The November Man

by Bill Granger

  “It did at the first one. We had spies and they had spies and there were defections all over the place. They started it with that couple pulled out of West Germany. And we aced the game with the agents in Italy and Britain. We won the battle of the magazine covers.”

  “It was like war,” Quentin agreed.

  “A lot of war is trading prisoners,” Perry said.

  “Is that what’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. You can’t always predict the Opposition.”

  “I thought we could,” Quentin said. “Isn’t that why we have intelligence services and why we finance estimates?”

  Perry cleared his throat. He got up.

  “I’m fifteen minutes behind as usual,” he said to Quentin, who had not moved at the desk. He reached for the photograph.

  “Don’t you have a copy?”

  Perry smiled.

  He left the picture of the naked Soviet courier on the desk.

  24

  STRANGER IN THE HOUSE

  The car was streaked with dirt and road salt. The suitcases in the trunk were crammed with dirty clothes. Ends of vacations always look like this. The car growled up to the garage door in the last of the afternoon light—the muffler had been pierced by a rock on the road somewhere in Pennsylvania.

  The garage door opened automatically and the car crept into its space.

  Leo Neumann turned the key in the ignition and the engine dieseled into silence with a few sputtering coughs. For a moment, no one said anything. There had not been many words in the last five hours, in the last 150 miles.

  Lydia Neumann sighed and reached for the door handle and pulled herself out.

  Margot Kieker took it as a clue. She pushed at her handle, was confused a moment, and then found the right lever. The rear door opened with a groan.

  “I’ll bring the bags in,” Leo said.

  “Leave them for a moment. Let’s open the house. I could use a beer,” Lydia Neumann said. She really meant it. Her voice was more hoarse than usual; she had been fighting a cold. And now this. This thing that had happened in the morning, at St. Catherine’s.

  A great fuss. Sister Mary Domitilla had to consult with Sister Duncan, and then Dr. Goddard himself had come into the matter. But the matter had been settled by Finch, a small-faced man with large ears and a way of talking through his nose that made everyone around him want to offer him a handkerchief.

  Finch was clearly in charge, though no one deferred to him. He was like a janitor in a corporation who has executive pretensions. He had to interrupt conversations to be heard.

  But he was heard.

  It didn’t matter about Miss Kieker being next of kin or not next of kin. Yes, she had proof. Yes, she had rights. Get a lawyer, Finch said at one point. It didn’t matter. Not to Finch and not to the good ladies who ran St. Catherine’s.

  No one could see Mr. Hanley.

  Not at all. Not at this time. Not at all.

  But Margot Kieker was his only living relative.

  Mr. Hanley is in a bad way, miss.

  But I want to see my great-uncle—

  You wouldn’t want to see him the way he is now, miss.

  Finch went on and on, reasonable and wheedling and talking wetly through his nose. His little eyes shifted back and forth across the globes of white and watched the faces of Leo and Lydia Neumann.

  They were all travelers, all tired by the eight-hundred-mile journey from Chicago.

  And somehow, Mrs. Neumann had expected this. She had expected it because she had this very bad feeling about what was really going on in St. Catherine’s.

  They entered the house like burglars. As though they did not belong there. Then Mrs. Neumann shook herself out of the gloom. She went from room to room, turning on the lights. She turned on all the lights. The house looked so unlovely because it had been closed for nine days and everything in it was too perfect. She and Leo had lived there for twelve years and it fit them to a T.

  Because Mrs. Neumann led the way, lighting the house, she saw him first.

  He was not at all changed. She almost smiled. She knew him, had known him; and then the absurdity of it struck her. He had intruded on her house.

  “What do you want?”

  He said nothing. He sat on a plain wooden chair near the front window. His hands were on his knees, he sat very still. He put his finger to his lips and looked up at the chandelier.

  Leo came in then. He didn’t know the man. He reached for a poker at the fireplace and took a step.

  “Leo,” Lydia said in annoyance. He paused.

  “Put the poker down,” Mrs. Neumann said. “He’s not here to do anyone harm.” She looked carefully at Devereaux. “Are you here to harm anyone?”

  Devereaux shook his head no. It was like a game. They were real; Devereaux was the ghost. The spook who sat by the door. Devereaux got up then and walked to the telephone on the side table and pointed to it. Mrs. Neumann watched him. Devereaux looked at her. She nodded. She understood. The other two merely gaped. It was like a game suddenly going on between two people in a crowded room that involved no one else.

  Leo Neumann put down the poker into the holder next to the brick fireplace. Margot Kieker stood at the door, uncertain about what to do with her hands. She stared and would have been surprised at how young she looked. There was a natural grace to her, beneath the clumsy artifice, and it was clear in that moment.

  Mrs. Neumann pointed to a door. They crossed the room. The door led to the paneled basement. Devereaux smiled to her and she flicked on the light at the top of the stairs. They went down to the basement, the two of them.

  Basements are secure, packed with earth and surrounded by a moat of concrete. Even the sophisticated listening devices trained on houses are not made to work efficiently on basements.

  There was a telephone in the basement room and Devereaux unplugged it from the wall. And then Mrs. Neumann spoke to him:

  “Do you know what has happened to Hanley?”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said. “Part of it.”

  “He called you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “His telephone was tapped. He told us that. He implied all our telephones might be tapped—”

  “They probably are,” Devereaux said.

  “You get accustomed to this, in the field. I am not accustomed to this. I understand secrets; I do not understand spying. Not on your own people. Not on Hanley.”

  Lydia Neumann went to the stairs and called up. “Go on, Leo. Get the cases out of the trunk, show Margot the spare room, will you? And get her towels?”

  Leo said, “You just said—”

  “Please, Leo,” Lydia Neumann said.

  They even ate in the basement, for the sake of their visitor.

  Devereaux and Lydia Neumann sat at a cardtable at the south end of the basement, in the direction of the highway. There was a reason for that as well.

  All was secure. The room was paneled and dominated by a large felt-green pool table with carved legs. It had been a gift from her to her husband six Christmases ago. He had expressed a vague interest in the game, which he had played in his youth. Now they used it to store things on.

  Lydia Neumann thought about security: Devereaux was an agent in the field, retired, and Yackley said he had killed two chasers in Lausanne. Lydia Neumann had thought about that for a long time, as she prepared a dinner of sandwiches and coleslaw and beer in the kitchen. They ate in silence—for a while. Margot Kieker came out of herself enough to talk about her mother and what life had been like in the Nebraska of her growing up, so different from Hanley’s Nebraska.

  Devereaux had watched her during the meal.

  There is a way a man can watch a woman which does not frighten her. It is a watching that implies interest, even attraction, but it is not dominating. It implies that the man is watching out of some respect, some physical attraction, and he is attentive to the words of the other.

  Devereaux had the trick of watchin
g like that. It can be acquired and practiced, like all tricks.

  Lydia Neumann would glance at him from time to time and then at Margot and then at Leo, who was enjoying the mystery of it all.

  No, there was something wrong with security that put Hanley away, that denies him visitors; something wrong with the way things were going inside Section. She said this to Devereaux. It was a matter of making a judgment about Devereaux.

  They sat at the cardtable with the flimsy top and rickety metal legs and she began her story, which began about six months before, when the new budget message came down from the National Security Council. There was to be an increased emphasis in the coming years on electronic intelligence gathering. And a think tank study—coming from one of the vaguely conservative institutions—had concluded that the weakest link in the chain of intelligence security was the case officer.

  “Machines don’t lie,” Lydia Neumann rasped. “Machines cannot do anything but tell the truth.”

  Devereaux stared at her a moment. “Is that true?”

  “No, of course not. ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ But if they think it’s true, it’s true. Yackley had everyone in and we talked about Section, about how much a field agent costs us. A half million a year in Section. Do you believe that?”

  “As much as I believe in thirty-seven-thousand-dollar coffee pots,” Devereaux said.

  “The point is, it got to Hanley. I mean, it was his division they were talking about.”

  “Operations.”

  “The director of spies, chief spook. They were talking about heavy cutbacks over the next five years. Not the kind of bloodbath that Stansfield Turner did at CIA, but the same sort of cutback. He was supposed to start a list and—”

  Devereaux started. Just for a moment, he betrayed himself. Lydia Neumann saw it.

  A list of names of agents.

  “It got to Hanley, as I said,” she said in a hoarse voice. “Poor Hanley.”

  “What got to him? You mean, he had a breakdown?”

  “Of course. That’s why he was committed to St. Catherine’s. Except it gets worse and worse. I’m afraid. I’m afraid he’s going to die.”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said. “I didn’t understand it. I thought it was Hanley. But it wasn’t Hanley at all. That means he’s going to die.”

  Mrs. Neumann blinked, stared. Devereaux’s voice had not changed at all; the pronouncement was routine. It was a matter of life and death all along and now the verdict was death.

  “What is it?”

  “ ‘There are no spies.’ I remember he said that to me. His line was tapped. He was babbling and I thought he was drunk. Perhaps he was drunk; perhaps he was drugged.”

  “Drugged?”

  “He complained about the doctor. About medicine. I didn’t quite understand it because I thought he was drunk at the time. Two men came after me in Switzerland. Chasers from Section.”

  “Yackley said you killed them.”

  Devereaux almost shrugged. His eyes never wavered. “There was an accident on a country road. The point was: They were chasers. I was asleep. Let sleeping agents lie. That’s always a good policy.”

  “What is going on?”

  “What is Nutcracker?” Devereaux said.

  She stared at him.

  “Is there an operation? Is there something called Nutcracker?”

  “No. I’m not aware—I would be aware of it if it existed in Section.”

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “Damnit, I would be aware of it—”

  “If it existed in Section,” he said. The voice was quiet. The furnace thumped on and the fan began to send surges of warm air through the vents. They felt the chill first and then the waves of warm air. The house was absolutely silent, save for the sounds of the furnace.

  “Why did Yackley have Hanley committed?” Devereaux said.

  “I don’t know. He said it was on the advice of the houseman. Dr. Thompson. But Thompson is a fool; I mean, he’s not a shrink even. Hanley went home in February. He told everyone he was tired.”

  “He was on medication.”

  It was not a question.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “He was on medication. It explains what he was saying to me.” He paused, thought of something else. “Who runs Operations now? On a day-to-day?”

  “Yackley. I mean, there are the sub-directors. A lot of it is automatic.”

  He said nothing. He seemed to be looking beyond her. “They’re killing him,” he said. Then he paused. “Perhaps I should prepare him for his death.” And smiled.

  25

  WATCHER

  Alexa adjusted her length in the car. The car was large, larger even than a Ziv, but she had been waiting for four hours.

  Her muscles ached across her back beneath the silken shirt. She wore very dark slacks stuffed into the tall leather boots she had purchased in Stockholm. The day that she had gone to kill November; it seemed a million days ago.

  The night had stars.

  She stared at the stars and felt pity for the child from Moscow who had wanted to count the stars and contain heaven.

  She felt pity for herself. As she had been, as she was.

  She felt pity for her own fear. She was bereft, alone in the West, adrift in a foreign place she would never escape from.

  Even after she killed the target tonight.

  He was contained in this suburban house that was grander than Gorki’s dacha outside Moscow. The Americans lived like such profligates. Every home was an estate. Yet she saw the people in Washington, in the city, at night: They came with cardboard for warmth and also newspapers and they bedded down under the bridges and in alcoves of doorways, in alleys where there was some warmth. She had contempt for Americans and their ways.

  And fear for herself.

  The target was at hand and there was nothing more to be done. She had delayed the inevitable too long. She had not wanted to decide her own fate while deciding the life of another. Gorki had abandoned her and done it cruelly. He had not transferred her, not posted her abroad to another assignment, not banished her from Moscow. He had decided she would die. She was sure of it and could not understand the wrath of the man who had been God to her.

  She had danced for him.

  She had been naked for him.

  Not for any favor from him. Because he had so much power in him and she had been attracted to the power in him. It was a palpable thing to her.

  Four times in two days—four times in forty-eight hours exactly—she had seen Devereaux. He was the target; the second November that came once in a blue moon. And when she killed him, as she would do tonight, she would have killed herself. Somehow, this was implied in the assignment. There would be no escape or there would be a botched escape; in any case, she would die when November died.

  Once every six hours, she contacted the source at a phone with a New York City area code. The voice assured her this last time that the target was in this suburban house in Bethesda, Maryland. The voice was always right. He knew everything, Alexa realized: He really knew.

  Which made it so sinister.

  This was a script, she thought. This was a play with Alexa as an actress in a role assigned long before to her. It was all made easy for her. Which meant that it was all a trap—a death for November, a death for Alexa.

  Gorki had ruled her passions but not her mind. Gorki thought he could pat her hand at a table in a restaurant in Prague and tell her that everything was all right. That she would believe him.

  She was not a fool. Not even when she had danced naked on the Afghan rug that night, before the crackling fire, the fire lighting up her loins and her breasts and making her skin a tawny color. Not a fool when she had heard music that was unplayed and danced to it, intoxicated by drugs shared and the wine and all the making of love that had gone before. Danced in bare feet on the Afghan rug and showed him her power to arouse him. But in that mad moment, she had not been a fool. Not that.

  Gorki
treated her so. But what choice did she have now. To perform the assignment, she would die; to not do the job, she would betray her commission. And die as well.

  She was strong; she had power because she was beautiful and men desired her. Also, because she controlled herself and those around her. She was aware of everything around her and she was cunning and intelligent.

  And Gorki was so much more.

  Power was the aphrodisiac.

  He had commanded her as easily as a child commands its doll.

  Now he commanded her death.

  The moment she killed November, she was dead.

  His death carried her own inside him.

  She blinked. Her eyes had made tears and that had made her eyes irresistible.

  She sat in the darkness, under bare trees, beneath stars. She sat in a rented car with a borrowed pistol on her lap. She sat very alone and still. Her shoulders ached. Beyond those yellow-lighted windows were homes of strangers where strangers were warm, familiar with each other, at some sort of peace, even for a moment. Alexa let tears fall on her perfect, taut cheeks because she was so cold and alone.

  And then he was there.

  On the steps of the house she had watched.

  She put her hand on the pistol. Her long fingers crept over case, housing, trigger guard, trigger—they were like snakes creeping over stones. She held her breath—not that he could hear her.

  November.

  He was bright against the darkness because of the street lamp. His jacket was light blue, his sweater was black. He wore tan trousers.

  He was a large man and he paused at the curb to look around him. He stared right into the darkness where she was hidden. It didn’t matter; he didn’t see her.

  It was important to take care of him away from the house of spies where he had spent Sunday afternoon.

  His image flashed beneath the street lamp.

  Tall, long legs, a certain strength in the way he walked. It was the way a lion stalks in the veld.

  She blinked her eyes to blink away the tears. She was aware her life was coming to an end very soon, even as his life was ending.

  She pushed the car into “drive” and let it slide forward into the street. She turned toward Wisconsin Avenue at the end of the street.