Tim Powers - Declare

“No,” agreed Theodora, nodding with evident satisfaction as he reached forward to fold the handkerchief and sweep it back into his own pocket, “he was as attractive as we could make him-virtually bankrupt and doing odd ghost-writing jobs, drinking too much, his wife going crazy, avoided by all his old friends. And then after the Prime Minister exonerated him in Parliament, SIS gave him some charity chicken-feed jobs in Beirut, where he’s been doing journalistic piecework. And Angleton’s CIA men in Lebanon have been harassing him and getting him arrested on trivial suspicions, which certainly hasn’t made it look as though he had any usefulness to anybody. We painted them a proper picture, with him. And still it was mere KGB that finally approached him, very tentatively, in ’58. But he continued to look genuinely abandoned-brilliant man, he even tried to get Indian citizenship in 1960!-and now he’s fully back on the old Russian force, as trusted by them as anybody ever is.” He finally clicked his fan closed and tucked it back into his pocket.

Hale pushed away the fresh memories of having installed the microphone, trying to do it so thoroughly that he would even be able to deny the action convincingly in a polygraph interrogation. He focused all his attention on the old man’s story. “And-me?” he asked now. Hale recalled Theodora telling him, in 1941, It’s not so much our plans for you that are at issue.

“Yes. Well, this has to move fast. Last night in Beirut”-he glanced at his wristwatch-“sixteen hours ago, someone shot Kim Philby as he stood too near the bathroom window of his Beirut apartment; it was a.30-caliber rifle round, fired from the roof of a building across the street. He’s alive-the bullet nearly missed, cracked his skull instead of exploding it. He’s had it put about that the injury was caused by a drunken fall, but he very nearly bled to death, and the wound took twenty-four stitches at a local hospital, and he isn’t expected to be receiving company for a few days. Peter Lunn has been head of the SIS Lebanon station in Beirut since October, and of course the hospital staff will have let him know that it’s a gunshot wound, and he knows that Philby has been doing allotment work for the service since his semi-vindication in ’55; Lunn doesn’t know yet about SIS’s new evidence against Philby, and the impending immunity offer, but he will certainly be calling Philby up soon, wanting to ask about this assassination attempt.”

Hale’s heartbeat had nearly slowed to normal. “Who would the shooter represent?” he asked. “Not us, I gather, nor the broader SIS, and not any of the powers out of Moscow.”

Theodora shrugged expansively. “The Turkish Security Inspectorate? The Service de Documentation Extérieure et d’Contre-Espionage? Mossad? Any of them would like to spike this covert Russian expedition, if they knew about it and didn’t trust us to effectively infiltrate a”-he waved at Hale-“a Trojan horse; or if they feared England might try to harness the Ararat power for herself, instead of simply killing it. We’re aware now of a woman with a forged Canadian passport who flew from Istanbul to Beirut yesterday morning, and a Beirut taxi driver remembers driving her to the Rue Kantari, where Philby lives, at sunset. She was carrying a case for a musical instrument the size of an alto saxophone. We made the Istanbul Head of Station get whatever he could out of the room she had vacated; but the room had been cleaned, and all they found was two slips of paper that had been in the waste bin-on one was written ‘Bueno Año,’ and on the other ‘Medio Año.’”

Only old practice kept Hale from twitching, and he narrowed his eyes to prevent Theodora from noticing his surely dilated pupils. “Spanish!” Hale said easily. “Good Year and Medium Year, those mean.”

“Yes. I suspect there was a third slip that said ‘Malo Año,’ Bad Year; most likely a brush-pass signal, with three possible messages, and she only knew yesterday morning which one to pass. I suppose the one she took away with her, Malo Año, meant I’m going off now to kill Philby.”

Hale’s ears were ringing, and he felt dizzy. I should have spoken up when he first mentioned the two slips, he thought; they’ve got nothing to do with any brush-pass signal. And if I don’t speak up now, I’m concealing vital information from him, concealing it from the service. “The Crown’s good servant” indeed! But-is she still working for the French Secret Service, the SDECE, as an assassin now? Or could she possibly be involved in this as an independent actor? Those slips of paper were no indication that she’s working with anyone, as Theodora thinks. Could her attempt to kill Philby have been personal?

To his surprise he felt an extra surge of anger toward Philby, and recognized it as jealousy.

She must actually have looked, this time-and got Malo Año.

I need to get there, he thought. Soon.

He remembered crawling out of bed in his rented room in Weybridge on many nights in 1953 and ’54, when nerves and resisted memories had made sleep impossible, and tuning the landlady’s short-wave set to random points near the 40-meter bandwidth, and then just sitting there in the dark parlor listening to the indecipherable dots and dashes of code groups being transmitted from God knew where in England or Western Europe-and wondering if one of those lonely signals was originating from her finger on a sending key, far out there in the night in some boulevard garret or harbor boat.

“If I’m to be a part of the Russian team,” he said evenly, “I expect I’m to do some coat-trailing myself, and fast. What is my story to be, this time, what can they hope I’ll give them? What will I give them, good enough to convince them that I’m a real traitor? Why am I going to Kuwait, if Philby is in Beirut?” With all of Arabia between, he thought.

Again Theodora glanced at his wristwatch, and Hale thought the old man looked uncomfortable. “Yes. Well, we’ve painted them a proper picture of you too.” He looked up with a frosty stare. “‘Surrendered to the service,’ right? ‘Go to prison, in disgrace.’”

“Good God, Jimmie!” said Hale in unfeigned alarm. “What have you scripted?”

“A good way to make something look plausible is to make it appear to be just one more of an established ongoing series, right? We’ve been, that is, MI5 has been, exposing a lot of corruption in the secret service files lately, turning up old shamefuls like the ones the Prime Minister mentioned a few minutes ago; and the Russians are certainly aware of Profumo’s imminent fall, and they probably know about the new evidence against Philby. The liberal press always headlines each new instance of it, it’s been like a running serial, and Macmillan is known to hate it, and it’s terrible for the country. One more would not look at all deliberate.”

“I follow you. I’m not a longtime Soviet plant, obviously, since they’d know that wasn’t so. Mossad? Have I secretly been a Zionist all along?”

“I’m afraid you’re just a crook, Andrew. Our new, unimpeachable evidence indicates that when you were in Kuwait from ’46 to early ’48, you were involved in betraying British Petroleum interests in the Persian Gulf by selling strategic secrets to the Americans at Standard Oil, and a couple of murdered Bedouin guides now appear to be on your conscience; and you used your cover post as Passport Control Officer to sell forged British passports to fugitive Nazi war criminals stranded in Oman. Oh yes, and you took money from a now deceased Russian illegal to break a couple of Soviet agents out of a Turk prison and smuggle them safely back across the Soviet border; the illegal kept no records, it can’t be disproved. There’s a good deal more, you’ll be briefed in Kuwait.”