Devereaux thought of Denisov.
Denisov had been sent by the KGB with incomplete instructions to obstruct Devereaux’s investigation of Hastings’ network in Ireland and Scotland.
In the end, Devereaux had just managed to survive by betraying Denisov to the British authorities. They had expelled the Soviet back to Russia.
Thoughts of Hastings and Denisov vanished. It was time. The dreary present had to be served.
Devereaux dialed directly a different number in Washington from the one he had dialed one hour before.
This time, he heard Hanley’s voice clearly on the phone.
“There have been developments,” Devereaux began in a quiet voice.
The line was secured by a double scrambler box at Hanley’s end. Devereaux could see his control officer alone in the chill of his bare office, his hands resting on the empty desk top. Hanley rarely took notes. Hanley rarely left memos. In this business, he said, only those things that are not secrets are written down.
Devereaux recounted the incident in the chapel that morning; and the gray car; and his information about the man from the Vatican now residing in the motherhouse.
“A priest?”
“Yes. Most probably.” He hesitated, turning away from the phone booth, unconsciously surveying the field around him for any face, car, shadow that did not seem usual, that might be watching him. It was the spy’s game, to segment the field of vision in a glance and then let the mind examine each piece for an element that did not belong there.
“What is their intelligence apparatus?” Devereaux said.
“Why? Do you suspect—”
“I suspect everything.”
“The Congregation for the Protection of the Faith. Would the man from Rome be one of them?” Hanley asked.
“I don’t know. Perhaps there’s a way of finding out. The Rome station man.”
“January,” Hanley said. “He can make inquiries.… And the Agency?” Hanley continued after a moment. “Are they still on the field?”
“Rice,” Devereaux said. “He’s getting a suntan. We played a game at the beginning of the week. He pretended I wasn’t here and I pretended he wasn’t here.”
“Does he have any connection with the gray car you saw? Following that reporter?”
“No. It’s not their usual procedure in any case. And I don’t think they want to get burned twice by Rita Macklin. Not on the same case.”
“But where does the gray car come from? Is this a third element?”
“Or a fourth? Or fifth? If the Vatican has sent an agent here and we’re here and the CIA is here—” Devereaux paused and smiled. “A surfeit of spies.”
“Yes. And now this damned business with this woman in the chapel. It was all over the evening news programs—”
“Miracles aren’t ‘damned business,’ ” Devereaux said.
“Miracle?” Hanley made his imitation of a laugh. “Miracles don’t happen. That’s what’s wrong with it all. Someone set it up.”
“Who?” Devereaux said. “If it was rigged, who rigged it? The Agency doesn’t gain by more publicity directed at the priest. I guess they were waiting around down here for the matter to cool down, to have another go at Tunney. And the Vatican hasn’t announced its presence here. So who gained with this show this morning?”
“I don’t know,” Hanley said. “You’re supposed to find out.”
“Perhaps it was a miracle after all.” Devereaux knew it would annoy Hanley.
“Dammit. Nothing makes sense, not from the minute this man came out of Thailand.”
“No,” Devereaux said. “Not even our involvement in it. Why are we concerned?”
Yes. It was the same question that had dogged him from the moment Hanley put him on the assignment in New York. Why was R Section delving into a matter involving a fellow intelligence agency?
“We have to be concerned is all,” Hanley said in the vague way of a man dismissing an irrelevant question.
Devereaux waited and let the silence hum on the phone lines. Dusk had come quickly and night was dark and purple over the Gulf.
“Talks with the Soviets, we don’t want a hitch,” Hanley said. But it was not the truth and the voice of the Control could not carry it.
“Or just our usual interagency jostling for position.”
“It’s more complex than that.”
“What is?”
Silence again.
“Devereaux?”
He waited.
“This is a matter of delicacy. Tunney was their man in Asia. When he came out, they wanted him in a box. And then they had to let him go and they are not satisfied. He has something they want.”
“And we want it first.”
“Yes.”
Devereaux let his breath explode softly against the green mouthpiece of the plastic phone. He was standing in the open yet he felt constrained, as though he had been placed in a small cell without windows, pitched in total darkness. He closed his eyes.
“Why do we have to know?”
“There are matters here. Delicate matters,” Hanley said vaguely. “Agency to agency.”
Devereaux thought of Hastings concocting his reports from the clippings of English and Irish papers. Until the day he really found something important, something that he did not make up, and was killed for it. He thought of Denisov, the Soviet KGB man, floundering as blindly as he had floundered in the trap of Hastings’ knowledge. It was happening again. There was nothing new to say about this matter of an old priest from Asia yet vast forces seemed to be grinding slowly toward each other, groping and clumsy, sending blind agents against each other, and no one knew why: They only knew they had to play this game, at this time, in this place.
The matter with Hastings and the Irish had been over for a long time but he could not help thinking about it now. He felt as trapped, as alone, as he had felt then. He felt that his survival now was not certain.
“What if Tunney has no secret, has nothing to say?” Devereaux said at last.
“Ah.” A long pause. “Then it will not have been worth it, will it?”
There was nothing more to say. They hung up at the same time. For a moment, Devereaux stared at the night waters, listening to the birds cry against the darkness.
It will not have been worth it.
But it was always this way in the field: not understanding in whole or part, working to bend to the question at hand, never seeking beyond it. Never to know too much. Or end up with too little. The world of spies was an infinite series of watertight compartments and the agent went from one to another only after locking the last compartment behind him.
Don’t think of Hastings or what happened to Denisov. That compartment was closed long before.
He felt immensely tired as he began to walk slowly back down the causeway to the island. The hotels along the beach were gleaming and the boats in the harbor bobbed darkly in the water.
Unconsciously, as he turned his thoughts back to the present, he watched the scene around him and segmented the field of vision. Trees. Boats. A jogger flashing along the trail. Posts. Cars.
Car.
A gray car.
The car moved past him in the stream of traffic moving toward the island. He watched it as he ambled slowly. The car turned at the far end into the Howard Johnson’s parking area, then crossed to the other roadway and slid into the parking lot near the harbor.