by Bill Granger
VOICE: Why are you calling me? Leave me alone. Everything is over.
HANLEY: Damnit. You never leave the service. You know that. You’re in for life. And I’ve told you that.
VOICE: November is going to Moscow. You said it. November does not exist.
HANLEY: (portion missing) the secret, the point of the thing, when it comes down to it, it might just be that simple.
VOICE: What are you talking about?
HANLEY: I read Somerset Maugham over and over. Ashenden. About the secret agent in World War I, he reminded me that you were in Lausanne and that you probably took the same ferry boats between France and Switzerland that he did. All those years ago. When it was accepted finally. The need for spies. Reilly. Maugham. The people in BritIntell—I thought about you when I read those stories. Because of the location. You took that ferry.
VOICE: Yes.
HANLEY: I am not insane. I am not going insane. I am tired and I have time to think about things. I mean, sanity is understanding where your feet are planted, isn’t it? But I’m off my feet, I don’t have perspective anymore.
VOICE: Seek professional help.
HANLEY: Sarcasm. You have to help—
VOICE:—no.
HANLEY: (interrupted) secret. I think of one thing and think of another. I had a nutcracker when I was a child and—
VOICE: Good-bye, Hanley.
HANLEY: Wait. There are no spies. That’s what it means. There are no spies at all. But that’s not true. That’s the one thing I realize now. That’s not true.
(Disconnect)
February 28, time: 10:13 A.M. (Incoming call; location uncertain.)
HANLEY: Hello? Hello?
LYDIA NEUMANN: This is Lydia Neumann, Hanley. You’re still ill. I wanted to see how you were. Can I get you anything? I’m worried about you and we need you in Section.
HANLEY: So we can pull our oars.
NEUMANN: (Laughter)
HANLEY: I need rest, that’s all I need.
NEUMANN: Should I come over?
HANLEY: … sleep at night. Traffic. Where are those people all rushing to?
NEUMANN: Have you seen a doctor? Not Thompson. Don’t use Thompson.
HANLEY: Thompson? He doesn’t know a damned thing. I understand his little game. Pills. I know all the secrets, you know, Mrs. Neumann. I know everything. You let me fool myself but you were onto the secret as well, weren’t you? This is a game in a computer and you’re the master of Tinkertoy. The mistress of Tinkertoy. So I’ll ask you: Where is my Nutcracker?
NEUMANN: Hanley? Hanley? Are you all right?
HANLEY: My Nutcracker. New Man knows, New Man (Neumann?) knows—
NEUMANN: Hanley, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
HANLEY: Spies, Neumann. I am talking about the whole business of spies. Of moles and sleepers and agents who come awake, of doubles and triples, of dogs who bark and dogs who bite, covert and overt, going into black and black bag operations, and the business of the trade. I am talking about goddamn bona fides and about software and I am telling you, I am going to get to the bottom of the whole damned business.
NEUMANN: (garbled)
HANLEY: Oh, you believe that. I know you do. There are no spies. But I have my spies and you have a bunch of circuits. I have the spies. There are no spies?
NEUMANN: Hanley, my God—
(Disconnect)
Three telephone calls, except the call from a woman asking Hanley to subscribe to the Washington Post.
Yackley’s frown was deep and sincere. His skin was burned brown by January’s sun in St. Maarten; his eyes were blue and quite empty. But the frown spoke for his thoughts.
The room was lit by a single green-shaded banker’s lamp. The soft light framed the two photographs on his desk. His wife smiled crookedly at the photographer; his daughter smiled at Daddy. If they only understood all the secrets he had and was privy to. If they only could understand the nasty business that had to be done.
There are no spies.
Hanley told Devereaux that. And he told Devereaux about Colonel Ready, tagged as November, now making his way to Moscow to try to arrange a defection. A damned mess, all of it. And what was the real November going to do now? Except plot with Hanley.
There are no spies. And the New Man knows.
Yackley considered the matter for a moment. He knew exactly what he was going to do; he was working up an argument in conscience to sanctify it. But it had to be done in any case, even if it was going to be dirty.
2
THE FINLANDIA INCIDENT
Alexa was quite beautiful in the way of a certain kind of young Russian woman. Her eyes were coal-dark and deep and it was difficult to describe their color. Her eyes were also set sharply in the paleness of her strong features. Despite the generous width of her mouth and her very high cheekbones that seemed to stretch her skin, despite her coal-black hair that severely defined the edges of her pale features, her eyes held you. Her merest glance compelled you to stare at her, at her eyes, in total fascination.
Her eyes were her only drawback, from a professional point of view.
She might be able to change the color of her hair or disguise her slender figure by flattening her full breasts or by stooping to seem shorter or older than she was. But she could never disguise those eyes.
Alexa turned from the bar in the warm green room on the third deck of the Finlandia and gazed across the room at the man she was going to kill.
The trouble with Alexa’s usefulness as an intelligence agent for the Committee for State Security was that she was very good at those assignments that called for action—immediate, brutal, violent—and very bad at those assignments that called for mere intelligence gathering.
She was intelligent; but she was too visible. She was very beautiful and she was noticed wherever she went. Her Moscow accent was slight when she spoke English; her Moscow manners might have made many people mistake her for a New Yorker or a Parisian. She had the right mixture of rudeness and grace.
But it was no good having your informant fall in love with you or having your network of agents desire you sexually. Or have the watchers from the other side find it too agreeable to watch you. And suspect you, even as they fell in love with you. Besides, she could never change her eyes.
She stared at the man with graying hair who sat at the wide window, gazing into the gloomy night of the Baltic Sea. Alexa was the death-giver. It was not so bad, it was over so quickly, it was part of a large game. She never felt bad afterward. In fact, she had felt bad just once, when her victim had lived.
Two years ago. She was sent up through the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, which was the usual route of spies working on the West Coast of the United States. In that area south of San Francisco called Silicon Valley—where they made computers and invented wonderful things—she had seduced a somewhat shy, certainly amoral security guard who was twenty-four years old and made $7.23 an hour guarding the great secrets of M-Guide Computer Laboratories in Palo Alto.
His name was Tony. Poor Tony. He was now in the very harsh maximum security prison at Marion in southern Illinois. He was kept in a narrow cell most of the time and his only recreation was reading and working with weights. She felt bad afterward not because she had loved Tony at all—that had been business—but because she thought of herself caught in a cell for the rest of her life. She pitied herself. It would have been a merciful thing to kill Tony. She had considered it, the night he put his face between her legs and she had the Walther PPK under the pillow and she thought about it because Tony was very close to being caught. But he had pleased her and she had been merciful. Too bad for Tony.
Better to die like the man at the window in the bar. She studied his face, his lean chin, his glittering eyes. Dead man, she thought.
The Finlandia slid down the open sea passage between the islands that are flung out in a stream east from Stockholm, almost to the coast of Finland. In the bright moon of the starry night, here and there, above
the snow, poked roofs or sticks of summer homes on the islands. The islands were the perpetual retreats of middle-class Swedes in summer; the islands, some no more than an acre or two in size, promised summer even now at the end of the long Scandinavian winter.
The Finlandia was a huge ship, the largest car ferry in the world. She might have been an ocean liner but was trapped in the dull passage every day between Stockholm and Helsinki. She always passed at night because the trip took exactly thirteen hours. It was midnight and the ship was halfway to the lights of Helsinki.
The man at the table was Colonel Ready. He had been chased for 400 days. He had killed three “contractors” sent by KGB. He had disappeared in Copenhagen five months ago and despite the large network of Soviet agents working in that city he had not been found.
Until he surfaced four weeks ago. With messages to the Soviet courier. He wanted to sell secrets; he wanted to sell himself. After all, the KGB knew he was an agent of R Section called November. He had many secrets.
The bartender was in love with her. He was a large blond Swede and he spoke good English. He thought his good looks impressed her. When she treated him with reserve, even coldly, he adored her. Her eyes always lied; her eyes always told of passion and unbelievable lust. The coldness of her manner only framed the passion promised in her eyes.
“Please, another drink for you?” he said, not sure of himself, fawning. He was too large and handsome to fawn.
“Perhaps,” Alexa said, as though deciding. “Yes, I think,” she said, deciding, giving him one small smile as a reward. “Glenfiddich.” She had her preferences: single-malt Scotch whisky, and the Walther PPK, a very small automatic with a deadly accurate field of fire at short range. She worked in very close because she was not afraid of killing or feeling any passion at the act of giving death.
It was just as well that Alexa was so good in the matter of wet contracts.
She had been contracted to November four days ago. There had been confusion for a long time inside KGB over who November was. He was supposed to be the man who kidnapped KGB agent Dmitri Denisov six years ago in Florida; who had wrecked the IRA plan to kill Lord Slough in his boat off the Irish coast; who had caused enough troubles and embarrassment—all outside the rules of the trade understood by both sides—that Gorki had “contracted” him. He had to be killed. Which is why he wanted to come to the Moscow side. Gorki said it was too late. Gorki said November—who was this man, Colonel Ready—had to be killed because he could not be trusted.
Alexa thought of Gorki, head of the Resolutions Committee. Her mentor. A gnome with yellow skin and sandpaper hands. He had used her; the only man who had truly used her. When he was finished with her—in the dacha, long ago—she belonged to him. He knew that and never made great demands on her again. She was a painted wooden doll upon his shelf. He had opened her and found the doll within and the doll within the third doll and so on. He had gone to her core. She had shuddered at his touch and needed it. She had danced naked for him.
Gorki was not his name. Alexa was not her name. They were named by computers and codebooks. They were puppets, all of them. But some puppets danced naked for the others.
Alexa had been at Moscow University when KGB approached her. She had been afraid at first and then curious. What if she ended up in the translation pool that worked in one of the buildings adjacent to KGB headquarters in Dhzerzhinski Square? She knew what the pool was. She would be plucked from the pool as though she were a piece of fruit, by some KGB major to serve as his mistress, to feed his ego and maleness, to be discreet so that when he had to escort his plain, quite fat official wife she would understand and say nothing. She would be taken to Paris by him but not to the Black Sea because the Black Sea was for the family. She didn’t want that to happen to her, not at all. And it had not happened. She had been placed inside the Resolutions Committee and her superior, who was not permitted to make love to her, an obnoxious man named Mikhail, had said of her: “Women cannot kill, except in fury.”
She had proven him wrong in a brilliant bit of business in Finland. She had attracted the attention of Gorki.
She thought of Gorki now and shivered as she drank the Scotch. The Scotch flooded her with warmth. Her loins were warmed. Gorki commanded her.
And she was very good at what she did.
Which is why he had full confidence in her to wet contract the annoying American agent called November.
November had limped and left a trail until he disappeared in Copenhagen. Then he made contact with the Soviet courier chief in Copenhagen. His code name was Stern. He played November along until he got instructions. They came from Gorki. The wet contract was still in force, Gorki said. Tell November we will negotiate with him—but in neutral Finland. Give him money to get to Finland. Tell him the running is over. And I will send Alexa to intercept him and to kill him once and for all.
November had no choice but to believe them.
Alexa had flown to Stockholm for the intercept at eight in the morning. She had spent the day in the splendor of the Birger Jarl, which was a warm hotel. In the afternoon, she took a walking tour through the narrow old streets of the Gamla Stan, the island of Stockholm that contains the oldest parts of the city. She had never been in Stockholm and found it charming. She bought a pair of leather boots at a shop in the Old Town. The clerk had very dark hair and an innocent face. He knelt before her to put the boots on her legs. She had felt the warmth build in her then and nearly considered it. But there was business to take care of. She had no doubt the clerk would have obeyed.
She had not seen boots like the ones she purchased even in the special stores in Moscow. They fit her well. Everything she wore fit her well. She always got a second-hand copy of Vogue each month from the Paris courier. She dressed in fashion.
The Finlandia had sailed at six from the grimly modern terminal on the southeast coast of the city. The terminal was as sullen and cheerless as a bus station and she had sat at a table in the cafeteria, eating a stale cheese sandwich, watching November enter the place, look around, wait in line with the others. She had boarded the ship at the last moment.
She had watched him at dinner in the vast dining room. She would have preferred to dine alone but agreed to be seated with a middle-aged woman from Malmo who spoke no English. They smiled to each other with the wary grace that only women display when meeting other and unknown women. The woman from Malmo certainly saw how much more beautiful and better dressed Alexa was.
The dining room had been cheerful, full of small lights and small tables and a quiet orchestra at one end. Everything was made very intense by the presence of the Baltic Sea all around them. We are alone in the world, Alexa had thought with pleasure.
The American agent dined alone across the room.
Their eyes met once and held.
He had not smiled at her.
He did not turn his eyes away. It was she who broke contact.
She had followed him after dinner. He had gone on deck, he had visited one of the smaller bars, he had looked in the duty-free shops. She followed him and he knew it; it was what she had wanted him to know. The advantage was hers.
He was handsome in a rugged sense. Perhaps he believed she followed him because she desired him.
There was a trick to killing him on this ship, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the winter of the Baltic Sea.
Alexa would use the obvious approach and he would stop it; he was smart enough to have eluded Moscow for 400 days of running, so he would see the obvious. But the obvious way sometimes worked when a man had grown lonely or careless or dejected or had been lulled into the belief that Alexa merely wanted to go to bed with him.
Alexa had backups. When the obvious did not work, the backups would.
She decided to cross the room.
She carried her glass and sat down across from him in the overstuffed chair. She put her glass on the table and stared into his blue eyes. He was smiling at her.
He wore a ra
gged red beard now, perhaps to cover the scar that was on his cheek. He looked a little different from the descriptions given her, but then, anyone on the run for more than a year undergoes changes.
She let her eyes lie to him. Her eyes, she knew, glittered with lust. But Alexa was calm, without any feeling at all. She stared at him and let her eyes do the trick. Then she said, in precise English: “I have seen you and I want to go to your cabin and make love to you. Tonight. Now. Or you may come to my cabin.”
“All right,” he said. Just like that.
They did not speak or touch again until they reached his cabin door. He turned the key in the lock. The carpeted passageway was empty. He smiled at her with perfect white teeth. There were pain wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had lost weight in 400 days of running. She thought he might be thin beneath the loose shirt and that his ribs would press out against his skin. But it wouldn’t come to that, Alexa thought.
He kissed her very suddenly at the door to the room and reached for her purse with one motion.
He pushed her away a little.
It was in the purse and they both knew it and it seemed to relax the tension between them.
He produced the shining Walther PPK and unsnapped the safety and pointed it at her. She wore a short fur jacket and a black silk blouse and a dark wool skirt that came to the top of her boots. The darkness of her clothing accentuated her paleness. She wore no jewelry and her lips were painted lightly. Her eyes were wide and deep and November stared into them. She was smiling.
“You know who I am. I wanted you to know so that there would be no trouble—”
“You’re a little obvious,” he said.
There, Alexa thought. There. That made it better.
“Come in,” November said.
“All right.”
She smiled—a properly small smile of acknowledgment of his superior instincts in this matter—and brushed past him through the narrow cabin opening into the room. There was a single bed made up. There was a small dresser and a porthole. In the front was a shower and a toilet.