Bill Granger - The November Man

“So it appears,” Claymore Richfield said, tapping his stained front teeth with the eraser end of a Number 2 pencil. The tap had a beat—the exact beat of “Sweet Georgia Brown” in fact—but it just sounded like tap, tap, tap to Yackley. He looked up in annoyance at Richfield, who was staring out the window at the mass of the Bureau of Engraving across the street. Even old Engraving inspired Richfield: He had in mind a hard, holistic dollar to replace the paper dollar, just as various credit cards were now designed. The “hard dollar” would inspire public confidence in currency again, he reasoned, and make it more difficult to stash or make illegal transactions. A “hard dollar” would be harder to counterfeit as well. The people at Treasury were appalled by the idea.

“So it appears,” Yackley repeated. “Does that mean the information isn’t any good or does that mean we don’t care enough to check on bona fides?”

“Not in this case,” Claymore Richfield said. He had been pressed into temporary service as acting director of Computer and Analysis during Mrs. Neumann’s absence.

“What do you mean?”

“There is unusual traffic. Some of it radio, radio computer, some of it routine filings. Devereaux left Switzerland openly on Tuesday, told the police his destination, used his own passport. He even contacted his lawyer. He made himself the talk of the town. On Wednesday, he appeared in London and used Economic Review facilities for all sorts of inquiries that are—at the moment—still secret. He paid for them in cash and ER has a policy about this sort of thing.”

ER was the London-based research tank and resource center used by public and private intelligence agencies from countries on both sides of the Curtain.

“What could he be preparing for?”

“Perhaps nothing,” Claymore Richfield said. “He’s a good one, our November.”

“He’s not ‘our’ November. He’s a goddamn renegade agent, he’s killed two of our men—”

“Our chasers,” corrected Richfield. “Casual laborers.”

“Two of our men,” repeated Yackley, trying to raise his voice a tone or two, to impress the other man. It was pointless. Claymore Richfield wore Levi’s when he met the President at the White House. He was a loyalist to Yackley but a difficult one.

“Thursday, he flew into Toronto on Air Canada out of London. That’s been the end of it. Of course, he used his own passport. We picked up all the routine entries out of Toronto—as usual—and there he was. Using ‘Devereaux’ even.” Claymore Richfield smiled at that. “He’s coming our way. He’s in Washington by now.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. We can’t sweep the hotel registers as easily as the French used to do. But he’s here. I sent along a couple of boys from Operations to do the police routine. For all I know, he’s at the Watergate by now,” Richfield said, referring to the famous hotel and office complex above Georgetown.

Yackley bit his lip and said nothing.

There were some things he felt he couldn’t say to Richfield.

It was time to consult Perry Weinstein again. Quickly. About the matter of sanctions.

Devereaux had been professor of Asian Studies at Columbia University in New York City when he had been recruited to R Section in 1966. The lure had been Asia. He would go to the land of blood-red morning suns and the eternal fog that hung over the endless rice paddies; he would go and squat down in the rich delta earth with peasants with wizened faces and flat and serene eyes and attempt to understand that part of him that yearned for Asia as for a lover. He would be an intelligence agent, of course, but that was the means; it was never the end.

The means became the ends. Then the means obliterated the ends. The Asian earth was pounded by death from skies, the paddies turned red with blood, the jungle crawled over all—over civilization, over conqueror and defeated, over the living and the dead. Over Devereaux. He had gone to Asia to find his soul; instead, he had lost it there.

Devereaux had learned to think during the years in school in which he had earned his doctorate in history. He had always known how to think on the level of the street: On the street, thought was part of instinct, part of conditioning. It is thought that makes the fighter choose the combination that breaks the defense of his opponent and lets him come inside and tear away the flailing arms and land hammerblows on face and chest and belly until the weight of the other cannot stand any more; those who don’t understand call it instinct, as though instinct were something that could not be developed as part of thought.

Devereaux knew the street and knew street thinking; he had just grown lazy in that regard in the idyllic months of Lausanne. He had allowed himself to be circled and nearly trapped.

The other part of thought was reason and the key was research. There was no other way around it. With a certain number of facts, a certain number of theories could be put together.

He had the facts now. Not all of them. It was not so difficult.

He sat in the glow of a single lamp in Hanley’s living room. The apartment was unchanged from the day nearly three weeks before when two men had come to take Mr. Hanley away. They were described by the doorman and by the super in the building.

No. No one had seen Mr. Hanley again since they came to take him away in the ambulance. Yes, he had been home a lot; he had been ill. Yes, Mr. Hanley continued to pay rent on his apartment; probably part of some government insurance plan. No. No one had come to visit Mr. Hanley or his apartment after that first day. They mentioned the name on the ambulance that had taken Hanley away. He took down the name and looked it up.

The answers were so prosaic that they were undoubtedly true. Devereaux had very little difficulty in gaining entry to Hanley’s flat. He had various badges and cards of authority; he had authorized papers to search the premises. Besides, people wanted someone to be in that flat again. It wasn’t natural for a flat to be empty all this time. It just wasn’t right.

Devereaux spent three hours in going through Hanley’s life, scattered in the apartment, to find a clue. Not to his disappearance. That would be solved in time. But to Devereaux’s part in it.

Once again he was the scholar on the trail of just a few facts. He was the student in study hall at the University of Chicago again. He was waiting as he pushed his way through graduate theses, through long-forgotten letters written by long-forgotten people, through books that had not been removed from the stacks for decades: He was waiting for first the one fact and then the second and then the third to fall from the pages in patterns and for the patterns to be seen at last in his mind.

Sometimes the patterns had come very late at night, in the room he lived in on Ellis Avenue down the street from the university complex. Sometimes they came in thoughts before sleep; sometimes, the pattern fell out with morning coffee. But the pattern was always apparent at last because Devereaux had prepared his brain to receive it.

There were insurance policies set out on Hanley’s desk. Hanley had a desk as plain as the desk in his office. His whole apartment was furnished with plain and useful furniture, without regard for elegance, grace, even beauty. Perhaps all the furniture had been left here by a previous tenant; it had that feeling of anonymity, like the man himself.

The perfect spy.

Devereaux smiled. He read the policies and noted the name of the beneficiary: Margot Kieker.

The policies were laid on his desk because Hanley was thinking about death. In that sense, his telephone calls to Devereaux had been honest. And if he had not been in his apartment for three weeks—and had been off the job for weeks before that—then Hanley had not set the operation against him.