by Bill Granger
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This is for Aaron Priest
Shall we submit?
Are we but slaves?
* * *
I am the slave of duty.
—W. S. GILBERT
Author’s Note
Investigations conducted over the past decade by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the principal domestic counterespionage agency of the United States, show that immigrants, illegal aliens, resident aliens, and visitors to this country from Eastern Bloc nations have been used as intelligence agents.
It is a working assumption of U.S. intelligence forces, including the Central Intelligence Agency, that all members of the Soviet Union’s press contingent in the United States are intelligence agents to a greater or lesser extent and that they are controlled by the Soviet Committee for State Security (the KGB).
Since the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II, the public has become aware of what the intelligence agencies have known for some time—that the Bulgarian Secret Service is an active agence provocateur of the Soviet Union.
The National Security Agency, headquartered at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, has become one of the most powerful intelligence forces in the world, rivaling both its sister agency, the CIA, and the true Opposition, the KGB, and, to a lesser extent, the military-dominated GRU.
Though there are some direct flights of LOT, the Polish airline, between Warsaw and the United States, many emigrants from Poland find their way to the United States through the “window” of Vienna, the easternmost free city in continental Europe.
The largest Polish-derived population outside of Warsaw is concentrated in Chicago.
Finally, the recruitment of journalists as espionage agents has been routine practice by all governments for more than 140 years.
1
CHICAGO
“I don’t think we need a pistol,” Mikhail Korsoff said, getting out of the white Oldsmobile on the driver’s side and automatically pushing down the lock as he closed the door. “Lock it. This is a bad neighborhood.”
The Bulgarian pushed the lock and closed his door. He shrugged as though agreeing with Korsoff, straightening the lines of his gray coat around his large body. His shirt collar was too tight; his face looked pained, bloated.
They crossed the street, hands in overcoat pockets, shoulders hunched against the damp breeze. A late morning sky was hangover gray; the light was pinched and mean.
They climbed the stone stairs past the broken stone lion and knocked on the door. They didn’t talk while they waited. Korsoff was going to talk when the door opened. The Bulgarian’s English was limited.
The door opened on a chain. They saw part of a face in shadows. Korsoff was surprised and showed it; he hadn’t expected a black man.
“What you want?”
“My name is George Klemper,” Korsoff said. “You have a woman who works here. Name of…” He consulted a sheet of paper. “Name of Mary Krakowski.”
“I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout.”
Korsoff frowned. “You better know.”
The black face did not change, only the eyes darkened.
“I’m with Immigration and Naturalization.”
“That right?”
“You got a Mary Krakowski work here?”
“Wait a minute.” The door closed. They stood in the damp cold, on the stone steps, staring at each other. The Bulgarian wrapped his fingers around the .22 MIK pistol in his pocket.
The door opened on the chain again. A white face on an old woman appeared.
“What do you want?”
“Klemper,” Korsoff began. He produced a badge and identity card and spoke more words.
“What do you want?” the old woman said.
“Ask you about one of your employees.”
“Is something wrong?”
“This is routine,” Korsoff said. He tried a smile and didn’t get it right. “Can we ask you a few questions?”
“Let me see that identification again,” the old woman said. She stared at the card for a moment and decided. She closed the door, removed the chain, and opened it. She wore a blue print robe and slippers. Her hair was sparse and gray, her eyes steel.
She led them into an old-fashioned room to the right of the door. The room was dark and had the look of a museum about it. The two men stood and she waved them with a single gesture to chairs. They sat down. Both removed their felt hats and held them by the brim. The Bulgarian still had not spoken. Korsoff did not understand why he was necessary for the trip, but control in New York had said the Bulgarian was to be included on everything.
“What’s this about?”
“You’re Melvina Devereaux?”
“And what’s this about?”
“To ask about the woman you employ.”
“She’s perfectly legal—”
“A green card. Did she have a green card?”
“A green card?”
“A work permit. A green card. Did she have one?”
“Let me think.” Her forefinger tapped her jaw line.
“Did she show it to you?”
“Yes,” Melvina lied. She never thought to ask for it.
Korsoff hadn’t expected that. The lie made him nervous. “All right. Tell me something. Do you live here alone?”
“Why is that germane?”
Korsoff blinked, scanned the word germane in memory, could not find it. He said, “Pardon?” The accent was light but lingering.
“I said why do you want to know that?”
“As you know, your son works for the government. It is always important when you, when someone like you, employs an alien, even with working papers, from a foreign government. A communist government.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I mean your son, Mrs. Devereaux.”
Her eyes narrowed suddenly, shifting from one face to the other. “I have never married. I have no son.”
The two men glanced at each other, then at the woman.
“That is not our information,” Korsoff said at last.
The Bulgarian stuck his right hand back in his coat pocket. He felt the cold pistol. He wrapped his fingers around it. He looked around the room but the black man was not visible.
“The government is interested in what, exactly? In me? In Mary Krakowski? Or in what, exactly?”
“In Mr. Devereaux. And you, madam. You are of the same family.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the old woman said, her eyes reflecting her words. “Would you mind showing me your identification again?”
“Where is the black?” the Bulgarian said in an accent so thick that pretense was dropped. He stood up.
“Oh,” she said, smiling. She rose as well from a red chair. “In the back, I think. I asked him to call the police.”
“Police?” Korsoff began. His eyes widened. Was the old woman insane?
“Polizei,” the Bulgarian repeated. He decided to kill this old woman. He removed the pistol from his pocket. Korsoff saw the gesture in time. He stood in front of the Bulgarian and stared at him. The Bulgarian, giving ground, took a step back and then, reluctantly, put the pistol away. Did the old
woman see it? But Korsoff could only think to get out now.
“Madam,” he began, offering apologies. Have to run along. Another time. But there was nothing to say.
They opened the door. She was behind them. Down the stone steps, past the broken lion. Korsoff almost ran across the street. Police. He unlocked his car door, slid in, reached across for the button. The Bulgarian got in, slammed the door even as Korsoff pulled away.
“She knew,” the Bulgarian said.
“Why did you take out your pistol? I told you—”
“She knew,” the Bulgarian said. “Do you think he has contacted her?”
“I don’t know. But she knows now, if she didn’t know. She knows.”
“I should have killed her.”
“And the black? And then who else? This won’t solve your problem,” Korsoff said. “You have to find him first.”
“We will,” the Bulgarian said. “He can’t be invisible forever. We will.”
2
NEW YORK CITY
When Devereaux’s mail arrived at the post office in Front Royal, Virginia, it was restamped and sent on to his new address, PO Box 971, Fort Meade, Maryland.
Fort George G. Meade, an Army post between Baltimore and Washington off the Beltway, also houses the central offices of the National Security Agency. The NSA, because it ostensibly serves the various intelligence services even when it dominates them, also acts as postmaster in cases such as Devereaux’s.
The mail was rerouted in large envelopes to an address on Fourteenth Street in Washington that houses the offices of R Section, an intelligence agency listed officially in the annual federal budget as “the agricultural estimate and crop information service” of the Department of Agriculture. The description of R Section in the budget has elements of truth. Devereaux’s mail was removed from the envelope provided by NSA, placed in a new (though identical) envelope provided by R Section, and sent to a final destination on West 88th Street in New York City.
Because of all the routine security concerning the mail, it was nearly too late when Devereaux received the letter.
His mail was stuffed in the battered brass box in the marble lobby of the eight-story building where he had lived for nearly four months.
The lobby was cold, even though heat banged up the radiator pipes near the elevator. The floor was a checkerboard of broken black-and-white tile. On the marble walls were two spray-painted legends: Fuck Puerto Rican Porkies and Cobra Black A. Stones. The graffiti had been scrubbed but the pale outline of the words was clearly visible.
Late in a fall afternoon he opened the outer door and held it ajar with his foot for light while he unlocked his mailbox. He grabbed the two manila envelopes, closed the box, climbed three steps to the security inner door, turned the key, and entered the foyer, crossing the checkerboard tiles to the ancient Otis elevator to the left of the entrance.
The elevator’s steel door had been vandalized and did not shut properly. Graffiti was scratched on the inside of the door, including a crude representation of what someone named Penny liked to do with men.
Devereaux, the trained observer, had taught himself in the last months to see none of this. His life had become internal, as though he were in solitary, in darkness, existing by not resisting the horror of the endless dark. He was a child again on Chicago streets, immune to ugliness because he was part of it, adopting a sort of dream that became more real than real stones, bricks, smells, and shouts in the world that pressed him in.
On the fourth floor, he pushed against another steel door and trudged down the darkened corridor. The lights were broken or removed or the electricity was out; it was always like this, always dark, and no one had complained for years.
He fumbled the key into the top lock of the steel door to his apartment. Then he opened the bottom lock. The door swung open on a narrow foyer that led into a narrow dining room that opened onto a wider living room. The walls had once been white and now were gray. Radiators hissed heat into the room. The light switches on the walls bore the smudge marks of previous occupants. Who were they? What had they been and what had they been changed into? How many had been processed through this place? Devereaux always thought of the questions as he added his smudges to the others and flicked on all the lights.
There was a bedroom that he rarely used. He would sit in the living room and doze in front of the television set. Usually, he slept on the couch. The living room was littered with books, some still in bookstore bags, some opened with broken spines to keep the place, some waiting in patient piles on the plastic coffee table. Sometimes he read all day and all night until the next dawn when he could finally sleep. He felt like the child he had been in this place: a prisoner who had escaped quietly, not resisting the world, merely waiting for his mind to replace the world by reading of other worlds. Oddly, he felt most content rereading the books that had first given him escape. On a gray afternoon, a Sunday, he had begun again David Copperfield:
I am born.
He smiled now, coldly, acknowledging his momentary self-pity. He put the manila envelopes down on the plastic coffee table next to the lumpy couch with the orange slipcover. He went into the kitchen and opened an elderly General Electric refrigerator. It contained six eggs, two cartons of Tropicana Premium Pack orange juice, an unopened package of German black bread, a jar of Vita herring in wine sauce, and a liter bottle of Finlandia vodka. He stared for a moment and then reached for the vodka. He touched the bottle, almost removed it, and then slid it back on the shelf. He took out a carton of orange juice, poured some into a glass, and replaced the carton in the refrigerator. He took the glass into the living room and put it down on the coffee table. He took off his raincoat and threw it on a chair. He sat down and contemplated the manila envelopes and the books waiting for him. He tried not to resist in his mind; it was evening and another night in the cell, waiting for another morning, waiting for another night, enduring because he did not resist.
It had been a year since Helsinki. They had wrapped him in security so tight that there was no breathing room, no room to stretch his arms, no light to see beyond the limited horizon of four walls. R Section called it “reprocessing.” He understood the procedure; he accepted it simply because nothing else could be done. No. He had accepted it because of her.
The Opposition had marked him and Rita Macklin for elimination after the Helsinki matter. They had made themselves easy targets. Both thought they could escape their old lives and pool a new one together. How naïve. If he had not fallen in love with her, he would not have been so stupid. That’s how he explained it to himself now. When they left their old lives, they left their old protections. They went to live together in the house on the mountain outside Front Royal. The idyll ended one afternoon in winter when two Bulgarian assassins stalked them up the trail and Devereaux killed them from ambush. He and Rita had buried the assassins and destroyed their car and fled back to their old lives, but they had only stayed their executions for a little while. They could never survive alone, even alone together. Reluctantly, docilely, like slaves locking their own manacles to the oars, they returned to what they had been. Only now they were apart. It had to be so.
He picked up the glass of orange juice and sipped it. Hanley had contacted him that morning, in the lounge of LaGuardia Airport. Hanley was his control, ostensibly in charge of “reprocessing,” though all the nitty-gritty was handled by a section at NSA. Hanley had been on his way through New York; the meeting place was for his convenience. It didn’t matter; Devereaux only had time to kill.
“They tell me two months,” Hanley had said cheerfully. “Not too much longer.”
“No probes by the Opposition?”
“No,” Hanley had said. “You’re safely dead and buried.”
“And Rita?”
“Nothing. No contact. I handled it myself.”
“You’re certain.”
“It’s been nearly a year.”
“Is she all right?”
Hanl
ey had glanced at him curiously. “I just said so.”
Devereaux had said, “I meant…” He paused.
“I know. That, I don’t know. She’s safe. No probes. No leaks. They’ve given up on both of you. As long as you’re back, you’re safe.”
“It’s good to be back,” Devereaux had said.
“Sarcasm,” Hanley had identified.
He frowned to think of the meeting with Hanley. Not because it had gone badly but because Devereaux had been so eager to talk to his control. The solitary was getting to him; he hated that weakness in him. He picked up the glass of orange juice and took another swallow.
Devereaux was in early middle age and felt it sometimes when he awoke on the lumpy couch and felt his joints make noises as he stretched and felt the muscles in his broad back bunch up before he took a morning shower to loosen them. His body did not show signs of failing; aches and pains had no counterparts in a sagging paunch or softened chest. Only his face seemed older than his body, crosshatched with lines on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. His gray, arctic eyes were a match for his gray hair thatched with tundra brown; but these manifestations of age were merely a bad guess by some chromosome—his hair had turned gray at twenty-two. His shoulders were deceptively large, his hands were large and calm; his fingers were flat, his fingernails broad. Everything about his appearance was deceptive: He would seem small in one light, then emerge larger than he was in another. He rarely spoke, especially now, in a neighborhood of strangers. He had lived among strangers all his life.
He tore open the first manila envelope.
Inside were three pieces of mail. One envelope was addressed in an elegant hand, blue ink on blue paper. He knew that writing. It chilled him.
He held the envelope a moment and then got up and went into the kitchen and dropped it, unopened, into the garbage can next to the sink. He opened the refrigerator and took out the bottle of vodka and brought it into the living room. He sat down on the couch, opened the vodka, and splashed some into the remains of the orange juice.