They drove out of the town along a road that ran through the valley and led to the hills. Two miles beyond Front Royal, they found the rutted dirt road that led up to his mountain.
Devereaux had told Elizabeth they could see the Shenandoah River from the top of the mountain. He said there were bears and wild deer in the virgin forests along both sides of the road.
There had been a light rain in the valley; now they drove up to the light snow covering the mountains. There were tracks of animals in the snow, animals scurrying for the last bit of forage against the winter. Devereaux drove slowly through the mists that thickened along the road. When they neared the top of the mountain, the mists were so thick they could scarcely see the road.
Elizabeth had not spoken. She was like a child being shown unexpected magic, given rare treats. She absorbed it all and watched him; he looked different now, in the pale light. The light softened the hardness and the edges of his face.
It was safe now. He had made it safe. They were not afraid anymore. They would live.
This was what he had promised.
The house was at the end of the dirt road and seemed lost in another world. There was no valley below and no sky above, only the mists shrouding the wooden house and the immense silence of nature.
When they got out of the car, Elizabeth helped Devereaux carry the groceries inside; he got the bags while she filled the old-fashioned refrigerator.
He had warned her the place would be cold.
The house was dark and silent when they entered; he went from room to room and turned on the lights and he set to building a fire in the stone fireplace in the great living room.
He turned on the large gas heaters on the wall, but the chill was slow in leaving.
There was mail, as well; he threw all the accumulated mail down on the table behind the couch in the living room. The couch faced the fire. They sat in front of the fire and listened to its roaring; they ate after a while and then they made love; the house was warm and the darkness pressed at the windows; they drank wine and made love again.
Elizabeth fell asleep on the rug before the fire, snuggled in pillows. When she awoke, it was because she heard him laughing.
She had never heard him laugh before.
He laughed slowly; in a deep, gentle rumble, coming from some warm place in him that she had never discovered.
She smiled and opened her eyes. It was night and the fire was still burning.
“You’re laughing.”
He was sitting at the table behind the couch. He looked at her and continued to laugh.
She began to laugh in empathy, the way people must laugh when they hear others.
“Why?” she asked.
He couldn’t speak. He finally handed her a piece of paper and she read it with an eager smile on her face; but it puzzled her and she didn’t understand. She read it again.
The letter was an official notice addressed to Devereaux.
From the American Express Company. Suspending the use of his credit card until his overdue balance was paid.
AFTERWORD
Code Name November (originally published as The November Man) was my first novel. It was published in September, 1979. Two weeks after it appeared in a paperback edition from Fawcett Gold Medal Library, Lord Louis Mountbatten of Britain was assassinated on his boat off the western coast of Ireland.
That event was to make this book an infamous reminder that realistic fiction — if it is to be any good at all — is merely a clear mirror vision of what is really happening in the world described. The things that happen in fiction mirror those things that have happened — or will happen soon — in real life. The parallels between what in fact happened off the Irish coast to a cousin of the Queen and what happened in the pages of The November Man to the character of Lord Slough were both derived from the terrorism and sorrow of a radically divided Ireland. In one case, a real life ended; in my book, I wrote from knowledge of my own time spent reporting the story of death and terror in Northern Ireland.
Within twenty-four hours of Lord Mountbatten’s assassination by elements of the Irish Republican Army terrorist group. The November Man became internationally famous. I sat in my kitchen in a suburb near Chicago and received calls morning and night from around the world. There were live interviews on the phone with morning DJs in Sydney, Australia, and post-midnight calls from the Glasgow Herald. The calls from reporters all asked the same question in different ways: “How did you foretell the death of Louis Mountbatten in your novel?”
I did not. My book had been based, as are all the others in the series, on some reporting and my own interviews and experience. The world of intelligence, espionage, and terrorism explored in the November Man novels is a glass turned to the real and quite shadowy world that exists beneath the consciousness of most of us.
In August, 1971, my wife and I were at the end of a six-month period of bumming our way across the face of Europe. We had been in Narvik, Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle; we had lived off the generosity of friends in Rome to experience the daily life of the ancient city; we had lived with relatives outside London and in slums inside Paris. We were at the end of our money and our experiences had filled us with a thousand stories of everyday life in the old countries of the world. We had lived in two-dollar-a-night flophouses in Paris and Madrid, bed-and-breakfast places in obscure cities like Lincoln, England, and we had not so much seen a different world but felt it and heard it and smelled it until it had become part of us.
We had stopped this August night in The Corner House Hotel in Burford, which is in the old sheep country that once provided England with all its wealth. We went out in the evening — it was warm and smelled of earth, sheep, and the lushness of the English countryside — and noticed the local evening paper in the front parlor of the hotel. The Oxford Mail carried a typical one-word headline: INTERNMENT.
The British authorities in Northern Ireland had decided to suspend habeas corpus rights for the Irish in exchange for a measure of order. In a swift roundup, they had locked up suspected IRA supporters, sympathizers, and participants without benefit of trial or charges. Some of them were interned on prison ships in the harbor of Belfast.
The story was about the British measures — not the Irish response. I felt certain there would be violence and that it was going to be a hell of a story to cover.
I was a reporter on leave then from the Chicago Sun-Times. I was also a stringer for Newsday on Long Island. My wife and I, pushed to our last pennies by our mad half-year holiday in Europe, talked about the opportunity of what was happening in Ireland. I am sorry to say that is the way I saw it — as a reporting opportunity. I was so close to what I was sure was a battle.
I telephoned the Sun-Times, which declined my offer to go back on full salary to cover the war. It was run in those days by a parsimonious management that considered “foreign” stories those events that take place in the farther suburbs of Chicago. But Newsday editor Don Forst called back in the wee hours and commissioned me to battle. I had never been in Ireland before; I had no idea how to get there. My phone calls had excited the considerable curiosity of Mr. Bateman, the proprietor of the hotel (who would later take a year out of his life to do nothing but sail a barge from England through the waterways of France to the Bay of Biscay). Bateman thought my best bet was to take a fast train north and then cross to the ferry service to Larne Harbour, Belfast. He undertook to drive me across the countryside to Cheltenham to pick up the fast train for Glasgow. My wife and I separated and, in twenty-four hours, I was in Belfast and she was safe in the little village of Bridge-of-Erin in Scotland.