The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  “Skarda,” Devereaux said, breaking a moment of silence. “Person or operation or both. Unresolved. But Viktor doesn’t know.”

  “That is your assessment.”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  “So,” Hanley said, shifting in his chair.

  Silence ticked into the room. The Thurber drawings on the wall next to the bar portrayed the Algonquin lobby with old ladies shaped like overstuffed chairs, wearing lamps for hats. The roar of the street did not penetrate this silence.

  Vodka filled Devereaux with false warmth. Autumn was bleak now that he did not live in Washington, where the colors were languid and sullen and suffused with sexual stimulation. It was not the colors, he realized. It was the warm, languid, sullen, sexual remembrance of when he lived with Rita Macklin there. He was certain this final separation was inevitable, which made the separation so much more bleak. Rita Macklin was a journalist, and her name in a magazine or in an op-ed piece in the Times was a constant reminder to him. She never tried to reach him, though it would have been simple. She could call the Section number, and they would patch her through to the safe house in Manhattan.… House, safe house—three rooms in a West Side neighborhood full of shabby, rent-controlled apartments. Orange-lit Manhattan enclosed him, but he had to be here, waiting for the next assignment and the next, away from the color and comfort of the only woman he had ever loved, who could have been his if only he could renounce this bleak shadow life. He could not. He could explain it, the life, but he could not renounce the life.

  Hatred was so strange in all its forms. Devereaux had marveled at Viktor Rusinov’s hatred, which spewed out from time to time in words as foul as sewage, blaming this or that circumstance or member of the bureaucracy for his lack of advancement, blaming the American agents for keeping him locked in the velvet prison of the Stockholm embassy. He wanted to go to New York.

  Devereaux had no such hatred. Not for Section, not for Hanley. Not for Rita Macklin. Hatred was scorched out of him, twisted as a burned forest, blackened to charcoal into fossil remains of what he had been. The only thing that remained was the pain of separation from Rita Macklin because she could not live anymore with a man of secrets.

  He had to stop thinking of her. He turned back to Hanley. “Skarda as a man, not an operation. Think of it.”

  “I’ve thought of it,” said Hanley. “We run through files and find one thousand six hundred thirty-four Skardas. Primarily a Czech name. There was a Skarda who was running agents from Berlin in the sixties, during the Dubczeck regime. But nothing in computer links Henry McGee to any Skarda.”

  “Then consider it as an operation,” Devereaux said.

  “We have no reason to do so,” Hanley said.

  “No reason not to. When we put Henry McGee away two years ago, we didn’t get a flutter from the Russians. Not even an informal contact. He was their agent, a ranked agent inside KGB. It’s not like them to not recover their lost lambs.”

  “Even Henry expected more,” Hanley said.

  “Perhaps they plan to spring Henry,” Devereaux said. He did not look at Hanley but at the room, at the soft light, tried to feel the warmth of the place. “Skarda is some future thing that needs the presence of Henry McGee. Or his cooperation. Or Skarda is some ongoing operation that Henry knows about and they are worried he told us.”

  “Why send such a message to the Leo Tolstoy?” Hanley countered. “It’s not a spy ship, just a dirty freighter with no secrets.”

  The Tolstoy had “political officers,” of course, as all Soviet ships did, ostensibly to answer questions and provide instructions on matters of faith and morals in the communist religion. They were the KGB men who had spooked Viktor into defecting in Stockholm.

  But why this defection by this Soviet sailor? Why in Stockholm? Why was he bringing the gift of a coded message fragment hinting at a link between Henry McGee, a jailed spy, and something or someone called Skarda, and a penetration of Eagle?

  “We don’t understand this message—” Hanley began again, signaling for his third drink of the afternoon.

  “Therefore, it must contain the germ of truth,” Devereaux finished for him.

  Hanley nodded. “Is it disinformation? That seems unlikely, since disinformation must be understood to disinform. We don’t understand. Unless you missed something, Devereaux, and Viktor is a spy and you believed him to be genuine.”

  Devereaux took his second vodka. The vodka burned the back of his throat.

  “Could you have made a mistake?”

  Could he? He made mistakes all the time. He let her go. Now Rita Macklin haunted him in the Manhattan streets in this bleak, treeless autumn. He was certain he saw her on Broadway, hailing a cab in the rain… in the doorway of Lutèce… saw her at a sidewalk table in the St. Moritz, talking to a man.… He knew they were just ghosts, but they were genuine anyway. Yes. He made mistakes all the time, about important things.

  “No,” Devereaux replied. “I didn’t mistake Viktor. Just as I didn’t mistake Henry McGee when Section believed him and let itself be penetrated.”

  That was meant to sting, and Hanley squinted in pain.

  “Then perhaps it is a matter of place,” Hanley recovered. “Viktor defected in Stockholm. Scandinavia. Soviet submarines are probing at the Swedish coast again, violating the waters.”

  “But the Swedes never find them.”

  “They want to turn the Baltic into a Soviet pond. That was clear in the last Soviet naval secret directive. They don’t have to own the shoreline of every country, just make their presence felt long enough and often enough.”

  Devereaux considered it. “So Skarda might be a plan directed at Scandinavia. Some bait to make us react foolishly.”

  “What about the political officers on the Leo Tolstoy?”

  “They were followed while the ship was in Stockholm harbor. That’s not easy to arrange on short notice. The report said they split up several times and were lost more than once.”

  Hanley said, “Two weeks, the secretary of state meets with his Soviet counterpart, the foreign secretary, in Malmö, Sweden. The talks are… about freedom of the seas in the Baltic. But there is a secret agenda.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t know. Either the secretary isn’t telling the intelligence services, or he doesn’t know, either. The initiative came from Moscow.”

  They all did nowadays, Devereaux thought.

  The administration was fumbling in a dozen places in the world, grasping at every Soviet straw proffered. The intelligence services had advised against meetings with “secret” agendas, but the administration was not listening to them right now; it was listening to the popularity polls published at intervals in the newspapers. If the Soviets wanted to throw Washington a bone, it might have meat on it.

  “You’ll have to go to Malmö for the conference. To observe.”

  “For whom?” Devereaux said.

  “Section. Maybe this Skarda thing involves the conference. Maybe it will come up.”

  “I was going to take furlough,” Devereaux began. He had not thought of such a thing until now. He was very tired, and he did not want to go to Malmö, and he did not want to think of Henry McGee or try to unravel another riddle.… He wanted to sit in the shabby three rooms in New York and wait for a telephone call to be patched through from Washington. What would he say to her? What had he ever been able to say to her?

  “You can have furlough when you come back. It’s not such a difficult matter—”

  “None of them ever are, Hanley,” Devereaux said.

  “Is that sarcasm?”

  Silence again except for the rain against the windows.

  Hanley said, “There’s an opening. In Bangkok.”

  Devereaux’s eyes became heavy. He had been recruited for Asia during the Vietnam War. He had loved Asia. He had been locked out of Asia for twenty years. What new irony did Hanley intend?

  “You’ve been cooled off,” Hanley said. Why was he offering thi
s? “No one objects to your going back to Asia. We need a man there.”

  “You don’t need a man. Everything is SIGINT now. Spy satellites, transmitter interceptors. It’s Fort Meade’s show now.” Fort Meade was home of the gadget-laden National Security Agency. “I don’t need Asia, Hanley. Not anymore. No promises because I’ve been a good boy.”

  At the beginning of the world, Devereaux had been professor of Asian studies at Columbia University. Until a man in bow tie had met him on the steps of the library one sunny afternoon and explained that he could give him all of Asia in exchange for his soul. That’s how simply his recruitment into R Section had been handled.

  “We have to talk to Henry McGee,” Devereaux said. He put down his glass. “Before Malmö.”

  “Henry won’t talk to us,” Hanley said.

  “He’s a federal prisoner. He’ll talk to anyone we tell him to,” Devereaux said.

  “I don’t want to hear his lies again.”

  “We never asked him about Skarda. Maybe that will jar him.”

  “How will you know if he tells you the truth?”

  But Devereaux did not speak. He could not. Henry was just the next step leading to Malmö, leading to Skarda, leading to the next step and the next, that much farther away from Rita Macklin and the ghosts of New York City.

  3

  LEWISTOWN, PA

  The first six weeks inside prison, Henry McGee did not think he would survive. His faculties were intact, though the shock of the sentence—twenty-five to fifty years in federal penitentiary for treason—had not sunk in. But prison was a very different place from all the places he had been in the world.

  When he had first defected to the Soviet Union seventeen years before, they had put him in detention, but he had understood that world and his role in it. He had been a defector in a party of Eskimos lost on the straits between Alaska and Siberia. So it seemed. He had known exactly what he was doing then, always had known what he was doing.

  They had questioned him, over and over, to see if he was a plant from the American intelligence services. They became convinced he was what he seemed—a traitor to the Americans and a convert to the Soviet side. He gave them good information. He knew the location of radar installations and the secret Alaskan naval and air bases that were not listed on any map but are all over Alaska. He knew them as a native knows the secret places. After he told them many stories that they believed, the detention was lifted and he was merely observed closely at all times. They stripped him of all knowledge, and later they built him back up again, this time with the tools of a counterspy. He became the mole who nearly tore apart R Section.

  But this place, set in the gentle hills of Pennsylvania, this was prison as punishment—that was the difference. A cold, dehumanizing mechanism ran life inside the walls. The new prisoners were not even people, not even animals. They were called fish. They were chum for the sharks who had survived their own infancy as fish and now cruised the blocks and tiers for victims.

  Henry McGee, fifty-one, had the body of a thirty-year-old. He was thin and dark and very mean. The mean aspect showed clearly in his coal black eyes. A coldness in his manner set him apart from the others. In the evenings, in his cell after supper, he did exercises—one hundred sit-ups and one hundred push-ups. The evening hour of his exercises was his surrender to age: It was easier to move his body in the evening as opposed to the morning, when it was stiff. His body had scars and his hands spoke of strength. He thought he would be left alone. Anyone could see how mean he was if anyone had looked hard at him. Still, in the first week, a large black prisoner attempted to make him perform fellatio in the dark of his cell.

  Henry had already fashioned a cutting weapon from a spoon. Nearly everyone had such a weapon. They were routinely confiscated in sweeping searches several times a year. The weapon was sharp, but the cutting edge was still jagged. When Henry fell to his knees before the black man as he had been told to do, he took two passes to cut off the right testicle. The black man staggered to the common tier. He was screaming so loudly that the rest of the prisoners turned down their radios and fell into an uncommon nighttime silence. He ran along the metal tier, pursued by guards with rifles and clubs. They clubbed him to unconsciousness to stop the screams. His body fell at the far end of the block, and the guards saw the blood on his legs, on his trousers, on his lower belly. One of the guards was sick at the sight of the blood.

  There was both an official and an unofficial inquiry. No weapon was found. The code of the prisoners was silence. Henry McGee was left alone after that.

  This prison, like all others in the country, was segregated by its inmates. Blacks and whites formed their own societies, and bloody encounters between the societies were not unusual. Hispanic prisoners, when present in numbers, formed a third society. Societies of Nazism and black supremacy and Islam formed spiderwebs of structure inside the larger divisions of racial segregation. Complicating the sociology was the strong homosexual community—willing and unwilling, resigned in any case—that was both black and white. In many cases, the younger, smaller males—usually white or Hispanic—were attached as “women” to the black society.

  Henry McGee tried to understand the sociology of the place, and it buried him in despair. As he saw the hopelessness of prison life, the weight of his sentence began to drown him. His mean, black eyes lost luster, and for a time he could not eat. He sat in the darkness and stared, listening to the animal noises of the prison at night. He was certain he would not go mad; he just might not survive. He thought he was less afraid of death and the endless oblivion beyond than survival for months and years in this stupid, self-limiting place.

  He tried to be patient about the Soviets and to have understanding of the real politics. The Soviets always took care of their own. It was the great unspoken tenet of Soviet espionage, the ultimate reward for the secret soldier. He had been a colonel inside KGB; he had status as a mole in R Section for nearly ten years. He had been a faithful servant to their cause, and his reward must be his freedom. Even a freedom in retirement in Moscow, with its intricately layered society of privilege.

  He had been certain he would be traded in time. He had boasted about it to Devereaux of R Section, his antagonist and interrogator. Just before he’d been transferred to this prison, Devereaux had arranged to interview him one last time in a small room in the federal courthouse in Washington.

  “You’ll do the time,” Devereaux said. He had said it without a note of vengeance. There had been curiosity in the gray eyes, a catlike quality that wonders what pain is like to the bird in his paws.

  Henry McGee had smiled and said nothing.

  “They don’t want you very badly,” Devereaux said. “We marked your trail. You gave us too much information about too many things. That’s what they think. They think you betrayed everything, and they don’t want you back.”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “You confessed,” Devereaux had said. “We made a nice package and spread it around. The embassy here thinks you’re the reason we sent home seventy-four KGB-GRU ‘clerk-typists’ from the embassy and the United Nations. We gave you full credit. They’re discussing you tonight in Moscow Center.”

  Henry McGee had let the smile fade exactly as Devereaux wished. It was personal with Devereaux, and Henry McGee knew the disinformation could be carried out. There was no reason to “frame” Henry McGee as a willing betrayer of the Soviet operation inside the U.S. It was too petty, too personal, too vindictive. But he had seen something in Devereaux’s eyes that chilled him. Perhaps the man was capable of coming down to that.

  “They’ll still want to trade for me.”

  “They have nothing to offer us, Henry. You’re used up. Empty.” The words tolled. Devereaux’s face held only contempt, without pity.

  Henry was as tough as Devereaux, was the toughest man alive. He let the meanness in him sustain him for a moment.

  “You’ll do all fifty, Henry. You’ll be a hundred and one whe
n you come out. It’ll be a different world.”

  “You get your kicks out of this, don’t you? Something I said? Or you just a generally sadistic son of a bitch? You want to scare someone, start practicing on little girls. I don’t scare, not from men or bears or anything.”

  Devereaux had smiled. The bastard had smiled, and it unglued Henry. “I just wanted you to know, Henry. It was me. I wanted you to know that so that it could comfort you all those days you got ahead of you.”

  He became a prisoner in late winter of one year. The winter-brown fields in narrow valleys, sullen with ice and streaks of dirty snow, melted at last to spring. And spring turned to the sticky, hot Pennsylvania summer. The trees bloomed, the fields were full of corn. The corn tasseled, and pollen filled the air. Fall broke the stalks in the field. The cold days came and the prisoners wore naval pea coats in the yard. Their breath came in clouds. Henry McGee went to movies and watched television. He read a book every day. He went to the dentist. He worked in the laundry first and then transferred to the library when one of the librarians was paroled. At Christmas, there was a show and some of the he-shes wore their best clothes and sang and danced and shook their fannies on the stage. Everyone loved it, even the straight cons. There was a knife fight in the laundry and two prisoners were killed. A prisoner died of AIDS in the hospital. It snowed Christmas day. Winter howled until March, and then it was spring again. Twelve months. Twelve months turned into thirteen.

  Henry figured that twenty-five years had three hundred months.

  He wrote to the Soviet embassy in Washington six times. He wrote twice in code. He wrote four times in clearspeak. There must have been some misunderstanding because, after four months, he began to receive the picture monthly called Soviet Life. It enraged him.

  The words. It came down to Devereaux, sitting quietly in that small room, explaining how he had smeared Henry’s name with the Soviets and they would never want him back.… Henry could not stop the dreams, and Devereaux’s words came back in dreams. Everything else was an act of will, but he could not stop the dreams. He awoke some nights with sweat covering his body in a fine sheen, so that he had to towel himself off.