Bill Granger - The November Man

She waited and the cold feeling grew in her. Gorki spoke in a sharp whisper, the words glittered, he was constructing a story that seemed entirely plausible. And yet Alexa knew it was a lie, it had to be a lie from the beginning. And if it was a lie, then it meant Gorki wanted to eliminate her.

He wanted to kill her.

The thought fastened to her like a leech. She felt the blood draining from her face. She went very rigid and pale and cold in that moment. He wanted to kill her.

“You have had the training of an illegal agent and that is what you will become again,” Gorki said, staring at his cognac. It seemed he did not want to look at her. “In the packet is identification. A French passport, papers, driver’s license… all the paperwork. It seems better to travel to Montreal from Paris first and then shuttle to Washington. The Canadian entry is much easier.”

“But our own people… in Washington—”

“This is not a matter for them. It is too delicate for more usual channels—”

She felt the words like blows; they were all lies. Gorki was isolating her and there was nothing she could do about it.

He had sent the killers in Lausanne not to kill the American but to kill her.

A rush of guilt overwhelmed her. It must be some flaw in her that exacted this punishment; some failure.

She was a woman of great beauty and cunning. In that shaken moment, she fell back on her resources.

She reached her hand across the white linen and touched the parchment fingers.

Gorki looked at her for a moment, as though he could not understand the gesture. He looked into Alexa’s glittering eyes. Eyes that could not be disguised, he thought. Eyes that will always give her away.

Gorki smiled at her as though she might have been a child.

“My dear Alexa,” Gorki said, removing his hand. “I fly back to Moscow in an hour. There is so little time. Believe me—” He spoke in a soft voice and then interrupted himself with silence. His eyes spoke regret. He smiled. “Perhaps—” Again, silence intervened. He rose and she saw he had left a packet on the table. Instructions and identification and money—the usual precautions.

But Alexa felt failure. Acute and cold. He was instructing her to follow a trail of lies to her own death. What was her failure?

And what was her alternative?

She shuddered. She looked up. Gorki was already threading his way through the tables, past the Party officials and their girlfriends, his thin frame silhouetted against the black window that looked out on blackened Prague. And the great red star turning slowly, slowly, above the church spires and the steeples.

For a long time, the bulky man in dark cashmere coat and homburg hat walked along the seawall that jutted out into the Channel in Dover.

Dover was having a British spring with drab days and the threat of rain in the air. The Channel was choppy and gray, the way it always seemed to be. The great gulls groaned madly above the waves crashing into the seawall and the chimney pots of the town boiled up with curls of smoke. It was a day for hot tea and cold sandwiches and the huddled conversations of the public house. It was a day for dampness, wet wools, and the red noses that come with sniffles and deep spring colds.

The bulky man in dark had his hands folded behind his back as he patrolled the seawall and felt a touch of spray now and again on his ruddy face. His eyes were mild as a saint’s behind rimless glasses. He looked like a man of great kindnesses. He might have been one of those millionaires who gives all to the poor. In the case of Dmitri Ilyich Denisov, all those assumptions about him would have been wrong.

Once he had been an agent from Moscow; then, again, he had been made a reluctant defector to America. He was certainly a killer; he was certainly ruthless; he certainly broke laws as part of his new trade in the world of supplying those things to the world that the world wants but does not want to allow to be traded.

Denisov had once battled a nemesis named November, an American agent who had embarrassed him, nearly killed him, used him twice, and who had also given him a complete set of Gilbert and Sullivan recordings to while away his days in American exile. Gilbert and Sullivan was the only thing that had kept Denisov’s sanity in those terrible first days when the American questioned him over and over and he felt the deep sense of loss: He would never be in Russia again, nor walk Moscow streets, nor smell the home smells, nor sleep with his wife, nor hear his son and sister argue for the privilege of the morning bathroom. They were things he thought he would never miss and then, on a beach in Florida, an agent named November had arranged to deprive him of everything that defined his life.

It had happened a long time ago.

Now, out of the grayness, came the hideous roar of the beast that crosses the Channel. The hovercraft was in the waters, propellers turning and the whoosh of air pounding the waters flat beneath it, the hull like a rubber inner tube inflated and absurd. The roaring of the beast grew and the hovercraft seemed to lumber sideways toward the landing apron.

“Time,” Denisov said aloud, in Russian. He had a pistol, as always, and he felt for it in the pocket of his large overcoat. He turned and walked back along the seawall and down the road to the terminal where the hovercraft would crawl ashore, resembling some link in the chain of being turning from sea monster to creature of the land.

The hovercraft was late, delayed on the French side as usual. Now they were going to build a railroad tunnel between France and England and the day of the ferries would soon be over. Denisov thought he would not miss it. He hated the hovercraft and detested the slow ferries with their cafeterias full of dreadful English food. He made the crossing twenty times a year. He could afford to fly, naturally, but there were reasons to take the land-and-sea route.

He saw the other man enter the green customs line marked Nothing to Declare . The man had only a small suitcase and he was stopped and told to open it. He did so. Denisov watched this and smiled. They never could find a thing. It was the first thing you learned, no matter what side you were on. If clumsy assassins like the Palestinians could do it, how much better the professionals could be.

Like us, Denisov thought with something like affection. Of course, he would just as gladly have killed the other man if it had been to his advantage.

At the moment, he was curious.

Devereaux crossed into the glittering and cheaply modern terminal which was typical of so many bad buildings put up by the British in the 1960s and 1970s.

He fell in beside Denisov without a word and then passed him as though they were strangers. Everyone is careful in the trade. Was Denisov watched? Devereaux became a second set of eyes behind his back, to see who the watchers might be.

Denisov waited in the terminal, puzzled, looking for a face of a friend.

Disappointed, Denisov turned and walked out in the gray day full of spray and the cry of sea gulls. Devereaux was nowhere to be seen. Devereaux had gone around the building, waiting for Denisov’s retreat.

The other passengers pushed to get on buses that would deliver them to the train station in Dover and the tedious ride up the tracks to London. The pushers were French, of course; the English can tell the rude continentals from their own people.

The green buses belched black smoke and rattled away from the curbing.

Denisov was halfway up the road to the public house with the sign of the flying fish.

No one behind; no one before. No unaccounted plain cars full of intent men who seem to be waiting for someone. No careless men in trench coats pretending to light cigarettes into the face of the channel winds.