The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  “Where is Tartakoff?”

  “Ten feet away from me. I’m watching him drink a glass of beer.”

  “My God. Where are you?”

  “In the Helsinki train station.”

  “It… It’s a public place—”

  “Everything has changed, I told you that. There were two murders here. One was the British agent, Sims. I think the other one was a mistake, but the point is, I was set up. I’m being set up now—”

  “You know it’s a trap—”

  “I’m not a fool, Hanley,” Devereaux replied. “But I need some backing from your end.”

  “I can’t do anything. The New Man—”

  “Fuck the New Man,” Devereaux said.

  “I have my orders.”

  “And I have Tomas Crohan,” Devereaux said. “And Tartakoff.”

  “Leave. Leave now. Walk away from it and get on the first plane back home.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “That’s an order.”

  “No. Not this time.” Softly now, with an edge of menace. “Do you remember a woman named Rita Macklin?”

  “What? You mean that reporter? In the Tunney matter?”

  “Yes.”

  A long silence followed. “What about her?”

  “She’s here.”

  “What did you say?”

  “She’s here. She wants to know about Tomas Crohan.” Devereaux paused. “So do I, Hanley.”

  “I don’t know anything.” Hanley considered the lie and revised it. “The information is not…” Again, the lie was altered. “Information is not germane to your mission now that your mission is terminated. You have no need-to-know.”

  “You aren’t listening to me, Hanley.”

  Indignation sputtered on the international line but Hanley’s tone was too tinny to carry it off: “Damn it. Are you blackmailing me now, November? Have you lost your senses? This is the Section—”

  “Fuck the Section,” Devereaux said. His voice was calm, low. “And fuck you, Hanley.”

  It was suddenly open between them; loyalty had cracked.

  Devereaux spoke again in the same calm, surging voice; his voice was like a river in flood, inexorably spreading across barriers. “You let me dangle for the past two years, since the business in Paris. I wanted to wait you out; I didn’t see any other way. But I won’t be the dead puppet anymore, not for you, not for the New Man. It comes down to my survival now, Hanley, and you don’t really have any choice but to help me.”

  Silence on the line.

  “November,” Hanley began. But Devereaux interrupted:

  “I want to know about Tomas Crohan and I want to know what has been going on from the beginning…”

  Hanley’s voice was suddenly tired. “We don’t know that. Not all of it. Can’t you get rid of them, even now?”

  “I’m not your hitter, Hanley,” Devereaux said. His voice had become weary in that moment as well; the two voices, like two old friends meeting at the end of a long day. Or two old enemies. “I won’t hit Tartakoff for you.”

  “An attack of morality?” Hanley probed.

  That would be a joke, Devereaux thought. He saw all the killing in all the years, hits seen and unseen, and he had gradually frozen his soul until the little deaths around him did not touch him. But he was not a hitter, not for Hanley, not for the Section, not for a little game they were playing which he did not understand. He stared out the telephone booth at Tartakoff sitting calmly at a table, sipping beer, staring back at him.

  “I’m not talking about the journalist,” Hanley said. “But she is a major part of the problem.”

  “Not of my making,” Devereaux said.

  “Things have gotten out of hand.”

  “You want Tartakoff hit and then the old man and then Rita Macklin—”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You make vague suggestions and shuffle away. You don’t want to know the details.”

  Hanley’s voice was cold. “Exactly.”

  “The details can’t be taken care of so easily this time.”

  “You are not in a position to make bargains with us, November; we can forget this conversation occurred. Walk away from it. We can send in… someone… to solve the problem of the Russians.”

  “And ‘solve’ the problem of Rita Macklin.”

  “We’re not barbarians, November. She is an American citizen.”

  “A small protection. Will she show her blue passport to the hitter?”

  “Get out, November. Walk away from this.”

  “Why? Why is that important?”

  “We can’t be involved.”

  Devereaux sighed. There were never any answers, never facts, never connections of logic. Classified material in the government was even called Sensitive Compartmented Information to emphasize that each secret must not be connected to the secret that came before or the lie that would come after. He could not argue with Hanley anymore.

  “Who called you on the special phone, Hanley?”

  Hanley, nearly five thousand miles west, held the phone tightly and did not speak.

  “Was it a woman? Who said, ‘We are coming out’?”

  “The call came from Paris.”

  “I know,” Devereaux said.

  “My God, what have you done? This cracks security, this—”

  “There is no security left in this, Hanley.”

  “It was that woman, Macklin. You’ve opened up our operation to a… to a goddamn journalist.”

  “She went to the CIA two months ago to look up files on Tomas Crohan and she wasn’t allowed to see them. The newspaper morgues had been stripped of references to him. She tracked the matter to an old priest in Dublin but he was killed before she got to him. Does it surprise you that she became curious about Tomas Crohan?”

  “Sarcasm,” Hanley identified.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What is she going to do?”

  “The secrets are safe with me,” Devereaux said gently, irony coloring the words.

  Hanley thought then of the humiliating interview with the New Man the previous afternoon. Yackley said the Section would cooperate with the CIA, that the trust would all be placed on one side. But he couldn’t trust his own agent dangling in Helsinki for one long winter.

  “Mrs. Neumann got the file from CIA. On Crohan.”

  Devereaux smiled. “If anyone could, she could.”

  “I saw it. I destroyed the copy after I saw it.”

  “Where is the original?”

  “In the OSS Section. At Langley.”

  “Why are they involved?”

  “I don’t know.” Hanley paused and then rushed ahead as though the words washed away some stain that had nagged him. “The New Man is sucking up to Langley.” The slang surprised them both. “I don’t like any of it.”

  “But it doesn’t matter now,” Devereaux said.

  “No. No, I don’t suppose so. Not if you’re unwilling to come out alone—”

  “I couldn’t walk away from it from the moment I sent Rita to Paris.”

  “That was very unwise,” Hanley said with dejection.

  “Any action would have been.”

  “Yes. I suppose you’re right.” He paused. “I will tell you, November. Now. I’m sorry.” The apology surprised him as much as the slang, as though he no longer controlled his words. He had done nothing wrong but he felt shame, deep and heavy, inside himself.

  “Tomas Crohan was a Fascist sympathizer to the point of forming a neo-Nazi splinter of Fianna Fáil in the late 1930s in Ireland. He came from wealth, mostly in land. He and his father visited Hitler in 1938 before Czechoslovakia. You understand the position of the Irish government in those years… new state, somewhat shaky, depression, determined to steer a course away from British domination. Lots of admiration for the Nazis in Ireland simply because they were anti-English—”

  “I understand.”

  “When the war came, Ireland opted
to be neutral. Both sides used the country to their advantage. Nazi spies in Dublin, just as they were in Portugal and Sweden and Switzerland during the war. The OSS came in with a scheme to turn Crohan, use him behind the Nazi lines, promise him some great reward after the war.”

  “What was the promise?”

  “The usual thing we offer dictators in Latin America. We said we would give him the country after the war. He would become taoiseach of Eire.”

  “Could we reasonably promise that?”

  “That is the wrong question. Could Crohan believe it was in our power to do it? He was already in government, was wealthy, was well known and admired in the country for his anti-British stance. The British had a positive paranoia about him, feared he might become prime minister in Ireland—”

  “What did he do for us in Austria during the war?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Rita Macklin told me.”

  “A journalist? Are you sure that’s all she is? How did she know—”

  “I’m not sure of her, of you, of any of this.”

  “You have to be careful.”

  “No, Hanley. It’s time for you to be careful. The puppet cut the strings, Hanley. You tell the New Man that.”

  “If you release any of this, you’ve breached security at the highest level. I can cover the use of the special phone by that journalist. She could be in trouble if she revealed information about internal security… not to mention you, November. But any of this about Crohan is classified—”

  “You stole it from the CIA.”

  “Damn you—”

  “No more threats, Hanley. Threats and promises don’t mean very much to me anymore.”

  Another pause. “We needed British cooperation. After all, they had the Senior Intelligence service and part of it was keeping an eye on Ireland, even during the war. We got their permission to put Crohan into a black job for us; we told the Brits he would arrange passports and passage out of Vienna for a group of Jews we were interested in saving.”

  “Not cleaning women or peasants,” Devereaux said.

  “There are always priorities. Scientists mostly—”

  “Go ahead.”

  “That’s what we told the Brits, as I said. But Crohan wouldn’t have lifted a finger to save Jews. Besides, we knew the Jews had been killed already in the camps, the ones we named. We knew that.”

  “Then what did we want from Crohan in Austria?”

  “An incident,” Hanley said vaguely.

  “What sort?”

  “To push Ireland into our arms, out of neutrality. We set him up to kill Hitler.”

  Devereaux blinked. The line crackled but there was no other sound. Tartakoff still stared at him. He was in the present, in Helsinki, waiting to get out and yet he felt disoriented, as though half of him were now in wartime Austria with Crohan, setting up a hit. An impossible assignment.

  “That’s absurd. We wouldn’t have sent in an amateur to set up a hit like that.”

  “Even if we contemplated such a hit,” Hanley said. “Once the war had started, Hitler was his own worst enemy. We never wanted him dead until the war was over and won.”

  Devereaux felt burdened by Hanley’s revelations; it was too much dirty knowledge, too cynical to want to know, too true to keep from haunting his unconscious thoughts at night, too awful not to be the stuff of nightmares.

  “We wanted the Abwehr to seize him in good time, try him, and kill him. The charges against him would be fantastic. No one would believe them.”

  “That’s madness. Why not tell the Brits what we were doing?”

  “Security,” Hanley said, as though that explained everything.

  “It couldn’t have worked.”

  “Madder plots worked. Remember the pilotless gliders bringing saboteurs into Norway in the war?”

  “They crashed; the men died for nothing.”

  “And a woman called Madeleine who was dropped into France and who unconsciously betrayed one network before she was picked up by the Nazis and killed?”

  “So your scheme didn’t work.”

  “It wasn’t mine; it was OSS and it was a long time ago. Unfortunately, our Irish Fascist went into Austria just before the generals decided to kill Hitler and blew up his meeting room. Crohan was trapped in Vienna and tried to survive the war. We left him dangling. He might have survived it, too.”

  Devereaux understood. “Which would have been embarrassing to us. In case he blames us for his predicament.”

  “He was certain to blame us.”

  “So we betrayed him.”

  “We told our allies, the Russians, by circuitous means, that he was a spy working for us.”

  Devereaux felt so tired. He closed his eyes a moment. He opened them and nothing had changed. Tartakoff stared at him still.

  “We let the Russians get rid of Crohan,” Devereaux said.

  “But they didn’t get rid of him, did they, November? And now you have him and what are you going to do with him?”

  “He is still an embarrassment.”

  “Yes. We have our leverage with the Irish Republic. We have certain… needs. Oil off the coast. And now this business of the Russians negotiating for use of a naval refueling base.”

  “Is that true?”

  “We don’t think so; but paranoia demands we believe it sometimes.”

  “So this was a trap after all,” Devereaux said.

  “Yes. It appears so.”

  “You could have avoided the problem from the beginning.”

  “Damn it, November, we didn’t know what the problem was. Langley told us nothing. There is too much security sometimes.”

  “We have to work our way out of this.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “The New Man wanted me out of Helsinki.”

  “Yes.”

  “You told him I was out.”

  “I thought you were.”

  “No,” Devereaux said. “You knew I was still inside. You knew it and you lied to him, deliberately.”

  Hanley gasped. “I did not.”

  “This time, you did. This time, you’re going to have to save my neck to save your own.” The voice had changed again; it was low and harsh, like the growl of a hidden animal on a dark night. “You’re going to have to take the heat on this.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because I can’t go back on any of this. Because I have Rita Macklin and I have Crohan and I have Tartakoff. Your solution is to walk away from it. What do you think Rita will do then? This is a story and even if she doesn’t have all the answers, she has the questions. And she knows about Crohan.”

  “And you,” Hanley said. “She knows about the Section and she knows about you. She knows too damned much.”

  “So hit her? And Crohan? And Tartakoff? And then who should be next, Hanley? Me?”

  Hanley said nothing; the possibility had occurred to him and he was not certain he had rejected it.

  “If I work out of this, I’m through,” Devereaux said. “If I don’t, I’m dead.”

  “Yes,” Hanley said. “Those might be the only choices.”

  “I’m sick of you,” Devereaux said. “I’m sick of the Section. I’ll work out of this and you’ll take the heat from the New Man and you’ll figure out how to survive; you’ve been figuring that out for a long time.”

  “And you will quit.”

  “We call it retirement, Hanley, with maximum points and payoffs like medical care.” Devereaux smiled. “All the mundane pleasures of the middle-class servant. I want you to fix it.”

  Hanley did not speak for a moment and then continued in a soft voice: “I can fix it.”

  “I want everything cleaned up after this,” Devereaux said. “I want the break total.”

  “I understand.”

  Devereaux said coldly, “No hitters after me, after Rita.”

  “What are you going to do with her?”

  “That’s not your problem anymore. Listen
to what I said. No late hits after I cut myself off from the Section.”

  “You’ll have a safe-conduct pass,” Hanley said.

  “I trust you because you have to trust me. If there is any foul-up after I walk away from the Section, everyone will regret it.”

  “There won’t be anything from us, November.”

  “Not from you, not from Langley, not from the policemen at NSA. You will have to fix it. For me. And for the woman.”

  Devereaux said the words slowly, as though he had thought about them for a long time; in fact, the thought came as the words were spoken. It was the only way out for them, the only safe way to escape the trap. She would have to agree with him to be safe; he needed her to be safe. Neither could survive the matter alone.

  “Can you guarantee her?”

  “Trust me,” Devereaux said.

  Yes, thought Hanley suddenly. It was the only option left to him.

  Two hours later, Hanley sat across from Mrs. Neumann in her office in Computer Analysis Section. For a long time, he sat silently and then, with slow and careful words, he told her of the conversation with Devereaux in Helsinki.

  Mrs. Neumann did not speak.

  Once she got up from her desk and went to the closed door of the small windowless office and opened it as though making certain there was still an outside world and that there were still concerns beyond this time and place and the story that Hanley was telling her.

  All was calm outside; women were at rows of video display terminals, punching in endless series of code numbers, creating records and retrieving them, upgrading documents and destroying them at the push of the “permanent delete” series of buttons. All was usual; all was in order.

  Mrs. Neumann closed the door and looked around her windowless cell. On the back wall was a sampler done in needlework by one of the women in CompAn and presented to her at a Christmas party five years ago. In archaic lettering, the sampler said, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

  The sentiment made her frown now. All the information about Helsinki and the prisoner had contained elements of garbage, right from the first lies told the British during the war about the nature of Crohan’s mission. Who was lying now?

  “Devereaux is right, in a peculiar way,” she said at last.

  “About what?”

  “There’s no choice for him. You let him dangle along too long, Hanley—you know that as well as he does. When you were finally ready to tell him what to do, it was too late. He couldn’t leave Crohan or whoever that is or the Russian. It was a trap; you thought he was the only one who might be trapped by it. Now he’s got you.”