Hanley waited for him to speak. He did not look at the Old Man directly nor at the activity of his spider fingers. He fixed his gaze at a place on the teak desk where there was nothing at all and the gloss of the dark wood provided a partial reflection of himself. He felt aged; he looked old, in fact; but the lines of age had been most pronounced since the Old Man decided nine days before to suddenly pull Devereaux back into headquarters. The Old Man knew what the result would be. It was as though each had taken a speaking part in a tattered melodrama where the lines were hoary and inevitable and the denouement long expected; yet these players were expected to proceed to the end of the act as though none of them knew how it would all turn out.
“I really didn’t expect that,” the Old Man said. He was done with tamping and filling at last. Now he selected a large wooden match from another rosewood holder and struck it against a flint and let the flame be sucked into the pipe bowl three times. The air in the small room was suddenly filled with the acrid, sickly sweet odor of burning tobacco. “This morning all this happened?”
“Last night. He dropped into the Section after closing time. He said he wasn’t going to come at all but then decided he should do that. At least that.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Nothing more.”
“No fond farewells?” The Old Man stared at the puffs of smoke rising from the pipe; only the tone of his voice indicated a gossip’s interest in what had happened.
“Did you expect any?” Hanley let the bitterness creep into his voice. Devereaux had been useful to the Section.
The Old Man continued to study the clouds of smoke for a moment as though they contained certain visions reserved for him.
“He wasn’t independent, you know, Hanley. You of all people should know that.”
“That was never at issue.”
“Of course it was. He was just an agent, Hanley. I think he should have appreciated the promotion.”
Hanley did not speak. He continued to stare at the balding image of himself reflected in the gleam of the desk top.
“Too much arrogance,” the Old Man said.
“What?”
“Insolence, arrogance — whatever you call it. From the beginning. I suspected he was out of control. He was going out of control. It’s happened before, with the Langley Firm, with us. These people operate alone, they begin to think they are the Section. That fellow at Langley…”
“Agee.”
“Damn. He blew the whistle, and by God, he got away with it. I would have taken care of him.”
“Devereaux won’t write a book.”
Hanley felt cold and sickened. He glanced down at his colorless fingers, pressed on the crease of his trousers. Devereaux was gone; Devereaux had been useful. In a strange way, Hanley felt he would miss him, and Hanley always prided himself on his lack of emotion. Well, it was done with. After all, Devereaux was only an agent.
“What about this Paris adventure?”
The Old Man’s voice shook Hanley out of his reverie.
“We’ve got Manning in place, at least. No slip-ups yet.”
Hanley did not carry notes or papers; everything in the meeting was official but off-the-record between them. Later, summaries of the minutes would be typed and filed in cardboard holders marked “TS — Priority One.” It was the regular weekly meeting between Rear Admiral Thomas M. Galloway (USN Ret), director of R Section, and his chief of operations. For the convenience of the Old Man, it was held in the library of Galloway’s Bethesda house, at the rear of the two-story brick colonial off the Old Georgetown Road in the northwest suburb of Washington.
Outside the sliding patio windows was a tangle of private forest land. March had stolen in quietly, and green shoots of garlic and wild onion and wild asparagus were pushing through the brown, muddy earth between the thin trees. Damp southern breezes from Virginia caressed the capital city and made life in government seem suddenly vague and unimportant. Hanley had grumped that it was spring fever, and like all his mundane announcements, it had circulated within the Section among the clerks and cipher personnel who were amused by all that Hanley said.
“But has he made any move?”
“Of course.” Hanley looked up. “He’s there, he’s made contact, the…liaison.”
“Is he in her pants yet?”
Hanley was offended. He frowned, but the Old Man smiled at the crudity; something in the mission had struck a ribald note from the beginning. The Old man sometimes fancied himself a rough old sea dog given to bawdy talk and hard language; in fact, the Old Man had spent his dull naval career sailing a desk in the intelligence division of the Office of Naval Operations, deciphering stolen cables and suggesting impractical new ways to gauge Soviet naval strength. He had been made director of R Section after his family gave a large contribution to the 1972 reelection campaign of Richard Nixon.
“I don’t know…details of the relationship,” Hanley continued in his prim, flat Nebraska accent. “I thought we were more concerned with the initial contact, whether it would come off. The human factor here—”
“The human factor is if Manning can cut the mustard twice with the same goddamn Communist French whore,” the Old Man said.
Hanley winced. He felt aged; the winter had aged him, Devereaux’s leaving had aged him. Sending Manning back into the same assignment after fifteen years had aged him. And Tinkertoy. Always the thought of Tinkertoy, casting a shadow in the past months on all other matters inside the Section.
“Tinkertoy,” Hanley said.
“What about the damned thing now? Are we finished with the Paris briefing?”
“We put Manning in place because of the initial cross-reference,” Hanley began, as though in a dream. He was not so much informing the Old Man as recalling his own memory, trying to put a special link between all the disparate events of the past few months.
“Tinkertoy coughed up Manning’s name when we ran a routine comp search for some appointments announced by the Mitterand government. I vaguely remembered the whole business — he was freshly recruited, a journalist initially, and we had trained Manning and sent him back to Paris under Quizon’s control. He had made contact with this woman in the first place—”
“I knew all that, dammit,” the Old Man said, picking a quarrel.
“Yes. We knew that,” Hanley said in the same vague way. “Mrs. Neumann was scanning Tinkertoy again this week. She’s convinced something is wrong.” He paused and chose a rare adjective: “Terribly wrong.”
“What happened?”
“Tinkertoy. Mrs. Neumann ran a comp search on the name of that Soviet agent, the one who was killed near our air force base in England. Reed. And Reed linked with Madame Clermont.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Machines don’t make jokes,” Hanley said. “If Tinkertoy is having a joke, no one understands what it is. The link had not been there before, Mrs. Neumann is certain of that. Someone has entered Tinkertoy and linked Reed with Clermont.”
“Mrs. Neumann is the human factor here, you’re always talking about the human factor — how can she be sure that she didn’t—”
“Dammit, no one can be sure of anything except Tinkertoy,” Hanley said. The outburst was unusual. It reflected his frustrations. “But if someone did tamper with the computer, if someone marked the machine to turn up Reed with Clermont, then why did they do it?”
“What was the similarity?”
“Tinkertoy had nothing to say. Nothing. That’s why it had to be tampered with. It was like a card-sorting machine: We put in Reed’s name to see what links would come up. Madame Clermont. But it just turned up. There’s no attachment to it. Just a name, sitting naked there in the middle of Tinkertoy’s memory.”