Then Jeanne Clermont spoke.
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I have. Everything is part of everything else.”
“But you guessed,” she said. “About William and about Quizon.”
“It was logical, the only thing that made any sense. And now it makes more sense about Simeon. What is the antiterror bureau?”
“It’s devoted to investigations of terror groups operating inside the country.” She smiled with bitterness. “And so, of course, the man in charge of the bureau could control the terror groups as well.”
“The man called Three. Simeon.”
“But all of this is so shadowy. Le Coq didn’t know who Three was; Simeon merely did what he was expected to do, even in turning Quizon. There’s no evidence he killed William at all.”
“Except that we know he did,” Devereaux said.
“Yes,” Jeanne Clermont said. She stared again, not at the room but at the past, the sad remembrance of William Manning on that last night. He would not have betrayed her again, she thought — though she would have used him. He loved her finally, and so he was killed. Everything turned in on itself. She saw his horrified face as he had watched her while she told him of her tortures at the hands of the police in 1968. She had returned his love, wounding him as he had hurt her; if she had not loved him, she would not have bothered to wound him. Their love must be equal, she thought; now it was even between them, a placid sea after the storms of hurt and betrayal.
And he had left the apartment in the last hour of his life and she had not even watched him leave, she had been so tired.
And then he was dead and there would be no more betrayals or lies or pledges, no more chances to hurt or even to heal the wounds they had caused each other.
“What will you do now?” Jeanne said in a distant voice.
“Report.”
She sighed, so softly that she might have intended to make no sound at all. “All of these games,” she said. “Little games and the deaths we caused. And it came down to nothing at the end.”
He stared at her as though he fathomed the melancholy in her laconic words. “What will you do about Quizon?”
“What should I do?”
“You don’t want revenge?”
“Should I? Should I seek to kill everyone who has wounded me or who has insulted me or all those who killed William?”
Devereaux waited; there were more words to be said.
“I sought revenge once before, against a policeman. There was no satisfaction to it, only more pain, only the burden of another’s suffering.” She plucked at her soiled dress, distracting her hands so she could concentrate on her words. “Yes. I will do the petty thing, the little cruelty to Quizon, because I am still human. He loves Paris; he has lived here nearly all of his life. But he will never return to this city. Never.” Words without fire, like the sentence handed down by a judge who must kill the man accused.
“I feel so tired,” she said. “It is as though I have lived all my life and now I am old and tired and waiting for death.”
“Simeon must have tapped Quizon, broken into his transmissions back to the Section,” Devereaux said.
“Why does it concern you?”
“Simeon concerns me now. What he knew and what he was able to do with it.”
“What are you going to do?”
Devereaux looked at her. “Rest now,” he said, his voice soft again. “If there’s a safe place in Paris away from Simeon, it must be here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Make a report,” he said.
“And then?”
“Rest,” he said, because he would not tell her all that would follow.
33
“What do you make of this?”
The president of the United States turned to the man who was his national security adviser and waited for a reply. But the adviser seemed reluctant to speak at all. The others in the situations room were silent; the adviser carried weight in the meeting because he had expressed no opinion yet, because he had taken no side.
It was one minute past four in the morning of June 6.
Oddly, though the bright room was filled with clocks detailing the time in every time zone of the world, the room had a timeless quality to it. It would always be a room at the raw edge of morning, before dawn. The room was off the corridor that connected the basements of the White House and the ornate, old Executive Office Building across the way.
The president had been summoned out of a sound sleep. The national security adviser, who had been making a speech in Kansas City, had been flown back by special air force jet at midnight.
The matter was extraordinary, and the complexity of it had not lessened the sense of urgency that permeated the room. On a giant projection behind the president was a portrait of the earth taken by camera from two satellites — one at the north pole and one at the south. The twin globes were crossed with lines marking latitude and longitude as well as the zones. Depending on which projector was used, the photograph served as a map marking the spots of the American armed forces in the world, the Soviet forces, the forces of ten other countries deemed important enough to be fed into the computer scan.
Now the map showed all the forces of Europe arrayed against each other. Europe had been the focus of the debate for the past two hours.
“I think there is too much information,” the national security adviser said at last. “And too much of it stands alone.”
The secretary of state smiled at this, but no one else in the room joined him, and the secretary realized at last that the adviser had not intended a joke.
“What do you mean?”
“Two days ago, the Central Intelligence Agency received solid information that troop maneuvers by the Warsaw Pact along the south border of Poland were in fact preparations for a direct invasion of Western Europe. We put the boys on the front line first on yellow alert and, twenty-four hours ago, on red alert. NATO has been informed, the French liaison has been clued in.” The adviser paused to light a cigar. Though the president did not smoke and no one smoked in his presence, the adviser was an exception. He was a man who spoke little, but each word carried weight with the president.
“Now, CIA tells us they have received details of a plan supposedly out of the Soviet war college computer that explains the whole thing is a hoax, set up to lure us into a warlike feint, and that the president of France is going to be targeted for assassination by terrorists. I mean, what the hell is the truth of the thing?”
“Exactly,” the CIA director replied. He had been uncomfortable for the length of the meeting. It was the job of the agency to gather information and to evaluate it, and yet the information contradicted itself. Which was the truth? “I don’t understand still how our alerts can be transformed into an act of war. If the president of France is assassinated, how would that connect with us?”
“We notified the French,” the president said.
“Yes, sir,” the CIA director replied. “That was three hours ago. But the French have their own way of looking at things. They said that their security was adequate for the president.”
“Damn them,” the president said. “Nobody’s security is that good.”
“The trouble comes back to the information again,” the adviser said. “There’s too much of it. And we don’t have any third point of the problem to verify one or the other. We’ve got two legs of a tripod and the damned thing keeps falling over.”
“I think we should not stand down from the red alert,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff interjected again. He had maintained the same simple point throughout the meeting, to the annoyance of the president. “If anything, we ought to gear it up to Complex One.”