Tim Powers - Declare

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?

Hold your fire.

Neither man spoke, or even glanced again at the other, as the jeep bounced over the muddy road and the red sun slowly rose at their left, over Soviet Armenia.

Philby did not slow down as he drove through the silent main street of Dogubayezit, past the Ararat Hotel, and straight on toward the road that would take them back to Kars.

At Erzurum Hale was able to use an RAF radio to send a long decipher-yourself signal to Theodora in Broadway Buildings. In it he reported his failure, and he reported too his suspicion that Philby had participated in the operation, working on the Soviet side. Nearly immediately he received a telegram, but it was from the SIS personnel office rather than from Theodora. It was orders-he was to get aboard the next RAF flight to London and then report immediately to C, who in 1948 was Stuart Menzies.

And Hale had not seen Jimmie Theodora again until January second of this year, 1963, in Green Park.

When he had got out of the cab at Broadway Buildings by St. James’s Park in London he had thought again, for the first time in many years, of the old Broadway Tower in the Cotswolds and of how he used to hike out across the stubbled fields to stare at its medieval-looking turrets and limestone walls when he had been a boy. The SIS headquarters at Broadway Buildings had long since lost for him its storybook associations with that old isolated castle, but now it seemed almost as remote.

The guard at the reception desk had recognized him from the wartime service, and after showing the man his orders-telegram Hale had been directed straight to the “arcana,” the fourth-floor office from which white-haired old Stuart Menzies guided the worldwide concerns of the postwar SIS. The courtly old man had stood up from his desk to shake Hale’s hand, but had not seemed to know exactly what Hale’s work in Kuwait had been; and clearly he had not heard from the Turkish station about the recent disaster on Mount Ararat.

Perhaps imagining that Hale was simply a wartime agent demobbed very late, C had advised him to make a new life for himself in the private sector.

“I understand you were reading English at an Oxford college before we recruited you,” Menzies had told him kindly. “Go back to that, pick up your life from that point, and forget the backstage world, the way you would forget any other illogical nightmare. You’ll receive another year’s pay through Drummond’s in Admiralty Arch, and with attested wartime work in the Foreign Office you should have no difficulties getting an education grant. In the end, for all of us, ‘ Dulce et decorum est pro patria vanescere. ’”

Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga awoke in an unfamiliar bed before dawn, from a dream of Madrid; she was alone in the dark, and it took her several seconds to remember that she was nearly thirty-nine years old, and that she was in Beirut. After leaving Kim Philby last night in the bar of the Carlton Hotel on the southern shore, she had taken a series of cabs to the St. Georges Hotel and paid cash for a room on the northwest corner of the second floor, overlooking the beach and the terrace.

She could hardly remember Madrid before her parents had been killed-she could call to mind the sunlit palaces along the tree-lined Gran Avenida de la Libertad, and the metal barrel of the strolling barquillero, with a wheel on the top of the barrel that she would spin to see how many barquillos her centavo would buy; the barquillos were light sugared wafers, and when she won more than three of them her father made her carry the rest home in her handkerchief. And she remembered taking her first Holy Communion at San Francisco el Grande, on the city’s western bluff…solemn in a white dress, receiving on her tongue the wafer that was the body and blood of Jesus…

Then in April of 1931 King Alfonso had fled Spain, and riots had erupted in the streets-and on a stark Sunday afternoon in May, seven-year-old Elena had stood over the sprawled bodies and spilled blood of her father and mother, on the pavement of the Gran Via in front of a burning church.

Young Elena had apparently gone quietly mad and stopped eating for a while after that, and she recovered from the brain fever in the boardinghouse owned by her aunt Dolores. Her parents had been devout Catholics, members of the Accion Popular-but her aunt told her that the fascists of the Accion Popular had covertly set fire to the church themselves, in order to lay the blame on the Socialist Provisional Government; Elena’s deluded parents had threatened to go to the guardia civil with the story, and had been killed by the fascists.

Only after her stay in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow did it occur to Elena to doubt her aunt Dolores’s version of the story.

Tia Dolores was a Communist, and she enrolled Elena in the Pioneros youth organization, where the children had made big cardboard hammer-and-sickles and five-pointed Red Stars and learned to revere Lenin and Stalin and the Workers’ Paradise. When the army rebelled against the government and the Loyalist guns had fired on the barracks and driven the soldiers out of Madrid, Elena’s aunt had joined one of the citizens’ militias and got a couple of rifles from the Loyalist Ministry of Defense, and the old lady and the little girl had practiced marksmanship by shooting at the statue of Christopher Columbus in El Retiro park. At night Elena sat through Party meetings in the unheated Palacio del Congreso, under a framed photograph of La Pasionara, the nun-like old woman who was one of the Communist deputies in the Loyalist parliament and whose radio and street speeches could rouse the sick from their beds to take their places at the barricades-and on the walk home through the Madrid streets afterward, Elena and her aunt had looked as pale as drowned corpses, for all the streetlamps and automobile headlights had been painted blue to be less visible from the air.

The right-wing Nationalists had taken Spain ’s army with them when they had rebelled, and the Loyalist army was just men in rope-soled shoes and coveralls and token red sashes, and women in smocks and forage caps, all equipped with unfamiliar rifles. Elena could still recall the sporadic banging of amateur target practice echoing in the streets-and she could recall too driving out the north road in a requisitioned Ford truck one morning in the summer of 1936, shouting Viva la Republica with everyone else, to stop the rebel army at the pass in the Sierra de Guadalarrama.

And the ragged militia had stopped the army, for a while. Twelve-year-old Elena had fired her rifle at a soldier that day, and had seen him fall; and that night she had not slept, and by the next morning she had come to the endurable conclusion that her parents had been fools, and that all priests were liars, and that there was, as Tia Dolores insisted, no God at all besides Man himself.

Her aunt was killed while crossing the Puerta del Sol one afternoon in August, struck in the spine by a stray Loyalist bullet.

Children were recruited for spy work because of their anonymity; Elena joined one of the International Brigades and learned the uses of wireless telegraphy and code groups and one-time pads, and she met the Communist Andre Marty in Albacete. She watched Marty shoot a British spy, and from Marty she learned more about the Communist Party which had replaced God in her chilled heart.