The November Man

by Bill Granger

  “Strip,” he said.

  She turned and he smiled at her.

  “Please,” she began.

  “Strip,” he said. And he smiled.

  She took off her coat.

  She looked hesitant.

  He was grinning at her. He put the pistol on the purse on the dresser.

  “You want help? I could take off your clothes for you. Not as carefully as you might do it.”

  “I am KGB,” she said.

  “I know exactly what you are. Right now, you’re a woman and I want you. I saw you get on the ship, I saw you at dinner, I guessed we would meet. Do you think I’m crazy? I know there’s going to be a setup along the way. You’re the setup; but if I overcome it—overcome you—they’ll have to talk to me. I’ll have you and then we will talk some and then maybe I won’t kill you,” he said.

  Gorki had emphasized the brutality of the man and his cunning. He had lectured her about him. Alexa had taken precautions.

  She began to unbutton her blouse. She undressed slowly, watching his eyes watching her.

  November stood still, fully dressed, watching her, smiling.

  She took off her blouse. Her brassiere fastened in front. She opened her brassiere and her large breasts sank a little against her slender frame.

  She sat down then, on the only chair in the room, and removed her boots.

  She reached beneath her dark skirt to remove her nylons. She blushed now because it seemed a good idea to her. “Really,” she said.

  “Come now. Only a few more things.”

  She blushed furiously. She reached for the top of her panties and panty hose.

  The weapon contained two plastic bullets encased in a plastic firing device that was eighty-nine millimeters in length. She pulled down her hose and panties and the device, between her legs, fastened by the elastic of the panties, was in the palm of her left hand.

  The device—it could scarcely be called a pistol because the principles were not the same, all the firing parts were electronic—popped loudly once and there was a sudden and large dirty hole in the middle of his forehead.

  It was over that quickly. It amazed both of them.

  He was quite dead, though it takes the brain some moments to realize that the flicker of images in mind and eye are terminated, rather like a reel of film still spinning after the screen has gone blank.

  There was no need to fire a second time—there were only two charges in the plastic device—but Alexa was a woman of carefulness. It was why she had risen in a bureaucracy that might be described as not very progressive in the matter of respect for the talents of women.

  The second opening in the skull came very near the first. Alexa was a professional and played a top game.

  She had to step aside to let his body fall between her and the bed.

  She went through his pockets. He had a few notes of Swedish money on him; also a Danish passport and a credit card issued by a Danish bank; also a passbook with a canceled account from Credit Suisse in Geneva.

  She opened his shirt out of curiosity. He had a very nice chest, she thought. If there had been time to arrange the matter differently… well.

  She dressed again. She put the device in her purse. As a precaution, Alexa buried the Walther under his mattress.

  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.

  3

  BREACH OF SECURITY

  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—”

  “And we know it,” Lydia Neumann said in her barking whisper. “We know everything.”

  “Only God knows everything,” said Claymore Richfield in his vague and scientific way, as though he might be on intimate terms with the Almighty. “We guess we know.”

  “We know who they are. They know who we are. We trade our agents from time to time. A long time ago, we had a field agent, he said there was so little worth knowing and so many people bent on finding it that it mixed us up. We had too much information.”

  She thought of an agent called November, long buried now in dead files.

  “I’m not going to let the Langley Firm or the Sisters make us dance to their tune. I am not going to be embarrassed by discovering the first Section agent who has gone over to the Opposition,” Yackley said. He was using the voice he used on Capitol Hill during the budget hearings in the clubby privacy of the ornate Senate Conference Room.

  “So this is about politics, not about Hanley’s mental health—”

  “It is about reality.”

  “Hanley didn’t give up his human rights when he joined the Section. And I add he joined it a long time ago, before any of us.”

  “This is not a matter of depriving him of his rights,” Yackley said. With patience. “It is a matter of helping him. Of restoring him. Of finding the best way to treat him.”

  “But he’s committed no crime—”

  “Indiscretions—”

  “But how can you order an evaluation, a psychiatric evaluation—”

  “—done all the time—”

  “But he’s not crazy—”

  “—we’re not talking about crazy. The word is meaningless. People aren’t crazy, people have psychological problems they have to become aware of to solve—”

  “—Hanley has the right—”

  “That’s it, Mrs. Neumann.” Yackley never spoke in a loud voice. The room was jarred to silence. Yackley’s face was as round as that of a wizard; he thundered and spoke fire:

  “It is done. It is going to be done. Hanley is a security risk until further notice. He is a problem. We are going to resolve our own problems. Until I make a further decision, I will take over active directorship of operations, pending selection of a successor. To Hanley. The rest of you remain at your posts, carry on as before. We are all going to have to bend to the oars to make this work. The loss of Hanley diminishes us.”

  Franz Douglas said, “We understand, sir.”

  Claymore Richfield mumbled assent. Richfield was working on an equation that might be able to link CompAn with Translations, eliminating an entire division inside the Section. It was fantastic, and it was being worked out right now on a sheet of paper during a long and tedious meeting in the office of the director. Richfield never looked up, even when the others filed out of the room in silence. Yackley left him alone because it was obvious that Richfield was lost in thought, on another plane. Not of this world, as poor old Hanley had said once.

  4

  ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

  She was not allowed back into the Soviet Union. The message had been left for her at the dock by a seaman in a dark-blue pea coat and stocking cap and full blue-black beard. The message puzzled her. There was a dead man on the Finlandia who would be found in time. Alexa had wanted to be back in Moscow in time for dinner.

  She took a taxi to the Presidentti Hotel in the center of Helsinki, near the bus depot and down the street from the red granite walls of the imposing Central Railroad Station. There was a train every day from Helsinki to Leningrad. The journey took eight hours because of the procedures at the border crossing. It was the route that Lenin had taken in 1917 to return to the Soviet Union and lead the Revolution.

  Alexa waited in the lobby for a long time. She amused herself by playing the slot machines and watching the herds of Japanese tourists check in after their numbing flight over the polar cap from Tokyo. They all appeared to be dressed in thin clothes with cameras and a need to bunch together, chattering like birds.

  She drank Scotch at the bar. It was very expensive. After a while, an American began to talk to her but he was rather old and portly and she pretended to be French, It worked because she knew Americans never spoke foreign languages.

  At noon, the contact arrived. He was a man called Alexei. She had worked with him once before and he had presumed too much based on the similarities of their code names.

  He was a large, bluff man and carried the accents of Georgia. Like all Georgians, he was rather brutal, loud and crude, and Alexa worked around him carefully until she was in a position to explain her independenc
e from him and his goodwill. He had been reprimanded, that last time, by Gorki himself.

  They sat in the inner lobby of the hotel. It was a place of dark woods and square architecture and large spaces.

  He had to have a drink. He sipped the chilled Stolichnaya like a thirsty man.

  Alexa watched him drink with her deep, dark, glittering eyes and noted it. That would be useful sometime as well. Everything was useful to a careful woman.

  “It is too late,” he began.

  “Everything went all right,” she said. The responses must be kept at a minimum.

  “All wrong,” Alexei said. He had thick eyebrows that bridged his nose and hostile blue-gray eyes and the overwhelming smell of cologne of the sort smuggled into Moscow in attaché cases.

  Alexa had never worn perfume. Her body was clean and pure. She drank a little Scotch whisky at times and, at dinner, wine. She ate vegetables. She did not smoke. Her breath was sweet. Her body smelled like fields of flowers and she thought the smell of her body was more beautiful—even to herself—than the appearance of it.

  She waited, attentive, her hands on her lap, her legs slightly apart because it was amusing to sit in such a way and no less comfortable to her.

  “You have taken care of the wrong man.”

  “No,” she said. “I was certain.”

  “I have information from the Committee. They could not reach you on the ship. In any case, it doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t matter?”

  “You killed a man named Ready.” He pronounced the name with a long e sound and spoke it again. “He was not November.”

  “I killed November—”

  “Like a blue moon,” Alexei said suddenly and she saw that he was smiling. “Gorki is embarrassed.”

  “What embarrassment?”

  “The wrong man. There were two men called November. One was the shadow of the other. But the man we were to have killed was not the man on the Finlandia. He was another man. Your task, my dear, is not over.”

  “I am not at fault—”

  “You know how it is,” Alexei said, still smiling. “Everyone must share responsibility.”