20 Sep 90—WASHINGTON, D.C.
Devereaux bought a ticket on a Delta flight bound for Los Angeles that had to go through its Atlanta hub. He had planned on Mickey Connors having one of his watchers trailing him at LaGuardia but he figured even Mickey Connors didn’t have anyone in Atlanta. He also bought a nonstop ticket on American from New York to Los Angeles. The planes left within twenty minutes of each other. Did Mickey Connors have an in with the airlines? Could he check tickets? Devereaux wasn’t sure. But he was sure that Mickey Connors was setting him up, either because of his own inherent caution or because he suspected the truth about Devereaux.
In any case, he had to see Rita Macklin.
The flight to Atlanta was bumpy but boring. Twice Devereaux strolled from his first-class seat to the toilet at the back of the 727. Each time, he searched the faces in all the seats. What was he looking for? He was just watching his trail and he wasn’t sure he had the skill to pick out anyone who might be watching him.
Hartsfield International is a long nightmare of plastic that endlessly replicates itself throughout the terminals. So many feet between identical bars, identical restaurants, identical newsstands; there is no sense of a beginning or ending to these airport shops or, indeed, any sense of being anywhere in particular in the world.
Devereaux caught a Delta flight to Washington National. The taxi ride from Washington to Bethesda took forty minutes.
Had he misread her slurred message that night? She was throwing him out and told him to pick up his clothes on Friday or they would be tossed in the garbage. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps they had both understood that the line might be tapped, by either Section or someone else. Like Mickey Connors.
Was he putting her in harm’s way?
He stood on the front stoop of the building and waited while the cab pulled away. He waited for ten minutes. The street was empty in the bright late morning light and there was no traffic at all in those ten minutes. The apartment had suited them; it was quiet and anonymous and the perfect hiding place for lovers who have no need of any amenities except themselves.
He opened the apartment door with a key. She was sitting at the kitchen counter on a stool, typing into a laptop Zenith word processor. She looked up as he entered and he understood.
He kissed her very hard and she began to cry and shake and he held her for a long time until she could stop crying and stop shaking.
“I thought maybe I got it wrong,” he said.
“Oh, Dev. I was so angry with you all those weeks. You never called and I couldn’t reach you and I thought even if you were killed, they wouldn’t tell me. I got angrier and angrier. And then, three days before you called, I went to see him.”
He held her apart to better see her eyes. They were red with tears but there was something else; they were eyes that had seen too much too soon.
He didn’t ask who.
“Oh, hold me again.”
He held her and she buried her face in his chest. He thought she might break in that moment but there were no more tears. When she stepped back from him, he could only gaze at her and wait.
She went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She took out a carton of 2 percent milk and poured it into a glass. She drank the milk and put the glass down on the counter. She looked at the glass of milk and began to speak in a slow, uninflected way that was curiously outside her, as though another person were making a report.
“I went to see Hanley at first but he transferred me to this man who had replaced him. He wouldn’t even see me. Just a security guard who took me to this other man. His name is Pendleton.”
Devereaux waited. Silence ticked like a clock between them.
“Pendleton said you were doing a mission. He called it that. A mission. He seemed amused by me. He said he had no idea where you were or what you were doing. He said it was a secret.”
“He told you the truth.”
“I didn’t believe him at first. He wanted to know if I had spoken to you on the phone. I said he ought to know, he probably had my phone tapped. He laughed at that and then he said, ‘The tap doesn’t belong to us.’ He said it without any indication of what it meant. I figured he had checked the telephone for a tap and discovered it and left it in place. That pissed me off along with everything else.”
“So you knew it was tapped.”
“I guessed it was. I guessed that part of what you had to do was to make them, whoever they are, believe you and I were separated.”
“Yes,” Devereaux said. “I told you I loved you.”
“Damnit, why didn’t you tell me.”
“I don’t want you to get involved in this. I don’t even know how it’s going to end up—”
“Why did you do this for that man, Pendleton? I really hated him after ten minutes. Another ten minutes and I could have gotten a gun and shot him.”
“He has that effect on people,” Devereaux said.
“Why are you working for him?”
“Because I have to.”
“Damn you, damn you. This filthy trade always comes between us.”
It was true. He couldn’t defend it. Or himself.
“Oh, honey.” Spoken with a voice on the edge of despair. “Dev, whatever it is, you have to tell me. You have to share it with me. We have to share some things.”
“No,” he said. “You’ve got a real life. You write about news, real people, real things. I’ve got lies and secrets and deals you don’t ever want to know about.”
“So how long will this go on?”
“I don’t know. I have to satisfy someone’s idea of when the job is finished. I don’t know; Pendleton knows.”
“If you hadn’t shown up today, I would have gone to New York and found you. I really would have. I know someone on the Times. I would have told her the story about you and they would have put your picture in the paper and—”
“And then I would have been dead. And the problem wouldn’t have been resolved.” Devereaux turned from her and went to the picture window that looked down on the brilliant autumn woods behind the building. There were traces of red and yellow in the still luxurious green on the trees.
“That’s your instinct, Rita. You’re a reporter and you tell things. That’s why I can’t tell you my things. It isn’t a matter of trust. I love you and I trust you. But you don’t need these secrets and you don’t need to know the bad things. All the bad things.”
“So you won’t tell me.”
“I can’t.”
Silence. They sat down across the counter from each other and let the silence feed on itself. She went to the refrigerator freezer and took out a tray of ice and prepared two glasses. She poured Red Label Scotch in them and gave him one.
“I was in a bar so Irish that they wouldn’t serve you Scotch,” Devereaux said. It made him smile now; it was a world removed from her. Maybe that was it. If he told her everything and shared the secrets, it would hurt them both, hurt the thing they had together.
“Where was it?”
“On the West Side. Manhattan. A different kind of New York.”
“What was it called?”
He glanced up then. “I don’t remember.”
“You’re lying again. You can’t even tell me that.”
“It was Grogan’s or something. I just forgot it.”
“You never forget,” she said.
He tasted the Scotch. The Irish whiskey had been drunk that night to ease the pain of her anger and her words. He hadn’t figured out her coded message to him—if it had been a coded message and if he wasn’t just reading it into her words to give himself a bit of hope—until the next day when Mickey Connors had introduced him into his world. He tasted the Scotch now and thought about the nature of his world of lies.
“Pendleton wants me to infiltrate an organization run by an Irish fellow named Mickey Connors,” he said, staring at the drink in his hand. “Mr. Connors is one of the world’s middlemen in the trade. He does dirty work for the CIA and he sells illegal arms and he can manage to get things for Langley that more straightforward organizations can’t get. He works in the dark side of a dark business.”
“Like the old Mafia connection with the CIA.”
“Like that. Giancana and those people trying to knock off Castro in the sixties. Like the Arab in Florida who sells arms to people in the Middle East. Sometimes they’re useful.”
“What does Pendleton want exactly?”
“I’m not sure but I’m beginning to understand. There’s something out there that a lot of people want. I guess it’s some kind of code machine, only better and faster than any machine before. Do you know what a one-time pad is?”
“No.”
“It’s a way of sending secret codes. You use a sequence of numbers that are contained in a book that’s the key to the code. The sender has the key and the receiver has the key. You use the code once and even if it’s overheard, it can’t be broken because there’s not enough in the message to piece together the sequence. You know, so many Es in a code or As or Ms.”
“All right.”
“But one-time pads can be broken by the weight of the information that has to be transmitted. Cipher clerks are like everyone else, they cheat. They have, say, a sixty-page report to transmit and the way to do it is to break it into forty or so one-time codes, breaking off after so many pages and then inventing the new code. Well, there is a machine that everyone is talking about but no one has yet which is the mother of all code machines. It’s a supercomputer that is a perpetual one-time pad. It can change the code every line if need be. Yet the operator can’t cheat because the machine does all the work. A machine like that would make cryptography just about foolproof. That’s the machine that everyone wants and that Mickey Connors wants. And now I think it’s the reason I’m sent in to get on Mickey’s team. Because Pendleton wants the machine and he knows the person who’s going to get it for him.”
“Mickey Connors.”
“Eventually. Or possibly. No, it’s Denisov.”
She knew the name of the man. Denisov had been sent to Florida once to get the secrets of an old priest who had seen too many things in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Rita had met Devereaux then for the first time. Denisov had been sent to kill either Rita or Devereaux or whoever stood in the way of getting the old man’s memoirs. Yes. She knew the name.
“Denisov has the machine?”
“Denisov is getting the machine. That’s what Mickey Connors says. I don’t believe very much of what he says but he has a name and a place and he says that Denisov was making arrangements in Hawaii a few weeks ago—”
“The machine is in Hawaii?”
He looked at her. She was all eagerness now; the face of the reporter being told a story. Why was he telling her? Because, for a very long time in his secret life, he was able to bear the burden of secrecy alone but she had changed all that. She had given him love when it was the last thing he had ever expected to receive from another person. God, he loved her.
“Probably not. He’s talked to a fellow in the drug trade, with a fast boat, named Peterson. That’s not important. We’re not interested in Hawaii, only in the end result. When Denisov gets the machine and when he tries to sell it.”
“To whom? The CIA?”
“No. He can’t. He’s our… asset. But R Section doesn’t buy stolen goods. Pendleton can’t get around that. We can’t deal directly with someone like Denisov and Denisov wouldn’t deal with us directly because he’d be afraid of us. We couldn’t have a defected Russian KGB agent sell us stolen goods and then live to tell the story, could we?”
“God, this is bad, Dev. This is really bad. And you walked into it for Pendleton.”
“I have to do it,” Devereaux said. “I don’t know that Pendleton just wants the machine. Maybe he wants Mickey Connors to work for him. Maybe, maybe.”
“Mickey Connors could be trusted but Denisov couldn’t trust R Section.”
Devereaux spread his hands on the table and looked at the stretched fingers and spoke to his hands. “Section can’t be blackmailed.” He paused. “Mickey Connors is a crook, essentially. Denisov can deal with a crook and be that much removed by the crook. And Section can deal with a crook but not a defected spy who does illegal things. I mean, this machine does not belong to the United States government.”
“But if they get it, they don’t have to tell anyone.”
“Yes.”
“And Denisov wouldn’t know who this Mickey Connors would sell it to.”
“Yes.”
She got up, restless as a runner waiting for a race. She paced to the window and looked at the forest behind the building. She spoke to the glass. “I can go to Hawaii. Interview this Peterson. Learn about him.”
“No. You must not,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because. No matter what happens, there’ll be bad along the trail.”
“Who’s making the machine?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“How will Denisov steal it?”
“I don’t know. But whoever he steals it from will be after him. On the trail of it. And no one caught on the trail is going to be alive for very long.”
“You’re saying that to scare me.”
“Be scared, Rita. You can always be scared.”
“And what if you get out of this alive, Dev? Do you wait until the next time and the next time? Do we always have to go through this? I can’t live apart from you. I thought you knew that. I thought we had worked that out.”
They made love. They were so lost and so abandoned that the softness of making love filled in the hollow places in them. They made love in the intense and selfish way of people who have been held apart a long time. When he satisfied her and put his hands under her, pushed up her body to meet him more deeply, he satisfied himself. He wanted to lick her face in the comforting way that some animals lick their beloved. When he was exhausted, they slept a little and there were no dreams in his sleep. When he awoke, it was sudden. It was night. He didn’t know where he was. And then he felt her next to him and he felt an indescribable sadness. Because it was time now to leave her again.