Declare (43 page)

Soviet military lorries passed him in both directions during the two-hour drive west, but he resisted the surprisingly strong impulse to race out of the Russian territory; and before slowing for the final checkpoint at the Helmstedt border crossing, he wiped the sweat from his face and managed to breathe deeply and slowly. A number of German diesel lorries were halted on the shoulder so that the loads could be checked, but when the checkpoint guard looked at Hale’s stamped travel order, he simply waved, and the barrier was lifted.

Hale drove through, into the British Zone of conquered Germany. Abandoned brick warehouses fronted the street, and on the nearest curb stood a figure in an overcoat and a homburg hat—Hale recognized Theodora even as the figure began waving. Hale pulled over, and Theodora opened the door and climbed in, setting his hat on his lap.

“Don’t talk,” the gray-haired man told him shortly, “the Americans probably miked the car. Just drive straight ahead here.”

Hale nodded and let out the clutch; and when the road had led them past the last outlying farmhouses of Helmstedt to shaggy green fields, Theodora said, “This will do. Pull over to the shoulder here. I’m not flying back with you, and I might not see you again in London. You’ll give me your report now.”

Hale nodded and steered the car onto the muddy shoulder, and when it had squeaked to a halt he rocked the shift lever into neutral and set the hand brake, and then clanked open the driver’s-side door.

Theodora leaned forward, frowning. “I hope the report will be
lengthy
enough,” he said, “to make it worthwhile turning off the damned
engine.”
“Oh, yes, sir, of course,” said Hale, reaching back to switch off the ignition. In the sudden silence he swung his legs out of the car
and straightened up; blinking over the car’s roof before Theodora unfolded himself from the passenger seat, Hale looked out across what he now recognized as wheat fields. No farmer was visible, and Hale wondered if there were still working tractors here.

When Theodora had stood up straight and replaced his hat, he strode west along the shoulder, his hands clasped behind the tails of his coat and his head down to be sure of keeping his shoes out of puddles. Hale trudged along after him.

When they had walked a hundred feet away from the Renault, Theodora turned around and fixed Hale with a chilly stare. “Well?”

“The stone is buried under fresh cement, sir,” said Hale, “about two hundred feet from the Brandenburg Gate on the western side, pretty much centered. I’ve done drawings,” he added, reaching into his pocket for the diagrams he had made that morning, “indicating the exact position—I can amplify them to make them more precise, now.”

Theodora took the papers and glanced at them. “Good, I think this is clear.” Again he turned his cold eyes on Hale. “Go on. Tell me every detail.”

Hale began easily by telling him about his visit with the American Flannery and hearing that Kim Philby was in Berlin; then he recounted the pursuit of the fugitive from the Soviet Sector, and told Theodora how the man had seemed to be herded to the spot where the stone would soon be buried, and how the fugitive had been killed there. Hale became aware of a reluctance when he came to describing meeting Elena and Cassagnac at the restaurant by the Reich stag, and Philby’s intrusion and odd behavior with the insecticide. And when his narrative got to the point when he had stood up from the table to go get food, he abandoned the story he had concocted on the drive west to Helmstedt and just stopped talking.

“Food,” said Theodora impatiently, “right. Did you get some bloody food, or what?”

“No, sir, not then.” Hale felt dizzy, and he didn’t even know whether he hoped he was ending his SIS career here, or not. At last, slowly and deliberately, he went on: “There was a radio playing in the restaurant, and the music it had been playing was interrupted
by—by an interference which I had learned in Paris meant—super-natural—attention—being paid.” He was sweating again, and he discovered that it was no easier going on with this than it had been starting. “Magic, that is, sir,” he said, feeling as if the words were coins he had tried to smuggle out, surrendered now as he pushed them out past his lips. “I think I should amplify the report I made to you concerning my three months in occupied Paris in ’41,” he added, “by the way.”

Theodora exhaled, and Hale wondered how long the man had been holding his breath. “Good lad. Good lad. So many promising agents manage to convince even
themselves
that they didn’t see what they saw—but go on. And
don’t
tell me, in tones of apology, that
‘It gets more weird’
—I do know that.” “Right. Well …” Hale ground out the story of the rest of the night, omitting only the gallows-marriage on the boat and going to bed with Elena—in this version of the story, he and Elena had parted outside the restaurant.

The sun was high when at last, with relief, he described ditching the gun and driving back up the hole to the Helmstedt checkpoint.

Theodora strode away across the mud, careless now of his shoes. He was nodding, and after a few paces he turned around again to face Hale. “Good. I did want to know where the stone was put, and I’m glad to learn of Philby’s participation—oh, he was there about the stone too, lad, don’t doubt it—and I think I’m alarmed at how aware the French DGSS is—but this was a test, too, to find out if you’re worth all the years and money we’ve expended on you. Happily, you are. And I trust you are discreet with your little Spanish judy, no secrets revealed over the pillow. Eunuchs for agents would be best, I sometimes think. Impossible to get it past the Foreign Secretary, of course. Your work will be—of a different nature, now that you’re an initiate. You’ve learned all you can from the old files, I expect, and it’s time to put you in the field. When you get back to Broadway, you’ll be sent to Fort Monkton for a six-week training course in the paramilitary arts, and then you’ll be posted to the Middle East, Kuwait probably, under the cover of the Combined Research Planning Office, known jocularly as Creepo.”

“The Middle East,” said Hale thoughtfully. He had been hungry all morning, but now he felt distinctly nauseated; and he knew that it was fear that had quickened his heartbeat—but this was the next step
farther in
, on the way to learning the very deepest secrets of the world, of the most powerful and most hidden world. He flexed his right hand, remembering how the whirlwind had bowed in the rain when he had waved the ankh…

Theodora nodded. “Not totally a surprise, I daresay. Before you go, I will acquaint you with the big picture, the biggest picture— and then, finally, indoctrinate you for clearance to what we have called Operation Declare.”

Know, Not Think It

Beirut, 1963

And the two of them, laying him east and west, that the mysterious earth currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon— bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by nerve.

—Rudyard Kipling,
Kim

Kim Philby sat back in his chair by the window-side table in the Normandy Hotel bar, and he licked his lips, tasting her lipstick. The woman on the other side of the table simply stared at him for a moment, then took a long inhalation on her cigarette. Out beyond the window glass the late afternoon sky was gold over the purple sea.

Philby smiled at her, but he was nettled. He found her prematurely bone-white hair very erotic, but her lips had been as inert as the back of her hand would have been; and he wished his head were not ludicrously wrapped in white bandages. “I do b-beg your p-pardon, Miss C-B. My Sov-oviet
handler
was in the l-lobby, with some cadaverous specimen, j-just now. They d-didden
did not
come in, but if you do in-snit—
insist
on meeting me in my—office this way, we had b-better pretend to be h-having an extramerry-extramartial-extramarital—”

“I understand,” said Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga in careful English. She sighed out a puff of smoke, then picked up her glass of Dubonnet. “In our work we have to emulate Judas sometimes.” She
finished the red drink in two gulps, raising her disconcertingly dark eyebrows at him over the rim. “Your office, this hotel bar is?” she asked when she had put the glass down.

“I g-get my mail here, and the c-concierge keeps a tah-tah-typewriter here, for my use. I’m a j-
journalist
, you know, these days.” He picked up his own glass, swirling the gin among the diminished ice cubes. “But Judas, you say? The outfit I pro-propose to b-b-b—betray!—is hardly the aqua-equi-equivalent of the Son of man, even in my atheistic c-consideration.” He smiled more broadly. “Or maybe you mean I turn out to have betrayed
you?”

Elena stubbed out her cigarette. “I haven’t seen you since Turkey in 1948,” she said, getting to her feet and smoothing her skirt. “If you and I had a—had anything at all—then, I’m sure I can’t recall it.” She glanced around at the tables and the beaded curtain that led into the lobby. “Is there another way out of here? I’d never have been so careless as to approach you here, if I’d known you still had a—damned
handler
about. Bad craft, I apologize—we assumed you were in retirement here in Beirut.” She spoke calmly, but he could see a quicker pulse in the side of her neck.

Philby tipped up his glass for the last mouthful of gin. “Beirut is a neutral city,” he told her. “And my employers are not ee-eager right now to be doing any such—con-conspicuously
robust
operations—as k-kidnapping agents of a f-f-foreign power. But you’re right, we probably shhh—should not be seen together.” He waved toward the bar. “Anwar will let us leave by the delivery dock in back.” He set down his glass, reached under the table to be sure the snub-nose .38 was still secure in the elastic ankle holster and that his trouser cuff was tugged over it, and then he stood up.

As they walked across the tile floor toward the mahogany-and-brass bar, he said, “ ‘If we had anything at all, then—you’re sure y-you can’t recall it.’ I have a fucking b-bullet-hole in my head; do take note of the f-fact that you have n-n-not got one in yours.”

He was pleased to see her face redden, at that.

“I—I know,” she said as she stepped behind the bar and nodded distractedly at the simpering moustached Anwar. “I do remember.”

They walked out the back door and down the alley behind the
Normandy Hotel, past the fire escapes and the hot-air fan vents, and when they emerged into the early twilight on the main street side-walk Philby waved at a passing Service taxi and called
“Serveece!”
The taxi pulled in to the curb, and for once there were no other passengers already inside. Philby opened the back door for Elena, then went around to the street side and climbed in himself. He gave the driver 125 piastres, and said, in quick French, “I’m paying for all five spaces, right? No other passengers, right? Take us to Chouran Street, by the Pigeon Rock.” He beamed at Elena and draped his right arm over the seat back behind her. In German, he said, “I’m fascinated that the”—the French SDECE, he thought, Pompidou’s secret service; but the driver
might
speak German—“that they chose to send
you.”

She answered in the same language. “The thinking was that since I have known you in the past, I would be best able to gauge whether your offer is genuine or not. And I’m an off-paper operative—if your offer is a trap, if I am arrested, then I am disownable, not traceably in their employ. But if I judge that it is genuine”—the German word she used was
richtig
—“my employers will exfiltrate you from here immediately, and give you a new identity and much money in my country. If you renege in any way, we will…
give you the truth
, as your people say.”