Devereaux stared at Simeon for another long moment, trying to decide.
Simeon was the wrong complication; he didn’t know if the French agent believed him or not, but he couldn’t even return to his hotel room. He had money, he had identities. But time had run out, if Simeon pressed him.
And why should he trust the other man?
“Turn around,” Devereaux said.
“Are you going to shoot me?”
“Turn around,” Devereaux said. But the large man with the large brown eyes would not move.
“I have three choices,” Devereaux said. “I could do as you say. I reject that. I could kill you. I could simply give myself time to get away from you. I would rather not kill you. I want to tie your hands and then get away.”
“But I can help you get away,” Simeon said, flashing the smile again. “I promise you I will take you to Orly.”
“No. I don’t think I want your promise. And I don’t think I want to take any more time.”
Simeon shrugged then and turned and placed his large hands behind his back.
Devereaux reached for the piece of copper coil at his wrist. It was the sort of device worn by those who believed it cured arthritis; in fact the coil resolved itself into a long, thin strand of garroting wire.
Devereaux took a step and quickly wrapped the wire around the large man’s wrists.
“It’s very tight.”
Devereaux pushed him and tripped him. Simeon hit the ground heavily on his stomach.
He groaned and struggled for breath.
Devereaux removed Simeon’s shoes and pulled the laces out and tied his ankles together. He picked up the shoes and threw them, in different directions, into the woods. He reached without a word into the pocket of Simeon’s coat and removed the bloodstained handkerchief. He turned Simeon over and shoved the handkerchief into his mouth and wrapped his own handkerchief around the Frenchman’s face to hold it.
“If you don’t choke to death, someone will find you eventually,” Devereaux said.
Simeon stared at him with his large eyes. But now they were hate-filled; the comic veneer had dropped away.
Devereaux got up and quickly crossed the woods back to the path where he had waited for the stranger who followed him.
He went down a little knoll into the woods on the other side. The sounds of the distant, unseen restaurant were more clear.
He didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he had to find a safe house, he had to operate now outside both the Section and the law of France.
It was growing lighter in the woods; the streaming sunset was now so low that the long shadows of the trees were silhouetted in the golden haze. The scene reminded him of a painting by one of the French Impressionists he had seen once as a child at the Art Institute of Chicago.
He stumbled across the body just before turning south toward the park entrance.
It was the face of the stranger. A copy of Le Monde lay open on the grass. The face was bloodless, the eyes staring.
Devereaux caught his breath, felt the adrenaline surging through him. He knelt down and reached into the pocket of the dead man’s coat.
A British passport registered in the name of John Alexander Gaunt.
Gaunt. Devereaux stared at the features of the dead man for a moment as though memorizing them. The face was like the face of a skull drawn with flesh that had been pale in life and was now ashen in death.
Devereaux turned the head slowly and saw that Gaunt’s neck was broken. A sharp blow, perhaps the blow of a man’s hand.
A large, powerful man like Simeon, who had not seen anyone follow Devereaux. Who had disavowed this stranger.
Who had probably killed him.
Devereaux’s knees cracked as he rose. There were too many complications now, and yet he felt he was close to the heart of the matter. Jeanne Clermont. It all came down to her.
18
“There are complications,” Devereaux said. His voice was laconic; the mood was conveyed clearly despite coming across the transatlantic telephone cable.
Hanley waited. He was alone in his bare office, but he cupped the receiver with his hand with characteristic caution. He was a man of little cautions, picked up one by one after thirty-four years in the trade of espionage.
That morning he had brought two men from the plumbers’ unit to sweep the lines in his office, looking for taps or other signs of electronic surveillance. The plumbers had been called the black-bag boys before Watergate offered them new nomenclature to play with. They had not detected any taps on the lines and were amused by Hanley’s fussbudget way of overseeing their work. Hanley had even changed the code on the double-scrambler box connected to the phone. The box tore the sounds of conversation apart into meaningless bits of noise for those who might tap the lines.
Every caution was observed.
Devereaux did not exist in the Section anymore, and Hanley knew he was playing a dangerous political game. So this conversation could not be taking place.
“Complications here as well,” Hanley said.
“A French policeman. At least, he had that identification. Jules Simeon. And a British agent named John Gaunt.”
“What do they have to do with this?”
“Gaunt is dead. I think Simeon killed him.”
“You were only supposed to go after—”
“Goddammit, Hanley, I didn’t want these complications any more than you do.”
“Gaunt was the British control. On that business at Lakenheath.”
“Everything links back to Lakenheath and Felker. And Jeanne Clermont.”
“Could you get Manning’s things?”
“No. The room had been sealed by the Paris police. This Simeon had the identity of a copy but I think he was something else.”
“Deuxième Bureau.”
“Yes,” Devereaux said. “He knew about Manning. Not the way a policeman would know about him.”
“This has to do with Lakenheath,” Hanley said.
Now Devereaux waited at the other end of the line with patience. In all the years as agent and control officer, neither man had been forthright in these conversations. Agents always held back; it was almost a rule of the trade. And the controls, from their desk far away, tried to keep agents fragmented from others, to seem to be the repositories of all knowledge so that no one agent would finally break the control.
But the rules did not apply. Even Hanley had said it. Devereaux had resigned and Hanley had brought him back, through a door that should not have existed.
“Mrs. Neumann thinks that Felker’s information — actually, what he stole from Reed — was a plant.”
“Great minds,” Devereaux said. “So do I.”
“But she doesn’t understand it.”
“Because whatever is gumming up Tinkertoy is supposed to gum up whatever the British use for a computer.”
Hanley was silent for a moment. “Do you know that?”
“No. It only appears to make sense. Reed was too easy. He was supposed to have been turned by the British. He was supposed to have turned over his information.”
“Then the Soviets are feeding us. And feeding the British and God knows who else.”
“We always did it,” Devereaux said. “They’ve just gotten more sophisticated. The computer is blind until someone says it can see and takes the blinders off.”
“But what’s the point?” Hanley’s voice was nearly petulant. “Why warn us about a Warsaw Pact strike against the West? I mean, if it’s going to happen, why warn us? And if it’s not, why get us ready to repel it?”
“I don’t know.”