Bill Granger - The November Man

“You don’t have the capability and neither would we. No one predicts everything so easily except in spy novels. All the satellites and agents in the world only give us a clue, not the whole story. But someone has the whole story. About me. About Alexa.”

“Who is it?”

“The man who tapped the phones. The man who listened to Hanley’s conversation with me and decided I was dangerous.”

Denisov did not speak. His hands were flat on the creases of his trousers. When he breathed again, his breath came in a whiney rush. “You have a mole in Section.”

“More than that,” Devereaux said.

“What is more?”

“Hanley knew. Somehow, Hanley had it figured out. Not all of it but parts of it. There is something called Nutcracker and it worried Hanley. Maybe it sent him off the deep end. I don’t know.”

“But Hanley. You know what you will do?”

“Yes. Part of it. No one knows everything.”

“Except God,” Denisov said. It was the voice of icons and incense; even a rational man, even a man such as Denisov, had these moments of automatic piety, gained from childhood.

“Except God,” Devereaux said. “So let us pray tomorrow for guidance.”

And Denisov was shocked to see that the other man was smiling.

They left a little before five in the morning. This was due less to the need to get an early start than the fact that Devereaux and Denisov felt there was too little night left for sleep.

Devereaux had made preparations.

In the small black bag were vials and vestments, the working tools of the Roman Catholic priest. He showered for a long time—the water restored him in a way that the vodka could not—and then he called Lydia Neumann’s home. She didn’t answer. The signal was not verbal: Three rings. Silence. Three rings.

Denisov was shocked.

Devereaux put on the clerical collar and fastened it with a stud. He slipped on the black blouse that ties in the back. He slipped on the black coat. He took the .32 Beretta police special, checked the action, and slipped it under the blouse into the belt of his black trousers. He looked at Denisov and smiled.

“I don’t like this at all,” Denisov said.

“You’ve become superstitious in old age,” Devereaux said. “I’m going to leave by the back entry. The car is in the parking garage. I don’t suppose she’s stayed awake all night watching it, especially since she can get information whenever she wants from our mole. Only this time, I really want a couple of hours. I’ll shake any tail but you’ve got to cover the rear door.”

“What is the gain again, exactly?”

“A chance to play the old game,” Devereaux said.

“Substantially more than that.”

“Seventy-five thousand.”

“I’ll leave you a poor man.”

“I don’t intend to take it out of my account,” Devereaux said.

“No. I didn’t think so.”

He was not followed. Even spies sleep. Denisov had followed him out of the hotel and watched the back door while Devereaux took the rental car out of the garage.

Devereaux pulled into the driveway in Bethesda and the garage door opened and he slipped the long gray Buick into the second, empty parking space. It was typical of Leo Neumann not to have allowed junk to clutter up the second space.

He turned the ignition. The car fell silent. He had liked the idea of a Buick; a priest’s car.

They waited at the kitchen. There were no lights on in the house. Dull dawn crept across the fog and lit the field behind the house.

Margot Kieker was as ready as she ever was. Her eyes were made up in that careful way that can be jarring at six in the morning. Her palms were wet and cold and she held them pressed together. She didn’t quite believe all this was happening to her and that she had allowed it to happen.

But, in a strange way, she felt just fine.

He talked to her in a soft voice, explaining what they would do as though it were nothing at all.

“I only want to locate him. When I find him, I’ll do the act and then we leave. That’s all. I just want to know where he is. I can get him out myself.”

“But what if they won’t let you in?”

“I’m a priest. He’s dying.”

“But what if they say he isn’t dying?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

Of course, Devereaux had thought about that since the night before, from the moment he had studied the girl at the supper table. He had acquired the clerical garb from a religious supply house in the afternoon and the plan had been to replace the regular priest who said mass on Sunday in the chapel inside the grounds. Once inside, he would have improvised.

Using the girl seemed safer. Especially for Hanley.

Mrs. Neumann spoke as softly as the morning.

“The problem with what you want me to do is that it alerts whoever it is that—”

“The mole,” Devereaux said. “It has to be a mole in Section.”

“Yackley,” she said.

“Perhaps. Perhaps it is Richfield—he would have initiated the actual hardware part of the tap on Hanley’s phone. He would have seen the transcript. It doesn’t matter. Whoever it is has had it his own way and you have to flush him. Maybe Nutcracker will do that—”

The fog on the road made the going slower than expected. It was nearly 8:30 when they descended into the steep valley in western Maryland and then took the old road up to the south rim, where St. Catherine’s stood.

Two and a half hours in a car can create a suggestion of intimacy between passengers.

Devereaux drove without much thought. Sunday morning was without traffic and the white fog that clung to the hills, to the meadowlands below the roadway, to the road itself—all hushed the outside world so that it ceased to exist.

“What is my great-uncle like?” She had tried once.

Devereaux glanced at her. She was on the edge of fear, like a doe in autumn at the edge of an Interstate Highway, deciding whether to cross. Her eyes were wide but steady. She had guts, Mrs. Neumann said. Maybe Mrs. Neumann understood these things well enough.

She was dressed in light blue, in a soft business suit that permitted a frilly blouse instead of an old school tie. The blouse had no color and it allowed the color of her face to define her face. She had a round face that might grow rounder with age. Her eyes were good and when she stared straight at you, you had to respond in the same way. She was good at silences.

“I didn’t really know Hanley,” Devereaux said at last.

“You worked with him.”

“In a sense.”

“You don’t anymore.”

“No.”

“Why do this? For him?”

“It’s for me.”

“What did you do?”

“I worked for the government. At jobs.” It wasn’t enough. “Estimates. Field work. Department of Agriculture.”

“No,” she said.

Devereaux glanced again at her. The Buick clambered over the rise and there was a long, blind descent into white fog. Above them, the sun was trying to burn it off.

“No what?”

“This Department of Agriculture stuff. And Mrs. Neumann said that, too. This isn’t about the price of soybeans.”

“In a sense, everything is. About the price of soybeans,” Devereaux said. But with gentleness.

“I ought to be told,” she said.

He thought about it.

There was no more speech for two miles. And then:

“Your uncle is an intelligence officer. A director. In an agency that you have never heard of.”

“Like the CIA?”

“Like the CIA.”

“But I thought that was all there was.”

“No. There are others. And he knows a good number of things. And secrets. So, I suppose, he was committed here for his own good and the good of keeping his secrets secret.”