Bill Granger - The November Man

He had slept with her. He made love as never before. When it was over, the smell of her filled his memory. Back in Moscow, in the small and noisy flat, he had made love to his old wife after the assignment and he still remembered the smell of Alexa. He had made ferocious love, hard and cruel, demanding. He had moved over his old wife and felt her under him, her big belly and sagging breasts, and with his eyes closed and the smell of Alexa in memory, he was making love to Alexa again in Helsinki, before they had parted. He closed his eyes in Moscow and remembered the smell of Alexa beneath him, the firm, straining belly that pushed against his belly until he had to explode, again and again, into her.

The breasts were firm, and he had felt suspended above Alexa and felt her long, cat’s tongue drag across the flesh of his throat and reach his ear and lick into it like a saucer of milk. His head exploded and this strong woman beneath him—he had been thinking of Alexa—moved and moved and he grasped her buttocks, her back, every beautiful part of her perfect body…

He was sweating in the coolness of morning in the shadowed street in Berlin. He remembered: He had opened his eyes in the darkness when he made love to Alexa and she had been watching him. He was above her and her body was moving beneath him but she was watching him with an apartness that frightened him.

Griegel’s voice intruded.

“No. Nothing,” Denisov replied, though he had not heard what the other man had said. He closed his reverie and looked around him.

“Quite beautiful,” Griegel jeered. The Berliner always attempts humor, even when it is most inappropriate.

“I was thinking about Nutcracker.”

“Ah, she’s cracked a few nuts in her time,” said Griegel. The English pun startled Denisov. It was something he wished he had the skill to say. Even the puns of Gilbert had to be studied and had to be explained for Denisov.

His head filled with music then. He rose.

He nodded in a correct German way at the old man at the table and saw, from his height, the East German agents in the street below. Berlin was not so difficult and neither was Prague; the past that had been an agent named Denisov had been obliterated long since. No one looked for him anymore or even suspected he existed.

The music pounded as he pounded down the stairs, round and round the balconied marble stairs. What was the reason for so much music?

But Griegel had made a pun.

The pun had given him Gilbert and Sullivan’s wonderful tunes.

He saw the players again of the old D’Oyly Carte company before it disbanded in London. He saw them go round and round with the music. He saw the strutting English actors in Japanese costumes and the strains of the opening of The Mikado.

He was on the street, hurrying along to his car parked illegally at the corner of Unter den Linden. He would be in West Berlin in ten minutes; he could be in Washington in ten hours.

Did this matter affect him?

Yes.

He saw it clearly now. And the danger to Alexa, the danger so palpable that he was certain he could see her dead in the streets.

It was a price worth paying, to save her. To have her gratitude.

He saw the images and rushed past the security forces in their trench coats loitering in dark doorways.

When he reached the car, he had a ticket.

And he thought—in one blinding moment—he had the key to Nutcracker. If only he could keep it in his head.

You are a busy little fellow, Yackley thought. The reports were coming on a regular basis now. They had picked up on him at the border when he crossed from Ontario into upstate New York at Niagara Falls. But the report from U.S. Border Patrol had not been correlated into Devereaux’s running file (NOVRET) until Sunday morning. He had been granted two days of mischief.

There had not been any luck involved in finding Sellers in the trunk of the car at National Airport. The arrogant bastard had parked the car in one of the stalls designated for use by Congress and staff. Obviously, it would have been found as soon as a Congressman complained about someone using a privileged space.

By then, someone thought to secure Hanley’s apartment. It was too late. The place had been wrecked. Devereaux must have gone there sometime Friday.

The problems were multiplying as well. Mrs. Neumann had apparently pulled a copy of Hanley’s 201 file. That was discovered Thursday night by Claymore Richfield, who hadn’t even been looking for it. She had left a trail in the computer and she had been gone on leave for four days. She would be back Monday. There would be questions to be answered Monday.

Yackley felt the Section was falling away from him and that Devereaux was suddenly on the periphery of every action, waiting for Yackley’s move. Yackley knew he was the target.

There was a name in the 201 file—the will section. Margot Kieker, whoever she was. They had run that through the National Credit Center in Virginia and the information was thin. She lived in Chicago, she was a salesperson for IBM—she sold computers.

Computers, for Christ’s sake.

Two agents from the Section hit the sales center in Chicago on Thursday. They were told that Ms. Kieker had been called to Washington. They said it like that, very proudly: She had been called to Washington by the director of a top secret computer design program and would be gone for several weeks. It was quite an honor for everyone in the sales center.

Yackley read through the reports, fingered them as though they might speak. He glanced at the photographs on his desk. His wife still smiled at him as she always did, even in life. She thought none of it was terribly serious. He had tried to impress upon her the changes going on in government, the changes going on in the business of intelligence. He was on the cutting edge of those changes. He always used terms like cutting edge in trying to explain to Beverly. She would have none of it. She made apple pies from scratch and read USA Today and thought baseball was boring and wore cotton dresses during the week. She didn’t understand a damned thing. If she hadn’t supported him through law school, he would have felt he owed her nothing.

The reality of the White House is always so much less. A thousand books and movies have given the public the image of a great manor with a full staircase that reaches and reaches upward to a heavenly second floor. The Oval Office—which had begun life as the presidential library—is a gigantic room in image; in reality, it is very much of the eighteenth century, small cozy and able to be heated by a single fireplace.

Perry Weinstein considered the vulnerability of the place every time he crossed the underground corridor to the White House proper from the Executive Office Building.

He was coatless with his tie askew. His glasses had been patched that morning with a paper clip inserted at the place the screw fell out. He looked like a man on fire. His eyes were wide with interest in some idea percolating inside him and when he talked, he brushed at his rep tie with nervous fingers, as though the fire had spilled ashes on him.

The man on the other side of the narrow desk was Reed. Reed was about four or five in the hierarchy, if anyone paid attention to numbers like that. In fact, a good-sized forest was felled each week to print just such speculation.

Reed was Eastern, which was unusual; he was old money but he made more of it in new ways; even though his funds were in blind trusts, it didn’t matter because what was good for Quentin Reed was good for the U.S.A.