24 Oct 90—WASHINGTON, D.C.
He often sat alone in his town house off M Street in curious old Georgetown. He had never found the time or inclination for a hobby and now the days were vast and empty and there was this burning in him. Pendleton had been visited twice by the man who was now director of Operations again. The sight of Hanley enraged him as much as anything, as much as Heinemann’s secret testimony and an array of documents that proved now that Pendleton had compromised the integrity of R Section for the sake of ambition.
He had broken the Soviet networks in 1976 with information contained that morning on a sheet of paper passed to him in a brothel in Zurich. He had used an agent inside R Section named November to clear the Mossad off the trail of a terror director named the Double Eagle. Kurt Heinemann had told the Israelis everything because he had felt betrayed by Pendleton.
And Pendleton had used his power to threaten the same agent fifteen years later, to use him in illegal espionage inside the United States.
And Pendleton had provided secret bona fides for the German terrorist named Double Eagle and induced him to work within the United States for a shadowy company called Consortium International. Along the way, he had approved the acquisition of a code machine by murder and theft from a prominent company of a friendly power.
Hanley would explain these things to Pendleton with obvious satisfaction and with a certain cold, even prissy, tone of voice.
“Devereaux was outside the law as much as he was in it all the time he worked for you,” Pendleton exploded during the second visit.
“You broke the laws, Pendleton, but you did worse. You broke the rules.”
“I resigned because of blackmail.”
“What blackmail?”
“What are you going to do with this information? The Jews got their terrorist and they got the goddamned machine and they don’t even acknowledge there is a machine.”
“Not publicly,” Hanley had said.
“I could still blow this open.”
“You could still spend the rest of your life in prison,” Hanley had responded.
The days were very long even as the time of daylight grew shorter.
And one late afternoon, a gray car that might have been a Ford or Chevrolet, or something like that, pulled up to the town house off M Street. The driver waited and Pendleton came down the steps and got into the car. He sat next to the driver and studied his face.
“Why can’t Hanley come here?”
“Not this time. He says you insult him,” Devereaux said.
“He can arrest me but he can’t just keep harassing me.”
“He doesn’t want to arrest you. You can hurt Section badly with everything you did. It would embarrass a lot of people. Congressional investigations. He doesn’t want that.”
“He doesn’t want that.”
“And you.” Devereaux stared at him for a moment. “You don’t want that either. That brings prison because you misused your office.”
“You are one sanctimonious son of a bitch.”
“You set me up twice. I took it personally,” Devereaux said.
“All because of that bitch.”
“Don’t ever speak of her.”
Pendleton grinned. It might have been his only real hobby, tearing the wings off people and tying cans to their tails. He had nettled Devereaux and that was what passed for a triumph in these empty days of enforced retirement.
They crossed over Key Bridge and took the Beltway south and they were long past downtown and the Mall, where R Section was tucked away in the top floor of the Department of Agriculture Building.
The air was heavy with the thought of rain. The colors were still open on the trees in the long, languid autumn of Washington and Virginia and Maryland.
“Where we going?”
“We’re using a safe house down in Charles County. Along Indian Head Highway,” Devereaux said.
“Why?”
“Because Hanley said he didn’t want you to set foot ever again inside Section. He said you soiled it too long to ever go back to it.”
“You’re all pushing me too much. I might just decide to take a chance and strike back.”
“Hanley doesn’t want you to harm R Section anymore.”
The highway was divided and busy with homebound commuters going to the sprawl of hamlets that led all the way down to Indian Head itself and the Naval Propellant Plant at the end of the road. Some twenty years before, it had been very rural and suspiciously southern but the hunger for housing tracts for commuters to the District had pushed back the forests along the Potomac River and Charles County was no longer the home of slot machines and little farms.
In most parts.
He turned at a highway that led east toward the main highway up the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. But they didn’t go that far. There was a turnoff into a woods and the dirt road did not lead far, only far enough for them to see the swamp ahead. It was a bog, ground low and spongy.
Devereaux looked at Pendleton until he understood.
“You can’t be serious.”
“It’s personal.”
“Hanley didn’t send you.”
“Hanley follows the rules. You broke the rules.”
“You son of a bitch—”
But Devereaux showed him the pistol then and he cut himself off.
“This is murder.”
“Yes,” Devereaux said. “In cold blood. Without any redeeming aspects. Except you’ll disappear from the face of the earth, which is reason enough.”
Pendleton stared at the pistol.
“You gonna shoot me.”
“If I have to,” Devereaux said. “But I’ll bet you can’t make it to those trees across there.”
“That’s a bog.”
“Swamp. Bog. Something like that.”
“You know this place.”
Devereaux said, “I know this place.”
“You can’t kill me.”
“Go ahead.”
“I won’t go.”
“Then I’ll shoot you now, you son of a bitch.”
The headlights illuminated the dark scene and sticks of trees across a marshy, long grass field. Pendleton licked the sweat from his upper lip.
“I can go away,” Pendleton said. “You want that deal?”
“You’re going away. That deal’s been made.”
Pendleton looked at him a long time, the blue eyes smoldering and careful at the same time.
“You’re crazy, ain’t you?” Pendleton said.
Devereaux made a signal. Pendleton sighed and opened the door of the car. The two men got out. The night air was close and the smell of rain was overwhelming. It would be raining very soon on a shuttered dark night by the Chesapeake Bay.
“I ain’t done you a wrong, boy,” Pendleton suddenly burst out.
“You did me a wrong a long time ago. In Paris and Zurich. You set me up for Kurt Heinemann. Kurt gave you a leg up the ladder, gave you names of Russian networks in Europe and you were the bright boy in Section. Oh, yes. You had to sacrifice a Section agent along the way named Devereaux but those things happen.”
Devereaux’s voice surprised him. It was calm but there was such a note of underlying hatred and contempt that both men were fascinated by it. The silence underscored it. The black night around them pressed the point to them.
“Whatever happened in Europe happened a long time ago, Devereaux.”
“I didn’t need revenge for that. I needed to be let alone. But you can’t pull one wing off a butterfly without pulling off the other, can you? You wanted to set up Heinemann inside CI and you needed me to distract Mickey Connors long enough to get the code machine. So you rigged up dirty shit about Rita Macklin because it could force me to do what you wanted—”
“All that’s been destroyed, Devereaux, you know that—”
“You made me expendable again. And Rita Macklin. And that poor dope in Hawaii who was disemboweled by the Japanese gang because he tried to be a good friend and reporter.… All the deaths come out of your hand.”
“You have deaths on you, Devereaux. Nobody escapes clean.”
“You dirtied Section. You set me up twice. You tried to use Rita Macklin. You’re sitting in that house in Georgetown now, figuring how to get around Hanley, get around me. You broke the rules, Pendleton, and you’re bad into your bones.”
“You make this personal,” Pendleton said.
Devereaux was silent. Then he nodded. “Personal,” he said.
“You gonna shoot me?”
“You can run or I can shoot you. It doesn’t matter, Pendleton. Maybe you could make the trees.”
Pendleton stared in fear at the field. Then he began to run, the tall grass slowing him, slapping his face with stems, the muck pulling at his shoes. The muck accumulated around his shoes and it was under him, drawing him down. He cried then, not Devereaux’s name or Hanley’s. “Clothilde!” It was the cry of a name from his past; he was drowning in the earth growing up to his chest. “Clothilde, aidez-moi!”
Devereaux stared at the figure in the headlights sinking deeper into the sea of tall grass. His arms were above his head and he was clutching at the air.
“Clothilde!”
What memory was suddenly shaken in him?
Devereaux stared. The man’s arms fell. And then his head sank beneath the grass and he cried and then it was muffled and then it was gone. The night was returned to insects and owls and the scurrying sounds of small animals. Devereaux stood still and waited and heard nothing but these other sounds of the busy Maryland night.
Then he got back into the car. He backed up the dirt path and found a turnaround. His rear wheels almost stuck once in the perpetually wet grass. It was a good night. It would rain and wash everything down and the tracks would be turned to rivers and smoothed out along with everything else.
On the highway, he drove slowly, thoughtfully. No one would speak of Pendleton’s disappearance. Not officially. Hanley would ask him about it as a matter of routine and, in any case, would not believe him.
He parked the car in a far lot at Dulles and put his shoes in a paper bag that contained clean shoes. He put the clean shoes on and then took the bag to a garbage can and dumped them in. The car might sit in the far parking lot for a week before its theft was reported.
He went to the terminal building and took a limousine home, all the way to Bethesda. The ride cost eighty-five dollars and he left a ten-dollar tip.
He entered the apartment and she was asleep and he did not want to wake her. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of vodka. He did not feel clean or free. He felt the weight of a man’s death the way he felt other weights. The vodka startled him because he rarely drank it anymore and the taste of it reminded him of his times alone when he had been the secret agent in a foreign land, doing the little jobs of the trade, unable to share the terrible exile with anyone, unable to share the secret horrors that filled his heart. He had shared it with his vodka, inviting the numbness.
It was a night to feel nothing.
The rain was heavy when it came and it blotted out the secrets of the world for a time and it soothed him, sitting alone at a kitchen counter in this little place that was home. It made him think of other days, the rain and the vodka and the silence.
Other days.