Declare (11 page)

Hale just nodded; but he remembered coming across lightning tubes, in a desolate region where huge basalt stones moved like smoke and sand dunes roared like low-flying bomber aircraft engines, south of the well at Umm al-Hadid in the Arabian Rub’ al-Khali desert, in early 1948. The wail in his head was louder, and he thought he might be sick.

“But we knew what he was now, you see,” said Theodora. “So we worked to achieve definition of his motivations for defection, as recruiters say—that is, exacerbate his problems. An agent of ours in the embassy was able to tell us that Zhlobin was forever taking pills and measuring his own blood pressure and running to the embassy doctor.”

“So you—you crash-turned the doctor.”

Theodora smiled. “Did we not. We showed that poor man KGB documents we’d got from our own sources and told him how we’d claim to have got them from him, and showed him composed photographs of himself in bed with an MI5 woman—he quickly agreed to give Zhlobin a convincing diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.” Theodora shrugged. “We figured that might soften him up for a pass, you know; we could even promise a cure as a prerequisite to any questioning, miracles of modern British medicine, since he didn’t have the cancer anyway; but before we could approach him, Zhlobin went out solo, and he
dived
—he used every elusion trick in the book, pogo-sticking like a twenty-year-old all over Bloomsbury and Holborn, and even a quick four-car team of our watchers could scarcely keep him in sight! Well, he wasn’t hiding from
us
, he was hiding from his own security people. And where do you think he went?”

To a pub, thought Hale; to a whorehouse. “To St. Paul’s.”

Theodora looked nettled. “Why did you say that? You’re almost right—he went to a Catholic church near the Old Bailey and went to Confession! The Papist sacrament of that name! Some of our fellows were all for quick-miking the confessional, but I said to back off. I braced him on his way out of the church, and he immediately broke down weeping, in that Slavic way, and agreed to everything I said. I promised him citizenship and a new identity and stacks of money and total medical care—I didn’t want to get too specific there—and we got him to one of our safe houses right off the Holborn Viaduct. For five hours he answered every question I put to him.” Theodora sighed. “Then he said he wanted a bath, and he pulled a radio into the tub with him, and that was the end of Zhlobin.”

Hale blinked. “Deliberately?”

“He had to plug the radio into a closer outlet, for the cord to reach.”

“Huh! That rather negates his confession—the one to the priest, I mean.”

“Perhaps that was the penance the priest assigned. I felt that, if anything, it enhanced his confession to us.”

For a moment neither of them spoke, and Theodora’s fan swished and rattled faintly in the warm air; then the old man stirred and said, “You’re right, the Russians have no intention of annexing eastern Turkey—but they are preparing to send a team in again to Mount Ararat, as they did in ’48 and tried to do again in ’52; if all goes as planned, you and Philby will be members of the team.”

The ankh in Hale’s pocket was twitching with his rapid heartbeat, and he had to take a deep breath to speak. “Back to Ararat,” he said, “to finally kill the—”

Theodora waited with raised eyebrows for him to finish, then laughed softly when Hale lapsed into silence. “If I had thought there was any chance of you completing that sentence, I would have shushed you. But your instincts are still good; what do
I
know about the microphone situation here, really, right?”

“Sure.” Hale stretched his arms out and yawned again. “Is
lunch
a prospect of any imminence? What on earth can you
mean
, Philby
and I will be ‘members of the team’ when the—Russians go up Ararat again?”

With his free hand Theodora reached over to the silk bundle he had laid on the table and flipped the edges of the handkerchief aside. Lying on the fabric was a tiny hand-drill like a screwdriver, a dental pick, and a plastic cylinder no bigger than a cigarette filter with a fine antenna wire projecting two inches from one end.

Hale nearly forgot his hanging question as he stared at the kit in disbelief. The plastic cylinder was clearly a miniature microphone, an electronic bug, and the tools were for installing it.

“Well,” Theodora said smoothly, “the expedition probably can’t succeed without Philby; the—the Russian equivalent of our SOE, at least, is convinced that it can’t, and I think they’re right. Philby is in a privileged position, relative to the thing on Ararat, that the Russians know they can’t duplicate with anyone else—you’ll be told about that shortly, when you get to Kuwait. They may serve some sort of tiffin on the plane.”

The archaic word reminded Hale that Theodora had long ago served in the Indian Civil Service, the Raj—where high-handed schemes had been the standard
modus operandi.
“When I—get to Kuwait,” Hale said in a monotone. He gave the old man a wide-eyed questioning stare and waved his spread fingers stiffly at the kit.

Theodora frowned impatiently and snapped his fan closed to use it and both hands in a pantomime of drilling and inserting.

He wants me, thought Hale incredulously, to plant a bug in this secured conference room! In Number 10 Downing Street!
I wonder what the new PM’s attitude will be toward the poor old services
— the old man doesn’t intend to wait for hints.

Theodora held up his free hand. “But!—when we grabbed Philby at the Turkish–Soviet border in the winter of ’52 and forced him to switch sides, there wasn’t time to set up a sabotage of the Russian attempt on the mountain; we had to force them simply to abort it, so that they’d have to try it again at some later date, when we’d have something prepared.”

Would you break the laws of England, if we ordered it?
thought Hale as he tried to pay attention to what Theodora was saying;
Yes
,
I would.
God help me. He sighed and glanced around the room as Theodora had done. There was no telephone, nor any window frame at all, much less a nice metal one to damp the microphone’s electro-magnetic field, and Hale finally shrugged and pointed down at the table.

The old man nodded judiciously, and then went on, “We had to ask Philby himself!—who had then been a double agent of ours for only about ten minutes—what development would cause the Russians to call it off; and in his imperturbable way he advised fomenting an uprising among the native Kurds, with the Turkish government goaded to respond in force.”

Hale leaned forward to lift his chair by the arms, hike it back a yard, and then slowly and silently lower it to the wooden floor; then he slid the handkerchief and its burden closer to him and knelt carefully between the chair and the table.

“So we hastily burned some Kurd villages in the area,” Theodora said, waving his ivory fan to make it rattle, “shot a couple of the Oscars with Kurdish rifles, and got an excitable Turk captain to radio a grossly exaggerated report of it to Ankara, and then we bribed a Security Inspectorate bureaucrat there to send in the Turkish Air Force.”

Hale recalled that
Oscar
had been the enduring American mispronunciation of the Turk word
asker
, which meant soldier; and fleetingly, remembering the hospitality of a Khan in the Zagros Mountains, he hoped the Kurds had come through the contrived skirmish without too many casualties. He nodded, then picked up the tiny hand-drill and ducked his head under the tabletop and peered up at the underside; a hole for a counter-sunk screw in the corner-block nearest him looked like the best spot, and he pressed the bit of the drill at an angle into the hole and began twisting the handle, cupping his free hand under it to catch the curls of sawdust. The knees of the old man’s neatly pressed striped trousers were only a couple of feet in front of his face.

Theodora wasn’t speaking any louder than before, and Hale had to cock his head to hear him as he kept twisting the drill: “It was a proper circus around Ararat for a week or so, with the ignorant KGB
and the Red Army panicking on the Russian side of the Aras River, and therefore the Shah sending Iranian aircraft out to patrol
their
border—and the Russian expedition was indeed canceled, with no evidence that the circumstances had had anything to do with Philby, who obviously had no choice then but to return to England. So far so good, you’ll say.”

Hale straightened up from under the table to replace the drill and lift the pick and the little microphone. “Consider it said,” he told the old man in a conversational tone, and then ducked under the table again. The drill bit had been well chosen—the plastic cylinder slid tightly into the new, oblique hole without needing any help from the pick, and its fine antenna was invisible in the shadows. He knew Theodora wouldn’t be sending an activating signal to the microphone, making it vulnerable to electronic security sweeps, until such time as Macmillan’s government fell and a Labour Party Prime Minister took office.

“But the secret Russian directors were suspicious of Philby anyway,” he could hear Theodora saying over the rapid, covering rattle of the ivory fan, “clearly wondering if he had been turned there in Turkey, or in London the year before when MI5 interrogated him about Burgess and Maclean, or even right after the failure in ’48. They’ve always been so leery of Ararat, since Lenin got killed fooling with it, that they’d jump at any honorable excuse to leave it alone; we’ve had to nudge them at every turn to encourage them to try it again, so that we’ll be able to step in at the last moment and finally close down the whole show. And so we had to leave Philby out trailing his coat, for another six years, before they worked up the nerve to get back in contact with him.”

Hale pocketed the sawdust and wiped his hand on the pocket lining, then stood up and laid the pick on the handkerchief. “Six years of it,” he said respectfully as he slowly sat down in his chair, “and he wasn’t working for SIS anymore.” He reached for his own handkerchief, but it was in the coat he had left in the Peugeot; so he mopped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with the new coat’s rough sleeve.

“No,” agreed Theodora, nodding with evident satisfaction as he
reached forward to fold the handkerchief and sweep it back into his own pocket, “he was as attractive as we could make him—virtually bankrupt and doing odd ghost-writing jobs, drinking too much, his wife going crazy, avoided by all his old friends. And then after the Prime Minister exonerated him in Parliament, SIS gave him some charity chicken-feed jobs in Beirut, where he’s been doing journalistic piecework. And Angleton’s CIA men in Lebanon have been harassing him and getting him arrested on trivial suspicions, which certainly hasn’t made it look as though he had any
usefulness
to anybody. We painted them a proper picture, with him. And still it was mere KGB that finally approached him, very tentatively, in ’58. But he continued to look genuinely abandoned—brilliant man, he even tried to get Indian citizenship in 1960!—and now he’s fully back on the old Russian force, as trusted by them as anybody ever is.” He finally clicked his fan closed and tucked it back into his pocket.

Hale pushed away the fresh memories of having installed the microphone, trying to do it so thoroughly that he would even be able to deny the action convincingly in a polygraph interrogation. He focused all his attention on the old man’s story. “And—me?” he asked now. Hale recalled Theodora telling him, in 1941,
It’s not so much
our
plans for you that are at issue.

“Yes. Well, this has to move fast. Last night in Beirut”—he glanced at his wristwatch—“sixteen hours ago, someone shot Kim Philby as he stood too near the bathroom window of his Beirut apartment; it was a .30-caliber rifle round, fired from the roof of a building across the street. He’s alive—the bullet nearly missed, cracked his skull instead of exploding it. He’s had it put about that the injury was caused by a drunken fall, but he very nearly bled to death, and the wound took twenty-four stitches at a local hospital, and he isn’t expected to be receiving company for a few days. Peter Lunn has been head of the SIS Lebanon station in Beirut since October, and of course the hospital staff will have let
him
know that it’s a gunshot wound, and he knows that Philby has been doing allotment work for the service since his semi-vindication in ’55; Lunn doesn’t know yet about SIS’s new evidence against Philby,
and the impending immunity offer, but he will certainly be calling Philby up soon, wanting to ask about this assassination attempt.”

Hale’s heartbeat had nearly slowed to normal. “Who would the shooter represent?” he asked. “Not
us
, I gather, nor the broader SIS, and not any of the powers out of Moscow.”

Theodora shrugged expansively. “The Turkish Security Inspectorate? The
Service de Documentation Extérieure et d’Contre-Espionage?
Mossad? Any of them would like to spike this covert Russian expedition, if they knew about it and didn’t trust us to effectively infiltrate a”—he waved at Hale—“a Trojan horse; or if they feared En gland might try to harness the Ararat power for herself, instead of simply killing it. We’re aware now of a woman with a forged Canadian passport who flew from Istanbul to Beirut yesterday morning, and a Beirut taxi driver remembers driving her to the Rue Kantari, where Philby lives, at sunset. She was carrying a case for a musical instrument the size of an alto saxophone. We made the Istanbul Head of Station get whatever he could out of the room she had vacated; but the room had been cleaned, and all they found was two slips of paper that had been in the waste bin—on one was written
‘Bueno Año,’
and on the other
‘Medio Año.’ ”