Did this matter affect him?
Yes.
He saw it clearly now. And the danger to Alexa, the danger so palpable that he was certain he could see her dead in the streets.
It was a price worth paying, to save her. To have her gratitude.
He saw the images and rushed past the security forces in their trench coats loitering in dark doorways.
When he reached the car, he had a ticket.
And he thought—in one blinding moment—he had the key to Nutcracker. If only he could keep it in his head.
Y
ou are a busy little fellow, Yackley thought. The reports were coming on a regular basis now. They had picked up on him at the border when he crossed from Ontario into upstate New York at Niagara Falls. But the report from U.S. Border Patrol had not been correlated into Devereaux’s running file (NOVRET) until Sunday morning. He had been granted two days of mischief.
There had not been any luck involved in finding Sellers in the trunk of the car at National Airport. The arrogant bastard had parked the car in one of the stalls designated for use by Congress and staff. Obviously, it would have been found as soon as a Congressman complained about someone using a privileged space.
By then, someone thought to secure Hanley’s apartment. It was too late. The place had been wrecked. Devereaux must have gone there sometime Friday.
The problems were multiplying as well. Mrs. Neumann had apparently pulled a copy of Hanley’s 201 file. That was discovered Thursday night by Claymore Richfield, who hadn’t even been looking for it. She had left a trail in
the computer and she had been gone on leave for four days. She would be back Monday. There would be questions to be answered Monday.
Yackley felt the Section was falling away from him and that Devereaux was suddenly on the periphery of every action, waiting for Yackley’s move. Yackley knew he was the target.
There was a name in the 201 file—the will section. Margot Kieker, whoever she was. They had run that through the National Credit Center in Virginia and the information was thin. She lived in Chicago, she was a salesperson for IBM—she sold computers.
Computers, for Christ’s sake.
Two agents from the Section hit the sales center in Chicago on Thursday. They were told that Ms. Kieker had been called to Washington. They said it like that, very proudly: She had been called to Washington by the director of a top secret computer design program and would be gone for several weeks. It was quite an honor for everyone in the sales center.
Yackley read through the reports, fingered them as though they might speak. He glanced at the photographs on his desk. His wife still smiled at him as she always did, even in life. She thought none of it was terribly serious. He had tried to impress upon her the changes going on in government, the changes going on in the business of intelligence. He was on the cutting edge of those changes. He always used terms like
cutting edge
in trying to explain to Beverly. She would have none of it. She made apple pies from scratch and read
USA Today
and thought baseball was boring and wore cotton dresses during the week. She didn’t understand a damned thing. If she hadn’t supported
him through law school, he would have felt he owed her nothing.
The reality of the White House is always so much less. A thousand books and movies have given the public the image of a great manor with a full staircase that reaches and reaches upward to a heavenly second floor. The Oval Office—which had begun life as the presidential library—is a gigantic room in image; in reality, it is very much of the eighteenth century, small cozy and able to be heated by a single fireplace.
Perry Weinstein considered the vulnerability of the place every time he crossed the underground corridor to the White House proper from the Executive Office Building.
He was coatless with his tie askew. His glasses had been patched that morning with a paper clip inserted at the place the screw fell out. He looked like a man on fire. His eyes were wide with interest in some idea percolating inside him and when he talked, he brushed at his rep tie with nervous fingers, as though the fire had spilled ashes on him.
The man on the other side of the narrow desk was Reed. Reed was about four or five in the hierarchy, if anyone paid attention to numbers like that. In fact, a good-sized forest was felled each week to print just such speculation.
Reed was Eastern, which was unusual; he was old money but he made more of it in new ways; even though his funds were in blind trusts, it didn’t matter because what was good for Quentin Reed was good for the U.S.A.
“We need some orchestra music for this one,” Reed
was saying. The room was modern, dull, white, windowless, and devoid of charm—exactly like Reed.
“We’ve worked OT,” Perry Weinstein said. It was not his style at all. Clichés fell by the bushelful in this administration. Jargon clogged the corridors of power. Everyone had slang or invented it. Yackley was probably chosen to head R Section because of his inability to speak in anything but clichés.
“Play me some,” Reed continued. He assumed a pose of power that required him to lean back in his swivel chair and feign defenselessness.
“I’m coordinating with Section, Langley, Puzzle—” He stopped. Was it too much jargon? But Reed nodded as though he understood. “We have a scenario ready for a road show three weeks before the Pow-Wow.”
Pow-Wow was Summit; the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union were scheduled to meet in one month’s time in Berlin—in both sections of the city to symbolize a new beginning to peace. Peace was full of new beginnings.
“Two years ago, we started our exchange program,” Perry said. He lapsed out of jargon, to Reed’s annoyance:
“We picked up their agent in Italy and the Brits picked up one in the Isles; they defected two West Germans into the East. I think we rattled our sabers effectively. It set the tone.”
“But the one from Italy—what’s his name—that was badly handled by Langley. He redefected into the Soviet embassy right on Mass Ave.”
Perry let that one go. Reed sighed, shifted the swivel, tapped his fingertips together to make certain they were still there, and continued:
“I don’t want a fuck-up like that this time. That’s why you’re in place on coordinating this thing. And I don’t want to see the Red Machine come back as quickly.”
“I’ve tried to explain to you, Quent,” Perry Weinstein said, brushing at his rep tie again. “We can’t absolutely control the Opposition. All we can do is hold our own.”
“I’d like to see a better scenario than that.”
“It can’t be guaranteed,” Perry said, his voice on edge. “We have identified nine agents, all very top drawer, very KGB and GRU upper echelon. Including, I might add, the director of the Resolutions Committee.”
Quentin stared at him. The eyes had no comprehension.
“His code name is Gorki. He’s an old man, he made contact with us in the last eighteen months through the CIA. He wants to come over to our house. He has some health problems and he needs us. I think it’s less a matter of ideology than just wanting to live longer.”
“I like this—”
“It’s timed for the summit exchange.”
“I like this very much, Perr.”
“We have our little Indians all lined up. There’s a cipher clerk in SovEm in Rome, there’s an East German intelligence director in Potsdam, there’s—”
“More and more,” enthused Reed, cutting off the litany. “How do we begin?”
“The best one is a Resolutions courier named Alexa. Really attractive. I thought you’d like this.” And he slipped the photograph out of his pocket and dropped it on Quentin Reed’s empty desk top.
Extraordinary face, without any doubt. The eyes held you.
But the body. The sheer, voluptuous nakedness of that body. She stood quite naturally, not posing at all,
not hiding anything either. Reed felt an urge and hid it by slamming his body forward into the kneehole of the desk and plunking his elbows on the desk top. The picture required several more seconds of careful study.
“This girl is naked,” said Quentin Reed.
“Her name is Alexa. Rather, her real name is Natasha Podgorny Alexkoff. But she’s Alexa, which is a good name for a killer. She seduced that security guard in Silicon Valley a few years ago. She’s been active. Considered their best ‘Resolutions’ courier.”
“And she’s here?”
“Reasonable supposition. She crossed the Canadian border into Niagara Falls three hours ago.”
“We have her?”
“Not yet. It’s better to bait your trap. You see, she’s sort of a gift to us. From Gorki. The old man who’s coming across on Summit eve.”
“That’s one helluva gift,” Reed said. His tongue licked at his dry lips. He had gray eyes to match his suit, and right now he felt he could take on this Alexa-Whatever. It was only ten in the morning and he was thinking about the bedroom. Hell, the top of his desk.
Perry Weinstein appreciated the spectacle of Quentin Reed. Reed was looking at the photograph of Alexa and could not see the contempt in Perry’s eyes.
After a salacious moment of silence, Perry spoke again: “Gorki took that. He had her. About five years ago, in his dacha.”
“But what does she do? Besides this, I mean?”
“She kills,” Perry Weinstein said.
The cold word fell between them. Perry dropped the photograph on the desk top. “What does that mean?”
“It means she kills. She’s a courier. That’s their slang for Resolutions agent. She killed a man on a ferry in Helsinki two weeks ago. She killed three people in Lausanne a week ago. She kills people, that’s what she does.”
Perry repeated the word because of the effect it was having on Quentin Reed. The spirit was drooping. The gray eyes became old again. The hands left the desk top. The photograph was an orphan.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Yes. Apparently, that’s one of the reasons she’s effective. So many can’t.”
“Why is… why has she come here?”
“We guess she’s here to kill somebody.” Perry Weinstein said it without emphasis and watched the effect on Quentin Reed.
“My God, this doesn’t involve the President, does it?”
“No. That would be so unlikely, so crude, so—”
“It wasn’t so goddamned unlikely when they put those assassins on the Pope, was it?”
“We are monitoring her constantly.”
“Why not just pick her up?”
“We’d like to see what she had in mind.”
“How did you get this photograph, Perr? How do we know about her?”
“That’s why we have spies, Quent,” Perry Weinstein said.
“Spies? Spooks?” Quentin smiled. “Are you going to give me that booga-booga stuff? You’re coordinating Changeover, aren’t you?”
“Joke, Quent.”
“Changeover. I think the budget director outdid himself. Save five bill over five years.”
Perry nodded. Changeover was the newest idea in intelligence since the invention of invisible ink. Cost analysts had figured out that information gained through fixed investment enterprises—satellites, computers, machine analysis—was far more cost efficient than information gained by agents in the field. The agents would be cut back over five years to avoid the sort of bloodletting that had crippled CIA during the Carter administration.
“But what about this dish of Russian ice cream? Tell me about her.”
“There’s nothing to tell—so far. She’s a gift from our man in Moscow Center. She’s already cut off from her control, she’s flying blind. She has some sort of S&D here—”
“S&D?”
“Search and destroy, Quent,” said Perr.
“Right.”
Silence.
The jargon machine was on hold. The room was silent. Being this close to the most powerful man in the country—he was 150 steps away at the moment, sitting in the Oval Office, reading briefing papers for tonight’s live press conference—awed them both, awed everyone. The reality of the presidency was borne by the sense of awe.
“I think this is going to put the President in a strong position. At the summit.”
“It did at the first one. We had spies and they had spies and there were defections all over the place. They started it with that couple pulled out of West Germany. And we aced the game with the agents in Italy and Britain. We won the battle of the magazine covers.”
“It was like war,” Quentin agreed.
“A lot of war is trading prisoners,” Perry said.
“Is that what’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know. You can’t always predict the Opposition.”
“I thought we could,” Quentin said. “Isn’t that why we have intelligence services and why we finance estimates?”
Perry cleared his throat. He got up.
“I’m fifteen minutes behind as usual,” he said to Quentin, who had not moved at the desk. He reached for the photograph.
“Don’t you have a copy?”
Perry smiled.
He left the picture of the naked Soviet courier on the desk.
T
he car was streaked with dirt and road salt. The suitcases in the trunk were crammed with dirty clothes. Ends of vacations always look like this. The car growled up to the garage door in the last of the afternoon light—the muffler had been pierced by a rock on the road somewhere in Pennsylvania.
The garage door opened automatically and the car crept into its space.
Leo Neumann turned the key in the ignition and the engine dieseled into silence with a few sputtering coughs. For a moment, no one said anything. There had not been many words in the last five hours, in the last 150 miles.
Lydia Neumann sighed and reached for the door handle and pulled herself out.
Margot Kieker took it as a clue. She pushed at her handle, was confused a moment, and then found the right lever. The rear door opened with a groan.
“I’ll bring the bags in,” Leo said.
“Leave them for a moment. Let’s open the house. I could use a beer,” Lydia Neumann said. She really meant
it. Her voice was more hoarse than usual; she had been fighting a cold. And now this. This thing that had happened in the morning, at St. Catherine’s.
A great fuss. Sister Mary Domitilla had to consult with Sister Duncan, and then Dr. Goddard himself had come into the matter. But the matter had been settled by Finch, a small-faced man with large ears and a way of talking through his nose that made everyone around him want to offer him a handkerchief.
Finch was clearly in charge, though no one deferred to him. He was like a janitor in a corporation who has executive pretensions. He had to interrupt conversations to be heard.
But he was heard.
It didn’t matter about Miss Kieker being next of kin or not next of kin. Yes, she had proof. Yes, she had rights. Get a lawyer, Finch said at one point. It didn’t matter. Not to Finch and not to the good ladies who ran St. Catherine’s.
No one could see Mr. Hanley.
Not at all. Not at this time. Not at all.
But Margot Kieker was his only living relative.
Mr. Hanley is in a bad way, miss.
But I want to see my great-uncle—
You wouldn’t want to see him the way he is now, miss.
Finch went on and on, reasonable and wheedling and talking wetly through his nose. His little eyes shifted back and forth across the globes of white and watched the faces of Leo and Lydia Neumann.
They were all travelers, all tired by the eight-hundred-mile journey from Chicago.
And somehow, Mrs. Neumann had expected this. She
had expected it because she had this very bad feeling about what was really going on in St. Catherine’s.
They entered the house like burglars. As though they did not belong there. Then Mrs. Neumann shook herself out of the gloom. She went from room to room, turning on the lights. She turned on all the lights. The house looked so unlovely because it had been closed for nine days and everything in it was too perfect. She and Leo had lived there for twelve years and it fit them to a T.
Because Mrs. Neumann led the way, lighting the house, she saw him first.
He was not at all changed. She almost smiled. She knew him, had known him; and then the absurdity of it struck her. He had intruded on her house.
“What do you want?”
He said nothing. He sat on a plain wooden chair near the front window. His hands were on his knees, he sat very still. He put his finger to his lips and looked up at the chandelier.
Leo came in then. He didn’t know the man. He reached for a poker at the fireplace and took a step.
“Leo,” Lydia said in annoyance. He paused.
“Put the poker down,” Mrs. Neumann said. “He’s not here to do anyone harm.” She looked carefully at Devereaux. “Are you here to harm anyone?”
Devereaux shook his head no. It was like a game. They were real; Devereaux was the ghost. The spook who sat by the door. Devereaux got up then and walked to the telephone on the side table and pointed to it. Mrs. Neumann watched him. Devereaux looked at her. She nodded. She understood. The other two merely gaped. It was like a
game suddenly going on between two people in a crowded room that involved no one else.
Leo Neumann put down the poker into the holder next to the brick fireplace. Margot Kieker stood at the door, uncertain about what to do with her hands. She stared and would have been surprised at how young she looked. There was a natural grace to her, beneath the clumsy artifice, and it was clear in that moment.
Mrs. Neumann pointed to a door. They crossed the room. The door led to the paneled basement. Devereaux smiled to her and she flicked on the light at the top of the stairs. They went down to the basement, the two of them.
Basements are secure, packed with earth and surrounded by a moat of concrete. Even the sophisticated listening devices trained on houses are not made to work efficiently on basements.
There was a telephone in the basement room and Devereaux unplugged it from the wall. And then Mrs. Neumann spoke to him:
“Do you know what has happened to Hanley?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said. “Part of it.”
“He called you, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“His telephone was tapped. He told us that. He implied all our telephones might be tapped—”
“They probably are,” Devereaux said.
“You get accustomed to this, in the field. I am not accustomed to this. I understand secrets; I do not understand spying. Not on your own people. Not on Hanley.”
Lydia Neumann went to the stairs and called up. “Go on, Leo. Get the cases out of the trunk, show Margot the spare room, will you? And get her towels?”
Leo said, “You just said—”
“Please, Leo,” Lydia Neumann said.
They even ate in the basement, for the sake of their visitor.
Devereaux and Lydia Neumann sat at a cardtable at the south end of the basement, in the direction of the highway. There was a reason for that as well.
All was secure. The room was paneled and dominated by a large felt-green pool table with carved legs. It had been a gift from her to her husband six Christmases ago. He had expressed a vague interest in the game, which he had played in his youth. Now they used it to store things on.
Lydia Neumann thought about security: Devereaux was an agent in the field, retired, and Yackley said he had killed two chasers in Lausanne. Lydia Neumann had thought about that for a long time, as she prepared a dinner of sandwiches and coleslaw and beer in the kitchen. They ate in silence—for a while. Margot Kieker came out of herself enough to talk about her mother and what life had been like in the Nebraska of her growing up, so different from Hanley’s Nebraska.
Devereaux had watched her during the meal.
There is a way a man can watch a woman which does not frighten her. It is a watching that implies interest, even attraction, but it is not dominating. It implies that the man is watching out of some respect, some physical attraction, and he is attentive to the words of the other.
Devereaux had the trick of watching like that. It can be acquired and practiced, like all tricks.
Lydia Neumann would glance at him from time to time and then at Margot and then at Leo, who was enjoying the mystery of it all.
No, there was something wrong with security that put Hanley away, that denies him visitors; something wrong with the way things were going inside Section. She said this to Devereaux. It was a matter of making a judgment about Devereaux.
They sat at the cardtable with the flimsy top and rickety metal legs and she began her story, which began about six months before, when the new budget message came down from the National Security Council. There was to be an increased emphasis in the coming years on electronic intelligence gathering. And a think tank study—coming from one of the vaguely conservative institutions—had concluded that the weakest link in the chain of intelligence security was the case officer.
“Machines don’t lie,” Lydia Neumann rasped. “Machines cannot do anything but tell the truth.”
Devereaux stared at her a moment. “Is that true?”
“No, of course not. ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ But if they think it’s true, it’s true. Yackley had everyone in and we talked about Section, about how much a field agent costs us. A half million a year in Section. Do you believe that?”
“As much as I believe in thirty-seven-thousand-dollar coffee pots,” Devereaux said.
“The point is, it got to Hanley. I mean, it was his division they were talking about.”
“Operations.”
“The director of spies, chief spook. They were talking about heavy cutbacks over the next five years. Not the kind of bloodbath that Stansfield Turner did at CIA, but the same sort of cutback. He was supposed to start a list and—”
Devereaux started. Just for a moment, he betrayed himself. Lydia Neumann saw it.
A list of names of agents.
“It got to Hanley, as I said,” she said in a hoarse voice. “Poor Hanley.”
“What got to him? You mean, he had a breakdown?”
“Of course. That’s why he was committed to St. Catherine’s. Except it gets worse and worse. I’m afraid. I’m afraid he’s going to die.”
“Yes,” Devereaux said. “I didn’t understand it. I thought it was Hanley. But it wasn’t Hanley at all. That means he’s going to die.”
Mrs. Neumann blinked, stared. Devereaux’s voice had not changed at all; the pronouncement was routine. It was a matter of life and death all along and now the verdict was death.
“What is it?”
“ ‘There are no spies.’ I remember he said that to me. His line was tapped. He was babbling and I thought he was drunk. Perhaps he was drunk; perhaps he was drugged.”
“Drugged?”
“He complained about the doctor. About medicine. I didn’t quite understand it because I thought he was drunk at the time. Two men came after me in Switzerland. Chasers from Section.”
“Yackley said you killed them.”
Devereaux almost shrugged. His eyes never wavered. “There was an accident on a country road. The point was: They were chasers. I was asleep. Let sleeping agents lie. That’s always a good policy.”
“What is going on?”
“What is Nutcracker?” Devereaux said.
She stared at him.
“Is there an operation? Is there something called Nutcracker?”
“No. I’m not aware—I would be aware of it if it existed in Section.”
“Perhaps,” he said.
“Damnit, I would be aware of it—”
“If it existed in Section,” he said. The voice was quiet. The furnace thumped on and the fan began to send surges of warm air through the vents. They felt the chill first and then the waves of warm air. The house was absolutely silent, save for the sounds of the furnace.
“Why did Yackley have Hanley committed?” Devereaux said.
“I don’t know. He said it was on the advice of the houseman. Dr. Thompson. But Thompson is a fool; I mean, he’s not a shrink even. Hanley went home in February. He told everyone he was tired.”
“He was on medication.”
It was not a question.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“He was on medication. It explains what he was saying to me.” He paused, thought of something else. “Who runs Operations now? On a day-to-day?”
“Yackley. I mean, there are the sub-directors. A lot of it is automatic.”
He said nothing. He seemed to be looking beyond her. “They’re killing him,” he said. Then he paused. “Perhaps I should prepare him for his death.” And smiled.