Tim Powers - Declare

Rome? thought Hale. Because I used to be a Catholic? Theodora said Dick White had consulted the Pope…And Paris? That would have to be in case I had gone looking for Elena, through the French SDECE; apparently the Rabkrin really doesn’t know her present whereabouts.

He walked back to his chair and sat down. “Right,” Hale said, “now you want my…counsel and assistance. What if I’m not worth it, as things work out? I might not be much help, even with the best will in the world, you know. I’ll tell you right now, if I…go with you, it’ll cost you a lot.” This shaky, defiant tone was good. “And-and I might not go with you in any case, you understand. I’ve never been disloyal, not to the service, at least.”

“Only to your country, as in the matter of steering oil concessions to the Americans out from under the British Petroleum Company, and as in aiding Nazi war criminals to escape proper retribution. I do see. But how do you reconcile-I’m simply curious, my dear fellow-how do you reconcile having killed Cassagnac with ‘not being disloyal to the service’? I would have thought that was a memorable event.”

It was a good thrust, and Hale had stared at Ishmael and shrugged before he had thought of an answer; but without a measurable pause he said, “Cassagnac? But he wasn’t SIS, was he? He was GRU, or Rabkrin, or French DGSS. At best he was part-time MI5.”

Ishmael laughed, and again it was nearly coughing. “I like ‘at best’! Interdepartmental rivalry! You don’t have to tell me about it. Well, but you must admit you’ve shaved your patriotism down to a very narrow reed. It will not support you.” He leaned forward, and the birds all clamored in their cages. “Break it now. Say, ‘I break it now.’”

“Before I would-”

“You bought that coat you’re wearing today after losing your previous one at the airport, and you have some kind of ankh or drogue stone in your pocket. I know you do, because if you did not have it, I would not have had to raise smells and flares here to summon the servant; and the birds are inhabited tonight. Do you understand? Assassins from Russia or England are not what you should primarily be afraid of.”

Hale remembered the storm clouds he had seen over the Persian Gulf last night; but he forced himself to laugh and say, “I’ll admit that-on Ararat itself-”

The old man got to his feet and was nearly shouting to be heard over the controversies among the birds. “What sort of personage did your Lawrence of Arabia learn of, in the brontologion scroll he found at the Qumran Wadi in 1917? Why did the American President Wilson suffer a stroke immediately upon returning to America from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where he had reluctantly agreed to take the League of Nations mandate to occupy eastern Turkey, in spite of the advice of the experts-experts on ancient Persian languages and the Crusades!-in his secret Inquiry group? Why did Lenin suffer the strokes that killed him in ’22 and ’23, after the Red Army had recaptured and then lost the Kars and Van districts in eastern Turkey? Idiot! Will you walk out of here still a knight without a protecting lord, without a covenant? Where will you walk-how far? I offer you a staff-say to me, about your old betrayed reed, ‘I break it now.’ Your statement will be witnessed.”

Ice would have been rattling in Hale’s glass, for his hand was trembling-but with sheer excitement, for this was the very highest-stakes table of the Great Game, and he didn’t suppress a tight smile as he said, “I break it now.”

Ishmael was breathing hard, as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. “Surrender your weapon.”

Hale reached into the inner pocket of his new coat and dragged out the tinfoil ankh, and as the parrots and roosters shouted around him he tore it apart into impotent glittering shreds and let them fall like twisted airplane wreckage onto the spotlit flagstones.

“I break it now,” he repeated.

Ishmael said, “Would you die for our cause, your new cause?”

Hale barked out two syllables of a surprised laugh. “No!”

“I would. Would you kill for us?”

“Well, it’s your cause, isn’t it? Makes a world of difference. I haven’t got one of those any longer, aside from enlightened self-preservation. Kill for you?” Hale shrugged. “In some circumstances.”

Ishmael pursed his wrinkled lips, clearly recognizing that this indifference, distasteful though he might find it, was a small point in Hale’s favor-an infiltrated double might well have been told to feign more commitment. “What did Cassagnac say?” the old man snapped. “What does Whitehall know?”

Hale took a deep breath and opened his mouth-and then discovered that he had an almost physical difficulty in telling Ishmael the answers. As recently as yesterday, Hale would have undergone torture rather than tell a Rabkrin operative these things.

He exhaled without speaking, aware of a chill of sudden dampness on his forehead. But it’s all wrong, he told himself, you can tell this man the old math because it’s-apparently-invalid; but! -but it is nevertheless the math I put together, discovered! -to deceive and checkmate Ishmael’s people-and it’s so internally consistent, so convincing-

Ishmael was staring at him with eager attention, and Hale realized that his own hesitancy here was obviously genuine…and he knew that Theodora had arranged all this so that it would be.

And so at last Hale began talking, haltingly telling his questioner everything the Declare operatives had known in 1948, and describing, as if it were the still-current plan, his own earnest, painstaking strategy for countering that Soviet attempt to awaken what slept uneasily on the top of Mount Ararat.

The birds appeared to want to listen, and Ishmael had to summon the boy and make him beat the cages with a stick to get them all shouting and cawing again.

When the stars had begun to fade in the east, Hale and his host shared a breakfast of hot saffron rice with eggs beaten into it, accompanied by a choice of beer or camel’s milk, of which Hale chose beer; and then Ishmael gave him a clearly secondhand set of Bedu clothes to change into: a patched cotton dishdasha smock with an aba robe to drape over it, and a once-white kaffiyeh head-cloth and an agal cord to tie it on with. Ishmael looked like a prosperous town Arab in his long white shirt and robe and white kaffiyeh, while Hale’s smock had been patched with so many different fabrics that he sourly thought he looked like a dervish; and his bare feet were obscenely white, and soon achingly numb with cold from standing on the dewy flagstones.

In the frosty overcast dawn Salim bin Jalawi returned with the jaunty blue Chevrolet, and Hale and Ishmael climbed into the back as Ishmael gave bin Jalawi directions to a place off the highway south of Magwa.

Bin Jalawi was moody, and several times frowned at Hale in the rear-view mirror. Hale had gathered that they were to travel to some desert location to consult some very old person.

Hale thought about how to phrase a question. “Is it a place I know?” he asked finally, leaning forward over the seat back. They were driving down a big new divided highway under a clearing sky, and for nearly half a minute now had been gunning around the perimeter of a traffic circle almost wide enough to contain another airport; but the interior of the circle was just tractor-leveled sand, as were the expanses on either side of the highway, and the only other vehicles between the flat north and south horizons were a couple of miles-distant water tankers.