The British Cross

Book 4: November Man

by Bill Granger

Genres: Crime Fiction; Spy Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

In the depths of a Finnish winter, Deveraux--the November Man--is about to be betrayed... A defecting Russian agent dangles a Gulag prisoner, thought dead for thirty-eight years--in front of the November Man. Suddenly the intelligence forces of the world are locked in a bloody battle, and Deveraux is cut loose by his own people. From Britain to Ireland to Leningrad, Deveraux and a tough, beautiful reporter slip outside the system to bring the prisoner out--even if it means blowing the lid off the most shocking triple-cross of World War II.

Release date: August 26, 2014

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

Foul, leaden clouds threatened, but it had not snowed for four days and the streets were finally clear. The bricks of the old streets seemed to glisten in the light of a weak sun, polished by the shattering cold. Cold was piled on cold; wind piled on wind, keening unexpectedly around corners, barreling into pedestrians who fought for their footing along the treacherous, ice-streaked walks. The streetcars ground noisily against metal rails as their steel bodies arched around the corner into Mannerheimintie, making sounds colder and more hurtful than the touch of warm flesh on frozen metal. Every sound in the numbing cold of the city seemed a sort of strangled scream; every sound scraped at the senses because the smothering muteness of the snow had been cleared away from the streets and piled in dirty heaps along the curbs. Pale, sullen days came and withered and they were scarcely noticed because this was the dark heart of the dark Finnish winter and the sun seemed like a dead planet in another solar system, far and distant. The nights were long and starless: gray clouds at sunset, scudding in from the choppy, shallow Gulf of Finland beyond the frozen port of the city smothered the sky and did not permit light from stars or moon.

Devereaux awoke in darkness.

He blinked once and again, but darkness remained. He held up the face of his wristwatch and perceived the hour. He awoke at the same time each morning; except morning was always night.

The room was too warm but nothing could be done about that. Devereaux lay naked on the sheets, half-covered by the comforter. A sudden burst of wind broke against the window of his room; it howled like a damned soul, seeking warmth and entry.

Seven in the morning, Devereaux thought. But to say morning in the darkness has to be an act of faith. Maybe this is the morning that the light will not return. He smiled then, mocking the darkness and his own depression. The Scandinavians called this horrible pit of long, black winter “the murky time.”

Devereaux reached for the lamp at the side of the bed and flicked it on. The room was bathed in yellow incandescent light that made the sense of perpetual night much more real. He pushed himself up in bed and stared at nothing; he waited for the first red streak of morning beyond his window.

For seven weeks in Helsinki, he had moved ever more slowly each day, as though caught in a dream.

He had come to serve his time here like a prisoner. He shut down all his senses. He deprived his mind of expectation; he did not note the passing of the days or mark them on a calendar or keep track of the weeks. The miniature appearances of daylight could not be celebrated or enjoyed for fear of making the long and bitter nights unendurable; he began to understand this was part of the character of the Finns, part of the stoicism, part of the muted suffering. The streets of Helsinki were never crowded.

Seven weeks.

Devereaux stared at the night outside the hotel and still there was no morning light.

No message from Hanley, no answer to questions that had to be asked. In the fourth week—it was the fourth week, Devereaux thought, but perhaps it was not—he had requested more money. And two days later, in the mailbox behind the front desk in the lobby of the Presidentti Hotel, a small envelope waited for him. Again, no words, no messages, no admonitions, no instructions. Money and a copy of a receipt noting the money had been passed to him. At least it was contact; Devereaux had felt lightened by the anonymous touch for the rest of that day; he had nearly felt something like happiness in the way a grateful prisoner might acknowledge the end of time in isolation.

There.

He turned his eyes back to the window and was very still. He felt a curious sense of anticipation that was both pleasant and unpleasant.

Slowly, moment by moment, the blackness became purple and etched the buildings in that color beyond the hotel-room window. And then he saw the redness splitting the horizon; a chill, winter sunrise. He smiled, threw off the comforter and put his feet on the brown carpet; at least this morning was to be different. Perhaps it was the end of the isolation and waiting; in a little while, he would go to the underground mall and make the contact and perhaps that would provoke the resolution.

But he would not hope too much. Hope wounds.

He turned on the tap in the bathroom and the water drummed flatly from the shower against the molded fiberglass tub. When the water was very hot and the room was filled with steam, he stepped into the tub and let the coldness he felt in himself wash away.

On the morning it began, Devereaux was outside on the flat ground beyond the cabin, splitting firewood against the threat of snow later in the day.

He had not expected Hanley because Hanley had never come to this place in the Virginia mountains where Devereaux had his house. “Not a house exactly,” Hanley had once joked to the Old Man. “More like the place where Devereaux goes to ground.”

The mountain was not very high but it had the virtue of being deserted, penetrated by a single-track dirt road that steeply scaled the hill to the place where Devereaux’s house was buried in the forest. From the simple cabin you could see the only approach to the mountain, up the only road, but the one who approached could not see you at all.

Devereaux had put down his ax when the black car began its slow ascent off the main highway that led to the little town of Front Royal, snug at the entrance of the Blue Ridge Mountains six miles beyond.

The car worked slowly up the snow-packed road. Once it nearly slid sideways into a shallow ravine broken with birch and pine trees. When it seemed certain that the black car would reach the summit of the mountain, Devereaux went inside the cabin. He removed the Remington double-barrel from its place on the stone-covered wall and broke it open. He shoved two red shotgun shells into the chambers and closed the piece. He took a box of similar shells from a drawer in a small pine cabinet on the wall.

Devereaux waited outside for the car grinding up the treacherous road. It stopped fifty feet from the cabin. After a moment the rear door opened. Devereaux cocked the shotgun.

It began to snow gently.

Hanley closed the rear door and made his way across the slippery ground to the cabin. He wore a black overcoat, a small black hat, a white woolen muffler and he wore black gloves. His face was pale and even the exertion of walking across the sloping, uncertain ground to the cabin did not give it color.

At ten feet, he stopped as though he saw Devereaux’s shotgun for the first time. He blinked and did not speak.

Devereaux uncocked the rifle and pointed to the car.

“He’s Henderson,” Hanley said, understanding the silent question. “He hasn’t the faintest idea what this is all about.”

“And me?”

“No. He doesn’t know it’s even you. If I had known about that road, I would have insisted you meet me in Front Royal. Why don’t you improve it? A car can barely make it.”

“That’s the idea.”

“So this is where you come to ground.”

Devereaux said nothing. They stood beneath the shelter of a wooden porch roof on the bare, frozen ground. Hanley slapped his gloved hands together. “Are you going to invite me inside?”

Devereaux said nothing. He had worked for Hanley in R Section for nearly twenty years. The time had not softened Devereaux’s contempt for his control; nor softened Hanley’s perplexed distrust of the agent he ran. They existed in a symbiotic balance that teetered back and forth on a thin wire, suspended above a black gorge without a net.

“Then should we stand out here and freeze to death?”

Hanley attempted to force a smile as he said it, but Devereaux did not respond for a moment. Then he said: “Why did you come here?”

“It must have been important.” Hanley said it with a note of sarcasm. The mountain was winter silent in the falling snow; the larger animals were asleep or dead; the deer had gone to lower ground; the bears snored in filthy dens; the birds were gone; only the ground squirrels and the possums, still foraging for food, left tracks in the mountain snow.

Devereaux decided. He held the shotgun loosely in his right hand. He pushed against the rough wood door. Hanley followed. The room was lit at each end by two small lamps and illuminated by a fireplace where logs spit and crackled and the flames licked at the edge of the stones.

Devereaux turned and waited while Hanley carefully removed his gloves and took off his hat and coat. He folded the coat precisely and laid it across a table behind the large red couch that faced the fire. Devereaux stood at the stone wall and put the shotgun back on the wall. He turned to a small kitchen-bar and poured a glass of vodka.

Hanley was thin, precise, small. His hands were calm and white, like ivory sculptures. His fingers were very long. When he spoke, his flat Nebraska voice surged without emphasis, as though there could be no depressions or elevations coming from the man. He was a winter pond, flat and still.

“We’ve had a probe from someone in the Opposition.”

Devereaux did not speak. He sipped the Polish vodka from the glass; the bottle had been cold an hour before but it had warmed while he had worked outside. The vodka warmed him.

“One of their boys,” Hanley said. He did not sit down because Devereaux stood. “One of their boys wants to become one of ours.”

Devereaux put down the glass. He was in his mid-forties but his body was still large, still strong, still carried a sense of power. His face was hard, his eyes were gray and flat and unrevealing. His face was not handsome because it was lined and because of the hardness in it; and yet there was something compelling in it. His hair was mostly gray, as it had been since he was twenty. His fingers were flat and his hands were wide. He did not speak very often because all of his life was part of a deceit and speech betrayed a person too often to be trusted. When he spoke, his words cut like glass; they were remorseless.

He spoke now. “Why did you come here?”

“Because we have a little matter.”

“Asia,” Devereaux said. “You remember that little matter?”

“In time. Everything in time. It’s working.”

“Is it?”

“I haven’t forgotten my promise.”

The promise had come at the time of the Mitterand business. Quid pro quo; Hanley owed him and in his position of acting director of R Section, he had been able to pay his debt to Devereaux.

Devereaux had been an old Asian hand in the beginning; Devereaux had been recruited out of Asian Studies at Columbia University in New York; Devereaux had served in Asia during the Vietnam War until he made a mistake in 1968. He told the truth about the coming Tet Offensive and it was understood that his usefulness was over. He had been sent home and cast adrift in the Western world he despised. Only Asia had been home to him; only the warm jungle nights and the chattering of people in a dozen dialects and languages; only the elaborate courtesy that masked an elaborate deceit, which in turn finally revealed simple truths—and he had been exiled from that world for fifteen years. Until the Mitterand matter when Hanley had finally been in a position to promise him that the exile was over; that he could go back to the only world he had ever wanted as home.

Hanley had promised. Hanley said he had not forgotten the promise.

“I don’t care about your probe from the Russians,” Devereaux said slowly. “We made a little bargain between us.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Hanley said, and they both knew then that it was a lie.

Devereaux did not speak.

“The Russian business,” Hanley said.

For a long moment, there was silence. What did it matter if Hanley had promised? Or that he lied now? Or that Devereaux could not go back to Asia? The Section had trapped them both in time. Hanley was trapped as his control and Devereaux was trapped as an agent; twenty years and they could only share a lie. Perhaps it was enough. Devereaux stared at the white-faced man with thinning hair and long, pale hands and realized he felt pity for him.

Or perhaps it was for himself.

“The defector. Does he want an assignment?”

Hanley shook his head. “He wants to come out of the closet.”

“Is he in a position to dictate the terms?”

“Not really,” Hanley said. “But we are curious.”

“Why?”

“There are unusual aspects to the matter.”

“Where is he?”

“Inside,” Hanley said.

“What is the problem?”

Hanley had not said there was a problem but it was implied in everything from the shallow lie he told Devereaux to the unusual trek to Devereaux’s retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“We would like to be certain. Of his intentions.”

Devereaux reached for the bottle of Polish vodka and poured another long drink. He did not offer the bottle to Hanley; neither man sat down.

“Nothing is certain.”

“Langley was burned last August on that fellow. You know the one.”

“The alleged Soviet cipher clerk.”

“Very clumsy. It exposed a mole of theirs working inside the Central Committee apparatus.”

“Yes,” Devereaux said. The CIA mole had been murdered in his cell by two KGB interrogators who were subsequently reprimanded for their overzealous examination of the prisoner. “It was too bad.”

“Too bad,” Hanley agreed with matching insincerity. “Langley can get away with mistakes like that but we can’t. I don’t have to tell you the Section lives too close to the edge. These are perilous times for all of us.”

“Yes, you don’t have to tell me.”

Hanley frowned. “That’s sarcasm,” he said pedantically. “We want to minimize the risk in contact.”

“For the Section,” Devereaux said.

Hanley looked surprised. “Of course for the Section.”

Devereaux waited.

“This is a delicate business.”

For the first time, Devereaux smiled. The smile was without comfort. Hanley was chief operations officer for the Section, which meant he had never been on an operation; operations were actions and all actions in the bureaucratic establishment were fraught with peril and political liabilities. Hanley would prefer to do nothing, to not have been contacted by this Soviet defector; but the single action made a response necessary, if only to ensure that nothing would result and nothing would be done.

In the shadows of the dim-lit room, with the fire making dancing lights on the walls, Hanley did not see the smile. “We will minimize risk at contact. He isn’t the sort who is expected to turn, you see. I want you to see what he is like, take his measure; we need some input to make a decision.”

“You sound like a corporate recruiter.”

“Yes,” Hanley said, suddenly pleased. “I suppose we are in a way.”

“What do you want?”

“Our defector-in-waiting comes from a sensitive area inside the apparatus of the Opposition. But not one that is of particular interest to us. So two things come to mind: Why does he want out? Why does he want to come out through the Section?”

“Because Langley would be leery of another defector so soon after being burned last August,” Devereaux replied.

“Exactly. The Opposition has been neglecting us. Perhaps the Section would be so eager for a small coup that we would not be careful when checking his bona fides.”

“And that might mean he is a triple.”

“The thought crossed my mind.”

Devereaux put down the empty glass and went to the fire. He picked up a black poker and shoved a large piece of oak back into the grating. The gesture exposed unburned wood and the fire leaped in the stone fireplace.

“Where does he come from?”

“Leningrad. He’s very high in the Gulag.”

Devereaux turned from the fireplace with the poker in his hand. His eyes betrayed interest for the first time. “That’s odd,” he said.

“Yes, isn’t it? Obviously, we can’t ignore him. But who cares about the Gulag Archipelago?”

“Don’t let the human-rights groups hear that.”

“If they had an interest in my opinion, I would tell them,” Hanley said stiffly. “There are no secrets in the Gulag, not secrets worth having. We proved that prisoners worked on the gas pipeline, we fed the information to every agency, we created a propaganda front in Europe… to what effect?” There was an edge to his voice. “Nothing. The Soviet Union has slaves and prisoners and no one is concerned; and once we have learned about the prisoners, what more is there to say? There is no profit in the knowledge.”

Devereaux stared at Hanley a moment and then put down the poker. “Why has this one sought us out?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? The one you have to answer.”

“Do I go into black?” Black was undercover, illegal.

“No.” Hanley crossed to the fire and held out his hands to the flames though he felt perfectly at home with the cold in the cabin. In the bowels of the Department of Agriculture building on Fourteenth Street in Washington, Hanley kept his office at sixty degrees Fahrenheit, summer and winter. The flames gave color to his pale features.

“You agree to the operation?” Hanley asked softly.

“No. Not at all.” Devereaux said the words flatly. “But there is no choice, is there?”

No, Hanley thought. There is no choice at all. There never was.

“His name is Tartakoff. They accord him a degree of confidence, which means a degree of freedom. That bothers us as well. He received a rapid elevation after Andropov took over. That bothers us, too. He’s only forty-six. Far too young for those people.”

“You know a lot already.”

“Too much. Everything is so delicate.” Hanley frowned. “He makes a shopping trip next week to Helsinki.”

“From Leningrad.”

Hanley nodded. “You can meet him at Stockmann’s. Were you ever in Helsinki?”

“Going back. Once. To Vietnam. It was 1966.” Devereaux seemed to recall the memory involuntarily. The words were as flat as computer-generated speech. “There was business in Copenhagen; it had a connection to that business at Da Nang. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“I took Japan Lines back across the Soviet Union.”

“That was risky.”

“I was an accredited journalist.”

“But they knew what you were.”

“It didn’t matter. I spent a long night in Helsinki.”

“He has a wife but he does not mention her in the matter. He’s buying her some trinkets at Stockmann’s. He likes to get out of the Soviet Union. He spent two years in Paris in the early seventies.”

“KGB.”

“Of course.”

“What does he have to sell?”

“Himself at the moment. It’s not enough. I want you to lead him, find out what he can put together for us.”

“What do I tell him?”

Hanley stared at the fire as though hypnotized by it. He had been a child in Omaha so long ago that it seemed remembered as a fragment of someone else’s dream. A fire in a fireplace and the Nebraska winter raging outside. He saw ships colliding in the fire; the ships were the logs, the flames the death. He could hear men crying as they fell into the sea.

“Anything you wish to tell him. Promise anything because it doesn’t matter. Take the time to see what he is worth to us.”

“Only promises after all?”

Hanley blinked and tore his eyes reluctantly from the flames. He could see the cold, mocking face clearly despite the shadows. He felt the chill of the gray eyes resting on him.

‘I have to get back,” Hanley said. “This seemed the best way. I thought if I called you to Washington, it would be under false colors. I mean the Asian business. It’s difficult to arrange, Devereaux.”

“You’re a liar, Hanley.”

Hanley did not speak for a moment. When he found his voice, it was sure and flat, the bureaucrat who has always prepared an answer. “Examine Tartakoff. If he promises us nothing, we have no use for him. There must be a middle ground between too much and too little.”

“Until then, he’s trapped.”

“Yes. It’s the only comforting part of the whole matter.”

“He can’t get out without us.”

“He wouldn’t be alive by the time he got to Paris.”

“How long does he dangle?”

Hanley shrugged. “As long as it takes. As long as we need.”

Seven weeks and there had been three meetings with the Soviet defector named Tartakoff and there had been no message from the Section.

Devereaux would buy the new English-language papers in the afternoon at the red granite Helsinki train station. He would savor the newspapers, not daring to read them too quickly like a child who saves parts of his candy bar against a time when he will want them more. He walked the streets of the city until he could remember all the street names. He walked down to the frozen harbor where the vegetable market was held in the open in the warm weather. A squat cathedral in the Russian style sat on a hill above the harbor and brooded over the silence and the ice stretching into the Baltic waters. Channels were cut in the ice for . . .