“R Section.”
“Yes. It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”
In the second week, a GS14 in Computer Analysis in R Section showed, through charts, how Skarda was designed to work. Everyone agreed it was very clever, including Mrs. Neumann, who understood computers, and Hanley, who was completely baffled by the demonstration but did not acknowledge it. The only way they had discovered the secret of Skarda was that they knew what they were looking for; otherwise, the computer program would have passed any minute inspection.
On the same day, a secret grand jury in Washington, D.C., filed a true bill naming Vaughn Arthur Reuben on fourteen counts of conspiracy to commit espionage against the United States by misdirecting CIA personnel in Europe and conspiring to steal a government tape recording. The true bill was signed into an indictment at one forty-five P.M., and two hours later, when officers arrived at Reuben’s house, off DuPont Circle, they were not especially surprised to find him dead, a large pistol in his right hand and a large hole in his forehead. There was a note, a long one of explanation and regret, and it was turned over to the U.S. marshal’s office, which, in turn, sent it to the CIA. It was destroyed at Langley, after a suitable number of conferences.
On December 20, during a routine field exercise in Utah, a Strategic Defensive Initiative test missile veered suddenly off course. All this was monitored at Moscow Center communications. The missile appeared to cross the border into Canada before it was destroyed. No one was injured in the incident, and the administration denied that any such test had occurred or that a missile had been destroyed. The consensus in Moscow Center was that Plan Skarda — to send a U.S. missile off course and into a Canadian city — had not worked, despite all of the late Skarda’s brilliant posturing. Gorki of the Committee for External Observation and Resolution concluded that Skarda had oversold his masters inside KGB on his software expertise and suggested that, in the future, KGB stick to more fundamental methods of infiltration and sabotage.
In the funding of covert counterintelligence activity, it is not uncommon to bury authorizations inside more routine budget allocations.
This is done less to fool the intelligence enemy, who might stumble upon such material, than to obfuscate facts in the face of scrutiny by Congress and the more professional interest of the General Accounting Office.
Thus it was noted that $200 million in funds to the CIA that were used for “research and liaison with religious bodies in foreign countries” were stripped from its budget. The CIA so informed Cardinal Ludovico within two weeks.
The following day, an agent from R Section called at the house on the Borgo Santo Spirito and explained the new facts of life to the cardinal. He reluctantly agreed, and the secret lists of Lithuanian networks was turned over to Section, which had, surprisingly, come up with a $200 million surplus in its fiscal budget to enable it “to expand crop reporting techniques to Scandinavia and nearby regions.”
Thus Devereaux had convinced Hanley, who had convinced Mrs. Neumann and the power structure of the American intelligence community, to “do the right thing.”
44
She loved him like a schoolgirl; she followed after him; she took his arm with the eagerness of a child. Why did she fear once that he would not come back to her? He had come back to her, back to her rooms on the rue du Lavois, come back to sleep with her and share her life, to put his strong arms on her and feel satin and silk and lace and velvet, to reach and reach until he had all her secrets. She had feared he would never come back to her.
But he needed her, because New York was too full of ghosts and this was the gloomy time of year when ghosts revealed themselves throughout the world.
There had been a message on the answering machine in the safe house in Manhattan.
“Call me.”
The voice was the same, the voice was exactly as he had always heard it in his dreams, as he always saw Rita Macklin. Rita’s voice was an angel’s, clear as a bell at midnight on the coldest night of winter.
“Call me.”
When he heard it, he rewound the tape and played it again and again. “Call me.” A simple request, a command — he felt all the love welling in him again. She could not live without him. “Call me.” She needed him despite everything, despite her decision to walk away from him.
New York was full of ghosts, and they were all the same, all red-haired women with melting green eyes, all full of sweet flowers and milky breath, all full of desire that was wet before they touched each other. What would he do now but run to her, hold her as he had held her that afternoon in the hotel?
Instead, he took the Sabena flight to Brussels. It raced across the ocean toward the coming light. When he went to Rena Taurus’s apartment, it was only an act of strength that others might see as an act of weakness. Cold Rena and cold Devereaux seeking to warm themselves in aimless passion, they deserved no better than they got. Got no better than they deserved.
Rena was the schoolgirl of a romance that had always eluded her. Devereaux was life, strength, a story she told herself that was almost true. They ate at a little café on the Grand Place and watched the snow fall, and when they walked up the hill to her rooms, they were in love with each other. Perhaps it was not love as defined by some, but it was what they had and they both needed it to stave off the cold. They rarely spoke to each other, as though they had both heard too much for too long.
Would it last?
Even the world would not last, but they did not speak of the end of things, did not speak at all as they urged each other on with touches and kisses and every familiarity. It got to be that just to see him coming to meet her after work would fill her with such desire that she wanted him, insisted, right then and there, demanded that he fill her.
Oh, she loved him and she knew what love was. She had always known, though it had been a secret until she met him.
45
Oh, yes, there was no question about it: He was a good-looking man, and he treated her in a way that pleased her. He was plenty rough all right, but she was used to that. He was really able to take his pleasure with her, and sometimes it hurt, sometimes she had to hold him off for a day or two, but he understood about things. He needed her — she knew that. He really needed her. She was in love with him because he needed her.
The other thing that made her love him was thinking about that dirty old priest, the one who had tried to kill her.
Henry said he would kill the priest for her. That it wasn’t a problem at all. Henry meant it, too, you could see it in his eyes. She wasn’t afraid of mean eyes, not at all. The pigs had mean eyes. Some of the men who had abused her had mean eyes.
Henry looked nice, it was nice to be out with a man who presented himself well.
Not that they went out very often. Henry said he had to stay in the shadows. Well, Marie was just the girl to show him how to do it. How you could hide yourself away for years in her old city, her mother, Berlin. It was the perfect match they had, and she would almost forget about her lamb on some days.
She would never call Henry a lamb.
She had known a lamb once, a little lamb, innocent as the first day of the world.
She could cry sometimes.
When Henry was sleeping, she might sit in the second room and stare out the window at the old, sleeping city, and her eyes would make soft tears as she thought of Michael.
And then she would think of Cardinal Ludovico, and she would think of Henry, and she would think of so many things, and it would dull the edge of pain that Michael, the sheer thought of dead Michael, tore out of her.