League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  For a moment, they shared the silence like comrades. Hanley was always the control, the puller of strings in Washington, the man who made marks on the map that represented agents and safe houses and operations carried out both legal and black. Devereaux had been code-named November, one of the tacks on the map. And then one day, the world realized the Mercator projection of the earth was distorted and began to question the tacks as well.

  “Devereaux. It’s time to talk about some things. Unpleasant things.”

  It was the moment he had avoided for the past three weeks. In the beginning, it was simple. There was a question of whether Devereaux would survive at all. If he had not survived, the problem would not have come up. But now he was hallucinating about KGB agents and he needed reality. Dr. Krueger had been firm about that: Mr. Devereaux needs to be reminded of the reality of things so that he does not escape into his other world, the one that is not real. Dr. Krueger said Devereaux was a difficult patient but that he, Dr. Krueger, understood this because people wanted to deny their incapacities in the area of intellect and memory. He saw it all the time with Alzheimer’s patients who wanted to deny that they were suffering from the disease. Did that mean Devereaux had Alzheimer’s disease? Hanley had asked. Dr. Krueger had merely smiled a sad professional smile and spread his hands and said, It’s only a label, it can’t work miracles.

  “Devereaux,” Hanley began. He looked at his hands. “Devereaux,” he began again.

  Devereaux waited.

  “You recall you attempted to retire from active service six years ago. The matter was aborted. It was a different time then. A different world. You came back inside because there was a wet contract on you and because you needed the… security of being part of Section.”

  Devereaux said nothing. His large hands were spread on the hospital sheet. This was a private room because intelligence demanded it. There was a twenty-four-hour police guard on the door and the policemen had been screened by both the FBI and R Section, though R Section did not, strictly speaking, have the authority to operate in a security field inside the United States. Devereaux even had a private bath, adjacent to the room. He was sealed from the world.

  “We think it is time to consider your retirement again. As I said, this is a different time and a different world,” Hanley said. He wiped his hands on his trousers and looked down at them as he finished the job.

  “Why?”

  “You were terribly injured,” Hanley said. “Dr. Krueger confirms that you have suffered brain damage that will affect your ability to function effectively in a field environment.”

  “Dr. Krueger would tell you that cats bark if you asked him,” Devereaux said.

  “It’s quite common for a patient… in your circumstances… to exhibit hostility toward his physician,” Hanley said.

  Devereaux let the silence settle between them. He looked at his hands and was surprised to see that he had clenched his right hand into a fist.

  “Hanley, I don’t really give a damn whether I stay in Section. I want to get out of this place. I want to see Rita and see that she gets well. And then I’m going to kill Henry McGee.”

  “Devereaux. Your active status has been terminated. In a sense, it was terminated the night you were… injured.”

  “You mean I have no status to perform a sanction?” Devereaux said, and suddenly, grinned. Then the grin faded and Hanley saw there was pain behind the gray eyes, pain in the color of the ashen face. He had lost weight. He looked like what he was, a sick man. The day before, when they came to inject him, he had struck out at the doctor and knocked the needle and syringe to the floor. They had talked about restraining him. They had talked to Hanley about a mental hospital and Hanley had been so shaken that he had actually shouted at Dr. Krueger. There would be no mental hospital, no restraints. Hanley could remember his own restraints, could remember the enforced humiliation that was daily life in the mental hospital he had been sent to. Against his will, as though his will had ceased to matter.

  “You have no status. You’ll get out of here in time. Rebuild that place you had in Front Royal; I can arrange a transference of assets.” Section had bought the place of Devereaux’s retreat when the retreat had been penetrated by KGB agents on a wet contract against Devereaux. It all seemed so long ago, the cold war rhetoric, the belief that the enemy was singular and very knowable. Or such was the euphoric mood in current Washington politics that shoved the professionals in intelligence now into dark corners. It was a bitter time for intelligence agencies and Devereaux had to understand that Hanley was trying to get him the best deal he could. A full pension and disability. And he’d even fiddle a way to return that property on the mountain in Virginia back to him. To pretend that there had been nothing in the past to warn against the future.

  “All right, Hanley,” Devereaux said, and the quiet words startled him. “I want to get out of here. You know about being locked up in a place like this.”

  “I was drugged against my will that time,” Hanley began. “I… was set up; I was set up by a Soviet mole working in National Security. I wasn’t really ill.”

  “Against my will,” Devereaux said.

  Hanley saw it. What was the difference?

  “Get me out of here. You can do it.”

  “Dr. Krueger.”

  “Dr. Krueger is to healing what Typhoid Mary was to kitchen sanitation,” Devereaux said.

  “I can talk to him.”

  “Goddamnit, Hanley. You owe me this.”

  And Hanley, unexpectedly, looked at the man on the bed and saw through him as though his eyes had turned to X rays and all emotions and memories were bones, broken and healed, forming the skeleton of the man’s life. In that moment, for the first time, he really understood Devereaux, and it shook him because he had no real capacity for understanding others—it was the quality that had made him very good at his job in the espionage bureaucracy all these years.

  “I’ll do something,” Hanley said.

  “When?”

  “You still have a broken bone.”

  “It’ll be broken in or out of the hospital,” Devereaux said.

  “Dr. Krueger said your brain wave patterns are interesting.”

  “So is macramé,” Devereaux said. “I want to get out of here. Today.”

  “I’ll talk to Dr. Krueger.”

  “Tell him.”

  “He’s the doctor.”

  “You’re the payer.”

  “Your concern for saving Uncle money is sudden and touching,” Hanley said. “All right.” He nodded, not to the man on the bed but to the man in memory who had taken him out of Saint Catherine’s when they were killing him. “All right. I’ll tell him.”

  Devereaux did not speak and, after a moment, Hanley realized he could not stand the silence a moment longer. He rose and went out the door of the private room without saying a word. He nodded to the policeman. He walked down the corridor past the nurse’s station, toward the elevators. He took the elevator down to the basement.

  Dr. Krueger sat in a windowless office at the end of a corridor. They had arranged this meeting for the time after Hanley confronted Devereaux with his recalcitrance and his violent behavior. Dr. Krueger did not smile at Hanley when Hanley walked into the room. He acted as though it were all Hanley’s fault.

  “He wants to be released,” Hanley said.

  “That’s impossible. He’s on the edge of a breakdown, he is hallucinating—”

  “He said he didn’t want any more dope. What is it that you give him?”

  “A mild sedative—”

  “He says he dreams he is out of his body when he has been… sedated.”

  “That’s what I mean. The man is going through a very critical time right now. He’s hallucinating, he needs—”

  “I want you to release him.”

  Dr. Krueger was a very young man with black hair and a white beard and cool blue eyes. Every time he saw Rita Macklin—and it was every day now—she would either ask why
Devereaux did not visit her or where he might be. Devereaux was a very bad influence on Rita Macklin, in terms of her full recovery. Her body was healing nicely and he loved to look at her, at her soft, unlined face and at those beautiful green eyes and to look at the swell of her breasts beneath the soft hospital gown and to think of her in terms of perfect love, to wonder about her.

  “I can’t release him. It wouldn’t be responsible,” Dr. Krueger said.

  Hanley scowled. “I don’t give a damn about that. He’s to be released immediately.”

  “I can’t take that responsibility.”

  “I’ve taken it.”

  “You’re not qualified.”

  “Damnit, man. He’s to be released.”

  Krueger stared at him. “If I release him on your authority, I can’t have him bothering other patients. You understand what I’m saying? Miss Macklin is not in the government employ. As far as I’m aware. Her eventual recovery is at stake. Your… agent… or whatever he is, that’s your responsibility. But Miss Macklin is my responsibility.”

  “Dr. Krueger. They were… lovers.”

  “All the more reason. Why was she nearly assassinated in the parking lot of her building? What sort of game is this? I can assure you, the authority of you—of your agency—extends only to your agent. You don’t have any right to harm a civilian or put her in harm’s way.”

  “Why would he harm her?”

  “She’s become… very dependent on our therapeutic sessions, our talks, and it’s important that the distraction of her trauma, of remembering her trauma, and your… agent is part of that memory, not be brought back to her attention. If I release your… agent, and your agent causes harm to Rita, to Miss Macklin, then I hold you responsible. And your agency. I can’t tell you what might be the consequences of that. All in all, it would be wiser for your… for you and for R Section, whatever R Section is, not to cause further harm to an innocent woman.”

  Hanley understood the meaning behind the fog of words. Understood the distaste in Dr. Krueger’s voice every time he used the soiled word agent. There was a threat here and Dr. Krueger could make good on it. What would he use? The newspapers? Television. He would be very good on television, very photogenic with his very black hair and his wispy beard and penetrating eyes. In another time, Hanley might have dismissed him. But Devereaux was yesterday in any case; why not allow the treatment to continue here a little while longer?

  Hanley realized he had already abandoned Devereaux. He looked across the desk and saw that the doctor realized it as well.

  “Well?”

  Hanley said, “No more injections. No more induced hallucinogens or whatever it is that you give him.”

  “My treatment methods are conservative, are recognized as—”

  “No more talk of restraints,” Hanley bargained.

  “All right,” Dr. Krueger conceded.

  “He’s not an animal,” Hanley said.

  “No one said he was. He’s in a dangerous state. If I had intended him harm, would I be working so hard to save him?”

  “So much bad is done for the good of others,” Hanley said. He realized it was something that Devereaux might have said. Yes, he had looked right through Devereaux for a moment and seen the frame of the man’s life in his bones.

  “All right. I won’t prescribe further… medications. He’s in pain but that’s his decision. I want to observe his physical progress a few days longer.”

  Hanley said, “Is this really necessary?”

  “For the sake of Miss Macklin,” Dr. Krueger said. “I’ll release him on… Friday. You can tell him that, that I’ll release him on Friday if his progress is such that I think it’s safe.”

  “Why couldn’t it be now?” Hanley said.

  But Dr. Krueger was already thinking he had three days to remove Rita Macklin from her hospital and from the way of potential harm from Devereaux. Three days to secure her in a place of safety where he could minister to her and show her that she could learn to rely upon him.

  13

  Marie made the call from a telephone booth on O’Connell Street. It was raining and the streets were shrouded in the usual mists made of fog and soot pollution. Dublin was full of din, full of rain and gloom, and she heard all this as the telephone rang and rang. Finally, the connection was made but there was no sound at the other end. She began: “He said he wanted the money right away.”

  “I figured that.”

  “I said he would want to meet me in the bar of the hotel on Thursday.”

  “Good girl. Did he like you?”

  “I think he was afraid of me.”

  Henry chuckled. “He was right about that. I figured on some snag so I’ll make this quick. You just stick close to the Buswell and wait for my call. Tonight. I should be set up by then.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Marie thought about it. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “I believe that, honey, but there’s really nothing to tell you.”

  She let it go. She hung up and opened the door of the old-fashioned booth and stepped into the rain. The streets were full of people in wet wools hurrying along the walks, splashed by passing cars. Buses roared along narrow ways. The world was close and damp and Marie smiled at it, knowing a secret that no one else knew at that moment in that city.

  14

  Rita Macklin fitted herself into the soft leather passenger seat. She looked across at Dr. Krueger behind the wheel and smiled. He was a comfort and she so wanted comfort. There was pain but he could ease it for her. Even the other pain of being abandoned by Devereaux. In these weeks, he hadn’t called, he hadn’t answered her heart.

  They were in the countryside. Washington spilled out of its girdle into the suburbs but now the suburban tract town houses were hidden more and more by the ancient southern trees. The sky was very blue and the long, languid autumn of Maryland filled the ravines with colors.

  She sighed at the sadness of the colors, the sad scarlets and yellows kept alive by the warmth of the season long past the time they might have properly died. She remembered autumns in Wisconsin when she was a girl and the colors had burst briefly in October, bombarding the hills and forests with explosions of color for only a moment before the sudden death that came in the first snows. Those autumns had been glorious, full of celebration and sacrifice. This Maryland autumn was only elegiac, a sad and lovely poem uttered in a whisper from a pale young woman in a long white gown who lies dying on a chaise propped at a tall window. She sighed again, so overwhelmed by thoughts of death.

  She was crying again and he saw this. He accepted her tears. He said nothing and he held her hand when she cried.

  She cried so often.

  His hand found her hand on her lap. She was thinner now, even though she had never been overweight, but the wounds had drained her. Her cheeks were full of blushes that had the unhealthy hue of the tubercular, though she did not have tuberculosis. She suffered pain but mostly she suffered from melancholy. Why couldn’t she end the melancholy?

  Devereaux.

  She blinked against the tears.

  He pulled off the road into a path between the trees that led into a deep forest in a narrow ravine.

  “The place is down here,” he said to her. But he had stopped the car.

  He still held her hand.

  His eyes were kind, gentle; they saw through her pain and sadness.

  He kissed her.

  He had kissed her before, in the hospital. She felt so grateful to him for his patience and kindnesses. She was still weeping while he kissed her and there was something urgent in the way he kissed her that had not been apparent before. She felt his body strain against her body and she felt her body opening. She was a woman and this is what she was made for, wasn’t it?

  No.

  She turned away from him. He still held her. His face was flushed. She looked out the side window at the trees that pressed all around.<
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  “Don’t you want me to kiss you, Rita?”

  “Oh. I can’t think now.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “A little.”

  “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

  “You didn’t hurt me.”

  “I’m sorry anyway.”

  She looked at him. He was a man with a tender heart. If he wanted a kiss from her, what did it matter?

  “But will you still come to the sanitarium?”

  “Every other day, I’ll arrange to be here every other day. I wish I were able to be here every day. They’re good people, they’ll help you overcome… your sadness.”

  “I think it just overwhelms me.”

  “Don’t worry, Rita. It’s something that will pass. We can both overcome it.”

  “Thank you,” she said. And she kissed him. She kissed him the way he had kissed her, the way that would please him. She felt his hands on her body and it reminded her and that caused another fit of melancholy so that she kissed him all the harder to stop the pain or to make the pain worse, she couldn’t tell what she wanted. My God, my God. So lost in the world, so pressed in by the colors of sad trees and times past. She was falling through the world and she could never reach the ground because she had so far to fall.

  15

  The first was Brian Parnell.

  Parnell was from Belfast and was wanted for murder and other acts of terror, including the bombing of a public house the previous summer.

  He was sixteen years old and far too young for the job Henry McGee had in mind. Therefore, he wasn’t needed.

  Henry approached him outside the public house on the Galway road. They had walked to the back where the urinals were in an open courtyard. The sweet smell of urine rendered sour in the ancient slate of the walls made the boy say “phew.” He meant it as a pleasantry, a manly bit of male bonding between two gentlemen such as themselves found in the awkward position of relieving themselves at the same time in the same place.

  Henry McGee grinned and unzipped his trousers.

  Brian did the same and stared at the wall in the accustomed way. Men did not watch each other in such naked moments unless they were intending to send out the wrong signal. Brian was a manly young fellow with a slightly pretty face but he had bucked the mare Maureen Kilkenny more than a few times when Old Man O’Day was away.