Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  “The technique?”

  “The way to tell the stories to make them believable. You fooled Section once but you know you didn’t fool them twice.”

  “Then why arrange this escape?”

  “It’s the way things are done. The guard was drugged, the power shut down. No one has to know how you got out, merely that you did. You got out and you were killed as you made your escape. Moscow will not believe this at first but they monitor us the way we monitor them. Believe me, it will be believed and the last of Henry McGee and his stories will be accepted. It’s the way we can sanction people, Henry, without sanctioning them, if you see what I mean.”

  “You’re crazy,” Henry said.

  Devereaux took the shotgun down from the wall. “Go ahead and pray, Henry. We’re a civilized people.”

  “You won’t kill me,” Henry said.

  Devereaux opened the shotgun, inserted the shells, closed it. He brought it up.

  “Look, I want to tell you—”

  “But I’m done listening.”

  “I can tell you the truth.”

  “You couldn’t tell the truth if you were dying. Which is what you are.”

  Devereaux shot him with both barrels.

  Blood splattered Henry’s face, his chest, his arms. He was a mass of blood. The force of the blast threw him against the wall. He was completely covered in blood and pain from the force of the blast.

  Henry was still alive.

  “My God, my God,” he said in Russian. “My God,” he said in English. “You killed me.”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said.

  “I’m dying,” Henry McGee said. “Help me. Help me, Devereaux, for the love of God.”

  “Not love or money.”

  “You were right, you were right, if I got caught, this was the last backup, I was supposed to give them a couple of stories that were true and give you a lot of things that weren’t true about the Committee for External Observation and Resolution, none of that is true, and the stuff about Pierce wasn’t true and… my God! Get me someone to help me! I can’t die like this, I can’t die just like this!”

  “You were lying when you went after Hanley, to plant a story with that senator that he was a mole.”

  “Yes, yes, Jesus, yes.”

  Devereaux smiled at him.

  Henry felt this enormous pain and there was warm blood on his arms and chest, his own blood.

  “You killed me! I don’t want to die! I fooled them all except you! You killed me! I need your help now.”

  “You’re beyond help, Henry. You’re dying and you’re lying.”

  “Am I dying then?”

  “You’re really dying.”

  Henry McGee groaned. “Why did you have to be so goddamn stubborn? Why do you think it was important to have everything exactly right?”

  “Not exactly, Henry. I just wanted the truth.”

  “So now you got the truth and you can’t do anything with it because you still won’t believe it.” And Henry groaned again.

  “I believe it, Henry.”

  “Jesus, Jesus.”

  “Remember Narvak?”

  Henry closed his eyes and felt the death in him. He said the name of his Savior again.

  “Remember when you killed her?”

  “Jesus,” Henry McGee said and made the sign of the cross in the Orthodox Russian manner.

  “The first time?”

  And it took a moment.

  Henry opened his eyes.

  But he felt the pain.

  The blood was real.

  He stared at the blood on his chest.

  Devereaux turned off the tape recorder. “The problem is in the charge. You use too much and you might kill someone. Too little and you don’t fool them. You and Narvak used a blood bag but I couldn’t count on your cooperation, could I, Henry? You use very little shot but the force of the blast is enough to shock you off your stool, and the blood, well, you got enough shot in you to attract magnets but I doubt you’re in such bad shape as you think.”

  “Then I’m not dying?”

  “I’m not a doctor. Only an agent.” He went to the telephone and dialed a number and spoke to the emergency service at the other end of the line.

  In a little while, they heard the wail of the volunteer rescue ambulance on the hills.

  46

  THE TRUTH OF HENRY MCGEE

  Henry McGee did not die and was hospitalized for less than two weeks with a number of superficial wounds, as well as several broken ribs.

  The inquiry was held in secret and it was decided that security at the complex in Maryland had to be increased. It was also decided that the incident involving an agent named November and a detainee named Henry McGee would be expunged from records. This was decided at the highest level in R Section. It was decided reluctantly but there was no other way.

  The tape recording, however, was not destroyed.

  Devereaux received a private reprimand of the most severe nature. It was delivered verbally.

  Patricia Heath announced her surprising retirement from the Senate on July 14. Two days later, she was indicted on various federal charges by the U.S. attorney at Fairbanks who had received undisputable documents of her involvement in the pipeline blackmail case. He did not reveal the source of the documents and there was much speculation that it was Malcolm Crowder.

  Malcolm Crowder, in fact, could not balance a checkbook, let alone accumulate evidence on another human being.

  The evidence had arrived anonymously from another source.

  47

  EXILES

  Alexa was surprised to find Roger’s older Porsche still in the parking lot at LAX.

  She drove to her own place and took a long shower and contemplated her uselessness and loneliness. She thought her life had been a full thing only when she was with the KGB and she killed people for them. She had extracted all the information from Karpov without any feeling at all, even if Karpov had a part in frightening her, humiliating her with those photographs. It was business.

  The next day, she was visited by a very young woman who said she was from the Witness Relocation Program.

  “We have to relocate you, Alexa,” Karen O’Hare said. “The program compromised you. I apologize for that.”

  Alexa had not offered her coffee, had not even asked her to sit down. Alexa felt serious contempt for someone so young talking this nonsense to her.

  “I’m never leaving Los Angeles,” Alexa explained. “I am in no danger.”

  “Three men took you to a motel room and they knew who you were. They took photographs of you to force another member of the program to do what they wanted.” Karen said this very hard and flat. Alexa was very willful, it was noted in her 201 file.

  “That is past,” Alexa said with contempt. “There is no place like Los Angeles.”

  “There has to be something,” Karen said. She envisioned the U.S. as a giant menu. “I thought you would like Seattle.”

  “Is that where it rains all the time?”

  “It doesn’t, actually.”

  “I have friends here.”

  “It is not so far from here,” said Karen.

  “I will not go.”

  “I’m afraid you must. It’s a matter of security,” Karen said. “And we are still paying you.”

  Later, Alexa told Roger some things. She made love to him for a long time and then told him about three men who had kidnapped her and taken her to a motel room. They had staged her death in the room after stripping her and making her wear a signboard.

  “So what they wanted to do was blackmail another person with the photographs?” Roger said. He was naked and they were in bed, beneath the $240-a-sheet satin covers. Roger had been on an up all day with the makings of a new deal in which Danny DeVito would reprise the Marlon Brando role in On the Waterfront. The old movie would be rewritten into a comedy and titled Waterfront!

  “Yes,” Alexa said, making her voice small. “I don’t know what to do.�
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  “It’s fabulous,” Roger said.

  “Roger,” she began. “I was kidnapped.”

  “Someone like Kim Basinger, a victim kind but very haughty, too, someone for the eighties. Make it sort of like that guy that wrote those stories in Czechoslovakia, make it that she doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  “Roger, is this not a terrible thing I have told you that happened to me?”

  “It’s fabulous,” Roger said, meaning every word.

  Denisov was going to leave Santa Barbara in a few days for relocation to another place in the country.

  He felt nothing about this. He had felt nothing about so many things since the day in Alaska when he had decided at the last moment that he was reconciled to returning to Moscow, that he would betray another man to do it.

  He was waiting for the movers and he could not stand sitting in the empty apartment.

  Karen O’Hare was the agent who had informed him. She had replaced Wagner, who was now in federal custody because he could not make his bond on all the charges against him.

  Denisov put on his light coat and went out of the apartment because the movers would be hours late. He had nothing to do.

  He walked in the bright morning sun of midsummer in Santa Barbara. The early fog was already burned away from the hills. He wondered if he would miss this place.

  He wondered about Moscow and sometimes he hummed the melody of “Moscow Nights” and felt very sad. The man with two countries has none. He had not wanted to make a decision again, but when it came, he had decided to go home.

  They would have killed him probably but he would have been home.

  He walked in the slow careful way of a heavy man who watches his steps and sees all around him.

  He did not see the other man waiting at the intersection, however. He was trained to see in certain situations but not in this one where he was wrapped in his own thoughts.

  It had taken Skeeter a long time. Skeeter followed the trail of the Russian man to Nome and then back to Anchorage and even down to Seattle where it disappeared again. The newspapers had no more accounts of the heavy Russian man who had killed his friend Pierce. The man from Dutch Harbor who wanted solitude, and a few friends, and a little whiskey, and whom Skeeter had grown to love.

  Skeeter worked the navy to find the heavy man.

  Everyone could be found and it was a matter of careful patience. It was also about delving into the business that Pierce did, about the fax-copy photo of Denisov that Pierce had given him in the airplane above Cook Inlet on the last night of Pierce’s life.

  “He was a spy,” someone told Skeeter. Hell, Skeeter had known that when he flew Pierce to Anchorage.

  But he had been a friend as well.

  Friendship counted for something and this wasn’t about politics or spies or who was doing a cover-up.

  This was about a heavy man who got away with killing his friend.

  He had the horse killer under his jacket and he was waiting for the man to begin the turn around the block. He knew just the way the man did things, every day of his life.

  Or on this, the last day of his life.

  Because Skeeter was a true friend and you had to avenge the death of a friend.

  48

  THE HURT

  Ninety-four days later, in the midst of the humid and suffocating summer in Washington, D.C., they sat in an air-conditioned office off Pennsylvania Avenue and signed papers.

  It is the ritual of property transfer. You sign and sign and the papers keep coming and the lawyers have grim faces.

  He kept looking at her.

  When it was all signed, one of the buyers wanted to shake his hand.

  Devereaux looked through him.

  That made her smile.

  They walked into the bright sunshine.

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Do you want to fight?”

  “No.”

  “You want to buy me a drink?”

  “No,” he said.

  She looked at him curiously. “You know about Ted?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “He’s very nice.”

  “I know all about him.”

  “I don’t know if I want you to spy on me.”

  He said, “It’s what I do best.”

  “Damn you,” she said, but she wasn’t very angry.

  “Marry him,” he said.

  “You give up easy,” she said. She had not intended to say that. It was the dumbest thing in the world she could have said.

  He kissed her.

  They never made it past the door of room 312 in the Willard Hotel. He helped her unbutton her clothes. It was frantic and silly, almost as if they were teenagers.

  They made love standing up, in the hallway leading to the room, made frantic and terrible and warm love. They had clothes on. They opened each other and hurt each other with their rough caresses. When it was done, they made love again.

  They slept on a rented bed in a hotel room in the warm night, beneath the stars. They slept as exhausted lovers. Their hands touched. It was just a little time apart. In the morning, when sunlight probed their disarray, they would have to decide something and neither of them wanted to think about it. They merely touched hands and let their bodies sleep, forgetting about the next hurts.

  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 his 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 twenty-two novels, including thirteen in the November Man series, and three nonfiction books. 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

  Chicago Pieces

  The Magic Feather

 
Fighting Jane

  Lords of the Last Machine (with Lori Granger)

  PRAISE FOR BILL GRANGER AND THE NOVEMBER MAN SERIES

  THE NOVEMBER MAN

  “Chilling… seems to move with the speed of light.”

  —Pittsburgh Press

  “Should keep you reading to the end… an engrossing book about the world of computers, treachery, slow or sudden death, and ‘doing things wrong for all the right reasons.’ ”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Crisp style, well-mannered prose, and inexorable tension characterize this worthy addition to the successful November Man series. Granger once again displays his winning talent for manipulating traditional elements of intrigue… highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Granger’s November Man series has been consistently entertaining and interesting, far surpassing much of the work done in the espionage genre. This addition to the list maintains that consistency… builds almost perfectly to an exciting finish… on the mark.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “First-rate… This gripping novel provides further proof that November Man has grown into one of the most complex fictional spies on the current scene.”

  —Booklist

  CODE NAME NOVEMBER

  “Mr. Granger has combined Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Trevanian in a heady mix… He handles all the elements with real virtuosity.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Granger is one of our premier spy novelists. His Devereaux is the perfect spy for these less than perfect times.”

  —People

  “A novelist of superb talent who has mastered the genre and brought to it a distinctly American viewpoint.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A serious American writer of the first rank… Like Hemingway, Granger learned the technical aspects of his craft through newspaper work. The result is lean and uniquely American.”

  —National Review

  SCHISM

  “An intelligently crafted thriller… lean prose and intricate plotting.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “The mysteries and motives here turn out to be suitably momentous… all of the characters are vulnerably likeable… solid entertainment.”