“But the Swedes never find them.”
“They want to turn the Baltic into a Soviet pond. That was clear in the last Soviet naval secret directive. They don’t have to own the shoreline of every country, just make their presence felt long enough and often enough.”
Devereaux considered it. “So Skarda might be a plan directed at Scandinavia. Some bait to make us react foolishly.”
“What about the political officers on the Leo Tolstoy?”
“They were followed while the ship was in Stockholm harbor. That’s not easy to arrange on short notice. The report said they split up several times and were lost more than once.”
Hanley said, “Two weeks, the secretary of state meets with his Soviet counterpart, the foreign secretary, in Malmö, Sweden. The talks are… about freedom of the seas in the Baltic. But there is a secret agenda.”
“What?”
“We don’t know. Either the secretary isn’t telling the intelligence services, or he doesn’t know, either. The initiative came from Moscow.”
They all did nowadays, Devereaux thought.
The administration was fumbling in a dozen places in the world, grasping at every Soviet straw proffered. The intelligence services had advised against meetings with “secret” agendas, but the administration was not listening to them right now; it was listening to the popularity polls published at intervals in the newspapers. If the Soviets wanted to throw Washington a bone, it might have meat on it.
“You’ll have to go to Malmö for the conference. To observe.”
“For whom?” Devereaux said.
“Section. Maybe this Skarda thing involves the conference. Maybe it will come up.”
“I was going to take furlough,” Devereaux began. He had not thought of such a thing until now. He was very tired, and he did not want to go to Malmö, and he did not want to think of Henry McGee or try to unravel another riddle.… He wanted to sit in the shabby three rooms in New York and wait for a telephone call to be patched through from Washington. What would he say to her? What had he ever been able to say to her?
“You can have furlough when you come back. It’s not such a difficult matter—”
“None of them ever are, Hanley,” Devereaux said.
“Is that sarcasm?”
Silence again except for the rain against the windows.
Hanley said, “There’s an opening. In Bangkok.”
Devereaux’s eyes became heavy. He had been recruited for Asia during the Vietnam War. He had loved Asia. He had been locked out of Asia for twenty years. What new irony did Hanley intend?
“You’ve been cooled off,” Hanley said. Why was he offering this? “No one objects to your going back to Asia. We need a man there.”
“You don’t need a man. Everything is SIGINT now. Spy satellites, transmitter interceptors. It’s Fort Meade’s show now.” Fort Meade was home of the gadget-laden National Security Agency. “I don’t need Asia, Hanley. Not anymore. No promises because I’ve been a good boy.”
At the beginning of the world, Devereaux had been professor of Asian studies at Columbia University. Until a man in bow tie had met him on the steps of the library one sunny afternoon and explained that he could give him all of Asia in exchange for his soul. That’s how simply his recruitment into R Section had been handled.
“We have to talk to Henry McGee,” Devereaux said. He put down his glass. “Before Malmö.”
“Henry won’t talk to us,” Hanley said.
“He’s a federal prisoner. He’ll talk to anyone we tell him to,” Devereaux said.
“I don’t want to hear his lies again.”
“We never asked him about Skarda. Maybe that will jar him.”
“How will you know if he tells you the truth?”
But Devereaux did not speak. He could not. Henry was just the next step leading to Malmö, leading to Skarda, leading to the next step and the next, that much farther away from Rita Macklin and the ghosts of New York City.
3
The first six weeks inside prison, Henry McGee did not think he would survive. His faculties were intact, though the shock of the sentence — twenty-five to fifty years in federal penitentiary for treason — had not sunk in. But prison was a very different place from all the places he had been in the world.
When he had first defected to the Soviet Union seventeen years before, they had put him in detention, but he had understood that world and his role in it. He had been a defector in a party of Eskimos lost on the straits between Alaska and Siberia. So it seemed. He had known exactly what he was doing then, always had known what he was doing.
They had questioned him, over and over, to see if he was a plant from the American intelligence services. They became convinced he was what he seemed — a traitor to the Americans and a convert to the Soviet side. He gave them good information. He knew the location of radar installations and the secret Alaskan naval and air bases that were not listed on any map but are all over Alaska. He knew them as a native knows the secret places. After he told them many stories that they believed, the detention was lifted and he was merely observed closely at all times. They stripped him of all knowledge, and later they built him back up again, this time with the tools of a counterspy. He became the mole who nearly tore apart R Section.
But this place, set in the gentle hills of Pennsylvania, this was prison as punishment — that was the difference. A cold, dehumanizing mechanism ran life inside the walls. The new prisoners were not even people, not even animals. They were called fish. They were chum for the sharks who had survived their own infancy as fish and now cruised the blocks and tiers for victims.
Henry McGee, fifty-one, had the body of a thirty-year-old. He was thin and dark and very mean. The mean aspect showed clearly in his coal black eyes. A coldness in his manner set him apart from the others. In the evenings, in his cell after supper, he did exercises — one hundred sit-ups and one hundred push-ups. The evening hour of his exercises was his surrender to age: It was easier to move his body in the evening as opposed to the morning, when it was stiff. His body had scars and his hands spoke of strength. He thought he would be left alone. Anyone could see how mean he was if anyone had looked hard at him. Still, in the first week, a large black prisoner attempted to make him perform fellatio in the dark of his cell.
Henry had already fashioned a cutting weapon from a spoon. Nearly everyone had such a weapon. They were routinely confiscated in sweeping searches several times a year. The weapon was sharp, but the cutting edge was still jagged. When Henry fell to his knees before the black man as he had been told to do, he took two passes to cut off the right testicle. The black man staggered to the common tier. He was screaming so loudly that the rest of the prisoners turned down their radios and fell into an uncommon nighttime silence. He ran along the metal tier, pursued by guards with rifles and clubs. They clubbed him to unconsciousness to stop the screams. His body fell at the far end of the block, and the guards saw the blood on his legs, on his trousers, on his lower belly. One of the guards was sick at the sight of the blood.
There was both an official and an unofficial inquiry. No weapon was found. The code of the prisoners was silence. Henry McGee was left alone after that.
This prison, like all others in the country, was segregated by its inmates. Blacks and whites formed their own societies, and bloody encounters between the societies were not unusual. Hispanic prisoners, when present in numbers, formed a third society. Societies of Nazism and black supremacy and Islam formed spiderwebs of structure inside the larger divisions of racial segregation. Complicating the sociology was the strong homosexual community — willing and unwilling, resigned in any case — that was both black and white. In many cases, the younger, smaller males — usually white or Hispanic — were attached as “women” to the black society.