Bill Granger - The November Man

Devereaux held up his hand.

Hanley coughed. “And now I’ve got a goddamn cold,” he said. He never swore. He was a man of propriety. “I feel like a fool.”

“There are no spies,” Devereaux said.

Hanley blinked. There was a silence that could be felt in the room. The house was shuttered for the night. Margot Kieker slept on a cot in the basement room. The whole house had been squeezed to find room for the three visitors. The housekeeper said nothing to any of them, as though it might be quite normal for three strangers to drop in on Dr. Quarles in the middle of a Sunday and stay for the night.

“I said that. I said that on a goddamn open line.”

“What does it mean?”

“Yackley. Yackley said it to me. He attributed it to Richfield, our mad scientist. Richfield was very gung ho on this retrenchment program that was coming down from Administration. We had too many agencies, too many spies. It was involved.”

“A lot of bureaucratic infighting,” Devereaux said. “The same old thing. It had to be more than that.”

Hanley’s eyes brightened. “More. A lot more than that.” The dry voice was drier still but the flat Nebraska accent emerged with clarity.

“Richfield was trying to sell Yackley on the idea of cutting back Operations, that the work of agents was now largely redundant because we had so many surveillance devices, computers, satellites… all the hardware. Yackley liked the argument. He used it against me. The cost could be shown so clearly as savings. I mean, he wanted to eliminate a bunch of agents to start, as an experiment, to see if the operation would suffer—”

“Who?”

Hanley frowned. “One of the things… specific memory. It’s harder to fix times. This morning I woke up and I thought I was six or seven years old, the time I was in hospital with appendicitis in Omaha—”

But Devereaux had opened a sheet of paper. He read: “January. New Moon. Equinox. June. August. Vernal. Winter.”

Hanley said nothing for a moment. “Yes. The names. The agents.”

“They’re all in the field—”

“Yes. No chasers or safe-house keepers. All watchers and stationmasters. They had networks. My God, I couldn’t explain to Yackley that he wasn’t talking about seven men. He was talking about hundreds of men. The links…”

“I know,” Devereaux said.

“It wasn’t a matter of protecting our investment alone. It was all that work thrown away. And what good is the hardware without software? I mean, we get soft goods all the time from the Opposition. The hardware bona fides it for us. And the other way around. The satellite spies movement outside of Vladivostok. What’s the good of knowing the SIGINT without knowing what the motive is? Software. Human contact. HUMINT. That’s what you need. But the hardware doesn’t have life or soul or judgment. It isn’t human. You can’t make it all on hardware, can you?”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t know what to do. I thought something was wrong. Yackley was positively demented on the subject. You’d think he was brainwashed.”

“Yackley struck me as a man waiting for some stronger brain than his to tell him what to do. They call him a team player.”

Hanley plucked at the cover for a moment. He was waiting but Devereaux said nothing more. Devereaux had made the contact with Denisov at five. It was the fallback point, derived from an old show business routine. Denisov called the lobby of the hotel and asked if there had been any messages for him. Then Devereaux called and used the same name and asked for messages. He then left a message for anyone who would call him. Denisov called again, asked for the name he had used before, and picked up the message Devereux had left. They made contact and the final message was: Ivers had talked.

“Damnit, man, what is going on?”

“What is Nutcracker?”

Hanley said the unexpected: “It was set up a year ago. We were collating information inside Operations. This was strictly Operations, Mrs. Neumann’s division wasn’t in on it at all. It was strictly software, strictly HUMINT.”

“Go ahead.”

“The idea came about because of what happened at the first summit. You remember the exchange of agents? It was all just coincidence. I thought it was coincidence at the time. I really wasn’t paranoid.”

Devereaux said, “In the trade, that might just be reality.”

“But the idea took on some urgency.” Hanley was going back over memory. “I mean, there was all this talk about cutting back Operations. Cutting back software. Field agents and Number Four men and station-masters and housekeepers and garbagemen. Even chasers. My God, you need chasers.”

“My experience with chasers hasn’t been all that pleasant. Section chasers,” Devereaux said.

Hanley looked at the patterns on the wall. “A woman designed this room.”

“The clever spy,” Devereaux said.

Hanley said, “Sarcasm.” Devereaux felt better at that. It was a trace of the old Hanley and not this weak man sitting up in bed in front of him.

“I’m so damned tired,” Hanley said.

They waited for each other.

“Nutcracker. The idea was to find and identify three or four men from the Opposition. That wasn’t so difficult. What we were going to do was to turn them. And if they wouldn’t turn, we were going to muddy them up so that Opposition wouldn’t know if they had been turned or not. We decided early on it would be in Europe exclusively, because that’s where the Summit was going to be held.”

“Berlin.”

“Exactly.”

“This was for politics?”

“For survival. Of Operations. Operations is the heart of the Section. Operations is HUMINT. Besides, it was legitimate.”

“We’re supposed to gather intelligence, not play ‘I Spy,’ ” Devereaux said.

“We’re supposed to survive. That’s the first rule of every game.”

“This is crazy,” Devereaux said. Nutcracker didn’t turn out to be what he expected.

“It got crazier.”

“How?”

“It was downholded.”

“What happened?”

“I had my own file in Tinkertoy. On Nutcracker. Yackley didn’t know about it, Neumann didn’t know. Well, I thought Neumann didn’t know; she’s a smart cookie. I had the file to keep track of my own reports… we were moving along, setting up our targets, we had made contact with one…”

Devereaux waited. Hanley seemed to be seeing something beyond the room. He plucked absently again at the covers. His eyes were wet. There might be tears at times, Dr. Quarles had said. The body reacts in strange ways to the manipulation of the mind. Give him time, give him rest.

“In January, I came in one morning and I had… I had been feeling bad. I had seen Dr. Thompson a few times. He gave me pills. Iron pills or something. I don’t know. At least, I thought they were.” His voice was small. “I came in this morning in January. It snowed. You know what snow is to Washington. The office was half deserted. My God, people are babies.”

Silence again. And then the distant voice resumed. “I went into Tinkertoy for the Nutcracker file. And Tinkertoy stopped me. ‘Access denied.’ It was my goddamn file. And I am the director of Operations. It was my file and my plan and it had been taken from me. I felt… so strange. I felt like I had gone through the Looking Glass. I had to know what happened. I went to Yackley and he looked at me like I was crazy.

“‘What are you talking about,’ he said. ‘I never heard of Nutcracker.’ Of course, it was true. I mean, it was my operation. I hadn’t shared it with anyone. I had used discretionary funds. I made it a secret and now someone had taken it away from me. I couldn’t figure it out. It was making me… well, what happened to me? Did I go crazy or not?”