Bill Granger - The November Man

She lifted the body onto the bed and covered it with blankets and buried a pillow over the face so that the holes could not be seen clearly.

She went to the door and opened it carefully and looked up and down the empty corridor. She flicked off the lights in the room. The engines of the ship chugged serenely below decks. The night was clear and the waters of the Baltic Sea were gentle and shining beneath the full moon.

It was the fourth of March. The day was filled with sun and blustery winds down the broad avenue that connects the White House with Capitol Hill. In the dark corner office of Frank L. Yackley, there were four chairs around the big rosewood desk. The illumination in the room had not improved. The light from the green-shaded banker’s lamp made the faces of the four arrayed around the desk dark and indistinct. Frank L. Yackley’s face seemed large and unreal, as though he might be the Wizard of Oz. It was the effect he desired.

“The problem is Hanley,” Yackley said.

Lydia Neumann felt the chill again in the pit of her stomach. She counted as Hanley’s closest friend in the Section, though “friend” might be too strong from her point of view and “friend” might be too weak from Hanley’s. Hanley had no friends and pretended not to want them. He trusted Lydia Neumann as he trusted no one else. He had been a bachelor all his life, he was sexually indifferent; he was a bore, in fact. But Lydia Neumann with her raspy voice and Ma Joad manner had liked him in the way that some people favor the runt of a litter of farm dogs.

But she knew there was a problem as well. She squirmed in her chair and the leather squeaked protest.

“He needs help,” Yackley continued in his careful voice, slowly rubbing the side of one hand up and down the palm of another, as though playing his hands.

There was no sound in the room. The other chairs were occupied by the director of signals, the director of translations and analysis, the director of research. Lydia Neumann, the only woman at this level, was director of the computer analysis division. Since her duties overlapped those of Franz Douglas in TransAn (slang for translations and analysis), they were rivals in the fabric of the bureaucracy. Naturally, Franz Douglas would oppose Neumann on the matter of Hanley. It was the way things worked.

“We are all aware of his illness. We are also aware of his extraordinary response to Mrs. Neumann’s call of… sympathy. I have talked to him as well. I am afraid that Mr. Hanley has suffered some severe shock.”

That was a giveaway, Lydia Neumann thought. She narrowed her eyes. Mr. Hanley. He was getting the setup.

She was a large woman and huddled for a moment in her even larger loose sweater, her hands on the lap of her cotton dress. She might have posed as a farm-woman from another era. She was a Midwesterner as Hanley was; perhaps that explained their attraction to each other.

“I am not competent medically to make a judgment,” he continued. “I have sent for Dr. Thompson to make a report.”

“He said Hanley needed rest,” Lydia Neumann said. “He’s been overburdened.”

“Yes, Mrs. Neumann,” Yackley said. “But there is rest and there is rest.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Neither do I. I consulted with Dr. Thompson, who agrees with me that some evaluation needs to be made of Mr. Hanley. Perhaps at a different level than that afforded by Dr. Thompson. Who is, after all, concerned with the ills of the body.”

“The mind,” said Franz Douglas. “There’s something in what you say.”

“Acted peculiar,” chimed in Claymore Richfield, director of research, a white-gowned scientific sort who never noticed anyone or anything. He had developed a large budget because he agreed with everyone in the Section and then went off and created miracles. Like the wire of the innocent copper bracelet worn by field officers and used to garrote the unsuspecting. Like Marcom One, which not only analyzed photographs from the spy satellites but automatically coordinated them in computer memory so that the face of the Soviet Union from ninety-seven miles up was captured fresh from morning until night by photos that could sense the change of traffic lights in Moscow. Claymore Richfield was not of this world, Hanley once observed; he did not see things on a human scale but as a god might. Hanley had imparted this observation to Lydia Neumann once as they got drunk at the Christmas party held in the translation pool. “Intelligence is a mountain to be climbed,” Hanley had intoned. “It is not a mountain to be descended to.”

The fifth person in the room, Seymour Blyfeld, was director of signals and the upper-level liaison with NSA. He didn’t count.

“Whether there is or not, we are faced with difficult decisions,” said Yackley, quietly picking up the consensus. “The trouble with Hanley is that he has Ultra clearance, he can be very dangerous to us, to the Section, to the country. He has secrets.”

“He’s not a traitor. You’re not calling him that,” Lydia Neumann said. “He’s ill—”

“I am not diagnosing him, Mrs. Neumann,” said Yackley in a stiff voice, grinding the walnut words into powder. “I am suggesting that there must be an evaluation. A psychological evaluation.”

“From which he won’t return,” she said in a stubborn voice. “No one ever gets a clean bill of health in a psychological evaluation—”

“And no one is ever recommended for one unless there is something wrong with him,” Franz Douglas said in his thin, snippy voice.

“We have a problem, Mrs. Neumann. In the past three years, FBI has uncovered thirty-two traitors, thirty-two spies who have—”

“FBI? What does that have to do with us—”

“Traitors,” said Yackley. “What if it were proven by one of our dear sister agencies—let us not name the agency, let us just assume it is one of our Competition—that the director of operations division was not only off his head but that he was babbling secrets to outsiders?”

“Has that happened?” Lydia Neumann said.

“Yes. He has made contact with a former agent. A former agent who no longer exists. He is babbling over an open line—”

“How do you know this?”

“Because the line has been tapped for six months. At my directive,” Yackley said. Richfield looked innocent.

Lydia Neumann’s face went red. “What about us? Are we tapped as well?”

Yackley smiled at that. “It wouldn’t do to tell you if you were, would it?”

“I wouldn’t mind being tapped,” said Franz Douglas. “I have nothing to hide.”

Mrs. Neumann ignored him. “Who is the agent? The ex-agent? What did he say?”

“That’s not really your concern, Mrs. Neumann.”

“What secrets did he—”

“Mrs. Neumann. I have called this meeting for the purpose of gaining a consensus for a course of action in the matter of Mr. Hanley. I think the course of action is obvious. I will recommend to the director of National Security that Mr. Hanley be examined at the facility at St. Catherine’s.”

Mrs. Neumann knew. She felt the ice grow as a real thing in her belly, press against the warm skin from the inside and freeze it, grow up into her chest and make the breath come short.

“That’s wrong,” Mrs. Neumann said at last, choking.

“It is the only solution of the moment,” Yackley said. “St. Catherine’s is secure. St. Catherine’s is a perfectly respectable private institution with a government contract and they have served us well over twenty-five years. The Claretian Sisters—”

“This is not about the nuns, that man has some say in this, some rights—”

“Mrs. Neumann, this is a matter of grave national security. Mr. Hanley is a sick man, he needs treatment.” The voice had stopped grinding walnuts. There was the balm of healing. Yackley looked at the photograph of his wife on his desk for a moment, at the crooked, good-natured grin. He smiled at his wife. He smiled at them all. He felt a string of reassuring clichés coming on. “This is a matter of security at every level of government, at the level of secrecy in our private agencies. The government has become a sieve intelligence-wise. There are Soviet agents on the prowl—”