Code Name November

by Bill Granger

“We weren’t wrong, you know, about Devereaux. He should have kept us informed,” the Old Man said at last.

  Hanley nodded but did not speak. They walked on in silence.

  “We’ve got our opening to Brit Intell,” Galloway said. “It was what we wanted.”

  “British Intelligence,” Hanley said. “I detest slang.”

  And the old man glanced at him curiously as they walked along.

  Of course, Green had been the key to Devereaux’s plan to survive and to sabotage the CIA at the same time. It was Green who finally convinced British Intelligence that Devereaux was correct and that the whole wild story was plausible and even true. It was Green who, indirectly, moved C (as the British Intelligence commander was still called) to order the extraordinary alert of police and special-branch forces during the night which had resulted in the capture of the CIA hit man from Hamburg.

  Green trusted Devereaux and followed his instructions. He told British Intelligence the truth to save his life.

  They had taken him—the night before the Brianna launch—to the police station in Dale Street at Hatton Gardens in the center of the old city of Liverpool. He told them all: About Operation Mirror and about his part in it; about the attempt on the life of Elizabeth Campbell on the Dover train (and his part in it); and about Devereaux’s mission to Scotland and Ulster. He told them about the tape-transmitter box in Blake House. Yes, he knew about Hastings’ death, from Ruckles.

  They had been very quiet and polite. Ruckles?

  Green was expansive. They were treating him famously, in the finest British manner. These were his people, the sort of civilized men he felt at home with. They offered him tea. He did not notice that their faces had become drawn and their eyes become small and cold.

  Ruckles was the CIA man. He told them about Ruckles.

  When had he last seen Ruckles?

  Not seen, actually. Heard. On the telephone. Sunday night.

  Come now. He had seen Ruckles on Monday certainly.

  Not at all. He was in Cambridge on Monday.

  Really? For what purpose?

  Devereaux had told him to wait in Cambridge.

  The three men from the Ministry for Interior Affairs (Extraordinary) glanced at each other and then again at Green, who sat smiling in the corner of the small room in the basement of the central police station.

  The tea was cold and Green put down his cup.

  “We put it to you that you murdered Ruckles,” one said quietly.

  “What?”

  “This belongs to you.” And they produced a black gun—Devereaux’s gun, Green realized—the gun he had pointed at Green that Sunday night he came to kill him at Blake House.

  “Not mine, no—”

  “It was in your room at the Adelphi Hotel.”

  “Now—”

  “Ruckles was found murdered in the gents at Euston Station on Monday afternoon. He was shot once. With this pistol. And you knew him well.”

  Green looked from face to face and saw only hard men.

  “That’s Devereaux’s gun—”

  “Nonsense. You had it. In your room. You knew Ruckles. He was your contact. You said you had been angry with Ruckles because the company wouldn’t take you in after Operation Mirror was blown.”

  Green frowned.

  “You are an espionage agent, operating outside your embassy in Great Britain, and you have admitted complicity in one attempt at murder, knowledge after the fact of a second murder—that’s Hastings—and now you wish to deny your involvement in the murder of Ruckles?”

  Green opened his mouth to protest but no words came. He suddenly understood that Devereaux kept his bargain—his bargain with R Section and his bargain with Green. As he promised, Green would not die. He would live. But he would be eliminated.

  He tried to laugh.

  There were no public executions in Britain any longer. Green would live. Safe. In Her Majesty’s prisons. For the rest of his life.

  27

  FRONT ROYAL

  A cover of snow lay lightly on the mountains. And there was mist as well, so thick that they closed Skyline Drive along the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  You could not see to the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains south of the little town.

  They bought groceries in the little store where Devereaux always went, and the owners said it had been a long time no see, and was he stayin’ a while?

  Devereaux nodded then and the grocer looked at the woman with her pale face and dark, luminous eyes. Because Virginians form a polite society in the mountains, the old man did not ask about her but merely smiled and nodded to her.

  They drove out of the town along a road that ran through the valley and led to the hills. Two miles beyond Front Royal, they found the rutted dirt road that led up to his mountain.

  Devereaux had told Elizabeth they could see the Shenandoah River from the top of the mountain. He said there were bears and wild deer in the virgin forests along both sides of the road.

  There had been a light rain in the valley; now they drove up to the light snow covering the mountains. There were tracks of animals in the snow, animals scurrying for the last bit of forage against the winter. Devereaux drove slowly through the mists that thickened along the road. When they neared the top of the mountain, the mists were so thick they could scarcely see the road.

  Elizabeth had not spoken. She was like a child being shown unexpected magic, given rare treats. She absorbed it all and watched him; he looked different now, in the pale light. The light softened the hardness and the edges of his face.

  It was safe now. He had made it safe. They were not afraid anymore. They would live.

  This was what he had promised.

  The house was at the end of the dirt road and seemed lost in another world. There was no valley below and no sky above, only the mists shrouding the wooden house and the immense silence of nature.

  When they got out of the car, Elizabeth helped Devereaux carry the groceries inside; he got the bags while she filled the old-fashioned refrigerator.

  He had warned her the place would be cold.

  The house was dark and silent when they entered; he went from room to room and turned on the lights and he set to building a fire in the stone fireplace in the great living room.

  He turned on the large gas heaters on the wall, but the chill was slow in leaving.

  There was mail, as well; he threw all the accumulated mail down on the table behind the couch in the living room. The couch faced the fire. They sat in front of the fire and listened to its roaring; they ate after a while and then they made love; the house was warm and the darkness pressed at the windows; they drank wine and made love again.

  Elizabeth fell asleep on the rug before the fire, snuggled in pillows. When she awoke, it was because she heard him laughing.

  She had never heard him laugh before.

  He laughed slowly; in a deep, gentle rumble, coming from some warm place in him that she had never discovered.

  She smiled and opened her eyes. It was night and the fire was still burning.

  “You’re laughing.”

  He was sitting at the table behind the couch. He looked at her and continued to laugh.

  She began to laugh in empathy, the way people must laugh when they hear others.

  “Why?” she asked.

  He couldn’t speak. He finally handed her a piece of paper and she read it with an eager smile on her face; but it puzzled her and she didn’t understand. She read it again.

  The letter was an official notice addressed to Devereaux.

  From the American Express Company. Suspending the use of his credit card until his overdue balance was paid.

  AFTERWORD

  Code Name November (originally published as The November Man) was my first novel. It was published in September, 1979. Two weeks after it appeared in a paperback edition from Fawcett Gold Medal Library, Lord Louis Mountbatten of Britain was assassinated on his boat off the western coast of Ireland.

&
nbsp; That event was to make this book an infamous reminder that realistic fiction—if it is to be any good at all—is merely a clear mirror vision of what is really happening in the world described. The things that happen in fiction mirror those things that have happened—or will happen soon—in real life. The parallels between what in fact happened off the Irish coast to a cousin of the Queen and what happened in the pages of The November Man to the character of Lord Slough were both derived from the terrorism and sorrow of a radically divided Ireland. In one case, a real life ended; in my book, I wrote from knowledge of my own time spent reporting the story of death and terror in Northern Ireland.

  Within twenty-four hours of Lord Mountbatten’s assassination by elements of the Irish Republican Army terrorist group. The November Man became internationally famous. I sat in my kitchen in a suburb near Chicago and received calls morning and night from around the world. There were live interviews on the phone with morning DJs in Sydney, Australia, and post-midnight calls from the Glasgow Herald. The calls from reporters all asked the same question in different ways: “How did you foretell the death of Louis Mountbatten in your novel?”

  I did not. My book had been based, as are all the others in the series, on some reporting and my own interviews and experience. The world of intelligence, espionage, and terrorism explored in the November Man novels is a glass turned to the real and quite shadowy world that exists beneath the consciousness of most of us.

  In August, 1971, my wife and I were at the end of a six-month period of bumming our way across the face of Europe. We had been in Narvik, Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle; we had lived off the generosity of friends in Rome to experience the daily life of the ancient city; we had lived with relatives outside London and in slums inside Paris. We were at the end of our money and our experiences had filled us with a thousand stories of everyday life in the old countries of the world. We had lived in two-dollar-a-night flophouses in Paris and Madrid, bed-and-breakfast places in obscure cities like Lincoln, England, and we had not so much seen a different world but felt it and heard it and smelled it until it had become part of us.

  We had stopped this August night in The Corner House Hotel in Burford, which is in the old sheep country that once provided England with all its wealth. We went out in the evening—it was warm and smelled of earth, sheep, and the lushness of the English countryside—and noticed the local evening paper in the front parlor of the hotel. The Oxford Mail carried a typical one-word headline: INTERNMENT.

  The British authorities in Northern Ireland had decided to suspend habeas corpus rights for the Irish in exchange for a measure of order. In a swift roundup, they had locked up suspected IRA supporters, sympathizers, and participants without benefit of trial or charges. Some of them were interned on prison ships in the harbor of Belfast.

  The story was about the British measures—not the Irish response. I felt certain there would be violence and that it was going to be a hell of a story to cover.

  I was a reporter on leave then from the Chicago Sun-Times. I was also a stringer for Newsday on Long Island. My wife and I, pushed to our last pennies by our mad half-year holiday in Europe, talked about the opportunity of what was happening in Ireland. I am sorry to say that is the way I saw it—as a reporting opportunity. I was so close to what I was sure was a battle.

  I telephoned the Sun-Times, which declined my offer to go back on full salary to cover the war. It was run in those days by a parsimonious management that considered “foreign” stories those events that take place in the farther suburbs of Chicago. But Newsday editor Don Forst called back in the wee hours and commissioned me to battle. I had never been in Ireland before; I had no idea how to get there. My phone calls had excited the considerable curiosity of Mr. Bateman, the proprietor of the hotel (who would later take a year out of his life to do nothing but sail a barge from England through the waterways of France to the Bay of Biscay). Bateman thought my best bet was to take a fast train north and then cross to the ferry service to Larne Harbour, Belfast. He undertook to drive me across the countryside to Cheltenham to pick up the fast train for Glasgow. My wife and I separated and, in twenty-four hours, I was in Belfast and she was safe in the little village of Bridge-of-Erin in Scotland.

  I spent some time there and began to understand the tragedy of Northern Ireland—and of Ireland and Britain as well—in terms of the participants. In particular, I made friends with those who had covered the war for a long time. There were a couple of good and cynical newsmen from The Times in London there who gave me help; and a man from Corriere della Sera in Milan who teamed with me to cover all the sides of the story one man could not do alone. (One day, I remember, I chatted with Rev. Ian Paisley of the Protestants in one parlor of the old Station Hotel while my Milanese friend interviewed one of the IRA Provos in the main dining room of the same hotel. We shared our notes and experiences.)

  I was nearly shot once following an explosion on the docks when two B specials (policemen) mistook me for an IRA type—I had red hair, red beard, and a black sweater. Mostly, working in Ireland was a matter of just working and listening and taking notes and trying to understand what it all meant. I do not mean to make the experience more or less than it was.

  One night, during the end of my tour, I talked to a couple of fellows from the BBC who had spent a lot of time in Belfast. I opined that the IRA, sooner or later, as a terrorist group, would have to threaten or assassinate someone in the royal family of Britain.

  The BBC fellow with the wide face and whisky voice and sure manner was shocked. Truly shocked. “Yanks don’t understand a thing about the Irish,” he said.

  “I understand terrorism,” I said. I had seen a few riots in Chicago and covered that strange week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

  “But you don’t understand,” he said. “Even the IRA has too much respect for the Royal Family to do anything of the sort.”

  I thought he was wrong at the time and wrong still years later when I wrote The November Man. Terrorism has no rules except to effect terror. And that is why I wrote the book I did, based on experience and what I thought I understood of the way politics works. And terrorism is politics, no matter how extreme.

  My book had been purchased by an English publisher before publication. Unfortunately, when Mountbatten was killed and The November Man achieved a sort of instant celebrity in the press worldwide, the English publisher said it would reek of opportunism to publish the book—even though it had been purchased on its merits before the event of the assassination—and held it off the market for two years. It is still being published in Britain and in a number of other countries.

  This is the first American edition in half a decade. There have been six sequels involving November, but this book, written at the beginning of my life as a novelist, has a special life of its own. Readers of the other November Man novels have haunted used book shops to find “the first one” and a dear lady in the Chicago Tribune circulation department once offered twenty-five dollars for a worn paperback copy of the book. I am glad it is back in print for those who asked about it.

  I make no apologies about the plot of the book or my attempt to portray Irish society as it really is—with all its beauty, its diversity, and its great potential for good and harm. This book—and the other November Man books—holds a mirror to the face of reality. I try to make the mirror as clear and undistorted as I can.

  Bill Granger

  Chicago

  1986

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he won an Associated Press award for hi
s story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for Newsday—and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to Time, the New Republic, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.

  He began his literary career in 1979 with Code Name November (originally published as The November Man,) the book that became an international sensation and introduced the cool American spy who later gave rise to a whole series. His second novel, Public Murders, a Chicago police procedural, won the Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1981.

  In all, Bill Granger published thirteen November Man novels, three nonfiction books, and nine novels. In 1980, he began weekly columns in the Chicago Tribune on everyday life (he was voted best Illinois columnist by UPI), which were collected in the book Chicago Pieces. His books have been translated into ten languages.

  Bill Granger passed away in 2012.

  ALSO BY BILL GRANGER

  The November Man series

  Code Name November (previously published as The November Man)

  Schism

  The Shattered Eye

  The British Cross

  The Zurich Numbers

  Hemingway’s Notebook

  The November Man (previously published as There Are No Spies)

  The Infant of Prague

  Henry McGee Is Not Dead

  The Man Who Heard Too Much

  League of Terror

  The Last Good German

  Burning the Apostle

  Other Novels

  Drover

  Drover and the Zebras

  Public Murders

  Newspaper Murders

  Priestly Murders

  The El Murders

  Time for Frankie Coolin

  Sweeps

  Queen’s Crossing

  Nonfiction