Tim Powers - Declare

She remembered lying prone in the darkness on the office building roof, seeing that familiar pouchy face in the yellow square of the bathroom window across the street, divided into fleshy quadrants by the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight. He had turned away, toward the mirror, and she had centered the cross-hairs on the back of his head, and squeezed the trigger.

Even with the silencer the shot had sounded like a hammer-blow on a door, and she had hurried away to the fire escape, mentally preparing the report she would encode and radio to the SDECE headquarters in Paris-OFFER WAS A TRAP, DISCRETIONARY VERIFICATION OF THE DECOY BECAME NECESSARY-but later when she listened to the police band to confirm the kill, she learned instead that Philby had been taken, alive, to the American University Hospital.

She should have known that his birthday-of-record would not be his real one. And she could not deny now that his offer to defect was clearly genuine; the SDECE team would exfiltrate him, and soon the service would learn that she had slept with a Soviet agent directly after the infamous 1948 catastrophe in the Ahora Gorge.

Trying to kill Philby had not been part of her orders, had not been for the defense of France -it had been sheer attempted murder, a mortal sin. The next morning, with as much “firm purpose of amendment” she could muster, she had confessed it at the St. Francis Roman Catholic Church on Hamra Street.

She tied a towel around her white hair, put on a pair of oversized sunglasses, then opened her hotel room door and inhaled the chilly sea air.

She stepped to the rail and looked down at the crowded tables under the bright red umbrellas on the terrace-and fell back against the stucco wall, her heart racing and her face suddenly cold.

Andrew Hale was sitting at one of the tables, blinking up at a waiter.

The waiter said, “Here’s a list. Gin…Scotch…brandy…vodka…”

Hale’s attention had been caught by the man’s first sentence, and vodka made four. “Right,” said Hale hastily, “vodka.” God! he thought; after a night of arak! Why couldn’t the fourth word have been beer? But his thudding heartbeat had instantly become more rapid, for this was the old SOE recognition code; though of course the waiter might not be a player at all, might simply have sized Hale up as a man who needed strong drink this morning. Hale squinted up against the sunlight at the clean-shaven young waiter. He appeared to be Lebanese.

“On the rocks,” Hale added.

The table was on a railed cement deck on the Mediterranean-facing side of the St. Georges Hotel; a red umbrella shaded half of the table from the pre-noon sun, but Hale had chosen one of the white-painted wrought-iron chairs in the direct sunlight. Sweating seemed to lessen his headache, and his white shirt was already clinging to him.

Hakob Mammalian had knocked at Hale’s hotel room door at about ten o’clock, an hour ago, and said that Philby wanted to meet them up the street at the St. Georges Hotel, rather than at the Normandy; and Mammalian was now standing only six yards away, at the rail overlooking the beach and the white sails on the blue sea. Hale had got perhaps four hours of sleep after the long, recorded interview. At least he couldn’t remember any dreams.

“Shall I tally the bill now, sir?” the waiter asked.

Hale frowned in thought. I’ve got to think of a contrary and then a parallel or an example, he told himself. “Rather than me pay cash now,” he said haphazardly. “Why don’t you simply bill it to the Queen.” He caught the waiter’s eye and raised an eyebrow toward Mammalian. For God’s sake, Hale thought, don’t say anything here to compromise my cover!

The waiter smiled and nodded. “Do be careful not to overindulge, sir,” he said. “If you were inebriated on the street, you would be arrested -and taken to jail. Very routine, happens with frequency.”

He stepped away from the table to take Mammalian’s order, and Hale peered after him uncertainly. Had that been the deliberate recognition signal? Had Hale just been ordered to fake drunkenness so as to be arrested, and presumably receive his long-delayed Declare briefing in the local jail-or had that simply been a friendly warning from a plain hotel employee? He would have to assume the man was an SOE operative, and that it had been deliberate.

Hale heard Mammalian order coffee and arak, and then the big Armenian was shuffling back to the table, his blue-striped gown flapping in the wind.

“He’s right,” said Mammalian as he pulled out another chair and sat down. “You shouldn’t get drunk.”

The sea breeze was pleasantly cool on Hale’s forehead, but he would have to be moving soon. He had to bolt this drink and then get out onto the Avenue des Français, where, if he had understood the waiter correctly, sûreté officers were waiting to arrest him. “A sober traitor will cost you a lot more,” Hale said, putting irritation in his voice.

“Does it sting you, valuably, to use ugly words like that?” Mammalian was staring at him curiously.

“‘Sober’?”

“‘Traitor.’ You were born in Palestine, and the service you worked for planned to kill you even before you fled, a week ago. Do you suppose that in 1948 they went looking for the SAS men in your party who had gone mad on the mountain? Well, perhaps they did-to kill them, ‘give them the truth.’ No, my friend, you are simply devoting all of your energies and recollections now to a new cause-one that will allow you to sire children in the next century, and the century after that.”

“‘Take the cash in hand, and waive the rest,’” quoted Hale, shaking his head. “Children in another century! How is all this live-forever stuff supposed to happen, precisely?”

“You are skeptical, after all that you have seen!” Mammalian bared his white teeth in a grin. “Perhaps you will become the consort of a goddess, Andrew Hale, and share in her immortality. Perhaps you will have a djinn for a body slave, who will protect you from every ill, even from age. If all else fails, you will eat a salad of enchanted thistles, and never die. Believe me, the ‘cash in hand’ will be the most trivial of your rewards. You do a service for angels here.”

“And for Russians.”

“The angels do not distinguish among our nations.”

Seem reckless and belligerent, Hale thought. “The Russians… kidnapped one of your angels,” he said, “in 1883, didn’t they? Took it back to Moscow, moored it with drogue stones, anchors, in the Lubyanka basement and at the Soviet borders. I would think his fellows-” He remembered the thing he had seen in Berlin, and corrected himself: “ Her fellows, would look unkindly on that.”

Mammalian’s face was expressionless. “If we-when we succeed, on the mountain, this time-” He raised a hand hesitantly. “You needn’t fear that there will be injustice.”

Hale quickly looked over his shoulder, as if impatient for his vodka-for Mammalian, hungover himself, had given away more than he had meant to, and there was no advantage for Hale in seeming to have noticed.

But Hale was certain now that Mammalian’s loyalty here was to the djinn themselves, and not to the Rabkrin. And Hale wondered if Mammalian had even been a devout Communist during the Rabkrin attempt in 1948.