Tim Powers - Declare

And in the crowded street Elena saw flashes of many Arabic faces-from the toothy grins of ragged brown boys crying for “Baksheesh!” to the white beards of Moslem elders, and she was nervous-even though she knew that Machikha Nash was confined within the borders of the Soviet Union-each time she met the eyes of an Arab woman staring at her from the slit above a black veil. It occurred to her that Utechin’s target might be forewarned, and that Utechin’s head and her own too might be centered in the sights of rifles in high windows even now. She hoped she might soon find a Coptic Catholic church-with luck, the priest wouldn’t even understand the language in which she would make her lengthy Confession.

…that I have sinned exceedingly, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do…

The architecture of the city had been plaster-fronted white houses and domed mosques at the northern end, but on this street nineteenth-century European buildings had intruded among the older houses, making the traditional overhanging latticed balconies look frail.

“That is the French Embassy,” said Utechin, nodding toward the Romanesque doorway of an ornate stone building front, “covert headquarters of the French secret service. They are hand-in-glove with the British Special Operations Executive. So is the American OSS, in the American Embassy, another block down this street.”

Elena had gathered that the British SOE contained a secret core that was the Western equivalent of the Rabkrin. Among Andre Marty’s Communists there had been rumors of a vast old British operation known as Declare, and from the way Marty had especially devoted his energies to killing any British agents who seemed aware of a supernatural element in the war, Elena was confident that Declare, if it existed, was opposed to the secret Soviet cult of Machikha Nash.

They had stepped off the curb and were crossing Port Said Street, among a mixed crowd of Europeans, Egyptians, American soldiers, and half a dozen goats that were being herded by children in loincloths and baseball caps. Elena unzipped the leather case Utechin had handed her.

On the sidewalk she slipped her hand into the case, and her palm fit familiarly around the.45’s grip. The safety catch was up, engaged, cocked-and-locked-and she thumbed it down. Finally she took a deep breath and pointed the concealed gun at Utechin’s back. “Look,” she said.

Utechin’s face went blank when he turned around and saw her hand inside the case. He stopped walking, and leaned against a lamppost. “Explain this, please,” he said. The concealed muzzle was now pointed at his abdomen.

“We will walk into the French Embassy,” Elena said. There was a quaver in her voice, but her hand was steady. “We will surrender to their secret service. Defect.”

Utechin licked his lips. “And…why?” he asked hoarsely.

“Because we are in front of it. If we were another block down the street, we would surrender to the Americans.”

He shook his head slowly, an expression of both sadness and surprise on his damp face. “Ach, Elena, so soon! It is my fault, for not taking more time with you.” And then he said, in Russian, “Take the death now.”

A spot on her forehead stung with a sudden chill, and the breath stopped in her throat and her knees began to fold-and she realized that she must have been given a precautionary post-hypnotic order to die, as if of the gunshot that had killed her double in the Lubyanka cellar, upon hearing this Russian phrase a second time.

But though she fell hard to her knees on the pavement, she was able to raise the hidden.45 and keep it pointed at him; and the spot of chill on her forehead was now hot, as if a priest had marked the Ash Wednesday sign of the cross there with still-smoldering palm-frond ashes; and she realized that the words of the post-hypnotic order had got tangled with the words of the Ave Maria that had been droning in her head both before and after the shot had been fired- ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora en esta hora nuestra muerte-

Pray for us, sinners, now in the hour of our death.

Apparently the inadvertent parallel had disrupted the lethal grammar of the order, broken its imprinted lines like a double exposure.

Utechin hesitated, and then he abruptly crouched, falling backward as his right hand sprang up and under his lapel.

Elena hammered her gun hand downward to follow his sudden drop, and she twitched the trigger three times rapidly.

Only the first shot fired, for the recoiling slide snagged on the inside of the case-but when she brought her right hand back down into line after the recoil, she saw that Utechin was lying flat on his back, with a spreading spot of bright red blood on his white shirt over the solar plexus. His eyes blinked once, and then simply stared up at the cloudy sky.

Elena was dimly glad that she was kneeling as she stared at the body, for she was suddenly dizzy, and she was reminded of having seemed to die when the girl in the Lubyanka basement was killed. We don’t want you wasting any more of your baptized sanctity, Utechin had told her in Moscow, until you can spend it effectively. At last, after no more than three stretched-taut seconds, she forced herself to look away.

The noise had been loud enough, but, muffled by the leather case, had not obviously been a gunshot; and the fact that Elena had fallen to her knees in the same moment that Utechin did had made the pedestrians duck away, fearful of whatever had apparently knocked these two down.

Glancing up at the rooftops now to suggest the idea of a sniper, Elena scuttled on her hands and knees up the gritty stone steps and through the swinging glass doors of the Cairo French Embassy.

Once inside, she got to her feet and walked directly to the reception desk. The man behind it had got to his feet to peer past her at the street, and she waved at him to catch his attention.

“I am a Soviet agent,” she told him in French, speaking clearly though her vision was blurred with tears of a vast, almost impersonal grief, “and I have just killed my handler. I wish to defect-and to report a Nazi collaborator who has been working out of the City of the Dead here in Cairo, assisting the German General Rommel.”

And after long interrogation in Algiers, she had been recruited into Colonel Passy’s wartime Central Bureau for Information and Military Action; she met other ex-Communist agents in the BCRAM, and in 1944, by which time the French secret service had been incorporated into the Direction Generale des Services Spéciaux, she was surprised and delighted to be assigned to work with Claude Cassagnac.

The DGSS counter-Machikha team in Algiers was deliberately assembled along the same lines as the American President Wilson’s Inquiry group of 1917, which had included experts on ancient Persian languages and the Crusades, and the British Admiralty’s Room 40, which during the First World War had included a scholar of the early Church fathers and the code-breaker Ronald Knox, who had become a Catholic priest after the war. The DGSS team also included a number of physicists and geologists and an astronomer.

The result of their researches had been the bullet, lathed from a nickel-iron Shihab meteorite, which Cassagnac had fired at Machikha Nash in Berlin in June of 1945.

Now, nearly eighteen years later, Elena crushed out a cigarette in an ashtray piled with cigarette butts, and she crossed again to the window of her room at the St. Georges Hotel. The sun from over the Jebel Liban mountains east of Beirut made the sails and the seagulls glow white against the dark blue Mediterranean, and she knew that the tables on the terrace below her door would be crowded with hotel guests having breakfast. She glanced at her radium-dial wrist-watch-but Philby would not be arriving there with his Soviet handlers for hours yet.