6 Oct 90—SAN FRANCISCO
Cable cars were packed with tourists and ordinary San Franciscans resorted to buses and cabs. The hills were wet with the sort of fog-induced rain that sweeps the sun away from time to time and buries the Golden Gate Bridge in a heavenly gloom. It is a beautiful city because it evokes such a sense of isolation and exile.
They were in the Fairmont Hotel and now they could make love to each other to bury the horror of the past weeks of separation and the trail of murder. The newspapers announced the arrest and detention in Israel of Kurt Heinemann, the ex-Stasi terrorist expert who was linked to any number of terror factions in Europe and the Middle East. The Israeli announcement said he had been apprehended “abroad.” And that he was being examined for his role in the 1972 attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. There was no mention made at first of Ruth Sauer.
Rita Macklin smiled at the gift of flowers on the table of the large hotel room and at the candy.
“I feel like my mother must feel on Mother’s Day,” she said.
“I love you. I never meant to put you in harm’s way. I don’t know why I told you all those things. I was frustrated that day in Bethesda, I couldn’t see any way out of this.”
“But now you can.”
“It was Pendleton. I couldn’t tell you about it then. He had a way to get me to do something for him and I knew it was extracurricular, out of Section, but I couldn’t stop him.”
“What was it?”
“Two years ago, you went to the Soviet embassy in Washington and the FBI took your picture. You were carrying a large envelope. Five days earlier, the Section took your picture at the consulate in Leningrad. You met with Felix Bloch.”
“I went to college with Felix.”
“Felix Bloch was arrested a year ago by the FBI but they couldn’t prove anything. They thought he was a spy. Felix Bloch gave you an envelope and R Section had the photographs. Put it with the photographs in Washington and they might have had a case, only they didn’t put the photographs together. FBI sent over information on you to R Section about the time Pendleton took over Hanley’s old job, running operations. Pendleton liked it well enough.”
“That was the blackmail? Photographs? I was carrying my pad and tape recorder in that envelope. In Washington. It was raining.”
“I don’t know anything about Felix Bloch except he was mixed up in something and FBI and Secret Service both know it but don’t have enough to prove it without revealing something important. At least, that’s my guess. But that wouldn’t have stopped Pendleton. He wanted me to be set up and he wanted me to destroy Mickey Connors’s organization.”
“But that blackmail couldn’t work, it—”
“You would have been out of a job for the rest of your life, Rita. Even if it never made it to court. Your magazine wouldn’t have kept you on, you know it. And no one would hire you or trust you again. That’s all you’ve got.”
“I had you.”
“And I would have been the star against you. An agent in R Section living with a journalist who made trips to Russia to see a man under FBI investigation, a man fired from his government job at an important consulate. No. You would have been shopped and I would have shopped you just because I knew you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you would have fought it. You would have hired a lawyer or gone to your friend at the New York Times. The business would have been murky and you would have gone down. Believe me. I know journalism and I know my own trade. When they want to set you up, they set you up. We do that for a living, Rita.”
“Disinformation.”
“Worse. We can ruin lives.”
Silence on a Sunday morning in a hotel room on top of Nob Hill. The gloom of the city scratched at the windows of the room. She sat in bed, her arms around her knees, staring at the window. He told her these things sitting on the overstuffed chair by the breakfast cart.
“And you can tell me now.”
“Now.”
“I hate him.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s over for us.”
“Why?”
“Because of Kurt Heinemann. Three days ago, I thought I saw a way clear but it had to happen quickly. I called a man in Mossad and we met in Solvang. In the same hotel we stayed in. I laid it out for him. He called back in six hours and agreed to it. Then I had to move on the timetable. Denisov was showing signs that the end was coming and Heinemann would get the code machine and I would be left out in the cold again.”
“You could have told them Heinemann was in Denver—”
Devereaux shook his head.
“I didn’t know where he was. Only Ruth knew. I knew he worked for Consortium International but it might have taken me months to crack it. It’s a cooperative of sorts, each unit takes care of itself.”
“So you had to wait on the deal. On Denisov.”
“It was the easiest way.”
She shook her head.
She got up from the bed and went to the window and looked down at the fog and could not see the street below. “And it was my fault. That Ernie Funo was killed.”
“It was my fault for telling you anything.”
“I feel lost sometimes,” she said.
He came up behind her and held her. She wanted that.
“Why is it all right about Pendleton now?”
“Because Kurt Heinemann worked for him. An ex-Stasi terrorist wanted by Israel for more than fifteen years. A terrorist we had twice and twice let go, once in Zurich and once after the collapse of the GDR. Heinemann is going to bring Pendleton down. I called him this morning at home while you were asleep.”
“You called Pendleton?”
“I told him to read the morning papers. I told him that Heinemann would tell the Israelis all about his year in America and how he had worked for an American control named Pendleton of R Section. I told him I did it and that I could hold out the information or I could use it.”
“You told him that?”
Devereaux smiled behind her. It was a hard, mean smile and it was all right because she didn’t see it, did not see the sheer anger behind it.
“He’s going to think about it.”
“About what?”
“Retirement.”