Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  “I don’t know why anyone is coming to see me.”

  “Honey, get smart.” He slapped her face. No one had ever slapped her face. It made her eyes tear and that made her angry and she almost forgot herself for a moment. Henry waited to see if she would get control of herself. It was one of his little tests. Every scenario had three or four possibilities.

  She stayed calm.

  “All right, Pattie, this is part of it, a massive conspiracy by the various oil companies and certain broker organizations to keep secret the details of a series of sabotages on the pipeline.

  “Do you like that for starters? Senators are good at getting in a rage when there are secrets they want to know. I bet you give good rage when you have to. Lots of indignation in it. Is that right, Pattie?”

  Patricia Heath did not know what to say. This madman was talking to her in the darkness of her own bedroom. She was all alone and she didn’t know what he wanted her to say.

  Henry said, “The information came to you about the pipeline bombings two days ago at your office in Anchorage. It was the usual anonymous shit, you can work out the details yourself of how you got it. Just make sure you don’t change your story with the telling of it. You’re going to have to tell a lot of people. Invoke confidentiality. Hint that it was a disgruntled employee of the pipeline. Do any damned thing you want. After you got the information, you set out, alone, to find out the truth behind the allegations. You are a very brave woman, Pattie, and you should be commended.”

  For the first time, she thought he wasn’t going to hurt her. He stood close to where she was seated and he kept the grin on his face.

  She put her hand on the sheaf of papers.

  “You did not involve your staff in this because of the serious, secret nature of the allegations. Allegations of rip-offs by former Senator Malcolm Chowderhead. Allegations of a massive cover-up of sabotage on a vital national resource. And it all involved a secret organization not authorized to operate in the United States, called R Section. Right now there is an agent in Nome making a deal with a known Soviet double agent to transfer security plans of the pipeline to the Soviets for their use in case of war—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He slapped her face again very hard. She broke this time and made a fist and hit him hard in the chest. He slapped her face again. She was sitting on the backless bench and she nearly fell over.

  “Don’t hit me,” she said.

  “Then pay attention, Pattie, I ain’t got all day.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Pattie, you know how much I collected on you? All that stuff you had as attorney general when you should’ve gone after Malcolm instead of just taking his seat in the Senate? You’re a bad girl, Pattie, just as bad as Mal, maybe a little worse. You know you could go to jail for what you did? You know that?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said.

  “Exactly. And you should have,” Henry McGee said. He continued:

  “Now let me explain what you’re going to do now and what you’re going to do tomorrow and what you’re going to be doing for quite a few months. I’ll be watching you, Pattie, and if you fuck up, it’ll all come back down on your head. You think it’s easy on a woman to do time? Even if they give you a country-club prison, it isn’t easy, not for someone who’s had power and money and men. No men, Pattie, unless you want to get in a prostie ring, which all the best women’s prisons have. Well, I’m just saying all this to throw a good scare into you so you’ll think about it when you have a weak moment.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Turn in Mal, for one thing. I wish you hadn’t’ve fucked his brains out. I didn’t figure on that because you two were such enemies, but those things happen. I just want you to fuck him in a different way a week from now when he’s already cornered. That’s when you’ll come up with the information about the bank account in Hong Kong. Mal is going to hold the bag on that one. A million in cash.”

  “He’s going to say I was in on it.”

  “No, he’s not. Not at first. Then when they find the money, they’re going to go after him. The only ones who could have leaked this stuff about the terrorism on the pipeline was either Mal or the terrorists or both. See, everyone has got to not trust Chowderhead, that’s for starters. Then everyone has got to trust all your bona fide information. You’ll be the toast of the Washington Post, Pattie. Especially as a ranking member of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Terrorism and Intelligence. You’re going to be the 1980s version of Frank Church, only you’re going to do to R Section what Church did in the seventies to the CIA. You understand?”

  “Who are you with?”

  “The fucking CIA, didn’t I just make that clear?” Henry McGee said.

  “Is that why you know everything about me?”

  “Of course, Pattie. We didn’t forget what was done to us in the 1970s and we got a long memory. You weren’t on the hit squad then so we gave you a pass. But Mal went along with cutting our balls off back in the bad old Vietnam days, so Mal, we don’t waste any sympathy on him. You getting the picture?”

  “You’re going after Mal—”

  “No, Pattie. He’s just a little part of it. We’re going after R Section. R Section has been playing fast and loose for a long time. For example, this is bona fide, do you know they have perverted the Witness Protection Program?”

  It was all going so fast. She sat in her black nightgown on the bench by her dressing table and she listened to the raspy voice in the half darkness and she was absorbing it all.

  Henry McGee explained about the program and how a Soviet agent protected by the program was used illegally in Alaska and elsewhere to continue funneling information to his former masters in Moscow. About a mole inside R Section named November. About the use of agents named Denisov and Alexa to courier information to Zurich and Berlin and trade with KGB for simple money. About Malcolm Crowder’s part in the conspiracy and how he and the R Section agent blackmailed the oil conglomerates to stop the terrorism on the pipeline. It was terribly complicated, the kind of story that comes out leak by leak by leak, day after day after day in the pages of prominent newspapers. The story was too complicated to make up; because it was so complicated, it must be true. Patricia Heath saw how it must be true and the CIA agent carefully led her through the scenario, pointing out pitfalls.

  They got an atomic device from East Germany in trade for blueprints for a new computer system under development in a think tank in Palo Alto, California. The accounts in Hong Kong Bank of Commerce belonged to Denisov and Devereaux and Malcolm Crowder and each account contained exactly 1.33 million—the way they had split the money.

  Henry McGee went over and over the material again. He had photographs of the rogue agent and of the Soviet double agent who had compromised the Witness Protection Program. It was a stunning scandal and Patricia Heath saw how clever the CIA had been to trust her with the details of it. The CIA must not be involved in leaking any of these details to a reporter; the world would not soon believe another Deep Throat. She was a senator, a respected political leader with White House ambitions. She was respected by both NOW and the Moral Majority. Of course, she would be believed because this terrible business had involved her home state of Alaska.

  “Malcolm will want to involve me,” she said at one point.

  “Malcolm is a Chowderhead as you knew at one time,” Henry said. He was grinning and his teeth were bright in the darkness of the room. “He will make all sorts of accusations before it’s over but it really doesn’t matter. That’s his name on the account in Hong Kong. Those were his bombings of the line that were covered up. Hell, he just killed the last two boys could start to refute the whole story, you both saw to that.”

  “Is this the way it is? Is this the way it always is in espionage?”

  “This is intelligence,” Henry said. “There isn’t espionage and all that spy stuff. There’s just one side and the other and a lot of underocc
upied people figuring out their private scams. Denisov is almost a millionaire on his own, not to mention the money he just took in on this last scam. R Section is a corrupt, vicious component in the intelligence community. Open their files, air their linen, make yourself a name.”

  She looked at him. “And CIA is on my side.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  29

  CHANGE OF LUCK

  After they landed, Kools put the cuffs on the pilot and smashed the instrument panel with the rifle butt. Bill looked sad about that but happy about not being killed. Bill had a wallet full of credit cards as well as six hundred in cash.

  “You gonna take all my money?”

  “Sure,” Kools said.

  “And the credit cards?”

  “Sure,” Kools said. “What the fuck you care about credit cards? The only people get screwed is the card company. It isn’t like it was your money.”

  “Well, I guess you’re right but I wish you’d leave my driver’s license and the pilot’s license. That’s a pain in the ass to get replaced.”

  Kools thought about that and took out the two licenses and shoved them in Bill’s jacket.

  “That’s decent of you,” Bill said.

  “Hey, it wasn’t your fault,” Kools said. They might have shaken hands on it if Bill hadn’t been wearing handcuffs.

  Kools finally hitched a ride from a tractor-trailer truck hauling lumber down the Glenn Highway from Palmer. The driver let him off by the Northland Mall and Kools took a cab to Anchorage International on the other side of town.

  He bought the ticket to Seattle with the green American Express card.

  He was moving like a sleepwalker. He held the ticket in his hand with the American Express card. He looked at a couple of city cops in the crowded terminal and he thought they were staring at him. He went into the bar and ordered a screwdriver and he drank it like it was plain orange juice. He ordered another one. The plane left at noon and there was absolutely no way he was going to make it. He always got caught. Like robbing that gas station. Everyone robs gas stations. Gas stations are put out there to be robbed and they never catch anyone but Kools got caught and did some serious time. Now what was going to happen to fuck up getting away this time?

  He thought about the look on Noah’s face when he was getting pulled by the beard out the hatch of the chopper. It made him dizzy just to think about it, about Noah falling all that way down. Noah did not believe it, as though that had anything to do with getting it. Kools thought about the Russians and the women on the other side and how they had played at this Mickey Mouse stuff about explosives and how to arm the bombs and it was all just a dream, like most of his life had been.

  The Delta Airlines plane left at noon and Kools was absolutely amazed to be on it, amazed to be alive, amazed to be getting out of it. He tried not to think of Noah or whatever happened to his sister. He was just out of it.

  He ordered rare steak for lunch but it was overcooked anyway.

  30

  THE STORIES

  Hanley got the call at noon. He had decided not to go to Sianis’ place for lunch after all. A straight-up martini and a well-done cheeseburger were part of his serene routine when Section was running on automatic pilot. That was no longer the case.

  Stories were coming out of Alaska about a bomb on the oil pipeline. The stories seemed to confirm the earlier reports of the agent from Dutch Harbor. There had been something there and Section had ignored it. The first report came out of a Fairbanks radio station; the Associated Press in Anchorage had been asked to look into the allegation.

  The name Alaska alerted Hanley. He had had two agents there and one of them had been found dead shortly after five A.M. Washington time in the parking lot of a disco lounge in Anchorage. His name had been Pierce and he had been a good man. He had gone to Alaska trailing a defected Soviet agent and a woman companion. The Soviet agent had been defected by Devereaux, the second R Section agent in Alaska. It was all connected, it had to be, connected to Pierce and Devereaux and ULU terrorism. All connected to Henry McGee. Hanley felt very afraid when he thought about Henry McGee.

  “What does it mean?” Mrs. Neumann had demanded. She was a large woman with a raspy voice and a homespun manner. She had accidentally become head of Section because of politics she was not part of. Hanley had seniority in service. He did not resent her, even when she asked rude questions.

  Hanley sat in the large red leather chair at the corner of the desk in Mrs. Neumann’s office. The room was a standard, dull government office but it conveyed touches of Mrs. Neumann so that, unlike Hanley’s office, there was a sense it was occupied by a real human being. On the wall behind the desk was a homespun needlepoint design that had been given to her years before when she ran Computer Analysis division: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

  “I don’t know what it means,” Hanley said. “I have the feeling of being battered suddenly. Four weeks ago, I put November on the matter of Henry McGee. My mistake was in not telling him everything Pierce filed with us, about the pipeline bombings Pierce had looked into. I didn’t think it was relevant to looking for Henry McGee. I didn’t expect anything, but suddenly everything is happening and none of it makes sense. Who killed Pierce in Anchorage? What earthly reason was there to kill him? It had to be Denisov or the other one, the woman he was with. Why haven’t we heard from November in more than thirty-six hours? The ship he was on tied up at Deadhorse this morning and that man Holmes said Devereaux left the ship at Nome. Where is he? And the wire services are reporting rumors of a bombing on the Alaska pipeline—”

  “It’s always connected, isn’t it?” Mrs. Neumann said. She stared at Hanley’s eyes and expected to find an answer in them.

  “We have to get all the files together,” she said to herself. “Henry McGee, Devereaux, Denisov, all of them. And we contact FBI now about the mess in the San Francisco office—”

  “Mrs. Neumann.” His voice was sharp. “We do not tattle to the Justice Department.”

  “This is not our matter,” she said. “This is domestic and you know our charter and the charter of the FBI. The Witness Protection Program is a useful tool for us but it is under the aegis of the Justice Department, not Section. We tell them about Miss O’Hare, the leaks, we cooperate—”

  “The FBI will shit all over us.” The vulgarism was startling because Hanley rarely indulged in them. Mrs. Neumann’s face filled with clouds of anger.

  “We run by the rules.”

  “There are no rules.”

  “We run by the rules,” she repeated. “What if this all blows up against us and we have no place to hide because we have broken all the rules?”

  “The rules are what you make up after the game is over to justify what you’ve done,” Hanley said. “The FBI is under no urgency in this. If we give them information that the program is compromised, their urgency is in proving our allegation is not true. The name of intelligence is cover-up when the wrong people know the wrong things.”

  “We have a dead agent in Anchorage,” she said. “The FBI has liaison with local police and—”

  “What was the agent doing in Anchorage? That’s what the FBI will want to know first. What do we explain? Do we give them Denisov? And how many others? Or just open our personnel files to the Hoovers?”

  She said nothing. Hanley let the silence work on her.

  “The final paranoia,” Hanley said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have been thinking about this in terms of paranoia. The life of counterintelligence is wrapped in paranoia. We must lead the other side to mistrust its own information about us; we must plant false information for them. They, in turn, must make us distrust ourselves. Why did we believe in Henry McGee in the first place? The initial interviews were made by Devereaux when McGee led his people across the ice bridge from Siberia. Why did we believe in him sufficiently to draw him into Section?”

  H
anley looked at her, looked at the needlepoint behind her desk. He was staring into his own thoughts and he was seeing nothing in the office.

  Finally, he went on: “Devereaux questioned him and then we put others on it. In time, we were convinced of his bona fides. He had enough stories, enough real information. We could act on what he said. Every story was buttressed by a real event. Only Devereaux ever raised any suspicion about him. He did not believe in Henry McGee. It turned out that Devereaux was right. It was noted in his 201 file when Henry disappeared back behind the curtain five years ago. That was the reason I put Devereaux on the trail when the name of McGee resurfaced this spring.”

  “You’re just rattling on,” Mrs. Neumann said. “What are you really thinking about?”

  “About how everything suddenly falls, everything was dependent on everything else. Henry McGee barks at the hounds and off we go, chasing him over the fields, and all of a sudden we lose a Soviet client, we have a dead agent in Anchorage, our second agent has gone radio-dead on us, and you want to call in the FBI. They would tear us apart, Mrs. Neumann. Pierce had his reports on rumors of bombings on the pipeline; he had done some research on this supposed terrorist organization. Now anonymous callers are reaching radio stations in Alaska with rumors to fit Pierce’s facts. Is everything connected? If it is, God help Section, because it is going to look as though we were in this thing from the beginning.”

  “You’re indulging in professional paranoia,” she said.

  “You have to. The trap is being set, you can see that yourself, Mrs. Neumann. But it’s not a trap for one of our men, it’s bigger than that. I think all of Section is in danger.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Our files,” he said. “We have Henry McGee’s stories as bona fide facts in our files. Our files were compromised by this man, our agents compromised. Remember the double agent we thought we ran in East Berlin three years ago? Who was running whom? I used CompAn to search through every operation Monday touched, going back fifteen years. CompAn then correlated the scenarios with the scenario pool. Do you know what I got back this morning?”