The November Man

by Bill Granger

  “I came back to kill you, Hanley,” Devereaux said.

  They let the silence support the words.

  “You have to carry me on the books,” Devereaux began again.

  “But you won’t come back.”

  “No. Not in the way you think. That’s the way it has to be. I need my bona fides back. The badge and the gun.” Said with bitterness. “You said you can never quit.”

  Hanley closed his eyes. He was weak but without pain. It was not an unpleasant feeling.

  “I was so tired. At the end. Maybe I did have a breakdown. It was hopeless. If I went to the security adviser, what could I tell him but the raving suspicions of a paranoid? And if I did nothing, the Section was finished.”

  “The Section may be finished in any case.”

  “I gave my life to the Section.”

  “You nearly did.”

  “Who was it? Who is the mole?”

  “In a little while,” Devereaux said. “Mrs. Neumann was arrested at two. Right in the Department of Agriculture building. She must have penetrated Nutcracker. It must be very close, whatever it is.”

  “My own plan turned against me. But how are they going to do it? And why did you trust Mrs. Neumann?”

  “Because I had to.”

  “You put her at risk.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s a woman.”

  And Devereaux smiled at that. “Are you a male chauvinist then?”

  “That woman saved my life.”

  “Be quiet. She’s in Section. What do you think they’re going to do with her? Execute her? They took her to Fort Meade.”

  “My God, I can’t stop whatever it is that is happening because I don’t know what is happening. And no one knows.”

  “So think about it.”

  “I can’t. I’m too tired.”

  “You were pushed about agents. Too many agents. The talk in Europe is about a major Soviet coming out. It’s too much talk, too open. Gorki in Resolutions Committee—Denisov’s old boss. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Why?”

  “Because everything is made so easy. Everyone knows everything about everyone else. ‘There are no spies.’ Who told you that?”

  “Yackley,” Hanley said.

  “There are no spies,” Devereaux repeated. “So what does the loss of a few spies mean? If they really don’t exist. If we know all their secrets anyway?”

  “But what is Nutcracker turned into? What’s going to happen?” Hanley said. His voice was dry.

  “I think I know.” Devereaux stared through Hanley, through the walls of the room, to a schematic in his mind reflected on a blank screen. Like a sheet of white paper with names on it.

  “I think I know,” Devereaux said.

  And began to tell him everything that would be done.

  32

  NUTCRACKER

  The operation called Nutcracker commenced thirteen hours after Hanley began to explain the procedures to Devereaux. Nutcracker had been too imminent to stop.

  The Soviet agent identified as Andromeda was drugged and slipped into the western zone of Berlin at 1945 hours. When he was awakened, in an American hospital in Frankfurt, he demanded to know what was going on. Two officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was Andromeda, a Soviet agent who had just “defected” to the West. One of the agents was a little smug about that. It had been so slick a maneuver, without any trouble at all. The man called Andromeda said over and over that he was a Lutheran minister in Potsdam. No one believed him. Not at first.

  At the same time but in a different time zone—1845 Greenwich Mean Time—the Soviet agent identified as Hebrides was picked up by two SIS men from BritIntell and hustled to the safe house outside London off the Great Western Road that leads to Oxford. Hebrides was clearly bona fided; his description had been confirmed by Washington. He was questioned, rather harshly, about his network. He explained, just as harshly, that one did not treat a British subject and the second tenor in the Warwick Light Opera Company in this manner. The SIS men were not very gentle and the CIA men looked the other way.

  In three hours, Saturn and Mercury fell into the orbit of the West as well, the first in Tokyo, the second in San Francisco.

  Nutcracker appeared to be functioning smoothly. Everyone was pleased. Quentin Reed phoned Perry Weinstein twice with a happy tone in his cultivated voice.

  But Perry Weinstein was not so happy.

  There were problems, all sorts of problems.

  But nothing to tell Quent about.

  There had been a definite fuck-up in Athens. The agent there for R Section, codenamed “Winter,” reported to Athens police an attempt to kidnap him as he sat in Plokas Café on the sidewalk in Constitution Square. Only the chance that he had been dining that day with four business associates—all heavily armed—foiled the plot. Two men were dead.

  By midmorning in Washington, D.C., the word from Athens was that the two dead men were Soviet commercial attachés with the embassy in the Greek capital.

  Weinstein broke a pencil as he heard the report from Yackley by phone. Yackley was quite happy about it. Yackley did not understand.

  Weinstein dropped the broken pencil in his wastebasket.

  By noon, the watcher in Helsinki for R Section told police there his apartment had been broken into and ransacked.

  Again, the R Section agent had not been harmed. Yackley had phoned Weinstein with that bit of news as well and now he was not happy, merely puzzled.

  Weinstein saw what was happening.

  He thought about it as he stared out his window at the White House. There was still a way to salvage things, he thought. If only—

  He reached for the phone and pressed the button to connect him with Yackley.

  Yackley could still be used.

  Weinstein heard the phone ring and ring and ring. And then Yackley’s secretary was on the line, explaining that Mr. Yackley was at lunch at an undisclosed location and expected to be out of the office until late in the afternoon.

  “I don’t believe this,” Weinstein shouted. He never shouted. “I don’t believe that idiot is out to lunch! What the hell does he think is going on?”

  But the woman at the other end of the line said nothing and Weinstein slammed down the receiver so hard that the phone jumped on the desk. The white room was suddenly wrapped in silence.

  What was going on?

  Perry Weinstein considered himself a man of intelligence and calculation but there was a third part to him in that moment. He could not identify it. It began in his stomach and made him nauseous and built up through his organs until it reached his throat and made him dry and hoarse.

  It was fear. For the first time, he felt afraid of what was going to happen.

  He crossed the quiet room to the outer office.

  His secretary was gone; well, it was lunch hour. He stared at her desk and at the two television monitors connected with the security lobby.

  He pulled his eyes away and started back into his own office and stopped.

  He turned again.

  On the black-and-white screen focused on events at the security desk he saw the man cross the lobby and flash an identification to the guard. The guard put the ID card into a machine and looked at the machine and at the man before him.

  Weinstein knew the card. It would be gray and featureless, like a blank and unused credit card. The machine would read the message buried inside the card, between the twin layers of smooth plastic bonded together.

  He stared at the monitor screen and the man looked at the camera.

  He knew that face.

  His mind swept memory, clicking over files implanted in brain tissue, connected to life with electrical impulses.

  He knew the face from a 201 file he had read carefully before beginning everything that was now happening.

  Perry Weinstein retreated into his own office and went to the desk. He opened the upper right drawer and removed the old, heavy .45 caliber Colt army au
tomatic. It was the type designed at the turn of the century to kill a horse—literally, because there was still a cavalry in those days. It was replaced in service now by a light Italian handgun. Weinstein had a fondness for weapons and for antiquities. He was a very good shot and no one in the building knew he had a weapon in his drawer. It would not have been allowed, this close to the White House, across the street.

  He sat down at his desk and waited. He waited for a telephone call to break the silence, to tell him the fortunes of Nutcracker were reversed. He didn’t see how the blame could come back to him in any case.

  But the door to his office opened anyway.

  Perry Weinstein almost smiled in relief. The pistol in his hand was very heavy and felt good to him. He held it up so the other man could see the pistol clearly.

  “Bang bang,” Perry Weinstein said.

  “You’re dead,” Devereaux said and stepped into the room. His presence filled the room. Weinstein held the pistol easily in his big right hand. He propped his elbow on the desk top to steady the grip.

  “Bang bang,” Perry Weinstein said again, like a child who finds himself very clever.

  Devereaux waited by the door.

  “The TV monitor. I was in the outer office and I saw you in the security lobby,” Weinstein said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why?”

  “Nutcracker is off. Dead in the water.”

  “November,” Weinstein said. His eyes glittered in the dull light of the room. “Our man November.”

  Devereaux stood very still.

  “Come into the room a little more,” Weinstein said.

  Devereaux took a step.

  Weinstein waved the barrel of the pistol in welcome.

  Devereaux stood before the desk.

  Weinstein came around the desk carefully. “I am very good with pistols. Very good. In case you think I’m one of those desk-bound bureaucrats who doesn’t really know anything about anything.”

  He pressed the pistol against Devereaux’s head, behind the left ear. The barrel felt cold on the scalp. Devereaux said, “In the belt, left side.”

  Weinstein reached and removed the pistol from the clip.

  “Hands on head,” he said. He pointed to a straight chair by the north wall. Devereaux went to the chair and sat down. Weinstein pushed the chair back on the rear legs so that it balanced Devereaux back against the wall. “Is that comfortable?” he said.

  Devereaux did not speak.

  Weinstein went back to the desk and sat on the edge of the desk. He stared at Devereaux with owlish curiosity. His eyeglasses were still held together by a paper clip. He had a rugged and tired look to him. It really had been a lot of work and now it was over.

  Devereaux said, “You should have let sleeping agents lie.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” Weinstein said.

  “I was curious about Hanley’s calls. But it was only curiosity.”

  “I couldn’t be sure of that. It was difficult for me to maneuver.” He said this with a slow, funereal cadence. He wanted someone as smart as himself to understand.

  He went on: “I was succeeding. In getting Hanley out of the way. In another year, I would have R Section stripped down, discredited.”

  “How long have you worked for them?”

  “ ‘The other side,’ you mean?” Weinstein smiled. “It’s old-fashioned to think in those terms, don’t you think? There is only one side: Stability. A sense of order. Real peace. The enemy is the terrorists and they’re nothing more than nuisances. Who cares greatly that eight or nine people are killed in a Rome airport? I mean, beyond the eight or nine and their families? There is death like that every day, in every city of the world. No. There’s no ‘other side’ anymore; just as there are no spies anymore.”

  For the first time, Devereaux smiled. He seemed at ease and that annoyed Weinstein. “You’re the author of that nonsense.”

  “Yackley is my messenger, my agent. Yackley is an empty mind waiting to be filled. I gave a talk, actually, at Yale three years ago, before this assignment. I was trying to make an intellectual point that is true in practice. Eighty-five to ninety percent of our intelligence is hardware. It comes from things. It comes from satellites, skyspies, automatic listening devices. ELINT. PHOTINT. SIGINT. You know. There is so much information we can’t process it all. The information is like a constant avalanche that just never ends, never runs out of snow, never fills the valley below. On and on, year after year. There is too damned much intelligence and we are drowning in it. So what is the use of agents in the field? Are they going to steal the drawings of the Norden Bombsight? Or a copy of the Enigma Machine? My God, no one grows up. HUMINT is passé.” He became agitated and got up, walked around his desk, dropped the .45 heavily on the desk top. He sat down and Devereaux was very still.

  “This is modern times. There are no spies and spies are not only a drain upon the resources of the government—an argument, November, that flies well in budget-making circles—but a positive detriment. Spies generate spies. We spy on one another like kids. We misinterpret information because we are limited in intelligence; we hold up important analysis of real intelligence because we have our doubts or we are fed disinformation by our opposite numbers…”

  “And then, there are times when there are moles in government and it takes a spy to catch a spy.”

  Devereaux’s words were not expected and the room was quiet now. The man at the desk with the gun stared at Devereaux with something like hatred.

  “You caught me? I caught you,” Weinstein said. “You’re a renegade to Section. You crashed a crazy old man out of St. Catherine’s. You killed a nun—or it looks that way. And you killed a state policeman pursuing you. He died in the crash.”

  “He was driving too fast for conditions.”

  “You are a killer. You are out of control.”

  “I am licensed again.” Very softly. “In the old trade.”

  “Goddamnit. I can kill you right now and get a medal for it.”

  “Why work for them?”

  “Work for them? Those midgets? I saw a way clear to do some good. Don’t tell me you believe in that nonsense about recruitment in college and years of quiet dedication to the cause? I was in Czechoslovakia five years ago on a fellowship and I made the contact, not them. I told them I would do what I could. To make the world a saner place.”

  “How kind of you.”

  “I didn’t even want any money but I had to take money or they wouldn’t have believed me. I wanted to contribute to understanding.”

  “You’re crazy, Weinstein.”

  “No. You are. And Hanley. Spies and spymasters. I was handed R Section practically as a gift by that idiot Yackley. He was a climber and a star-fucker. He wanted me to see what a good job he did. Liked to call me Perry just as if we worked out at the same club together. What a complete asshole.”

  “Most of them are,” Devereaux said.

  “Yes. None more so than Hanley. I wanted to get rid of Hanley but you can’t just kill people, you know. Not at that level. I convinced Yackley, who convinced Dr. Thompson that Hanley needed calming down. Some sort of tranquilizer. Thompson is to medicine what Typhoid Mary was to cooking. Hanley was being blocked, going through some sort of career crisis—he doubted himself. And then, when I took Nutcracker away from him, he went off the edge. It was a clever enough bit of business, I think. I wasn’t even suspected.”

  “What is Nutcracker?”

  “Didn’t Hanley tell you?”

  “But that isn’t what it is—”

  Weinstein smiled. “You don’t know. So you haven’t blocked it after all. Nutcracker isn’t finished, is it?”

  “Only the parts I could understand. About the other side snatching our agents. Part of our pre-summit maneuvering in the field—we get a defector/spy and they get two—”

  “That can’t be.” Weinstein picked up the pistol again and sighted Devereaux along the barrel. “That can’t be.” T
he voice was soft. “There are four hundred and fifty-three agents in field. They can’t all be notified that quickly. I wasn’t concerned when you escaped with Hanley that you could figure this out right away. And notify all the agents. You couldn’t do it.”

  “No. You’re right.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I guessed which ones were the targets.”

  Weinstein blinked.

  He felt his finger become very heavy on the trigger.

  “You guessed?”

  Devereaux waited.

  “You guessed? You don’t guess! This isn’t a matter of guesswork.”

  “But it is. That’s what it always is. All the information doesn’t mean anything unless you can guess what the missing pieces are.”

  “How could you guess?”

  “Hanley had a list of names. Of agents. Scheduled for early retirement to trim the budget. They seemed most logical. And it would be enough to begin wrecking the Section—”

  “I gave Gorki all the information. I told him about you—that you were sleeping. I told him to take care of you. And that damned idiot Yackley had already sent out two Section chasers to talk to you. So we ended up with four dead agents in Switzerland. What a mess. What a stinking mess that was.”

  “You gave Gorki all the information. It was so good. He knew where to send Alexa. He wanted to get rid of Alexa.”

  “I know. She was an embarrassment to him. The old fool had photographs of her naked and dancing. Pictures of them together. Stolen New Year’s Eve from his dacha. He has his enemies in the bureaucracy as we do. I had word that he was coming out when the matter was over. Voluntarily or not. My little reward. After November was dead and the R Section spies were defected, Gorki was coming out. He was tired and old and he had enemies.”

  “Which side were you on?”

  “I didn’t care about Gorki, except that I could get credit for his defection. R Section was going to be ruined by Nutcracker. Let CIA get credit, NSA, the Brits for pulling in some low-level Soviet flotsam… Gorki set that up as one of his bona fides, to show he was going ahead with the program. The grand prize was Gorki himself from Resolutions Committee. I would arrange the meeting myself—”