“Did you call me to justify yourself?”
“I’m not explaining,” Hanley said.
“No. And neither am I.”
“What have you done since you quit?”
“Written a book,” Devereaux said.
Hanley started and turned in his seat, but he was stopped by the trace of a smile on the winter-hard features. Hanley had felt uncomfortable from the first moment of meeting, when he saw Devereaux enter the plane by the cockpit door. He had chosen to meet Devereaux on this flight because it was a secure meeting — no bugs, no witnesses. And it was one of the new flights in the middle of the day from Washington to Kennedy Airport — most of the shuttle planes went to LaGuardia.
“That’s not a joke,” Hanley said. “The Old Man is sensitive about that.”
“About books?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I wouldn’t betray you,” Devereaux said. “Any more than you would betray me.”
“That isn’t fair,” Hanley said in the defensive voice of a bureaucrat.
“Nothing is.”
“This is about Manning,” Hanley said. “You knew him.”
“He relieved me a long time ago. In Asia. You know that as well as I do.” Devereaux’s voice was cold and comfortless. He closed his gray, arctic eyes for a moment and saw Manning in his mind, coming off the plane at Saigon late in 1968. They had called Devereaux home and Manning had not understood the reason. Home. It was really an exile to the West, because Asia — even the Asia of Vietnam, scarred by war and corruption — had become the only place he had wanted to live. And after 1968, it was the only place denied to him.
Devereaux had refused to play the numbers game initiated by the CIA and accepted by the Pentagon and the Johnson administration. With devastating accuracy, Devereaux had prepared a report predicting the Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese troops early that year. The report had not been well received in Washington because it had contradicted everything from the CIA operatives. And when Tet did happen and toppled the Johnson administration, someone in some bureaucracy had remembered Devereaux’s report and had pulled the proper strings to make certain that Devereaux would not go against the grain again. Not in Asia. His exile in the West had lasted until three months before, when the Old Man had forced him to move into the bureaucracy itself or resign.
“What about Manning?”
“He was a good man.”
Devereaux understood the tense.
“Where did he get it?”
“Paris.” Hanley’s voice was soft. “We thought he had a little assignment there. A probe with someone in the Mitterand government. We weren’t sure it would work into anything. You know he had been in Paris. I mean, before we sent him to Asia.”
“Yes.” Devereaux remembered Manning that night in a cheap bar down in the black heart of Saigon, telling him things he should never have confessed.
“I didn’t tell him everything. Even when we started getting the links. In Tinkertoy, I mean. I told him to be careful.”
“Sound advice,” Devereaux said with sarcasm.
“I should have told him. After the business with Felker.”
“Hanley, I don’t work for you anymore.”
Hanley stared at him as though not understanding him.
“I don’t want to know your secrets.”
“But you came to the plane…”
“I was curious. I told you that.”
“Devereaux.” Hanley paused. “We need an outside man. A contractor who can come in without any records, without anyone knowing.”
“Even the Old Man?”
“Yes.”
They were silent for a moment, feeling the plane shudder up through the layers of atmosphere.
“In the last six months, Tinkertoy has had problems. We have been getting a lot of information and it doesn’t seem to fit at first, and then, when we double-check, it does fit. One of the things was a bunch of data that Tinkertoy put together that led us to tell the National Security Council there was solid evidence that the Warsaw Pact maneuvers were a prelude to an invasion of Western Europe.
“NATO went to red alert and then called it off when nothing happened. And then this business in Venice. You see, the Brits were running a little network around our air force bases over there. They caught a Soviet fish named Reed, and Reed had some goodies, and their contract man — named Felker — decided to do Reed in and take the stuff and sell it freelance.”
“I thought this was about Manning.”
“It isn’t that simple. Dammit, I’m trying to make some sense out of it.”
Devereaux did not speak.
“You see, this Felker contacted us in Venice, wanted to make a deal. The CIA was interested, too. We moved as fast as we could and got one piece — just to check on Felker’s bona fides — but then Felker was killed. So was Cacciato, our agent there. Do you know what Felker had stolen from Reed?
“The oddest stuff. It was in a pretty simple code. When we fed it to Tinkertoy, there were five items in all. Four of them checked out with Tinkertoy, but Tinkertoy threw out the fifth — it didn’t work, it didn’t background with all our other stuff in the computer. So Mrs. Neumann went in and checked out the four items that did make the grade, and all the support for them had come from other information that had been either fed in or altered in the last year in Tinkertoy. And it all had to do with stuff about a game at the Frunze War College in Moscow involving a mock invasion of Western Europe and…one bit had to do with Jeanne Clermont, some unconfirmed reports of her contacts with a terrorist group operating in Paris.”
“What did that have to do with the invasion of Europe?”
“Nothing by itself.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“This is the way Mrs. Neumann explained it. If point A of Felker’s information was fed into Tinkertoy, it was accepted; it jibed with what we had known before. But if we went back to see what it jibed with, we found point AA connected to point BB and point CC, all coming through the same pipeline. And point BB, which had no direct connection with point A, was about Jeanne Clermont. Do you see?”
“Like second cousins who never met,” Devereaux said.
“Except in Tinkertoy. No connection between Felker and Jeanne Clermont. Except through bits of information from a dozen sources that met inside the machine.”
“If Tinkertoy isn’t reliable, get rid of it.”
“But that’s it.” Hanley stared hard at the seat back in front of him. “We don’t know that Tinkertoy isn’t reliable. If we guess about an invasion of the West, maybe the information is right and our guess is wrong. Maybe someone made a mistake, in either gathering it or feeding it into Tinkertoy. NATO was furious after they stepped down from the red alert. Said red alert stirs up the population and everyone in Europe is jittery now about this so-called peace movement. It gets the military upset.”
Again, a ghost of a smile crossed the gray features of Devereaux’s face. “Peace gets a bad reputation, doesn’t it?”
“This is not a joke,” Hanley said. “No matter how absurd, we still have two agents killed in the past three months. And now, this week, Frunze has started playing ‘Paris.’”
“How do we know that?”
“We know that,” Hanley said.
“And what’s the outcome?”
“The game isn’t over.”
“Are we going to win the war?”
“This is not a joke. Not to them, not to us.”
“Are we going to win?”
“No. I don’t understand it.”
“Maybe we don’t have God on our side.”
Hanley ignored him. “The Langley Firm is interested because they’re afraid we are doing a little probe on their operations in Europe. Especially in the Mitterand government. It explains the message we intercepted in Rome. I had a meeting with the A.D. at Langley.”