Bill Granger - The November Man

Lydia Neumann blinked. Hanley seemed so intense. He was staring at the path between the two fences. Hanley’s face was pale and his eyes were dull. He seemed very tired.

“I wondered if there were any spies at all,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“We go into budget crunch and the people at NSA can show figures—what they are based on, I don’t know—they can show figures that show eighty-five to ninety percent of all intelligence is done by machine. Satellites, computers, bugs. Raw data. The listening post at Cheltenham, at Taipei. The goddamn space shuttle overflies the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc on every second mission. It all comes down to coming down to the mountain. I was convinced of it.”

Tears again. Mrs. Neumann looked away while Hanley found a handkerchief and used it.

“Yackley was on me day and night. Cutbacks in stationmasters, networks… my God, he thought it was all just so much meat cut off the bone. It wasn’t that. And then there was Nutcracker—”

He stopped, frightened.

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Forget that. It was over long ago.” Frightened. He gazed at Mrs. Neumann. “I played with the computer and there were all these coincidences in which we got their spies to defect to us and our spies defected at the same time, almost as part of a game. Musical chairs. But aren’t there real spies?”

She said, “You should know that.”

“But Yackley doesn’t believe in them.”

“Yackley is a fool,” she said.

“Yackley does not believe in spies. He says there are no spies any more than there are elves or leprechauns. There are only intelligence agents on each side analyzing computer materials, making value judgments…”

“Hanley, get hold of yourself.”

He was crying again.

“Pawns. He said they are pawns. The game moves in feints and little gestures. I said he was wrong. I would prove it. I could have proved it—”

“Proved what?”

He looked through his tears at her. She wanted to understand, he thought.

And he knew he didn’t trust her at all.

“They know our secrets, the Opposition,” he said. “We know their secrets. That’s all it is, two sides equal, starting from scratch just to stay even. But what if they had advantages over us that we didn’t have?”

“What are you talking about?”

Hanley looked puzzled. He put his handkerchief away. “I called November, I wanted him to understand. At least, he said he was outside the game. Maybe everyone was in it together. Even you?”

Mrs. Neumann bit her lip.

“I have to get out of here,” Hanley said. He looked at the path between the fences. “Dr. Goddard keeps saying ‘eventually’ as though he knew it was never going to happen. Eventually can mean when I die. I have to get out of here.”

“What do you want me to do?”

He stared at her. “Whatever you do, don’t pray for me. I have a nun here. She prays for me. It is sufficient. I couldn’t stand any more prayers.”

“Hanley—”

“Get me out of here,” Hanley said in a low and terrible voice. “I need to get away, get away from the drugs and routine. I have to think about—” He almost said something and stopped. “I have to think.”

“I’ll talk to the New Man, to Yackley—”

“No, Mrs. Neumann.” Very cold, very much like the old Hanley who had not been ill. “You will not talk to that man. I’ve talked to you too much. Do you want my secrets? Try my test: Do not talk to Yackley. You are going to have to help me get out of here.”

“I can’t.”

“November,” he said.

She shrank from his grasp and the name. “He’s buried, dead in files.”

“Asleep,” Hanley said.

“Buried,” she said.

“Wake him.” His eyes glittered. “But you’re afraid, aren’t you? You don’t want him to wake up, do you? My God, is it all true?”

“Is what true?”

But he had turned. He began to run back toward the ward. She started after him. She stopped, listened to his footsteps. Poor frightened man, she thought.

Perhaps the horrible best thing to do for Hanley was to keep him here.

Right between the fences.

Not all of the intelligence operations of KGB are headquartered in the dreary building on Dhzerzhinski Square, which the other intelligence services call Moscow Center. The Committee for External Observation and Resolution, for example, is located in a long and windowless building two miles east of the square.

The man who was called Gorki (by the same computer that named Alexa) sat in his office at the end of a long hall. There was a reception area at the end of the hall and three closed doors. One of the doors led to Gorki; a second led to a supply room; the room beyond the third door was not spoken of by anyone.

Gorki’s office was wrapped in darkness made more acute by the fluorescent lamp on his desk. Everything in the office had been chosen as a prop, save for the giant General Electric air conditioner built into the wall. The building was something of an embarrassment. It had taken too long to construct, it was gloomy (even by Russian standards), and the marble corridors had been stripped at last because the great slabs of marble kept falling off the walls. A party undersecretary had been injured shortly after the building opened by a piece of marble that separated from the wall. The stripped marble was now used as flooring in the various dachas of high Party officials around Moscow.

Gorki’s office was decorated with the portraits of three men: Lenin, Felix Dhzerzhinski, the founder of the secret police, and Gorbachev. He had no other ornaments. He was a spare man with Eurasian features and small, quick eyes that seemed to glitter in the light of the single lamp in the room. His skin was parchment and it was yellow with age and liver disease.

The man across from him was an agent called Alexei, a man of little consequence from the Helsinki station.

Alexei was sweating profusely though the office was very cool in the way a tomb is cool.

Gorki did not smile or speak; he sat very still for a long time. He took a file folder and dropped it on the desk and indicated with a nod of his head that Alexei was to retrieve it. The desk was very wide and Alexei, sitting in an overstuffed chair in the cramped room in front of the large desk, had to rise awkwardly and reach across the desk for the file folder. When he sat down heavily, he was sweating all the more. He had to squint to see the photographs.

“She killed these men,” Gorki began.

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this,” said Alexei. He really didn’t understand. He stared at the faces. There were four photographs. They were grouped in twos by paper clips. The first man was shown as he appeared for his official photograph (updated each year—the Russians have great faith in the power of photographs to identify people). The second had a man with his face blown away.

“It’s the same man?” said Alexei.

“Of course.”

The second grouping featured a hairless man staring at a camera. The “after” picture showed him on a slab in a morgue, his eyes open, a large wound on the side of his head.

“She killed them? Alexa?”

“Alexa. She was informed at Zurich they would accompany her on her… assignment. The contract on this second November. November.” Gorki closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them again, they were liquid and on fire. “Will no one get rid of November for me? Does he subvert every agent? Does he have nine lives?”

Alexei said nothing. The questions were not to be answered.

“Alexa was our most formidable agent in her specialty. What has happened to her? She goes to Lausanne and she betrays us. Why?”