Declare (60 page)

Philby’s charm had returned in the crinkling of his eyes and the quirk of his lips. “She’s not dead, by the way—she rode past here twenty minutes ago, on a horse. No, not five-draw. A different derivation of As-Nas, I think,” he said as he began shuffling the cards in a lazy, overhand style. “Seven-card stud—high-low—declare, not cards-speak.”

Again Hale made himself show no reaction to the word
declare.
“High-low?” he asked. “Low hand splits the pot? How can that work? We can’t split
her
, the way… the way King Solomon offered to split the baby those women brought to him.”

The thunder of rain on the roof was redoubled, and the ground
under the steel floor shook with an aftershock of the earthquake, or perhaps at the impact of a close lightning strike. Fleetingly Hale thought of the rough glass fulgurites he had found in the Rub’ al-Khali desert three months ago.

Philby had paused in his shuffling to stare speculatively at the curved, ribbed ceiling. “You’re insane,” he remarked in a conversational tone, “to invoke that name here, tonight. But you have, at least, summoned witnesses! No, we won’t split her. High hand wins her, and the low hand wins this.”

Holding the deck of cards in one hand, he reached with the other inside his robe, and then tossed out onto the blanket a thick roll of buff-colored paper.

Hale stared curiously at it—it appeared to be a manila envelope, tightly rolled up and tied with a ribbon. Red wax had been smeared across the ribbon and over an ink signature on the outside of the envelope, and the paper was speckled with half-dried red drops, blotted in spots with a dampness that must be recent rain.

From where he sat, Hale could read the signature’s last name—
Maly.

Hale widened his eyes at Philby.

“I was supposed to get that in ’37, from an old friend, a Soviet agent I had… doubled, and was running in England. An inheritance, last-wishes type of thing. I only got it tonight, and even so I had to take it off of a dead man.”

“And it is what?”

“It’s the true Eucharist, the guide to it, anyway; it’s the reason Stalin purged the GRU in ’37—what you’d have called the Razvedupr, during your Paris days. Did you know that even the GRU cooks and lavatory attendants were killed, in that purge? The illegals in Europe had stumbled on a discovery, learned it from the Communist Polish Jews who had fled to Palestine, in the 1920s, and run the undercover Unity network there. At first it was just a—well, you must have stumbled across it—a sort of beat, or cadence, used in telegraphy, to project signals better. But the illegals eventually discovered that this sort of cadence could evoke peculiar aid in all sorts of situations. Eventually this man”—he reached forward to tap
the rolled envelope—“discovered how it could be used to—if used in a certain symbiosis—prevent death.”

At the word
death
the shelter shook with a hard gust of shotgunning rain.

“Yes!” Philby shouted at the roof. To Hale, he went on, “You know the
amomon
plant—your Kurds must have told you about it.”

Hale turned up one palm. “Remind me.”

“It’s what my father searched for in the Rub’ al-Khali desert, what Lawrence found and chose to die rather than use; it’s—well, it’s the way to avoid the ‘truth to be found on the unknown shore,’ be sure that you won’t ‘without seeking find.’ Stop anyone from establishing the
truth
about you, hmm? Evade the”—the corners of his lips turned down ironically—“ ‘the
wrath of God.’ ”

“Not die
, you mean,” said Hale. “Directions are in that envelope.”

“Your position is gone, you do know that, don’t you? You’re out of a job, old son; so why bother acting skeptical now? Yes, in this envelope! It’s… it’s partly a crude musical score, I’m told, and partly a recipe, for the preparation and
awakening
of the angel that slumbers in the thistle.” He smiled. “You were brought up a Catholic—evade the Last Judgment, husband your precious sins— live forever, without the necessity of a resurrection!”

“And you’re willing to gamble
that
against”—Hale paused to gulp some more of the Scotch—“just for an unobstructed way with Elena.”

Philby opened his mouth as if in a laugh, but if there was any sound it was too soft for Hale to hear over the drumming of the rain. “I’m confident I’ll get
this
again,” Philby said, “if not entry to immortality on a higher level of access.
You’ll
never see it again, that’s certain.”

And no djinn died on the mountain tonight, Hale thought dully. There will be no poisoned honey for the Kurds next spring, and I won’t be bringing Elena to the village of Siamand Barakat Khan. But I
might
be able, back in the Nafud or Summan regions of the desert outside Kuwait, to find and kill a djinn; and then the following spring take a party of the Mutair out to look for blooming thistles …

Live forever, evade the wrath of God.

The taste of khaki, and blood…

He shuddered. “Deal,” he said.

Thunder broke in vast syllables across the sky outside, and Hale remembered that Philby had said his reference to King Solomon had summoned witnesses. And it occurred to him that Philby was not so much playing here to gain something as to make Hale “cast lots” for Elena, betray his love of her. Philby was supposed to be a master at getting Soviet agents to defect—was he playing here simply to get Hale to damn his own soul?

But the cards were already spinning out across the blanket, two down and one up. Hale was showing a three, and his hole cards proved to be a pair of nines. Not a bad start toward the high hand.

Philby’s showing card was an Ace—good either way.

“We’re both already all-in,” said Philby in a voice like rocks rubbing together. “No further betting.” He dealt two more cards face-up—Hale got a seven; Philby got a four, and was looking good so far for making the low hand.

Philby’s eyes were as empty as glass. “She’s staying in Dogubayezit,” he groaned as he flipped out two more cards. Hale got a ten, no help, and Philby got a six, looking very good for the low hand. “And she’s got her own room, at the quaintly styled Ararat Hotel! I’ve got my jeep here, I can drive us to town at dawn, and the holder of the high hand can sneak right up to her room then, hmm?” His stiff demeanor made the jocularity of his words grotesque.

Hale’s face chilled as he realized that Philby’s two hole cards might be Aces, giving him three of them. Philby might have a lock on the
high
hand.

What have I done, here? thought Hale, trying to will away the fog of alcohol. Will this game have real
consequences?
Am I
giving
her to Philby?
Her
, to
Philby?
With a sickness in the pit of his stomach he realized that he couldn’t back out of the hand now—he would simply be forfeiting the entire pot. And Philby had said there were
witnesses.
Hale remembered wondering if Philby was trying more to damn Hale’s soul here than to win; and he realized
that Philby had lost his stutter in the last minute or so, as if another entity, a devil, was speaking through his lips.

“She doesn’t—Elena doesn’t—
fancy
you,” said Hale thickly.

Two more cards flipped out: Hale got a nine, giving him three of them now, and Philby got an eight. The rocking lamp flared and dimmed.

Philby’s voice was an echoing growl: “Do you think that will matter, after this?”

The bomb shelter shook with a gust of wind, or thunder, or an aftershock—the earth and sky seemed to be agreeing with Philby.

“Last card,” said Philby in a tone like the hollow crack of artillery; “down and dirty.” He dealt each of them a card face-down, and Hale picked his up from the shaking floor with trembling fingers. The welded seams of the shelter were creaking now as the little structure rocked in the wind like a boat on a turbulent sea.

Down and dirty.
The whole bomb shelter was vibrating now.

Hale’s last card was another seven, giving him a full boat, nines over sevens. That was a good high hand—but Philby might conceivably have a better high hand, Aces-full, or even four Aces. If Hale declared high and then lost, he would lose the entire pot: Elena’s safety from Philby and the immortality, both. And even if he should choose to abandon Elena to Philby, and try for the immortality—declare low—Philby could easily have a better low hand than Hale’s terrible pair of sevens and could declare that way, and again win the whole pot.

Philby looked at his last card and then placed it back on the shivering blanket, still face-down. “We need tokens, for the declaration,” he said peevishly, “to hold in our fists until the count of three—one token to declare for the low hand, two for the high, three for both ways. Do you have six… pennies, pebbles, matches?”

Slowly and thoughtfully, Hale dug his fingers into the canvas pouch that had contained his iron ankh.

And after a few seconds he tossed out onto the blanket six of the scorched black glass beads he had picked up from the sand by the meteorite, in Wabar.

And as the beads bounced on the blanket, the whole bomb shelter
was abruptly kicked over sideways, and the western wall of it punched Hale in the head as the lantern flew against the opposite wall and shattered—and then the creaking structure had ponderously rolled all the way over, and Hale tumbled to the ceiling on his right shoulder, his knees following in the constricted somersault to thump against some part of Philby; spatters of burning lamp oil had splashed across the blankets and the clothing of the two men, and Hale scrambled up, his feet slipping on the flaming curved ceiling, and wrenched back the bolt of the inverted door. He butted it open with his head.

Cold rain thrashed against his face and cleared his nose of the smell of burning wool and hair, and he threw himself over the top of the doorway and then jackknifed out onto the puddled grass, rolling over and over in the darkness to extinguish all of the flaming paraffin that had splashed on him.

He supposed Philby had climbed out too, but Hale could only clutch the wet grass and sob into the mud, for the whole earth was booming and resounding and shaking under him, and he was irrationally sure that God was striding furiously across eastern Turkey, looking for him, to throw him into Hell, as he deserved.

Hale closed his eyes lest their glitter should give his position away, and he tried to burrow his body into the mud.

I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.

After some hundreds of heartbeats, the ground stopped jolting under him, but Hale could still feel an intermittent subsonic vibration swell and fade deep in the earth, and he was drunkenly sure that it was God’s wrathful attention sweeping the landscape.
I let go of the Khan’s stone, because I wanted to command the djinn
, he thought despairingly;
I participated in the deaths of my men, in order not to be killed myself; and I tried to trade Elena for eternal life.
He kept his face pressed into the wet grass.

The rain dwindled away and stopped before dawn, and the earth was quiet, waiting for the sun. The moment came when Hale dared to move—he got up stiffly on his hands and knees in the windy darkness, cowering, but no shout from the sky knocked him back down; and he crawled to the inverted bomb shelter and pulled
himself up to peer in through the open door. The fires had burned out, and when he climbed cautiously inside he discovered that Philby was gone. Hale wrapped himself in charred, rain-damp blankets and closed his eyes.

He awoke with a jolt at the screech of a starter motor in the dawn air outside; gray sunlight was slanting into the steel box through the open door, and he disentangled himself from the smoke-reeking blankets and climbed stiffly out onto the grass, shivering and squinting around at the plain and the mountain.

A gray Willys jeep sat on the north side of the upended bomb shelter, and the scarecrow figure of Philby was hunched in the driver’s seat, fluttering the accelerator now to keep the cold engine from stalling. God only knew where the man had waited out the night.

Hale limped wide around the crumpled corrugated-steel walls, plodded across the wet grass to the vehicle, and wordlessly climbed into the passenger seat. Philby swiveled on him a look that was devoid of greeting, or of anger, or even of recognition; and eventually he clanked the engine into gear and began motoring across the bumpy field to the road that would take them to Dogubayezit.

Hale saw that a two-foot length of the rope he had seen yesterday in the jeep’s bed was knotted now to the ring on the dashboard, and he saw that its end was hacked, as if by frantic blows of a knife edge; the fibers of it were curled up and blackened, and the tan dashboard paint around the steel ring was charred. Hale thought that the ring was even bent upward.

The other end of the rope, now gone, had been attached to a weather balloon mooring.

He tried to comprehend the huge thought: this jeep was used to awaken the djinn last night. This is the jeep I heard driving on the plain, just before the earthquake. The man who was driving this vehicle last night was almost certainly working for the Soviet team.

Hale looked away, out at the boulder-studded grass plain in the watery sunlight, and he kept his breathing steady.

Hold your fire until you’ve got a clear shot, he told himself as his
heart thudded in his chest and he thought of the five lost SAS men. Plain revenge is seldom the shrewdest move in espionage. It might have been Burgess—but could Burgess be an active Soviet agent in this without Philby’s complicity?