Bill Granger - The November Man

She nearly stopped. She was in a country without maps.

For a moment, she paused. She thought of Hanley in St. Catherine’s. She thought of Margot Kieker, overcoming her own fears and uncertainties.

She thought of November, in clerical collar. And that made her smile and she plunged in.

The computer was very quick to respond this time. The numbers tumbled out.

NUTCRACKER:

CODE 9, PRIORITY ULTRA:

NUTCRACKER: 22 APR: DIRECTOR GORKI RESOLUTIONS COMMITTEE;

EXCHANGE OF PERSONNEL: JANUARY, NEWMOON, EQUINOX, JUNE, AUGUST, VERNAL, WINTER; EXCHANGE: ALEXA, ANDROMEDA, SATURN, MERCURY, HEBRIDES, GORKI.

KEY: GORKI FLUTTER ONE; ALEXA IN BLACK: ANDROMEDA TO GREEKSTATIONFIVE; KEY: VERNAL IN BLACK; WINTER IN GREEKSTATIONFOUR; JANUARYX; NOVEMBERX.

She used a Number 2 pencil to write down all she saw on the fluttering green screen. The screen held the message, waited patiently.

She understood it only a little but it would take too long—perhaps be too dangerous—to press the file inward for CLEARSPEAK. CONDSPEAK (for condensed version, the version on screen) would have to serve.

But serve whom?

Noon on Sunday. The fog was gone from the capital. The streets were wet and warm under the sun. The churches spoke songs and the bell tolled in the National Cathedral. From his apartment a block away, Hanley had often listened to that bell. But Hanley had not been in that place all this spring.

The gray Mercedes sloshed through puddles along Massachusetts Avenue. The car followed the gentle circle beneath the U.S. Naval Observatory and down across Rock Creek Park and down into the bowels of power. At DuPont Circle, the automobile leaned slightly into the curve and continued south along Connecticut Avenue toward the White House and the Executive Office Building.

The driver was a GS 9, cleared to Top Secret level for no other reason than that he drove an assistant national security adviser named Perry Weinstein.

Yackley had been on the phone at eleven. He had been contacted by Claymore Richfield, who had gone back through Tinkertoy after Mrs. Neumann left the DA building. Richfield had been merely curious and he had no way of understanding a damned thing that was going on. But Richfield was now a dangerous man.

Damnit. This was what you had to work with.

Perry Weinstein, in the back seat of the Mercedes, still had not repaired his horn-rimmed glasses. He wore a jogging suit that had never been sweated in. He sat back in the Mercedes and closed his eyes and tried to think.

It had only been thirty hours to Nutcracker, Yackley had shouted. It was April 18, the feast of Pentecost. Every move had been put in place. All the agents to be defected East were in place; Gorki had kept his bargain as well. But, perhaps, that was the way it was supposed to be. You didn’t bargain with the devil.

Yackley, on the phone to Perry, had been very close to hysteria.

Hanley was snatched. By someone. Dr. Goddard said a nun was dead, as well as the security director, Randolph Finch. There had been two of them: A priest and a young woman.

Yackley had been babbling when Weinstein hung up the phone on him and made a second call. There was a scramble going on right now inside Operations Wing 3 of FBI. “The Sisters,” as usual, didn’t have a clue but they were the domestic intelligence agency and when it came to tracking people inside the citadel, they were the best at the game. So the FBI director kept explaining to the National Security Director who passed on his budget recommendations to the White House.

Now prove it, Perry Weinstein thought. Find Hanley and his abductors and do it in twenty-four hours.

He had allowed too much rope for Yackley. Yackley, in the end, was too stupid to know what to do with it. Weinstein had even had to prod the boob on electroshock treatment. Hanley was lingering too long; it was quite possible he could be legally rescued from St. Catherine’s before he died. At least let his memory die.

He never said it in those terms to Yackley, of course.

Perry Weinstein was so careful and so close and it was not going to end badly. He had worked out a careful bargaining. Yackley had been assured he would have five enemy agents to show for the work and he would be more secure than ever. Even when this administration came to an end, Yackley would be included at the highest levels in the next administration—whatever the party. Perry Weinstein was a pragmatist and he promised practical things to people like Yackley.

And he would bring out Gorki. That was the key to the whole exchange. The master spy, the director of the Committee for External Observation and Resolutions—the Resolutions Committee of KGB. Gorki would come, kicking and screaming, because Gorki was the prize that Weinstein needed to make himself a “made” man in intelligence, one of the litmus tests to apply to others again.

And now some goddamn double-cross at the lowest level was being worked and two killers had snatched Hanley from St. Catherine’s.

And a busybody named Lydia Neumann had somehow uncovered the digest of Nutcracker. She was being taken care of now.

The telephone was ringing when Weinstein entered his office. He popped buttons on the console and put on the speaker phone. He crossed to the window, hands in jacket, and stared down at the White House while he listened.

“Two chasers were put on Alexa ninety minutes ago,” said the voice. There was a laconic charm to it. Ivers was the fixer from NSA; he had been part of Nutcracker from the beginning. Not that Ivers understood what Nutcracker was really all about. He was a good, loyal, conspiratorial, and limited man of action; his part in Nutcracker was just large enough to hold his interest.

“Where is she?”

“She is due to call in by one. We’ll hold her this time, trace the call—”

“It’ll be a pay phone—”

“That’s in the movies, sir. We can trace anyone. Anytime. From any place.” Ivers was sure and that amused Perry Weinstein. He pushed the glasses up his nose and smiled at the White House. The President was at Camp David. In a little while, the helicopter would clatter in and the ghouls from the networks would gather and wait for some word from the Main Man and the helicopter blades would keep rotating until the President had crossed to the south portico and entered the White House.

In two weeks, there would be the summit in May. But first, a crossing of swords called Nutcracker. A skirmish with spies and defectors.

Ivers rang off.

Dickerson at FBI was next. The Sisters had already found the abandoned Buick in Hancock. A second car had been stolen in that small town in western Maryland. “They’re heading back this way,” Dickerson said.

What a genius, Weinstein thought. “Do you have helicopter surveillance?”

“Yes sir, but it’s a limited advantage today. The fog is really thick out on the Panhandle, I—”

“Roadblocks?”

“Yes sir, this is Division A emergency, we are moving—”

He rattled on in that dry disguise-my-accent voice. He offered reassurance like a telephone company salesman.

When the domestic business was done, Perry Weinstein moved to the other phone. It was colored red and it was safe and the numbers that it dialed were also safe.

He picked up the phone, waited, decided on the first block to be pushed over. Nutcracker was commencing in the morning because every block was in place now and the whole edifice could be tumbled.

Alexa had not slept at all.

She had followed the taxicab containing November all the way back to the hotel. Wisconsin Avenue was bright and unsuitable for the sort of direct hit she intended. And then the hotel had been wrong as well. She had lost him at the elevators and she suspected he had doubled back behind her. Watergate was so complex.