Bill Granger - The November Man

It was probably over now.

And while these melancholy feelings came in waves over his consciousness, another part of his mind was deciding where to run and how to run.

He felt as he sometimes had felt on fall mornings in the old place in the Virginia mountains, when the air was crisp and dry and the leaves in the forest on the hill crackled with the alert movement of animals. He felt aware of all things around him. It was what he had been trained for.

“It’s all right, Claudette,” he said at last.

“ Monsieur le professeur , I am afraid. For you, not for me.” This was true, she felt. The steadiness of his gaze and the concern she read in his eyes had warmed her.

“There is nothing to be frightened of—”

“If they come back—”

“They won’t come back,” Devereaux said. “If they know this place, they could watch for me easily enough. They had some other reason for saying what they said to you.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Neither do I.” He tried a smile. “But it’s going to be all right.”

“What will you do?”

“Go away for a while, Claudette. But I’ll be back.”

As he stood up he saw that she knew he was lying to her in that moment, and it made him feel a peculiar emotion, one he could not place at first. Yes, he realized: It was sadness. This café, even Claudette’s presence in it, had become one of his touchstones, though he had not consciously attempted to create touchstones in a foreign land. It was weakness to need such things. Was he becoming weak? Did he need the ritual of morning newspapers, this café, the old man who played chess on the pavilion outside Ouchy?

He left a ten-franc note and Claudette thought to say something else, something to draw them together. But there was nothing to say.

Devereaux was in the street, standing for a moment framed in the door of the café. The day was brilliant. The sun was high and there was a warm breath of wind from the French side of the lake. The sun glinted on the perpetual snowfields in the high reaches of the mountains.

There was no need to return to the apartment. Whatever had to be arranged could be arranged from another place. He considered the pistol sealed in plastic and strapped to the underside of the toilet tank lid. He would find another weapon. He had his passport, his bankbook.

He walked down the hillside to the Avenue de la Gare and went into the first branch of the Credit Suisse and withdrew 10,000 Swiss francs. Because he wanted the money in denominations of 100 francs, there were 100 bills and the wad was thick enough to split in two—half in his inside jacket pocket, the other half in the lower “cargo” pocket of his denim trousers.

While he made these preparations for flight, he tried to see what was unusual around him. He had lived long enough in Lausanne to find the oddities in the colorful scenes on the street.

There were old women in black coats hurrying to do their shopping and men in brown caps, smoking curved pipes, and businessmen with their coats open to the warm breeze, walking with the light step of their younger days. What did not fit this scene?

And he saw the two men sitting in the Saab down the street, watching the life surge around them.

Two men at noon on a weekday in a car bearing the license plates of Bern. This was Vaud; they were far from home. They were sitting in an expensive Swedish car in the middle of the day on a side street, waiting for someone. They had to be waiting for someone. In a rental car most likely. Businessmen from abroad.

They seemed to be parked just on the periphery of his activity.

He thought about the crude warning given Claudette in the café. It was stupid, almost self-defeating. It invited him to flee, which was what he was doing.

Why?

KGB, like the other espionage services and some terrorist organizations, passed through Switzerland easily on their way to activities in the north and—more likely—the south of Europe. But incidents of terror in Switzerland were rare enough to be nonexistent. The reason was simple: Switzerland was a compact, orderly country with a fierce military tradition and an absolutely cold-blooded approach to dealing with terror. It was not acceptable, not negotiable, and, in the long run, not worth the effort on the part of terrorists. Devereaux considered all this information in a split second, as a computer might, except that the mind worked faster when it was trained to consider information with both thought and feeling.

Devereaux crossed the broad avenue to the long, red stone train station. A white-gloved policeman held up his hand against the traffic.

Devereaux stopped at the kiosk where he usually bought the papers and chose the current copy of the Economist . Exactly as a potential railroad passenger might, choosing a magazine to kill the time on the train. He paid and turned around and saw the Saab parked illegally at the curb by the Continental Hotel across the way. He walked into the train station, across the concourse, to the ticket windows. He stood in line behind two schoolgirls who were talking to each other between giggles. When he reached the window, he bought the ticket for Zurich. He stood with the ticket a moment and looked in a glass window of a confectionary shop inside the terminal. He saw the two men at the entrance of the station.

Devereaux crossed the concourse to the platforms. The train for Geneva was just pulling into the first platform. It didn’t matter: They had seen him buy the ticket, they had observed him walk to the platform. They would draw the right conclusion.

He climbed aboard.

The train waited.

He went to one of the windows and watched.

The two men stepped onto the platform and they stared at the train, at the very car where Devereaux waited. They looked at each other and then looked up and down the platform. At the last moment, they started across the concrete platform toward the waiting train.

Perhaps they had miscalculated and thought he would flee by auto.

Devereaux opened the door at the end of the car and dropped from the train onto the platform as the electrified express to Geneva quickly picked up speed. A conductor at the far end of the platform frowned at Devereaux. He walked over and shook his finger and told him about the dangers of jumping from a moving train. Devereaux had broken the rules in a country of rules.

Devereaux crossed the platform slowly, watching the train swing out east of the city in the tangle of tracks. He entered the concourse and looked around. There were the usual crowds of midday travelers. The trains were swift and frequent so that all classes and ages took the trains as a matter of course. Devereaux tried to see if there was anything different he could find in this crowd around him. There had been two men. Perhaps there were more. He was a patient watcher, falling easily back into the habits of a trade he had sought to quit more than once. The habits couldn’t die—they merely became rusty through disuse.

Outside the station, the sun was still blindingly bright. The passersby were shedding themselves of heavy morning coats and scarves and soaking up the sun and the warm southern breeze. There was a cheerful feeling on the Avenue de la Gare.

He crossed the street to the abandoned Saab and opened the door. He saw the keys in the ignition. He reached in the glove compartment and took out a rental agreement between a M. Pelletier and a Swiss rental car company at the airport at Geneva. So they had flown into Geneva, picked up a car with Bern registration, and gone directly to Lausanne. They had arrived yesterday.

They had known exactly where to find him. He had eluded them. But it had been much too easy.

He felt the vague chill that he had learned to live with in the years in the old trade. He had the feeling of watching and being watched. He looked around. A policeman approached with a sour look and told him to move the car.