Tim Powers - Declare

Hale walked on past, then stepped in under the awning and glanced up and down the street, shivering in the eddying wind and wishing he had not lost his jacket at the airport. When he glanced at the old man behind the window six feet away, he saw that the man had breathed a patch of steam onto the inside of the entryway glass, and with a fingernail had written in tiny English letters: STAND + DECLARE. The letters were painstakingly drawn, and Hale guessed that the old man probably didn’t even know the meaning of the symbols he was tracing in reverse on the glass.

Hale closed his eyes in a slightly protracted blink to show that he had understood; and then he looked the other way. This was fairly extreme caution-not even to go to the indicated address, and now to be redirected by this evanescent writing. And it occurred to him that only someone standing as close to the shop as he was would even see the old man in the darkness inside, much less the faint letters in the dampness on the glass.

Hale glanced back and saw that the old man had wiped out the two words and written, less legibly but still readably in the moisture: WATCHED-BRIEF IN BEIRUT.

Hale was apparently not being redirected, here.

His stomach churned, and his face was hot in the cold breeze as he turned away from the window. The planned briefing here in Kuwait had apparently been called off, with no fallbacks until he somehow got to Beirut. But he needed his script, he needed to know what story he was supposed to give the expected Rabkrin recruiter. Damn it, he thought worriedly, what am I supposed to say?

The unwelcome answer was written in a fresh patch of steam when he glanced back after another blind look in the other direction:

GIVE ’48 ARARAT MATH: ALL WRONG.

This time he looked away to hide his face, even just from this stranger behind the glass.

Hale was numb and dizzy, and for a moment his mind simply recoiled from comprehending the words he had read. The math-the strategy and the calculations and the orders given to the men he had led up the road below Ararat-had been of his own devising. “All wrong”? Was it actually possible?

With a desperate leap of logic he decided that it was not. Cold sweat of relief dewed his forehead as he told himself forcefully that his secret purpose here had been found out by the Rabkrin, that this was a gambit to trick him into revealing to their recruiter the valid deductions and strategy that he had assembled in ’48. His mission here was blown, Cassagnac had been shot uselessly, but at least Hale was not guilty of having killed his own men through a mistake fourteen years ago. It was obvious, so obvious that he didn’t need to prove it by trying to get confirmation of this “order,” even if he could make contact with Theodora…

But the thought of Theodora brought back the old man’s words yesterday morning- You’ll probably doubt its validity…this right now, what I’m telling you, is your confirmation-in-advance. If you hate it, it’s the genuine instructions .

Too obviously this was exactly what Theodora had been referring to.

Hale closed his eyes and let his thoughts collapse into an unvoiced shrill wail of abysmal dismay; and he didn’t realize that he was clenching his jaws until the pain in his teeth made him involuntarily open his eyes, and then he had to blink away tears to see the street clearly.

He remembered wondering who or what Theodora expected him to betray in his script. But apparently it was not to be a script after all, and the betrayal had happened fourteen years ago.

All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.

He blotted his eyes on his shirt cuff and took a deep breath and forced his gaze to be blank as he looked back again at the window.

The old man was gone, and the word GO was barely visible in the fading steam. A moment after he had seen it, a wet squeegee drew an obliterating streak of runny cleanness across the inside of the glass.

All you can do now is justify the losses, avenge them, Hale thought emptily. If Declare knows the ’48 math was bad, Declare must have some better sort to work with now-there’s nothing for it but to push on and further that effort. Lines from a Bartholomew Dowling poem dirged in his head: ’Tis all we have left to prize. One cup to the dead already-hurrah for the next that dies!

He looked at his watch and then began trudging away on down the sand-gritty sidewalk. Forcing himself into the familiar cold professionalism, he considered whether it was likely himself or the welding shop that was being watched. Probably it was the shop-he was fairly sure he had evaded any watchers on the buses, or at the airport. He wondered what the rest of the missed briefing would have consisted of, and what “equipment” he would have been given.

But speculation was useless. He had no choice here but to follow such scanty instructions as he had been given, and look up Salim bin Jalawi and any other covert operatives he could find from among his old networks. He made a mental note to wash the shoe-polish out of his hair in the first men’s room he found-it would be counter-productive to seem anxious about anything at all.

And as for equipment, he could make an ankh, if he had to-tinfoil rolled and bent into the right shape would do, since it was the Klein bottle topological shape of the thing that compelled the attention of djinn, not any property of what it was made of.

He filled his lungs with the sea air, then exhaled it all in a deep sigh. Since it might be himself who was being watched, he conscientiously stepped into a carpet shop to ask about some of the waterfront merchants he had known fifteen years ago. After half an hour of this, he could catch a bus back north to Al-Kuwait and call Salim bin Jalawi. Whatever agency might be watching, this would be behavior consistent with his fugitive cover, and the troublesome tail-evading route he had taken down here from Al-Kuwait could only make it look more genuine.

Old, reawakened practice permitted him to nearly forget the intolerable words drawn in the steam-ALL WRONG.

Salim bin Jalawi’s house was air-conditioned, and in the aggressive chill Hale sipped a glass of tea and politely ate some cashew nuts from a bowl on the Danish Modern table. A refrigerator hummed out in the white-tiled kitchen next to an electric range, and fluorescent lights held back the dark of the late afternoon. Through the sliding glass door at his right Hale could see, as bright dots on the iron-colored southwest horizon, the beacons of natural gas flares out on the Burgan oil fields.

Bin Jalawi’s beard was ivory white now, but his face was still as dark as coffee and as lean and angular as a Notre-Dame gargoyle, and he bared white teeth as he grinned at Hale.

“You must be a director,” he said, “or a vice president, by now, of the Creepo.”

There was knowingness in the man’s voice, but Hale couldn’t tell if it meant that bin Jalawi was somehow already aware of his fugitive status or, more likely, if it was just the equivalent of a wink at the long-compromised pretense of the old Combined Research Planning Office.

Hale had called the man from a nearby telephone, and though they had only exchanged the old recognition signals over the wire, bin Jalawi had greeted him at his door with Bedu enthusiasm, holding both of Hale’s hands and joyfully shouting, Shlun kum? Kaif hal ak, kaif int, kaif int, kaif int? -and much more, all of which had essentially meant: How have you been?

Hale now put down his tea glass with a soft knock, absurdly wishing it were a cup of the coffee they had made at camp in the old days, harsh with the foul water of the desert wells.

“I’ve retired,” he said in Arabic. “I felt like a change of water and air. Tommo Burks will, I think, begin a new life in the Arab states. And I thought you might be able to help me.”