League of Terror

2

She stepped out into the bright October light. The sunlight was fragmented against the golden maples behind the apartment complex. It was dazzlingly beautiful in that moment.

Rita Macklin stepped onto the new gravel on the lot, stopped, smiled at the sky and trees. The bad thoughts about Devereaux had left her; she would be all right for the rest of the day. Now she was herself, an attractive woman with merry eyes and an eager manner that pleased all men and not a few women. She could not be given to melancholy on a perfect autumn morning.

She fumbled for her car keys in her purse and pulled them out. The car was a five-year-old Ford Escort, a minimal sort of car that fitted her life and style. She hadn't wanted a car at all but her bosses insisted she have one. There are stories outside the District, Mac would say; you have to fly out of Dulles, another would say, and it would be more economical. Inside the District, she still used the clean, swift Metro underground and the poke-along buses. Sometimes she would just walk all the way home, up Massachusetts to Wisconsin Avenue and out to the Old Georgetown Road, marveling at all that was new in the city, comforted by all the things that had not changed. But today she had to go to Dulles, so she would use the car.

She had her keys in hand as she reached the car. In the next moment, she was on the ground.

She had fallen, she thought.

She felt a dull sickness in her stomach and wondered if she had broken the heel of her right shoe. The shoes cost $125, which was obscene, but she had loved them when she saw them in the store on L Street.

She thought her skirt would be soiled by the gravel and dirt in the parking lot. A stupid fall and she had ruined her clothes and would have to change and miss the next flight… The thoughts came jumbled and fast as she lay on the gravel and tried to decide why she felt sick. She tried to turn on her hip and push herself up but her right arm didn't work. She thought she had sprained it in falling. And why had she fallen?

Then she felt the pain from her belly up across the right side of her chest to her shoulder and from her shoulder down to her right elbow. The pain was centered in her right side but she couldn't understand why she wanted to retch.

Instead, Rita moaned. And blood filled her mouth and her nose, although she did not know this yet.

She blinked to be able to see better. She saw a man coming between the rows of parked cars. The sun was behind him and he was merely a shadow until he came near. He carried a briefcase. She noticed the initials on the briefcase and thought it was pretentious to have initials on your case. She wouldn't have thought of doing that. She counted herself a simple person. She wouldn't have owned a car but she had to go to Dulles, where the plane would have left already—

Oh my God, she thought, I'm going to scream in a moment.

It was the lawyer who lived in the apartment at the other end of the hall. Tom. Tom something, they had met at a party of a mutual friend in the same apartment building. He had wanted to put the hit on her but he really wasn't her type at all. Now she was lying here, embarrassing herself, embarrassing him. What an awful way to start a—

She moaned again and saw that frightened look in his eyes, as though he were looking at something quite horrible. His look frightened her more than being on the ground.

"Please," she said.

"My God, Rita, your blouse, your face—"

She wasn't seeing him very well.

What about her blouse?

"You're bleeding, you've been shot," Tom said. "My God, Rita, I'll call emergency… I heard the shot."

What about her blouse? There was nothing wrong with her blouse. She looked down at her blouse and saw that the green satin was wet on the right side and that the green had turned a much darker color. What about her blouse?

He was leaving her and the world spun around so that the rows of cars narrowed around her. Were they going to crush her? What did she care? She didn't want to close her eyes because she thought she might fall asleep right there, between the parked cars in the parking lot. That would make her look foolish. Tom what's-his-name certainly shouldn't have left her to look foolish. Was she drunk? She had gone running five miles this morning, all the way out to the Beltway and back, and she had eaten an English muffin, lite cream cheese, and a tomato slice for breakfast…

She closed her eyes despite herself.

3

Devereaux picked up the telephone in the living room of the three-room safe "house" on West Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan.

He was just over six feet tall, with graying hair and absolutely pewter eyes. For a moment, he only listened to the complex whine of the scrambler becoming activated.

"November," Hanley said.

"Control," Devereaux responded.

"There's been… a rather bad thing," Hanley said. His voice was so unusually delicate, almost hesitant. It was the voice of someone trying to be a friend while conveying both sympathy and bad news.

What a peculiar tone of voice. Hanley was only control and not his friend by any means.

"Rita Macklin was shot this morning in the parking lot of her apartment building," Hanley said. "We were only notified a little while ago, through the editor of that magazine she worked for. She had left her building at the usual time, according to him; she was catching a flight to Phoenix."

Devereaux waited. If he spoke now, he would betray himself to Hanley. He thought of the voice on the answering machine and how he had been tempted to call her and catch the shuttle back to her. But he had not because it would have been no good again. They had loved each other too much to put up with hurts and disappointments in his work for Section. He understood how much he hurt her, and there was no way not to go on hurting her. So he had cut it off, finally, even if she could not. He always dreaded returning to this apartment, dreaded the blinking red light on the answering machine that meant someone had called. Would it be her voice? "Call me." But he loved her too much to do that.

"Goddamn you, Hanley, is she dead?"

"She's in surgery. She lost a lot of blood before they got to her. She was in shock at the scene; her eyes were rolling back above her lids." He paused; the graphic description chilled both of them. There was a long silence before Devereaux spoke.

"Who shot her?"

"An assassin," Hanley said. "Shot from a grove of maples behind her apartment house. She wasn't robbed, she was set up to be shot."

"Who shot her?" Devereaux said.

"The police say they don't have any clues, that—"

"Screw the police. Screw the goddamn police." Just this close to losing control. They both understood it. More silence, more waiting. The telephone line buzzed faintly. Devereaux pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. "I want to know who shot her."

"Devereaux," Hanley said. "I don't know. We're working on it through liaisons. With the Bureau. We're doing what we can—"

"Where is she?"

"Saint Margaret's Hospital. We made certain she had the best. Has. The doctor has a good reputation, but she was in shock and the loss of blood… Also a concussion when she fell. After she was hit. That concerned him greatly for a time. They took X rays, a C-scan, EEG…" The medical terms were supposed to soothe; they did not. "Everything is being done…"

Devereaux again made a silence by not propping up the dying words of Hanley's monologue. He looked out the single living room window at the hurly-burly below. Eighth Avenue was in full early-evening swing. The streets were crowded with commuters and idlers, ladies of the evening and boys of the night, theatergoers and tired young women walking home from work in limp gray suits and tennis shoes. The city had worked desperately hard all day and now it would play desperately hard all night. There was no respite from the sense of desperation, even in the nightmares of sleep.

Devereaux saw Rita as she was the first time, on that beach in Florida a long time ago when he only meant to use her and not to love her. Call me. He could have picked up the phone yesterday or the day before or a year before.

"What was she working on?" He tried a calm tone in the face of the nightmare. A fire engine wailed beyond his windows, one more scream in the night.

"A piece about the renaissance in city life in Pittsburgh. Also this story in Phoenix, about the crime syndicate. It was about the reporter who was killed there years ago. Don Bolles, blown up in his car," Hanley said. "Her editor, MacCormick, he told me that. He didn't seem surprised that I had called him. I told him I was with the Bureau but I knew he didn't believe me. He knew about you, about her… relationship to you."

"That was past," Devereaux said.

"But he knew I wasn't FBI," Hanley said.

"What else was she working on?"

"Nothing of importance, nothing to get shot over. It was the anniversary of his death, this Bolles fellow, it was a retrospective and a look at the city today. I don't really understand journalists but he told me it was routine."

"Is he sure? Who has her notes on the Outfit?"

"I beg your pardon?"

Devereaux closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"The crime syndicate in Phoenix. Did he have her notes?"

"No."

"Then why—"

"I notified the Bureau, I told you. They're looking into it."

"Yes. You told me."

More silence.

"Are you coming to Washington?"

"Yes," Devereaux said.

"We can send a man to the airport to meet you. Drive you to the hospital. You can have a car at your disposal."

"Yes." He said it in a dull voice, keeping the conversation from flickering into silence now because he was suddenly afraid of silence, afraid he would hear her voice.

The apartment was dark. He had been sitting in the dark, drinking vodka, listening to the roar of the city outside his windows. He had not thought about Rita Macklin for days and he had wondered if he would eventually reach the point when he would not think about her at all. Memory can be contained and all old wounds turned to healed scars by new experience. It wasn't the passage of time at all that did it but burying the past under each new, unrelated experience. Now she was back in all his thoughts, she was all old wounds torn open again.

"There's been a lot of this. Murder. In the capital. The police think it was unrelated to her, perhaps—"

"Don't tell me that. Not in Bethesda, not in the morning. That's bullshit, Hanley."

"You're upset. You have every reason to be. I called you as soon as I was told…"

Hanley's voice craved sympathy. He wanted Devereaux to be glad that he had acted so humanely. He wanted Devereaux's forgiveness for whatever it was he had ever done.

Devereaux replaced the receiver.

He walked into the bedroom and turned on the small brass lamp at the side of his bed. He rarely slept in the bed but on the couch, under a single prickly wool blanket, generally falling asleep while he read a book. The apartment was littered with books. They were stacked on the floor everywhere because the safe house had no bookshelves, although it contained two television sets. The books made some mark of his on the place. And he kept vodka in the refrigerator, neat rows of bottles of vodka so that he would never be without it.

He placed the 9-millimeter Beretta in the bag with a few bits of clothing. And the blue passport. And the British passport, too, in case he would have to become someone else. He slipped the money pouch—Velcro close, waterproof—inside his waistband.

He zipped the canvas bag and turned toward the door. The front entry had four locks. He opened the door, stepped into the tiled hall, and closed the door. He relocked all four locks, sending the dead bolts home four times, four thuds of metal against metal in the silent chamber of the hall. The door was solid steel and so was the framing around the door.

He walked to the elevator cage and pressed the button. The machinery pulled the elevator slowly to the sixth level.

"Call me," she had said on the message tape. He had wanted to purge her from his life.

The doors opened and he stepped inside the cage.

Call me.

He wanted tears in that moment but none came. He listened to her voice over and over as the cage descended.

4

Devereaux sat in the lounge on the second floor. The hospital was full of night sounds, groans from the darkened halls and television sets. All the fear of sickness and death in a hospital is concentrated in the night corridors and is endured through the narcotics of conversation and banal TV entertainment, punctuated by groans.

He was alone. He didn't need the driver or the car. Or goddamned Section and the goddamned sympathy of someone like Hanley. Section had tied him to remain an agent—to abandon Rita—because they knew all the secret things that Devereaux had done. They had Devereaux tied forever to them because they needed him. Goddamned Section. For one moment a long time ago, he had traded his soul for something Section knew he wanted to have. Thought he needed—until he met Rita Macklin.

Section. He felt hate and he didn't know if it was for himself or Section, but Section was sitting out there and he could kick at it, maybe bring it down, shoot to kill…

She was dying. He felt it. Dying was pure cold, pure white.

"Mr. Devereaux?"

He looked at the surgeon and was shocked to see how young he was. Or was it merely that Devereaux was growing old?

"Your friend is out of surgery now," the surgeon said. He had changed his smock because of the blood on it. For a surgeon, he had learned sensitivity somewhere.

Devereaux waited. He almost never asked questions because the silence makes a better questioner.

"She's in guarded condition." He waited for a question but none came.

Devereaux sat, staring at him, not with curiosity or hostility or any emotion on his face.

"There was a lot of damage. She's lost part of her right lung. That's what took so long. There was no way to save all of it. When the bullet entered, it exploded. Fortunately for her life, the bullet was not dead-on. It entered below her right breast but exited sharply up, through her shoulder. The shoulder muscles were damaged; I don't know how great the neurological damage is. While she was under, I tried to get a grasping response from her right hand but she couldn't manage it. But this can be temporary. I mean, the partial paralysis."

He was telling Devereaux everything, as calmly as possible. Devereaux's silence demanded everything.

"The point is, she has a healthy heart, she has good circulation, she was undoubtedly athletic. These are the pluses. The lung. Well, you can live with one lung, let alone only losing part of one… but the trauma of losing it this way and the loss of blood before surgery count against. I'm trying to be as honest as I can."

Devereaux knew dying was cold, was white. It was still there and he could sense it. "Is she going to die?"

"I don't know. I hope not."

Devereaux got up. He saw the surgeon was shorter than he was and that his eyes were very tired. "Is there anything anyone can do?"

"She's being monitored, I'm on call… there's nothing to do now."

"Can I see her?"

"There's… look, Mr. Devereaux. Her head is bandaged. From the concussion. There's a lot of healing going on right now, tubes, a sling. I really wish you wouldn't."

Devereaux saw her anyway, from the door of the bright-lit room where she lay. Her eyes were closed and her beautiful red hair was capped by a crown of bandages. He saw the machines that measured the course of her life and the green lines that noted she had advanced another heartbeat.

"Oh, goddamn it," Devereaux said. He let the door close without a sound.

5

Room 803 of the Dupont Plaza Hotel was small and marginally clean. The window overlooked the neighborhood around the Circle. It was just after one in the morning. The city looked seedy and dark at night because of the overgrowth of southern trees on small northern lots and the dangerous shadows of street lamps obscured by the trees. The usual derelicts occupied the park in the middle of Dupont Circle.

It was just after one in the morning and they had given him a bottle of vodka at the liquor store on Wisconsin in Bethesda. In the empty lobby of the hotel, he had dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter to order a bucket of ice and a large glass brought to his room. The clerk explained that the bar was closed and there was an ice machine on each floor and that the plastic glasses in the room would have to suffice. Even money could not buy service.