Bill Granger - The November Man

She had not seen boots like the ones she purchased even in the special stores in Moscow. They fit her well. Everything she wore fit her well. She always got a second-hand copy of Vogue each month from the Paris courier. She dressed in fashion.

The Finlandia had sailed at six from the grimly modern terminal on the southeast coast of the city. The terminal was as sullen and cheerless as a bus station and she had sat at a table in the cafeteria, eating a stale cheese sandwich, watching November enter the place, look around, wait in line with the others. She had boarded the ship at the last moment.

She had watched him at dinner in the vast dining room. She would have preferred to dine alone but agreed to be seated with a middle-aged woman from Malmo who spoke no English. They smiled to each other with the wary grace that only women display when meeting other and unknown women. The woman from Malmo certainly saw how much more beautiful and better dressed Alexa was.

The dining room had been cheerful, full of small lights and small tables and a quiet orchestra at one end. Everything was made very intense by the presence of the Baltic Sea all around them. We are alone in the world, Alexa had thought with pleasure.

The American agent dined alone across the room.

Their eyes met once and held.

He had not smiled at her.

He did not turn his eyes away. It was she who broke contact.

She had followed him after dinner. He had gone on deck, he had visited one of the smaller bars, he had looked in the duty-free shops. She followed him and he knew it; it was what she had wanted him to know. The advantage was hers.

He was handsome in a rugged sense. Perhaps he believed she followed him because she desired him.

There was a trick to killing him on this ship, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the winter of the Baltic Sea.

Alexa would use the obvious approach and he would stop it; he was smart enough to have eluded Moscow for 400 days of running, so he would see the obvious. But the obvious way sometimes worked when a man had grown lonely or careless or dejected or had been lulled into the belief that Alexa merely wanted to go to bed with him.

Alexa had backups. When the obvious did not work, the backups would.

She decided to cross the room.

She carried her glass and sat down across from him in the overstuffed chair. She put her glass on the table and stared into his blue eyes. He was smiling at her.

He wore a ragged red beard now, perhaps to cover the scar that was on his cheek. He looked a little different from the descriptions given her, but then, anyone on the run for more than a year undergoes changes.

She let her eyes lie to him. Her eyes, she knew, glittered with lust. But Alexa was calm, without any feeling at all. She stared at him and let her eyes do the trick. Then she said, in precise English: “I have seen you and I want to go to your cabin and make love to you. Tonight. Now. Or you may come to my cabin.”

“All right,” he said. Just like that.

They did not speak or touch again until they reached his cabin door. He turned the key in the lock. The carpeted passageway was empty. He smiled at her with perfect white teeth. There were pain wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had lost weight in 400 days of running. She thought he might be thin beneath the loose shirt and that his ribs would press out against his skin. But it wouldn’t come to that, Alexa thought.

He kissed her very suddenly at the door to the room and reached for her purse with one motion.

He pushed her away a little.

It was in the purse and they both knew it and it seemed to relax the tension between them.

He produced the shining Walther PPK and unsnapped the safety and pointed it at her. She wore a short fur jacket and a black silk blouse and a dark wool skirt that came to the top of her boots. The darkness of her clothing accentuated her paleness. She wore no jewelry and her lips were painted lightly. Her eyes were wide and deep and November stared into them. She was smiling.

“You know who I am. I wanted you to know so that there would be no trouble—”

“You’re a little obvious,” he said.

There, Alexa thought. There. That made it better.

“Come in,” November said.

“All right.”

She smiled—a properly small smile of acknowledgment of his superior instincts in this matter—and brushed past him through the narrow cabin opening into the room. There was a single bed made up. There was a small dresser and a porthole. In the front was a shower and a toilet.

“Strip,” he said.

She turned and he smiled at her.

“Please,” she began.

“Strip,” he said. And he smiled.

She took off her coat.

She looked hesitant.

He was grinning at her. He put the pistol on the purse on the dresser.

“You want help? I could take off your clothes for you. Not as carefully as you might do it.”

“I am KGB,” she said.

“I know exactly what you are. Right now, you’re a woman and I want you. I saw you get on the ship, I saw you at dinner, I guessed we would meet. Do you think I’m crazy? I know there’s going to be a setup along the way. You’re the setup; but if I overcome it—overcome you—they’ll have to talk to me. I’ll have you and then we will talk some and then maybe I won’t kill you,” he said.

Gorki had emphasized the brutality of the man and his cunning. He had lectured her about him. Alexa had taken precautions.

She began to unbutton her blouse. She undressed slowly, watching his eyes watching her.

November stood still, fully dressed, watching her, smiling.

She took off her blouse. Her brassiere fastened in front. She opened her brassiere and her large breasts sank a little against her slender frame.

She sat down then, on the only chair in the room, and removed her boots.

She reached beneath her dark skirt to remove her nylons. She blushed now because it seemed a good idea to her. “Really,” she said.

“Come now. Only a few more things.”

She blushed furiously. She reached for the top of her panties and panty hose.

The weapon contained two plastic bullets encased in a plastic firing device that was eighty-nine millimeters in length. She pulled down her hose and panties and the device, between her legs, fastened by the elastic of the panties, was in the palm of her left hand.

The device—it could scarcely be called a pistol because the principles were not the same, all the firing parts were electronic—popped loudly once and there was a sudden and large dirty hole in the middle of his forehead.

It was over that quickly. It amazed both of them.

He was quite dead, though it takes the brain some moments to realize that the flicker of images in mind and eye are terminated, rather like a reel of film still spinning after the screen has gone blank.

There was no need to fire a second time—there were only two charges in the plastic device—but Alexa was a woman of carefulness. It was why she had risen in a bureaucracy that might be described as not very progressive in the matter of respect for the talents of women.

The second opening in the skull came very near the first. Alexa was a professional and played a top game.

She had to step aside to let his body fall between her and the bed.

She went through his pockets. He had a few notes of Swedish money on him; also a Danish passport and a credit card issued by a Danish bank; also a passbook with a canceled account from Credit Suisse in Geneva.

She opened his shirt out of curiosity. He had a very nice chest, she thought. If there had been time to arrange the matter differently… well.

She dressed again. She put the device in her purse. As a precaution, Alexa buried the Walther under his mattress.