Tim Powers - Declare

I won’t be obsequious, Hale thought. “Scotch, please.” He squinted in the flickering amber lamplight, and saw that it was a lean man in a white Arab robe and head-cloth that sat in the chair. The garden walls appeared to be sheets of tarpaulin, their hanging folds gleaming dully in the muted light.

“Call me Ishmael,” the man said without a smile. “John Christie is the SIS Head of Station in Kuwait, and the only cable he has got regarding you is an order that you be detained. Christie’s office is of course now aware that you have arrived in Kuwait.”

Hale just nodded, confident that his tradecraft had been logical and trusting the Russian to see that.

“Salim,” said Ishmael, “you can go. Bring the car back at dawn.”

Bin Jalawi had been standing in the doorway; now he nodded and retreated out of sight, closing the door.

“Sit,” said the Russian, waving toward a palm tree a dozen feet from where he sat; a green or black rattan chair stood there, and Hale crossed the flagstones to it and sat down.

Hale looked more closely at the Ishmael person; he was much older than he had seemed at first glance, perhaps in his late seventies, and he didn’t look well. His eyes glittered in dark sockets, and his leanness seemed a symptom of fever.

“You knew Kuwait in the old days, I’m told,” the old man said. “Do you remember the flood of ’34? No? Well, you’d have been a child, wouldn’t you. On the first day of the Ramadan fast, four inches of rain fell in three hours-no drainage, the streets were five feet deep in water, and all the mud houses collapsed. Homeless, destitute. This was in May, when ordinarily there is never any rain. But the desert bloomed, grass for grazing was everywhere, and so butter and mutton and wool were suddenly as cheap as water. They were water, first destructive and then nourishing. You must remember when water was boated in from Iraq.”

“Yes.” Hale could vividly recall the teak booms that had sailed south daily from the Shatt-al-Arab, anchoring off Ras al-Ajuz to let the silt settle out in the topside tanks; then the itinerant Arab candaris would sell the water from goatskin bags, while established merchants sold it out of carts and trucks.

Beyond the door Hale heard bin Jalawi’s car engine start up and then shift into gear.

“And when the sandstorms were fierce from Syria and Iraq,” Ishmael said, “the boats couldn’t sail, and Kuwait went without water for days.” He coughed, and drank from a tumbler of what might have been vodka; when he put the glass down again on the table beside him, Hale noticed an automatic pistol lying beside it. The growl of bin Jalawi’s Chevrolet diminished away down the road outside. “Nowadays,” the old man went on weakly, “the Westinghouse distillation plant at al-Shuwaikh produces millions of gallons of water a day, so pure that brackish water has to be added to give it taste. Do you think the engineers could have accomplished that, if they had not first learned the secrets of rainstorms?”

“I suppose not.”

“And still it rains.” What Hale thought was more coughing appeared instead to be laughter. “Other, bigger, powers that can destroy or enrich remain-and if they cannot be tamed as thoroughly as rain and water can be, at least we owe it to ourselves to press for whatever accommodations we can get.”

The old man gave Hale a quizzical look, and then picked up a cigar from the table and lit it with a gold lighter. In the glare his face was furrowed and lined. “If,” he went on between puffs as the lighter flame rose and fell, “for no other reason-than to prevent inimical nations-from getting such accommodations-for themselves.” He clicked the lighter shut and seemed to disappear in the sudden darkness. “You are, clearly, acquainted with the power I speak of,” came his voice from behind the dim red coal of the cigar, “and you are at the moment a knight without a lord. Will you listen to persuasions?”

“Yes. Listen.”

A barefoot Arab boy in a dark turban appeared at an inner doorway and stared with obvious expectancy at Ishmael; and the old man set down the cigar and waved a frail hand in a circle and then made a pulling-down gesture.

The boy nodded, and went to the nearest section of garden wall and yanked the tarpaulin down, exposing a bright metal mesh with dark movement behind it, and then went to the next tarpaulin. Hale guessed that the boy was a deaf-mute and had been summoned by the aroma of the cigar, in which Ishmael now appeared to have lost interest.

Brief staccato flutterings and mumbling and a smell like bad cheese on the chilly evening breeze let Hale know that the wire mesh structures the boy was exposing were tall birdcages; and when the boy had yanked the tarpaulin cover from the sixth and last cage, he scampered to a fuse box on the wall and stood on tip-toe to pull a switch, and floodlights lit the garden in a dazzling glare, illuminating dozens or perhaps even hundreds of finches and pigeons and doves and huge green-and-red parrots on perches inside the cages. Squinting, Hale even saw hens and roosters standing up and stretching their stubby wings.

Ishmael said nothing, simply stared at the nearest cage, until the birds had begun a fairly continuous din of cawing and chirping, punctuated by shouts from the parrots and crowing from the roosters.

“Why did you flee England yesterday morning?” Ishmael asked. Hale had to lean close to hear him, and he realized that the birds had been awakened in order to prevent any microphone from catching this conversation. And Hale was bleakly sure that the man wanted to prevent the KGB from eavesdropping as much as the SIS.

“I was about to be arrested, for old crimes,” Hale answered.

“You are said to have killed two men yesterday, an MI5 consultant and a policeman. This would mean you can’t go back to England ever again, if it’s true, and that the SIS would work hard to find you, even here, and extradite you.” He smiled, wrinkling his face. “These must have been extraordinarily bad old crimes.”

“Bad enough.” The news that Cassagnac and the policeman were dead hit Hale like profound weariness. He took a deep breath and made himself go on: “But in fact the MI5 consultant offered me at least partial immunity from prosecution, if I would do some work for them on an old operation.” Living his cover, it didn’t occur to him to urge the Russian to check out the facts of the story for himself. “They’ve probably been sitting on the criminal charges for some time, and dusted them off now just in order to compel me to work on the operation.”

The Russian sat back, and for a moment seemed at a loss as to how to continue. At last he said, “Do you know which of the Soviet secret services I represent?”

“Rabkrin.”

Ishmael raised an eyebrow. “I hope that name is not common knowledge in the SIS. Do you know our history?”

“No. I know you were aligned with both the KGB-or NKVD, as it was called then-and the GRU, before the war, and independent after.”

“Like your SOE,” Ishmael agreed. “A secret service that is secret even from the secret service, isn’t it? In 1880 Tsar Alexander II founded the Department of State Police to protect him from assassins, and the special department in charge of stopping political crimes was called the Okhrana. As it happened, the Tsar was blown up with a grenade in the following year, but the Okhrana, at least, was already a power unto itself. In 1883 an earthquake in eastern Turkey knocked down cliffs in the Ahora Gorge on Mount Ararat, and, after Kremlin scientists investigated the situation on the mountain, it became necessary for the Okhrana to establish a foreign agency, the Zagranichnaya Agentura. Its headquarters were in Paris -and still were when you did work for their ETC network there.”