Tim Powers - Declare

The news forced a harsh laugh out of Hale. “We thought we were working for the Razvedupr, the GRU. That was…Rabkrin?”

“Under one of its names, yes. Where is Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga these days?”

“I don’t know. I last saw her in Berlin in the summer of ’45. She was working for the French DGSS then, out of Algiers.” Hale wondered uneasily what he might have been told to reveal or hide, if the briefing today had not been aborted.

“You are lying. Good, you were almost seeming too perfect, too cooperative; but this lie is nicely vain, ill-considered. In fact you saw her in the Ahora Gorge in 1948, when you had tried to stifle the thing on Ararat for the SIS. She called you a rude name.”

Cannibale. Hale could feel shame heating his face as he realized that one of the Russian gunmen must have survived that carnage, and heard her. It had to have been one of the Russians, surely…not something in the sky…

Hale breathed slowly. “You’re right,” he said. “I forgot.”

“Is she so forgettable? I met her, in 1942, in the Lubyanka.” He stared at Hale for a few seconds, then went on: “In 1913 the Zagranichnaya Agentura was ostensibly shut down to mollify certain French Catholics who had got wind of its real work and were threatening to involve Pope Pius X; but it went on under another name, in greater secrecy.”

Hale was leaned far forward to hear, and now he said, “You mentioned a-drink.”

The Russian nodded, as if Hale had made a conversational point; and his hand rattled among the items on the table beside him, at one point striking a flame from the cigarette lighter, and then he tossed out onto the flagstones a tiny cardboard cylinder that commenced whirling furiously and whistling and shooting out colored flame like a road flare. The Arab boy hurried up to him, and Ishmael gestured.

A parrot behind the mesh at Hale’s right elbow said, “ Allaho A’alam,” and Hale glanced at the bird curiously, for what it had said was a deprecatory phrase, usually preceding some dubious story; but the parrot appeared to have nothing else to say.

The boy had scampered away, and now skipped back to where Hale sat and expressionlessly handed him a tall glass of neat Scotch, without ice. Hale tasted it-it was lukewarm, and he recognized the smoky, almost tarry taste of Laphroaig.

Ishmael nodded, and then went on: “When the Labor Party split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in 1903, the Okhrana had penetrated both groups; and when six Bolshevik deputies were elected into the Duma parliament in 1912, two of them were the Okhrana’s. The Bolshevik Lenin, motivated by both opportunism and idealism, came to a secret agreement with the Okhrana-they arrested the most troublesome of the Mensheviks for him, as well as any Bolsheviks still agitating for reunification of the Labor Party, and in return Lenin saved the core of the Okhrana, the onetime Zagranichnaya Agentura, and transplanted it into the new Soviet secret police, the Cheka.”

“ Hayhat!” said the parrot; the word was Arabic, meaning roughly alas, or far be it from you and me.

Ishmael frowned at the bird. “Revolutionary mobs,” he continued, “broke into the Okhrana headquarters in 1917 and burned all the records there, but the soul of the Okhrana had moved on, and the head of the Cheka was Feliks Dzerzhinsky-a man who, in his youth, had aspired to be a Catholic priest; a certain spiritual perspective had by this time proved to be necessary in the highest levels of state security and espionage. It was Dzerzhinsky who convinced Lenin to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1918, adding thirteen days, so that the previous year’s October Revolution was retroactively made to have happened in November; Dzerzhinsky knew the value of concealing true birthdays, though Lenin later became overconfident of it.” Ishmael stared at Hale. “Mr. Hale, when is your birthday?”

“January sixth. I’ll turn forty-one in three days.”

The old man nodded thoughtfully, apparently weighing Hale’s answer-though he must have known it. And Hale remembered that Philby had appeared to question his birthday, at the Ham Common camp in ’42.

Ishmael went on, “Lenin himself instituted the autonomous Rabkrin directorate, with provisions to keep it independent of, and even secret from, the other services; he did not trust Stalin, who in fact later purged the services unmercifully in an unsuccessful effort to eliminate the Rabkrin element. Stalin had a horror of spiritual warfare, the possible wrath of God. Since then we have at different times been known as the OMS, which was the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, and as Smersh and Smernesh even under Stalin’s very nose during the war, and at other times as flickering sub-directorates in the KGB; but since 1917 it has always been Rabkrin, under the shifting titles. Why didn’t you accept Whitehall ’s offer of ‘at least partial immunity from prosecution’?”

“I don’t know that it was Whitehall ’s offer,” Hale said over the noisy bickering of the birds. “In any case, I’m convinced that it was an offer of immunity from prosecution on account of death. Other agents who have got too informed about this operation have had a way of dying prematurely.”

The old man nodded tiredly. “T. E. Lawrence was bludgeoned off of his motor-bicycle; the code-breaker Alan Turing was fed a poisoned apple. You were probably right. This MI5 advisor you killed yesterday, this Cassagnac-he was one of ours, once, and I am grateful that you succeeded in killing him at last-what did he tell you about our current operation? What does Whitehall know?”

This was moving very fast-everything since his arrival in Kuwait had been fast-and Hale felt badly uninformed, and he wasn’t happy that this man had told him so much about the Rabkrin. “Am I working for your people now?” he asked nervously. “Does the Rabkrin offer me immunity from prosecution?”

“You think we’ll resolve your status, as your service jargon has it? Establish the truth about you? No, I can demonstrate, to your most exacting satisfaction, that it would be against our interests to kill you afterward. As you proposed to Salim bin Jalawi, Tommo Burks can begin a new life in the Arab states-a very comfortable one at that, more privileged than you can now imagine. What did Jimmie Theodora talk to you about?”

“When?”

“When you last spoke with him. When was that, to the best of your vain, ill-considered memory?” He shifted in his chair. “Any further lies will seriously impair the note of mutual respect you and I have established here.”

Hale had to assume that the Rabkrin was unaware of his summons to London yesterday. “It was just before Ararat in ’48,” he said evenly. “We discussed…that operation, damn it. And I didn’t ever see him again, after that.”

“It was Cassagnac alone, then, who came to your house yesterday morning, with the news of your imminent detainment and possible immunity?”

“He was alone, yes.”

“Incautious of him-but then you and he had been friends, I believe.” Ishmael smiled. “In the old days.”

Hale took a quick gulp of Scotch and then stood up and paced to the farthest birdcage and stared at a couple of angry-looking roosters. “I guess it’s a lucky thing for you that SIS braced me when they did,” he said tightly.

“Not coincidence,” came Ishmael’s voice from behind him, barely audible above the birds’ squabbling. “Your masters are clearly aware that we are preparing for another attempt on the mountain-and you were the man in charge, working against us, when we tried it fourteen years ago. They would naturally want to compel your counsel and assistance in trying again to counter it. And when instead you fled England, ringing all the alarms, I was activated in case you decided to hole up among your leave-behind Hadhira or Bedouin networks. Other Rabkrin agents were activated in other places, or sent, to watch for you. Paris, Rome, even Chipping Campden, pitiably.”