“Happens to the best of them,” Mickey Connors said. He smiled at Denisov. “You shoulda shopped with me in the first place, Russian. I know how to make a deal and keep it.”

  “But Devereaux was part of your deal and now he has the machine. Would you keep it like that?”

  “Devereaux is a problem,” Mickey said.

  Silence. And then Denisov said, “I must leave now.”

  “Don’t you want your money?”

  “No, no. You do not intend to give me any money, Mr. Connors. You intend to cheat me. You only want my account and then you would kill me and rob me and still try to get the machine. I am not such a fool as that.”

  Mickey smiled. “Maybe we’ll just work on you anyway and get the account.”

  Denisov took off his glasses then and put them in a case in his coat. It was two to one and had been. They both looked like killers who wouldn’t flinch at a thing. “How much time do you have? You broke down my door. It is afternoon. Maybe people have called the police already. How much time do you think it would take you to find my account number? You don’t even know what city. There is Lichtenstein as well as Geneva. Or Zurich. Or Luxembourg. Or the Bahamas. Would it take you a day? All night? No, you might get it or you might not but you don’t have any time. I think I will leave now.”

  Mickey Connors made a chewing motion and bit his lip. He was frowning now and looked at Kevin, who was made for murder.

  “He’s right and he’s cool enough. All right, Kevin. I hate to see the money go but we can’t afford it. California isn’t our territory.”

  Denisov smiled at him. “I thank you now.”

  “You don’t have to thank anyone. You should have dealt with me in the first place,” Mickey Connors said. “It’s a shame. You know where Devereaux is?”

  “I know he has my machine. It is your problem now.”

  Kevin had murder in his eyes. There was no heat to it, just a cold and even sleepy look that meant killing as a casual act.

  Mickey Connors stood aside, straddling the fallen German agent.

  “Thank you,” Denisov said. He stepped over the body and through the broken doorway. He pulled the door behind him and it would only partially close on the cracked jamb.

  “Why’d you let him go?”

  “Because Devereaux does have it and I got the thing Devereaux wants. I don’t understand all of it but somehow this woman, his little girlfriend, she was working with him hand in glove. The fucking devious bastard, he never trusted me.”

  “That’s right.”

  Devereaux stood in the bathroom door. The pistol was small and dark. “I didn’t think you were going to let him go, Mickey. That was generous of you. It shows a good instinct.”

  Slow, surprised. The smile spread across the lean Irish face and lit the eyes.

  “You got it, don’t you?”

  “It’s safe, Mickey. You did my deal for me, didn’t you?”

  “I did. I held my end.”

  “You fucking liar. I called Pendleton a half hour ago. He’s out playing golf.”

  “That’s where it happens, on the golf course.”

  “He doesn’t play golf. He was in his office. You never intended to make an even trade.”

  Mickey shook his head. “And neither did you.”

  “On the floor, Kevin, facedown, hands and feet spread.”

  Kevin got on the floor. He had no doubt about the man with the gun. He had seen him use it on a man he didn’t even know in a basement of a warehouse in New York. And he knew that look in the gray eyes, just as cold as his own. He could be made for killing, too.

  Devereaux watched Mickey’s face while he patted Kevin’s body and removed the gun. Then he crossed to Mickey Connors and put the pistol against his nose. “Now yours.”

  “At least you didn’t make me get down on the floor.”

  “My respect for the Kennedys and your father’s connection with them.”

  “You and Rita Macklin cooked this together. You were fucking me over and fucking Pendleton over.”

  “No. What I told you was true. But you didn’t want to do me the favor.”

  Devereaux stepped back with the piece in his hand and threw the other gun on the desk. “I wanted Kurt Heinemann and you didn’t believe me. Greed got in your way.”

  “You don’t kill a government agent like that. It takes time and I didn’t have the time to set it up.”

  “But you thought about it,” Devereaux said. Sarcasm was squeezed cold.

  “I did, I seriously did, but I didn’t see how I could do you the favor.”

  “Kurt had his agenda and you had yours and I had mine and we couldn’t seem to get together. I suppose you can’t trust people like us,” Devereaux said. He wasn’t smiling but something made Mickey smile.

  “So you’re going to shop the machine yourself. To Pendleton. Make your brownie points with the smoke.”

  “I can’t, Mick. I told you that. Pendleton and I are in this too deep. He’s broken all the rules and he knows it. More important, Kurt Heinemann knows it. Going back fifteen years.”

  “Kurt Heinemann? Who you going to give him to? Langley? You think Langley will do you a favor and bust Pendleton for you? You aren’t naïve, are you, lad? The G takes care of itself. It doesn’t go running to tell stories.”

  “I don’t need Langley. I need to settle a debt I picked up once and to settle a score at the same time. The trouble is with you, Mickey, thinking I was so far down that I couldn’t see my way up. That’s bad character judgment.”

  “I must of liked you,” Mickey Connors said. “I must of believed you.”

  “You wanted to use me to find a way to get the machine because you said it yourself, Langley couldn’t make the approach. And you figured that I was a secondary consideration. Especially after our little heart-to-heart in the car the other morning in the rain. I wanted you to take out Pendleton and you knew I was down to my last resource.”

  “You figure it that close?”

  “That close.”

  “What if I had taken you up on it and whacked him?”

  Devereaux smiled. The smile was the first one on his face.

  “Then, Mick, I would have given you the goddamned code machine,” Devereaux said. He crossed to the desk and punched in a local number.

  “Time,” he said. And replaced the receiver.

  “You can’t trust Pendleton. You do tricks for him and he’ll take you out just as soon as he has the chance.”

  “He had the chance in Zurich a long time ago. And now, in Santa Barbara. If it hadn’t been for Rita deciding to go to Hawaii… if it hadn’t been for a lot of things, I might have been dead in bed this morning. If you get caught by a blackmailer, you have to find a way to put him in your power. You can’t use threats, you have to use other things. I used you and I was lost, I couldn’t figure out how you could work for me. But you had to tell me some things and I made a big mistake.”

  “What was that?”

  “I trusted someone. I told someone and it worked out.” And he thought of the pain of that moment with Rita Macklin in the apartment in Bethesda when he had let down his guard and confessed some of his trouble to her. Peterson in Hawaii. One name and it had spurred her to save him.

  The door opened.

  There were three of them, young and nervous in appearance with drawn pistols. One was a woman with dark, darting eyes and a fierce expression on her face. They looked at the two men on the floor and then at Devereaux.

  “That’s him,” Devereaux said. He nodded at the unconscious Kurt Heinemann. “And the woman in the bedroom. She’s rigged to a bomb but it’s been deactivated.”

  “We thought only the man—”

  “They’re brother and sister,” Devereaux said. “Inseparable.”

  Kurt groaned and pushed at the floor and began to rise. One of the men stepped toward him and placed an automatic in his left ear.

  He stopped rising.

  “On the floor,” the man said. And Kurt felt his arm kicked out from under him. He hit the floor hard and an involuntary moan escaped him.

  “What is this about then?” Mickey Connors said, his hands apart from his coat, looking around the busy room.

  But Devereaux didn’t have time now.

  The woman said, “What about the machine?”

  “In the trunk of the red Nissan around the corner. Here’s the key,” Devereaux said.

  The third man led Ruth from the bedroom. Her ordeal showed in her eyes. He had not taken the gag from her mouth. The presence of four guns displayed in such a small space seemed to overwhelm them all with the tension of violence. Even the gun-holding trio were hostage to it and it made their movements sharp, almost violent.

  The woman with the pistol slipped it into her pocket and knelt beside Kurt. She produced a roll of duct tape and wrapped it around his mouth.

  “Hands behind your back.”

  Tape again.

  She pulled him to his feet roughly by pulling his hair.

  Mickey Connors seemed amused by all the activity. “More Section agents than I figured you had the clout to get. You must be on Pendleton’s winning team.”

  “Pendleton is not on mine,” Devereaux said. “But this was overdue.”

  “You didn’t get nothing out of it, lad, not a thing. Pendleton double-crossed you and double-crossed you and he’ll do it again soon as he gets the chance. You want to tell me about that blackmail?”

  “No, I don’t think so, Mick. I don’t think we have to go into it now.”

  The three with guns were leading the two Germans out of the room but Devereaux held up his hand. He wanted to see their faces. Ruth glared at him but Kurt was different. He was the same as he had been that morning in Zurich when he had thanked him for killing the Mossad on his trail.

  Fifteen years. Devereaux had thought about it from time to time in the isolated life he had led, even thought about it in nightmares that visited him after he had met Rita Macklin. He had never told her everything though he had explained the scar on his chest with the sort of clinical detail that did not invite closer scrutiny. There had been a lot of people in between but Kurt had been bad enough.

  “Mossad,” Devereaux said.

  And was rewarded by the black, calm eyes going wide.

  28

  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.”

  29

  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.”

 

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