The Shattered Eye Read online

  “Garbage in, garbage out.”

  “Dammit, Mrs. Neumann. We always have had troop strength estimates for the Eastern Bloc. That’s what we do.” He let the sarcasm seep out. “We are in the business of intelligence.”

  “But what if it were changed?”

  “But what if it wasn’t changed?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You are driving me mad. You are telling me that if there are changes in the data in Tinkertoy, it has something to do with this other change, the one where somebody allegedly and supposedly and all that—somebody somehow called up the names of Jeanne Clermont and these two British agents for some reason that even you don’t understand.”

  “Now you’ve got it, Hanley,” Mrs. Neumann said, smiling with a mother’s pride written on her large face.

  “But what do I have exactly?”

  “I don’t know, man. That’s what the hell I’ve been trying to tell you and those idiots at NSA for the last four months—I just don’t know. You think there’s some answer in all this, that I should just pluck it out. Well, dammit, Hanley, I don’t know any more.”

  And then Hanley realized the chill he felt had nothing to do with the temperature in the little room inside R Section. Tinkertoy could not be fixed. Tinkertoy could not be tapped. It had been set up that way.

  But could Tinkertoy ever be wrong?

  2

  PARIS

  William Manning put down Le Monde and dropped two ten-franc brass coins on the black tabletop to pay for the croissants and coffee. It was just after ten-thirty in the morning and business in the brasserie was slow. On the other side of the shop, two young men who might have been Sorbonne students were playing the electronic pinball machine with deadly seriousness.

  The game involved an invasion of creatures from space who were destroyed systematically as the players fired rockets on a screen. Each “kill” was marked by an electronic sound like an explosion; the explosions reverberated in the brasserie, but no one seemed to notice them.

  Behind the zinc counter, the proprietor polished the copper finish of the espresso machine while engaged in a long, raging argument with a fat woman at the cash register who might have been his wife—they argued with intimacy. In front of the counter, the sole waiter lounged, reading the tables in the morning racing sheet.

  Manning had entered the place twenty minutes earlier and catalogued all these elements of life there. Then he had selected the table by the rain-spattered window, even though it was chilly outside and the cold could be felt through the thin layer of glass. From his window he could watch the entrance to the English-language book shop across the way. He knew there was no other exit from the shop; in any case, the woman he had followed for three weeks had no reason to think he was watching her or that she needed a way to escape his surveillance. In a few minutes, when she left the shop, it would be over in any case. One way or another.

  Thirty-one days before, Manning had arrived in Paris on the Concorde flight from Dulles airport outside Washington. Time for an assignment was never unlimited in the Section; but this was a delicate matter, and even Hanley could provide no guidelines. “Be careful,” he had said at last, as Manning prepared to fly to Paris; “Be careful,” as though that would prepare Manning for everything.

  He had surveyed the newspaper records for mention of her; he had talked long into the night with Herbert Quizon, the freelance agent who had immersed himself in the details of her life for the past fifteen years. But no matter how much preparation there had been, nothing readied him for the first sight of her, emerging from the Métro station at the St. Michel entrance, bundled against the February cold in a black coat. None of it prepared him for the pain at seeing her again.

  Manning had not spoken of the pain, even to Quizon. He was a thorough agent, a bit wearied by the work of the last fifteen years, but a “good man” in Hanley’s patronizing evaluation. He had followed her to Mass on Sunday at Notre-Dame. He would not have guessed that she practiced religion; he could not remember that she had taken part in Catholic rituals before. Not when he had first known her.

  He had followed her with discretion, with a certain dogged skill that was noted in his records back in the Section. In fact, Manning had been code-named “Shadow” by the whimsical clerk in processing who had charge of such matters. Shadow had once observed at close hand, for sixteen months, the staff and cabinet of Ian Smith of the former country of Rhodesia. He never knew what use had been made of his information; he had never wanted to know. He was a man in perpetual shade, always at the edge of events, always the watcher and never the man watched. Until now, until he had to act against Jeanne Clermont again.

  It was not difficult to perform surveillance on her. She had settled into a premature middle age that was as predictable as the hour of sunrise. Her habits were the crabbed habits of a spinster, but he refused to think of her by that ugly English word. She was Jeanne Clermont, as she had been to him fifteen years before; as she was now.

  Twice in the past month he had broken into her apartment on the fourth floor of the old building at Number 12, rue Mazarine. He had carefully combed through the scattering of books and private papers and photographs that completed Manning’s knowledge of her life in the past fifteen years. He had even found the little schoolgirl diary she still kept; the entries were without color, without use for him. Yet, slowly, with infinite care and patience, he broke into all the elements of her past life kept in the little apartment with the tall ceilings and the narrow windows. All her secrets were broken.

  The second break-in had come less than three days before; it had shaken him, nearly to the point where Manning wanted to quit the assignment, to tell Hanley and Quizon that it was no use, to lie that she had a lover, that she knew he had once betrayed her, that the vague scheme would not work. The secret had been buried in an old schoolbook on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in her bedroom. It was a faded black-and-white photograph. Jeanne had forgotten it, no doubt, because the book was covered with dust. Manning had forgotten it as well, and it struck him like a blow.

  In the photograph, she stood next to him as they had been fifteen years ago. Her hair was much longer than the way she wore it now. Her hands were in the pockets of her skirt. Her face was open and smiling, amused by the moment and by the chatter of the itinerant old photographer who had snared them at the entrance to the Tuileries that Saturday. It had been Saturday, he remembered it clearly. He remembered the photographer and his droll teasing of her: “Madame is too beautiful not to be photographed, even by someone like me.” He had smiled, revealing yellow and broken teeth.

  “Then you may photograph me, monsieur.”

  “Only fifty francs.”

  “But consider the honor, monsieur, to photograph someone so beautiful.”

  “Of course, of course, the honor is great, but unfortunately, I have not been a man of honor for some years…”

  How she had smiled, Manning thought again, holding the photograph in his hand in the dull afternoon light of her apartment. She had not only infected the moment with good feelings but she had somehow conveyed the warmth of it to memory, recalled again by the touch of the picture.

  He had not wanted to be photographed, and in the picture he was shy and scowling. She had scolded him for his frown. “It could have been such a lovely picture, my keepsake,” she had said.

  “But you have me,” he had said.

  “How long, William?”

  “As long as you want.”

  Of course, it had been a lie. Everything was a lie, everything he had said led to betrayal. He could not tell her that the agent who had recruited him had warned him, “You must not be photographed, that’s elementary, at the demonstrations or at school. Remember, you don’t know who’s taking your picture and what he intends to do with it.”

  But Jeanne Clermont had twisted round him and had made him pay the fifty francs for the Polaroid photograph from the old photographer. What harm could there be in a Polaroid photo
graph?

  “Please, William, don’t be so sour, you are famous and wealthy, a correspondent from America, you have plenty of money.”

  “But the photograph won’t last…”

  “I swear, monsieur, on the grave of my mother, it will last forever.”

  And so it had. Here, in a page of a dusty schoolbook at the bottom of a bookcase in a Paris apartment. They had stood in the sunlight, facing the gardens, their backs to the Louvre. She held his arm and smiled. What would the Section have said?

  He had felt a moment of loss so great that he thought he would die, that he was already dead. Three days ago, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, holding the photograph, hearing the voices of the past—Jeanne, the photographer, Verdun, and the others at the university…What had their expectations of life been on that rare day fifteen years ago? She had shared her bed with him and, after a time, her love. And he had responded in a charade that would end only with terror and betrayal.

  “I love you,” he told Jeanne in the darkness of a spring night fifteen years ago. He had spoken the words over and over as they held each other in dreamlike embrace, sated by lovemaking, conscious of the feeling and the smells of the other commingled, breathing softly as one. He had loved her, in fact, which Hanley never knew, or Quizon, or anyone; he had loved her and betrayed her. Why hadn’t he saved her? She might have escaped the net closing around them; she might have gone with him. But he had known, even as he held her, that she would not accept his love and the betrayal of the others. And so he had said nothing to her but that he loved her and would love her forever.

  “Monsieur?”

  Manning glanced up quickly at the waiter who suddenly hovered at his table.

  The waiter had removed the cup of coffee and the plate that had contained the croissants and the ten-franc coins. In the rude way of brasserie waiters in Paris, he was unsubtly demanding further rent on the use of the table in the corner of the empty restaurant. Manning ordered a glass of beer. The waiter made a face that might have been disapproval or merely gas; he withdrew to the counter.

  “I think I should arrange the matter on Saturday morning,” Manning had told Hanley laconically on the safe phone thirty-six hours ago.

  “Is it time?” The voice, scrambled by complex connectors at each end and flung across an ocean, was curiously tinny.

  “I don’t know. I’ve done all I can.”

  “But what if she turns you down?”

  “Hanley, there are no certainties in the world.”

  “But it’s important.”

  “I don’t understand that; you’ve never explained that.”

  “We’re not certain.” Despite the flat tone, the voice from Washington was suddenly withdrawn into secrets. “We can’t proceed on logical grounds.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Be careful.” So Hanley had repeated the inane advice, the same he had given at the start of the assignment. He had said it might not work, that he could not predict the human factor. And Manning had not understood a word of it except that they wanted him to confront Jeanne Clermont after fifteen years and lie his way back into her confidence and, if possible, into her bed.

  As he followed her, the scenes of the old city had made him ache with nostalgia. He had not been in Paris since 1968, since the night he fled the capital after giving the Section her name and the names of the others and the proofs and the locations of the secret houses. Three years later, after a tour in Vietnam, he had learned what had happened to her. A trade had been arranged between R Section and the French espionage agency, the Deuxième Bureau. It was not made clear to him what the Section had obtained. The French, teetering on the brink of revolution, had obtained time. And the names of those most likely to effect the revolution. And proof enough for a secret court and a secret state trial. Jeanne Clermont had simply disappeared for sixteen months.

  Manning could not have returned to Paris on his own.

  And then, on the first of February, Tinkertoy had turned up his name in a routine scan of names of personnel changes in the French government. Jeanne Clermont had linked William Manning.

  “You might say this is a form of computer dating,” Hanley had said flatly, unable to resist the joke but equally unable to make it funny.

  “But she would know I betrayed her. How do I explain the absence of fifteen years?”

  “You were a correspondent,” Hanley said, consulting the file in front of him that day in February. “You told her you were pulling out for Saigon, that the war was heating up after Tet.…”

  “And she was arrested three days later,” Manning had argued.

  “She expected it,” Hanley said.

  “And I never came back…”

  “You were wounded in Saigon,” Hanley had persisted. “We can make it seem to make sense to her.”

  But I had loved her, he thought then. I had made love to her, I had touched her, I had seen the hint of her soul behind her eyes.

  “We need leverage,” Hanley had said. “Inside the Mitterand government. These are uncertain times, I don’t need to tell you that—”

  “All times are uncertain.”

  “With the peace demonstrations and the Soviet disinformation program in West Germany—why, the West Germans are practically petrified, and—”

  “Don’t tell me politics. What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Hanley had said at last. And that was the way it had been left. Everything depended on Manning and Jeanne Clermont.

  “Reestablish the relationship,” Hanley had said.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “It may not be possible. You see, it is a reasonable risk. To take the chance…”

  Chance. Risk. Logic. None of it made any sense and they knew it, but they had to cloud the nonsense in words that would mask their own doubts.

  Manning put down the glass of beer in the bistro. The students had left the machines and were at the front door. And across the street, the door of the English bookstore opened. For a moment, Jeanne Clermont stood framed in the opening, the thin light from the shop behind her. She glanced up at the leaden sky and felt the mist on her pale face. She looked up the street and down and seemed to consider; then she started across the shimmering street.

  Manning watched her through the mist and the streaked window glass as though he saw her in a dream, through memory.

  He had taken the photograph from her room that day. He had replaced all the books and the diaries and the papers, and he had made certain that she would find no trace of the intruder in her rooms. But he had taken the photograph; it was absurd, it broke all the rules, but he could not have left it.

  She crossed to the walk in front of the brasserie, the book purchase tucked under the sleeve of her raincoat, and opened the door as though it were not a momentous act.

  Manning could only look up at her as though he had been startled. His eyes were wide, and he felt a little afraid; he could not imagine being so close to her again.

  Jeanne Clermont stopped in the doorway and stared at him. The door was partially open behind her, blocked by the frozen gesture of her hand. Then she dropped the book on the tiles; it made a loud sound, and the proprietor stopped in midargument, frowned, and glared at her.

  Manning could not speak.

  Jeanne picked up the book and let the door swing shut behind her.

  She stood still for a moment. Her eyes were unchanging, large and calm and so blue that they made her pale skin seem even more pale by contrast. Perhaps there were little lines of age at the edge of her eyes, but perhaps they had always been there. Her mouth was still wide and handsome in the frame of her face. She did not speak.

  “Jeanne.” He half rose, pushing the chair screeching behind him.

  Silence for a moment; they might have been the only people left alive in the city.

  And then her eyes changed, her soul shifted behind the blue irises. Manning watched her eyes and thought he saw pain cros
s them. Or was it only a reflection of his own pain?

  “William,” she said. Her voice was low, as he had remembered it, but not young and not soft; it had acquired a burden with the years.

  “I never expected, I never—” He began the lies and then stopped; the words were not needed. He could only hope the deception of their meeting would be agreed to by her. Words would not mask it.

  “No,” Jeanne Clermont said. She stared at him the way one stares at an old photograph or recalls a memory. “Neither did I,” she said.

  And she took one hesitant step toward him.

  3

  LAKENHEATH, ENGLAND

  All things bright and beautiful,

  All creatures great and small,

  All things wise and wonderful;

  The Lord God made them all…

  Pim seemed to bounce up and down in the pew as he sang the familiar words with earnest feeling but without a decent regard for pitch or harmony. It did not really matter: His voice was lost with the others in the small congregation huddled at the back of the damp old church, and seemed nothing more than a surging whisper in the tide of the others, as though each word he spoke—however keenly felt—had to be hidden.

  Next to him, Gaunt did not sing, but waited with ill-conceived impatience for the evensong service to be concluded. It was bizarre; nothing that had happened since Pim phoned him in London at noon and urgently asked to meet him in this rural village in the fens seemed real. And now, without saying anything to him by way of explanation, Pim had hurried Gaunt along into this ancient pile of church architecture to take part in evensong.

  Gaunt looked down at Pim as the hymn progressed and saw that tears glistened in the small, deep hazel eyes. Gaunt, not for the first time that day, felt uncomfortable, as though Pim were embarrassing himself and Gaunt was helpless to do anything about it; it was akin to the feeling he sometimes had in the theater during a bad performance. Gaunt fancied himself a man of rare sympathies.