Tim Powers - Declare

“Good God.” Hale shivered, and not just because of the cold rainwater that was battering his face, as he lengthened his stride to catch up to her. “I’m-that must have been horrible. But why quote that verse to me now?”

“I can work a radio,” she said. “I can copy and send International Morse, and I’ve been the assigned WT agent in several Soviet networks before this: here, and in Belgium, and back then, in Albacete. But in this current configuration I’m the one who travels around and meets couriers, and Centre wants each network to have one agent whose sole job is to manage the ciphers and the radio, and they don’t want anyone else besides that person to do any sending; their operators in Moscow quickly learned the characteristics of your ‘fist,’ as they call it, your particular style on the telegraph key, and they’d get suspicious if I or anyone but you was to do any of the sending for our network now. But I could. And I think-I’m certain-that, if I’d been working the radio a week ago, we wouldn’t have got the accelerated signal and the burned floor.”

Hale nodded nervously, not wanting to discuss that night. “And that’s why you quoted Job to me.”

“Marty killed hundreds of Comintern agents in Spain, on the pretext that they had Trotskyite sympathies. But I think he was trying to weed out agents who had gradually become members of a transcendent order, a category so subtle and secret that the agents themselves didn’t even know they were in it-that is, didn’t know that they were in it too. I think there are more than one of these higher orders, I think there are partisan divisions. That English agent that Marty killed had been driving around the airfield at Guadalajara in a jeep, taking photographs-but it seemed he was taking pictures away from the airfield! Guadalajara was a Moorish city once, Moslem-its old name was Wadi al-Hijarah, Arabic for River of Stones, and the campesinos say black basalt stones walk in those hills at night. The Englishman may not even have known he was involved in something bigger than the British secret service…though he did seem to mean something when he quoted the verse from Job.”

A roar in the sky that Hale had thought at first was thunder grew louder and droning, and then he flinched and glanced up as a tri-motor Junkers 52 sailed heavily across the gray sky several hundred feet overhead, its broad silver wings rocking as it banked in for imminent touchdown at Orly.

“The verse from Job,” he said too loudly, embarrassed at having been startled by the plane. “Well, it means nothing to me, besides Yahweh telling Job, rudely, that if the world is run according to any rules at all, those rules are beyond Job’s comprehension. Let’s move along faster here, we’re getting soaked.”

“If the belt is a recognition signal,” she went on doggedly, almost pleadingly, “I don’t think we need to worry about its being one that would be recognized by any mere Razvedupr or Gestapo agents.”

“Except Cassagnac,” Hale objected, “and whoever told him about it; and the man in London who told me to say I’d bought a belt in an ironmonger’s shop in Paris, as a password phrase.” He smiled and reached out and squeezed her shoulder under the sodden sweater. “Your angel will be able to recognize it even in my pocket.”

“Eyeless in Gaza!” she burst out in English, suddenly very angry. Hale stepped back from her in bewilderment; this was another quote from an English poem- Milton? Samson Agonistes? -and Gaza was a town in Palestine. Elena turned away from him and strode on ahead, and Hale thought her voice was choked with tears when she called back to him, “You be sure to quote the Catholic version, when they shoot you.”

Hale splashed hurriedly through the puddles at her heels, not at all sure of what she had meant; did she suspect that he too was a member of the British secret service? Surely not-he had almost forgotten it himself, until Cassagnac’s talk today had made him consider fleeing back to England, and he was certain that she would instantly turn him in if she ever suspected that he was a spy. No, she had simply seen him as one of these hypothetical agents who unwittingly begin to…what, operate in a higher category, like her friend Maly, and perhaps like herself.

The thought made him consider again the idea of running, of finding his way back to England. If it had been one of the big Focke Achgelis helicopters, instead of a plane, with big rotor blades turning slowly enough to be seen …Resentfully, he thought of his year’s-end childhood nightmares, which Theodora had been so interested in; and then he remembered his and Elena’s predawn clochard walk ten days ago, which had somehow transported them from one island in the Seine to the far end of the other- You were born for this, she had said that night-and he recalled the terrible near-music in the earphones the next night, and the weirdly scorched floor…

The implications of all this were simply too morbid and medieval to be true, or at least to be consistently true-he had been vaguely hoping that all these things would recede without consequence or sequel, and he had convinced himself that the emotion he had felt, when the radio had gone mad and the wind had been rattling the shingles outside the apartment window on that night, had not been fearful eagerness.

To wear the belt would be to voluntarily participate in this filthy old business…which, really, he had started to do when he had begun tapping out his wireless signals in the insistent, pulse-hopping rhythm.

Recognition, he thought bleakly as he pulled the belt out of his pocket and slung it around his waist; and perhaps some awful sort of protection, by God knew what means, from God knew what threat.

He sprinted through the rain to catch up with her, and after tapping her on the shoulder he pointed to the ankh buckle cinched at his waist. She gave him a broad, relieved smile, and they walked back to the apartment arm-in-arm.

The radio behaved normally that night, and once again Moscow did not respond.

On the last day of 1941 Centre sent orders that both Hale and Elena were to report in person to Moscow immediately, and that the ETC network was to be retired.

Radio contact with Moscow Centre had been reestablished for a month by that time, and right away Elena had been ordered to take over half of the radio duties, while at the same time resuming her job of meeting the furtive couriers and sources. And at the end it was Elena who deciphered the summons order-probably only moments before the Gestapo broke down the front door of the latest of the Rive Gauche pensions in which she and Hale had been renting rooms.

Moscow Centre had not come back on the air until November 29. During the two weeks preceding that, Elena had got work as a typist at the Simex offices in the Lido building on the the Champs-Élysées, while Hale had developed a rudimentary network among the unemployed and alcoholic clochards.

Neither of them had accomplished much in that interlude.

Though she was given only innocuous clerical work to do, Elena had learned that Simex was the main procurement firm working for the German occupation authorities-Simex executives were allowed free access to Wehrmacht installations, and the Abwehr actually consulted Simex engineers on secret German construction projects, and of course the company had a sophisticated radio system-and she guessed that Simex, and its sister corporation Simexco, in Brussels, were the perfect hermetic Soviet network she had speculated about to Hale, the intelligence source that was so secure and omniscient that Centre could afford to, and therefore arguably would be shrewd to, give the Gestapo the delusive satisfaction of rolling up all the other networks. Elena had begun carrying her little automatic pistol with her in her purse after she had deduced that, and Hale had known it was for killing herself if she should be captured, lest her conclusions should be wrung out of her by Gestapo interrogators.