Hanley did not drive and did not have a chauffeured automobile. It was a perk of office he deserved as director of operations for R Section but he had a curious, populist distaste for the idea of public servants riding in limousines. He was from Nebraska and entering his final years of government service. He had been with R Section since the beginning and had climbed slowly and more or less honestly through the ranks. He had never been “in the field” and had an odd sense of having lost something because of that lack. He had never married; his relatives were all dead; he had his job in R Section and his friendship with the director of R Section, Lydia Neumann; and he had some men he could relate to and even have lunch with at times. He never took a vacation because there was no place to go and a vacation would merely have meant separation from his real life.
No. He was not a friend of the former agent, Devereaux, known in files as November. No, not at all.
The taxi swept through the rain down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol. Thunder clapped across the boulevards of the city and filled the circle parks where the dope dealers and homeless mingled under the Southern trees. Hanley studied the beaded seat of the driver.
“What is that thing you’re sitting on?” he said.
“Beads, man. Help you stay cool in summer. Help your back. Sit on beads good for you when you driving.”
“They don’t look comfortable.”
“They are,” the driver said, challenging him in the rearview mirror.
Hanley sighed. He settled back into the discomfort of the dirty vinyl interior. Everything about the day was full of discomfort. Irritation. Damn Devereaux. The man was bound to cause this trouble and Hanley should have seen it coming.
The taxi swept into the square before the Capitol and skidded to a stop in front of the Irish saloon. An Irish saloon, Hanley thought: how appropriate.
Twenty-seven hours before, all hell had broken loose. And it was still loose in the streets. It was all Devereaux’s fault.
Hanley paid and demanded a receipt. He kept his accounts regular; he was probably the most honest employee in the United States government, including the president.
He crossed the sidewalk and pushed into the saloon. It was 11:30 in the morning and only a few drinkers had slipped away from their offices to begin another day with the bottle.
Devereaux stood at the bar. A glass of beer sat on a cardboard coaster in front of him. Hanley came up.
“I don’t know why I’m here.”
Devereaux looked at him. There was no mercy today for anyone. “Because you have to be here. Because you need me.”
“You kidnapped Miss Macklin.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a criminal act, even for an intelligence officer who has involved himself in criminal acts before and been exonerated by his long-suffering government.”
“Drug dealing is also a crime. The jails and the parks are full of dealers.”
“Dr. Krueger was found in his study. He was hallucinating. He is now in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, in the psychiatric ward. They say he took LSD, they don’t say how much, they don’t even know if his sanity will return. He stabbed himself, they said, he stabbed himself in the palm of his left hand with some kind of spike, the sort they use in offices. The police found that in his study as well.”
“Those who live by the sword,” Devereaux said.
“You’ve become a philosopher. The director of the sanitarium where you… abducted Miss Macklin… he identified you.”
“And Dr. Krueger. We did it together.”
“And Dr. Krueger then decides to OD on LSD.”
“Did they find drugs in his house?”
“A lot of them. A cornucopia of pharmaceuticals. But he is a doctor.”
“He’s a drugstore with two feet,” Devereaux said.
“God, you are a bastard, a murderous bastard,” Hanley said. “It’s good we’ve separated you from Section. You’ve gone too far.”
“Too many times.”
There was frustration in Hanley’s voice and in the tremble of his hand.
The barman came up.
Hanley said, “Beefeater martini, straight up. With an olive,” he said.
The barman turned away.
“It’s not even noon yet,” Devereaux said.
“You’ve interrupted my lunch hour.”
“No. It’s your turn.”
“We’ve cleaned up the mess you’ve made. You knew we would.”
“Yes.”
“We can’t be caught in a scandal. You’re blackmailing Section.”
“My loyalty is unquestioned,” Devereaux said.
Hanley frowned at the sarcasm.
The martini came and Hanley sipped it. It wasn’t the same as the martini he had every day at lunch in his usual place where they always made him a well-done cheeseburger with onion and a martini and a little kosher dill on the side. He had taken to onions in recent years. Hanley loved his routine and felt lost without it today.
“Where is Miss Macklin?”
“Safe.”
“But where?”
Devereaux stared at him. “It’s none of your business. Your business is giving me a trail to Henry McGee.”
“I told you yesterday that he didn’t exist.”
“That was yesterday.”
That was the morning when the police found the raving Dr. Krueger in the study of his home. That was the morning of inquiries from police about a former patient of Dr. Krueger’s named Devereaux who had been released the day before from hospital and who had appeared with Dr. Krueger at a private sanitarium about eight P.M. the previous evening and secured the release of another of Dr. Krueger’s patients. The police wanted to question someone in authority inside R Section and Hanley had pulled strings and blown whistles until the lower-level cops were squelched by the higher levels. There would be no inquiry; there would be no pursuit at any level. Until and unless Dr. Krueger recovered his senses and could tell coherently and believably how it was that he ingested a controlled substance at home and why his house was full of other controlled substances, including cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and even a small quantity of crack.
“I made a scan,” Hanley said.
“I don’t understand the term.”
“We’re in the computer age. There is too much information. It floats around the world like a cloud. A scan is the act of penetrating the cloud for a specific raindrop.”
“You’ve become poetic in your declining years.”
“The Irish special branch made known to the SAS in Britain the description of a suspected terrorist who killed another suspected terrorist in a public house in the west of Ireland. It was a ghastly crime in its details, involving sexual mutilation.”
“Why did it become a matter big enough to circulate to England?”
“Because of what happened two hours after this murder. Two hours later, a public house was damaged when a police car parked outside it was bombed. In the Republic of Ireland, not the north. Two policemen were killed and a number of people in the public house. Yes, the inevitable eyewitnesses said they saw a man who had visited the public house earlier. An American, they thought. They described him. Guess who he looks like? The man who had killed the terrorist earlier. And guess who they both looked like?”
“Henry McGee.”
“They don’t have a name because they don’t know he exists. They think he might be Irish or English. Being an American doesn’t seem to fit for them; apparently, Americans are supposed to be the victims of terrorism, never the perpetrators. But they routinely put the description on the scan for American eyes. I picked the description out of the scan. We should inform them.”
“We should not.”
Hanley stared at Devereaux for a moment. Then he looked around the large, dark room, Erin Go Bragh, said one sign on a wall, left from Saint Patrick’s Day. English Out said another, more heartfelt, scrawled on plaster. It was a dreadful saloon.
“Why did you choose this place to meet?”
“It has a front door and a back door. In case you weren’t friendly and had second thoughts. Besides, I like the beer.”
“You have caused me great professional discomfort. These are trying times for Section. Budgets are to be cut; manpower is to be cut. The world of espionage and intelligence is under siege because the world has become a nicer place.”
“So it seems. All those smile buttons in the seventies finally had some effect. Like prayers for the conversion of Russia that Catholic schoolchildren recited after Sunday mass in the fifties.”
Hanley didn’t know what to say. He looked at his drink. He looked at the wall filled with whiskey-company mirrors.
“So Henry McGee exists,” Hanley said. “More important, he seems to be involved in terror.”
“He has always been involved in terror. I tried to tell you that from the beginning. And he worked for R Section once and it would be a terrible embarrassment to Section to have a terrorist traced back to it. Especially at a time of budget cutbacks and such.”
“You are being sarcastic,” Hanley said.
Devereaux smiled. It unnerved the other man.
Hanley said, “We bit the bullet on that long ago. We went after him when he defected to the Soviets. We took our heat and we put him in prison. But he escaped and—”
“Yes. That’s the big and, isn’t it? He collaborated with us again. That’s the part Section can’t allow to get out. And it might get out as long as Henry McGee is alive and there’s a chance that someone might catch him. The Irish. Or the Brits. If SAS used some of their preferred methods of torture, they might accidentally trip across information they didn’t know Henry had. And where would that put you, Hanley?”
Why was this man shoving him into a corner? Hanley looked around wildly for a moment, as though he contemplated physical escape. But the doors were all there for the opening and closing. He could leave any time he wanted.
“You said he existed. You said he tried to kill you and Miss Macklin.”
“But you didn’t believe me for a long time. Now you believe me. And it frightens you.”
“I cannot authorize a sanction. We do not sanction people.”
“I know. It’s the reason we had to use boom boxes to attack Noriega in the Vatican embassy in Panama. When all else fails, make noise.”
“The business in Panama was botched from the beginning. That wasn’t the fault of R Section. The Langley firm fucked up that intelligence. He was their man, not ours.”
“But Henry is our man, Hanley, isn’t he?”
“What do you want? A piece of paper that says you have been hired by the government of the United States to find and kill Henry McGee, a former employee turned traitor twice?”
“I don’t suppose I’d get that.”
“What do you want?”
“Authority. A mission directive to the effect that Henry McGee is sought abroad for the attempted assassination of an agent of Section. Named Devereaux. Who is a current employee of Section.”
“You want to come back in?”
Devereaux had no pity now in his gray eyes. “No. I want that authority and when I’ve got him, it’ll be done. Then I’ll retire on disability as you wanted and spend the rest of my life forgetting the first part of it.”
“But it’s authority to try to apprehend a suspect—”
“I’ll kill him overseas, Hanley. I won’t drag the blackbird home and put him on your doorstep. I don’t want your approval for this but it’s one more thing on my side to have a mission directive in my pocket.”
“What will you do with Miss Macklin?”
“That’s none of your business, I told you that.”
“We didn’t mean her harm, Devereaux,” Hanley began. Was he apologizing?
“But you did her harm with that quack Krueger. You did her harm, Hanley.” Now his voice was low, without any edge to it. “If you had meant her harm, I would have killed you as well.”
“You’re crazy. You’ve gone too far. Too many years living by your own rules.”
“There are no rules.”
God, this room was cold and damp and bleak, exactly like an Irish tavern in the middle of winter. Hanley felt withered to his soul.
“When do you want it?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Where will you be?”
“Right here.”
“What if Mrs. Neumann vetoes it?”
“Tell her the truth of things if you have to. Or lie to her. It doesn’t matter.”
“And then you’ll quit Section.”
“You’ll never see me again. Or hear from me. As long as you send my disability checks.”
“Government pensions are not great.”
“They’re sufficient.”
“But what will you do?”
Devereaux put down the glass of beer. It was empty. He looked at the foam and then around him, at the walls of gloom and the drawn faces of the morning drinkers. He spoke not for Hanley but for himself.
“Live with Rita Macklin,” Devereaux said.