Bill Granger - The November Man

He had not rented a car in a week. He was usually back in the apartment by eight. The mistress was gone, the resident extra in Geneva had no information on her. But he had so much other information that it amazed Alexa.

Alexa frowned in the darkness. This was not usual. She had spent two days in Zurich waiting for contact. She had not expected to be given much information—but when the contact was made she had received a cornucopia of detail. If they knew so much about this man, why had they not taken care of the matter before this, before the bungled business on the Finlandia ?

Alexa removed the Uzi from her purse. It was made in France, fitted with a silencer, and it had eighteen shots. It was sufficient to tear a living man’s body in half.

The final arrangements were her own. It was a form of self-protection. After all, if she were to survive, it must be on her own terms. KGB ran her on a very loose leash; it was necessary to the business at hand.

The quartz clock in the kitchen ticked with a false sound. The bright day had turned to clear night. There was a full moon and she could see the street clearly.

When she had been a child, living in the flats along the Lenin Prospekt in Moscow with her mother, her brother, and her youngest sister—her father had been a colonel in the Soviet army and had spent long periods in command of troops on the Sino-Soviet border seven thousand miles to the east—she had thought once to count all the stars and end the mystery about the endless number of stars in the heavens. She was nine or ten and had a very precise mind and nature, however naïve. She reasoned with her mother this way:

The stars we see cannot be infinite because the scope of heaven we see is not infinite. So it is possible to count all the stars you can see from Moscow.

Her mother, who was intelligent and who had been beautiful when she was young, said it was impossible because the sky changed each night as the earth revolved around the sun.

Alexa had said it was still possible. On one night, a determined person in Moscow (such as herself) could count all the stars visible from an apartment on the Lenin Prospekt. It could be done in winter, on a clear, cold night, when the night stretched from the middle of the afternoon to the middle of the next morning.

Her mother had seemed amused and would not argue with her. She was a child.

Alexa thought of a child growing inside her body. It would be a splendid idea. But not now. Not for a while yet. The child would be magnificent. It would be a boy.

She had waited until winter to count the stars and when winter came she was older and wiser and she knew it was foolish to want to limit the number of stars by counting them. It was better to ignore them. Or accept the word of the scientists who did such things.

Still.

What if she had counted all the stars on a clear winter’s night in Moscow, from horizon to horizon? What would the number have been, all the stars seen with the naked eye? Would it have been possible at all?

She saw both men at the same time.

They approached from opposite corners, where the Rue de la Concorde Suisse ends in a terraced wall above the streets below that lead to the Cathedral.

They were on foot and there could be no car behind them because the walkway along the wall was a mere pedestrian path.

She watched them approach the building from opposite sides of the street.

She knew they were coming to this place and she felt trapped. Why had she been trapped?

For the first time, she felt a sense of guilt. Was there something in the past, something she had done or said that would have forced her Committee to list her for a “wet contract”? A contract to be carried out as far away from Moscow Center as possible?

But she had made no mistake. The careful child who wanted to count all the stars above Moscow had made no mistake. What had Alexei said in Helsinki? The mistakes had to be blamed on someone.

She rose from the chair and looked down at the two men on opposite sides of the street. They were staring up at the darkened window where Alexa stood. They glanced at each other and she thought one of them shrugged.

They entered the building, one at a time.

The street was nearly fifty feet below. There was a balcony outside the window. At the end of the hall, there was a fire escape. She hesitated. She felt terribly confused.

When she decided, it was too late.

She went to the door and reached for the handle and heard steps in the hall.

She waited at the door, the length of the Uzi pistol extended away from her body.

There were no voices, only steps in the hall. Then one of them knocked on the door.

The three waited, two outside, Alexa inside.

The dark made all sounds more intense. The clock in the kitchen seemed to reverberate with sound.

They had trouble with the lock, just as she had. They opened the door cautiously.

Alexa fired through the door. The Uzi thumped and bucked in her hand. The door splintered and she heard them cry in pain and surprise. She expected them to push into the room. Instead, the second one retreated back into the hall.

That would be messy.

She sprayed six shots into the hall, firing from right to left as she filled the frame of the door, straddling the man on the floor dying between her legs.

The flash of her pistol was met with the whump of another pistol, fitted with a silencer.

They’ve killed the concierge, she thought dreamily in that moment of action. It was so messy and they didn’t care, as though they wanted this to be done quickly or not at all. She thought they must be in a hurry and that puzzled her. All these thoughts crammed the moment needed to spray the darkened hallway with death from the Uzi.

The second one fell heavily and then she realized the first one was alive because he stirred against her feet. She lowered the pistol to finish him off—and stopped.

She knelt and turned him over.

The bullet had grazed his head, he was bleeding heavily, he might even live. His eyes were open wide but he did not seem to be conscious.

She reached into his pocket and found money. She pushed the bills into her own pocket. She stared at him in the moonlight and saw a man completely bald. He didn’t even have eyebrows. She knelt and cradled his head and spoke to him harshly in the voice of the Moscow agent, the voice of death that is without sex or promise—only a threat:

“Why do you come to kill me?”

But the hairless one only stared wildly at her, frightened into unconsciousness or mere inability to speak.

She went through his pockets, all of them, turning over his body roughly to go through his pants. Nothing at all.

She went to the second one in the hall. One of the shots had caught him full in the face and now there was no face left. Brains were splattered against the wall behind the body.

Without distaste, she knelt again and pushed her hands patiently through his clothing.

There was a wallet at least.

She opened the wallet and saw the bills.

There was nothing else.

Two contractors, she thought. Not even someone from Moscow Center but contractors hired on the broad assassins’ market in Europe. They might even be Swiss.

But Switzerland was a dangerous country to act so boldly in. They had not been careful at all. They had come into a peaceful neighborhood in the old city and they had surely killed the concierge to gain access to this apartment.

It occurred to Alexa then they had not come to kill her at all. But to kill the same man she had been sent to kill. She felt anxious. She smelled the beginning of death in the hall. It was the warm and sweet smell of the slaughterhouse and killing ground.

She stepped over the body in the hall and went back into the apartment. She looked around her, took her purse from the chair and glanced down again at Rue de la Concorde Suisse. The lights of Lausanne, low and few, spread down the hill. The sky was full of stars, too many to count because one no longer could believe in counting stars.