T
hey left a little before five in the morning. This was due less to the need to get an early start than the fact that Devereaux and Denisov felt there was too little night left for sleep.
Devereaux had made preparations.
In the small black bag were vials and vestments, the working tools of the Roman Catholic priest. He showered for a long time—the water restored him in a way that the vodka could not—and then he called Lydia Neumann’s home. She didn’t answer. The signal was not verbal: Three rings. Silence. Three rings.
Denisov was shocked.
Devereaux put on the clerical collar and fastened it with a stud. He slipped on the black blouse that ties in the back. He slipped on the black coat. He took the .32 Beretta police special, checked the action, and slipped it under the blouse into the belt of his black trousers. He looked at Denisov and smiled.
“I don’t like this at all,” Denisov said.
“You’ve become superstitious in old age,” Devereaux
said. “I’m going to leave by the back entry. The car is in the parking garage. I don’t suppose she’s stayed awake all night watching it, especially since she can get information whenever she wants from our mole. Only this time, I really want a couple of hours. I’ll shake any tail but you’ve got to cover the rear door.”
“What is the gain again, exactly?”
“A chance to play the old game,” Devereaux said.
“Substantially more than that.”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
“I’ll leave you a poor man.”
“I don’t intend to take it out of my account,” Devereaux said.
“No. I didn’t think so.”
He was not followed. Even spies sleep. Denisov had followed him out of the hotel and watched the back door while Devereaux took the rental car out of the garage.
Devereaux pulled into the driveway in Bethesda and the garage door opened and he slipped the long gray Buick into the second, empty parking space. It was typical of Leo Neumann not to have allowed junk to clutter up the second space.
He turned the ignition. The car fell silent. He had liked the idea of a Buick; a priest’s car.
They waited at the kitchen. There were no lights on in the house. Dull dawn crept across the fog and lit the field behind the house.
Margot Kieker was as ready as she ever was. Her eyes were made up in that careful way that can be jarring at six in the morning. Her palms were wet and cold and she
held them pressed together. She didn’t quite believe all this was happening to her and that she had allowed it to happen.
But, in a strange way, she felt just fine.
He talked to her in a soft voice, explaining what they would do as though it were nothing at all.
“I only want to locate him. When I find him, I’ll do the act and then we leave. That’s all. I just want to know where he is. I can get him out myself.”
“But what if they won’t let you in?”
“I’m a priest. He’s dying.”
“But what if they say he isn’t dying?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Of course, Devereaux had thought about that since the night before, from the moment he had studied the girl at the supper table. He had acquired the clerical garb from a religious supply house in the afternoon and the plan had been to replace the regular priest who said mass on Sunday in the chapel inside the grounds. Once inside, he would have improvised.
Using the girl seemed safer. Especially for Hanley.
Mrs. Neumann spoke as softly as the morning.
“The problem with what you want me to do is that it alerts whoever it is that—”
“The mole,” Devereaux said. “It has to be a mole in Section.”
“Yackley,” she said.
“Perhaps. Perhaps it is Richfield—he would have initiated the actual hardware part of the tap on Hanley’s phone. He would have seen the transcript. It doesn’t matter. Whoever it is has had it his own way and you have to flush him. Maybe Nutcracker will do that—”
The fog on the road made the going slower than expected. It was nearly 8:30 when they descended into the steep valley in western Maryland and then took the old road up to the south rim, where St. Catherine’s stood.
Two and a half hours in a car can create a suggestion of intimacy between passengers.
Devereaux drove without much thought. Sunday morning was without traffic and the white fog that clung to the hills, to the meadowlands below the roadway, to the road itself—all hushed the outside world so that it ceased to exist.
“What is my great-uncle like?” She had tried once.
Devereaux glanced at her. She was on the edge of fear, like a doe in autumn at the edge of an Interstate Highway, deciding whether to cross. Her eyes were wide but steady. She had guts, Mrs. Neumann said. Maybe Mrs. Neumann understood these things well enough.
She was dressed in light blue, in a soft business suit that permitted a frilly blouse instead of an old school tie. The blouse had no color and it allowed the color of her face to define her face. She had a round face that might grow rounder with age. Her eyes were good and when she stared straight at you, you had to respond in the same way. She was good at silences.
“I didn’t really know Hanley,” Devereaux said at last.
“You worked with him.”
“In a sense.”
“You don’t anymore.”
“No.”
“Why do this? For him?”
“It’s for me.”
“What did you do?”
“I worked for the government. At jobs.” It wasn’t enough. “Estimates. Field work. Department of Agriculture.”
“No,” she said.
Devereaux glanced again at her. The Buick clambered over the rise and there was a long, blind descent into white fog. Above them, the sun was trying to burn it off.
“No what?”
“This Department of Agriculture stuff. And Mrs. Neumann said that, too. This isn’t about the price of soybeans.”
“In a sense, everything is. About the price of soybeans,” Devereaux said. But with gentleness.
“I ought to be told,” she said.
He thought about it.
There was no more speech for two miles. And then:
“Your uncle is an intelligence officer. A director. In an agency that you have never heard of.”
“Like the CIA?”
“Like the CIA.”
“But I thought that was all there was.”
“No. There are others. And he knows a good number of things. And secrets. So, I suppose, he was committed here for his own good and the good of keeping his secrets secret.”
“But that’s not right,” she said. “I mean, I’m not being naïve. But what’s the point of doing things wrong for all the right reasons?”
Because that is the way things are done, Devereaux thought. Because there is no morality in this, any of this; that morality is something for afterward, the sermons and soda water that follow the frenzy of the game. The
politicians who preach about the amoral code of the intelligence establishment don’t believe in what they say but like to hear themselves say it. The morality comes at the end of the game; when it is won.
No, not won.
Merely not lost.
Devereaux drove and said none of these things. The fog pressed against the car and intensified the silence.
“Why would he leave everything he had to me?”
“Because you were all he had.”
“That’s really pitiful, isn’t it? Someone he doesn’t even know? All he had.”
And Devereaux thought of Rita Macklin. There was a conversation they were going to have to have. They both knew the form of the conversation but they never let it play out to the end because the end might really be too bad. What would Rita Macklin think of the morality in this? About rooting out a mole inside R Section for the love of government and country?
She would see through that.
When they had the conversation, they would have to be honest at least. He could never fool her anymore; that’s what made it so good to be with her. Pretense was down and the careful agent could be careless. It was just that good between them.
He rehearsed in his mind: I had to do this. To save myself, to find out what had happened—
And she would say: What will you do now? It’s not enough to go back, is it? You’re going to have to stay inside, aren’t you? Everything we arranged—it’s not enough.
And he would say:
What?
What exactly would he say?
The silences in the car lasted the rest of the morning.
Finch looked at the priest. He saw the nuns on the steps already.
“Look, Father, this is a restricted area here, we are talking about the government—”
“I am a priest. I understand you have a dying man here, and his niece has called me.”
“We don’t have a religious preference on his card and—”
“He’s a Catholic,” Margot Kieker said. “Sister, Sister!” She shouted to the fat nun who waddled over. She saw the nun had cuts on the ends of her fingers and she wondered why.
Finch thought: Terrific.
“Sister, my uncle is dying and I want him to have the last rites. Extreme unction. Father Peterson was his priest, his friend, I had to ask him—”
“I hadn’t seen Mr. Hanley for months, I thought he was out of the country, if only I had known—” Devereaux dithered. He stared hard at Finch and thought about how much Finch knew about anything going on around here.
They were at the main house and the morning fog was still thick and white around them. They might have been ghosts in a Scandinavian film.
Sister Domitilla looked confused. She looked at Finch—a man lately attached to the establishment by the government—and then at Sister Gabriella. “I don’t want… I don’t want to be responsible for denying the last
rites to Mr. Hanley.” She bit her lip. “Why can’t they see him, Mr. Finch?”
“There are orders—”
“There is God’s order, which is greater,” Sister Domitilla blurted, surprised by her eloquence. She had felt very badly about Mr. Hanley. He had deteriorated so quickly, especially in the last week after Dr. Goddard began the electroshock treatments. The treatments were designed to help “resettle” the random electrical patterns in the brain. Hanley was sliding now; he would be dead in a matter of days.
“Look, I don’t take orders from anyone but Mr. Ivers—”
Devereaux looked up at mention of the name. Who the hell was Ivers? It was the same name Sellers had mentioned.
“Mr. Finch,” Devereaux said. “I am a priest. I want to help my old friend in his last moments—if these are his last moments. You can come with me. I am a man of secrets, as you are, as poor Hanley was.” He paused, looking at Margot. “This poor creature is worried about her family. I am worried about my friend. But God is worried about his soul.”
Devereaux’s eyes were mild and he nodded solemnly to Sister Domitilla, who looked as though she might fall on her knees in prayer at any moment. Instead, she did something else.
“Come with me, Father, child,” she said. “And don’t interfere with me, Mr. Finch. This is St. Catherine’s and I am in charge here and not you. You take care of security and Dr. Goddard will take care of the medical ills but I will take care of souls. Even the least of these, the most demented, is a creature of God.”
“Let me see what’s in the bag—”
It was all right, Devereaux thought, as Finch sniffed at the vials and replaced the tops, as he felt in the purple confessional stole for a hidden pocket. It was going to be all right.
Hanley had awakened after dawn and the room was vague in the watery morning light and he thought he might be dead at last. And then he had managed to focus well enough to see the crucifix on the opposite wall, above the place where Kaplan had died.
He felt unusually clear. He had felt this way for days. Ever since the beginning of the electroshock treatment. He was quite certain that he had been in this room all his life. He was now six or seven years old. Kaplan had been an old man. For some reason, he was supposed to die very soon, though he was quite young. His mother was due to visit him any day now. He was in Christ Community Hospital in Omaha and they were going to remove his appendix in a little while. They explained to him that it would hurt afterward but it would hurt much less than the hurt he suffered now. He had tried to explain yesterday—to Dr. Goddard—that he was feeling no pain at all. But Dr. Goddard only smiled at him.
He smiled when the door opened.
It was his sister, Mildred.
“Hello, Mildred,” he said.
His sister seemed strange. As though she had something to say and didn’t know how to say it. That was Mildred. The quiet one. And what was wrong with her eyes?
“Mildred? Is there something wrong with your eyes?”
“What?”
“It looks like someone has given you a black eye,” Hanley said.
“He thinks you’re his sister,” said a nun.
Of course this was his sister. Who did she think it was? He was six years old and he was having an operation tomorrow.
“Hello, old friend,” said a man.
He stared at the man over him.
He blinked and could swear he knew that man. He saw that man and part of him knew him. The man was a reverend.
“Reverend Van der Rohe,” said Hanley. “You came all the way to Omaha for me? Am I going to die?”
“No. You’re not going to die, old friend.”
“I was good. I missed Sunday school that one time but I was really sick, I wasn’t just playing hooky.”
“Go ahead with it,” said another man. He was at the back of the room. “The guy’s crackers.”
“Mr. Finch,” said the nun.
He had not seen a nun until he was twelve. He was certain of that. So how old was he? He couldn’t be seeing nuns now. He was only five or six. No, at the time of the operation, he was seven. A terrible pain in his belly, they had been at the state fair, which is how he came to be in Christ Community Hospital. He didn’t know anyone. They were so kind.
Hanley blinked.
“Mill? Are you there?”
“It’s me, it’s Margot.”
“I don’t know Margot,” Hanley said. He thought of a name on something. What? A form of some sort? Margot Kieker. But this person was Mill. Mildred Hanley. She
would marry Frank Knudsen and have a daughter named Melissa and up and die. Cancer. So young. It broke your heart. And then Melissa died. And then there was Margot. Now, was this Margot?