Both men were down and blood was on the trail, on their clothing, on the trees around them.
Devereaux climbed out of the culvert and loped forward, reloading the shotgun as he ran.
Rita made a strangled sound that was half a cry, half a scream. She put her hands to her ears as though to stop the sound of the shotgun long after the echo of it ceased to reverberate in the sudden still of the forest.
When he reached the place where they had fallen, he stood over them. The first one was short and dark and plainly dead.
The second man was alive.
He moaned. His belly was open.
Devereaux reached into his coat and pulled out the Czech pistol and threw it aside. He reached for identification cards.
Balkan Export Company.
He threw the cards aside and the dying man spoke, slowly, as Rita ran to the scene. She was sick and turned and vomited away from the bloody bodies, into the woods.
Devereaux listened to the dying man.
Then he stood up and pulled the black Colt Python from his belt. His face showed nothing.
She spoke: “Dev.”
“Death to spies,” he said quietly. “He said it in Russian.” He stared at her for a moment but he could not say her name even, not now. And then he fired point-blank into the face of the dying man.
“My God, my God,” she said.
But he did not speak. He only felt the heaviness of the pistol in his hand, felt it hold him like a chain.
They buried the two men in the woods. When the horror of it was over, they could not speak to each other.
They sat in the large room of the cabin before the roaring fire and felt cold, felt apart from each other.
“I can take you back in the morning,” he said.
“Yes,” she said dully. She stared at the fire and saw the bodies of two men. She saw Devereaux standing over a man with a pistol, firing into his face. She saw a man at the end of a corridor in a department store with a long, thin knife blocking her way.
“We have to go in two cars. I’ll take the rental car and dump it in Fairfax on the way in. You can follow me and pick me up.”
“Yes,” she said, without tone.
“You saw the way it was,” he said.
“I can…” And then she couldn’t speak. She began to cry. He did not move toward her.
“Dev, help me.”
And then he touched her.
“I feel so cold,” she said. “I feel so cold.”
Cold and cold, he thought, until you can feel nothing again.
“I don’t want to leave you,” she sobbed against him. “I love you, I love you, but I’m so frightened.”
Cold and cold, he thought, it would never end. Hell was not fire; hell was a frozen place. Hell was darkness and separation and emptiness.
“I love you,” she said.
“Rita,” he replied. They held each other then against the night that enveloped the mountain, that blackened the forest on the mountain until the shadow and substance of the woods were the same thing, that permeated the house, that was held back only by the flickering flames that gave them a momentary warmth before the cold enveloped them.
About the Author
An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for Newsday—and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to Time, the New Republic, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.
He began his literary career in 1979 with Code Name November (originally published as The November Man), the book that became an international sensation and introduced the cool American spy who later gave rise to a whole series. His second novel, Public Murders, a Chicago police procedural, won the Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1981.
In all, Bill Granger published thirteen November Man novels, three nonfiction books, and nine novels. In 1980, he began weekly columns in the Chicago Tribune on everyday life (he was voted best Illinois columnist by UPI), which were collected in the book Chicago Pieces. His books have been translated into ten languages.
Bill Granger passed away in 2012.