Bill Granger - The November Man

“Yackley,” Hanley said.

“There are no spies,” Devereaux repeated. “So what does the loss of a few spies mean? If they really don’t exist. If we know all their secrets anyway?”

“But what is Nutcracker turned into? What’s going to happen?” Hanley said. His voice was dry.

“I think I know.” Devereaux stared through Hanley, through the walls of the room, to a schematic in his mind reflected on a blank screen. Like a sheet of white paper with names on it.

“I think I know,” Devereaux said.

And began to tell him everything that would be done.

The operation called Nutcracker commenced thirteen hours after Hanley began to explain the procedures to Devereaux. Nutcracker had been too imminent to stop.

The Soviet agent identified as Andromeda was drugged and slipped into the western zone of Berlin at 1945 hours. When he was awakened, in an American hospital in Frankfurt, he demanded to know what was going on. Two officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was Andromeda, a Soviet agent who had just “defected” to the West. One of the agents was a little smug about that. It had been so slick a maneuver, without any trouble at all. The man called Andromeda said over and over that he was a Lutheran minister in Potsdam. No one believed him. Not at first.

At the same time but in a different time zone—1845 Greenwich Mean Time—the Soviet agent identified as Hebrides was picked up by two SIS men from BritIntell and hustled to the safe house outside London off the Great Western Road that leads to Oxford. Hebrides was clearly bona fided; his description had been confirmed by Washington. He was questioned, rather harshly, about his network. He explained, just as harshly, that one did not treat a British subject and the second tenor in the Warwick Light Opera Company in this manner. The SIS men were not very gentle and the CIA men looked the other way.

In three hours, Saturn and Mercury fell into the orbit of the West as well, the first in Tokyo, the second in San Francisco.

Nutcracker appeared to be functioning smoothly. Everyone was pleased. Quentin Reed phoned Perry Weinstein twice with a happy tone in his cultivated voice.

But Perry Weinstein was not so happy.

There were problems, all sorts of problems.

But nothing to tell Quent about.

There had been a definite fuck-up in Athens. The agent there for R Section, codenamed “Winter,” reported to Athens police an attempt to kidnap him as he sat in Plokas Café on the sidewalk in Constitution Square. Only the chance that he had been dining that day with four business associates—all heavily armed—foiled the plot. Two men were dead.

By midmorning in Washington, D.C., the word from Athens was that the two dead men were Soviet commercial attachés with the embassy in the Greek capital.

Weinstein broke a pencil as he heard the report from Yackley by phone. Yackley was quite happy about it. Yackley did not understand.

Weinstein dropped the broken pencil in his wastebasket.

By noon, the watcher in Helsinki for R Section told police there his apartment had been broken into and ransacked.

Again, the R Section agent had not been harmed. Yackley had phoned Weinstein with that bit of news as well and now he was not happy, merely puzzled.

Weinstein saw what was happening.

He thought about it as he stared out his window at the White House. There was still a way to salvage things, he thought. If only—

He reached for the phone and pressed the button to connect him with Yackley.

Yackley could still be used.

Weinstein heard the phone ring and ring and ring. And then Yackley’s secretary was on the line, explaining that Mr. Yackley was at lunch at an undisclosed location and expected to be out of the office until late in the afternoon.

“I don’t believe this,” Weinstein shouted. He never shouted. “I don’t believe that idiot is out to lunch! What the hell does he think is going on?”

But the woman at the other end of the line said nothing and Weinstein slammed down the receiver so hard that the phone jumped on the desk. The white room was suddenly wrapped in silence.

What was going on?

Perry Weinstein considered himself a man of intelligence and calculation but there was a third part to him in that moment. He could not identify it. It began in his stomach and made him nauseous and built up through his organs until it reached his throat and made him dry and hoarse.

It was fear. For the first time, he felt afraid of what was going to happen.

He crossed the quiet room to the outer office.

His secretary was gone; well, it was lunch hour. He stared at her desk and at the two television monitors connected with the security lobby.

He pulled his eyes away and started back into his own office and stopped.

He turned again.

On the black-and-white screen focused on events at the security desk he saw the man cross the lobby and flash an identification to the guard. The guard put the ID card into a machine and looked at the machine and at the man before him.

Weinstein knew the card. It would be gray and featureless, like a blank and unused credit card. The machine would read the message buried inside the card, between the twin layers of smooth plastic bonded together.

He stared at the monitor screen and the man looked at the camera.

He knew that face.

His mind swept memory, clicking over files implanted in brain tissue, connected to life with electrical impulses.

He knew the face from a 201 file he had read carefully before beginning everything that was now happening.

Perry Weinstein retreated into his own office and went to the desk. He opened the upper right drawer and removed the old, heavy .45 caliber Colt army automatic. It was the type designed at the turn of the century to kill a horse—literally, because there was still a cavalry in those days. It was replaced in service now by a light Italian handgun. Weinstein had a fondness for weapons and for antiquities. He was a very good shot and no one in the building knew he had a weapon in his drawer. It would not have been allowed, this close to the White House, across the street.

He sat down at his desk and waited. He waited for a telephone call to break the silence, to tell him the fortunes of Nutcracker were reversed. He didn’t see how the blame could come back to him in any case.

But the door to his office opened anyway.

Perry Weinstein almost smiled in relief. The pistol in his hand was very heavy and felt good to him. He held it up so the other man could see the pistol clearly.

“Bang bang,” Perry Weinstein said.

“You’re dead,” Devereaux said and stepped into the room. His presence filled the room. Weinstein held the pistol easily in his big right hand. He propped his elbow on the desk top to steady the grip.

“Bang bang,” Perry Weinstein said again, like a child who finds himself very clever.

Devereaux waited by the door.

“The TV monitor. I was in the outer office and I saw you in the security lobby,” Weinstein said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why?”

“Nutcracker is off. Dead in the water.”

“November,” Weinstein said. His eyes glittered in the dull light of the room. “Our man November.”

Devereaux stood very still.

“Come into the room a little more,” Weinstein said.

Devereaux took a step.

Weinstein waved the barrel of the pistol in welcome.

Devereaux stood before the desk.

Weinstein came around the desk carefully. “I am very good with pistols. Very good. In case you think I’m one of those desk-bound bureaucrats who doesn’t really know anything about anything.”

He pressed the pistol against Devereaux’s head, behind the left ear. The barrel felt cold on the scalp. Devereaux said, “In the belt, left side.”