Bill Granger - The November Man

Hanley’s eyes went wide in that moment and the priest leaned close to him.

“Make an act of contrition, my friend—”

Close. So close. He could see the gray eyes above him, feel the sense of power so close to him. He knew that face, he knew the sense of power. The face grinned hideously.

Like a nutcracker.

“Devereaux.”

The name echoed in conscience. What does the brain know?

“Devereaux. I wanted you to come. I called you, damn you! I needed you!”

And the priest did a strange thing. He rolled on the floor and he came up with a pistol in his hand and the man at the door fired into the room.

Can you imagine a reverend shooting a pistol? There were more shots and the room shook.

The fat nun fell down. There was blood and Margot was pulling his arm. It hurt. Was it really Margot?

He was dragged to the floor, atop the woman who looked so much like Millie.

“Get out, get out, get out,” she said, making a litany of the same words.

And he thought he really understood.

There was more firing and the man in the doorway screamed. He screamed and screamed. It was probably one of the patients. They were always screaming. He had to get out of here.

He had to get out of here.

He was up and it was absurd because he was nearly naked, he shouldn’t appear this way in front of his sister. Once, in a bedroom in the old farmhouse, two children of intense loneliness, brother and sister, surrounded by emptiness, filled in by only each other: He had opened her blouse to see her breasts and she had let him and that was all they had done but they had been deeply ashamed for a long time and been bound to each other by the secret.

One man was dead. He was a small man with small eyes and there was the reverend standing at the door and Margot Millie was pushing him—

They were on the grounds and it felt good to be in the air. Hanley blinked at the ghostly fog and inhaled the air and felt lightheaded and nearly fell. The girl held him around the waist. He was so weak and it was cold in the milky-white morning.

Shouts and sounds and sounds of ghosts in the fog.

There were shots again.

Dr. Goddard was on the steps and he had a shotgun.

They heard the blast. The sound of the shotgun firing filled the dense air and exploded so that it hurt their ears. Hanley fell again, this time dragging the girl to the ground. He was so sorry.

“I want to apologize, Mill—”

“Come on, goddamnit!” the girl said with such savage zest that Hanley scrambled up eagerly. She shoved him in the back of the gray car and he felt the seat close to his face and the car was moving, there were shots and the side glass above his head was splattered by gunfire. The glass fell on him. The car shot through the closed gates, driving them off their hinges.

Hanley felt the razor cut of glass on his cheek. He opened his eyes. He sat up. The girl was next to him. He glanced around. The driver was the same; the girl was the same; he was in a car and it was plunging down into a valley and the fog grew around them.

“My face. I cut my face,” he said. His voice sounded numb and strange to him.

In the rearview mirror, he saw the face of the driver.

“Devereaux,” he said. “Devereaux.”

The driver glanced in the mirror once. He saw the gray eyes. He knew the face, the eyes, the voice of that man.

“November,” he said.

It felt such release to say that.

“November came back,” he said.

Lydia Neumann sat in her office. Her fingers were poised above the cream-colored keys. The screen was blank save for a flashing green cursor.

The floor was nearly deserted because this was Sunday and her office was in the suite at the west end of the floor where R Section hierarchy had their private rooms and private showers and executive washrooms. Her presence was sometimes inconvenient, especially in managing executive washroom privileges, but there was nothing to be done: She was a woman, and she had risen very high indeed in Section.

The door to her office was open, as always. The office did not have a window; she was the only one of the four division directors without a window. But it was the most cheerful office of the four. There was a sampler on one wall, above the computer screens, that advised: Garbage In, Garbage Out . It had been a gift from some of the staff in division when she made the grade; it was a little joke the women shared and the men in the other divisions would never understand.

Lydia Neumann sat at the keyboard like Stravinsky. She summoned Tinkertoy to life on her screen.

She knew Tinkertoy so well.

Tinkertoy was the computer system used in R Section. It was named for the child’s building toy. Link by link by link. The endless links fit numberless pieces of information together. Tinkertoy reconstructed the universe every millisecond as information poured into the computer from a thousand sources. Each bit of information was not merely added—it was indexed, categorized, fitted with other bits of information. Tinkertoy contained all the secrets of the spies, living and dead.

Tinkertoy was secure. It required a voice print, face print, fingerprint, and heat print.

When Tinkertoy’s monitor flashed: “READY,” she began.

She approached the information she wanted in three ways. Each approach was cautious and it allowed her time to retreat.

In each approach, she signed on at her level but then changed level of access by inserting the correct “add-on” code. This was only possible to her because she had designed the system with the safeguards. Even locked doors in secret buildings have to have keys and, generally, the lowliest worker in the building—the cleanup man—is given all the keys.

In each of the three approaches, she added on at a higher and higher level, to see how high the level of the secret of Nutcracker was kept.

She did not see Claymore Richfield walk into the room.

“Back on it already, Mrs. Neumann?”

She struck “BLACK,” the key that cleansed the screen. She was annoyed; she would have to start over. She turned to Richfield.

Richfield lounged in his jeans and sweater at the door.

“I hope I kept everything in order.”

“I hope you did, Clay,” Mrs. Neumann said.

“I wouldn’t expect you back until tomorrow.”

“Yes. I wouldn’t have expected to be here.”

“Problem?”

“No problem.”

Claymore Richfield smiled. He was one of Yackley’s loyalists. Why shouldn’t he be? He had a free hand and free budget. His only complaints came when field agents rejected one of his devices. He had a James Bond idea for an exploding briefcase that had cost the hands of one of the field agents in Japan. He had complained the Japanese agent did not know how to use it properly and that the briefcase was perfectly safe. The agent in Japan had sued R Section for $4 million.

“I kept things tidy,” Claymore said.

“Yes.”

There was no encouragement to further conversation.

She waited at the keyboard.

“Well.” Richfield seemed put out. “I suppose I’ll be going.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Neumann said.

“Nice to have you back,” he said.

“Nice to be back,” she said.

When he was gone, she closed the door. She went back to the screen. She tapped Tinkertoy to life again.

At the fourth approach, in the fourth add-on level of security, she moved very far and it was frightening. She existed in a world of secrets, those kept and those stolen. Secrets have their own familiarity, like the furniture in a room you know well. But to stumble in the dark in a strange room and not to know where the room is or when there will be light to see the way makes for fear.