Tim Powers - Declare

“Huh! That rather negates his confession-the one to the priest, I mean.”

“Perhaps that was the penance the priest assigned. I felt that, if anything, it enhanced his confession to us.”

For a moment neither of them spoke, and Theodora’s fan swished and rattled faintly in the warm air; then the old man stirred and said, “You’re right, the Russians have no intention of annexing eastern Turkey-but they are preparing to send a team in again to Mount Ararat, as they did in ’48 and tried to do again in ’52; if all goes as planned, you and Philby will be members of the team.”

The ankh in Hale’s pocket was twitching with his rapid heartbeat, and he had to take a deep breath to speak. “Back to Ararat,” he said, “to finally kill the-”

Theodora waited with raised eyebrows for him to finish, then laughed softly when Hale lapsed into silence. “If I had thought there was any chance of you completing that sentence, I would have shushed you. But your instincts are still good; what do I know about the microphone situation here, really, right?”

“Sure.” Hale stretched his arms out and yawned again. “Is lunch a prospect of any imminence? What on earth can you mean, Philby and I will be ‘members of the team’ when the-Russians go up Ararat again?”

With his free hand Theodora reached over to the silk bundle he had laid on the table and flipped the edges of the handkerchief aside. Lying on the fabric was a tiny hand-drill like a screwdriver, a dental pick, and a plastic cylinder no bigger than a cigarette filter with a fine antenna wire projecting two inches from one end.

Hale nearly forgot his hanging question as he stared at the kit in disbelief. The plastic cylinder was clearly a miniature microphone, an electronic bug, and the tools were for installing it.

“Well,” Theodora said smoothly, “the expedition probably can’t succeed without Philby; the-the Russian equivalent of our SOE, at least, is convinced that it can’t, and I think they’re right. Philby is in a privileged position, relative to the thing on Ararat, that the Russians know they can’t duplicate with anyone else-you’ll be told about that shortly, when you get to Kuwait. They may serve some sort of tiffin on the plane.”

The archaic word reminded Hale that Theodora had long ago served in the Indian Civil Service, the Raj-where high-handed schemes had been the standard modus operandi. “When I-get to Kuwait,” Hale said in a monotone. He gave the old man a wide-eyed questioning stare and waved his spread fingers stiffly at the kit.

Theodora frowned impatiently and snapped his fan closed to use it and both hands in a pantomime of drilling and inserting.

He wants me, thought Hale incredulously, to plant a bug in this secured conference room! In Number 10 Downing Street! I wonder what the new PM’s attitude will be toward the poor old services -the old man doesn’t intend to wait for hints.

Theodora held up his free hand. “But!-when we grabbed Philby at the Turkish-Soviet border in the winter of ’52 and forced him to switch sides, there wasn’t time to set up a sabotage of the Russian attempt on the mountain; we had to force them simply to abort it, so that they’d have to try it again at some later date, when we’d have something prepared.”

Would you break the laws of England, if we ordered it? thought Hale as he tried to pay attention to what Theodora was saying; Yes, I would. God help me. He sighed and glanced around the room as Theodora had done. There was no telephone, nor any window frame at all, much less a nice metal one to damp the microphone’s electromagnetic field, and Hale finally shrugged and pointed down at the table.

The old man nodded judiciously, and then went on, “We had to ask Philby himself!-who had then been a double agent of ours for only about ten minutes-what development would cause the Russians to call it off; and in his imperturbable way he advised fomenting an uprising among the native Kurds, with the Turkish government goaded to respond in force.”

Hale leaned forward to lift his chair by the arms, hike it back a yard, and then slowly and silently lower it to the wooden floor; then he slid the handkerchief and its burden closer to him and knelt carefully between the chair and the table.

“So we hastily burned some Kurd villages in the area,” Theodora said, waving his ivory fan to make it rattle, “shot a couple of the Oscars with Kurdish rifles, and got an excitable Turk captain to radio a grossly exaggerated report of it to Ankara, and then we bribed a Security Inspectorate bureaucrat there to send in the Turkish Air Force.”

Hale recalled that Oscar had been the enduring American mispronunciation of the Turk word asker, which meant soldier; and fleetingly, remembering the hospitality of a Khan in the Zagros Mountains, he hoped the Kurds had come through the contrived skirmish without too many casualties. He nodded, then picked up the tiny hand-drill and ducked his head under the tabletop and peered up at the underside; a hole for a counter-sunk screw in the corner-block nearest him looked like the best spot, and he pressed the bit of the drill at an angle into the hole and began twisting the handle, cupping his free hand under it to catch the curls of sawdust. The knees of the old man’s neatly pressed striped trousers were only a couple of feet in front of his face.

Theodora wasn’t speaking any louder than before, and Hale had to cock his head to hear him as he kept twisting the drill: “It was a proper circus around Ararat for a week or so, with the ignorant KGB and the Red Army panicking on the Russian side of the Aras River, and therefore the Shah sending Iranian aircraft out to patrol their border-and the Russian expedition was indeed canceled, with no evidence that the circumstances had had anything to do with Philby, who obviously had no choice then but to return to England. So far so good, you’ll say.”

Hale straightened up from under the table to replace the drill and lift the pick and the little microphone. “Consider it said,” he told the old man in a conversational tone, and then ducked under the table again. The drill bit had been well chosen-the plastic cylinder slid tightly into the new, oblique hole without needing any help from the pick, and its fine antenna was invisible in the shadows. He knew Theodora wouldn’t be sending an activating signal to the microphone, making it vulnerable to electronic security sweeps, until such time as Macmillan’s government fell and a Labour Party Prime Minister took office.

“But the secret Russian directors were suspicious of Philby anyway,” he could hear Theodora saying over the rapid, covering rattle of the ivory fan, “clearly wondering if he had been turned there in Turkey, or in London the year before when MI5 interrogated him about Burgess and Maclean, or even right after the failure in ’48. They’ve always been so leery of Ararat, since Lenin got killed fooling with it, that they’d jump at any honorable excuse to leave it alone; we’ve had to nudge them at every turn to encourage them to try it again, so that we’ll be able to step in at the last moment and finally close down the whole show. And so we had to leave Philby out trailing his coat, for another six years, before they worked up the nerve to get back in contact with him.”

Hale pocketed the sawdust and wiped his hand on the pocket lining, then stood up and laid the pick on the handkerchief. “Six years of it,” he said respectfully as he slowly sat down in his chair, “and he wasn’t working for SIS anymore.” He reached for his own handkerchief, but it was in the coat he had left in the Peugeot; so he mopped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with the new coat’s rough sleeve.