League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  For a second, Devereaux knew exactly what had happened and how Henry had killed him.

  6

  Hanley was more tired than he could remember. He sat in the red leather chair in Mrs. Neumann’s corner office in the Department of Agriculture Building. The offices of R Section were located on a floor of the neoclassical building that—officially—did not exist. Mrs. Neumann, director of R Section, stood at the window and looked down the length of Fourteenth Street. Traffic from the bridge was piled against the gridlock of central Washington. It was 8:14 in the morning and the report from the District of Columbia police as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation summary was on her desk. Hanley had brought the two agencies in and lied to them about the nature of Devereaux’s employment. It was enough to tell them that Devereaux was important enough for them to find his attackers.

  “Do you have any word?” she rasped. Her voice was always harsh and direct.

  Hanley had been called by Tomkins of the FBI at three thirty A.M. The police had found the gray, unmarked credit card in Devereaux’s clothes and notified the FBI. The FBI knew the card was the ID of agents of R Section.

  “Nothing. His skull was fractured, his left arm and shoulder were hurt but no broken bones, he suffered extensive lacerations.” Hanley shook his head. “First Miss Macklin and now him. In less than twenty-four hours. This is beyond belief.”

  Mrs. Neumann said nothing. She now contemplated the Mall and the 505-foot obelisk on the Ellipse that is Washington’s memorial.

  “Did you explain the connection to them?”

  “Miss Macklin and Devereaux? Of course not.”

  “But we know there must be a connection.”

  “No matter what, this matter has to be contained. My God, they’d love it on the Hill to know that one of our classified men was dating a journalist.”

  “But not for some time,” Mrs. Neumann said. She probed directly. “And why not for some time? And why would they be killed now? Some delayed reaction from Moscow Center?”

  “I don’t know,” Hanley said. She could ask a hundred questions and he wouldn’t know. He shook his head again. It was not a characteristic gesture.

  “Can’t we do anything?”

  “The Bureau has charter in the United States. We do not.”

  “Damnit, Hanley, we’ve broken rules before.”

  That was so unlike her that Hanley registered surprise a moment before frowning. “He wasn’t assigned, nothing was pending. Nothing involved Miss Macklin. Maybe it was coincidence.”

  Mrs. Neumann didn’t comment.

  “Even if he survives, he’s finished. They as much as said that when I first called emergency. They’re not even certain they can save his right leg, and if they can, they’re not certain that he won’t be paralyzed. He broke his neck, Mrs. Neumann.”

  “They’re not certain how serious the break is. A chip. Breaking your neck is a layman’s term,” she said. She was clutching and Hanley knew it.

  “And I’m a layman and he broke his neck,” Hanley said again.

  She knew. She had called as well, before Hanley made his report. She knew and Hanley had to repeat the words to try to put them in perspective.

  Agents died on duty. Not as often as one might think but they died in action. Or they disappeared. Networks were blown and agents with fanciful file names like Beethoven and January and Lion were suddenly stricken from active duty and presumed dead. Or lost to Moscow Center. Even in the age of glasnost, the war remained.

  But this agent was Devereaux and Mrs. Neumann knew him and Hanley had been his control. In the 201 file, he was identified as November. The code name suited him. He had been morose and difficult and contrary at times, questioning the bureaucracy of Section in all his actions. But he had seemed very indestructible to Mrs. Neumann.

  Had seemed. Had been. Was he really past?

  She shook her head to rid herself of the thought and then crossed the spartan office to her desk. She picked up the FBI dossier. “Semcon was used and a simple electric prime hooked to the wall switch. He entered the room, turned on the lights, and was blown up. The materials smell of Libya, Iraq, in that neighborhood.”

  “All Middle East stations are alerted and the reports are starting to come in. I’ve destroyed the budget on this one,” Hanley said. “Our network in Tripoli is more difficult to contact. The stationmaster at Naples is trying to make a connection with them.”

  “Who is Naples?”

  “New man. Echo. Do you want his two-oh-one file?”

  “No.” She put the file down. “Miss Macklin was doing a story on the crime syndicate…”

  “What on earth would the connection be to November?”

  “Perhaps they thought she was a government agent—”

  “The syndicate does not pick fights with federal agents. Or journalists, for that matter.”

  “Except for the man killed in Phoenix,” she said.

  “That was a long time ago,” Hanley said. He studied the tent of his fingers. “Everything was a long time ago.” He looked up. “It has nothing to do with us, with Section—”

  “The government mixes itself up at times. Why not the crime syndicate?” Said with weariness or hope. Everyone needs an answer sometimes. Straws were grasped.

  “What are we going to do?” she said after a moment.

  Hanley was prepared. He began to speak about alerting the network liaison with the Israeli Mossad and Mrs. Neumann held up her hand to interrupt.

  “About Devereaux.”

  Hanley blinked.

  “He broke his neck, man,” Mrs. Neumann said. “Probably paralyzed. If he survives. A piece of wood a half inch thick pierced his lung. He isn’t coming back. What are we going to do if he does? I mean, what can we expect to ask him to do?”

  It was the difference between them. Hanley saw it without bitterness. In length of service, he should have been named director of Section. Instead, he was still director of operations, still old control to the first tier of agents. Hanley was tactics, Mrs. Neumann was strategy. She would let Hanley take care of the chase for Devereaux’s assassin. What about after? If he recovered? With his bag of secrets firmly in memory? What would they do for him then? The British had made a bad habit of cheaping out old agents and controls and it had come back to haunt them more than once, like the man in Australia who had revealed all his British intelligence secrets in the bitterness of his impoverished retirement. Devereaux must not be allowed to be bitter. Section would do the right thing.

  Hanley admired such foresightedness.

  “Yes.” He almost smiled. “A solid pension, solid disability payment. He’s earned it.”

  Mrs. Neumann seemed surprised. It wasn’t the answer she wanted at all.

  “No. I mean… inside. For him to come in, become an inside man.”

  Hanley let his smile fade. “I don’t know, Mrs. Neumann.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Mrs. Neumann. November is difficult. A good man but difficult. Not a team player. We need team players. In the… central office. He could disrupt…”

  Mrs. Neumann let him stutter off into silence. It wasn’t Hanley’s fault either. The square peg and round hole were not met.

  “Disability.”

  “He tried to retire once. There was a wet contract on him.”

  “He did,” she admitted.

  “He needed us. Then. And we needed him. He’s been around a long time.”

  “A pension. A disability.” Repeating words like automatic prayers. “The best thing.”

  “If he survives.”

  But she didn’t want to think of the other possibility.

  7

  “Where were you?”

  “All over,” Henry McGee said. He touched her face with what passed for affection in him. She had cleaned up nice and he wasn’t ashamed of showing her. There was grit in the girl, too, and he could use that. He had someone do her hair and he got someone to buy her clothes. She would look
good on the Champs-Elysées. A skinny girl, but skinny was always in fashion and, in a curious way, fashion counted a lot to Henry McGee. And she screwed about as well as anyone he had ever had.

  Marie Dreiser—that is what she called herself most of the time—smiled at his touch. She wore the bright silk dress just for him.

  They sat in the café in Rome that is less than a hundred feet up the Via Veneto from the United States embassy. Two marines were on the gates of the embassy and they looked all spit-and-polish in the warm Roman sun.

  Marie Dreiser. He had met her in Berlin and stayed with her during the months he had been hiding from KGB. Henry had been set up for his old employers by Devereaux and damned Section, and they had almost got him more than once.

  The irony was that Marie was a gift from Devereaux. Henry smiled every time he thought of that. She didn’t know it and Devereaux didn’t know it even when he was alive but it was enough that Henry knew it.

  “Why are you smiling, Henry?”

  “Thinking about things, honey.”

  “About America?”

  He had been gone three weeks. Had to set things up, first for Rita, then for Devereaux. Took care of them both in one day. It would have been nice to spread it out but Devereaux was dangerous—emphasis on the was—and Henry had been burned by him before. Waited for her three mornings before she used the damned car and then took her down with one shot. He saw her go down and he wasn’t sorry she was still alive because he might run across her sweet ass again. But Devereaux. Had to kill the sonofabitch twice to make sure he was dead. He was dead this time, all right.

  The smile spread. “Just the business I had in the U.S. Worked out fine, even if it cost me some money. We gotta have some ready, honey; we’re dipping into reserves.”

  “Will you take me to America, sometime?”

  “Take you everywhere, honey,” Henry said. He felt good, felt affectionate, felt like finishing his espresso and taking Marie up to the Excelsior and giving it to her all afternoon. In every way he could think of and some he hadn’t thought of yet. “But now we gotta rustle up some money because I had to spend some in the States. Yes sir. Gotta spend money to make money, but now we gotta make it.”

  “I can always steal. I’m a thief, a good one. Didn’t I steal for you in Berlin when you were hiding?”

  It had been very frightening at first, to be seeking a hideout in a strange city. To be a helpless dependent on this strange girl. She was a tough Berlin gamine who had grown up on the streets and been raped at twelve. Or so she said.

  For six months, KGB had hunted him and he had survived because of Marie Dreiser in the dirty old city of Berlin that she knew so well. He had lived in two rooms beneath the elevated railroad tracks, listened to the rumble of passing trains every hour of the day, felt his claustrophobia return as it had nearly strangled him the two years he was in prison. Two years of his life, thanks to Devereaux and R Section. Two fucking years.

  But Devereaux had been on Marie’s trail in that business that finally led to Rome and the old cardinal in the Vatican. Devereaux had saved her life when the old priest wanted to kill her. Devereaux never knew that he had given Henry a gift by saving Marie’s life. And Marie would never know it was Henry who had killed Devereaux in Washington.

  Devereaux was finally dead.

  Henry McGee smiled.

  Saw the fire engines roll up at the hotel and then the cops and then the FBI car. They carried Devereaux’s body out on a stretcher and put it in an ambulance, but that hadn’t bothered Henry McGee. No one was going to survive that blast.

  He couldn’t tell Marie about it. She had some affection for Devereaux because he had saved her life. Just as well not to tell Marie because he had three or four more uses for her before he was set up and could get rid of her. He liked a gal with guts. Marie had stolen for him in Berlin those terrible six months of hiding. She had fed him, housed him, clothed him with her thefts. And she had gone to bed with him every time, even if the bed was the dresser or the kitchen table.

  “We don’t have to steal now,” Henry said. He sipped his cappuccino. Life strutted along the Veneto as it did in every quarter of Rome, living in the streets, shouting from morning until past midnight, using the ancient buildings as mere props for a street opera.

  “Then what do we have to do?” Marie said.

  “I spent time in the States learning about what we got to do,” Henry McGee said. “You read the papers, honey? You know what’s going on in the world?”

  “What am I supposed to know?”

  “People dancing on the Berlin Wall. Hungary going queer for the West. And just this week, they had a conference in Washington District of Columbia to talk about antiterrorism. That was KGB and CIA. Imagine the day ever would come when the whole world would be putting on a happy face?”

  “I’m not political, Henry,” Marie said. “I know about Berlin but, believe me, nothing like that lasts.”

  “Terror, honey. It’s all disorganized and doesn’t turn a profit. There’s no real point to it if it doesn’t make money. Take the IRA. Been fighting in Belfast for twenty years and all they got to show for it is this ragtag rebel army, a few jobs, a few millions in arms… why, it hardly seems worth the trouble.”

  She waited. She knew Henry was only thinking out loud, not really talking to her. She understood some of it and her instincts took over on the rest of it.

  “I been on both sides of politics, honey. Right now, it isn’t paying very well. Not for me. You got the goddamned chief of the American armed forces touring Soviet missile facilities. The cold war has lost its Freon.”

  Her eyes were closed, head tilted up. The sun felt good on her face.

  “You gonna get a suntan, honey?”

  “It feels good,” she said, opening her eyes. He was smiling in his nasty way.

  “You know, we ain’t down here for pleasure.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “This is the place to be you want certain things. Weapons. Ole Italy sticking down into the Mediterranean like a finger waiting to poke North Africa in the ass. That’s why we’re here. North Africa is full of nasty folks making nasty stuff for terrorism.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I did my research in the States. Made contacts. Met people behind the terrorists. Money people, arms dealers, all that monkey stuff. It’s interesting but it’s limited.”

  “Do they make bombs in Africa?” Marie said.

  Henry grinned again, shook his head. “You’re closer, honey, but you ain’t there yet.” He sipped the milky coffee and licked a trace of the honey-brown liquid off his lips. Marie—hell, who even knew if that was her name but that’s what she called herself most of the time—Marie was a good one, never seemed shocked by anything, but he wondered if she was just crazy enough to go along with everything.

  “Honey, trouble with bombs is they don’t really scare the shit out of anyone anymore. And then there’s all the personnel involved. And getting the goddamned bomb through to the right target. You and I ain’t got time to organize all that, train people.”

  “What do you want in this part of the world?”

  Henry let a smile lighten his dark features. He ignored the question. “Terror has territory. Take Britain. I like Britain as a place to set up operations. Speak the language, know the customs, all that. I just gotta get me the right target, that’s what I ain’t found yet. But I know who the mule is gonna be when I do find it.”

  “Who?”

  “Some boys from the IRA. Irish Republican Army. Do any kind of terror in Britain and the first patsy you think of is the IRA. And the thing is, they’re hurting now for weapons and stuff, now that Czechoslovakia is going straight and not sending them the arms like they used to. IRA is definitely what I got in mind when I find the target.”

  “You are going to make a new terror,” Marie said in her Berlin-accented voice. She made it so simple and clear. Henry gaped at her a moment. He was truly amazed. In fact,
he admired her for a second or so and that had the odd effect of arousing him. She might have just licked the inside of his ear, coming up with an answer like that.

  “A new terror,” he repeated. “Exactly it. I never put a name on it but that’s what it is. It’s going to operate in Britain and when it’s over, I’ll have three, four million and the Brits will have their usual suspects and you and me are home free.”

  Marie stared at him with her tawny eyes. She was young but there was something a hundred years old about her as well. “And what will I have?”

  “Me, honey, I thought you understood that.”

  “You don’t fool me much, Henry. And I never fool myself. I don’t think you’ve even thought that far.”

  Henry McGee shook his head. “You’re right. I can’t fool you.”

  “Oh, try,” she said. “I hid you in Berlin when the Russians were looking for you. I could have sold you but you knew I liked you. I get used to a man. You’re good in bed, Henry.”

  “And every other place we do it.” He put his hand on her bare leg and squeezed the inside of her thigh. She closed her eyes a moment and then looked at him again.

  “Are we going to kill many people?”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “I can kill people. I killed my father.”

  “You tell me that but I think that’s one of your stories. You got your stories all mixed up with dreams.”

  “Maybe I just want you to think that.”

  “You don’t do no killing if it comes to killing. I need you, another hand, eyes-and-ears, courier, someone to handle the phone. I ain’t a one-man band. When we make it, you can come with me. Or take a share, whatever you want.”

  She thought about it. She tried not to let the money get in the way of her judgment. Like most people, she failed. It was a lot of money.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She knew.

  “Think it over.” Henry saw he had her. “We’re being checked by certain people right now. To see who we are, to see if we are bona fides. That’s why we’re waiting here in the splendid capital of Italy. We might have to move just like that when the setup is made. Naples, probably, but maybe even Morocco. We just sit and wait and let them look us over.”