Declare (48 page)

Hale nodded and lifted one of the glasses with a shaky hand. The liquor was sharp with the taste of anise, but when he had swal-lowed it he was glad of the expanding heat in his chest.

“What,” said Mammalian thoughtfully, “has the British secret service learned about our plans involving Mount Ararat?”

“We—got the first hints of it when—Volkov—tried to defect from the Soviet NKGB, in Istanbul in ’45,” said Hale. He clanked the glass down, and a few drops flew out and beaded like pearls on the polished dark wood. In spite of what Mammalian had said, he was so tense that it was a conscious effort to breathe. Somehow it didn’t help that he had gone over this same ground four days earlier with Ishmael. Ishmael’s subsequent death had been a reprieve, a negation of it.

“But the NKGB
killed
Konstantin Volkov,” said Mammalian, “before he could defect.”

“True,” said Hale. He forced his shoulders to relax, and he spread his hands on the desktop.

“Just wade slowly into the surf. It is cold, but still very shallow.”

Hale nodded. “Volkov was a walk-in,” he said. “He apparently just went to the British Consulate General building one day in August of ’45, and said he wanted to sell information; he had a lot of—names of Soviet agents, even of doubles working in the British service, but the—the big item—was details about a most-secret impending Soviet operation in eastern Turkey.”

“Go on. Take your time.”

Hale filled his lungs, and then just let the words tumble out in a rush: “Volkov was the NKGB deputy resident, under cover as the local Soviet consul general, and in exchange for his full deposition he wanted a lot of money and a
laissez-passer
to Cyprus for himself and his wife. Unfortunately our ambassador was on vacation, and his
chargé d’affaires
didn’t approve of espionage, so he
didn’t relay the offer to Cyril Machray, the SIS station commander. Both Machray and the ambassador had been indoctrinated into the outlines of our fugitive-SOE operation and would have relayed him to our man in Turkey. As it happened, though, Volkov’s offer was simply sent by diplomatic bag to the SIS Section Nine in Broadway, in London, where Kim Philby was in charge. Philby took control of Volkov’s case and somehow didn’t manage to drag himself down to Istanbul until a month had passed since Volkov’s visit; and by that time Volkov and his wife had been loaded into a Moscow-bound airplane—on stretchers, wrapped in bandages.”

He had been unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice, and Mammalian smiled sympathetically. “Ah, well, Philby was one of ours, you know. He couldn’t let Volkov talk to you people. In fact he told his London handler about it immediately, and Moscow Centre took care of the rest.”

Hale wiped his damp forehead with his shirtsleeve and took another sip of the arak.
“But!
—our consulate office had taken routine photographs of the contents of Volkov’s samples-package, the documents he had brought in to show his authority, before sending the originals to Philby in London; I was stationed in Kuwait then, and prints were eventually circulated to me for study.”

“Why to you?”

“Because during the war I’d become one of the listed referees in the topics the documents dealt with—Volkov’s samples included aerial photographs of Mount Ararat, with maps of the mountain’s Ahora Gorge indicating the locations of what he called ‘drogue stones,’ which are—”

“Anchors,” said Mammalian.

Hale nodded uncomittally; then he went on, more easily than before, “Or the five points of a pentagram, say, if there’s a ring of these drogue stones, as there appeared to be on Ararat. A containment, an imposed ground state.” The sea breeze from the window was chilly on his sweaty face, but now he felt as though a fever had broken; and he recalled that he had felt this way with Ishmael too, after a few minutes of talking. “It was autumn of ’47 when the
ne glected Volkov prints were finally relayed to my office in the British Embassy at Al-Kuwait, and by that time I had got to know the local Bedu tribes—I had even traveled with the Mutair during the previous winter, and I had—”

Hale paused and took another sip of the candy-flavored drink. He was always vaguely but specifically humiliated to refer to experiences with the supernatural.

“I had by then met several of the oldest inhabitants of the desert,” he said flatly, not looking at Mammalian. “Do you know the creatures to whom I refer.”

He shivered as he remembered at times cowering before tall sandstorms that boomed out the old rhythmic syllables across the dunes, and remembered at other times actually conversing in cautious, archaic Arabic with depleted or confined members of the unnatural species: by means of radios carried down into wells too deep to receive human broadcasts, or with codes plucked by box canyon winds on Aeolian harps, or in flocks of caged birds that generally died in the stress of conveying vigorous answers to questions.
Never surprise them
, he had learned;
never reason with them.

Mammalian reached across the hotel room desk to squeeze Hale’s shoulder with one big brown hand, and his bearded face was creased in a wincing smile. “They are
angels
, Charles Garner!” he said earnestly. “Fallen, yes, but they are nevertheless pure spirits, who must take up the physical matter at hand in order to appear to us at all. They are a bigger category of
thing
than we are, and their proximity must needs diminish and humble us, by comparison.”

Hale sat back in his chair, freeing his shoulder from the other man’s hand;
sympathy
in this, even companionship, seemed perverse. “I had seen one of them in the summer of ’45,” he said in a resolutely matter-of-fact tone, “in
Berlin.
And from my wartime studies I knew that the drogue stone that had drawn it there had ultimately come from Mount Ararat in 1883. So Volkov’s long-delayed information did two things for me: it bolstered my suspicions that a colony of djinn existed on Mount Ararat, and—”

“A kingdom,” said Mammalian.

“Very well, a
kingdom
of djinn. And it let me know that the
most-secret agency of the Soviets was planning to go again to the Ahora Gorge on Ararat—perhaps to fetch out another of the creatures, perhaps to establish some diplomatic alliance with the whole tribe.” He smiled. “Perhaps both.”

“It is both,” said Mammalian. He looked away from Hale, out the window at the darkening sky. “And ultimately it will be an alliance with
mankind
, rather than with this nation or that. You, and even Kim Philby, and even myself, are in fortunate positions in this transcendent work. We will live forever, and we will be like gods.” He blinked several times, and then looked back at Hale. “Your Operation Declare—it was a frustrated attempt to kill the angels on the mountain. How was it intended to work?”

And here we are at last, thought Hale. “It was,” he began, and then he paused, waiting to see if God would provide an interruption; but the wind kept fluttering the curtains, the wire spools rotated steadily, and Mammalian simply stared at him. “Oh well.” He sighed deeply. “I was trying to forcibly impose upon the djinn the experience of death.”

“Yes, of course. But how?”

“It was a refinement of a technique the wartime French DGSS had used to try to kill the one in Berlin. Their scientists in Algiers had cut a cylinder from what was allegedly a Shihab meteorite, one of the spent ‘shooting stars’ that has knocked down and killed a djinn. Our SOE was able to get the specs on the operation, and the meteoric iron the French had used did have a peculiar internal structure: fine straight fissures—something like the Neumann lines that are found in ordinary meteorite cross-sections, and which result from interstellar collisions—but these were all at precise right angles, and the French had concluded that this configuration was a unique result of fatal collision with a djinn. The scientists believed”—how had poor old Cassagnac put it?—“that the iron ‘contained the death of one of these creatures,’ and that firing the death into the Berlin djinn would kill it.”

“We had not known all this,” said Mammalian softly. “We knew only that someone had fired some sort of gun at the angel.”

“And of course the DGSS bullet didn’t affect your
angel
at all.
So I went back and studied the djinn. I read the oldest fragments of the
Hezar Efsan
, which was the core of the
Thousand Nights and One Night;
and in the Midian mountains of the Hejaz I found communities of Magians, fire-worshippers, and traded gold and medical-supply whole blood and thermite bombs for the privilege of witnessing their distressing mountain-top liturgies. And I found that in all the very oldest records, djinn are described as being killed by… trivial-seeming things: someone carelessly throwing a date-stone at one of them, or accidentally hitting one with a misaimed fowling arrow, or even by taking a sparrow out of a hidden nest. Eventually I decided that the way to kill a djinn was to change the shape of its animated substance in a particular way.”

“I am glad we stopped you on Ararat fourteen years ago,” said Mammalian, lifting his own glass and draining it in one gulp.

“I decided that a Shihab meteorite
would
comprise the death of a djinn—not in the stone’s internal structure, but in its melted and rehardened
shape.
The meteorites are always pitted with round holes, like bubbles, uniform in their dimensions but of all sizes, even down to microscopic; I concluded that the concavities in the surface of the meteorite are the imprint of a djinn’s death, repeated at every possible scale, and that if I could summon the djinn down from the mountain peak to the stone in the gorge, and then explode it in the midst of them, the pieces would be propelled into the substances of the creatures, forcing their
stuff
to assume the complementary convex shape.”

Hale paused. For the last several seconds he had been hearing a telephone ringing in some nearby room; but Mammalian hadn’t paid any attention to it, and now Hale realized that it had stopped.

“The djinn are supposed to have existed before mankind,” Hale went on, “and in many ways they are a more primitive sort of life, more crude. Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events, wind and fire and sandstorms, gross and literal. What the djinn imagine is done: for them to imagine it is to have done it, and for them to be reminded of it is for them to do it again. Their thoughts are
things
, things in
motion
, and their memories are literal things too, preserved for potential reference—wedding rings and gold teeth
looted from graves, and bones in the sand, and scorch-marks on floors, all ready to spring into renewed activity again at a reminder. To impose—”

He jumped in his chair then, for he had clearly heard a British man’s voice shout,
“Shut her up!”

It must have come from the beach outside, and Mammalian was simply waiting for him to go on.

Hale wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve again. “To impose a memory-shape onto their physical makeup is to forcibly impose an experience—which, in the case of a Shihab meteorite’s imprint, is death.”

Mammalian’s eyes were wide, and he was shaking his head mournfully. “In 1948 your people brought a big chunk of meteoric iron to the mountain and set it high in the Ahora Gorge, with explo-sives under it. The meteorite is still on the slope there now, rusting—though as soon as we finish talking here I will radio instructions that it be retrieved and ground to dust. Where did you get it, and how do you know it has killed a djinn?”

Ground to dust
, thought Hale dully. This is all part of your
plan
, Jimmie?—that we lose the meteorite that poor Salim bin Jalawi and I worked so hard to find, worked so hard to retrieve—

“We got it,” he said, “at the site of an ancient city that had been wiped out by a meteor strike—it’s mentioned in the Koran—south of the well at Um al-Hadid in the Rub’ al-Khali desert—the A’adite city of Wabar.”

As he began to tell Mammalian the story, and the reels of wire hissed slowly between the recorder’s spools, Hale did finally relax; the meteorite was gone, Elena was gone, and perhaps if he told his own story with objective, emptying thoroughness, drinking as much as possible as he told it, he might at least for a while lose the unwelcome burden of his own identity.

The Volkov documents had been the initial clue.

It had been late in 1947 when Hale concluded from them that the Soviets had in 1945 intended to mobilize a covert expedition to Mount Ararat; and when he had made some inquiries with the
Ankara SIS station and Broadway in London, and then traveled out to the Hejaz to talk with the reclusive old fire-worshippers in the mountains, he concluded uneasily that the Soviets had not yet
done
it, but intended to start very soon. Overflight photographs indicated that big new hangars and pools and railway yards were being constructed at the secret research stations in Soviet Armenia, just on the other side of the Aras River from Ararat; and Hale was told by the Bedu who roamed the Hassa desert west of Kuwait that all over the Arabian peninsula sandstorms were lately calling urgently to each other across the wastes, and that
hatif
voices from the darkness were keeping Bedu up praying loudly all night, and that the roaring of the djinn who were confined to desolate pools could be heard for miles over the sands.

The most-secret agency of the Soviets was planning to go again to the Ahora Gorge on Ararat, for the first time since 1883— perhaps to fetch out another of the creatures, perhaps to establish some diplomatic alliance with the whole tribe. Perhaps both.