Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  “Why not take November’s viewpoint? Perhaps it is disinformation.”

  “But it’s true. Disinformation cannot be true, that’s the point of it.”

  “Truth is a matter of perspective,” she said. She said it in her usual rumble but there was a gentleness to the words. “Perhaps he has the necessary perspective.”

  “He is obstreperous,” Hanley said. “He is an agent, Mrs. Neumann, not a trained professional interrogator. They are different jobs, requiring different skills.”

  “He has interrogated people,” she said. She liked November.

  “Mrs. Neumann. I think you owe my judgment some consideration at this point. I know about debriefings. November knows about field operations. I think it would be best to let him take a few weeks of leave.”

  It was her decision and she felt uncomfortable with it. The problem was that Hanley was not always wrong and November was not always right. She recognized in November the resistance to believe anything told him by any “defector” or “enemy agent.” Words were the stuff of lies to November. Words inclined to lie; the truth was usually silent.

  She made a slight nod of her head before she agreed to everything Hanley wanted.

  “There are no absolute successes or failures,” Hanley said.

  They were in his bare office three hours later. Devereaux had only been there six times in all his years in Section.

  “You’re pompous again. It must be going your way, whatever it is.”

  “It is not a matter of things ‘going my way.’ It is a matter of perspective. I think you have lost your perspective for whatever personal reasons in the matter you’re now involved in.”

  Devereaux stared at him with contempt. The intelligence agent must be reminded, again and again, that however much he knows of the real world, he must still explain it in dumb-down terms to the clerks back in Washington. Devereaux was tired of explaining things to Hanley because every word was too well chosen: He could not let his words lie for him, even to his advantage.

  “You’re silent. I think you might agree with me.” Hanley tried a little smile.

  Devereaux still did not speak.

  “Henry McGee is valuable to us in terms of his information.”

  “Henry McGee is death,” Devereaux said. “He has no beginning or end. His truths are constructed of facts and lies. You choose to believe him and you’re wrong.”

  “There are six interrogators—”

  “He contradicts Kools over and over—”

  “Why do you believe Kools?”

  “Because Kools is a loser. Kools cannot help but tell the truth. The only good liars are winners. The losers will begin by telling you what they think you want to hear, and if you’re patient, they’ll end up turning themselves inside out.”

  “Henry McGee implicated Pierce in—”

  “In what? If you go through the transcript of the debriefings, you won’t find a thing.”

  “There is a lot of truth in what he says,” Hanley said.

  “Fool me once, shame on you,” Devereaux said.

  Hanley understood and his eyes became as angry as they ever were. “You’re off this, Devereaux. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Face to face. You’re impeding our progress with McGee, demoralizing some of the others.”

  Devereaux had known from the moment Hanley called him.

  “When Henry McGee played his… games fifteen years ago, we were a disorganized bunch. Computer Analysis was in its infancy. The world has changed, Devereaux, and you have not changed with it.”

  “It’s not flat anymore?”

  “No. It’s not flat anymore. It’s got satellites monitoring every square foot of the globe. In ten years or less, we’ll train those satellites to look inside houses, not just outside.”

  “And when will you train them to look into souls?” Devereaux said.

  “Have you become a theologian in your middle age besides a paranoid?”

  “You need to have more than facts.”

  “There is nothing more than facts. A thing is or it isn’t.”

  “Henry McGee doesn’t believe that.”

  “He’s an extraordinary catch. I don’t stint my praise in your capture of McGee and Karpov and this other fellow, the Indian.”

  “Yup’ik Eskimo,” Devereaux said.

  “Whatever. You did a good job in a tight spot.”

  “Don’t do this thing,” Devereaux said. He never asked, never pleaded.

  “It’s out of my hands,” Hanley said. Meaning, of course, that he had already decided what to do.

  “He’ll poison you and Section with his stories, and when he’s done, you’ll trade him to the other side for one of ours,” Devereaux said.

  “It’s out of my hands,” he said again.

  “Nothing is redeemed, nothing is verified,” Devereaux said.

  “We know what we’re doing,” Hanley said.

  She had moved out of the town house on Rhode Island Avenue after she was told by David Mason that he was safe and coming back to Washington. That was three weeks ago.

  She had left him a letter.

  She tried to make the letter very short and to explain to him about the quality of pain and about how she could not be hurt anymore. To explain that every time he went away in the blackness of his trade, she lost him as surely as if he had died. To explain that one cannot bear up under so many little deaths.

  She did not speak of love because she loved him; but that was a little pain that would go away after a while. She would find a man when she needed one and she would think about her life—her life—and not his life.

  He read the letter the day he returned. The letter was on the little table in the hall of the town house where they always left the mail.

  He visited the boy, Philippe, who was living on campus. Philippe knew about Rita, but they did not speak of her.

  Devereaux was “put to sleep” again in service and his days were empty.

  He did as he had done long ago when he lived alone in a house in the mountains near Front Royal. He worked at small tasks in the house and he read. He went to the bookstore nearly every day and bought more books. He read old books he had on the shelves in the house. He read and the words put him into a different world; the words soaked into him like the vodka he drank, until his self was obliterated by the words and alcohol.

  She came to see him after three weeks, when she was certain the pain was bearable.

  He took her into the kitchen and they sat down. He offered her a drink.

  “What about the house? Do you want it?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Then we should sell it.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Will you do it or should I?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Goddamn it, are you going to mope around here?”

  “No,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Well?”

  “It doesn’t do any good to tell you.”

  “You told me nothing. You never told me a thing.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “About anything.”

  “You never said you loved me.”

  Devereaux stared at her then because she knew that was not fair, that he would never speak of something that was so utterly true in him that words defiled it.

  “Why did you go back? You love it, you love the trade.”

  “I hate it,” he said.

  “You’re very good, you must have saved R Section or something—”

  “They put me to sleep again.”

  “Great. Until next time they need you and then you will pack your bag and your gun and go play spy for them.”

  “I broke a few rules along the way. They don’t like it but they tolerate it. They say I owe them a life and I can’t argue about it. I told you that once. I tried to get away once. It doesn’t work out, Rita. On the other hand, what else c
ould I do?”

  “What if I wanted to have children?”

  He stared at her face, at the green eyes. “Do you want to have children?”

  “Not by you. Not by someone like you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I just wanted to know about the house.”

  “All right,” he said. “It’s your house.” He got up and went to the hall closet and opened it. There was a large suitcase and a smaller one. “I was waiting for you,” he said.

  “You ended it,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Damn you, I’m not throwing you out—”

  “I have a place. I was moving stuff there. It’s all right, Rita.” He said it like that, as though he wanted her to understand and not be hurt. He saw that she loved him and that it hurt her. He had thought about her every night and every day since coming back to Washington. He had to let her leave or he would just destroy her; he saw that.

  “Dev,” she began.

  “No,” he said. She touched his arm. “The keys are on the table,” he said. “All of them.”

  “I’ll never see you again,” she suddenly said.

  He stared at her. He nearly felt too weak to leave her. He could touch her in the way they touched each other in the secret pool and she would be his again, at least for a little time. And then they would do this again, they would have to hurt each other again. There had to be an end to it and he saw it, saw it in the pain of the letter she had written to him and left on the hallway table.

  “Devereaux,” she said, exactly as she had always said it.

  But now the door was closing behind him and he was on the steps, on the street. She ran to the window and looked at him as he walked down the street with the large suitcase and the hated smaller bag that he packed when he was going out of her life for a while. Except now he wasn’t coming back.

  45

  ESCAPE

  The message came in the usual way and Henry McGee could not believe it at first.

  It appeared in the “personal” columns of the Washington Post. As always, it was easy to recognize: An ad, in English, babbling about the true love of a “Henry” for his “Wanda.” The Soviet embassy knew the code and—it was thought on that May morning—no one else did.

  Henry McGee took the first letter of each word in the advertisement, put them on paper, and then reassembled them, trying to spell out the message in Russian. He had time to do this because it was Saturday afternoon in the compound in western Maryland and no one was working except the security guards. The government of the United States kept decent hours.

  “Gate C, four hundred on Sunday.”

  The message had to be directed to him.

  One of the contingencies was always escape. It was more easily done in the United States than in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union or Iran, but it was done, in any case, more often than believed. The governments of the world do not like the world to believe in escape.

  He had not expected it. He had expected to be subject to a trade in a year or two. But escape is always possible and there it was, in the Washington Post’s Saturday edition. The “guests” of the compound were always permitted all the reading material available, as a way to acclimatize them to life in the United States. Even the reluctant guests like Henry McGee.

  All afternoon, in the compound yard, he studied the electrified fence and Gate C, which led to the main dirt road down the mountain and to the highway. The message did not explain how the escape would be made. Perhaps it was up to him; perhaps they would fight their way in for him. But that seemed unlikely. The best escapes were the quietest.

  Henry McGee felt restless all day and could not wait for the short spring night to begin.

  He awoke at three forty-five A.M. to the beeping alarm on his watch. He silenced it and got out of bed cautiously. There was a night-light, just enough to make the room visible for the television monitor on one wall.

  The rooms in the barracks were crudely made with plywood. The toilets and showers were in a separate room at the front of the barracks, exactly the same arrangement of such buildings from the beginning of World War II until the early 1960s.

  Henry went down the corridor to the permanently lit toilets. The monitors watched him; he wondered if anyone was watching the monitors at this ungodly hour.

  He took a pee and washed his hands and face. His face was very light now but the eyes were still black and they still glittered with amusement when he told stories. He told stories all day long; they loved his stories because they seemed so true.

  He had known Devereaux did not believe him.

  It didn’t matter. One day, Devereaux was not there. One of the interrogators he was friendly with had indicated that Devereaux would not be coming back. That made him smile. Devereaux was thrown out of the church because he did not believe Henry McGee.

  He went back into his room and wondered what his rescuers would do about the TV monitors.

  At four A.M. Sunday, the power surged and failed.

  This happened at times in the uncertain scenery of the mountains. There were small, weak backup generators that clicked on then and provided illumination. But the television monitors were on the main circuit, not the backup circuit, and could not be activated until the power returned, usually a matter of a few minutes.

  Henry put on his clothes and walked softly down the creaking hallway to the front door of Barracks 2.

  The grounds were dimly lit. Henry moved along the shadow of Barracks 2 until he reached the electrified gate. He wondered if the gate was still electrified.

  He moved along the ground until he came to Gate C. Inside, the guard was visible in the light. The place was not so heavily guarded because it was not intended as a prison and because the wild mountains all around were not easy places for one to escape to.

  What was he supposed to do? He approached the guard shack and looked in.

  The guard had been drugged. His eyes were closed and he was snoring, and when Henry smelled his breath, he caught the chemical odor. Henry took the key from the chain on his belt and turned off the gate. He went to the gate and pushed it open. The gate made a screeching sound of metal against metal. He closed the gate.

  Henry crossed to the road and began to trot along the road down the mountain.

  He moved easily, his body still trim, his legs and wind strong. He moved as quickly as he felt he could go. His eyes adjusted to the semidarkness of the predawn morning. The woods smelled of fog and damp. He heard animals move in the thickets along the road.

  He rounded the second curve and saw the taillights of the waiting car. He ran to the car and opened the door and started in. The interior light was off. He climbed inside.

  He felt the pistol against his head.

  “Put your hands on the dash.”

  He put his hands on the dash.

  The cuffs fell on his wrists and were locked. The bracelets were very tight.

  “Too tight,” he said.

  “Shut up.”

  He turned to make sure.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Shut up,” Devereaux said again.

  The cabin was in the hills outside Hancock, Maryland. The mountains were lush beneath the wet Maryland sun and the valleys were full of the familiar rolling fog that burns off by afternoon.

  “What are you going to do?” Henry McGee said.

  “Ask you to tell me the truth.”

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  “My name is Henry McGee.”

  Devereaux hit him hard with the billy club on the right arm. He did not break the arm.

  “This is stupid, this is crude,” Henry said. “You are insulting.”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “You know what your own people believe, you can’t get the truth by beating it out of someone.”

  “Perhaps they’re wrong.” He hit him again. “The point is, you’ll say anything to have me stop this and maybe I
’ll be able to figure out what is true.”

  “What do you think is true?”

  “You are a lie, from beginning to end. Your true stories are lies with just a few touches of fact.”

  Henry smiled.

  Devereaux hurt him to make the smiling stop. When Henry was in tears because of the pain, Devereaux stopped hitting him. He hit Henry without passion, almost without malice, the way a surgeon causes pain for the good of a patient.

  “Yes, it’s a lie,” Henry said. “Everything is a lie.”

  “I don’t believe you. You have to tell me more than that.”

  “I just told you what you wanted to hear.”

  “But it’s less than I wanted to hear.”

  “It’s all I can tell you; it’s all I have.”

  “About Pierce.”

  “That was true.”

  He hit him.

  “That was not true. I made it up. It’s a lie.”

  “How do you make it up?”

  “You tell them some of the truth. I can remember everything. I can remember every story, every fact. You use the parts you want. To make the stories.”

  Devereaux hit him again.

  Henry was bleeding but it wasn’t serious, just messy. His mouth hurt but his jaw was not broken. Devereaux thought it was important for them to taste their own blood. Devereaux had hurt people like this but always the losers and the dumb ones, the ones who had just one or two facts to tell, not the minds like Henry McGee who would resist until death.

  He talked to Henry all morning and into the lush, warm afternoon. Thunderclouds rolled in high from Ohio and when it began to rain, a cooling wind came from the north and west. The rain made everything greener.

  “You’re gonna kill me,” Henry said.

  “Yes,” Devereaux said. “Maybe I got all I came for and it’s time to kill you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Henry McGee said in Russian.

  “Yes,” Devereaux said. “Time for tears and prayers. Section never believed you, Henry, they just wanted to see how far the stories would lead. They were interested in the technique.”