The November Man (9 page)

“They know our secrets, the Opposition,” he said. “We know their secrets. That’s all it is, two sides equal, starting from scratch just to stay even. But what if they had advantages over us that we didn’t have?”

“What are you talking about?”

Hanley looked puzzled. He put his handkerchief away. “I called November, I wanted him to understand. At least, he said he was outside the game. Maybe everyone was in it together. Even you?”

Mrs. Neumann bit her lip.

“I have to get out of here,” Hanley said. He looked at the path between the fences. “Dr. Goddard keeps saying ‘eventually’ as though he knew it was never going to happen. Eventually can mean when I die. I have to get out of here.”

“What do you want me to do?”

He stared at her. “Whatever you do, don’t pray for me. I have a nun here. She prays for me. It is sufficient. I couldn’t stand any more prayers.”

“Hanley—”

“Get me out of here,” Hanley said in a low and terrible
voice. “I need to get away, get away from the drugs and routine. I have to think about—” He almost said something and stopped. “I have to think.”

“I’ll talk to the New Man, to Yackley—”

“No, Mrs. Neumann.” Very cold, very much like the old Hanley who had not been ill. “You will not talk to that man. I’ve talked to you too much. Do you want my secrets? Try my test: Do not talk to Yackley. You are going to have to help me get out of here.”

“I can’t.”

“November,” he said.

She shrank from his grasp and the name. “He’s buried, dead in files.”

“Asleep,” Hanley said.

“Buried,” she said.

“Wake him.” His eyes glittered. “But you’re afraid, aren’t you? You don’t want him to wake up, do you? My God, is it all true?”

“Is what true?”

But he had turned. He began to run back toward the ward. She started after him. She stopped, listened to his footsteps. Poor frightened man, she thought.

Perhaps the horrible best thing to do for Hanley was to keep him here.

Right between the fences.

N
ot all of the intelligence operations of KGB are headquartered in the dreary building on Dhzerzhinski Square, which the other intelligence services call Moscow Center. The Committee for External Observation and Resolution, for example, is located in a long and windowless building two miles east of the square.

The man who was called Gorki (by the same computer that named Alexa) sat in his office at the end of a long hall. There was a reception area at the end of the hall and three closed doors. One of the doors led to Gorki; a second led to a supply room; the room beyond the third door was not spoken of by anyone.

Gorki’s office was wrapped in darkness made more acute by the fluorescent lamp on his desk. Everything in the office had been chosen as a prop, save for the giant General Electric air conditioner built into the wall. The building was something of an embarrassment. It had taken too long to construct, it was gloomy (even by Russian standards), and the marble corridors had been stripped at last because the great slabs of marble kept falling off the
walls. A party undersecretary had been injured shortly after the building opened by a piece of marble that separated from the wall. The stripped marble was now used as flooring in the various dachas of high Party officials around Moscow.

Gorki’s office was decorated with the portraits of three men: Lenin, Felix Dhzerzhinski, the founder of the secret police, and Gorbachev. He had no other ornaments. He was a spare man with Eurasian features and small, quick eyes that seemed to glitter in the light of the single lamp in the room. His skin was parchment and it was yellow with age and liver disease.

The man across from him was an agent called Alexei, a man of little consequence from the Helsinki station.

Alexei was sweating profusely though the office was very cool in the way a tomb is cool.

Gorki did not smile or speak; he sat very still for a long time. He took a file folder and dropped it on the desk and indicated with a nod of his head that Alexei was to retrieve it. The desk was very wide and Alexei, sitting in an overstuffed chair in the cramped room in front of the large desk, had to rise awkwardly and reach across the desk for the file folder. When he sat down heavily, he was sweating all the more. He had to squint to see the photographs.

“She killed these men,” Gorki began.

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this,” said Alexei. He really didn’t understand. He stared at the faces. There were four photographs. They were grouped in twos by paper clips. The first man was shown as he appeared for his official photograph (updated each year—the Russians have great faith in the power of photographs
to identify people). The second had a man with his face blown away.

“It’s the same man?” said Alexei.

“Of course.”

The second grouping featured a hairless man staring at a camera. The “after” picture showed him on a slab in a morgue, his eyes open, a large wound on the side of his head.

“She killed them? Alexa?”

“Alexa. She was informed at Zurich they would accompany her on her… assignment. The contract on this second November. November.” Gorki closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them again, they were liquid and on fire. “Will no one get rid of November for me? Does he subvert every agent? Does he have nine lives?”

Alexei said nothing. The questions were not to be answered.

“Alexa was our most formidable agent in her specialty. What has happened to her? She goes to Lausanne and she betrays us. Why?”

“How were they killed?”

“She had gone to the apartment of the agent. The American we had told her was the second November—”

“The blue moon,” Alexei said.

Gorki blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“I was—” Alexei blushed. “It was nothing, Director.”

Gorki resumed in the same sandpaper voice. “I want to question you as I will question our stationmaster in Zurich. I want to be absolutely certain that Alexa understood the contract and what was expected of her. The two agents she murdered in that apartment—I say ‘murdered’ because it was nothing more than that—I want to know
exactly how this came about. There was an old woman also killed. The police in Switzerland are not very happy. The missions in Geneva and Zurich have been shut down in part until the matter is over—”

“How do you know she killed them? It might have been this November.”

“The police are looking for this woman. There was a child she hired to distract the concierge, to gain entry to the apartment in the first place. It appears she ambushed Yuri and Vladimir—the agents, I can use their names now, they are dead. November is gone, Alexa is gone. What does that suggest to you?”

“Comrade Director,” Alexei began. “I don’t know what to make of it. I told her to go to Zurich. To wait for her instructions. You have talked to our Zurich stationmaster—”

“Not yet. He is sent for. He filed a long dispatch and he is flying into Moscow this afternoon from Zurich.” Gorki projected a sense of self-pity: Alexei knew this would be marked against him; something like this had to have blame affixed. It was nearly a repeat of what had happened to the agent Denisov who had been sent into the United States once, to Florida, who had been turned by November and induced to defect… And now Alexa. “I cannot emphasize too strongly the displeasure felt by the Committee—”

“My deepest sympathies, Comrade,” said Alexei, who understood that the focus of scrutiny was on Gorki and that Gorki wished to shift it to another. But not Alexei. Alexei had been in Helsinki. Alexei knew nothing. Alexei was quite certain he could not be blamed.

Gorki had spent the morning with the Secretary of
the Fourth Directorate. It had not been a good morning. A new administration in the Soviet Union was cleaning house in all areas, including the area called Committee for State Security. There were, nominally, 300,000 agents who qualified to call themselves KGB. But some were nothing more than timekeepers in factories that consistently fell below quota or where the level of theft was unusually high. Simple policemen and nothing more. The business of intelligence-gathering and disinformation dissemination and the business of agents like Alexa—they were handled by a select group, carefully screened, given long profile tests and psychological examinations. How could Alexa have gone crazy?

It was the perpetual question of the Secretary of the Fourth Directorate, who had pounded his desk again and again, until the little toy railroad engine on the desk danced to the edge and fell off and broke. It did not improve the Secretary’s humor. There were breakdowns in security at every level. Just this winter, the second man in the San Francisco station in the United States had been seduced into defection by a homosexual CIA agent. A homosexual! the Secretary had stormed. Why did our profiles not screen out the homosexuals?

Gorki could not explain that the homosexual agent had been sent to San Francisco in the first place to seduce other homosexuals in positions of power inside Silicon Valley. The world of spies, Gorki thought, was a mirror constantly reflecting different images—but always the mirror image of itself.

What was real? The mirror or the thing beyond the mirror?

Alexa was an embarrassment particularly because
November had been presumed dead once and then presumed to be another man—a man named Ready who was still unidentified in the morgue in Helsinki. Was it so simple to fool a bureaucracy? the Secretary had asked with sarcasm as he put the pieces of the broken toy train into his center drawer.

Gorki had no answer that would satisfy either of them. He interrupted his thoughts to speak: “You and Alexa worked together. A long time ago.”

“Yes, Comrade Director,” said Alexei. “I reminded her of this when I saw her in Helsinki. I can assure you, the meeting was brief. I had many matters—”

“You were reprimanded—”

“I can assure you, we met in the open, in the lobby of the Presidentti Hotel. I told her the assignment as I knew it and she caught the afternoon plane to Zurich.” He reached into his pocket for a notebook. “Flight 21, Finnair to Zurich, it left at 14:22 hours—”

“Yes,” said Gorki. “We know.” He sounded disappointed. He sounded tired. Where would he be able to begin?

The red light on the telephone console flashed on.

He picked up the receiver and said nothing.

He replaced it without a word. He looked across at Alexei.

“Go back to the hotel, Alexei. We’ll send for you—”

“Comrade Director—”

Gorki looked at him sharply.

Alexei blushed, struggled to rise, and squeezed out of the chair. He went to the door in the dark room and looked back for a moment. If only there was something he could say.

But he opened the door in silence, stepped outside and closed it. The secretary in the bare, depressing foyer with its linoleum floor and blank white walls stared at him. Alexei saw that a light on her telephone console was flashing. There was a call waiting for Gorki and he wished to take it alone; it was probably from the Zurich stationmaster, kept in another anteroom, waiting to tell Gorki that the problem of Alexa had been the fault of the man in Helsinki, that he must have fouled the message in some way. Alexei felt very sorry for himself as he crossed the bare reception room with its straight wooden chairs lined along one wall. He said something to the secretary, apologized, took his coat from the rack, and opened the door that led to the hall.

Gorki picked up the telephone again.

He heard the voice of his secretary. She said the call was waiting on the third line, the one protected from listening devices by the expedient of a black box that emitted radio signals to jam the line. It was not as efficient and marvelous as the electronic scrambler system used by the Americans but it worked well enough. He dialed to line three and waited.

The line crackled and then was silent. Then he spoke in a whisper: “Moscow is waiting.”

They were the usual code words.

The voice at the other end of the line finished the obligatory salutation: “Everything must go ahead.”

So. The code was complete.

Gorki realized he felt immense dread in that moment. He gripped the receiver tightly.

He knew the voice on the line. There was no mistake.

It was Alexa.

D
evereaux walked into the apartment building on the Rue de la Concorde Suisse. It was a bright morning, three days of hiding after the incident on the road to Chillon. He had taken the time of retreat to try to think his way through all that had happened. Twice he had visited Philippe in the school the boy attended. Philippe had understood about everything Devereaux told him. To see the understanding in Philippe’s clear blue eyes—which were set hot and shining in that brown face—was to see a clear reflection of his own thoughts.

He did not try to telephone Rita Macklin in the troubled Philippines. There was no way to explain to her what he would do next.

They had had a conversation once upon a time and it had never reached a resolution.

In the conversation, Rita said, “Would you try to go back? Into the old trade?”

In the conversation—which they both believed they had never actually taken part in—Devereaux replied, “I
would never go back. That’s what we went through all that for. That’s why we can be together.”

Rita said, “But if you had to go back. To survive?”

“I wouldn’t do it. But if I had to go back, to survive, what would it do to us? I mean, what would you do then?” Because they both knew the linchpin that held them together was that he was quit of the old trade.

It was a conversation that always stopped at that point—if it ever took place in reality or only in their separate thoughts. It had to stop there. Neither of them wanted to know the end of the conversation.

Devereaux turned in at the gate and crossed the walk lined with tulips to the door. He expected what he found there.

He opened the door to the lobby and the large policeman in bulky blue seemed to have been studying him through the glass. The Swiss are not subtle about their weapons. The policeman had already produced an automatic weapon—it looked to Devereaux like a variation on the Uzi—and had it pointed at Devereaux when he entered the lobby. The policeman had some words and Devereaux gave him some others.

The journey to the police station was framed in silence. Devereaux had made all the necessary calls abroad from the hotel in Lugano, during the three days of his hiding.

The police station of Lausanne smelled exactly like all the other police stations in the world. There was sweat, a certain musty sense of hopelessness, and the smell of despair that is mated with the sounds of iron doors closing shut very hard.

Captain Boll was on the second floor and his room was
spare. The window faced south, toward the lake, and you could even see the lake through the trees. The trees were gaining foliage quickly in the warm sun and thickening above the red rooftops on the terraces below.

Captain Boll was even bulkier than the policeman who had been waiting in the apartment building. He did not wear a uniform and he seemed put out. His eyes were small, not particularly shrewd, and his brows beetled together above a long, wide nose that betrayed some liking for Swiss wines.

Boll indicated a hard chair in the middle of the room—directly in front of the large, bare desk. Devereaux sat down and waited. His face was wreathed in wrinkles and calm. His eyes were steady and cool. He felt ready—which was not the same as feeling in charge. To do something was to exist. He had begun the process.

Boll said his name and Devereaux waited.

“This is about murder. Three people killed in your building. Two of them outside your apartment.”

Devereaux said nothing. Words were not really expected, he thought. Captain Boll had something to say.

But Boll surprised him by waiting as well, his hands flat and placid as rowboats on the desktop.

“I was in Lugano,” Devereaux began. “Three days. Visiting my son.”

“I know that,” Captain Boll said, surprising him for a second time. “It was convenient to be in Lugano, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The policeman said you didn’t seem surprised to be arrested.”

“I am rarely surprised. Or perhaps my innocence reassures me,” Devereaux said.

“You aren’t accused of anything.”

“Of course I am,” he said.

Silence again. There was a wonderful warm breeze from the south that brought smells of the lake and the trees through the window. The bare room warmed with the sun. The two men waited. The silence was complete.

Captain Boll sighed. He got up and went to the window and looked down at the housetops. “I should be sailing today. It’s early but it is running good and no one is in the lake,” Captain Boll said. His voice was surprisingly soft, Devereaux thought. Devereaux was on guard now because the soft voice did not seem to fit the big man or the situation they were talking about.

“You are an American agent.” Boll turned as he said it.

“Was,” Devereaux began.

“Peterson,” said Captain Boll.

“That’s one of the names,” Devereaux said, giving ground a little the way a fisherman feeds the line after the hook goes in.

“How did this killing concern you?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it did concern you?”

“It must have,” Devereaux said. “There would be too much coincidence to suppose it didn’t.”

“You are retired. From your… profession?”

“Yes.”

“You are much too young.”

“I am much too tired to continue.”

Boll smiled. The smile might have meant anything.

“The same with me. But I have not grown rich enough yet to sail every day.”

“I was in Lugano,” Devereaux said.

“Yes. And the woman at the brasserie, Claudette Longtemps, she said two men came for you the day before. They questioned her and threatened her. Very nasty people. They were killed. But you were in Lugano. So. Did you have someone kill them?”

“No,” Devereaux said.

“A woman, perhaps?”

For the moment, puzzlement crossed Devereaux’s face. That made Boll frown. Was he such a good actor?

“A woman, M. Devereaux?” said Captain Boll.

“I don’t understand.” The words came out simply, like the truth.

“A half hour before this horrible thing, a woman—a woman who was noticed with great interest by so many men in the area that their descriptions make me believe she is quite beautiful—hired one of our young thugs in Lausanne to break the window of the lobby of the building in the Rue de la Concorde Suisse. The woman wanted to draw the concierge from the lobby briefly enough to pass into the building. To go to your rooms, M. Devereaux.”

“What description?”

“It is not your wife, M. Devereaux. We have had a good long time to check on everything. Your wife is a journalist?”

“Yes. She is not my wife,” he added, automatically trying to separate Rita from this though he knew that was not possible.

“She is in Manila. She booked Swissair. She left a wide trail.”

Devereaux twisted in the chair. He realized it was designed in such a way that it would never be comfortable, like one of those modern stools attempted from time to time by famous architects which never work out.

“Rita is a journalist, nothing more. I came to Switzerland to live, to be on the edge of things and not in them anymore.”

“Do you think I’m a policeman, monsieur? I am something more than that. The Swiss are prepared for nearly everything, monsieur. That is our nature. That is why nearly nothing ever happens. And then something like this. Do you have an idea of what has happened?”

Devereaux waited for a long moment to pass between them. He spoke in a monotone. He knew the tone of voice that would satisfy both of them.

“The woman, whoever the woman was, went to the apartment to kill me. The two men, whoever the men were, went to the apartment for the same purpose. Apparently, neither of them was aware of the other.”

“And the woman killed all three—”

“No. Not the concierge. She wouldn’t have hired whoever she hired to lure the concierge out of the building just to end up killing her.”

“Yes,” said Captain Boll. “What I thought as well.” And he started at Devereaux for a long time. “They want to kill you.”

“It would seem so,” Devereaux said.

“Are you so cool to face death?”

“I did not invite it,” Devereaux said.

“What will you do?”

“Not impose on the hospitality of the Swiss in this matter. I am going back.”

“Is this so?”

“Yes.”

“Then why come back here to face me?”

“Because it had to be done this way.”

Boll was perplexed. He crossed again to the window and looked down enviously at the long finger of the lake that stretched to the mountains.

“When it’s done, I’ll tell you,” Devereaux said.

“And if I kept you here?”

“For what reason?” Devereaux said.

“We found a pistol taped in the toilet in the apartment. Is it your pistol?”

“No,” Devereaux said. “It was planted there.”

Boll turned. “You lie to me.”

“Perhaps.”

“This is not some joke. You should not have involved an innocent person. Like Claudette Longtemps. She was very shaken, I can tell you, to identify those two men in the morgue. She thought they had killed you. I had to assure her that you were alive. You live with one woman and you have a black child—God knows where you got him—and you have this young girl from the countryside who is so much in love with you. I tell you, you disgust me.”

Devereaux waited.

“Damn you, man,” Boll said and came around the desk and struck Devereaux very hard on the face. When he drew back his hand, there was blood at the corner of Devereaux’s lips. The blood trickled down, dropped on the dark fabric of the corduroy jacket. Devereaux did not move. He looked at Boll. His eyes were mild and waiting, as though Boll had to finish some private game he was involved in.

“I could lock you up a good long time.”

“That’s one way to do it,” Devereaux said. Now the voice was flat, without any tone at all. The gray eyes were steady.

“That would suit you?”

“I can take it, if that’s what you mean. If I were in your
prison, it would be up to you to keep me safe. You believe the woman came to kill me. You didn’t get her, so she will try again. Or others will try again. If you want to make this a Swiss matter, then I’ll oblige you by going to prison.”

Boll thought about that.

There were birds in the trees and both men could hear them clearly.

“And if I expel you—”

“On what grounds?”

“I can find grounds.”

“I have an attorney retained in Geneva. There are laws in Switzerland.”

“You are a guest of the country and you abuse the country’s hospitality.”

“It was not me, Herr Boll,” said Devereaux. “I will leave the country. I’ll resolve this—this is an American matter. In a little while, when it’s resolved, then you’ll know what happened.”

“Are you so sure you won’t be killed?” Boll smiled.

“Not at all.” Devereaux waited. “If that happens, then it’s resolved. If I’m not killed, it’s resolved. But it has to be finished. You choose where it will be finished—in Switzerland or not here.”

“And your son? Or whatever he is, the black child?”

“He’s in school. The lawyer has his trust. If things happen… then he’s taken care of. He’s fourteen. He understands.”

“And Rita Macklin? Will you arrange for her as well?”

But Devereaux had run out of words. The conversation with Rita—the one in mind—always ended at this point. He had broken free twice; twice he had been dragged back.

He didn’t know. Any more than Boll.