Bill Granger - The November Man

“She surprised me in the morning,” Devereaux said. “She could have taken me out then. I was an open target, the street was empty.”

“She is cautious,” Denisov said.

“I don’t know. But she’s thinking about the setup. She was set up in Lausanne. And I just wanted to tip her a little. If I know her name and what the business is about, it will scare her. I think it will. Maybe you can stay on her and find out who she’s dealing with.”

“Yes. That would not be so unpleasant. She is beautiful. But what do I do when I discover… her associates?”

“I don’t know.”

“You fail at the end, comrade. You fail when I ask you for the last answer. Why do you always fail at the end?”

“Because I don’t know.”

“Take her in,” Denisov said. “It is not so bad.”

“Yes. You read the Wall Street Journal now.”

“It is not so bad,” Denisov said. “But even freedom cannot replace memory. An exile is an exile, no matter how great the freedom of the exile.” He said, “Perhaps you will survive this matter. I think you will. You have lives like cats.” He drank his vodka neat and harsh in the Russian manner.

“She’s afraid of us as well,” Devereaux agreed.

“Yes. We have proof positive in KGB that CIA agents eat defectors and flush their remains away in sewers.”

“We have such proof as well,” Devereaux said. They had automatically assumed their old sides for the sake of speech. It was easy to be against; it was familiar, like friendship. But it was easier than friendship.

“I knew Alexa,” Denisov said.

“I thought you did.”

“I betrayed nothing.”

“Yes. That’s why I thought you knew her. You saw her picture and you weren’t even struck by her. By how she looked. You’re not so much of a saint as that.”

Denisov blinked behind the saintly rimless glasses. “I think of how to save her.”

“For yourself.”

“I knew her. In Finland. There was a business there and we worked together.”

Devereaux said nothing. To say anything would be wrong. He wanted Denisov to think about the business at hand.

“I came to settle with Hanley. And Hanley is the key to this thing. If he’s alive.”

“You have killed him?”

Devereaux told him about Hanley then, as though there were no secrets between them. The spy withholds; it is part of training. He withholds from control, from his friends, from his co-workers, from his network. A spy’s reserve is knowledge that is not shared. And yet there was so much they did not know that everything Devereaux had learned seemed no more than two or three interlocking pieces of a puzzle.

The two men talked into the middle of the night and the words opened into other words.

At three in the morning, Devereaux got up suddenly and went to the window again and looked down at the utterly silent, utterly empty streets of the city.

“Why do we know all this?”

Denisov stared at the back of the other man. He considered the question. He stared at the empty bottle of vodka they had shared.

“Because we are professionals,” Denisov said.

Devereaux did not turn to look at him. “Because it doesn’t matter. This is a scenario. A long and involved scenario and the answers are all written down long before it started.”

“Yes.” Slowly. “I thought about that, too. But this Hanley, this man is in an insane asylum which—”

“—which is where we put our actors who refuse to play their parts,” Devereaux said. “What is Nutcracker?”

And Denisov started so violently that Devereaux thought he would fall off the straight chair.

“The word was used. By Herr Griegel in Berlin when I saw him. An operation. But it seemed to connect to nothing at all, I nearly forgot it. What is it?”

“I don’t know. No one knows. Except that I think Hanley knows. Or he knew. Somehow, Hanley had to be taken care of and it was the easiest way to do it. He had to be put in a secure place where he could be examined to see what he knew, whom he had told—”

“You, my friend,” Denisov said.

They both saw it in that moment.

“He called me. He was raving or drunk but he called me twice and his telephone was tapped and someone was afraid that I shared Hanley’s secret. Whatever the secret was…”

“Except that you didn’t. When you came back, when you started searching Hanley’s rooms—they knew you didn’t know a thing about—”

“About the only thing worth knowing, Russian,” Devereaux said. “We are caught up in words and secrets and agents dancing around one another and it doesn’t mean a thing, none of it. The only thing worth knowing is what Hanley knows. Or what he guessed. And they’ve kept him alive long enough to find out what that was and to find out if I knew any more than Hanley did.”

For the first time, Devereaux’s face clouded.

He closed his eyes, heard Hanley’s words, heard his responses.

Yes. There was enough. To make someone think that he and Hanley knew more about something than they did. He had been involved because of a mistake; because someone misinterpreted the raving conversation recorded on tape on a tapped phone line.

“You can go back to sleep now, my friend,” Denisov said.

“But it doesn’t explain Alexa—”

“There was a man killed on the Finlandia who has not been identified. He was November.”

Devereaux waited.

“Was there a second November?” Denisov asked.

“You didn’t tell me this before—”

“Alexa took care of him. Two Novembers. Once in a blue moon, that is what Alexei said. It was the only unfortunate part of my journey. You see, it was necessary to retrace her steps and they led back to Helsinki and I had to see our stationmaster there. His name was Viktor. I had known him from days in the chess union, in Moscow, after I came out of Madrid embassy. His code name was Alexei.”

“Tell me about the other November.”

“On a boat in the Baltic. You know it, the Finlandia . A November with a scar on his face and gray hair who was to defect. Do you understand this?”

Devereaux betrayed nothing. He thought of Colonel Ready. So they had caught him at last. He had tagged Ready with the code name and his own identity so that the wet contract on him would be shifted to the other man. Somehow, the Opposition had finally understood that Ready was not Devereaux. And that meant that someone in Section had told the Opposition. Only Section knew the truth—and only the top people in Section. So there was a mole and he was in Section. Or she. And he thought very suddenly and painfully of Mrs. Neumann and of Alexa waiting outside Mrs. Neumann’s house.

Denisov frowned at the silence. But if Devereaux would not talk, the silence would last forever. Denisov frowned again, like a misunderstood child. “I had to finish Alexei.”

“Don’t you ever call it by what it is?” Devereaux said.

“No. It’s only business. Killing is not business, it is some mad act. When you finish something, you are only taking care of business. Alexei must not know about me, not enough to tell anyone again.” Denisov frowned a third time, then erased the thought from memory. “But I learned about Gorki. Why does he know so much about you? Why can he follow your movements so easily? I tell you, we don’t have that capability. Not in the U.S.A.”

“No,” Devereaux said. “I wish we had another bottle.”

“So do I. But the night is not so long from here now, is it?”

Devereaux was struck by that. Denisov had become entangled again in intricate English construction but it was appropriate. The night is not so long from here now. Whatever was going to happen, whatever had been set up, would happen quickly.