“Yes. This time, without fail. Even at risk to yourself.”
“Where is he?”
“There is a house on P Street,” the voice began. “Go to the house on P Street and when you reach it, wait inside.
The key is under the mat at the door. Wait there for instructions.” He gave her the address on P Street N.E.
She felt very afraid in that moment, more afraid than at any time since Helsinki when the agent there had directed her to “the second November in Switzerland.”
“What will happen to me there?”
“Happen to you?” The voice seemed on the point of taking on coloration. But the voice paused and resumed in the same bland tone. “Nothing, Alexa. It is for instructions. This time, there will not be failure. There is no time for failure now.”
And the line was broken.
She replaced the light-green telephone receiver. She looked around her. What a queer city of low buildings and Greek columns and shabby streets full of slums. There were trees everywhere and yet there did not seem to be gaiety to the city at all. She felt a sullen undercurrent around her. She was accustomed to the same thing in Moscow: But there was vitality in Moscow that came from within, from secrets kept locked in secrets.
Alexa thought there was no vitality in Washington on this Sunday afternoon. She felt alone and abandoned in the West.
She stared around her. Her eyes carried down to her soul. They were shining and black and dangerous. Her eyes could not be disguised and she would not die like a victim. If they meant to kill her, they would have to engage her.
She felt the pistol in her pocket.
She saw Lenin on the wall hangings, striding toward the Revolution.
She even felt the first stirrings of hunger.
W
hy are we going back?” Margot said.
“The best place to hide is a city,” Devereaux said. “Is he all right?”
“He’s shaking.”
“Give him my coat.”
“You killed that nun?”
“Give him the coat, Margot.” Softly, firmly.
“You killed her and that man—”
“Give him the coat.”
She draped the coat around Hanley.
They heard the helicopter again. The copter swept low over the road but there was nothing to see. The fog was blinding. It was an act of desperation to fly in fog like this.
Devereaux drove very fast and very hard. His eyes were so fixed on the road—on the billows of fog—that it was painful to refocus them. The fog seemed to roll at the windshield. It was worse than it had been that morning. The day was warm and the ground wet. He rolled down the window and could smell the springtime all around, all hidden.
“His face is bleeding.”
“Is it bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“For Christ’s sake, Margot, wipe the blood away and see how badly he’s hurt.”
She shivered. She wiped the blood from Hanley’s cheek and saw the wound. “No, it’s not bad,” she said. “You killed two people.”
The copter blades sounded very close. That was the trouble with fog. It affected hearing as well as vision. It enclosed everything.
Devereaux had not intended to rescue Hanley that Sunday morning. He never thought that Hanley would recognize him. Or, if he did, that he would have been enough in his senses to keep quiet. It had been a surveillance, to see where they kept Hanley and how hard it would be to get him out.
Now it was a mess. There was no time left at all. Hanley must hold the key to whatever was going on in Section. But what help could he be?
The police car passed them and Devereaux saw the taillights wink in the rearview window. Turning around. It was a good idea to get back to Washington but this was a terrible road for it.
“Hold him, Margot,” Devereaux said. “And get down.”
She slid down in the seat and the car came very near behind them. The Mars lights were flashing. Devereaux slowed down as though to stop. The police car slowed down. The helicopter surged overhead.
Radio contact, he thought.
Nothing to do. He pushed the gas pedal and the Buick roared ahead and the reaction time from the patrol car
was just a moment slow. There was no time to do anything else.
The Buick was going fifty miles an hour into blind fog. Devereaux could barely see the yellow line on the two-lane road; it was the yellow line that guided him. If he couldn’t see the yellow line at all, they were finished.
Margot’s voice was too loud: “My God, you can’t drive this fast!”
He didn’t answer. He held the wheel hard.
The cops had guts. They were following his taillights, scarcely thirty feet behind.
More guts than brains, Devereaux thought. He slammed the brakes, turning the wheels left to the wrong side of the road, and then rode the shoulder, controlling the skid.
The police car crashed into the right rear bumper and careened into a grove of trees that led down a gentle slope to a secondary road below. Devereaux never stopped. He pushed into the fog and Margot got up and looked around and guessed what had happened.
“This is insane, you’re making me… an accomplice to… this is killing… you killed a nun!”
“Shut up, Margot,” he said, never looking at her. “Hold him,” he said.
“This man is dying,” she said.
“He can die later,” Devereaux said. The voice had no pity in it at all.
They made it to the edge of the city in a stolen car, swiped from a church parking lot in Fredericksburg. For a moment, Margot had forgotten her fear because she had been fascinated by the technology of stealing a car without keys in it.
In Bethesda, Devereaux said, “Change cars again.”
“Are you insane? Are you just insane?”
“Margot, there are people after us. They are using helicopters. Just do what I say and don’t ask me any more questions.”
The car was a Rambler with the keys in it. It had patches of rust on the body and the tired look of a car that no one makes anymore. He pulled up the stolen Pontiac and got out. He helped Margot lift Hanley into the back of the Rambler.
The dude came out of the liquor store into the lot and watched them. He was in his twenties and looked scuffed at the toes. He had a worn leather jacket and he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“Hey, buddy,” he said in an easy voice. “My car.”
“I was just taking it,” Devereaux said.
The kid grinned. “Why don’t you steal something worthwhile? This is a shitbox.”
Devereaux smiled. “I could buy it from you.”
“Then I’d be stealing from you.”
“Do you have scruples about that?”
“No. Do what you gotta do, you know? Been driving that old sucker all winter, though. Got me through. Have some affection for it.”
“Are both of you crazy?” Margot was in the car now.
“Tell you what,” Devereaux said. “I’ll give you a hundred for it and I’ll return it later. Just renting it.”
“Ain’t worth a hundred. Why don’t you go to Avis?”
“What do you say?”
“Sure. That’s what I say. Just give me a lift, will you? You going into the District? Drop me off down by the Huddle House over the line, will you?”
The Rambler coughed across the District line on Wisconsin Avenue shortly after two in the afternoon. The kid’s name was Dave Mason and he told Devereaux to watch for the cop who always waited behind the supermarket on the south side of the line for speeders who wanted to push over the twenty-five-mile-an-hour limit.
Devereaux eased it down and was passed by a BMW. A better prospect. The D.C. police car shot out into Wisconsin Avenue with Mars lights flashing. They passed the BMW pulled over to the side of the road two blocks later.
“You got some idea where you’re going?” Dave said. It was just a friendly voice. He smiled at Margot in the back seat.
“Some,” Devereaux said.
“Ain’t nothing to me, man. But I would like to get the car back.”
“You’ll get it back or I’ll have one built just like it.”
“Rust and all,” said Dave. He smiled. He popped a beer out of the sack. “You want a beer, lady?”
“No,” Margot Kieker said. None of this was real. It wasn’t happening.
“You drop me off up ahead,” said Dave. “I can hoof it.”
“You working, Dave?”
“Not much. Do a little house-painting. Things are slow. Everyone with a job to offer wants you to work for two dollars an hour and clean out the toilets in your spare time.”
“Gimme the address,” Devereaux said.
Dave wrote it down on the paper sack and tore off a piece of the sack. He gave it to Devereaux. He looked him
right in the eye and Devereaux stared back at him. Dave smiled. “Damn. You’re gonna bring it back, ain’t you?”
“Bet on it,” Devereaux said.
The house was in Georgetown and it had occurred to Devereaux as they entered Hagerstown, an hour before.
The house was narrow and tall and elegant, with polished bricks and gleaming black iron. The roof was flat and ornamented with a copper façade. The Rambler seemed out of its class parked in front of the house. The Rambler would have to go. But first, there was the matter of Hanley. And the girl.
Margot had asked him after they dropped off Dave, “Why would he trust you?”
“He doesn’t.”
“He gave you the car.”
“I gave him a hundred dollars.”
“I don’t understand. He didn’t call the police or—”
“Why would he do that?”
“You were stealing his car.”
“No one would steal a car like this.”
“You would.”
“Margot.” Softer now. “You have too much belief in rules. There aren’t any rules.”
“Then it’s chaos. No rules means it’s chaos.”
Yes, Devereaux thought.
That exactly described it.
He opened the door of the car. His arms felt heavy. His back was knotted with lumps of tension. He would have to shake all his muscles awake again.
He went first, up the three stone steps. The street was empty but it could be full of people if the sun came out.
He knocked at the ornate brass plate. The door opened and it was an old woman.
“Dr. Quarles.”
“It’s Sunday,” said the old woman.
“Tell him it’s Mr. Devereaux.”
The old woman frowned and slammed the door. He waited. The afternoon was full of sweet smells and the fog. The wonderful fog that had covered their tracks all the way into Washington. Even the best agent needs luck; he had not expected the fog at all.
The door opened. Quarles stared at him. Quarles had large eyes and a red nose and his eyebrows exploded on a broad forehead. His hair was wild, long and combed in the absent manner of men who have better things to do than worry about how they look. He resembled an Old Testament prophet or John L. Lewis.
“What do you want?”
“I’ve brought you a patient.”
“Just as well. I don’t make house calls,” Dr. Quarles said. He opened the door wide and stared at the car. “My God, I didn’t know they still made those things.”
“They don’t.”
“Well, get it out of here. You’re driving down property values. Put it on M Street and let it roll down the hill and into the river.”
Devereaux nodded at the car and Margot Kieker opened the rear door.
“Well, she’s young enough. Knock her up?”
Then they saw the second man, emerging painfully, half-consciously, from the back seat.
“Goddamnit. He’s wearing a hospital gown,” Dr. Quarles said and he took a step down and then another
and reached Hanley before Margot sank under the burden of the man.
Quarles was large and strong. He had the arms of a Welsh miner, which his father had been, and the manner of a Welsh preacher, which his father had opposed. Quarles had no time for foolish people or foolish notions. He was immensely successful. Seventeen years before, in Vietnam, he had been captured by a file of Viet Cong. Seventeen years before, he had been rescued—not for himself but for the sake of someone else captured that day. The second prisoner had been important for some reason of state. For some reason of state—neither Devereaux nor Quarles ever knew it—Devereaux had saved Dr. Quarles’ life. It was a matter of a debt that could never be repaid and both of them knew it. And both knew that Devereaux was ruthless enough to exploit it.
Quarles picked up Hanley the way a child will pick up a bird with a broken wing. He carried him into the house.
He put Hanley down in an examining room, on a table covered with a leatherlike surface. He grasped his wrist, held his fingers to his throat, did all the things doctors do quickly.
“He ought to be in a hospital.”
“That’s where he has been.”
“Why did you take him out?”
“Because they were killing him.”
“Who is he?”
“It doesn’t matter; you don’t need to know.”
“Need to know?” Quarles turned the face of the prophet on him. “Like that, is it, Mr. Devereaux? You’ll roast in hell someday.”
“But not right now.”
“You wicked man and your wicked ways. Still playing at the game? Why don’t you grow up and act your age and get into something important?”
“It’s too late for that,” Devereaux said. “What can you do for him?”
“What did they do to him, is more like it?”
“It was a mental institution—”
“A goddamn loony bin? You took this wretch out of a nut house? Well, you’re not so far gone after all, you grave-robbing son of a bitch. Good for you.”
Margot Kieker blanched but this wasn’t the worst she had seen this day. She stood by her great-uncle, on the other side of the table, holding his hand because she didn’t know what to do with her own hands. She was so amazed with herself—with her calm, with her actions—that she felt in a perpetual state of shock.
“Who’s this? Your moll?”
“His niece.”
“Niece my foot. I see Congressmen with their nieces prowling the joints on M Street. Those are nieces. This looks like a girl to me.” He had such an odd manner of speech—as though he had learned to talk by reading old books—and the cause was precisely that: He had been nearly dumb until he was ten because he could not see very well and no one in that village in Wales understood it. He had taught himself to read by closing one eye and reading with the other.
Devereaux said, “There isn’t much time.”
“What? For him? He’ll make it by the look of him. Just needs some beef. Heartbeat’s slow but regular, pulse is—But then, why am I explaining this to you? I’m the goddamn doctor. If I say something, it’s so.”
Devereaux seemed to ignore the tone of voice, the glowering face, the posturing and theatrical gestures. He went to the window and looked out of the examining room at the street. “Bring him around,” Devereaux said.
“What is this about?”
“Do you have a medical directory?”
The book listed surgeons in Washington, D.C., and environs and their specialities.
Devereaux found the name he was looking for. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said.
“Where’s your shirt, man?”
“It’s a long story.”
“And you don’t have time to tell it.”
Devereaux buttoned the black coat over his collarless clerical shirt. He had no more time to waste with Quarles. Quarles owed him because of his own sense of debt; Devereaux would not have felt the same way. But if Quarles owed him, then let Quarles satisfy his conscience by paying the debt.