He quickened his pace and tried to keep his eye on the car.
The street lamps above the palms on the causeway were too dim. Had someone left the car?
He began to jog toward the parking lot.
When he reached the lot, he walked directly to the car. He had no need for pretense. The same car had followed Rita Macklin. The same car was now following him.
Empty.
He opened the side door. A rental car. In the glove compartment, a tourist map of the Florida west coast.
Nothing in the ashtray.
Clean, empty.
No rental agreement. He opened the rear door and felt beneath the seats for bits of garbage. Nothing. The car might have been new except for the 3,149 miles on the odometer.
And the faint smell of soap, mingled with a smell of sweat, proof of the presence of someone. Someone had watched him; someone had followed him, followed Rita Macklin. A fourth element or a fifth?
He closed the door and looked around the parking lot, segmenting again. A woman standing next to the restaurant, waiting for someone, holding her hands in front of her and grasping the handles of a straw purse.
Two old men on a bench near a shipping-supplies store.
Two teenagers roller-skating down the sidewalk.
A shadow of a man near the docks. He walked quickly across the lot to the place where the pleasure boats were moored. Empty. Bobbing in the water.
No man; no more shadows. But there had been someone there watching him.
Who had followed him?
At that moment, a man in a white suite suddenly came behind him, bumped against him. Devereaux froze, then turned, his hands outstretched.
“Beg your pardon, wasn’t watching.” The smell of whiskey on his breath, smell of aftershave, a man with brown eyes and gray hair. In a white suit.
Devereaux let his hands fall. A moment ago, he would have killed him.
The tension drained out of him. His hands began to tremble.
“Sorry, friend,” the boozy man said, stumbling on.
Devereaux stood still.
A delicate matter, Hanley had said. Agency to agency. A little game played to get the secrets.
Devereaux’s hotel was the first in line on the south end of the beach. He entered the bright lobby and pushed through a crowd of elderly tourists being sorted out by room numbers at the front desk. It was a noisy hotel and the steel band players were now entertaining in the inner bar and lounge. He did not feel the music tonight; he wanted to be alone in his room, to sit and stare out the window of his balcony, to drink a bottle of vodka alone and not think about old deaths, old friends, or old enemies.
He took the elevator to the ninth floor.
He had pushed a wisp of his graying hair in the jamb of his door, imperceptible below the door handle, when he left.
He turned the key in the door and saw the hair was still there.
He opened the door and was framed for a moment against the light from the empty hallway.
He knew the room was not empty.
He had not expected this; he stood motionless for a moment. He did not have a weapon except for the weapon of assassination contained in the strands of wire in a copper bracelet on his wrist. The garroting weapon would be useless now.
The room was dark but he saw the shape in the shadows, the shape of a man.
He felt he could not move.
“No. Do not use the light. Be so good to come in and be quiet.”
The voice came from a grave of memory. Heavy, childlike, serious with a trace of sadness at the edge. The voice of a man he had betrayed.
Devereaux pushed the light button on the wall. He had to see.
The other man held a pistol in his large, hairy hand. He had the gentle, kind face of an icon.
“Be good to turn off the light,” the other man said. “I see you well enough in the darkness. And there may be watchers.”
Devereaux pushed the light switch again and the room plunged into half-darkness. He let the door close behind him. “I didn’t expect this,” he said.
In the shimmer of moonlight in the room, Devereaux saw the gun barrel move slowly up, fixing itself on a line with Devereaux’s chest.
“No,” Denisov said at last. “Neither did I.”
17
For some minutes they sat in the dark without speaking.
Gradually, Devereaux’s eyes became accustomed to the thin moonlight that gave an uncertain illumination to the room. A hotel room, his home for fifteen years, each room a mirror of the next he would occupy: bed, nightstand, white telephone, the inevitable motel room art hung above the bed; mirror and dresser and desk done in phony teakwood, the desk filled with a clutch of postcards and never-used stationery bearing the hotel’s name. Devereaux let his gray eyes catalogue the elements of the room, the elements of his life, while he waited for Denisov, for the split-second sound of the whump of the silencer, the last sound he would ever hear. This was the way a spy would die, he thought calmly: in a hotel room, in a bizarre place a thousand miles from any roots or real memories, working at a dirty little game that no one understood. He was amazed at his calm.
The room itself might not have been occupied, it showed so few signs of its tenant. Devereaux had lived in a thousand such rooms and he had learned not to make his mark on them, just as he did not make his mark on the lives and scenes he moved through; when the housekeeper cleaned in the mornings, it was as though a ghost had occupied the place, leaving a faint impression on the sheets, dampness clinging coolly to the walls of the bathroom, and that was all. Devereaux’s life was contained in a single small, battered suitcase resting in the closet. It carried all his clothes and identities and all his other needs, including the inevitable small pharmacopoeia shared by professional world travelers — pills to wake up, pills to go to sleep, pills to give an illusion of security on cold nights in far places when illusions were all that was left.
Did Denisov consider these things as well?
They had been on the same duty in Asia, mirrors of each other. Denisov was cultural attaché with the Soviet embassy in Cambodia; Devereaux posed then as a Central Press Association bureau chief working out of Saigon and Phnom Penh. They made their moves and countermoves, nudging pawns forward into little acts of death, the pieces circling each other with the slow patience of wrestlers. And then, at endgame, nothing was resolved.
Each had known, after a time, that the other existed. Once, in the famous old bar on the roof in Hong Kong where all the correspondents gathered, they had recognized each other and realized they were both away from their game on leave. Denisov had purchased a drink at one end of the bar and sent it to Devereaux at the other end; but Devereaux had not tasted it. He had left the place and not seen Denisov again until the next game.
Three games in all in fifteen years. The last had been played out in England and Ireland. Denisov, for reasons of state, had even saved Devereaux’s life. He had claimed to be Devereaux’s friend.
Devereaux had returned the lie with another: Trust me. In their mutual wariness, in their professional paranoia that made all shadows good and usual, all light evil and frightening, they had begun to understand each other. Which did not make them friends, even if they had wished it; it made them, if anything, dangerous enemies.
Devereaux had paid Denisov shabbily for the favor of his life. He had arranged to deliver him to the British who had expelled him to the Soviet Union. For two years, Denisov had been in exile, out of action, at home in Moscow, disgraced by his failure and by his exposure.