The November Man (12 page)

“I know nothing. It was a phrase. A subcontractor in London who must think he knows everything but he knows nothing. He said there was chatter out of Cheltenham, the Americans were working on something called Nutcracker. That was all. Realignment of networks in Berlin. But it was chatter, even gossip, and you know that Cheltenham is a sieve. You cannot believe anything that comes from there.”

Cheltenham was the mole-ridden listening post shared by the Americans and British in the English west country. Cheltenham eavesdropped on the radio “chatter” of the world and tried to make sense of all that it heard. Nutcracker was a name, something that had been dropped by
computer or transatlantic phone or radio transmitter—it was an odd name of some odd thing that had struck Denisov in memory and now, in this damp and dirty public house in Dover, had been retrieved by a retired American agent.

“And you know this one,” Devereaux said. He was pointing at the picture.

“I do not think so.”

“When will you tell me who she is?”

“Perhaps I must understand what this is. What this is about. So there is no danger for me,” Denisov said. “I do not trust you too far.”

“This does not concern you.”

“I will see if that is true.”

“She came to kill me. Who is she?”

“Perhaps I do not know yet. Perhaps in a little time, I will know.”

“KGB,” Devereaux said.

“Perhaps.”

“And these are photographs of the men she killed.”

They were morgue shots, obtained from Boll along with the drawing of the woman. One of the faces had been obliterated.

“I do not know them.”

“I do. They were KGB. Resolutions Committee.”

“They wore cards? Did they tell you before they died?”

“They were identified.”

“And KGB kills KGB?”

Devereaux stared into the eyes of the saint. “Yes. Think about it: KGB kills KGB.”

“And R Section?” Denisov tried a shy smile. “Does R Section kill its own?”

“Perhaps.”

“Someone called you. In Lausanne. And then these things happen. Do you kill R Section, my friend? Is R Section to kill you?”

Devereaux said nothing.

“You speak madness,” Denisov said. “You say nothing to me but your quiet is madness. You want me to say that KGB kills its own and that R Section kills its own? Speak, my friend, and tell me why I should play this mad game for you.”

“For four thousand shares of stock,” Devereaux said.

Denisov sighed. “My weakness. It is my only weakness.”

“It’s greed.”

“I am a careful man.”

“You stole from KGB when you worked the Resolutions Committee. You steal now. I don’t care. I want to know about this woman. And about Nutcracker—”

“Four thousand shares. Must I trust you?”

“I will call Krueger and make the purchase through him. Is that satisfactory?”

Krueger was a man in Zurich who kept all the accounts and knew all the numbers and was an honest broker for every side because he was on no side but his own. Denisov nodded.

“He holds them until you deliver,” Devereaux said.

“Good. Be careful. Always be careful and do not trust too much,” Denisov said.

L
eo said he didn’t mind. Leo was an easygoing sort of man, which suited Lydia Neumann to a T. They always drove in spring. Sometimes to Florida, sometimes to Canada for the last of the winter carnivals in places like Montreal and Quebec City. They brought their own weather with them, their mutual comforts, their sense of each other. It was hard to believe that after seventeen years of marriage they still wanted to be alone with each other. They had no children and yet they still expected children in the vague and rosy future.

They went to the Midwest this time because Lydia had to see the woman in Chicago.

“Besides,” Leo had said, “I haven’t been in Chicago since the navy. Took boot camp at Great Lakes. We went down to Chicago on Saturday and used to hang around the Walgreen drugstore in the Loop, right on State Street. Wait for the girls to come down and look for us. We had a lot of fun.”

“Did you meet many girls, Leo?”

“Oh, some. I guess. I don’t remember.”

He did remember, of course. Lydia smiled fondly at her husband.

And yet she was not relaxed. She had to do this one thing. She probably should not even do this.

Leo was to spend the morning in the Loop, staring up at the tall buildings as though he had never seen such wonders. The day was bright, crisp, full of crowds on the wide walks of Michigan Avenue. The old elevated trains rattled around the screeching curves of the Loop. Leo had a Polaroid camera and took lots of pictures of buildings, monuments, the Picasso statue and the Chagall Wall, and of pretty girls on Dearborn Street who reminded him of all the pretty girls he had known as a sailor a long time before.

Lydia Neumann entered the IBM Consumer Product Center precisely at nine
A.M.
At 9:02, the attractive black woman, in businesslike attire from Saks Fifth Avenue down the street, crossed to her, smiled the automatic IBM smile, and took her to see the woman visible in the glass office beyond the carpeting.

“Hello.”

The voice belonged to a breed of professional class raised in the last generation that has no regional inflection, no accent, no betrayal in voice of any background at all. The voice suited her surroundings and her looks. She was a white replica of the black woman with a different wardrobe. Her eyes were defined in a businesslike way by eyeliner—just enough—and her mouth by lipstick—not too much. Her clothes spoke of being a bit more expensive than one might expect from one so young. Her blouse was silk but not revealing. Her hair was mousey brown and broken up into swaths to reveal a $125 haircut.

Lydia Neumann patted her own spikes created by Leo every three weeks or so. She sat down and didn’t smile and waited for the smile of the young woman to fade.

“How can I help you?” The voice was eager, formless, nearly a controlled squeal. It revealed nothing.

“My name is Neumann but you musn’t mention that again,” Lydia Neumann said. She felt the weight of what she was about to do. What did any of it have to do with her? And then she thought of Hanley.

“All right, Ms. Neumann.” She was as uncluttered as her office. Her figure was slight and everything about her was what Mrs. Neumann hoped she would not find. Still, she had to try. It was all she could do.

“I work. In an agency. Of government.”

She let the words sink in. They didn’t. The young woman with the poised Mont Blanc pen and the unringed fingers and the recent Bahamian tan was not impressed because it meant nothing to her.

It was hopeless, Lydia Neumann thought.

And then she thought of Hanley and tried again.

Perhaps her face reflected some anger.

“He is all you have. And all he has,” she said.

“I beg your pardon, Ms. Neumann?” At least she dropped the pen this time.

“Margot Kieker,” she said, pronouncing the name of the young woman. “Your great-uncle I’m talking about.”

The doll blinked.

It walks and talks, said Mrs. Neumann to herself.

“Uncle Hanley,” said Margot Kieker.

“He has a first name—” began Lydia Neumann.

“It doesn’t matter.” For a moment, she caught the dull trace in the voice of the doll-face. The blue-rimmed
eyes blinked, while precisely defined lashes met and separated. Her eyes were very blue, Lydia Neumann saw, clear and cloudless as though they had never seen any rainy days.

“We called him that. If anyone thought to speak of him. My grandmother… Ten years older than he was. Cancer. And then, my mother. My mother died six years ago.”

Lydia Neumann waited.

“Do you think it runs in families?”

“What?”

“Cancer,” said Margot Kieker.

“Yes,” she said, to be cruel, to break through to the doll. But it wouldn’t work.

“So do I. There’s nothing to do about it,” said Margot Kieker, the voice becoming soft, intimate. But not with Lydia Neumann. It was the voice of herself speaking to herself. Her eyes were seeing far away on a bright Monday morning in Chicago.

Then she snapped awake again and stared at Lydia. “Uncle Hanley. You work with him?”

“Yes.”

“How is he?”

“He’s in a hospital,” began Mrs. Neumann. She had planned what she would say to this strange creature all the way out to Chicago. They had traveled a while through the panhandle of Maryland, through the mountains that enclose the narrow valleys in the west of the state. It was the part of the state that lies beneath the weight of Pennsylvania coal country. The part where Hanley was being held in a hospital of a special kind.

Lydia Neumann had checked on Hanley’s question. The drugs he was given were very powerful psychoactive
compounds and when she had asked a friend of hers to describe them—a man who knew the secrets of pharmaceuticals—he had been uncomfortable with the question. At last, he had explained that knowledge of such drugs constituted a breach of security in itself. He wouldn’t say any more. He had worked in the secret drug experiments at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in the 1960s and he had managed to stay out of trouble by being discreet.

Lydia Neumann had felt terribly frightened. When she had gone back to see Hanley the following week, her fear had increased.

Hanley had been moved out of Ward Seven to Ward Zero. It was a ward not listed in the organizational charts of the mental hospital. He could receive no visitors. He was reported to be terribly ill and terribly depressed.

“Your great-uncle is in an asylum. Against his will. There have been no procedures to put him there. Nothing very legal, I think. And I think he is in terrible trouble unless you go to help him.”

“But I haven’t seen him since I was a baby. My mother never spoke of him. There was some slight. Some family business between my grandmother and him. They were brother and sister and—”

“You are his flesh.” She said it as well as any preacher might have done. Mrs. Neumann, in her great raspy voice, said things of certainty with a certainty of expression that made no mistake about her beliefs. She was refreshing in that, even to someone as cynical as Hanley had been.

“Flesh,” said Margot Kieker as though the word did not belong in this cool, gleaming room.

“Flesh and blood. It carries weight in law. You are his
relative and he has been committed against his will to an asylum. In Maryland. You have to get him out.”

“But. I don’t understand. Is he insane?”

It was the question Mrs. Neumann had pondered as well. Like an unfinished conversation, there was no answer. Let that conversation wait for a time.

“No,” she said, without believing it. “The point is: He is very ill. He is very, very ill and I can’t see him.”

“Are you his friend?” she said.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Neumann without thinking.

“Are you his lover?”

Mrs. Neumann laughed and both of them realized that laughter did not belong in this holy place full of holy things of a new age.

Margot Kieker tried on a smile approved by the company.

Mrs. Neumann responded. “No, dear, not his lover. I am… his friend.” To say the word again, deliberately, seemed strange to her. She had never been in Hanley’s home and he had declined all invitations to visit her and Leo. Hanley was the solitary man, enjoying his solitary nature. Or, at least, accepting it as a priest accepts the restraints on friendship and love in his vocation.

“That’s very nice of you to be concerned about him,” Margot Kieker said. It was the sweet butter sentiment of the prairies. Then her lips snapped shut like a purse. The sentimental visit was over. The workday was beginning and Margot Kieker was fresh and starched.

“You’re not interested in a computer then?”

Mrs. Neumann blinked.

Margot stared at her, the mouth poised to register an emotion—if appropriate.

“Yes, I am interested in computers,” said Mrs. Neumann, saying too much to a stranger. She felt angry and embarrassed. She had gone out of her way to save her “friend” and it was nothing more to this creature than if she had gone across the street to buy a newspaper.

Mrs. Neumann opened a paper file and pushed it on the desk. It was a computer printout that told most of the story of Hanley’s life.

“Do you know what this is?”

“A résumé?”

“It is a print of Hanley’s 201 file. I’ve made some deletions because there are… matters that do not concern you. What concerns you is the bottom line, honey.”

The “honey” was intended to shock but it sailed over Margot Kieker. She didn’t even blink. She guided her eyes to the place on the printout indicated by Mrs. Neumann. She frowned.

“This isn’t our company’s computer. I’ve never seen that typeface in our training modules and—”

“Look at what it says, honey.”

This time, the edge of a frown. Mrs. Neumann figured she could get through in six or seven weeks of intense confrontation. It must be the same as deprogramming a Jesus freak: The intellectual argument never counted because there was no intelligence involved.

“I don’t understand,” said Margot Kieker. And she licked her lip, slowly and unconsciously, reading the words.

“His government insurance policy, his own insurance policy, his benefits, and title to a vacant bit of land in New Jersey he had acquired. It is his will. Every agent”—she almost bit her lip—“every employee in our section is required to file the will in the 201 file.”

Margot Kieker looked up. “Why leave this to me?”

“Family,” said Lydia Neumann.

“But I don’t even know him.”

“Flesh and blood,” Mrs. Neumann preached.

“But I don’t understand,” Margot Kieker said.

“No.” Softly. “No.” Defeated. “You don’t, do you? But you are going to have to. Or are you some kind of a monster?”

C
laymore Richfield, the director of research for R Section, gathered the signals (written on “yellow-for-caution” paper) and put them down neatly on Yackley’s desk at 9:06 Eastern time Friday morning. He arranged the yellow three-by-five notices in such a pattern that they formed an outline of a Mercator map projection. The first signals—and sources—moved from the east to the west.

“He doesn’t move at all unobtrusively, does he?” Yackley thought to say. He felt fear closing him in a bag. He stared hard at the photographs of his wife and daughter on the desk as though they might be obliterated at any moment.

“So it appears,” Claymore Richfield said, tapping his stained front teeth with the eraser end of a Number 2 pencil. The tap had a beat—the exact beat of “Sweet Georgia Brown” in fact—but it just sounded like tap, tap, tap to Yackley. He looked up in annoyance at Richfield, who was staring out the window at the mass of the Bureau of Engraving across the street. Even old Engraving inspired Richfield: He had in mind a hard, holistic dollar
to replace the paper dollar, just as various credit cards were now designed. The “hard dollar” would inspire public confidence in currency again, he reasoned, and make it more difficult to stash or make illegal transactions. A “hard dollar” would be harder to counterfeit as well. The people at Treasury were appalled by the idea.

“So it appears,” Yackley repeated. “Does that mean the information isn’t any good or does that mean we don’t care enough to check on bona fides?”

“Not in this case,” Claymore Richfield said. He had been pressed into temporary service as acting director of Computer and Analysis during Mrs. Neumann’s absence.

“What do you mean?”

“There is unusual traffic. Some of it radio, radio computer, some of it routine filings. Devereaux left Switzerland openly on Tuesday, told the police his destination, used his own passport. He even contacted his lawyer. He made himself the talk of the town. On Wednesday, he appeared in London and used Economic Review facilities for all sorts of inquiries that are—at the moment—still secret. He paid for them in cash and ER has a policy about this sort of thing.”

ER was the London-based research tank and resource center used by public and private intelligence agencies from countries on both sides of the Curtain.

“What could he be preparing for?”

“Perhaps nothing,” Claymore Richfield said. “He’s a good one, our November.”

“He’s not ‘our’ November. He’s a goddamn renegade agent, he’s killed two of our men—”

“Our chasers,” corrected Richfield. “Casual laborers.”

“Two of our men,” repeated Yackley, trying to raise
his voice a tone or two, to impress the other man. It was pointless. Claymore Richfield wore Levi’s when he met the President at the White House. He was a loyalist to Yackley but a difficult one.

“Thursday, he flew into Toronto on Air Canada out of London. That’s been the end of it. Of course, he used his own passport. We picked up all the routine entries out of Toronto—as usual—and there he was. Using ‘Devereaux’ even.” Claymore Richfield smiled at that. “He’s coming our way. He’s in Washington by now.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. We can’t sweep the hotel registers as easily as the French used to do. But he’s here. I sent along a couple of boys from Operations to do the police routine. For all I know, he’s at the Watergate by now,” Richfield said, referring to the famous hotel and office complex above Georgetown.

Yackley bit his lip and said nothing.

There were some things he felt he couldn’t say to Richfield.

It was time to consult Perry Weinstein again. Quickly. About the matter of sanctions.