The November Man

by Bill Granger

  The city of Washington was sunk into the calm of its usual Sunday.

  The President had returned from Camp David in the mountains. He had an extraordinary ability to rest completely in a short period of time. He had shouted out answers to the hordes of photographers and newsmen awaiting his arrival by helicopter on the White House lawn. He had waved at them in that characteristic way and shrugged off those questions he did not wish to hear. The helicopter blades kept whirling until the President was inside the White House.

  Across the city and into the suburbs, people dozed in front of their television sets, read the remains of the Sunday Washington Post, dined on sandwiches made with leftovers from the big dinner meal, sank into the torpor of the day.

  Nothing was happening in the city. Even the police stations were unusually quiet. There was a small mattress fire reported on Eastern Avenue shortly after seven but no one was hurt and it was quickly doused. Washington was calm; therefore, the world was sleeping.

  Hanley spoke rationally at nine P.M. He recognized Devereaux. He was able to understand the questions.

  Quarles had said this might happen. Hanley was weak but the passages of clarity were frequent. The doctor had summoned Devereaux from downstairs.

  Dr. Quarles, unchanged in appearance from the afternoon, sat at the foot of the bed in the spare room at the top of the narrow house. He said, “The body is free of drugs but there’s been abuse. Definitely. They gave him tranquilizers in the last week but there’s nothing active now.”

  Hanley said, “They gave me electroshock treatments.” He remembered it so well. His voice was weak but the train of thought was clear.

  He had been fed twice. The portions were small but the soup was very rich. The liquid had warmed him. He felt vague and weak, as one does at the end of an illness that fevers the brain.

  “They were killing you.”

  “Yes,” Hanley said. “I didn’t expect that. Not that part of it. I thought they just wanted to get me out of the way. I really didn’t think this was going to come to murder.” The thought of murder—his own murder at the hands of others—was compelling to him.

  Quarles stood up. “Time now for shop talk, is it? The evil you do is never worth the good it brings.”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  Hanley watched Devereaux’s face.

  Quarles wanted some reaction and there was none. “Goddamnit. There should be rules.”

  “But there aren’t. There never were,” Devereaux said. It was the first time he had responded to the doctor’s rages and sermons.

  Quarles stared at him with the face of Moses for a moment. And then he opened the door, stepped out, and closed it. They heard his heavy tread on the stairs.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be rational,” Hanley said. Very soft. “I think they’ve done some damage to my mind. I was quite rational in the last week. I was dying and weak and I was trying to think of a way to get out of that place. Or at least, tell someone.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Mrs. Neumann when she came?”

  “I wanted to. You see, the drugs, they had this effect on me. They must have drugged me all along.”

  “You were given medication by Dr. Thompson. When you were still functioning in Section,” Devereaux said. And he told him everything Thompson had finally told him.

  “So that explained…” Hanley trailed off. “I was trying to figure it out. And I thought about you and decided you must have been part of it, part of the trade. Or maybe, because I was drugged, I thought of you.”

  “You were reading Somerset Maugham. You were reading Ashenden. All set in Lausanne and Ouchy and across Lake Geneva.”

  Hanley blinked. “Yes. That’s it.”

  “It was a mistake about me. I wasn’t supposed to be awakened. They tapped your phone and they made a mistake.”

  “There’s a mole. In Section,” Hanley said.

  “Yes.”

  “You understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I felt it for the last nine months. It’s been terrible. It could have been anyone. It could have been Mrs. Neumann. My God, even her. I suspected her. I thought the day she called up, she called me at home, I thought she was setting me up. I suspected everyone. I was paranoid. We lost two agents—two damned good men and their whole networks—in three months last fall. They defected. Can you believe that? The networks were blown up. All that work wasted. All those lives… They defected to the goddamn Soviet Union.” Hanley tried to sit up. He was exercised and his face flushed.

  Devereaux held up his hand.

  Hanley coughed. “And now I’ve got a goddamn cold,” he said. He never swore. He was a man of propriety. “I feel like a fool.”

  “There are no spies,” Devereaux said.

  Hanley blinked. There was a silence that could be felt in the room. The house was shuttered for the night. Margot Kieker slept on a cot in the basement room. The whole house had been squeezed to find room for the three visitors. The housekeeper said nothing to any of them, as though it might be quite normal for three strangers to drop in on Dr. Quarles in the middle of a Sunday and stay for the night.

  “I said that. I said that on a goddamn open line.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Yackley. Yackley said it to me. He attributed it to Richfield, our mad scientist. Richfield was very gung ho on this retrenchment program that was coming down from Administration. We had too many agencies, too many spies. It was involved.”

  “A lot of bureaucratic infighting,” Devereaux said. “The same old thing. It had to be more than that.”

  Hanley’s eyes brightened. “More. A lot more than that.” The dry voice was drier still but the flat Nebraska accent emerged with clarity.

  “Richfield was trying to sell Yackley on the idea of cutting back Operations, that the work of agents was now largely redundant because we had so many surveillance devices, computers, satellites… all the hardware. Yackley liked the argument. He used it against me. The cost could be shown so clearly as savings. I mean, he wanted to eliminate a bunch of agents to start, as an experiment, to see if the operation would suffer—”

  “Who?”

  Hanley frowned. “One of the things… specific memory. It’s harder to fix times. This morning I woke up and I thought I was six or seven years old, the time I was in hospital with appendicitis in Omaha—”

  But Devereaux had opened a sheet of paper. He read: “January. New Moon. Equinox. June. August. Vernal. Winter.”

  Hanley said nothing for a moment. “Yes. The names. The agents.”

  “They’re all in the field—”

  “Yes. No chasers or safe-house keepers. All watchers and stationmasters. They had networks. My God, I couldn’t explain to Yackley that he wasn’t talking about seven men. He was talking about hundreds of men. The links…”

  “I know,” Devereaux said.

  “It wasn’t a matter of protecting our investment alone. It was all that work thrown away. And what good is the hardware without software? I mean, we get soft goods all the time from the Opposition. The hardware bona fides it for us. And the other way around. The satellite spies movement outside of Vladivostok. What’s the good of knowing the SIGINT without knowing what the motive is? Software. Human contact. HUMINT. That’s what you need. But the hardware doesn’t have life or soul or judgment. It isn’t human. You can’t make it all on hardware, can you?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t know what to do. I thought something was wrong. Yackley was positively demented on the subject. You’d think he was brainwashed.”

  “Yackley struck me as a man waiting for some stronger brain than his to tell him what to do. They call him a team player.”

  Hanley plucked at the cover for a moment. He was waiting but Devereaux said nothing more. Devereaux had made the contact with Denisov at five. It was the fallback point, derived from an old show business routine. Denisov called the lobby of the hotel and asked if there had been an
y messages for him. Then Devereaux called and used the same name and asked for messages. He then left a message for anyone who would call him. Denisov called again, asked for the name he had used before, and picked up the message Devereux had left. They made contact and the final message was: Ivers had talked.

  “Damnit, man, what is going on?”

  “What is Nutcracker?”

  Hanley said the unexpected: “It was set up a year ago. We were collating information inside Operations. This was strictly Operations, Mrs. Neumann’s division wasn’t in on it at all. It was strictly software, strictly HUMINT.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The idea came about because of what happened at the first summit. You remember the exchange of agents? It was all just coincidence. I thought it was coincidence at the time. I really wasn’t paranoid.”

  Devereaux said, “In the trade, that might just be reality.”

  “But the idea took on some urgency.” Hanley was going back over memory. “I mean, there was all this talk about cutting back Operations. Cutting back software. Field agents and Number Four men and station-masters and housekeepers and garbagemen. Even chasers. My God, you need chasers.”

  “My experience with chasers hasn’t been all that pleasant. Section chasers,” Devereaux said.

  Hanley looked at the patterns on the wall. “A woman designed this room.”

  “The clever spy,” Devereaux said.

  Hanley said, “Sarcasm.” Devereaux felt better at that. It was a trace of the old Hanley and not this weak man sitting up in bed in front of him.

  “I’m so damned tired,” Hanley said.

  They waited for each other.

  “Nutcracker. The idea was to find and identify three or four men from the Opposition. That wasn’t so difficult. What we were going to do was to turn them. And if they wouldn’t turn, we were going to muddy them up so that Opposition wouldn’t know if they had been turned or not. We decided early on it would be in Europe exclusively, because that’s where the Summit was going to be held.”

  “Berlin.”

  “Exactly.”

  “This was for politics?”

  “For survival. Of Operations. Operations is the heart of the Section. Operations is HUMINT. Besides, it was legitimate.”

  “We’re supposed to gather intelligence, not play ‘I Spy,’ ” Devereaux said.

  “We’re supposed to survive. That’s the first rule of every game.”

  “This is crazy,” Devereaux said. Nutcracker didn’t turn out to be what he expected.

  “It got crazier.”

  “How?”

  “It was downholded.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had my own file in Tinkertoy. On Nutcracker. Yackley didn’t know about it, Neumann didn’t know. Well, I thought Neumann didn’t know; she’s a smart cookie. I had the file to keep track of my own reports… we were moving along, setting up our targets, we had made contact with one…”

  Devereaux waited. Hanley seemed to be seeing something beyond the room. He plucked absently again at the covers. His eyes were wet. There might be tears at times, Dr. Quarles had said. The body reacts in strange ways to the manipulation of the mind. Give him time, give him rest.

  “In January, I came in one morning and I had… I had been feeling bad. I had seen Dr. Thompson a few times. He gave me pills. Iron pills or something. I don’t know. At least, I thought they were.” His voice was small. “I came in this morning in January. It snowed. You know what snow is to Washington. The office was half deserted. My God, people are babies.”

  Silence again. And then the distant voice resumed. “I went into Tinkertoy for the Nutcracker file. And Tinkertoy stopped me. ‘Access denied.’ It was my goddamn file. And I am the director of Operations. It was my file and my plan and it had been taken from me. I felt… so strange. I felt like I had gone through the Looking Glass. I had to know what happened. I went to Yackley and he looked at me like I was crazy.

  “ ‘What are you talking about,’ he said. ‘I never heard of Nutcracker.’ Of course, it was true. I mean, it was my operation. I hadn’t shared it with anyone. I had used discretionary funds. I made it a secret and now someone had taken it away from me. I couldn’t figure it out. It was making me… well, what happened to me? Did I go crazy or not?”

  “I don’t know,” Devereaux said. “I’m not a shrink.”

  “They were going to kill me,” Hanley said with wonder. “The first day at St. Catherine’s, that bastard Goddard sprayed me. With Mace. He sprayed me in the goddamn face. That dirty son-of-a-bitch.”

  “You can get him later,” Devereaux said. “Why did you write this? Why did you write Nutcracker and then list all our own agents? And my name?”

  Hanley stared at the paper as though he had never seen it before. And then there was recognition.

  “I was home. I was on fire all the time and so tired. I couldn’t think what had happened to Nutcracker. It existed in Tinkertoy and I had no access to it. But if I went to Mrs. Neumann, what if it turned out that she was part of this… this thing that was happening in Section. She was the computer wizard. Maybe she wanted to destroy Nutcracker before it started. Hardware, she’s in hardware. Software is old-fashioned. ‘There are no spies.’ It kept going around and around in my head. Everyone was against me. I went to Yackley a second time and then I thought that maybe Yackley was part of whatever it was that was going on.”

  “There is no file above you, is there?”

  “My level, you mean? Yes. The Security file, the level of the National Security Adviser. And the President’s file.”

  Devereaux said, “Why did you list the names of your own agents?”

  “Because we had lost men and I got the idea—I got the idea that the Opposition was pulling a Nutcracker on me. On the Section. On our side. It just came to me like that. I thought I was crazy but there it was. It was logical. Maybe they—the other side—they were working against the Section. They could have access to my Nutcracker scenario and use it against me. Against the Section. They could let it go along and then, when the time was ready, turn it inside out.”

  “You called me,” Devereaux said. His gray eyes shifted focus. He was remembering as much as he could. The room was as still as a confessional. “You said something about the highest levels. When you called me.”

  “I was babbling.”

  “But what were you babbling about?”

  Hanley squinted, picked at the coverlet again and again. He sighed and tried to remember. It was so difficult to remember things. “I was out of my head most of the time. It was like being on fire.”

  “Remember,” Devereaux said.

  “The highest levels. The highest levels. It was like an itch inside my brain and I couldn’t reach it. That’s why I was writing down ideas. Like Nutcracker. That’s it. The highest levels. I couldn’t get through my computer to Nutcracker and that meant it was taken from me at the highest levels. But that didn’t make any sense.”

  “Unless there is a mole,” Devereaux said.

  “A mole in Section.” Hanley seemed to visibly collapse into the sheets. “A mole in Section.” The horror of it clouded his face. He closed his eyes and felt like weeping again. He had said it before as though in a dream. And now, there was no dream. When he opened his eyes, they were wet. He loved Section. He had given his life to Section as you give your life to a bride or a cause or anything you love. The director of operations had become defined over the years by his job: He was the puppetmaster and, yet, it made him a puppet himself. And now the thought: There was a mole in Section and it would all come down and the play would be over, the stage cleared.

  “Who committed you?” Devereaux said.

  “Yackley.”

  “And supported him?”

  “Richfield.”

  “And visited you at St. Catherine’s?”

  “Mrs. Neumann.”

  “Who else?”

  “Perry Weinstein.”

  “Did Yac
kley ever come?”

  “No.”

  “Yackley,” Devereaux said, turning the name over in thought. “Yackley tapped your phone. Yackley knew you had called me. So Yackley must have sent the chasers after me.”

  “Yackley,” Hanley said. “Are you sure?”

  “In a little while,” Devereaux said. “I need some things from you. Promises. And some money. Oh, and four thousand shares of stock.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Expenses,” Devereaux said. He tried a smile. “The only serious thing ever worth talking about to an employer.”

  “But you’re not an employee anymore, Devereaux,” Hanley said. He said it very softly.

  “Yes. That’s what I prefer.” He listened to himself as if he might be detecting a lie. But then, that’s what words were for. “I might come back. On active duty roster. But let everyone know so there are no more mistakes, no more independent contracts against me from the other side.”

  “Why?”

  “Protection. If I come back, then Section is behind me.” He said the words without any feeling in them.

  He had given up his trade because he did not love it anymore and because he loved Rita Macklin. He had thought all along what he could say to her if he went back into the trade, back into the cold. The conversation in mind never had a conclusion but now, in a little while, it would have to be played out for real.

  “I was set, I was anonymous, I was asleep. Only three people knew in Section—you, Mrs. Neumann, Yackley. And then one day, a Soviet courier kills Colonel Ready and it is neat and finished. Except someone told the Opposition they had killed the wrong man. That the real November was alive in Lausanne. So they sent a hitter down and two other hitters and pretty soon, it was like a comic opera. Every move that everyone made was orchestrated; everyone knew everything about everyone else. They couldn’t have such good information unless it came from us. Came from you.”

  “I’m not a traitor—”