Tim Powers - Declare

In fact the waiter was now striding back toward their table, carrying a tray; and neither of the seated men spoke as the two glasses and the coffee cup were set down on the glass tabletop. But as the young man was stepping away Hale called, “Another vodka here, please! And a cold Almaza beer with it to put out the fire.” He bolted the glass of vodka in two hard swallows.

The waiter nodded without looking back.

“You will be useless before noon, at this rate!” exclaimed Mammalian in dismay. “And Charles Garner drinks arak!”

Hale’s nose stung with the vodka fumes, and his eyes were watering. “I’m worse’n useless now,” he said, carefully pretending to be more drunk than he was. “And I don’t wanna be Charles Garner. I wanna be Tommo Burks.”

Mammalian frowned and stirred his coffee, and Hale recognized, from the other side now, the agitation of a handler dealing with a skittish agent. Mammalian appeared to decide something, and stared straight at Hale. “Have you ever,” he asked, “met a woman, an Arabic woman, with a string of gold rings around her neck? She would not have spoken.”

Not bad, Hale thought. Last night I didn’t bother to mention the woman I saw by Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin in ’45, but I do remember her, and it’s interesting to learn that she figures somehow. Apparently I was likely to meet her!

But he had to get onto the street, get his briefing, before he met Philby.

He stood up, so unsteadily that the table rocked and nearly spilled Mammalian’s coffee and arak. “I won’t-incidentally-work with Kim Philby. See. He told the Russians-he told you -where my SAS team was going to be, in the Ararat Gorge. The Ahora Gorge. Know, O Armenian, that I quit. Sod you all.”

He walked quickly away between the other tables, artfully bumping one with his hip; he heard a glass roll and then break on the cement deck as he reached the top of the stairs that led down to the hotel driveway; a chair’s legs scraped as it was pushed back, and hurried footsteps were coming up from behind him, but two uniformed sûreté officers were even now tapping briskly up the steps from below.

Hale deliberately snagged his shoe behind his calf and tumbled forward, driving his shoulder into the midsection of the officer on the right; somehow all three of them wound up sitting and bumping and flailing down the steps to the parking lot pavement, and before Hale could even pull his legs down off the bottom two steps, he felt the ring of a handcuff close on his wrist and ratchet shut.

While the policemen were barking questions at him in French-through the ringing in his ears he caught the word ivresse , drunkenness-Hale squinted back up the stairs; but Mammalian had apparently decided not to interfere in a civil arrest. The only person peering down was a tanned woman in big sunglasses and a towel wrapped around her head.

The Beirut Municipal Jail was in one of the modern buildings at the Place des Martyrs, only seven blocks south off of Weygand Street, and when the police car rocked to a halt in an alley beside the Direction of Police, Hale was pulled out of the back seat and marched in through a side door.

Briefly he glimpsed a crowded yellow waiting room, with civilians and uniformed officers standing in lines before a row of windows under fluorescent lights, and then he was pushed along a narrow beige-painted corridor and around a corner.

This stretch of the corridor was momentarily empty except for a brown-haired Caucasian man in a damp white shirt, who stood with his hands open at his sides and stared straight at Hale with something like apprehension; and in the same instant the two sûreté officers let go of Hale’s arms and took hold of the stranger’s, and a door was pulled open at Hale’s right.

In the dimly lit office beyond the door, a bald man in a jacket and tie beckoned to Hale impatiently. “Here’s a bloody list,” he whispered, “one-two-three-four.”

Hale heard a scuffle ahead of him and looked up in time to see one of the sûreté officers drive a fist into the face of the brown-haired stranger who was now being led away. Hale took a long step sideways into the office.

The bald man winced at the sound of the blow as he pulled the door closed behind Hale.

“They hit him?” the man asked. “Sit down,” he said, waving toward a wooden chair beside a gray metal desk. The smell of hot coffee drew Hale’s attention to a chugging urn on a nearby table even before the man said, “Or help yourself to coffee.”

Hale nodded and stepped to the table, and he looked around as he held a ceramic cup under the tap-the room, lit by an electric lamp on the desk, had no windows-and he sat down in the chair while the bald man turned a key in the door lock and walked around to the other side of the desk.

“Yes,” said Hale, setting the steaming cup on the bare desktop. “They hit him.”

“I am sorry.” The man shrugged and smiled. “Verisimilitude!”

Hale nodded sourly and touched his own left cheek, wondering when and how he would be given an identical blow. Soon, probably, since bruises change appearance quickly.

“Somebody will shortly be bringing in a photo of his face,” Hale guessed.

“I expect so-well, a drawing, probably. To make it match. You gave the Rabkrin all the ’48 math?”

Hale only became aware that his shoulders were stiff with tension now that his muscles began to relax. “That was the orders,” he said, watching the man carefully. “Yes, I gave them everything.”

The man nodded. “I’m heartsick,” he seemed to say, and Hale’s face was abruptly cold; but the man quickly added, “I’m sorry, that’s my name, H- A-R -T-S-I- K. Polish. You’re Hale, I know. Pleased to meet you. No, you did the right thing, all that math was bad. And if you gave them some extra stuff too, we can afford it; it’ll just enhance the look of the old math, and with luck Declare is within a week or so of shutting down for good.”

“They’re going to destroy the Shihab stone,” Hale said. “They may be on the mountain now, to get it. Mammalian said it’s still up in the gorge, on Ararat.”

“They’re welcome to it, now,” said Hartsik. “Two months ago we sent a team of undercover agents up there to make rubber castings from it. They had to go up with a truck, and winches, to make it seem that their purpose was to retrieve the stone itself. They did get the rubber molds safely down, though several of the men were killed by the Turk oscars.” He raised his eyebrows. “More verisimilitude-the Rabkrin was strongly led to believe that we went up to fetch the stone. It’s been guarded, since.”

More deaths on my account, thought Hale. “What,” he asked wearily, “did I do wrong? In ’48,” he added, seeing Hartsik’s incomprehension.

“Oh! Convex versus concave. You mistook the mold for the bullets.” He pulled open a drawer of the desk and picked out a couple of irregular gray metal balls, which proved to be lead when he spilled them from his palm onto the desktop and they thudded and didn’t bounce. “These were cast from the mold they took on Ararat in November.”

One of the balls wobbled across and clinked against Hale’s coffee cup. He slowly reached out and picked it up between his thumb and forefinger. It was egg-shaped, and though it was heavy it forcibly reminded him of the black glass pellets he had found at Wabar and had later thrown down in the bomb shelter below Ararat.

Peering more closely at the thing, he noticed that it was incised with two fine equator lines at right angles, one around the middle and one around the ends.

“Three-dimensional crosses,” said Hartsik, “or wheels buggered out of usefulness by being folded into three dimensions, if you like, completed -on an oval, which is a sphere with two internal hub-points, two foci . Mathematical severance of the geometric core. It’s the experience and expression of end-of-message , for djinn, and it will impose shut-down if it’s delivered spinning clockwise fast enough to match their own rotation, so that it becomes an integrated part of them. They can’t help but take it in-they’re hypnotized by right angles and ovals, like the shape of an ankh. Morbid of them, really.”