“All right,” he said, and thought this was the end of it. “But how do I explain this change to the others?”
“There is no need to explain it,” the man said. “Arrests will be made.”
“For what?” Bannion asked.
“They are assassins.”
Bannion was not sure he had heard correctly. “But if there is to be no assassination, then why should the others be arrested?”
“To expose their plot,” the man answered. “We will alert the Germans that we have a source inside an American plot. You are that source, of course, so you will not be harmed.”
“But why tell the Germans anything?” Bannion asked.
“That is not for us to ask,” the man said. “It has been decided that the woman will be needed.”
“Only the woman?” Bannion asked.
“Yes,” the man said. “She will be…interrogated until she exposes this American plot.” He laughed. “Then we will ask for her. They will turn her over because they don’t want the world to know that their leader is constantly a target. It will all be done secretly, and at some point after she has broken, she will be released.” He took a small envelope from his jacket pocket. “One is for you. The other is for the woman. Neither is real.”
Bannion said nothing, which clearly alarmed the agent.
“It is important that the Germans trust us,” the man said emphatically. “What better way for us to prove ourselves to them than by exposing a silly group of American adventurers?”
Bannion would all his life recall what happened next, the quiet argument the Soviet agent made, how much depended upon this plot, the dark consequences that would surely flow should it not be carried out. What was one man or one woman in the long view of history? No individual could be allowed to stand in the way of so important a mission. Later he would remember how silently he had listened to all this, and how easily he had been persuaded by it.
“All right,” he said at last, and with those words accepted his role in this far different plot. He listened as the rest of it was revealed: Danforth was to be sent to Hamburg and from there to London, where he would serve as a witness to the failure of the plot. Bannion was to be “arrested,” in order to shield him from later suspicion of having betrayed the plot. He was to fake his own suicide and then be carted away; later he’d be released into Soviet hands.
“So only . . . Anna,” he said.
The man’s smile was clearly meant to ease Bannion’s lingering concerns.
“Don’t look so sad,” he said. “She is just a little spy.”
With that, he left, and for a long time afterward, Bannion sat by the window and thought of Anna. He saw the little girl with her many languages, then the young woman she’d become, and in seeing both, he reviewed the dark past of which he was only dimly aware even as he envisioned the yet darker future that awaited her.
~ * ~
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983
“I later learned that it was the Russo-German pact they were determined to protect,” Bannion said. “Moscow called off several similar plots at the same time because they needed Hitler to trust them.” He shrugged. “After that, they became great allies, Berlin and Moscow, and when that happened, I finally lost hope in Russia.”
But before that, he had pretended to revile a god he continued to revere, Danforth thought.
“You fed Anna to the wolves,” Danforth said icily. “There was never a Rache. It was always you.”
“It’s an old game,” Bannion said. “Get the other side to pursue a man who doesn’t actually exist. And so we made him up. And made everyone believe he existed. The Russians pretended to distrust him, which made him that much more real. It was quite an effective ruse. It fooled Clayton, and it fooled you.”
“It fooled Anna too,” Danforth said. “She spent her life protecting this . . . phantom.” He pulled out the pistol and felt his finger draw down upon the trigger. “Because she thought she was protecting you.”
Bannion squinted at the pistol, then looked at Danforth. “Can you kill a man for believing in something that turned out to be terrible?”
“Yes, I can,” Danforth said.
“How?” Bannion demanded. “Answer that one question, Tom. How can you kill someone for being fooled into following a false god and doing terrible things in the service of it? How can you condemn a man for that?”
Danforth drew back the hammer on the pistol and answered Bannion with the only genuine truth his life had revealed. “I can, yes,” he said, “because in the end, it is a moral responsibility to be wise.”
~ * ~
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
The feeling was exactly as the cliche described it, I realized: a stopping of the heart.
“You shot him?” I murmured.
“No,” Danforth answered. “But I would have, Paul, if that grandson of his hadn’t appeared.” His look had all the force of a barrel pointed at my head. “He came running through the front door.”
I heard one of my earliest questions:
