The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  And George thought, the moment before he fell, that the absurdity of his death fit well the absurdity of his life.

  36

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “I told you, Hanley, I wanted to see him.”

  “Yes,” Hanley said distractedly. He had been staring at the same spot on the top of his government-issue desk for the past five minutes. He had looked up only once when the New Man, Yackley, entered his windowless office without knocking. The New Man had taken the uncomfortable straight steel chair across the desk from the director of operations.

  “My God, he doesn’t own this place,” Yackley said. “He can’t just waltz in and out—”

  “Devereaux resigned thirty minutes ago.”

  “I thought you told me he wasn’t going to resign.” Yackley said.

  “So I thought. We all make miscalculations.”

  “After you convince me he’s valuable to us, how could he walk out on us?”

  “It’s a free country,” Hanley said with a bitter smile. “At least it is some of the time.”

  “But he needs us—”

  “No. Not anymore. And we don’t have any way to stop him.”

  “We didn’t have any way to stop him before,” the New Man said with a puzzled tone. He felt uncomfortable, in the chair, in the little molelike office, uncomfortable dealing at all with Hanley who never said exactly what he meant.

  On the desk between them was a copy of the New York Times with a photograph of Sir Adrian Hugh-Fuller above a story noting that the famous director of intelligence at Cheltenham in England had been shot to death by a disgruntled employee the day before on the steps of his home. It was a slow news day, otherwise the murder would not have been given prominence; the story hinted that the killer might have been in the employ of one or another terrorist groups, including the groups used by the Soviet KGB. Nowhere in the story did it mention that a four-hundred-year-old oak in Hyde Park had been struck by lightning on the same night and destroyed by fire.

  It was the last hold Hanley had on Devereaux and they had both known it.

  “Now I will be left alone,” Devereaux had said.

  “Yes. And what are you going to do with her?”

  “That’s none of your business. Don’t involve yourself in my life anymore,” Devereaux had said. He had removed the plastic card without photograph or identifying mark on it from his pocket. He had placed it on Hanley’s desk. Then, as though giving it a second thought, he had broken the card in half and then again in quarters and thrown the pieces on the floor.

  “I suppose I should apologize about Helsinki,” Hanley had managed.

  And Devereaux had only stared at him for a moment, without expression, the cold eyes boring into the pasty features of the little clerk. He had said nothing. He had walked out the door of the office and said nothing.

  “Lucky for us, about this killing,” the New Man said suddenly, changing the point. Hanley glanced up at the newspaper on his desk. Lucky, he thought dully.

  “Now you won’t have to proceed with that… little plan,” the New Man said.

  “The plan was completed four days ago. We had the highest-level code access to Seeker and Mrs. Neumann put in the incriminating information herself,” Hanley said in the same flat voice.

  “Do you think this was intended then? I mean, by British Intelligence?”

  “No. The information we inserted into the Cheltenham computer against George is useless now, but there’s no point in retrieving it. George is dead and he’ll get a very nice state funeral out of it and this poor wretch who murdered him will get life at Wormwood Scrubs.” Hanley paused and thought mundanely of the best-laid schemes of men; a stupid little accident by a stupid little nobody who hadn’t the faintest idea of what George really was and who by killing George had stripped Hanley of his last hold over an agent called November.

  Well, Hanley sighed. It was over at least.

  At the same moment, as another cold, clear night wrapped itself around the city of Moscow, in an operations briefing room inside the Committee for External Observation and Resolution—which was the passively named section of the KGB in charge of foreign operations against American Intelligence—a Red Army colonel passed a briefing paper across a wooden table to two men who studied the Cyrillic letters for a moment and then asked two questions in bad Russian. Both men were Bulgarians.

  “Will the woman be with him?”

  “We don’t know. It is not relevant to us.”

  “If she is with him, what do we do with her?”

  “Obviously, you must judge that for yourself,” said the Russian colonel. The matter was not routine but it did not interest him greatly; he was only a messenger from Gogol’s office to the subsection of the agency in which the assassination bureau was housed. He had never heard of Rita Macklin or this man Devereaux. He was only following orders even as he contemplated a late supper that evening with a woman he knew who had arrived that morning from Leningrad and was now patiently waiting for him in bed in his apartment on the south side of the city.

  The next morning, while Hanley worked on a new plan to revise the code names of field agents and to change the control system used in eastern Europe and a Russian army colonel slept naked in a rumpled bed next to a woman he had known all night, the ME strolled down the carpeted hall from his office to the cubicle where Rita Macklin was cleaning out the last drawer of her desk.

  Rita closed the door and dropped the keys for the desk and the office on the desktop. “That’s it,” she said.

  “You sound like you’re going away forever,” Mac smiled.

  “Just three months, just to write the book about the old man,” Rita said, and her returning smile was too quick and they both thought she had lied.

  “I’d hate to lose you, Rita. I get the feeling you’re really not coming back.”

  The ME stood like a little boy with his hands in his pockets, staring at the blank screen of the word processor at the side of her empty desk. She had piled her junk in a cardboard carton that had once contained laundry soap boxes.

  “Thanks, Mac, but I’ll keep my word.”

  “Okay, kid,” Mac said in an awkward voice. “Don’t forget we always need fast writers.”

  “Sure, I’ve got most of the transcripts from the old man. It’s hard to believe you can remember so many horrible things so clearly.”

  “Ghosts,” the ME said. “You never forget ghosts or bad dreams.”

  “You can try,” Rita said.

  “Sure. But the ghosts are always waiting for you. The old man has ghosts and he can’t get rid of them.”

  “Maybe he’s too old.”

  “It’s not a matter of age,” the ME said and he realized Rita was not looking at him but looking somewhere in her own memory. He smiled again and said something neither of them heard and shuffled back down the silent corridor to his office.

  Rita left the building before eleven o’clock. The sun was shining but it didn’t matter; she didn’t need sunlight to add to the feeling that had come over her in the past few hours. Since he had talked to her; since he had told her what he had done.

  37

  FRONT ROYAL, VIRGINIA

  The mountains were green again and the morning fogs burned off by midday so that you could see the top of Skyline Drive that ran along the Blue Ridge Mountains down the central spine of Virginia, down to the Tennessee line.

  In the mornings, they would go into the woods together and find the trees that had fallen in the winter and they would drag them back to the cabin where he would cut them with a chain saw. If the fallen trees were too large, he would cut them on the spot where they had fallen and drag them back to the cabin in pieces.

  It was hard work but she saw that it seemed to please him and that the longer he was in the cabin, in the mountains, the more he seemed to be content with himself. He still dreamed, violently, and the dreams he would not speak of frightened her most of all. She would shake him and say his name over and over
until he would awaken and realize she had witnessed him dreaming. That had made him ashamed at first, as though he had revealed a weakness to her that they would never speak of. He would not tell her of the demons or ghosts of dead men who inhabited the violent dreams.

  In those dreaded moments, in the middle of the black night, he was most frightened. Not because of the dreams that he had learned to live with but because of the fear that he could never break away from the past of his life, even with her help, even with her body next to him, even away from everything on this mountain in the middle of the Shenandoah.

  “I love you,” Rita would say then as though she could read his thoughts and he would let himself be comforted; he would hold her as a child will hold its mother, with trust and yearning.

  Because all words lied, he never spoke to her of what he felt for her now except to say her name. She would understand that after a time.

  They would work now in the heat of the day. Sometimes they would walk together in the woods, along unmarked trails shared with bears and deer, with possums and badgers and the other creatures who had come alive after the long winter and had survived it.

  At evening, they would build a fire inside the old cabin, in the stone hearth, and they would eat together simply and talk.

  She never tired of him. She would wake first and see him sleeping next to her. She would trace the scars on his body but when she would ask him where the scars had come from, he would not say.

  She pried at his secrets but he would not reveal them.

  “Nothing I did was so important or so secret,” he said once to her. “It’s just that it’s an old life and I don’t want to go back to it. Like Crohan talking about the life in Russia. He is frightened to talk about it.”

  “But he tells me.”

  “But not me. I can’t do it. I can’t mix you up in my mind with what it was in the past. Just bury it, Rita.”

  “I want all of you.”

  And so that he would not have to speak to her anymore, he would hold her instead and kiss her and touch her in places she opened to him. “Rita,” he would say. And it would be enough.

  “I bought food and they told me at the grocery.”

  She looked frightened. Her face was pale. Devereaux paused in his work as she threaded her way up the slightly sloping ground to the place by the cabin where he was splitting wood.

  He put down the metal splitter and took the bags from her arms and led her inside the cabin. He put the bags of food on the kitchen table and turned to her. His face was red from the sun, his gray eyes did not appear as icy fields anymore to her; he wore a checkered shirt and his hands had become rough again with the hard work.

  “Who told you?”

  “Mrs. Gibbons in the grocery. She said a couple of men were asking about you.”

  “What kind of men?”

  “Foreign men. That’s what she said.”

  “Men in suits?”

  “Yes. Suits. Two days ago. Who is it?”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “That’s all. Just two men in suits, asking where you lived.”

  “Did she tell them?”

  “She lies to them. Said you lived west of town, on the other side of the river.”

  “You can’t lie to them,” Devereaux said.

  She held his arm. Her face was white, as though a sudden illness had struck her. “My God. That’s what I thought all the way coming back here. I was so scared I had the boy put the bags in the trunk just to have company in the parking lot. I drove like hell getting out of town. I didn’t care if I was stopped. I just wanted to get back here. I’m so scared.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him and saw that the flatness had come back to his eyes in that moment, that the arctic grayness had not gone away but had just been altered for a time in her company.

  I’ll be back in three months after I finish the book.

  But it had been a lie, just a convenient lie for Mac. She never intended to be back.

  And he had never intended to return either. They would run away from their worlds together for as long as they could; they would have no pasts, no tomorrows, make no promises, tell each other no lies.

  She heard the ugly metal snap. She turned.

  He had opened the shotgun. He filled the double barrels with two shells and closed it. He reached for the pistol and spun the chamber. He shoved the pistol in his belt. He took extra shells for the shotgun and put them in his shirt pocket.

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing. Not until they come.”

  “My God, Dev, let’s get out of here.”

  “You don’t lie to them, you don’t run from them.”

  “But this is America. This is Virginia.”

  “Sometimes they have to step outside the rules. They draw up the rules after all. I’m outside the service now; so are you. Maybe that’s the reason.”

  “But they can’t do this.”

  He started at her. “They can do anything they want unless you’re ready to stop them.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “It didn’t work out, did it?” he said.

  “Don’t say that. Please.”

  “Get out, Rita. Get back to D.C. Just go like hell and—”

  “No, goddamn it. You don’t get me in this thing and then tell me to take off like a movie heroine. Besides, I’m afraid. I don’t want to be alone. Not now. Not ever.”

  He looked out the window. “I suppose we did it too easy. Maybe we should have waited.”

  “Dev. I love you no matter what,” she said. “No matter what.” Her voice was stubborn but on the verge of breaking and they both knew it.

  They went out into the sunlight and there was nothing to see all the way down to the hairpin turnaround where a car could go back if it had wandered onto the trail by mistake. But at the foot of the mountain where the trail led to the asphalt highway, there was a gray car that had not been there before.

  He took her hand and led her across the clearing to the edge of the woods. They plunged quietly into the woods for about a hundred feet, to a natural culvert formed by the passing of an old melting creek from the mountaintop. He helped her down into the culvert. Mud clung to them. He held the shotgun against the rim of the culvert.

  She did not speak.

  They waited a long time.

  The two men had edged along the roadway up the mountain.

  He saw them and Rita nearly gasped but held her mouth with her right hand. She felt sick and cold.

  She realized it must be the way he felt all of the time, but mostly at night, when the dreams came to him, and he was naked in sleep, too weak to fight against them.

  One man whispered loudly to the other and the other nodded.

  Bulgarians, Devereaux thought.

  He turned to Rita. She was staring at him. She knew what it was as well as he. For a moment, they could only gaze at each other, in silence, wanting to say one true thing to each other which would wipe all this away, which would make the fact of the two men stalking the trail not a fact at all. He quietly pulled back both hammers of the shotgun.

  The two men in suits passed fifty feet from them, at the edge of the woods, outlined in the clearing by the bright sun.

  Devereaux held the shotgun level at the edge of the culvert like a soldier in a trench. The two men were apart from each other by about ten feet if faced from the house. But at this angle, they were together. Close enough for a shotgun in any case, Devereaux decided.

  The shotgun kicked against his shoulder and the boom tore into the silence of the forest.

  Both men were down and blood was on the trail, on their clothing, on the trees around them.

  Devereaux climbed out of the culvert and loped forward, reloading the shotgun as he ran.

  Rita made a strangled sound that was half a cry, half a scream. She put her hands to her ears as though to st
op the sound of the shotgun long after the echo of it ceased to reverberate in the sudden still of the forest.

  When he reached the place where they had fallen, he stood over them. The first one was short and dark and plainly dead.

  The second man was alive.

  He moaned. His belly was open.

  Devereaux reached into his coat and pulled out the Czech pistol and threw it aside. He reached for identification cards.

  Balkan Export Company.

  He threw the cards aside and the dying man spoke, slowly, as Rita ran to the scene. She was sick and turned and vomited away from the bloody bodies, into the woods.

  Devereaux listened to the dying man.

  Then he stood up and pulled the black Colt Python from his belt. His face showed nothing.

  She spoke: “Dev.”

  “Death to spies,” he said quietly. “He said it in Russian.” He stared at her for a moment but he could not say her name even, not now. And then he fired point-blank into the face of the dying man.

  “My God, my God,” she said.

  But he did not speak. He only felt the heaviness of the pistol in his hand, felt it hold him like a chain.

  They buried the two men in the woods. When the horror of it was over, they could not speak to each other.

  They sat in the large room of the cabin before the roaring fire and felt cold, felt apart from each other.

  “I can take you back in the morning,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said dully. She stared at the fire and saw the bodies of two men. She saw Devereaux standing over a man with a pistol, firing into his face. She saw a man at the end of a corridor in a department store with a long, thin knife blocking her way.

  “We have to go in two cars. I’ll take the rental car and dump it in Fairfax on the way in. You can follow me and pick me up.”

  “Yes,” she said, without tone.

  “You saw the way it was,” he said.

  “I can…” And then she couldn’t speak. She began to cry. He did not move toward her.