Free The November Man by Bill Granger Page A

Swiss francs. Because he wanted the money in denominations of 100 francs, there were 100 bills and the wad was thick enough to split in two—half in his inside jacket pocket, the other half in the lower “cargo” pocket of his denim trousers.
    While he made these preparations for flight, he tried to see what was unusual around him. He had lived long enough in Lausanne to find the oddities in the colorful scenes on the street.
    There were old women in black coats hurrying to do their shopping and men in brown caps, smoking curved pipes, and businessmen with their coats open to the warm breeze, walking with the light step of their younger days. What did not fit this scene?
    And he saw the two men sitting in the Saab down the street, watching the life surge around them.
    Two men at noon on a weekday in a car bearing the license plates of Bern. This was Vaud; they were far from home. They were sitting in an expensive Swedish car in the middle of the day on a side street, waiting for someone. They had to be waiting for someone. In a rental car most likely. Businessmen from abroad.
    They seemed to be parked just on the periphery of his activity.
    He thought about the crude warning given Claudette in the café. It was stupid, almost self-defeating. It invited him to flee, which was what he was doing.
    Why?
    KGB, like the other espionage services and some terrorist organizations, passed through Switzerland easily on their way to activities in the north and—more likely—the south of Europe. But incidents of terror in Switzerland were rare enough to be nonexistent. The reason was simple: Switzerland was a compact, orderly country with a fierce military tradition and an absolutely cold-blooded approach to dealing with terror. It was not acceptable, not negotiable, and, in the long run, not worth the effort on the part of terrorists. Devereaux considered all this information in a split second, as a computer might, except that the mind worked faster when it was trained to consider information with both thought and feeling.
    Devereaux crossed the broad avenue to the long, red stone train station. A white-gloved policeman held up his hand against the traffic.
    Devereaux stopped at the kiosk where he usually bought the papers and chose the current copy of the
Economist
. Exactly as a potential railroad passenger might, choosing a magazine to kill the time on the train. He paid and turned around and saw the Saab parked illegally at the curb by the Continental Hotel across the way. He walked into the train station, across the concourse, to the ticket windows. He stood in line behind two schoolgirls who were talking to each other between giggles. When he reached the window, he bought the ticket for Zurich.He stood with the ticket a moment and looked in a glass window of a confectionary shop inside the terminal. He saw the two men at the entrance of the station.
    Devereaux crossed the concourse to the platforms. The train for Geneva was just pulling into the first platform. It didn’t matter: They had seen him buy the ticket, they had observed him walk to the platform. They would draw the right conclusion.
    He climbed aboard.
    The train waited.
    He went to one of the windows and watched.
    The two men stepped onto the platform and they stared at the train, at the very car where Devereaux waited. They looked at each other and then looked up and down the platform. At the last moment, they started across the concrete platform toward the waiting train.
    Perhaps they had miscalculated and thought he would flee by auto.
    Devereaux opened the door at the end of the car and dropped from the train onto the platform as the electrified express to Geneva quickly picked up speed. A conductor at the far end of the platform frowned at Devereaux. He walked over and shook his finger and told him about the dangers of jumping from a moving train. Devereaux had broken the rules in a country of rules.
    Devereaux crossed the platform slowly, watching the train