Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  “Sit here,” Hanley said. He got up and closed the door of his office. He went to his secretary’s desk. He rang Security. “Put a camera on room 535,” he said, bugging his own office. “This is Twenty-two,” he said, identifying himself with the security number changed daily. “Hanley.”

  He put down his secretary’s receiver, crossed to the door and headed down the corridor. He opened the closed door of Ops room.

  “Where is Pierce?”

  It was the name of the man in Dutch Harbor station.

  One of the bright men scanned the computer. “On station.”

  Hanley gave him the flight number and description of Denisov. “Tell him not to lose him and report in constantly. If Redbird books a flight for Nome, let me know immediately. Now, the same flight touches down at Seattle-Tacoma International en route to Anchorage; I don’t know the time. Can we round up anyone to make sure our client does not disembark there?”

  Again, the computer screens changed. A map of the nation broke suddenly into a map of the northwest with flashing dots at various points. The operator touched the screen and the dot and map disappeared into a profile card.

  “We have a watcher on station in Tacoma. Current status: Watch on a Soviet science exchange-student at the university, very interested in the workings of Boeing Aircraft.”

  “To hell with Boeing for the moment. Get him down to the airport.” Hanley paused while the operator tapped out a telephone number on the screen and began to make contact with the watcher in Tacoma. Hanley turned to another of the bright young men. They all gazed at him expectantly: He was the master, the old man of Operations, he had once known John Kennedy and he had been with Section from the beginning. He was a piece of history to them. Hanley spoke in a soft voice: “Now, where is November?”

  “Booked at the Nugget Inn at Nome overnight. He missed the standard report time. We contacted the hotel and they were puzzled, the woman said he had gone out about nine in the morning with a young woman and that his bag was still in his room. Also, the contact—Nels Nelsen—is still in the hotel.”

  “Typical,” Hanley said, speaking of November. He stood in the middle of the Ops room surrounded by the bright young men who moved agent activities by computer tracks across the globe. The computerization was Mrs. Neumann’s idea as head of Section. She was computerizing all the operations. She did not believe in colorful tacks on Mercator-projection wall maps; she did not see the romance of the business. Hanley would not have thought himself a romantic either, merely a conservative accustomed to the old ways when agents were tacks and the world was flat on a wall.

  What the hell was going on?

  A defected Soviet agent living peacefully in Santa Barbara for years suddenly reports he is made by the Opposition. A babysitter goes down to hold his hand and she is preempted by her superior, who immediately cancels the assignment. Then the defected agent takes off for Alaska with a girlfriend—perhaps a second defector agent—without notifying or being noticed by the program. What the hell was going on?

  Before Hanley went back to his office, he ordered Security to turn off the room scan and send up a babysitter. He opened the door and Miss O’Hare sat as though she had not moved in the last five minutes. Hanley realized it was irrational to be annoyed with her and yet he felt resentment because the routine had been broken and the channels had been breached. Inevitably, he thought, such lack of discipline had to involve November.

  She turned to look at him with her cold eyes. She really was very tired and the fatigue made her look vulnerable.

  “What I have to tell you is not pleasant, Miss O’Hare,” Hanley began as he went to his side of the desk and sat down. He touched a button just below the surface of the desk.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go back to San Francisco immediately and be at the workplace tomorrow.”

  She looked distraught.

  Hanley shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

  “You don’t believe this means anything.”

  “No, you’re wrong, Miss O’Hare. I have come to your belief in the last few minutes; you might say you have made your first convert. The problem is deeper, Miss O’Hare, and I’m afraid we are going to need your help now because you are in the program, right in the same office.”

  “With whom?”

  “With Mr. Wagner. It seems obvious that Mr. Wagner is involved in whatever is wrong, as you observed, Miss O’Hare. But what, exactly, is wrong? We don’t know, except two witnesses in the program are acting in an extraordinary way. We need a watcher, Miss O’Hare, and you will have to be the watcher. Can you watch, Miss O’Hare?”

  She blinked and said nothing.

  “This is very deep,” Hanley said. He tried not to be unkind. He saw now how very tired she must be. He had a problem when dealing with women: He could never get the tone right, he was either too harsh or too soft. Now he felt sorry for her. “We’ll arrange transportation for you, babysit you to the airport, get you fed something before you leave. You should be back in your apartment well before morning.”

  The door opened and a babysitter from Security filled the frame of the doorway. He was large and he wore an ordinary brown sports coat and the Browning automatic at his belt hardly made a bulge at all in the expanse of his coat.

  Hanley instructed him in a clipped monotone. The agent nodded at the woman and she got up. She brushed at the wrinkles on her skirt and took the manila folder.

  “Leave the folder, Miss O’Hare,” Hanley said in the same soft voice he meant to be kind. “Thank you for your initiative.” It wasn’t good enough, he thought. “Your persistence.”

  “Is it going to be dangerous, Mr. Hanley?” she said.

  “Would it matter?”

  “I was going to make out a will. I have some savings and I wanted it to go to my mother and father,” she said.

  “It won’t be like that,” Hanley said.

  “How can you tell?” Karen O’Hare said. He saw the depth in her eyes now and he knew she was not so very tired that he had to treat her this way. He nodded and took her arm and led her to the corridor, where he turned her over to the babysitter.

  “I can’t tell,” he said, answering a question that had really been answered by the silence since she had asked it.

  “It’s all right,” she said then. She smiled at him. “I’m not really afraid of anything, you know. I just like to know. To know what you think.”

  “Very very dangerous,” he said then.

  “Thank you,” she answered and she did not say another word to him.

  21

  REPORTS

  Henry McGee was about fifty years old, an elementary fact of his life that no one knew. He had a very hard body, and if he was a step slower than younger men and if his eyesight was not the keen hunter’s eye it had been when he was twenty, experience had taught him how to overcome age.

  He would have explained that to Narvak if he had felt garrulous tonight.

  He felt something else instead.

  What he did could not be called making love to Narvak. It was merely the explosion of energy that had to be satisfied. He was a bomb that changes the force field for a moment and vaporizes the atoms all around it.

  She was afraid of him.

  She clung to him.

  They were on very soft sheets in a large suite of the Captain Cook Hotel, the tall brown building on the western edge of downtown Anchorage. If they had known what they were looking for when they looked out their window, they would have been able to see the roofline of the large home occupied by former Senator Malcolm Crowder on Hill Crest Avenue.

  The transfer of funds was completed and the exact coordinates of the suitcase were given. It was still light on the former Haul Road, which paralleled the pipeline from Fairbanks to Barrow. The sun now rose at about two-thirty in the morning in Anchorage and did not set until almost ten at night. The sun was still setting as Henry McGee made frightening sexual contact with the girl who was a killer and was not
yet seventeen.

  “You hurt me,” she said the second time.

  “It makes you feel alive,” Henry said. He was grinning like a devil, she thought. She had dreamed of devils once after the Baptists had come and been driven from the village for the ridiculous idea they had of everyone jumping into the water. Her brother Kools had shown her the book the Baptists left behind and there was a picture of a devil and she now thought that Henry McGee looked exactly like the devil in the picture.

  He had hurt her and the pain was not a thing she had intended. Like the pain when he had shot her in the cabin. He told her it was a wad and that the wad contained animal blood and that she wouldn’t feel a thing. But when it came time to shoot her, the wad almost knocked her out. The blast threw her against the wall and there was blood over everything so that she thought for a moment she was really dead. Henry McGee surprised her all the time. He had slapped her for his pleasure and she had not intended that. He was not always cruel to her and that was part of his surprises. He had three million dollars already gone from a bank in Hong Kong to a bank in Singapore. Perhaps the pain could be endured if it did not come very often.

  Henry moved restlessly around the room. He was naked. He picked up the bottle of Glenfiddich single malt on the coffee table and poured some more of it into the glass he had been using. He looked at her on the bed, huddled in sheets.

  “You liked that joke, all right,” he said.

  “I did the right thing.”

  “You did exactly right. He’s trussed up like a present and when they get him tomorrow morning—and they get the other one I’m sending them—half of this is going to be over, honey.”

  “I don’t understand everything.”

  “You’re not supposed to.” He sipped the whiskey straight. “You’re supposed to fuck and once in a while put a hit on someone for me and fuck some more and look presentable. First thing we get to Hong Kong, I’m getting you some clothes. You’ll clean up nice.”

  “Do you like to hurt me?”

  “I don’t even think about it,” he said. It was the truth and she saw it was. That made it worse. “Who are you sending to who?”

  “You wanna know? I got me a genuine U.S. spy tied up in the cabin and I got me a genuine Soviet spy coming up to see him. The pair of them, a matched pair. Who do you think I’m sending them to?”

  “What do we do?”

  “What we do is have ourselves a good night in the sack. I got a few more ounces of juice left in me, girl. And tomorrow, we start making our peace with the other side.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Bless you, Narvak, you really don’t. I could explain it to you if I wanted to hear myself talk.”

  “Let me have a glass of whiskey, too.”

  “Sure.” He poured her a stiff drink and put in ice and she sipped at it to burn her tongue and to make Henry think of talking. He was very large and he had hurt her. She wasn’t even there when he was on top of her, using her. She made a sound when he was inside her, to let him know that she existed. Noah was so much softer, gentler. She could tell Noah to do things in a way to give her pleasure. Poor Noah; he wouldn’t understand anything at first, and when he finally did, it would be too late.

  “I decided dancing on a hot roof ain’t as much fun as it used to be. Maybe I just need a rest. So we got some setups and some trails to put out and some reports to file. If you’re going to screw things up, make sure there’s a lot of trails so they don’t know which one to follow. You don’t understand, do you, girl? Noah is in Fairbanks now, getting ready to congratulate himself and the ULU people’s movement for blowing up the white man’s oil line. He’ll do it, too, and get the martyrdom he wants so bad. And Koolie. Well, your brother is going down to Seattle now and wait for his mythical fifty thousand dollars, and when the G-men get him, he’s gonna figure it was Noah double-crossed him at first, and when he gets around to figuring about me, well, shit, girl, we’re going to be sleeping on satin sheets in Tahiti.”

  “Will they hurt him?”

  “Sure. Hurt both of them. You think the G plays any fairer than any other side? This isn’t beanbag, honey.”

  “He said he’d kill himself if he had to go back to prison. He hated prison. He said it was all the time and the time never moved for you.”

  “He ever poke you, girl?”

  She stared at Henry McGee and thought about the three million dollars.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It gets so cold.”

  “Damn. You’d rub up against a gatepost to get rid of the itch, wouldn’t you?”

  “Please,” she said. She was never a person to ask or plead. She saw the change in Henry’s body again and she reached out her right hand to touch him the way he wanted to be touched. She tried not to think of her brother or Noah or the man they had left in the cabin or about anything in the world except three million dollars.

  22

  THE MAN FROM DUTCH HARBOR

  Skeeter took him out. It was nearly eight in the evening before they cleared the island and were flying north across Bristol Bay in the Bering Sea. Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island in the Aleutians was covered in clouds. A storm was building against the rim of islands that stretched up until they paralleled Kodiak Island and then the Alaska Peninsula. The sun was setting in Thursday across the Bering Sea and they were flying against the clock on Wednesday. The sun would take a couple more hours to set.

  Skeeter was retired navy whose last posting had been the naval air station near Dutch Harbor. He pretended not to know anything about Pierce except that he was a good cribbage player and he had to go to Anchorage a lot on business. Pierce was a friend and you pretended to believe a lot of things your friend said.

  Pierce had received the fill on computers that were linked by satellite to the second bedroom of the small house that Pierce rented on the hill above Dutch Harbor. The house was secure; it was a station house and a drop and there were people who came and went on the arc of the Aleutians down into the sunny depths of Pacific Asia.

  Pierce might have been a former policeman as he told everyone. He was large and calm and his eyes betrayed an edge of madness, just as the eyes of all policemen do in time. His eyes had seen too much. They were baby blue and he had blond hair and a neat little mustache of the kind policemen like to grow. He had a policeman’s hands and he wore very good clothes. He wore a tie now and a sports coat and a leather coat with a Thinsulate lining. The sun made the Far East look red and it blinded Pierce for a moment as he adjusted his seat.

  They had finally paid attention to his reports on the business of Otis Dobbins and the ULU raids on the pipeline. Hanley had talked to him by phone on the double scrambler and had told him about November, about Denisov, about the possible identity of the woman headed north with Denisov. November had not reported home in more than two days. Something very bad was happening, Hanley had said. Pierce knew it because Hanley was worried enough to breach the security of another agent’s operation.

  “How long is it going to be this time?” Skeeter said.

  “I can’t say. Maybe a day or two, whatever it turns out to be.”

  “I brought along a rifle.”

  “I don’t think we need a rifle.”

  “You brought along a gun.”

  “I did.”

  “I got the horse killer on me,” Skeeter said in his laconic way. He meant the .45 Colt automatic that had been standard military issue since the days of cavalry when a gun big enough to bring down a horse was preferred. He was from Georgia by way of Athens and he had country good looks, including freckles. He had done two straight tours off the coast of Vietnam in his time and never talked about it. He understood silences as much as Pierce did.

  Pierce brushed his mustache and looked down. The twin-engine Cessna was powerful and made a lot of noise. His feet were cold. The mountains and glaciers glittered in the last rays of the long evening of sun. The peninsula’s Kvichak Bay was below, still dotted with floating ice broken from the
glaciers. The plane was headed north by northeast now, up past Homer, coming in on Merrill Field on the east side of Anchorage.

  The radio broke into chatter from time to time as they passed control posts and took a fix on Anchorage. It would be twilight when they landed, but they would still have an hour to get across town to the international airport where the big Delta jet from Los Angeles would be landing.

  “Who are we looking for?”

  Pierce thought about it for a moment. He owed Skeeter some information, even though they had given him almost nothing. It was the way things were in Washington. They liked to send you out blind, as though the secrets they didn’t tell you made them more in control of you. He reached into the pocket of his sports coat. The computer printout had been done by laser but it was still a crude depiction of Ivan Ilyich Denisov, late of the Committee for State Security (KGB) of the Soviet Union. The shades of black and white were not subtle and the face looked flat in front view and profile.

  Skeeter took a long look at the face. “What is he?”

  “Someone we know who has no business in Alaska. He’s with a woman we don’t know. I’m supposed to get a photo of her and we’re supposed to babysit them.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Play it by ear,” Pierce said in a laconic way. “Just get over by the Wien Air counter because Delta will debark out of gate seven and you watch for the man. If they split up, you take the woman and contact me through our friend at the Sheraton.”

  The assistant desk clerk at the high-rise Sheraton on Fifth Avenue—a woman named Sheila Merritt—was the very unofficial drop for messages between Pierce, Skeeter, and others, who paid her a decent retainer for the service. Sheila Merritt was a loyal employee of the hotel and she enjoyed the spy game she was asked to play. She had been a radar operator during her four years in the U.S. Air Force when she had been first approached by R Section.

  “Your people got this covered, know even what gate Delta is coming in.”

  Pierce made a little sound that might not have been meant to be agreement. He thought very little of the intelligence of intelligence. He was a better man than this Dutch Harbor posting, despite its strategic importance, but he did not insist on his superiority. Alaska was a good place for him because, in sixteen years in Section, he had grown very tired of the world and its people and the stupidity of life in a modern society. He sometimes went into the mountains for days with a rifle and pack and the small survival tent and he would watch the grizzlies in the forest. He would hunt rabbits and cook them over a frugal fire and let the cold and stillness and aloneness fill him with contentment. The forest was full of secrets and he knew he walked in places where man had never walked before. When he came out of the wilderness after four or five or six days, he felt very good and he would sit with Skeeter and some of the others and play cribbage all night and drink whiskey and not talk about the forest or the thoughts he had there.