by Bill Granger
Devereaux stared at him. “You talked to her.”
“We talked to her.”
“He’s just getting off the subject,” Denisov said gently. “I think his leg is broken. He’s probably in shock. That’s why he doesn’t feel the pain. We can wait until the pain comes but that might be too long. I suppose he might die.”
“Yes,” Devereaux said, almost in a trance.
Three men in a car, parked on a quiet street on the Zürichberg, in a neighborhood of old homes and large estates high over a city obscured by the fog. It was night, just that suddenly. The wet thaw made everything seem sticky, even the inside of the Mercedes.
Morgan’s face was quite chalky now, almost transparent. There was some pain but not as much as there would be later.
“Who is Felix Krueger to you?” began Devereaux.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about—”
“Then I’ll kill you,” Devereaux said.
He sat next to Morgan. Denisov sat in the front seat, behind the wheel. Denisov eyed them through the rearview mirror, like a driver watching his passengers during a long ride. Little dramas in the back seat of a cab.
Devereaux waited.
“Not me. We’re the same side, Jack. You don’t gimme a lot of shit. My people know I’m here, don’t forget—”
“And that I’m here,” Devereaux said. His lazy gray eyes never left the other’s face. “What should I do about that?”
“Kill me and they know it’s you.”
“But you were willing to let Rimsky kill me.”
Morgan’s silence said yes.
“Why is this Russian operation important to NSA?” Devereaux said.
Denisov grunted.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Morgan said.
Devereaux shot him then, in the fleshy part of the thigh. The other leg. The air of the car was suddenly acrid with smoke from the pistol. The three were temporarily deafened by the sound of the shot in the small space. Even Denisov jumped at the sudden explosion. Because of the ringing in their ears, they did not hear Morgan scream at the moment he was shot. They heard only the sobs after.
“You sadistic bastard—”
“Then your right hand,” Devereaux said. “Do you think I’m playing, you bastard? Is this a game to you? You wanted me killed and you’ve been on my case for weeks. You want me dead, you push Rita Macklin around. Do you suppose I’m going to let you do it?”
“Son of a bitch,” Morgan muttered through the pain that was enveloping both legs, rising through his body. He felt sick. He vomited soundlessly on himself.
Devereaux waited.
“This makes the car smell,” Denisov said.
“Krueger,” Morgan said. “He works for us. Now do you see?”
“There’s more,” Devereaux said. “If it were that simple, there wouldn’t have been all these games. Back in Chicago. Putting the finger on me, on Rita, forcing us to get away. Those two clowns in Chicago, what were they supposed to be? Highway signs for the Opposition? This is Devereaux, this guy right here, shoot him, please.”
“You were interfering, you bastard, in an operation of the United States government—”
“And him.” Devereaux pointed the pistol at the back of Denisov’s head. He had removed the homburg because it was too tall for the interior of the car. “They know about him?”
“By now—”
“All right.”
Silence a moment. Three men breathe. One man groaning softly. The car still, the night still, the black fog over everything.
Devereaux waited a moment, watching the face twisted in pain before him, but not really seeing it. Seeing, for the first time, the possibility he had given up on. Just possible, he thought.
“Drive,” Devereaux said.
Craypool received a message in NSA code ultra, from Zurich. He ran it through the code computer, read the clear message twice, then hurried up the hall to the corner office and entered without knocking. O’Brien was alone. Craypool put the message on O’Brien’s desk. “From our man in Zurich,” Craypool said. O’Brien read it three times.
“Done then,” O’Brien said.
It was just after three in the afternoon. Washington was waiting for its first winter storm. The inch of snow that was predicted would, of course, shut down most of the functions of government for a day. The president was at his ranch in California. The vice-president was in Beaumont, Texas, speaking of morality to a group of born-again Christians. The National Security Adviser was in Palm Springs, California, at the home of a friend who owned two hundred thousand shares in the world’s largest computer company, a company that was trying to restructure the computer systems used by NSA.
“We’ll inform… our friends at the Section, certainly. In proper voices of respect,” O’Brien said with a smile.
“Everything has turned out satisfactorily,” Craypool agreed, nodding his fishlike head, his cheeks sunk in, his eyes large and colorless.
“We’ve got a couple of things to do now. Clean up California, interview the retired agent, try to get a line on what Macklin knows and where she’s put her information. There have got to be tapes, transcripts, something. I put my money on the Jewboy… what’s his name, Levy Solomon. She didn’t take them back to Chicago with her—”
“What then?”
“We let things happen the way they’re supposed to happen,” O’Brien said smiling. “We let things take their course. We let Teresa Kolaki go back where she belongs, we go back to our old relationship with Krueger.”
“The Macklin woman?”
“Let that smart-ass broad look out for herself. Her boyfriend gave Gleason three thousand dollars in dental work, she’s fucked us around. If the Opposition is still on her case, fine. If she wants to recall what Teresa Kolaki told her from memory, fine. It’s bullshit anyway without tapes, without Teresa Kolaki. No one is going to touch it except the National Examiner or something. Rita Macklin is finished as far as I’m concerned. I got the boy I wanted. I got his ass.”
“What about Morgan?”
“If he’s so goddam jumpy right now, let him come home for a little while. Send him the message; tell him there’s a circus we want him to go to. In Chicago. Tell him we’ll even buy the ticket so he can watch the last act go off.”
Craypool managed a watery sort of smile. “He’d like that. Be in on it. I mean, buttoning it all up.”
“Yeah,” O’Brien said. “Yeah, and he deserves it. He’s done the job for us.”
28
WASHINGTON, D.C.
An hour later, as the first of the snow began falling over the capital, a message came over the safe phone, and for a long moment Hanley held the receiver in his hand after the connection was broken. A phone call. The bastards didn’t even come to tell him in person.
Hanley put down the receiver at last and then picked it up again. This time, he punched an unfamiliar number, one he had written down when Rita Macklin called him from California. Damn it, he thought. He had put his neck out for Devereaux, for the woman. And they had just chopped it off and now there was blood all over everything.
He didn’t owe her this.
“Yes?” A male voice. A thick accent.
Hanley said her name. It was stupid, all of it had been wasted. Hanley realized his hand was shaking.
Rita’s voice on the line.
“What is it?”
“Devereaux,” he said, using the real name; it didn’t matter anymore.
Rita could hear the trembling in Hanley’s voice. It was going to be as bad as she had dreamed. It was going to be that bad awake. Rita Macklin stood in a dark hall in a dark apartment in Chicago, in a flat full of religious icons and photographs. Teresa Kolaki’s refuge, her immigrant kin. And now the horror of waiting was going to be over and the horror of action was going to begin.
“The Opposition finally caught up with him. In Zurich.”
“God damn it,” she said. Three distinct wor
ds, harsh and flat.
“They dumped their bodies in the Zürichsee. According to our… source. There’s been a sudden thaw in Switzerland, the lake ice is breaking up.”
“Damn,” she said, softly.
“Both of them,” Hanley said. “You have to tell Teresa Kolaki.”
“Yes.”
“It’s over. You realize that?”
“Yes.”
“When… when you come back—I mean, when you come back to Washington—I can…” He hesitated; why was he saying this to her? For his sake? He saw Devereaux in his mind’s eye, sitting across from him that night in New York long ago, at a table outside the hotel, on the sidewalk, drinking vodka, explaining about the mission in Teheran. Before he met this woman.
“I can watch you,” Hanley said. “For a while. I don’t know if they’re satisfied. The Opposition, I mean. With one death. I mean, they weren’t interested in you except you led to him.”
“I suppose,” Rita Macklin said. The softness had become dulled.
“Teresa has no protection,” he said. “It was an NSA operation. You understand? He was wrong. NSA had it buttoned from the beginning. Everything he thought about it was wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“It was legitimate,” Hanley said. “I shouldn’t even tell you this. But it was legitimate. A nice deep probe. And he screwed it up.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said. Just as flatly, without tone or color to her voice. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, what happens now doesn’t matter.”
“No,” Hanley agreed.
The worst thing had already happened. Devereaux was dead.
29
ZURICH
Felix Krueger walked up the damp sidewalk, brushing against the college kids marching down toward the old city on the east side of the Limmat, for a night of drinking. Children, he smiled. He was a benign man, at peace with the small world he inhabited.
The streets were clear and shining in the darkness, full of traffic, headlights glittering, stars above the mountains of the city in the clear, cold night. The fog was lifting, it would be clean winter again. Trams ground up the hill surely and slowly, as Krueger walked up the hill just as surely and inevitably.
“Guten Tag,” said a man who had not been there a moment before but who was now walking beside him.
Felix Krueger turned, his hands in coat pockets, his large head protected from the cold by a black beret. He smiled in friendly puzzlement. Many greeted him in his native city; people knew him because he had spent his life here. He could not possibly know them all, or their faces.
But he was certain he had never seen this man before.
“Good evening, sir,” he replied in simple German, uninflected, off guard, a German that called up the faces on the frescoes of Bavarian beer halls, all glowing and overfed and laughing.
“I have come to audit the books, Herr Krueger,” the man said, the German uninflected.
Almost said pleasantly.
“Do I know you, sir?” Felix Krueger said. He stopped on the slanting walkway and turned to the other man.
“No. But I’m the auditor.”
“Are you English?”
“No. Would you prefer to speak in English?”
“I can speak in many languages. It is—” He smiled broadly but too quickly. “It is the necessary gift of the Swiss to know many languages well.”
“Good,” said the American in his native tongue. “I put off seeing you for a long time.”
“Should I know you? Or who sent you?” Still a bit of a smile at the corner of his lips. He had felt so pleasant in the sudden thaw of the past two days. He had just eaten that night in the Kronenhalle on Ramistrasse, near the opera. The taste of sausages lingered on his breath with the smell of beer.
“Yes. You should. But we have not met before.”
The smile faded, slowly, to nothing. The evening was becoming colder, the brief thaw was chilling. Rivulets of sweat coated Krueger’s back beneath his heavy brown overcoat.
“Are we talking in riddles?” Felix Krueger said, annoyed, his voice rumbling slowly.
“No. It’s time to speak plainly,” Devereaux said. “I met a man named Morgan.”
Felix Krueger waited.
“And a man named Rimsky,” Devereaux said.
“And who are you? Who are these men you talk to me of?” His syntax was suddenly shaky. He felt his hand tremble.
“People who know you,” Devereaux said.
“And you are an agent?”
“Perhaps.”
“What is ‘perhaps’?”
“It means I may be what you think. Or I may not be.”
“Do you have an identity?”
Devereaux smiled. “Let’s go to your house, it’s just up the street. We can talk inside.”
“I prefer not to talk to you. I might call a policeman.”
“No.”
“What do you mean? This is my city.”
“And this is my gun.”
Felix Krueger clearly saw the pistol, clipped to the other’s belt, when Devereaux opened his coat.
“You understand?”
“Yes,” Felix Krueger said.
“Let’s go in. By the back door, I think.”
The two men entered the house as cautiously as burglars. The housekeeper was gone for the night. Felix Krueger, a man of solitary ways and solitary pleasures, kept a lonely house because he preferred it.
He led the other man to the library. The room, like the dining room opposite, was octagonal. The walls were stacked with shelves and thousands of books in several languages. An immense fireplace held a flickering wood fire. Krueger opened the glass screen and placed a new log on the fire. The birch crackled in the flames, filling the room with wavering light.
“The housekeeper always leaves me a fire before she goes,” Felix Krueger said. His eyes were wide with a child’s delight. He stared at the flames, saw stories in them. “I like a fire at night, especially a wet night,” he said. And he turned to the American.
“Would you like a drink? Schnapps?”
“Vodka.”
“Of course.” He smiled again. Why wouldn’t this other man smile at all? “Only the Russians like schnapps.” His little joke but the other man waited for the glass of vodka.
Krueger made the drinks, passed one over, led him to chairs set before a chessboard. A game was in progress. Krueger played with a man who lived in Bern and called him nearly every night with his next move.
“So, mister. Why have you come?”
“I came to audit the books,” Devereaux said.
“You are not serious, are you?”
“We pay you,” Devereaux said.
“We? I work for myself. I am paid commissions.”
“Fees for people. Rather, for slaves.”
“I do not believe in slavery,” Krueger said stiffly. “You are in my house and you insult me.”
“You are a slavemaster. You buy human beings and you sell them. How many times do you sell them?”
“What?”
“You buy them from the Soviets. You sell them their freedom. You collect from the Soviets, you collect from the slaves. Then you sell the slaves again. This time to Uncle. But is that the last time you squeeze a profit out of them?”
Said so reasonably. Said almost gently.
“What are you talking about?”
“The Zurich Numbers. Morgan told me that. At the end. At the end, he told me everything. About you and about Rimsky.”
“What do you—”
“Morgan is dead. Rimsky is dead. Do you want to be alive?”
“You cannot threaten me.”
“I did. Now. Tell me about the Zurich Numbers and tell me how far they go. And tell me what happened to Stefan Kolaki. You know, don’t you?”
“I know nothing, I—”
“Tell me.” Gently. Insistently. The voice of a lover. “Tell me.”
How frightened he was. In his city. In
his own house. In this library with the familiar books waiting for him like old, welcoming friends. Before the fire, sitting in his chair, listening to the stories of the crackling logs.
“I know nothing.”
“Where do you keep the books?”
Krueger got up suddenly, with a little angry burst, and went to the wall. He pulled down a red leather book, similar to the other red leather books on the same shelf. He turned, smiling viciously for the first time.
“You are an auditor? An accountant? Then audit my books, friend without a name. Here. Here is the information you want. Here, take it, it won’t bite you. Open it up and see all of Felix Krueger’s secrets and then tell me what you will do with them.”
Devereaux stood up slowly, walked across the room, took the red book. He glanced at Krueger a moment before he opened it. In the light of the fire, he turned to the first page. He thought: I am born.
Numbers.
Endless numbers. Some in rows, some in columns. Columns from the top of the page to the bottom. No signs of currency, no dollar symbol or pound symbol. Just numbers.
Numbers that stood for names, lives, terms of slavery, terms of bondage, whatever terms were set. Set by this man. By the Soviets. By American agencies.
The numbers ran into each other without spacing. No lines underscored any numbers. No totals were final. Some numbers were clearly symbols for units of money. Others might be for names, for years to be spent in bondage.
In the end, Morgan had told him they were called Numbers because that is all they were; that’s what the network was called within NSA. Morgan had not been afraid, not at first. He had been as brave as his masters would have expected him to be. Morgan had endured a great deal before he spoke of the Zurich Numbers.
Devereaux turned the pages slowly. What could he do to Krueger? Kill him? Threaten him with pain? There was plenty of that. Morgan only understood pain, even as Devereaux would only have understood pain.
He glanced at Krueger. He would tell him so much and it might be all there was. Or there might be more. He had to be certain. He did not want Krueger to lie to him. And Krueger might lie if it was only pain.
Devereaux tore the first page from the book.