Bill Granger - The November Man

Devereaux started the engine. Devereaux turned left on the east side of the station, went under the viaduct and down the road that parallels the Metro to Ouchy at the bottom of the hill. It would be better to get out of the tangle of Lausanne, to find an open road and see who might be on it.

A gray Renault pulled from its parking spot in front of the McDonald’s and followed the Saab down the steep hill toward Ouchy and the lakeshore.

Devereaux drove quickly enough to see if anyone kept up with him.

The gray Renault leaped ahead of a slow-moving bus and pushed between a dull limousine and a truck turning into a service drive. There was no one between Devereaux and the Renault.

They wanted him to flee.

They wanted him to leave Switzerland. They wanted to isolate him, he thought. There had to be a killing field where he could be hunted in the open. Switzerland was never a good place to trap a spy.

He turned at Ouchy and followed the line of the highway toward Vevey and Chillon. The highway rose into the hills above these coastal towns, suspended on pilings driven deep into the rocky hillside. All along the highways were disguised pillboxes, arms depots and rocks set in such a way as to cause a rockslide across the roadway at a signal. The Swiss perpetually booby-trap their country in preparation for a war that has not come in five centuries.

Devereaux pushed the Saab now, screaming through the gears, pushing the tachometer to the red line with each gear, shifting down hard, driving the engine to its limits. He was pushing 150 kilometers and the Renault was keeping pace.

The midday traffic was thin. Travelers were taking their dinner breaks. The countryside was empty and full of peace. The road was rising into the hills above the lake. Down on the lake, the ferry boats plowed through the waters.

Devereaux thought there might be two men in the Renault but the light was so brilliant that it made a mirror of the windshield behind him.

The light blinded both drivers. He thought of what he would do then.

He had no weapon but the car and his own knowledge of the roads around the lake.

There was a small road that tumbled down the mountain from the main highway toward Chillon. The road was made for slower transport in a slower age. He tried to remember exactly what he knew of the road. And then he remembered.

If they wanted him to flee, they would expect him to be running as fast as he could.

The Saab growled and whined as he pulled off the main road and onto the smaller road down the mountain. He pushed the gears down, taming the engine, feeling the tires catch at the asphalt and hold it despite the sway of centrifugal force. He pushed into a slow slide around a long and lazy curve and then pushed the car into a screaming acceleration down a short stretch of straight ground. He glanced behind him once in the rear-view mirror and saw the Renault. Was it ten seconds behind? Was there enough time?

The Saab whined through a second, sharp turn around a boulder and Devereaux slammed the brakes with brutal force, so that the rear end of the car bucked and the tires squealed as the car lurched sideways toward the edge of a cliff at the margin of the road. The car nearly turned around. Below was a farmer’s field with the earth waiting for a plow.

Devereaux was out of the car in a moment and across the road to the rocks.

Two seconds later, the Renault surged around the blind turn and slammed into the left side and rear end of the Saab.

There had been two men.

One hurtled through the windshield, over the Saab, and over the cliff to the broken field below.

The second hit his head hard against the crumpled steering post.

The Saab and Renault ground into each other in slow motion. There was no fire.

Bits of metal exploded against the rocks around Devereaux where he crouched in a ditch. Below the road was the old castle sitting in the waters of Lac Leman. It was the place where Byron had come and meditated on the prisoner held there twelve years and written a poem. It was peaceful and of another world.

Devereaux ran to the door of the Renault. The driver was unconscious or dead. He could not open the crumpled door. The window was broken. Devereaux used his elbow to break more glass, to get a way into the car. Devereaux reached through the window and felt into the pocket of the driver. He pulled out the pistol. It was an ordinary Walther PPK with a short barrel and six hollow-point bullets seated in the clip. He shoved the pistol in his pocket.

The wallet was inside the vest pocket.

He opened the wallet and found a sheaf of French banknotes and a photograph of a young man and a young woman and an American Express card made out to Jonathan DeVole.

And a second card.

Devereaux stared at the second card.

It was plastic, cut hard and brittle exactly like an ordinary credit card.

Except it was gray. Without numbers or letters on it. The card was perfectly smooth and unmarked.

Devereaux saw that his hand was closing over the card as though to swallow it and make it disappear. It was as though his hand were separate from his body.

Devereaux knew the card.

It was familiar to him when he had worked for the R Section in a life he had abandoned.

The card was accepted at 120 machines located throughout the world, identifying the cardholder as a member of the operations division of R Section, a very secret intelligence agency of the United States.

Hanley’s division.

Alexa waited until dark to enter the apartment building. It was small and there was a concierge but Alexa had taken care of that—the concierge was distracted from her apartment on the ground floor by a boy who threw a brick through one of the ground-floor windows and then ran down the Rue de la Concorde Suisse. It was not so difficult to find vandals, even in Lausanne, if they were well paid.

She climbed to the third floor and went to the apartment at the end of the hall. She had waited outside the building all day, sitting in the Volkswagen at the end of the block, watching for any sign of life at all.

The information had come with unexpected precision and it was timely.

The agent named November—the second moon of November—had been observed twenty-four hours previously in this apartment, in this building. It had been determined by the resident extra at Geneva that he had been living there for nearly two years.

Why was everything so precise, so exact? And yet, Alexa had a strange feeling that this was all too easy. What was it about, exactly?

She wore a black sweater that had a high collar; she wore black cotton trousers and black running shoes. Her jacket was a variation of a sailor’s pea coat. Her long black hair was tied up. She wore no makeup at all and her pale features were small and frail.

The lock was not so simple but she found the way in after a few moments with a pick and tumbler setter which electronically felt for the tumblers and tripped them.

The apartment was dark as it had been all day. It was still, save for the ticking of an electronic clock on the wall of the kitchen. The clock was quartz, the ticking was added to fake the sound of a real clock.

She went into all the rooms. She opened the closets. They did not have many clothes, the agent and his mistress.

There were no photographs. There was a sense of impermanence to the apartment.

She saw that the Panasonic answering machine was on but that there had been no calls. The red call button was not blinking.

She found a chair near the window where she could watch in the shadows down the length of the Rue de la Concorde Suisse.

He did not own a car but rented them often from the Avis garage next to the Lausanne train station.