by Bill Granger
“And if I hit him, you have something on me,” Devereaux said. “You have something to keep me in line five or ten years from now. You see why I won’t do it? I won’t be able to walk away from you.”
“You’ve killed men.”
“Yes but not a hit. The killings were line of duty.” The killings were for survival, Devereaux thought.
“This is line of duty because it is an order—”
“Don’t be stupid, Hanley. There are not orders to kill; it is against the charter of the Section just as it is against the charters of all the intelligence organizations. You will merely tell me to kill someone and if it is convenient to you, you will remember to bring it up the next time you want to use me. It’s not going to happen, Hanley.”
“You killed that banker in New York three years ago in the Tunney matter.”
“If you thought that, you would have to prove it.”
“All right. You want something from us and you won’t give us anything in return.”
“We’ll go back to the status quo,” Devereaux said. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Hanley smiled. It was exactly what he wanted. He had played the card neatly and it had worked; he had never expected the death of George in the first place, certainly not from Devereaux. “Fine, fine. You see, you couldn’t leave us until we wanted to let you go.”
There was a dull pause now and when Devereaux spoke again, there was a hollow weariness in his voice. “What about Rita?”
“I’m sure she’ll be all right. I can’t speak for the Russians but I can assure you we have no further interest in her.” Hanley was suddenly pleased. “When you get back, we can arrange a leave for you so that you can… ‘date’ her or however you would say it.”
“You’re scum, Hanley.”
Hanley’s face went white. “And you are a goddamn agent, November, not God. You are going to have to follow orders like everyone else; you are going to march when we say march and dangle when we want you to dangle. And when you’re used up and we don’t need you anymore, we’ll get rid of you.”
“And you’d let me go if I took care of George,” Devereaux said.
“That’s the only way, I’m afraid. You would have something on us and we would have something on you.”
Again, there was silence on the line.
“But I have Tomas Crohan.”
“An embarrassment, as you pointed out, but we can survive it. It all happened a long time ago.…”
“You weren’t so sanguine about it before.”
“That was before we found out he was Michael Brent. Our Russian defector had an interesting story. It seems we have something on the British as well. We might have crossed Crohan but the British double-crossed everyone when they sent in Brent to kill him. And that’s who you have now, nothing; you have a goddamn English killer.”
“You’re mistaken, Hanley,” Devereaux said then.
“What?”
“We have Tomas Crohan.”
“But that’s a lie,” Hanley said.
“Are you going to prove it isn’t true? Are you going to parade Tartakoff off to a press conference to explain that the man they kept in prison for thirty-eight years was really a British spy sent to kill an American agent behind Nazi lines? What kind of questions do you suppose the Section would get after saying something like that?” Now it was Devereaux’s turn to slash and cut with words like shards of ice. “You have your game and I have mine and if it’s stalemated right now, it isn’t over.”
“Damn you, we work on the same side.”
“Do we?”
“Yes, damn you,” Hanley said fiercely.
But he was met with a voice like an ice field: “When you’re in the middle, all the sides look the same after a while, don’t they?”
34
DUBLIN
In Stephen’s Green in the center of the city a tinker woman with a dirty child in her arms stood begging coins from the passersby. Only a few stopped to drop a shilling into her outstretched hand. Her face was dirty and her head was covered with a black and dirty shawl; her eyes were dark and they appeared in pain, but it was a trick of begging and it had been passed on to the tinker woman from her mother before her and her mother before that; she would pass it on to the child she held now in her arms. It was not that the woman was not truly poor; she was and it was a way of life passed on by generations of tinkers and their kin.
Rita Macklin passed her without looking at her and then stopped and turned back and dropped a coin into her hand. The grief on the face of the beggar woman never changed, did not lessen or become greater. Rita Macklin turned away from her and walked back through the park. He was late and she felt afraid and alone.
Her hands were thrust in the pockets of her tan raincoat. It was bitterly cold and damp but the gray skies had not yielded any rain since the night before. She paced down one walk and turned and tried another; Stephen’s Green was not a large square but there were many paths and many trees and perhaps she had missed him.
She could not escape her thoughts and each time she turned one over, it made her feel sick until she felt trapped in this foreign city, in this dirty gray world.
She did not see Devereaux until he was beside her, walking with her suddenly step by step.
She took his arm and buried her face against his chest.
He held her in the middle of Stephen’s Green for a moment and realized she was shaking.
When she pulled away and looked at him, he asked her, “Did everything work?”
“The way you said,” she replied.
“Where is he now?”
“The priests took him in at the rectory. He did everything he was supposed to do. I filed the story this morning. In two days, the world is going to know about Tomas Crohan.”
Devereaux held her arms and did not speak.
“Damn it, Dev. I feel sick all the time. I lied to the ME, I coached the old man in his lie.…”
“It wasn’t a lie,” Devereaux said softly.
“Of course it was. He’s Michael Brent—”
“No. He’s an old man who served thirty-eight years in prison and now he’s free.”
“He’s a killer. He’s a hit man, that’s all he ever was,” Rita Macklin said. “You forget that Tomas Crohan was supposed to murder someone and Michael Brent was supposed to murder someone. It doesn’t matter who the old man was; he’s a killer, just a killer.”
“He’s an old man,” Devereaux said. “He’s just a bit of history that washed up one day. We can forget about him.”
“I can’t,” she said. “And what are we going to do now?” Her green eyes stared mockingly at him. “Got the next chapter figured out yet?”
“I did,” he said and his voice was leaden and dull like the color of the sky.
They stood apart from each other on a quiet path on the green where no one trod.
“What happened?” she asked him.
I wouldn’t kill a man, he thought, but he said nothing for a moment. “I can’t leave the Section yet.”
“Damn you, damn you,” she said.
“I was…” He chose the word. “Forced. To remain a while longer.”
“They can’t force you to do anything. It still is a free country—”
“No. Only a larger prison,” Devereaux said, remembering the old man’s words.
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know, Rita.”
“You said you loved me—”
“Yes,” he said and he said it so softly it was as though he were affirming a truth too immense to speak of but in whispers.
“Oh, Dev. What are we going to do?”
“You’ll be safe. I had them promise that. Nothing that happened has changed. You can go back to the magazine and—”
“And we can have little rendezvous when you’re back in the country, is that it?” She doubled her fist and her face was flushed: Her small overbite was suddenly prominent.
“No,” he said,
again gently.
“No? Then what did you have in mind for me? I mean, you’ve used me to get out of this mess and now it’s kiss-off for little Rita, right? Love ’em and leave ’em. Up to the mountains for a little piece of ass and then send them back home, right?”
“Shut up, Rita,” he said with flat, dull words.
“Goddamn you, Devereaux, I love you and I would do anything for you, I told you—hell, I did it all for you—”
“And I did it for you,” Devereaux said at last.
“What?”
“Stay in the Section. It wasn’t safe any other way—”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I can’t explain it all. There was something I was supposed to do and I couldn’t and the only way I could make sure you would be safe was to remain in the Section—”
“What couldn’t you do for me? What couldn’t you do for me, Dev?”
“Kill a man.”
It was so quiet for a moment in the park that neither could breathe for fear of disturbing the quiet. And then all the color went out of Rita’s face and she was shaking again and she came and held him tightly, wrapping her arms around him, burying her face on his chest. There was nothing more to say and they both knew it and the sadness enveloped them like the silence.
35
LONDON
What happened next was not expected by anyone involved in the affair, least of all the man called George.
In reality he was Sir Adrian Hugh-Fuller, KCB and KCE, and fourth in line to the barony of Giles.
George had survived, though it had taken some fancy footwork in the past few days; the Americans had botched the matter from the beginning and George had been amused by their clumsiness.
It had begun cleverly. The R Section in America had sent a long coded telegram to Q with a copy to the prime minister. The telegram thanked the British in strong but unofficial terms for their cooperation in the seizure of the KGB officer Tartakoff and regretted in unofficial terms the loss of a British agent named Sims who had been part of Operation Helsinki.
The prime minister expressed her interest in the matter. She was given full background on the operation at a private meeting the following day; the background was given by Q and George personally. The meeting had been delayed because Q had not the faintest idea of what Operation Helsinki was until the Americans gave him background notes on it and again piled on their congratulations for the help provided by Ely, a British agent who had been generously loaned to the American section as a liaison officer.
“I wasn’t up on any of this, George,” Q said grumpily and George had to convince the old fool that George had been aware of the operation from the start and could not divulge too much in case it became necessary to “compartmentalize severe reactions.” The gobbledygook suited everyone from the PM to George.
But George was still afraid of an end run by the Americans and pushed his probe for the whereabouts of the British agent, Michael Brent. Unfortunately, Michael Brent surfaced four days later on the cover of an American newsmagazine as Tomas Crohan. He had been hidden safe in a priest’s house in Dublin until the long, bizarre story of his arrest and imprisonment was broken.
“It is the American agent again,” Latvia said to George on the day the story was screaming on front pages in the British papers. “Both of them.”
“Yes. But there’s very little to be done about Miss Macklin now. Or for that matter, about our Michael Brent. At least he can hardly go back on his new-fashioned lie, unless he wants to face a charge of murder.”
Tomas Crohan became a national hero overnight in Ireland and the Irish People dutifully recorded on Sunday that Tomas Crohan preferred eggs for breakfast and apples as well.
George felt at last he was safe because the Americans had been unable to follow up their first telegram with a probe about the man called George. The story by Rita Macklin had boxed them in as well as the British; neither side could contradict the lies of Tomas Crohan and the woman journalist without revealing more about their own sordid operations than was good for them.
Nothing had changed, George thought; not for him, not for either of the people he worked for. He only regretted the boredom of being safe again in his dual role as computer director and Soviet agent.
Which is why George was the last person in the world to credit what would happen six days after the story broke about Tomas Crohan and three days after George was mentioned in the Times as receiving personal congratulations from the queen for a recently completed Anglo-American operation that emphasized the friendship and cooperation of the two peoples. Naturally, nothing about the operation itself could be mentioned in the paper.
It was a windy and wet night in London where theater goers scurried along the streets of the West End with their faces flushed by fresh, stinging breezes that smelled of the River Thames. It was a strange, invigorating evening full of lightning flashes and sudden downpours and then, sudden periods of immense calm.
The man called George stepped out of the rear door to his black Rover in front of his graystone residence at 29 Gloucester Road and waited a moment for the chauffeur to close the door behind him. He left instructions to be picked up the following morning at seven; he had to fly to Brussels for the day, first for a conversation with the Americans at NATO and later, for a reporting session to the European Theater Soviet control officer who lived in Liège.
George started up the stone stairs as the car pulled away. He paused a moment at the top of the stairs to regard the face of the red-tinged London sky. Lightning broke sullenly over the old houses and he thought the feeling of the evening was quite enough to rid him of his boredom—at least for a few minutes. George actually smiled as the sky broke again and again with lightning that was, nonetheless, followed only now and then by muted thunder.
Thunder, he thought then; the slow and faithful servant to the brilliant messenger of the gods.
The sentence framed in his thoughts pleased him as well and the smile did not fade as he stood at the top of his stairs and surveyed the world.
“George.”
He glanced down to the walk and saw the figure huddled against the stone banister on the street. He blinked in the dim light to better see the man just as a bolt of lightning broke like crazed glass across the sky.
“Why… Bluebird. What on earth do you want?” George asked with mild interest. He had not seen Wickham from the moment he had been sacked nearly six weeks before. Poor old Wickham, he looked dreadful.
“George, I had to see you, they wouldn’t admit me at the ministry—”
“Of course not, Bluebird. You’re not secure.”
“But I got in anyway,” Wickham said and smiled strangely. “Not through the doors but through the computers. I got in through the computers at Cheltenham. All I needed was a small home computer and a telephone. And George, I went back through the records in Seeker and this time I used your code name—”
George stood perfectly still. He had nothing to fear but it was obvious that Bluebird was insane. His eyes glittered in the strange light of the strange evening and he smiled too much.
“You’ve changed the files, George. You’re the only one who could change them. About me. About the kidnapping. You knew I was going to be kidnapped.”
“You’re talking utter nonsense, Wickham. Are you drunk or mad?”
“Both, George. You set me up, George; my God, George, for no reason at all, you’ve ruined my life.” Wickham sobbed then but made no attempt to climb the stone steps to the place where George stood watching him with faint fascination.
“I thought it was for no reason,” Wickham continued suddenly in an altered voice, one that was too calm for his words. “George. You’re not what you seem to be, are you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Bluebird, and I am afraid I do not wish to continue this conversation—”
George turned on the landing.
“No, George,” Wickham said. He held a metal object in his right han
d; it had not been there a moment before. George felt energized suddenly. He turned to face the man at the bottom of the steps.
“Is that a knife, Wickham?”
“No, George. It’s a pistol.”
“Where on earth did you purchase a pistol?” George asked with sudden curiosity. What an odd question, he thought dreamily, as soon as he had uttered it.
“It doesn’t matter, George. George, I want my position restored, I want to be reinstated—”
“I’m afraid you’d better go home and sleep it off—”
“My wife has left me. Do you understand what you have done to me?”
“I’ve done nothing at all to you.”
“Damn you, George—”
“But I will do something if you don’t leave immediately. You are threatening an official of—”
“Shut up, George, I don’t care.” The calm was replaced by a sob again. “I don’t care about anything.”
“My God, Bluebird, act your age,” said George in a gruff voice. He took a step down and Bluebird did not react. He reached the bottom step and saw that Bluebird was crying copiously.
No guts, George thought. They never had any guts.
He took the barrel of the pistol and began to remove it gently from Wickham’s right hand.
Wickham, inexpertly, had wrapped his first finger too tightly inside the trigger housing. The fleshy part of the first third of the finger became caught as George removed the pistol. No one meant what happened; it was a small act of fate, similar to the fate that caused lightning to strike and destroy a four-hundred-year-old oak that night in Hyde Park to the west.
The bullet exploded almost quietly, the roar muffled by George’s heavy coat. If the bullet had been anything but a .45 caliber shell, George might have survived it. The bullet tore into his liver and then struck the edge of a rib and ricocheted up into the lungs and had enough velocity left to tear across the left ventricle of the heart.
George was alive for about four seconds. His last image on earth was of Wickham standing very close to him, his eyes wide in horror, his face covered with a stubble of beard.