The Lacey Confession (16 page)

Harry wanted nothing more than to go home. All the way home, to Roswell. He'd abandoned his Soho flat. It was a dangerous place to be. Once he heard the news about Sir Anthony, he knew he was in danger. Whoever killed the old man was looking for exactly what Harry had—the Lacey Confession. The President of the United States told him to sit tight and wait for his return call. But he had to leave his apartment.
The President of the United States was going to call him!
and he would not be there when he did. He was on edge. He'd read some of Lacey's confession, the confession of a dead man. Why did he insist it be released to the public? It was designed, it seemed to Harry, for only one purpose—revenge. From the grave, Frederick Lacey meant to inflict more damage on the Kennedys. He killed them all, thought Harry.
He killed them all!
Who else was there to hurt? And, who would be afraid if the whole world knew? Who needed to stop it so badly they would murder for it? The Kennedys, or what's left of them? Whoever it was, Harry knew he was now as much a target as the confession itself. Did Lacey have any idea his confession would prove this disastrous? Murder. Did he foresee the chaos? Could it be that's what he wanted? Harry didn't know, couldn't know and Sir Anthony could shed no light on the question—not anymore. There was no time to waste. He had to get out, get away. He packed a small bag, took the Lacey document, and fled. He beat the police by less than five minutes.

The American Embassy was surrounded by the English authorities. The grounds themselves were American property, sovereign territory immune from English law, but he had to get inside to be safe. Only inside. All the entrances were guarded, even the few nobody was supposed to know about. Harry had no chance of getting back in. The rain that fell all day had drifted to a drizzle. The cold air did not warm with the afternoon. There was no late day sun. He was cold and damp. He needed to call the President back himself. The President would have an answer for all this. Certainly he would. Maybe the President tried to get him on the phone already and he wasn't there. What would he have thought? “Christ!” muttered Harry. He so badly wished he was downstairs in his house in Roswell, Georgia. He longed to hear Aunt Sadie calling him to dinner. He missed his mother. She would know what to do. He was positive of that. She would never stand to see her son stranded on the street, in the cold, in the rain, a million miles from home. He turned and started walking toward St. James's Square, where he stopped and found a public telephone.

“Please, Iden . . .”

“Albertson, is that you?”

“Mr. Levine?”

“Yes.”

“I'll put you through.”

“Thank you,” said Harry.

“Levine,” said the President, almost immediately. “Where are you?”

“In a small café near St. James's Square.”

“They want to talk to you.”

“I know. They're all over the place.”

“We're going to get you in, Harry, okay?”

“Yes. Sure, Mr. President.”

“I'm going to put someone on this line. His name is Louis Devereaux. I want you to do whatever he tells you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” With that, the next voice Harry heard was Louis Devereaux's.

“Don't worry, Harry. I've got it all under control. I need you to believe me.” It was as much a plea as anything else.

“Okay,” Harry mumbled.

“Do you have it?” When Harry gave no reply, Devereaux said it again. “Do you have it?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Have you read it?”

“Yes. Some of it.”

“About Kennedy?”

“Yes.”

“About others too?”

“Yes. I saw lots of names, going back many years. Lenin. Hitler. King Edward. Lots of them. I didn't read it all. The Czar, too.”

“The Second?”

“What?”

“Czar Nicholas the Second?”

“Yes. Look, how can I . . . ?”

“There's an Indian restaurant,” Devereaux spoke over him. “It's called The Standard. It's on Westbourne Grove. Go there. You know where that is?”

“Yes. Go when?”

“Thirty minutes. When you get there, the owner will have a message for you. He's an old man, heavy set, white hair. Indian, of course. He'll be expecting you. Did you get that?”

“Yes. What kind of message will he have?”

“Just take whatever he gives you and follow the instructions.”

“And then?”

“Harry, trust me.”

“Yes, sir.” Harry said it, but he was far from sure. To Devereaux, how Harry felt didn't matter. He knew the sound of obedience to the chain of command.

“Good. Now go,” he said. Harry was left holding a dead phone. The ISCOM connection was broken.

Louis Devereaux looked at the President and wondered what this guy would do without him. “I've got some things to take care of, Mr. President,” he said. “I'm sure you do too.” He started to walk out, but the President called after him.

“Louis. What are you going to do?” He pointed at the phone,the one Devereaux had just used to speak with Harry Levine.

“I'll arrange for someone to meet him,” Devereaux said.

“And then what?”

And then what?
Louis tried to contain his disbelief, his disgust.
Asshole!
Again he thought of T. S. Eliot
. Will no one rid me of this troublesome President?
Louis Devereaux just smiled and said, “I'll take care of it.” A few minutes later he was talking to The Bambino.

Years ago, Devereaux emerged from the back offices at Langley mainly because of George Bush, the Father. When the Soviet empire collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity, Bush was caught off guard. At a meeting in the White House Situation Room, he gave his top intelligence people a piece of his mind. Few Presidents—even LBJ—have yelled louder and used as much profanity as Bush did that day. He was pissed and no excuse or explanation soothed his fury. The Russian bear was sick to dying and still they kept telling him it would be okay. Gorbachev would pull it together. But it wasn't happening that way at all. The bear looked like Winnie the Pooh.

“Isn't there anyone at your headquarters,” he screamed, pointing at the CIA delegation in the room, “who has a goddamn brain in their head? Do you all have shit for brains? Didn't anybody have anything to say about what might happen to the Russians? They fell apart, goddamnit! They fell apart! And not a single sonofabitch at your place had a fucking clue? Nobody?”

“Mr. President,” one of the CIA crew spoke up. “We did have a report—a long time ago—years ago, from Devereaux. We all thought he was a bit over the top. I read it myself and thought he was nuts. I guess . . . in retrospect . . .”

“Devereaux? Who the fuck is Devereaux?” demanded Bush 41.

It turned out that Devereaux had written and distributed a paper, read by some in the highest circles of the Agency, in which he flatly predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. He'd been told to analyze the possibilities for Soviet growth to the end of the century, and he did. They wouldn't see it, he said—the end of the century. He knew all along it was make-work and wasn't at all surprised when no one paid any attention to his conclusions. The Soviet Union would, he claimed, disintegrate and disappear without a fight. He put the chance of armed rebellion, from any republic, at less than ten percent. The Soviet military complex was doomed, he said, done in by incompetence and corruption. The Eastern European states, as well as the Muslim republics of Central Asia, would soon reject their continued union with the Russians—and they would get away with it. It would not be Hungary or East Germany all over again, Devereaux wrote. No tanks in the streets, not outside Russia. He put the probability of a Russian invasion of any rebellious republic at absolute zero. The Soviet military was a paper tiger, flimsy paper at that. In fact, he saw a unified Germany as a catalyst in this movement. “The Wall will fall,” he wrote, with a bit of a smile at the time. The Soviet Union had ten to fifteen years left, he prophesized. Although outside his purview, he even expressed some doubt about the fundamental capacity of their nuclear arsenal. What's most significant, Devereaux wrote this paper while Jimmy Carter was President. Once Bush was told about this, he was eager to see “this analyst no one paid any goddamn attention to.” Nobody at the table moved when the President was finished. Bush stood up, looked at them and shouted again. “Get him over here! Now!” He mumbled something about Devereaux being “a beacon in a pitch-black shithouse.”

That was Devereaux's first time in the Oval Office. It was a long and productive meeting. With the Soviet Union folding its tent, adjustments were necessary and he told the President all about them.

“We have people, throughout Europe and quite a few in Russia herself, and the other former republics as well,” he told Bush. “These are people who were of use to us in the last forty years. Many of them, the vast majority of them, never left the other side. They're still there. In addition, there are quite a few, among our friends, who helped us without their government's knowledge. Many of these people—agents, spies, informers, collaborators—know things about us, things that could be damaging if they became widely known. Some things, even small bits of personal information, might someday be used as blackmail. What I'm saying is, there's a population walking around out there who could embarrass us and hinder us in our new agenda.”

“People who couldn't talk before,” Bush began.

“Because it was too dangerous.”

“But they can now. Right?”

“Precisely, Mr. President. I am talking about people who no longer offer us any benefit. They present only a downside risk.” When this conversation started, there were two other people also in the Oval Office. Devereaux didn't know either of them, but made one for a secretary and the other an aide of some sort. Bush looked over and waved them from the room. Then they were alone, Louis Devereaux and the President of the United States.

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Bush, this time in a more casual, conversational tone the nature of which was clearly intended to put Devereaux at ease—a sign of respect for him from the President. The touch was not lost on Louis who had used the same device many times himself. “What do you have in mind?” Bush asked.

Devereaux laid it all out. The United States needed to eliminate dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people associated with covert activities during the Cold War. Some were enemies then, and still might be. Others were friends, friends who knew things they shouldn't. Each of them—especially with such a large number of them—was a possible danger. Every one of them had to be dealt with. Devereaux was not one to beat around the bush. “They needed to be killed,” he said. Then he proposed setting up a special network of agents to accomplish this task.

“Over time,” he said. “Over years. Many will be easy, but many others will be well protected. We can't just waltz into Europe and begin killing people left and right. Those left alive will sense what we're doing. We need to move slowly, with resolve. But, the longer we wait to get started, the greater the jeopardy to us.” That afternoon Louis Devereaux received Presidential authority to set up and manage a network of agents with a single mission: Clean up. He had, as he expected, no budgetary limits. And, of course, he was given the first of his misleading job titles.

The Bambino called two minutes after Devereaux's page. Nearly all of his agents were women, The Bambino included. He considered her his very best. None of them were Agency people, Company employees. All his agents were casuals, private independents recruited and brought together personally by him. Most were not Americans. They worked for money, and Devereaux had a river of cash that flowed with a swift current. They took their orders only from him. They knew no one else, not even each other. He gave them code names he derived from sports figures. He admired great athletes. He marveled at their success and had a professional's appreciation and respect for the discipline and determination the very best among them constantly exhibited. And he loved their nicknames. He was sorry he never had one himself. He named the women of DEVNET—as his group came to be known within the tiny circle of people who even knew it existed—to match their special characteristics. So it was that a Latvian agent, whose tireless dedication produced results when most would have conceded defeat, was called The Horse, after the great Baltimore Colts fullback Alan Ameche, a player who never gave up, especially on third and short. And there was Spike, a French agent with a distinctly unpleasant personality, who had no manners at all and who would just as soon cut your balls off as give you the time of day. She was named for Ty Cobb. The Bambino earned her code name one evening in Prague. Once he heard the story, in all its detail, Devereaux selected the name he had saved for just such a person. He hadn't even met her yet. Hired her, sight unseen. She had taken out eight targets in a single episode, killed them all, including five bodyguards, in a hotel suite in the heart of the city. Afterward, she calmly changed clothes, took the elevator down to the lobby and had a drink in the bar before leaving. Obviously, she could hit for power. She could also hit for average and rarely swung and missed. Best of all, she could bat cleanup. She could carry a whole team. The nickname Babe was too sexist—he had five older sisters to heighten his sensitivity to things like this—so Devereaux settled on The Bambino. She was his Babe Ruth. The Bambino worked out of an office in London, pretending to be some sort of Public Relations outfit. The conditions presented by Harry Levine were perfect for his big hitter. She was convenient, moments away in the same city, and Devereaux always liked being able to use the best.

In her own apartment, a small flat with a distinctly academic look about it, DEVNET's Ruthian equivalent poured herself a cup of tea, kicked off her shoes, flipped them through the open door into her bedroom, muted the Tom Waits CD she was playing, and sat down to return the page left by Louis Devereaux. She did not recognize the number, but it had to be Devereaux. He was the only person in the world who had the number to her pager. The phone next to the couch in the Oval Office rang. Louis Devereaux picked it up.