Bill Granger - The November Man

She had failed again. Everything else was an excuse.

She had not eaten for two days. She felt sick to her stomach all the time. She thought her breath smelled foul, for the first time in her life.

She dressed carefully, as always, but there was no joy in it. She was a woman who had delighted in all her senses, in feeling and smelling and touching. She was imbued with self-love but she never thought it was excessive. There had been much to love about herself.

How quickly it broke down, she thought.

A gesture from an old man with yellow skin in Moscow and suddenly she was a puppet on the stage with its strings cut. She had no action. She could not even save herself.

She pitied herself. And that was why she had not slept. That and the words of the man she had come to kill. So flat and soft in the darkness. He had known her. He had told her she was in danger.

She stood on Pennsylvania Avenue and the street was empty because it was Sunday and she looked at the White House. She thought it should be more impressive, like the Kremlin. She thought she would kill the second November today and then kill herself. It would be far better than to be arrested by the Americans and put in cells for the rest of her life.

She dropped coins in the pay telephone and made the call to New York City.

The phone was picked up at the other end. There was no other sound.

She identified herself.

“You had opportunities. Why didn’t you take them?” The voice spoke English; it was without any accent.

“I could not ensure my own way out,” she said. She spoke as brutally as the voice. “Each time, there were difficulties. He knows me. He called me by name last night.”

There was silence. She had silenced the pitiless voice for a moment. It was almost a moment of triumph.

“Is this true?”

The question was not meant to be answered.

“Do you have him?” Alexa said. “It doesn’t matter now. I know what I will do. I will fulfill the mission.” She closed her eyes and felt faint. She tried to think of the heroic posters thrown up in Moscow each May Day and in the fall, in celebration of the October Revolution. Men and women marched on banners hundreds of feet long, striding with Lenin toward the Revolution. But she did not feel heroic. Only sick and alone in this foreign, savage country. She would do her duty this last time.

“Yes. This time, without fail. Even at risk to yourself.”

“Where is he?”

“There is a house on P Street,” the voice began. “Go to the house on P Street and when you reach it, wait inside. The key is under the mat at the door. Wait there for instructions.” He gave her the address on P Street N.E.

She felt very afraid in that moment, more afraid than at any time since Helsinki when the agent there had directed her to “the second November in Switzerland.”

“What will happen to me there?”

“Happen to you?” The voice seemed on the point of taking on coloration. But the voice paused and resumed in the same bland tone. “Nothing, Alexa. It is for instructions. This time, there will not be failure. There is no time for failure now.”

And the line was broken.

She replaced the light-green telephone receiver. She looked around her. What a queer city of low buildings and Greek columns and shabby streets full of slums. There were trees everywhere and yet there did not seem to be gaiety to the city at all. She felt a sullen undercurrent around her. She was accustomed to the same thing in Moscow: But there was vitality in Moscow that came from within, from secrets kept locked in secrets.

Alexa thought there was no vitality in Washington on this Sunday afternoon. She felt alone and abandoned in the West.

She stared around her. Her eyes carried down to her soul. They were shining and black and dangerous. Her eyes could not be disguised and she would not die like a victim. If they meant to kill her, they would have to engage her.

She felt the pistol in her pocket.

She saw Lenin on the wall hangings, striding toward the Revolution.

She even felt the first stirrings of hunger.

“Why are we going back?” Margot said.

“The best place to hide is a city,” Devereaux said. “Is he all right?”

“He’s shaking.”

“Give him my coat.”

“You killed that nun?”

“Give him the coat, Margot.” Softly, firmly.

“You killed her and that man—”

“Give him the coat.”

She draped the coat around Hanley.

They heard the helicopter again. The copter swept low over the road but there was nothing to see. The fog was blinding. It was an act of desperation to fly in fog like this.

Devereaux drove very fast and very hard. His eyes were so fixed on the road—on the billows of fog—that it was painful to refocus them. The fog seemed to roll at the windshield. It was worse than it had been that morning. The day was warm and the ground wet. He rolled down the window and could smell the springtime all around, all hidden.

“His face is bleeding.”

“Is it bad?”

“I don’t know.”

“For Christ’s sake, Margot, wipe the blood away and see how badly he’s hurt.”

She shivered. She wiped the blood from Hanley’s cheek and saw the wound. “No, it’s not bad,” she said. “You killed two people.”

The copter blades sounded very close. That was the trouble with fog. It affected hearing as well as vision. It enclosed everything.

Devereaux had not intended to rescue Hanley that Sunday morning. He never thought that Hanley would recognize him. Or, if he did, that he would have been enough in his senses to keep quiet. It had been a surveillance, to see where they kept Hanley and how hard it would be to get him out.

Now it was a mess. There was no time left at all. Hanley must hold the key to whatever was going on in Section. But what help could he be?

The police car passed them and Devereaux saw the taillights wink in the rearview window. Turning around. It was a good idea to get back to Washington but this was a terrible road for it.

“Hold him, Margot,” Devereaux said. “And get down.”

She slid down in the seat and the car came very near behind them. The Mars lights were flashing. Devereaux slowed down as though to stop. The police car slowed down. The helicopter surged overhead.

Radio contact, he thought.

Nothing to do. He pushed the gas pedal and the Buick roared ahead and the reaction time from the patrol car was just a moment slow. There was no time to do anything else.

The Buick was going fifty miles an hour into blind fog. Devereaux could barely see the yellow line on the two-lane road; it was the yellow line that guided him. If he couldn’t see the yellow line at all, they were finished.

Margot’s voice was too loud: “My God, you can’t drive this fast!”

He didn’t answer. He held the wheel hard.

The cops had guts. They were following his taillights, scarcely thirty feet behind.

More guts than brains, Devereaux thought. He slammed the brakes, turning the wheels left to the wrong side of the road, and then rode the shoulder, controlling the skid.

The police car crashed into the right rear bumper and careened into a grove of trees that led down a gentle slope to a secondary road below. Devereaux never stopped. He pushed into the fog and Margot got up and looked around and guessed what had happened.

“This is insane, you’re making me… an accomplice to… this is killing… you killed a nun!”

“Shut up, Margot,” he said, never looking at her. “Hold him,” he said.

“This man is dying,” she said.

“He can die later,” Devereaux said. The voice had no pity in it at all.