Bill Granger - The November Man

Weinstein reached and removed the pistol from the clip.

“Hands on head,” he said. He pointed to a straight chair by the north wall. Devereaux went to the chair and sat down. Weinstein pushed the chair back on the rear legs so that it balanced Devereaux back against the wall. “Is that comfortable?” he said.

Devereaux did not speak.

Weinstein went back to the desk and sat on the edge of the desk. He stared at Devereaux with owlish curiosity. His eyeglasses were still held together by a paper clip. He had a rugged and tired look to him. It really had been a lot of work and now it was over.

Devereaux said, “You should have let sleeping agents lie.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Weinstein said.

“I was curious about Hanley’s calls. But it was only curiosity.”

“I couldn’t be sure of that. It was difficult for me to maneuver.” He said this with a slow, funereal cadence. He wanted someone as smart as himself to understand.

He went on: “I was succeeding. In getting Hanley out of the way. In another year, I would have R Section stripped down, discredited.”

“How long have you worked for them?”

“‘The other side,’ you mean?” Weinstein smiled. “It’s old-fashioned to think in those terms, don’t you think? There is only one side: Stability. A sense of order. Real peace. The enemy is the terrorists and they’re nothing more than nuisances. Who cares greatly that eight or nine people are killed in a Rome airport? I mean, beyond the eight or nine and their families? There is death like that every day, in every city of the world. No. There’s no ‘other side’ anymore; just as there are no spies anymore.”

For the first time, Devereaux smiled. He seemed at ease and that annoyed Weinstein. “You’re the author of that nonsense.”

“Yackley is my messenger, my agent. Yackley is an empty mind waiting to be filled. I gave a talk, actually, at Yale three years ago, before this assignment. I was trying to make an intellectual point that is true in practice. Eighty-five to ninety percent of our intelligence is hardware. It comes from things. It comes from satellites, skyspies, automatic listening devices. ELINT. PHOTINT. SIGINT. You know. There is so much information we can’t process it all. The information is like a constant avalanche that just never ends, never runs out of snow, never fills the valley below. On and on, year after year. There is too damned much intelligence and we are drowning in it. So what is the use of agents in the field? Are they going to steal the drawings of the Norden Bombsight? Or a copy of the Enigma Machine? My God, no one grows up. HUMINT is passé.” He became agitated and got up, walked around his desk, dropped the .45 heavily on the desk top. He sat down and Devereaux was very still.

“This is modern times. There are no spies and spies are not only a drain upon the resources of the government—an argument, November, that flies well in budget-making circles—but a positive detriment. Spies generate spies. We spy on one another like kids. We misinterpret information because we are limited in intelligence; we hold up important analysis of real intelligence because we have our doubts or we are fed disinformation by our opposite numbers…”

“And then, there are times when there are moles in government and it takes a spy to catch a spy.”

Devereaux’s words were not expected and the room was quiet now. The man at the desk with the gun stared at Devereaux with something like hatred.

“You caught me? I caught you,” Weinstein said. “You’re a renegade to Section. You crashed a crazy old man out of St. Catherine’s. You killed a nun—or it looks that way. And you killed a state policeman pursuing you. He died in the crash.”

“He was driving too fast for conditions.”

“You are a killer. You are out of control.”

“I am licensed again.” Very softly. “In the old trade.”

“Goddamnit. I can kill you right now and get a medal for it.”

“Why work for them?”

“Work for them? Those midgets? I saw a way clear to do some good. Don’t tell me you believe in that nonsense about recruitment in college and years of quiet dedication to the cause? I was in Czechoslovakia five years ago on a fellowship and I made the contact, not them. I told them I would do what I could. To make the world a saner place.”

“How kind of you.”

“I didn’t even want any money but I had to take money or they wouldn’t have believed me. I wanted to contribute to understanding.”

“You’re crazy, Weinstein.”

“No. You are. And Hanley. Spies and spymasters. I was handed R Section practically as a gift by that idiot Yackley. He was a climber and a star-fucker. He wanted me to see what a good job he did. Liked to call me Perry just as if we worked out at the same club together. What a complete asshole.”

“Most of them are,” Devereaux said.

“Yes. None more so than Hanley. I wanted to get rid of Hanley but you can’t just kill people, you know. Not at that level. I convinced Yackley, who convinced Dr. Thompson that Hanley needed calming down. Some sort of tranquilizer. Thompson is to medicine what Typhoid Mary was to cooking. Hanley was being blocked, going through some sort of career crisis—he doubted himself. And then, when I took Nutcracker away from him, he went off the edge. It was a clever enough bit of business, I think. I wasn’t even suspected.”

“What is Nutcracker?”

“Didn’t Hanley tell you?”

“But that isn’t what it is—”

Weinstein smiled. “You don’t know. So you haven’t blocked it after all. Nutcracker isn’t finished, is it?”

“Only the parts I could understand. About the other side snatching our agents. Part of our pre-summit maneuvering in the field—we get a defector/spy and they get two—”

“That can’t be.” Weinstein picked up the pistol again and sighted Devereaux along the barrel. “That can’t be.” The voice was soft. “There are four hundred and fifty-three agents in field. They can’t all be notified that quickly. I wasn’t concerned when you escaped with Hanley that you could figure this out right away. And notify all the agents. You couldn’t do it.”

“No. You’re right.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I guessed which ones were the targets.”

Weinstein blinked.

He felt his finger become very heavy on the trigger.

“You guessed?”

Devereaux waited.

“You guessed? You don’t guess! This isn’t a matter of guesswork. ”

“But it is. That’s what it always is. All the information doesn’t mean anything unless you can guess what the missing pieces are.”

“How could you guess?”

“Hanley had a list of names. Of agents. Scheduled for early retirement to trim the budget. They seemed most logical. And it would be enough to begin wrecking the Section—”

“I gave Gorki all the information. I told him about you—that you were sleeping. I told him to take care of you. And that damned idiot Yackley had already sent out two Section chasers to talk to you. So we ended up with four dead agents in Switzerland. What a mess. What a stinking mess that was.”

“You gave Gorki all the information. It was so good. He knew where to send Alexa. He wanted to get rid of Alexa.”

“I know. She was an embarrassment to him. The old fool had photographs of her naked and dancing. Pictures of them together. Stolen New Year’s Eve from his dacha. He has his enemies in the bureaucracy as we do. I had word that he was coming out when the matter was over. Voluntarily or not. My little reward. After November was dead and the R Section spies were defected, Gorki was coming out. He was tired and old and he had enemies.”

“Which side were you on?”