes all the time, about important things.
“No,” Devereaux replied. “I didn’t mistake Viktor. Just as I didn’t mistake Henry McGee when Section believed him and let itself be penetrated.”
That was meant to sting, and Hanley squinted in pain.
“Then perhaps it is a matter of place,” Hanley recovered. “Viktor defected in Stockholm. Scandinavia. Soviet submarines are probing at the Swedish coast again, violating the waters.”