The Shattered Eye

Book 3: November Man

by Bill Granger

Genres: Crime Fiction; Spy Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

The computer says the USSR will attack the USA. The computer lies. On Sunday, the 6th of June, a red alert will be sounded. There will be no war. Only a victory. And, unless the November Man can change history, it will belong to the enemy. An undercover mission is blown. The corpses of three U.S. secret agents lie unclaimed in Europe. Baffled and angry, unable to trust its own people or its own computer, American Intelligence must go outside the system. Enter the November Man. Devereaux, ex-CIA, a maverick and enforcer, is lured back into the fray. Now the war games begin. Now the skill, nerve and icy passion of one man must help avert a firestorm.

Release date: August 26, 2014

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

Mrs. Neumann did not knock at the door to Hanley’s bare office before she entered, and she did not speak to him until she was settled on the government-issue metal chair in front of his desk. The temperature in the office hovered just about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, as always, and Mrs. Neumann, as always, wore the thick brown sweater she kept in her own office for her private meetings with the chief of operations of the R Section. It was just after nine-thirty in the morning on January 9, and Mrs. Neumann and her staff had been struggling with the knot of the problem for the past six days.

“Tinkertoy is puzzled,” Mrs. Neumann said in her raspy whisper. For emphasis, she struck one large hand on the computer printout sheets that filled her generous lap. After the meeting with Hanley, a meeting without notes written or recordings made, the printouts would be shredded in the large machine in the central corridor.

“A computer cannot be puzzled. It is a machine.” Hanley spoke precisely and waited for a reply, his clean, colorless fingers resting on the polished Formica top of the gun-metal-gray desk.

Mrs. Neumann had unlimited access to him because she never wasted his time, no matter how odd her manner or way of conveying information. It was pointless to ask her questions at the beginning of these conversations because she never arrived at her point sooner than she intended.

She was a large woman with big bones and a thickening waist; her bones seemed to stretch her healthy, leathery skin. She had expansive gestures and wore old-fashioned cotton dresses, like a farm woman from another century. Her massive head was crowned by thick black, spiky hair, cut short, and she had once told Marge in the computer analysis section that her husband cut it for her twice a month. Despite years of practice, he had never become an expert barber.

She spoke at last. “It’s in the raw data. The raw data we’ve been getting from the field in the past four months is the puzzler,” she said. “Or rather…”

“Or rather what?”

Mrs. Neumann stared at Hanley for a moment, and Hanley tapped his fingers on the desk top. They both understood her look. She was about to bring up something he either would not understand or would not want to hear.

“It has to do with those created indices,” she said finally.

Hanley sighed. He hated the words. He hated the computer called Tinkertoy. And he hated the nagging edge of this problem that would not be solved and would not become worse and would not go away.

“You’re talking about the…indices…in your job file or memory bank or whatever you call it?”

“The additional ones, Hanley, the ones that weren’t there before.”

“That you believe weren’t there before.”

“Dammit, Hanley, the ones that make connections between entries that I know were never made.”

“That you don’t remember making,” Hanley said.

“My memory is just fine,” she said.

“Of course.”

Three months ago, Mrs. Neumann had slammed into his office with a loud complaint: Someone in Section had tampered with her work files. She had been storing complicated variables in a separate memory file of the computer in order to relate certain types of data—to make cross-checks of minor bits of information. And now someone had tapped into her files and built up these false indices.

Hanley had called in the National Security Agency—the policeman of the intelligence services—to make a careful and routine check of personnel in computer analysis. They had found nothing, and Hanley had not been surprised. He had assumed that Mrs. Neumann had accidentally punched some incorrect entries into Tinkertoy and then gone back over them without remembering to erase them from the computer memory. Mrs. Neumann had not been mollified; her suspicions remained. “The trouble with all of you is that you don’t know a damned thing about computers,” she had said at the time. Everyone agreed with her on that.

“What’s wrong now?” Hanley asked.

“All right. This new data—Tinkertoy has been giving me a correlation coefficient that—”

He held up his hand. “You’ve lost me again, Mrs. Neumann.” He said it with a slight smile that was not pleasant, as though he were a teacher admonishing a child who skipped words in his reading.

“It’s not that hard, Hanley. I wish you’d pay a little more attention to Tinkertoy.”

“I am from another age, a noncomputer age…”

“When spies were spies and men were men,” she said. “Dammit, Hanley, I’m no older than you.”

“Perhaps I am old-fashioned.”

“Perhaps you can afford to be,” she said in her raspy whisper.

“In any event,” he said, “you are in charge of computer analysis, not me. So give me an analysis. In an approximation of plain English.”

“Do you remember on 9 December when we picked up that flutter out of British intelligence through our London station?”

“From Auntie?” He used the British operation’s slang term for itself. “That was about Auntie running a little operation at Mildenhall air force base?”

“Right. Our base in East Anglia.”

“Actually, it is their base, I believe. They allow us to use it.”

“What the hell are the British going to fly out there? Spitfires? The British air force is paper.”

“No political commentary please, Mrs. Neumann.”

“All right. We took all their garbage and fed it into Tinkertoy. All routine. Then on 14 December, Tinkertoy gets fed Quizon’s crapola from Paris about new government postings and we dump it in. Nothing special from Quizon, but that doesn’t surprise me—we never get anything but press clippings from the Paris papers from that old fool.”

“Quizon has been with the Section for a long time.”

“Too damned long.” She paused and shifted her thoughts. “The point is that yesterday I was working from some of those indices. The ones that someone had put into my file when I complained before.”

Another sigh. Hanley realized he wished he were out of this room, strolling down Fourteenth Street, away from this woman and her problem, which Hanley could not quite comprehend.

“So I entered one of those phony indices—”

“I thought you had cleared them from memory.”

“I want to know who’s been screwing around with my computer,” Mrs. Neumann said. “Well, do you know what Tinkertoy gave me? The numbers were fantastic.” She glanced at the look on Hanley’s face and hurried ahead. “Anyway, I had this great idea right away. You know I was puzzled about the data those indices were throwing together because it didn’t seem to mean anything to me. There were things in there like troop movements, but also odd things like indication codes on some individuals. It was like a bowl of popcorn with apples in it—I mean, what the hell do the apples have to do with popcorn?”

“Popcorn?”

“So I asked Tinkertoy to print out all the separate data items that had gone into those indices. And I worked a couple of hours last night going through all the stuff Tinkertoy threw at me, and then it hit me—”

“Overtime? Mrs. Neumann, we need authorization for overtime now. You know that.”

“Damn overtime, listen to me. That index selected out—you can say related, if you want—only three names of individuals. Three goddamn names, Hanley.”

Hanley stared at her.

“Two were British agents, the two agents at Lakenheath-Mildenhall. And one other. A French woman, an official in the Mitterand government. Madame Jeanne Clermont.”

“But I don’t really understand any—”

“Let me finish,” she said sternly. “What do we have? We’ve got someone who thinks Madame Clermont and this Lakenheath business are linked in some way important enough to make them want to enter my files—enter my files, Hanley—and play around inside Tinkertoy to find out how they relate to troop-movement figures or—”

“Troop movements. Mrs. Neumann, we have been through all this before. We’ve had the NSA run checks on everyone at the highest level. I thought we had agreed there is no evidence to support your idea that a mythical someone has tampered with Tinkertoy. Mrs. Neumann, we can’t keep going back and forth over the same ground. We all become a little paranoid, it goes with the business, but you agreed that those ‘created indices’ you complained about must have been an accident.”

“I said that you people didn’t understand anything about computers.”

“Mrs. Neumann, what is the importance of any of this, outside of your obviously firm-rooted paranoia?”

She made a face at him but continued: “Well, it struck me funny because you had talked to me about this Madame Clermont person. Before you sent Manning across. I don’t know. I don’t suppose it would have bothered me that much until we kept getting some other strange stuff coming out of Tinkertoy.”

“Maybe it’s a mistake.”

“Tinkertoy doesn’t make mistakes.”

“Someone made a random entry sequence that coincidentally matched another entry sequence,” Hanley said.

“Yes. I thought of that.”

“Well? Who was it, if it wasn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should know that.”

“I know I should know that, but I don’t. I went back over the entries, and there isn’t any access code.”

“Well, how did the stuff get into the machine?”

“Magic.”

Hanley looked up with a sour expression pursing his lips.

Mrs. Neumann flashed him a broad smile. “I was kidding.”

“There isn’t anything funny.”

“But there is. Someone can get into Tinkertoy. And now we’re getting more of this crazy stuff. Troop strengths along the Czech corridor, you know, the spring games of the Warsaw Pact countries? They’re doubled. I’m sure of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hanley, I had a request from the Baltic desk for some figures on Polish armored strength in the northern sector, near Gdansk. So I punched it into Tinkertoy.”

“Yes?” Hanley asked hurriedly.

“Well, when they came up with some of those troop strengths, something rang a bell up here.” She touched her spiky hair.

“What bell?”

“About a year ago I had some reason to find out the strength of the Ninth Armored of the Polish army, and I remember distinctly the figure of two hundred forty-eight tank units.”

“So?”

“Now Tinkertoy flashed it out four hundred ninety-six. Exactly double. In one year.”

“Is that possible?”

“You tell me.”

“Well, where did the new information come from?”

“That’s it, Hanley.” Her eyes were gleaming. “Tinkertoy said it was there all the time, made in the original report by Taurus in Krakow.” Taurus was the Section R agent in Poland.

“Well, then it must be right.”

“But it isn’t, Hanley, I remember the number. It was two hundred forty-eight, not four hundred ninety-six. Exactly double.”

“Your memory is fallible.”

“Just as yours is, but I do remember some things, and I know I remembered that number, don’t ask me why. And the number is wrong now. Then I went through all the troop strengths in Warsaw Pact, and the figures were incredible. If Tinkertoy is right, the Opposition is putting together a war machine for a hell of a lot more than some troop maneuvers or war games.”

For the first time, Hanley felt a chill seeping through her words. He did not understand computers but he understood Mrs. Neumann’s plain words: a war machine.

“Tell me,” he said. His voice was quiet.

“Six hundred and fifty thousand troops,” she said. “Two thousand six hundred and seventy-five tanks. Nineteen—that’s one nine—armored divisions alone composed of mixed elements of the Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces, and—”

“Mrs. Neumann, that’s impossible. There can’t be so many troops for a war game.”

“Right, Hanley, now you’re getting it.”

“But Tinkertoy can’t be right.”

“Every piece of data in Tinkertoy supports itself. Tinkertoy analyzes that the troop strengths indicate we should put NATO up on red alert status, code two. Now.”

“But what do you think?” He realized his voice had assumed a pleading tone.

“Hanley, I’m in computers, you got other geniuses here to do the heavy thinking. I just give them the stuff to think with.” She paused and looked across the government-issue desk at the middle-aged man with the pursed lips and dour expression. “I put in this name again, this Jeanne Clermont. I wanted all the readouts on her. Interesting woman, Hanley—a middle-class sort of background but she scored well in tests, went to the University of Paris at the Sorbonne. Became a revolutionary, of course—this was 1967. And in 1968, our William Manning uses her to get the stuff on the Reds there…And now she’s in the Mitterand government.”

“I know all this,” Hanley said in his dry way.

“I’m just saying, Hanley, that a person like that could be hooked up with all kinds of funny business.”

“Funny business?”

“She was with the Reds once, with those terror people, maybe she still loves them. The trouble with this business, I’ve told you before, is that you get people like that wandering in, making friends, and you never know what they’re going to get into.”

“I don’t understand the point of this, Mrs. Neumann. Will you be clear? What do you suspect about Tinkertoy?”

“Garbage in, garbage out.”

“Dammit, Mrs. Neumann. We always have had troop strength estimates for the Eastern Bloc. That’s what we do.” He let the sarcasm seep out. “We are in the business of intelligence.”

“But what if it were changed?”

“But what if it wasn’t changed?”

“Exactly.”

“You are driving me mad. You are telling me that if there are changes in the data in Tinkertoy, it has something to do with this other change, the one where somebody allegedly and supposedly and all that—somebody somehow called up the names of Jeanne Clermont and these two British agents for some reason that even you don’t understand.”

“Now you’ve got it, Hanley,” Mrs. Neumann said, smiling with a mother’s pride written on her large face.

“But what do I have exactly?”

“I don’t know, man. That’s what the hell I’ve been trying to tell you and those idiots at NSA for the last four months—I just don’t know. You think there’s some answer in all this, that I should just pluck it out. Well, dammit, Hanley, I don’t know any more.”

And then Hanley realized the chill he felt had nothing to do with the temperature in the little room inside R Section. Tinkertoy could not be fixed. Tinkertoy could not be tapped. It had been set up that way.

But could Tinkertoy ever be wrong?

William Manning put down Le Monde and dropped two ten-franc brass coins on the black tabletop to pay for the croissants and coffee. It was just after ten-thirty in the morning and business in the brasserie was slow. On the other side of the shop, two young men who might have been Sorbonne students were playing the electronic pinball machine with deadly seriousness.

The game involved an invasion of creatures from space who were destroyed systematically as the players fired rockets on a screen. Each “kill” was marked by an electronic sound like an explosion; the explosions reverberated in the brasserie, but no one seemed to notice them.

Behind the zinc counter, the proprietor polished the copper finish of the espresso machine while engaged in a long, raging argument with a fat woman at the cash register who might have been his wife—they argued with intimacy. In front of the counter, the sole waiter lounged, reading the tables in the morning racing sheet.

Manning had entered the place twenty minutes earlier and catalogued all these elements of life there. Then he had selected the table by the rain-spattered window, even though it was chilly outside and the cold could be felt through the thin layer of glass. From his window he could watch the entrance to the English-language book shop across the way. He knew there was no other exit from the shop; in any case, the woman he had followed for three weeks had no reason to think he was watching her or that she needed a way to escape his surveillance. In a few minutes, when she left the shop, it would be over in any case. One way or another.

Thirty-one days before, Manning had arrived in Paris on the Concorde flight from Dulles airport outside Washington. Time for an assignment was never unlimited in the Section; but this was a delicate matter, and even Hanley could provide no guidelines. “Be careful,” he had said at last, as Manning prepared to fly to Paris; “Be careful,” as though that would prepare Manning for everything.

He had surveyed the newspaper records for mention of her; he had talked long into the night with Herbert Quizon, the freelance agent who had immersed himself in the details of her life for the past fifteen years. But no matter how much preparation there had been, nothing readied him for the first sight of her, emerging from the Métro station at the St. Michel entrance, bundled against the February cold in a black coat. None of it prepared him for the pain at seeing her again.

Manning had not spoken of the pain, even to Quizon. He was a thorough agent, a bit wearied by the work of the last fifteen years, but a “good man” in Hanley’s patronizing evaluation. He had followed her to Mass on Sunday at Notre-Dame. He would not have guessed that she practiced religion; he could not remember that she had taken part in Catholic rituals before. Not when he had first known her.

He had followed her with discretion, with a certain dogged skill that was noted in his records back in the Section. In fact, Manning had been code-named “Shadow” by the whimsical clerk in processing who had charge of such matters. Shadow had once observed at close hand, for sixteen months, the staff and cabinet of Ian Smith of the former country of Rhodesia. He never knew what use had been made of his information; he had never wanted to know. He was a man in perpetual shade, always at the edge of events, always the watcher and never the man watched. Until now, until he had to act against Jeanne Clermont again.

It was not difficult to perform surveillance on her. She had settled into a premature middle age that was as predictable as the hour of sunrise. Her habits were the crabbed habits of a spinster, but he refused to think of her by that ugly English word. She was Jeanne Clermont, as she had been to him fifteen years before; as she was now.

Twice in the past month he had broken into her apartment on the fourth floor of the old building at Number 12, rue Mazarine. He had carefully combed through the scattering of books and private papers and photographs that completed Manning’s knowledge of her life in the past fifteen years. He had even found the little schoolgirl diary she still kept; the entries were without color, without use for him. Yet, slowly, with infinite care and patience, he broke into all the elements of her past life kept in the little apartment with the tall ceilings and the narrow windows. All her secrets were broken.

The second break-in had come less than three days before; it had shaken him, nearly to the point where Manning wanted to quit the assignment, to tell Hanley and Quizon that it was no use, to lie that she had a lover, that she knew he had once betrayed her, that the vague scheme would not work. The secret had been buried in an old schoolbook on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in her bedroom. It was a faded black-and-white photograph. Jeanne had forgotten it, no doubt, because the book was covered with dust. Manning had forgotten it as well, and it struck him like a blow.

In the photograph, she stood next to him as they had been fifteen years ago. Her hair was much longer than the way she wore it now. Her hands were in the pockets of her skirt. Her face was open and smiling, amused by the moment and by the chatter of the itinerant old photographer who had snared them at the entrance to the Tuileries that Saturday. It had been Saturday, he remembered it clearly. He remembered the photographer and his droll teasing of her: “Madame is too beautiful not to be photographed, even by someone like me.” He had smiled, revealing yellow and broken teeth.

“Then you may photograph me, monsieur.”

“Only fifty francs.”

“But consider the honor, monsieur, to photograph someone so beautiful.”

“Of course, of course, the honor is great, but unfortunately, I have not been a man of honor for some years…”

How she had smiled, Manning thought again, holding the photograph in his hand in the dull afternoon light of her apartment. She had not only infected the moment with good feelings but she had somehow conveyed the warmth of it to memory, recalled again by the touch of the picture.

He had not wanted to be photographed, and in the picture he was shy and scowling. She had scolded him for his frown. “It could have been such a lovely picture, my keepsake,” she had said.

“But you have me,” he had said.

“How long, William?”

“As long as you want.”

Of course, it had been a lie. Everything was a lie, everything he had said led to betrayal. He could not tell her that the agent who had recruited him had warned him, “You must not be photographed, that’s elementary, at the demonstrations or at school. Remember, you don’t know who’s taking your picture and what he intends to do with it.”

But Jeanne Clermont had twisted round him and had made him pay the fifty francs for the Polaroid photograph from the old photographer. What harm could there be in a Polaroid photograph?

“Please, William, don’t be so sour, you are famous and wealthy, a correspondent from America, you have plenty of money.”

“But the photograph won’t last…”

“I swear, monsieur, on the grave of my mother, it will last forever.”

And so it had. Here, in a page of a dusty schoolbook at the bottom of a bookcase in a Paris apartment. They had stood in the sunlight, facing the gardens, their backs to the Louvre. She held his arm and smiled. What would the Section have said?

He had felt a moment of loss so great that he thought he would die, that he was already dead. Three days ago, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, holding the photograph, hearing the voices of the past—Jeanne, the photographer, Verdun, and the others at the university…What had their expectations of life been on that rare day fifteen years ago? She had shared her bed with him and, after a time, her love. And he had responded in a charade that would end only with terror and betrayal.

“I love you,” he told Jeanne in the darkness of a spring night fifteen years ago. He had spoken the words over and over as they held each other in dreamlike embrace, sated by lovemaking, conscious of the feeling and the smells of the other commingled, breathing softly as one. He had loved her, in fact, which Hanley never knew, or Quizon, or anyone; he had loved her and betrayed her. Why hadn’t he saved her? She might have escaped the net closing around them; she might have gone with him. But he had known, even as he held her, that she would not accept his love and the betrayal of the others. And so he had said nothing to her but that he loved her and would love her forever.

“Monsieur?”

Manning glanced up quickly at the waiter who suddenly hovered at his table.

The waiter had removed the cup of coffee and the plate that had contained the croissants and the ten-franc coins. In the rude way of brasserie waiters in Paris, he was unsubtly demanding further rent on the use of the table in the corner of the empty restaurant. Manning ordered a glass of beer. The waiter made a face that might have been disapproval or merely gas; he withdrew to the counter.

“I think I should arrange the matter on Saturday morning,” Manning had told Hanley laconically on the safe phone thirty-six hours ago.

“Is it time?” The voice, scrambled by complex connectors at each end and flung across an ocean, was curiously tinny.

“I don’t know. I’ve done all I can.”

“But what if she turns you down?”

“Hanley, there are no certainties in the world.”

“But it’s important.”

“I don’t understand that; you’ve never explained that.”

“We’re not certain.” Despite the flat tone, the voice from Washington was suddenly withdrawn into secrets. “We can’t proceed on logical grounds.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Be careful.” So Hanley had repeated the inane advice, the same he had given at the start of the assignment. He had said it might not work, that he could not predict the human factor. And Manning had not understood a word of it except that they wanted him to confront Jeanne Clermont after fifteen years and lie his way back into her confidence and, if possible, into her bed.

As he followed her, the scenes of the old city had made him ache with nostalgia. He had not been in Paris since 1968, since the night he fled the capital after giving the Section her name and the names of the others and the proofs and the locations of the secret houses. Three years later, after a tour in Vietnam, he had learned what had happened to her. A trade had been arranged between R Section an. . .