The November Man Page 9

  “You seem a lot better,” said Lydia Neumann.

  Hanley turned and looked at her. “Do I?”

  “Your old self,” said Leo Neumann. He had met Hanley only once.

  “I was wrong,” Lydia said. She stared at Hanley with the gaze of a mother examining a sick child. “I argued against sending you here.”

  “You were not wrong,” Hanley said. He looked at Leo. “Can I speak to you for a moment, Mrs. Neumann?”

  Mrs. Neumann and Hanley left Leo. They strolled a little farther along the double fence, looking in at the path between the fences. When he thought they were alone, Hanley said:

  “I was depressed. It began last summer, during all the spy exchanges. I started to examine them. I used computers to set up scenarios.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Of course you know. But not the results. Not the results. The computer logic—I think I’ve learned it well enough to understand that the logic is not really logic but a way out of a puzzle once the puzzle is described.”

  “Something like that,” Lydia Neumann said. “It has as much morality as you give to the puzzle.”

  “Morality was not a factor,” Hanley said. He stared at the double fences. “We’re confined there, between the fences, during the week. The outer fence is electrified. When the juice is turned down, they let the dogs run between the fences at night. Three Dobermans.”

  Lydia Neumann said nothing. Her face was white. Hanley saw her hand was clenched. She stared at the path between the fences.

  “They’re killing me,” Hanley said. Quietly.

  “No—”

  “The pills come morning and night. On Saturday, I get rid of the pills. I feel much better today. Tomorrow, it’s back to the pills. This is called HL-4. Can you find out what HL-4 is?”

  And he handed her one of the morning pills, wrapped in Kleenex. She stared at it in her hand and then slipped it into her pocket.

  “I have to get out of here,” Hanley said. “The first day here, the psychiatrist in charge, Dr. Goddard, he sprayed me with Mace when I asked for my clothes—”

  “You were kept naked?”

  “In one of those hospital gowns.”

  “This is horrible,” Lydia Neumann said.

  “Most of these places are, I think now,” Hanley said. His voice was very soft. “I called Devereaux. Twice, I think, when I was ill—”

  “But you were ill, you really were ill—”

  “I must have been. It seems like a long time ago. Like thinking of yourself as a child. I really must have been ill.”

  “You called him. I thought that’s who it was. When Yackley had the conference. On what to do with you—”

  “And you stuck up for me.” Hanley’s eyes were wet. “Don’t mistake my tears, Mrs. Neumann. I’m not crazy. I’m really not crazy. I feel so broken down. Tears are the last refuge of the weak—”

  “Cut it out, man,” Lydia Neumann said. “I don’t think you’re crazy. You were sick. You called Devereaux—”

  “Mrs. Neumann. I need an outside contractor. I wanted Devereaux to… come back into the trade for a while. I have to find out something—”

  “What?”

  “The computer analyzed the spy transactions of last summer. Before the summit. First there were two men from the West German intelligence agency who defected East. Then the Brits picked up the mole in Copenhagen and revealed he had been turned for three years. Then CIA picked up that Soviet in Rome. And then he defects back to the Soviet embassy in D.C. There was also the Chinese agent in Seoul and the two ROKs uncovered in Peking. Trumpets and flourishes. So I went through our own network. Who belongs to us and who, on our side, belongs to them? And how do we know which is which?”

  Lydia Neumann blinked. Hanley seemed so intense. He was staring at the path between the two fences. Hanley’s face was pale and his eyes were dull. He seemed very tired.

  “I wondered if there were any spies at all,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We go into budget crunch and the people at NSA can show figures—what they are based on, I don’t know—they can show figures that show eighty-five to ninety percent of all intelligence is done by machine. Satellites, computers, bugs. Raw data. The listening post at Cheltenham, at Taipei. The goddamn space shuttle overflies the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc on every second mission. It all comes down to coming down to the mountain. I was convinced of it.”

  Tears again. Mrs. Neumann looked away while Hanley found a handkerchief and used it.

  “Yackley was on me day and night. Cutbacks in stationmasters, networks… my God, he thought it was all just so much meat cut off the bone. It wasn’t that. And then there was Nutcracker—”

  He stopped, frightened.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. Forget that. It was over long ago.” Frightened. He gazed at Mrs. Neumann. “I played with the computer and there were all these coincidences in which we got their spies to defect to us and our spies defected at the same time, almost as part of a game. Musical chairs. But aren’t there real spies?”

  She said, “You should know that.”

  “But Yackley doesn’t believe in them.”

  “Yackley is a fool,” she said.

  “Yackley does not believe in spies. He says there are no spies any more than there are elves or leprechauns. There are only intelligence agents on each side analyzing computer materials, making value judgments…”

  “Hanley, get hold of yourself.”

  He was crying again.

  “Pawns. He said they are pawns. The game moves in feints and little gestures. I said he was wrong. I would prove it. I could have proved it—”

  “Proved what?”

  He looked through his tears at her. She wanted to understand, he thought.

  And he knew he didn’t trust her at all.

  “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.

  12

  MOSCOW IS WAITING

  Not 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.