The Infant of Prague

It had been called R Section simply because it had no other name. When it was first created as an intelligence agency during the Kennedy Administration, it was funded under a provision of paragraph R of the Agriculture budget. At the time, it was the ninth intelligence agency operated by various arms of the government including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, Office of Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, and the Department of State’s intelligence section. But its main rival for power and position was always the CIA, the Langley Firm. As Kennedy had said, “I don’t ever want those bastards to be able to put me over a barrel again.” He referred to the Bay of Pigs disaster, which he blamed on the CIA. R Section was the evaluator of CIA intelligence, the spies set up to spy upon the spies.

Or, as the present director of R Section put it, “We are the left hand seeking to know what the right hand is doing.”

Mrs. Neumann’s aphorism had created a positive feeling inside the bureaucracy of Section. The feeling was needed following the scandals involving the previous director and a White House liaison.

Mrs. Lydia Neumann, formerly in charge of the computer analysis division, had become the highest-ranked woman in the national intelligence community by dint of being available when she was needed. It had been a low moment for Section and Lydia Neumann had led Section out of it.

But today she did not feel triumphant or upbeat about anything. If she had been asked for aphorisms, she would have only thought of gloomy ones.

On this sleepy November afternoon of soft Virginia sun against the glittering phalanx of buildings on the river, Mrs. Neumann sat very still in her large office that overlooked Fourteenth Street and asked Hanley the same question she had asked him in the morning.

“Where is Devereaux?”

Hanley sat across the desk from her. The red leather chair squealed as he twisted in it. “We don’t know.”

“People cannot disappear.”

“It was exactly what we wished Miki to do.”

“And Miki has vanished as well.”

“The ship received the signal from the driver. We’re looking for him now. When the dinghy got to the beach, they were all gone. Car, driver, passenger, conductor. Everyone was gone. You remember Mason, the young man that Devereaux recruited? He was in London on station duty. I detached him twelve hours ago. He’s been in Zeebrugge.”

“He’s inexperienced.”

“But he’s outside the scope of Stowe’s people. I thought we still wanted to keep this out of regular channels.”

“Perhaps we were wrong.”

“Or right. Terribly right. If this whole thing was a setup by our friends at Langley to give us a black eye,” Hanley said.

“What does Mason say?”

“He was in Zeebrugge. He found machine-gun cartridges in the gutter. Also some auto glass on the street. There might have been a fight. In any event, that’s all we have without calling in the Belgium police. And we can’t do that. I don’t think they would appreciate us using their country as a staging area for defections.”

“Damn,” she said. She rarely cursed. Her voice was rough and raspy and she wore her hair in clumsy spikes fashioned twice a month by her husband, Leo. Leo had always cut her hair. He did so in the early years of their marriage as an economy. Now, like so many other things they did, it was an act of love. Leo was an accountant and Lydia Neumann was chief of a vast intelligence agency and they never talked about their work to each other.

Hanley understood. There were always frustrations but sometimes, even after a lifetime of frustrations, it was too damned much to bear.

“Is Devereaux alive?”

“If he is, he is held against his will. That means that he is across the wall now and it is time to cut our losses. I’ve gone through his 201. Most of his old business is neatly sealed. I don’t think he can hurt us.”

“He would hurt us?”

“Mrs. Neumann. If this whole matter was an elaborate ploy by the Soviet Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia, it involved trapping an agent. If it was successful and Devereaux is not dead, then he will surely tell them everything they wish to know. Pain has no limits but men do.”

“And the alternative is that he’s dead.”

“Yes. It’s the preferable alternative.”

“Was Miki worth it?”

She had asked him the question three weeks ago when he proposed using Devereaux to bring Miki across. He had probed Miki through an agent in Amsterdam the previous summer. Miki had only let one nugget drop but it was a beauty: It was a photograph of a Paris restaurant in the Trocadero district. Two men sat together at a table. One was the highest-ranking CIA agent in the Paris embassy. The second man was Miki himself. Miki did not explain the photograph but it was enough to convince Hanley. This was good enough to bring in Devereaux, to work outside the routine apparatus of Eurodesk.

“Miki was worth it if this was not a setup. If this was a setup, Miki is still worth it now because we will get him. Believe me, we will get him. This month or next or next year, but we’ll get him and break him and bleed him and get rid of him.”