Bill Granger - The November Man

“I didn’t care about Gorki, except that I could get credit for his defection. R Section was going to be ruined by Nutcracker. Let CIA get credit, NSA, the Brits for pulling in some low-level Soviet flotsam… Gorki set that up as one of his bona fides, to show he was going ahead with the program. The grand prize was Gorki himself from Resolutions Committee. I would arrange the meeting myself—”

“You’re a fool, Weinstein. Gorki gave you crap.”

“They were low-level agents—”

“Gorki gave you a Protestant minister and an opera singer. He targeted innocents and turned them over to half a dozen intelligence agencies. Gorki isn’t coming out. And Gorki was going to take credit for bringing in all the R Section people you were willing to betray. Gorki—whoever Gorki is—is a survivor. He got rid of Alexa—he was going to have her killed in Switzerland and put the blame on me—but it didn’t matter if she killed me first and then you got her. In any case, she was no longer a problem to the man in Moscow. She wasn’t going back to the Soviet Union to cause him trouble just by being alive. An old man learns to survive in a bureaucracy just because he’s practiced all the tricks.”

“We would have her. Ivers. It was pressure on him—”

“You’re a fool in the long run, aren’t you, Perry?” Devereaux’s eyes seemed to glitter in the strong afternoon light. “I was asleep in Switzerland, dead to the world.” For a moment, the two men were silent, considering the image of a sleeping agent, buried in a country at the edge of the world of spies. “You goddamn fool,” Devereaux said at last. “I was on that ship in the Baltic as far as Gorki knew—and then you let your contact know that I’m still alive in Switzerland, the real agent named November, because Hanley had called me, because Yackley had tapped his line, because you saw the transcript and saw that I had heard something about a nutcracker. One wrong conclusion and all the rest comes tumbling down and you had to believe that your masters would get Gorki out of Moscow, one way or another. Gorki must have a sense of humor, whoever he is. He played you the fool for so long you still don’t understand that’s what you are.”

“Shut up,” Perry Weinstein said. His voice hissed and a vein in his neck seemed enlarged. “Shut the fuck up.”

“And I would have stayed asleep in Switzerland but you sent those chasers after me—”

“Yackley did. To talk to you. They were only sent to talk to you and you killed them and—”

“Killing and killing and everything came down because of it. Because you made so many smart moves that you couldn’t move at all. And you forced me to come back into the cold, into the trade.”

“There is no cold,” Weinstein said. “Don’t you understand a goddamn thing I tried to tell you? Are you as stupid as the rest of them?”

Devereaux dropped his hands on his lap. He was smiling.

A damned smile. A damned smug smile. Weinstein picked up the pistol and came around the desk. “Nothing matters,” he said, regaining a tone he had lost in the last minute. “You’re dead. The real November is dead. And I’ll be more careful in the future. A little setback along the way. I can assure you that Hanley is finished in Section and that’s a victory—one less HUMINT believer. And we’ll put a new man in for Neumann in CompAn and—”

“You won’t survive,” Devereaux said. He said it so certainly that Perry Weinstein paused. The pistol was fixed in front of him, pointed at Devereaux’s face.

“I’ll survive you. It’s time to kill. End of the game, end of words.”

He held the pistol in exactly the right grip, with the legs in a stance, the pistol in the right hand and the left hand around the right wrist to support its weight. Everything was exactly right.

Except for Devereaux’s size. A petty miscalculation. His legs were longer than they seemed.

Devereaux’s right foot reached the barrel just as Weinstein fired.

The shot singed his hairline and there was blood on Devereaux’s scalp. He went down because the kick pushed him back off balance. His legs went flying. He rolled and Perry Weinstein brought the pistol down and fired again.

The shot destroyed a foot of plaster.

Devereaux braced, kicked out with both feet, making his legs points of a projectile. His feet slammed into Weinstein’s left side. The pain crushed the breath out of Weinstein and the third shot went into the ceiling.

Devereaux was up again, seeming to spring up like a halfback from a tangle of bodies on the football field. He grasped the gun hand and the gun exploded a fourth time.

Devereaux brought Weinstein’s wrist down hard on the edge of the desk and Perry gripped the trigger in pain and a fifth and sixth shot went off.

Devereaux cracked his wrist.

The pain went white, right up to Weinstein’s eyes.

Devereaux moved in close, chopped at the damaged left side.

Weinstein was big and strong but very slow. He was taller than Devereaux. He grabbed the smaller man’s face in his left claw and tore it. There was blood on the cheeks.

Devereaux stepped back.

Weinstein pushed him very hard with his whole body and exploded his body against the north wall. Devereaux hit the wall hard. He went to one knee.

The second pistol—a very light Walther—was on the desk top. Weinstein reached for it and the pain of his broken right wrist paralyzed him.

Devereaux pushed off the wall and slammed again into Weinstein, pushing his body against the desk.

Weinstein had the pistol in his left hand—not his shooting hand. He brought it around and the trigger wouldn’t pull. The safety was on. It was enough.

Devereaux hit him with a very heavy right hand square in the face, breaking his jaw and sending his glasses broken and sprawling across the desk top.

Perry blinked with pain that engulfed him like fear. It rose in his belly and reached for his throat and blinded his eyes.

The room was all sounds without speech. The shots lingered in echoes that nearly deafened both of them. They grunted with pain and effort. Weinstein brought the pistol down hard against Devereaux’s head and he went down.

Weinstein stood over the body for a moment.

He pointed the pistol at Devereaux’s head and unclicked the safety. He went to the outer door and stood there and looked at the twin monitors on the desk.

And then he saw it.

Terror crept over his broken features. The eyes were wide. He saw the horror of it.

It was there, on the monitor, the second screen.

A picture of the room he stood in. A picture of Devereaux on the floor by the desk. The monitor had been turned to the room. Someone had put a goddamn spy camera in his private room. Recording everything he had said to Devereaux. He looked up at the ceiling and still could not see the camera that had recorded everything.

And now they were coming, all of them coming. He saw them in the lobby on the other monitor. He heard the machinery of the elevator whirring beyond his outer office.

It was so damned clever of them.

But there was one way to escape.

He put the barrel of the Walther PPK in his mouth and squeezed the trigger easily. The trigger, unchecked by the safety, slid back to the guard.

He didn’t hear the shot at all.

They sat in one of those coffee shops on Third Avenue in New York City that are full of old men and bored waitresses. The couple sat quietly in the corner. They ate and drank and talked. They talked Russian. It was good to talk Russian, for both of them.

They became lovers, as well.

Alexa disappeared from the game, just as Denisov had and by the same way of escape—through Section. She was a good defector but she knew so little about anything except killing. Gorki had gotten rid of her—the photographs had been stolen from his dacha at Christmas and Gorki knew that his enemies intended to use them against him—and yet he had betrayed very little because Alexa knew very little. She was a disappointment to the Section but not to Denisov.