The November Man Read Free Page A

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
T HE
F INLANDIA
I NCIDENT
    A lexa 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 intelligenceagent 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