The November Man (21 page)

A
lexa saw the man in the house on P Street. He was at the window. Alexa stood across the street and felt for the pistol in her pocket.

She thought she would shoot the man in the window. Then she would wait six more hours to see what the reaction would be when she called the number in New York.

Action was better than worry, she thought. If this was a trap, it would not matter. And if this was a mistake—well, then, she was being condemned for some mistake she could not even understand.

She drew the pistol out of her coat pocket and unsnapped the safety and drew the target in line.

And felt the muzzle on her neck.

“Don’t even turn.”

Said in bad Russian. But she understood.

He reached for her pistol and took it from her cold hand and pushed her ahead of him across the street and into the house.

There were three men. It was as she imagined it would
be. She felt something like relief. She had been on a tightrope for so long. At least, this was the end.

The first man said it was necessary to handcuff her. For reasons of security. He said it as an explanation, which comforted her. He spoke fluent Russian but he was obviously not a Russian.

They cuffed her hands in front of her. The cuffs were attached by very thick and very heavy links of metal.

They searched her.

One of the men derived some pleasure from this. They removed her underpants and explored her body. They wanted to humiliate her; she understood that; she understood the techniques, all of them. It was preliminary to what would follow.

She hoped death would be easy. She had never dwelt on inflicting pain for its own sake or for her pleasure. She killed because she was a soldier in a war and that was what she was supposed to do.

Until the matter of the second November.

It had been a trap, all of it, and she had waited for the trap to be sprung on her with the timid courage of an animal that understands its impending doom.

They told her to sit down at last in a straight chair next to a wooden table in a room at the back of the house. One of the men went out. The second man sat at the table. The third man went to the window and looked out.

The first man—he was stocky, with rigid blue eyes and very blond hair—said, “We are United States agents.”

“CIA,” she said.

“Perhaps,” the blond man said.

That confused her. She opened her eyes very wide and he seemed to stare straight into her, as though she had no
secrets and no defenses. She felt the cuffs on her wrists. She was strong and she felt outraged—despite her training, despite her understanding, the search had touched an outrage in her—and she pressed her lips together very tightly. She had no intention of resistance, except in that moment of outrage. She had seen resistance shown by other prisoners and how that resistance was gradually broken down.

“My name is Ivers,” the blond man said. “But how much do you know of this already?”

Again, she felt disoriented. She blinked and stared at him and tried to understand. She spoke in English now:

“I want to tell you what you want to know. I know that I am trapped in this. I have no way out. I realize all of this and I want to cooperate with you. My government has… abandoned me. I do not understand. But I do not want pain.”

The one at the window said, “She doesn’t want pain. You hear that?”

“I heard that,” said Ivers. It seemed to give him pleasure to think about that. He said to the one at the window, “Why don’t you go out and get some sandwiches. Some coffee and sandwiches.”

“Oh,” said the one at the window. “I get it.”

Alexa stared at Ivers.

“All right,” he said. The second one went out the door. “What do you know about Nutcracker?” It was what he had been told to say. Ivers was the fixer, the errand boy. He understood his status and it didn’t bother him. No one else knew how important he was. Or who he reported to.

She stared at him without speaking. It was the wrong response. He got up from the chair and came around the table slowly. He hit her on the face. He hit her five times.
The blows were open handed and his hands were large and when they cracked her skin, the pain filled her head and clouded her vision. When the blows were done, the pain burned across her skin and filled her thoughts. She was crying but it was not self-pity; it was because of the pain. The tears came involuntarily.

“All right,” Ivers said. He went back to his chair and sat down. “What do you know about Nutcracker, and who else was involved? Why didn’t you do your contract, Alexa?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Really? You don’t really understand me? Dear, this is not a game. We have a loose cannon out there and it’s up to you to help us haul it in.”

“Please. Mr. Ivers. I will tell you. Please, I will tell you everything. I can tell you about the business in Finland five years ago, I can—”

“I’m not interested in ancient history. I want to know about November. Are you two in this?”

She felt she was sitting in the company of a madman.

“You didn’t take out November. You were supposed to take out November. You had chances. Was he part of the deal?”

“I was to resolve him. Yes. But I did not resolve him because I saw this was a trap. If I resolve him, then I am trapped worse than if I am a spy. Yes, I am an agent.”

“Oh, God, dear, we know that,” Ivers almost laughed. “Everyone’s known that. That’s a given. You’re a spy, he’s a spy, everyone’s a spy. So you tell me, dear, tell me if November was part of this scheme with you and… and who else? That’s what we have to know, dear. Who else?”

She sat very still. She was locked in a room, in handcuffs, and she was speaking to a madman. Her head was
ringing with pain. She felt isolated and alone and afraid. She could smell the fear in her breath.

“This is the way it is,” Ivers said. “You are a Soviet agent in the United States. You were involved in the seduction of a security guard in California a couple of years ago. That’s felony, dear. You have no diplomatic status. We could lock you up for the rest of your life.”

“No,” she said. “No.” Softer.

“And think of pain, dear,” Ivers said. “I have no aversion to that. I like my work. I do jobs for people and I do them well and I said, ‘You can leave her to me, I can take care of her.’ I saw your photograph. Very nice, all those photographs that Gorki took of you.”

The photographs.

On a spring morning six years ago.

So inventive. Why would she agree to such a thing? Because he was Gorki and there was power in the glittering lizard eyes and the yellow skin was parchment to the touch and, in those moments with him, alone, he controlled her utterly.

And now he had abandoned her.

And thrown her to people like this man.

“Now, let’s try this again,” Ivers said.

The door opened.

Ivers looked up. It was too soon for sandwiches. Didn’t the idiot understand anything?

Denisov said, “Will you take the handcuffs off?” The voice was as mild as a vicar speaking of children and flowers. The eyes swam behind rimless glasses and the right gloved hand held a Walther PPK.

“Who are you? This is government—”

“Shut up, please. Take the handcuffs off.”

Ivers reached for the key.

“Slowly.”

Alexa stared at him. He said to her, in Russian, “Why do you let yourself be trapped by dull people?”

She said nothing.

The wrists were freed and she felt for her face with her right hand. She felt the bruise.

“Who has sent you?” she said in Russian.

“I have come out of gallantry,” he said. The approximate English could not explain the degree of mockery built into what he said in Russian.

“This is a fucking double-cross,” Ivers said in plain English, without any subtlety at all.

“Perhaps,” Denisov said in English. “Alexa, will you put him in the restraints? Behind his back, please?”

“There is no escape,” she said.

“There is always escape. We are in America. There is always another way.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“No. No one does at all. But that is the beginning of understanding, to admit you are ignorant.” And Denisov smiled at his own cleverness.

Ivers learned to talk in a motel room outside of Arlington, Virginia, on a Sunday afternoon. It was amazing, Alexa thought. Denisov appeared so mild and the means were so brutal and direct. Ivers was eager to talk after only a few hours. Alexa thought it was the sense of patience that Denisov brought to the task; also, the sense that it did not pleasure him, any of it. Denisov was so powerful and controlled.

Alexa thought she was falling in love.

D
evereaux found Dr. Thompson and Dr. Thompson agreed, after a lengthy explanation, and persuasion of short duration, to talk about part of Hanley’s treatment. He was not so jolly when it was over. Dr. Thompson was left alive because Devereaux could not think of any reason to kill him.

The city of Washington was sunk into the calm of its usual Sunday.

The President had returned from Camp David in the mountains. He had an extraordinary ability to rest completely in a short period of time. He had shouted out answers to the hordes of photographers and newsmen awaiting his arrival by helicopter on the White House lawn. He had waved at them in that characteristic way and shrugged off those questions he did not wish to hear. The helicopter blades kept whirling until the President was inside the White House.

Across the city and into the suburbs, people dozed in front of their television sets, read the remains of the Sunday
Washington Post
, dined on sandwiches made with
leftovers from the big dinner meal, sank into the torpor of the day.

Nothing was happening in the city. Even the police stations were unusually quiet. There was a small mattress fire reported on Eastern Avenue shortly after seven but no one was hurt and it was quickly doused. Washington was calm; therefore, the world was sleeping.

Hanley spoke rationally at nine
P.M.
He recognized Devereaux. He was able to understand the questions.

Quarles had said this might happen. Hanley was weak but the passages of clarity were frequent. The doctor had summoned Devereaux from downstairs.

Dr. Quarles, unchanged in appearance from the afternoon, sat at the foot of the bed in the spare room at the top of the narrow house. He said, “The body is free of drugs but there’s been abuse. Definitely. They gave him tranquilizers in the last week but there’s nothing active now.”

Hanley said, “They gave me electroshock treatments.” He remembered it so well. His voice was weak but the train of thought was clear.

He had been fed twice. The portions were small but the soup was very rich. The liquid had warmed him. He felt vague and weak, as one does at the end of an illness that fevers the brain.

“They were killing you.”

“Yes,” Hanley said. “I didn’t expect that. Not that part of it. I thought they just wanted to get me out of the way. I really didn’t think this was going to come to murder.” The thought of murder—his own murder at the hands of others—was compelling to him.

Quarles stood up. “Time now for shop talk, is it? The evil you do is never worth the good it brings.”

Devereaux said nothing.

Hanley watched Devereaux’s face.

Quarles wanted some reaction and there was none. “Goddamnit. There should be rules.”

“But there aren’t. There never were,” Devereaux said. It was the first time he had responded to the doctor’s rages and sermons.

Quarles stared at him with the face of Moses for a moment. And then he opened the door, stepped out, and closed it. They heard his heavy tread on the stairs.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be rational,” Hanley said. Very soft. “I think they’ve done some damage to my mind. I was quite rational in the last week. I was dying and weak and I was trying to think of a way to get out of that place. Or at least, tell someone.”

“Why didn’t you tell Mrs. Neumann when she came?”

“I wanted to. You see, the drugs, they had this effect on me. They must have drugged me all along.”

“You were given medication by Dr. Thompson. When you were still functioning in Section,” Devereaux said. And he told him everything Thompson had finally told him.

“So that explained…” Hanley trailed off. “I was trying to figure it out. And I thought about you and decided you must have been part of it, part of the trade. Or maybe, because I was drugged, I thought of you.”

“You were reading Somerset Maugham. You were reading
Ashenden
. All set in Lausanne and Ouchy and across Lake Geneva.”

Hanley blinked. “Yes. That’s it.”

“It was a mistake about me. I wasn’t supposed to be
awakened. They tapped your phone and they made a mistake.”

“There’s a mole. In Section,” Hanley said.

“Yes.”

“You understand that?”

“Yes.”

“I felt it for the last nine months. It’s been terrible. It could have been anyone. It could have been Mrs. Neumann. My God, even her. I suspected her. I thought the day she called up, she called me at home, I thought she was setting me up. I suspected everyone. I was paranoid. We lost two agents—two damned good men and their whole networks—in three months last fall. They defected. Can you believe that? The networks were blown up. All that work wasted. All those lives… They defected to the goddamn Soviet Union.” Hanley tried to sit up. He was exercised and his face flushed.

Devereaux held up his hand.

Hanley coughed. “And now I’ve got a goddamn cold,” he said. He never swore. He was a man of propriety. “I feel like a fool.”

“There are no spies,” Devereaux said.

Hanley blinked. There was a silence that could be felt in the room. The house was shuttered for the night. Margot Kieker slept on a cot in the basement room. The whole house had been squeezed to find room for the three visitors. The housekeeper said nothing to any of them, as though it might be quite normal for three strangers to drop in on Dr. Quarles in the middle of a Sunday and stay for the night.

“I said that. I said that on a goddamn open line.”

“What does it mean?”

“Yackley. Yackley said it to me. He attributed it to Richfield, our mad scientist. Richfield was very gung ho on this retrenchment program that was coming down from Administration. We had too many agencies, too many spies. It was involved.”

“A lot of bureaucratic infighting,” Devereaux said. “The same old thing. It had to be more than that.”

Hanley’s eyes brightened. “More. A lot more than that.” The dry voice was drier still but the flat Nebraska accent emerged with clarity.

“Richfield was trying to sell Yackley on the idea of cutting back Operations, that the work of agents was now largely redundant because we had so many surveillance devices, computers, satellites… all the hardware. Yackley liked the argument. He used it against me. The cost could be shown so clearly as savings. I mean, he wanted to eliminate a bunch of agents to start, as an experiment, to see if the operation would suffer—”

“Who?”

Hanley frowned. “One of the things… specific memory. It’s harder to fix times. This morning I woke up and I thought I was six or seven years old, the time I was in hospital with appendicitis in Omaha—”

But Devereaux had opened a sheet of paper. He read: “January. New Moon. Equinox. June. August. Vernal. Winter.”

Hanley said nothing for a moment. “Yes. The names. The agents.”

“They’re all in the field—”

“Yes. No chasers or safe-house keepers. All watchers and stationmasters. They had networks. My God, I couldn’t explain to Yackley that he wasn’t talking about
seven men. He was talking about hundreds of men. The links…”

“I know,” Devereaux said.

“It wasn’t a matter of protecting our investment alone. It was all that work thrown away. And what good is the hardware without software? I mean, we get soft goods all the time from the Opposition. The hardware bona fides it for us. And the other way around. The satellite spies movement outside of Vladivostok. What’s the good of knowing the SIGINT without knowing what the motive is? Software. Human contact. HUMINT. That’s what you need. But the hardware doesn’t have life or soul or judgment. It isn’t human. You can’t make it all on hardware, can you?”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t know what to do. I thought something was wrong. Yackley was positively demented on the subject. You’d think he was brainwashed.”

“Yackley struck me as a man waiting for some stronger brain than his to tell him what to do. They call him a team player.”

Hanley plucked at the cover for a moment. He was waiting but Devereaux said nothing more. Devereaux had made the contact with Denisov at five. It was the fallback point, derived from an old show business routine. Denisov called the lobby of the hotel and asked if there had been any messages for him. Then Devereaux called and used the same name and asked for messages. He then left a message for anyone who would call him. Denisov called again, asked for the name he had used before, and picked up the message Devereux had left. They made contact and the final message was: Ivers had talked.

“Damnit, man, what is going on?”

“What is Nutcracker?”

Hanley said the unexpected: “It was set up a year ago. We were collating information inside Operations. This was strictly Operations, Mrs. Neumann’s division wasn’t in on it at all. It was strictly software, strictly HUMINT.”

“Go ahead.”

“The idea came about because of what happened at the first summit. You remember the exchange of agents? It was all just coincidence. I thought it was coincidence at the time. I really wasn’t paranoid.”

Devereaux said, “In the trade, that might just be reality.”

“But the idea took on some urgency.” Hanley was going back over memory. “I mean, there was all this talk about cutting back Operations. Cutting back software. Field agents and Number Four men and station-masters and housekeepers and garbagemen. Even chasers. My God, you need chasers.”

“My experience with chasers hasn’t been all that pleasant. Section chasers,” Devereaux said.

Hanley looked at the patterns on the wall. “A woman designed this room.”

“The clever spy,” Devereaux said.

Hanley said, “Sarcasm.” Devereaux felt better at that. It was a trace of the old Hanley and not this weak man sitting up in bed in front of him.

“I’m so damned tired,” Hanley said.

They waited for each other.

“Nutcracker. The idea was to find and identify three or four men from the Opposition. That wasn’t so difficult. What we were going to do was to turn them. And if they wouldn’t turn, we were going to muddy them up so that Opposition wouldn’t know if they had been turned or not.
We decided early on it would be in Europe exclusively, because that’s where the Summit was going to be held.”

“Berlin.”

“Exactly.”

“This was for politics?”

“For survival. Of Operations. Operations is the heart of the Section. Operations is HUMINT. Besides, it was legitimate.”

“We’re supposed to gather intelligence, not play ‘I Spy,’ ” Devereaux said.

“We’re supposed to survive. That’s the first rule of every game.”

“This is crazy,” Devereaux said. Nutcracker didn’t turn out to be what he expected.

“It got crazier.”

“How?”

“It was downholded.”

“What happened?”

“I had my own file in Tinkertoy. On Nutcracker. Yackley didn’t know about it, Neumann didn’t know. Well, I thought Neumann didn’t know; she’s a smart cookie. I had the file to keep track of my own reports… we were moving along, setting up our targets, we had made contact with one…”

Devereaux waited. Hanley seemed to be seeing something beyond the room. He plucked absently again at the covers. His eyes were wet. There might be tears at times, Dr. Quarles had said. The body reacts in strange ways to the manipulation of the mind. Give him time, give him rest.

“In January, I came in one morning and I had… I had been feeling bad. I had seen Dr. Thompson a few times. He gave me pills. Iron pills or something. I don’t know. At
least, I thought they were.” His voice was small. “I came in this morning in January. It snowed. You know what snow is to Washington. The office was half deserted. My God, people are babies.”

Silence again. And then the distant voice resumed. “I went into Tinkertoy for the Nutcracker file. And Tinkertoy stopped me. ‘Access denied.’ It was my goddamn file. And I am the director of Operations. It was my file and my plan and it had been taken from me. I felt… so strange. I felt like I had gone through the Looking Glass. I had to know what happened. I went to Yackley and he looked at me like I was crazy.

“ ‘What are you talking about,’ he said. ‘I never heard of Nutcracker.’ Of course, it was true. I mean, it was my operation. I hadn’t shared it with anyone. I had used discretionary funds. I made it a secret and now someone had taken it away from me. I couldn’t figure it out. It was making me… well, what happened to me? Did I go crazy or not?”

“I don’t know,” Devereaux said. “I’m not a shrink.”

“They were going to kill me,” Hanley said with wonder. “The first day at St. Catherine’s, that bastard Goddard sprayed me. With Mace. He sprayed me in the goddamn face. That dirty son-of-a-bitch.”

“You can get him later,” Devereaux said. “Why did you write this? Why did you write Nutcracker and then list all our own agents? And my name?”

Hanley stared at the paper as though he had never seen it before. And then there was recognition.

“I was home. I was on fire all the time and so tired. I couldn’t think what had happened to Nutcracker. It existed in Tinkertoy and I had no access to it. But if I went to Mrs. Neumann, what if it turned out that she was part
of this… this thing that was happening in Section. She was the computer wizard. Maybe she wanted to destroy Nutcracker before it started. Hardware, she’s in hardware. Software is old-fashioned. ‘There are no spies.’ It kept going around and around in my head. Everyone was against me. I went to Yackley a second time and then I thought that maybe Yackley was part of whatever it was that was going on.”

“There is no file above you, is there?”

“My level, you mean? Yes. The Security file, the level of the National Security Adviser. And the President’s file.”

Devereaux said, “Why did you list the names of your own agents?”

“Because we had lost men and I got the idea—I got the idea that the Opposition was pulling a Nutcracker on me. On the Section. On our side. It just came to me like that. I thought I was crazy but there it was. It was logical. Maybe they—the other side—they were working against the Section. They could have access to my Nutcracker scenario and use it against me. Against the Section. They could let it go along and then, when the time was ready, turn it inside out.”