Tim Powers - Declare

“You must see the attaché personally, alone, and if anyone else tries to deflect you, you must threaten them with reprisals from the NKVD; that’s the Soviet secret police, the threat should scare them if you deliver it in a mild voice. Don’t show your passport to anyone, not even the attaché-give all of them only your code name, which is ‘Lot’-and get the attaché to send a message to Moscow saying that Lot has lost contact with ETC and needs to get in touch with the director. The attaché will let you wait there until a reply comes, with instructions for you. What’s your code name?”

“ Lot.”

“And my code name?”

“Et Salinae.” He shook his head. “Et Cetera.”

“That was Latin-and salina is ‘salt mine’ in Spanish, probably the same. You were thinking of Lot ’s wife, who was changed to a pillar of salt, in the Book of Genesis.”

Hale was embarrassed, for the name Lot had put him in mind of the Biblical Lot, and so he probably had been thinking of this girl in terms of Lot’s wife. But what business did a young Communist have knowing Bible stories?

She had stood up, and now she crossed to the hat stand by the door and pulled her black sweater back on. “Just you work at being worth your salary”-the French word was salaire -“to the Party. You will be paid a hundred and fifty United States dollars a month, plus justifiable expenses. The Red Army never pays in any other currency-”

Hale had stood up too and started for the sofa, but now he paused. “The Red Army? I thought we were working for the Comintern.”

She bit her lip. “No, we are working for the secret service of the Red Army-Razvedupr, or GRU, both terms are short for Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie-the Chief Intelligence Administration.”

“Oh.” I should have known, he thought, that Theodora wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just to set me spying on the Communist International.

From her pocket she dug out a brass key and tossed it to him. “That is a duplicate key to this apartment. You are to use it only in an emergency having to do with our Party work, understand?”

“Yes,” he said humbly.

“If we should ever meet accidentally on the street, don’t acknowledge me-if I’m working I might be under surveillance, by either side.” She had her hand on the doorknob, but paused and looked back at him. “And-if we should find ourselves in a situation where the motivations and identities aren’t clear-there is a code phrase which means, Things are not what they seem-trust me. It is ‘Bless me.’ Have you got that?”

“Bless me,” Hale echoed.

She nodded, and her stern manner relaxed for a moment as she grinned and made a cross in the air with her forefinger. Then she was gone, and the tall door closed behind her, and he heard her steps tapping away down the stairs. Many years later he was to learn that they had not even really been working for the Red Army, or not entirely.

If a perfectly oscillating radio circuit is connected to an aerial, it becomes a transmitter, sending a uniform whistle out over the airwaves on its particular frequency; and if a telegraph key is wired into the leads from the high-voltage battery that maintains the oscillation, the key can break the steady carrier wave into the dots and dashes of International Morse. A receiving set tuned to a point just short of oscillation on the same frequency will pick up the stuttering whistle at great distances-as long as the Heaviside Layer isn’t curling and flexing in the vagaries of les parasites.

But it often was. On many nights, hunched under a bare lightbulb in the ammonia reek among the brooms and buckets in the custodian’s closet on the roof, with sweaty earphones clamped to his head, Hale would be hearing the signal from Moscow on the 39-meter band-ETC ETC ETC-but be unable to get them to acknowledge his answering signal-KLK KLK KLK DE ETC-on the prescribed 49-meter band or any bandwidth near it. Sometimes he would get weird ghost-echo responses, old signals of his own from the day or week before, as if they had been stuck quivering in the sky until his present agitation of the airwaves had shaken them loose, distorted in their rhythms now and riding a signal as faint as an electromagnetic sigh.

Very late on one such night in mid-October, when in fact the close-pressing blackness beyond the closet window had just begun to coalesce into jagged rooftop and chimney shapes against a receding sky, he blearily imagined that the rhythm of the parasite ghost-signal was a syncopated counterpoint to his own heartbeat, and so he impulsively began tapping out his call-sign in that same skipping, halting beat; and after only a few newly rhythmic passes he was rewarded with the clear answering signal ETC ETC OK DE KLK QRK RST 599 KN. In the international Q-code this indicated that Moscow had received his signal with perfect strength and clarity and asked him to go ahead. Hale immediately tuned his condenser to the designated working bandwidth and began tapping out the messages he had laboriously encoded with a one-time pad that afternoon:

FROM PIERRE B-T TOTAL STRENGTH OF THE GERMAN ARMY COLON 412 DIVISIONS COMMA 21 IN FRANCE NOW PERIOD 3 DIVISIONS PREVIOUSLY SOUTH OF BORDEAUX NOW BEING SHIFTED EAST…

He realized that he was able to send faster than normal when he matched his keystrokes to the quicker-tempo rhythm dancing in his head, even though it involved sometimes slapping the key on a hard double beat, and he realized that he no longer needed the metronome of his own heartbeat in order to follow it-

…FROM EMIL B-T NEW GERMAN GASES COLON NITROSYL-FLUORIDE COMMA CACODYLISOCYANIDE…

– he was almost able to hum the single line of barbaric melody that the fractured intervals seemed to hint at-

…GERMAN HIGH COMMAND MOVING HEAVY COASTAL AND NAVAL GUNS TOWARD THE MOSCOW FRONT FROM KONIGSBERG AND BRESLAU IN PREPARATION FOR A PROLONGED SIEGE…

– but he had to grip the edge of the table with his free hand, for the whole building seemed to be rotating with ponderous and increasing velocity, and at the back of his brain and in his spine he was sure that centrifugal force was about to tug him out of his chair. He was blinking sweat out of his eyes to keep reading the numbers he was tapping out, and then tears; the harsh castanet sound of the key seemed to be accompanied by a monstrously slow, far-subsonic pounding that he could feel in his blood, like a slow-motion giant’s running footfalls across the dome of the sky.

But he kept doggedly tapping out the code groups in the new ether-born syncopation, glad that the window was not directly in front of him and hoping that the stars were already invisible in the rising glow of dawn. At the end of his transmission he received the curt OSL NK on the Moscow bandwidth, signaling that his message had been received in its entirety and that contact was ended.

He shuddered convulsively, and then let his face follow the shaken-loose drops of sweat down onto the desktop, and for several seconds he just panted with his lips against the wood.

His mind scrabbled fearfully for an explanation of what had happened, and eventually came up with the reassuringly abstract phrase self-hypnosis. Fatigue and anxiety, and the irregularly repetitious action of tapping the telegraph key, had apparently-had obviously-pushed him to concoct a natural rhythm that allowed effective, spontaneous sending. The dizziness and the fear must simply have been childish reactions to the inadvertent self-hypnosis. Freud would have made short work of it.

Finally he unplugged the set and wearily tucked it and the key and the earphones away behind a sliding panel in the wall; but instead of going downstairs to his bed he pulled open the slanted roof door and climbed out onto the scooped iron gutter between two gables. Pigeons had clattered away into the brightening sky at the squeak of the door, and the fresh river breeze was cold in Hale’s lank sweat-damp hair as he leaned half-sitting against the slanted roof shingles, with his heels braced in the gutter, and stared northwest toward the still-shadowed spires of Notre-Dame Cathedral on the bigger island, the Île de la Cité. Below him in the chilly darkness he could see the channel that separated the islands, though he couldn’t quite see the Pont St.-Louis that linked them like a tow rope.