Declare

ELEVEN: Beirut, 1963

And the two of them, laying him east and west, that the mysterious earth currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon— bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by nerve.

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Kim Philby sat back in his chair by the window-side table in the Normandy Hotel bar, and he licked his lips, tasting her lipstick. The woman on the other side of the table simply stared at him for a moment, then took a long inhalation on her cigarette. Out beyond the window glass the late afternoon sky was gold over the purple sea.

Philby smiled at her, but he was nettled. He found her prematurely bone-white hair very erotic, but her lips had been as inert as the back of her hand would have been; and he wished his head were not ludicrously wrapped in white bandages. “I do b-beg your p-pardon, Miss C-B. My Sov-oviet handler was in the l-lobby, with some cadaverous specimen, j-just now. They d-didden did not come in, but if you do in-snit— insist on meeting me in my—office this way, we had b-better pretend to be h-having an extramerry-extramartial-extramarital—”

“I understand,” said Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga in careful English. She sighed out a puff of smoke, then picked up her glass of Dubonnet. “In our work we have to emulate Judas sometimes.” She finished the red drink in two gulps, raising her disconcertingly dark eyebrows at him over the rim. “Your office, this hotel bar is?” she asked when she had put the glass down.

“I g-get my mail here, and the c-concierge keeps a tah-tah-typewriter here, for my use. I’m a j- journalist, you know, these days.” He picked up his own glass, swirling the gin among the diminished ice cubes. “But Judas, you say? The outfit I pro-propose to b-b-b—betray!—is hardly the aqua-equi-equivalent of the Son of man, even in my atheistic c-consideration.” He smiled more broadly. “Or maybe you mean I turn out to have betrayed you?”

Elena stubbed out her cigarette. “I haven’t seen you since Turkey in 1948,” she said, getting to her feet and smoothing her skirt. “If you and I had a—had anything at all—then, I’m sure I can’t recall it.” She glanced around at the tables and the beaded curtain that led into the lobby. “Is there another way out of here? I’d never have been so careless as to approach you here, if I’d known you still had a—damned handler about. Bad craft, I apologize—we assumed you were in retirement here in Beirut.” She spoke calmly, but he could see a quicker pulse in the side of her neck.

Philby tipped up his glass for the last mouthful of gin. “Beirut is a neutral city,” he told her. “And my employers are not ee-eager right now to be doing any such—con-conspicuously robust operations—as k-kidnapping agents of a f-f-foreign power. But you’re right, we probably shhh—should not be seen together.” He waved toward the bar. “Anwar will let us leave by the delivery dock in back.” He set down his glass, reached under the table to be sure the snub-nose .38 was still secure in the elastic ankle holster and that his trouser cuff was tugged over it, and then he stood up.

As they walked across the tile floor toward the mahogany-and-brass bar, he said, “ ‘If we had anything at all, then—you’re sure y-you can’t recall it.’ I have a fucking b-bullet-hole in my head; do take note of the f-fact that you have n-n-not got one in yours.”

He was pleased to see her face redden, at that.

“I—I know,” she said as she stepped behind the bar and nodded distractedly at the simpering moustached Anwar. “I do remember.”

They walked out the back door and down the alley behind the Normandy Hotel, past the fire escapes and the hot-air fan vents, and when they emerged into the early twilight on the main street side-walk Philby waved at a passing Service taxi and called “Serveece!” The taxi pulled in to the curb, and for once there were no other passengers already inside. Philby opened the back door for Elena, then went around to the street side and climbed in himself. He gave the driver 125 piastres, and said, in quick French, “I’m paying for all five spaces, right? No other passengers, right? Take us to Chouran Street, by the Pigeon Rock.” He beamed at Elena and draped his right arm over the seat back behind her. In German, he said, “I’m fascinated that the”—the French SDECE, he thought, Pompidou’s secret service; but the driver might speak German—“that they chose to send you.”

She answered in the same language. “The thinking was that since I have known you in the past, I would be best able to gauge whether your offer is genuine or not. And I’m an off-paper operative—if your offer is a trap, if I am arrested, then I am disownable, not traceably in their employ. But if I judge that it is genuine”—the German word she used was richtig—“my employers will exfiltrate you from here immediately, and give you a new identity and much money in my country. If you renege in any way, we will… give you the truth, as your people say.”

Philby folded his arm back and clasped his hands in his lap. They could kill him, if they worked at it. In English he said, softly, “Oh, it’s richtig, all r-right.”

I have got to jump somewhere, he thought—and damned soon. The British SIS is being very slow in responding to old Flora Solomon’s kind and timely betrayal of my past to MI5—don’t they want the confession of their most damaging spy?—and Angleton’s CIA wouldn’t trust me to give them a recipe for Borscht, and Indian citizenship isn’t possible. And Theodora’s old SOE deal was for me to go on working for Moscow! But somebody’s got to take me out of Burgess’s control, out of Moscow’s control—I will kill myself before I’ll go up onto Ararat, alone as I am now. Our Hajji which art in Hell, now.

The driver steered the taxi up the Rue Kantari on the way to Hamra Street, and Philby leaned forward to hide his bandaged head well under the taxi’s roof, in case his wife might be looking out from their fifth-floor balcony. I’ll tell you about it if it works out, Eleanor my love, he thought. I won’t trouble you with advance notice—and you’d enjoy living in France.

At last they had doglegged south on Chouran Street and were driving along the cliff road, past Lord’s Hotel and the Yildizlar Restaurant, with the dark-indigo Mediterranean on their right. Philby could see the two enormous rocks out in St. George’s Bay— traditionally the site where England’s patron saint had killed the dragon. The weary St. Kim, he thought, will settle for just hiding from the dragon.

A crowd of Arab and European tourists was waiting at a taxi rank by the Pigeon Grotto pavilion on the cliff, and after Philby and Elena had got out of the taxi he took her bare elbow and led her south along the railed cliff-top sidewalk. To their left, under the modern white façade of the Carlton Hotel, Rolls-Royces and Volk-swagens slowed as an Arab on a donkey plodded away across the lanes. Only a few of the cars had turned on their headlamps, and the clean smell of surf spray in the air was still faintly perfumed with the afternoon aroma of suntan oil.

Seagulls spun in the darkening blue sky overhead, but their shrill cries were muffled by the gauze taped over Philby’s ears.

He turned toward the sea, where a quarter of a mile out across the water a motorboat had just shot through the tunnel at the base of the bigger rock, with a water skier just visible bouncing along in the spreading white fan of the wake. The four-hundred-foot-tall rock was flat on top, a remote backlit meadow furred with wild grasses, and he wondered forlornly if anyone had ever climbed up there.

“I’ll m-miss Beirut,” he said in English. “I’ve b-been here six years.”

“You’ll like France,” Elena told him. The red sun was low over the horizon beyond the rocks, and she fished a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and slipped them on. “Why do you want to leave the Soviet ser vice? I gather you’re still an active player, not just selling your memoirs.”

“My f-father is d-d-dead.” Our Hajji which art in Hell, now, he thought again. “He died here t-two years ago, and he was my … recruiter, in a, in an unspecific but v-very real sense, into the G-Great Game. He wasn’t a t-traitor—in spite of being j-jailed during the war for making pro-Hitler talk, ‘activities prejudicial to the safety of the Realm’!—and he never p-pushed me toward the S-S-Soviet services per se, but in the twenties and thirties he was studying under one of the S-Soviet illegals who were all eventually p-purged by Stalin in ’37 and ’38—a p-para-do-doxical old Soviet Moslem called Hassim Hakimoff Khan, in J-Jidda, which is the port city for Mecca.”

“I—I met one of the great old illegals,” said Elena quietly. “In France, when I was quite young. What was your father studying?”

Philby barked out one syllable of a mirthless laugh. “Oh—what was he not. Did you know that a g-god called al-Lah was worshipped in the Ka’bah in Mecca a thousand years before Mohammed? According to the Koran, the Thamud tribes refused to w-worship him, and were annihilated by something remembered as both a thu-thunderbolt and an earthquake. My father f-found and deciphered more than ten thousand Thamudic inscriptions, and he didn’t t-turn over all of them to the scholars. And he studied the Gilgamesh v-version of the Biblical flood story in the Chaldean cuneiform tablets at the B-British Museum, supplemented by others that he had f-found for h-himself in Baghdad.” More slowly, he went on, “In 1921 he was appointed Chief B-British Representative in Jordan, ruh-ruh-replacing T. E. Lawrence, who w-was being p-posted to Iraq; my father—s-s-s- stole Lawrence’s old files, and from reading them c-carefully one c-could deduce quite a lot about the files that were m-missing, the ones Lawrence had apparently dd destroyed: the tr-translations of some ancient d-documents he had found in one of the Qumran Wadi caves by the Dead Sea in 1918.”

Elena yawned, clearly from tension rather than tiredness. “You’re talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, right?—that were found—found again—in 1947! Do you know what the documents were?”

“Yes, I—I read the L-Lawrence files myself in 1934.” After breaking into my father’s safe, he thought, and photographing his papers. “According to h-his inventory files, there were a n-number of Semitic j-jars in the cave, but he took away an anomalous one that h-had an ankh-type c-cross for a h-h- handle. In it were s-several brittle old Hebrew scr-scrolls—apparently one was what is c-called a brontologion, which means ‘what the thunder said’; these were usually di-di-divination and astrological t-texts, derived from 1-listening to thu-thunder; but Lawrence’s references to it s-seemed to indicate a—more specific and deliberate m-message from the thunder. Another of the s-s-s-scrolls seems to have been a variant v-version of either the Book of Genesis or the apocryphal Book of Enoch—the story of Noah and the great f-flood, in any case. My f-father never obtained the ack-ack-actual transcriptions Lawrence made of these, so I n-never saw them either. Lawrence became unreliable, after he t-translated them.” Philby yawned too, creaking his jaw, and he clenched his hands into fists to stop them trembling. “I photographed what there was, and gave the foe-foe-photographs to Guy Burgess, who was always my m-main Soviet handler in those d-days.”

“And Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash the following year. How does all this relate to your decision to—quit the ‘Great Game,’ leave the Soviet service, and seek the protection of the SDECE?”

“My f-f- father—initiated, t-tried to initiate me—into—” He let the sentence trail away.

Elena clicked her tongue impatiently. “If you’re going to be evasive about the supernatural element of your story, the SDECE is not buying.”

“Evasive.” Philby laughed shortly, aware of the weight of chunky steel on his ankle and wondering if he might ever be faced with the necessity—and have the courage—to turn the gun on himself. “It is v-vaguely shameful, though, isn’t it? Didn’t you feel that, in B-Berlin?”

“And if you’re not willing to face shame, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

“ ‘O valiant wheel! O most courageous heaven!’ You g-give me back the s-same reproach I gave you, in T-Turkey. Yes, very well.” For several seconds he just blinked out at the shadowed, eroded faces of the two giant monoliths standing in the bay, and at a flock of seagulls flying in a ring just to this side of the rocks. A new identity in France, he told himself. You cannot go up onto Mount Ararat.

Still, his voice shook when he finally spoke: “My father was b-baptized, but renounced Kruh-Christianity and converted to Islam in 1930, and took the name Hajji Abdullah, ‘One Who Has Made the Pilgrimage, Slave of God’—and I never was b-b-baptized at all, he saw to that. He had been born on Good F-Friday in 1885, in Ceylon, and a c-comet was clearly v-visible in the sky on that day— once when he was a baby he was accidentally left behind at a government rest stop during a journey, and the s-servants rushed back and found him being n-nursed by a djjj—by a ‘gypsy’ woman.” Philby glanced at Elena, but her blue eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses, and he looked back out at the rocks. “In fact she was n-nursing two identical infants, b-both dressed in my father’s B-British baby clothes. Later one of the infants was apparently 1-lost—in any case, when they got home again, there was only one.”

“They were both him,” said Elena, “right? Don’t hint, say.”

Philby bared his teeth in a difficult smile. “My motto has always been ‘know, not think it, and learn, not speak.’ The short course for spies. But yes,” he agreed wearily, “they were b-both him. At around the age of s-seven he lost that ability to be in two p-p-places at one time. I was born in Ambala, in the Punjab in India, and I s-spoke Hindi before I s-spoke English. I used to d-dream—”

With an emotion no stronger than perplexity, he discovered that he was unable to tell her about the year’s-end dreams that had blighted his boyhood in India and England: dreams of a bearded bronze man as tall as the rotating night sky, holding an upraised scythe that glittered like a constellation; or of the whole world turning ponderously on the celestial potter’s wheel; or of an Arabian Nights magician whirling a flaming fishing net right into his scorching eyes—from his own studies in the Old Testament’s First Book of Kings he knew that the Hebrew words for burn, excommunicate, magician, potter, and blasphemy, as well as sword, all began with the Hebrew letters cheth and resh—and the dreams always ended with his head being forcibly split in two, so that before he awoke he imagined that he had been broken into two personalities. In adult-hood he had come to suspect that the dreams expressed dim memories of some anti-baptism to which he had been subjected as an infant.

“Well,” he said, covering his hesitation by jumping back to the last topic, “I didn’t just dream it—I was able to be in t-two p-places at once myself, as a b-boy. One of me could be in studying, while the other was out h-hiking in the woods. My p-parents had always been aware of it, and simply t-told me to be d-d-discreet, circumspect. I wasn’t b-baptized, and so I didn’t lose that ability until … until precisely on my t-t-tenth birthday.”

“When is your birthday?”

Never, he thought. It is never, and I will never tell you. “New Year’s Day,” he said lightly. “My f-father had been g-grooming me, he wanted his s-son to become—what his b-baptism had barred h-h-him from becoming. Until he was f-forced to resign in 1924, he was a m-major in the Raj, with the Political and Secret Department of the Indian government—the MI-1C, actually, f-forerunner of the present-day SIS. He became great p-pals with Ibn Saud, then king of the Najd r-region in central Arabia, eventually to become eponymous king of all S-S-Saudi Arabia, and when Ibn Saud’s son Feisal p-paid a state visit to England in 1919, the Foreign Office appointed my f-father as the boy’s escort. I was s-s-seven years old at the time, going to a Westminster-prep school in Eastbourne, and they v-visited me there. Feisal presented me with a t-twenty-carat d-diamond. The Russians have always wanted to g-get it away from me—not to be v-v- vulgar, but I had to swallow it, during the episode in Turkey in ’48—and I’ll wager Feisal h-himself would like to have it b-back now, now that air travel is so c-common.”

“What has the jewel got to do with air travel?”

“I’m not going to g-give it to you people either. B-but what it d-does is—it constitutes a rafiq, it makes the bearer an emissary, with d-diplomatic immunity to any r-r- wrath from the powers that prevail… up high, from roughly a thousand feet above sea-level on up… to the m-moon, I suppose.”

“Why did your ability cease on your tenth birthday?”

“I—don’t know. My f-father was alarmed, dismayed; he was in Amman, in Jordan, but my m-m-mother must have written to him about my sudden singularity. He ordered me to m-meet him in Amman in the s-summer of my eleventh year, and though it was ostensibly a holiday, for a couple of months he… tt tested me, and the jewel. We traveled to Damascus, and Baalbek, and Nazareth, always hiking among the oldest t-tombs and watching the w-weather. We fl-flew over Lake Tiberias in a De Havilland biplane and saw a waterspout that he said was Sakhr al-Jinni, a djinn that had been c-confined to the lake by King S-S-Solomon, but it didn’t approach us… and we went to the J-J-Jordan River near Jericho, and he collected samples of the river w-water.” Philby shivered, recalling even now his father’s frustrated rage as he had corked the dripping bottles. “He wanted to send the samples to the B-British Museum, to see if the water really d-d-did have any measurable special p-properties. I think he was worried about s-s-someone, some infant, who had been b-baptized there—not long before.”

“He was testing you?”

“Yes, and I f-failed. When I lost the ability to be two b-boys, I apparently also lost the ability to… conjure, or c-control, the old entities. I became ill—shakes and fever—with what he elected to d-d-diagnose as malaria, though I’ve never had the usual r-relapses. And I was sent home to Ig-England. A year later I went off to West-minster school, and my f-f-father made it clear that I was to go on to T-Trinity College, Cambridge, as he had done, and which I d-did. But I had a—a n-nervous b-b- breakdown, at Westminster! Do y-you know why?”

Elena looked away from the circling gulls to face him, and she laughed in surprise. “No,” she said. “Why?”

“Because of the unrelenting Christian instruction. Really! They did j-just k-keep on at us about Original Sin, and our individual s-sins, and how each of us m-must either submit to k-k-Christ, surrender our wills to His, or s-suffer the eternal wrath of God. I dee-dee- denied all of it. I was an atheist even then—though, thanks to my f-father, I was an atheist who was m-mortally afraid of graveyards, and of the Roman Catholic s-sacraments, and of tall storm clouds and th-thunder at twilight.”

He looked out at the sea. The red sun had sunk below the horizon, leaving glowing golden terraces of cloud hung across the whole western half of the sky, but no cumulus clouds were rearing their shoulders and shaggy heads out there. The ring of seagulls was closer, though—a quarter of a mile away, halfway between the rocks and the cliff highway now.

“We should g-go inside somewhere,” he said nervously. “Get something to d-drink.”

“They’re only birds. And no microphone can detect our talk out here. When were you actually inducted into the Soviet service? You say your father was your recruiter in an unspecific sense—who recruited you specifically?”

“Recruited. Into a t-t- treasonous cause, right? You resent that, the fact that s-secretly I was an agent of communism all along. H-how old were you in 1931?”

“Older than most my age.”

“Well, exactly, your p-parents were k-killed by fascist monar-chists, the right-wing C-C-Catholic lot, isn’t that so?—in Madrid, when King Alfonso fled Spain; and a few y-y-years after that you were an orphan precociously working as a wireless t-telegrapher among the Loyalists. You see I r-r-remember everything about us. But in England in 1931 the b-betrayed Labour Party was v-voted out, and a coco—a Conservative National Government!—was voted in. You sh-should sympathize—the common p-people had been viciously fooled by sin-sin- cynical propaganda, and anyone could see that mere d-democracy could never lead to real p-peace.”

He realized that he was frowning when the bandage over his fore-head tightened, and he wondered, Do I still even believe that? Really?

“And so,” he went on, thrusting the thought away, “when another Cambridge student, this Guy B-B-Burgess fellow, approached me about d-doing s-secret work for Mother Russia, I was— amenable. Burgess had me tr-travel to Austria in the autumn of ’33, when I was twenty-one years old; and with my B-British p-passport—and Cambridge accent!—I was able to be a useful network courier, c-carrying p-packages from Vienna to Prague and Budapest. In ’34 I was s-sent back to work in England by one of the great old European illegals—he was a dedicated Communist and a Cheka officer, but he had been a C-C-Catholic p-priest before the horrors of the first war made him lose his f-faith, and when he was d-drunk he used to weep about the Cheka work he’d done, imposing collectivization on the Russian f-farms—”

“ ‘I could not bear the women wailing, when we lined the villagers up to be shot,’ ” said Elena in a quiet voice, clearly quoting. “ ‘I simply could not bear it.’ ”

And Philby was suddenly nauseated. He leaned on the cliff railing and stared at the circling birds in the gathering twilight. “You— knew Theo Maly?” he croaked.

“I met him in Paris, in 1937.” Philby could barely hear her voice through the gauze over his ears. Her shoes shifted audibly on the pavement, and when she went on it was in a stronger voice, and she again seemed to be quoting someone: “Thistles, weeds—plants. Did Maly ever talk about such things with you, my dear?”

“Jesus!” burst out Philby, so loudly that a European tourist couple stared at him as they wheeled a perambulator along the sidewalk. “Yes, my dear,” he went on more quietly. “Yes, he did m-mention the amomon root to me—right at the end, when he had received his s-summons to Moscow and he knew he was g-going there to be g-given the, the schuss. And in fact he did tell me he was going by way of Paris.”

“The Stirnschuss,” said Elena. “The bullet in the forehead.”

Philby shifted to look around at her, and she was touching her own forehead, under the white bangs.

“Yes,” Philby said, “th-that was the word he used. We were drinking in a London p-pub in early ’37, and he t-told me, ‘They will kill me if I go to Moscow—Stalin won’t any longer continue to employ an ex-priest. But if I don’t go, they will simply send someone to kill me here; and I don’t want to give them the vindication of any disobedience on my part.’ And then he—he said that, as a p-parting gift, he could offer me… eternal life. When I asked him what he m-meant, he explained that a C-C-Catholic p-priest can n-never abdicate his sacramental powers, and he offered to b-baptize me right there at the table, and then—he was drunk—to hear my c-c-confession, absolve me of my s-sins, if I would repent and have a f-firm purpose of amending them, and finally to order some bread and wine so that he could consecrate them and give me the”—he paused, and spoke carefully—“the Communion, the Eucharist.”

“Ah, God,” said Elena softly, taking off her sunglasses.

“Pitiful to see him b-break down so, at the end,” agreed Philby. “I told him, ‘No, th-thank you’—civilly enough, for he was an old f-friend, and drunk—and then he sighed, and said he could in that case offer me a more p-p-profane sort of eternal life.”

The seagulls had been joined by pigeons from the cliffs, and the two sorts of birds were flying together in a wheel against the sky, which had lost its gold now and showed only the colors of blood and steel. Philby touched his chest, where Feisal’s diamond hung on a chain under his shirt.

“There is apparently a k-kind of plant,” he said slowly, “like a thistle, that g-grows at remote spots in the Holy Land. And you and I, my dear, have each seen enough of the sh-shameful supernatural to be at l-l-least ho-ho- open-minded to the idea that some specimens of this plant are inhabited, by the old entities. Maly said that when the r-rebel angels f-fell at the beginning of the w-world, some weren’t quite bad enough to rate Hell, perhaps weren’t developed or c-complete enough to have fully assented to the rebellion. In any case, they were truncated, compressed, c-condemned to live forever unconsciously as a k-kind of thistle—immortal still, in the a-a-aggregate at least, but on a sub-sentient level. They can be awakened, b-briefly, by a certain p-primordial, antediluvian rhythm, something s-similar to what the old illegals and the Rote Kapelle called les parasites.”

The wheeling seagulls had disappeared in the darkness below the cliff at his feet. Low tide, he thought vaguely. They’ll be feeding.

“And if a p-person awakens one of these vegetation-bound angels,” he went on, “and then eats it with the p-proper sacramentals, sugar and garlic and l-liquor and such, that p-person will share in the angel’s immortality, will n-never grow old or suffer f-fatal injury or illness. My father had known something of this—in the Gilgamesh story, a g-god tells the man Upanishtim to build a boat and take into it ‘the seed of all living creatures,’ and Upanishtim and his family do it, and s-survive the flood—and long afterward, Upanishtim gives Gilgamesh a th-thorny plant that will restore youth. But b-before Gilgamesh can take it home to his people, an old s-s-snake!—comes out of a well!—and eats the plant, and immediately c-casts off its old skin and returns, y-young again, to the well. So the plant w-w-worked as promised, but Gilgamesh d-didn’t get it.”

“Maly did talk to me about this!” exclaimed Elena. She went on, almost to herself, “Oh, I think he did; I will have to tell old Cassagnac that my answer in 1941 was not accurate.” She looked up at Philby, her eyes gleaming in the light from the hotels across the street. “I was only twelve, but Maly said that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to keep her and Adam away from the other tree, the Tree of Life, which—”

“Who’s that?” Philby shouted.

He had grabbed her arm with his left hand, and with his right he was pointing at the taller of the two rocks out in the bay—for he had just noticed a silhouetted figure standing in the meadow on the inaccessible top. It was far too remote for him to be able to tell if it was a man or a woman… but one of its arms was waving. It was beck-oning.

“Don’t move,” he added in a whisper, for with a sound like sudden rain the birds now swept up from the abyss below the cliff and were circling low over Elena and himself—the pigeons and gulls made no cries, but the flutter of their wings was like rushing banners, and Philby was now aware of an invisible third person here. Had the third person drawn the attention of the birds, or of the thing that animated the birds?

Philby’s chest was suddenly cold. Is that thing aware that I’m trying to beg off, here? he thought. Trying to forsake the old covenant?

The tourists along the cliff rail had been startled when he shouted, and now they hurried away as the low-flying pigeons and seagulls did not disperse—and Philby became aware of the ringing of a telephone.

Hatif, he thought breathlessly—the call from the dead at night, foretelling another death—but where is it? He glanced at the figure out on the rock, fearful that it might be flying toward them through the twilight; but it was still there where he had first seen it, still beckoning.

Rocking into cautious motion, Elena took two stiff steps toward a purse and a couple of abandoned toys that a woman had left behind on the sidewalk after snatching up her baby and hurrying away from the intrusive birds. Philby squinted at the toys and saw that one of them was a yellow plastic telephone; and then he realized that the ringing was coming from this toy.

“Don’t— answer it,” he croaked.

But Elena had bent down awkwardly, her white hair blown into her face by the battering breeze of the close wings, and she lifted the receiver, which was connected by a string to a plastic box with a smiling dial-face printed on it.

She held the little receiver to her ear; the mouthpiece was pressed against her cheek.

His face hot with humiliation, Philby babbled, “It will only be my w-wife, my l-last wife—she d-d-died five years ago, and she’s always c-calling me—d-don’t listen to her f-f-filth—”

“It’s—a man,” Elena said tonelessly. “I—I think I know him.” She lifted the plastic receiver, with the telephone swinging below it on the string, not connected to anything else and with no antenna, and held the impossibly speaking thing toward him, as if for an explanation.

Philby reached out—slowly, for he feared that any sudden move might provoke some kind of calamitous definition of the birds— and as he kept his eyes on the beckoning figure on the distant rock he pressed the toy receiver to his ear.

“Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events,” said a British man’s voice from the unperforated earpiece, clearly enough for Philby to hear through the bandages, “wind and fire and sand-storms, gross and literal. What the djinn imagine is done: for them to imagine it is to have done it, and for them to be reminded of it is for them to do it again. Their thoughts are things, things in motion, and their memories are literal things too, preserved for potential reference—wedding rings and gold teeth looted from graves, and bones in the sand, and scorch-marks on floors, all ready to spring into renewed activity again at a reminder. To impose—”

The woman whose child the telephone belonged to had for several seconds now been yelling something from several yards away. “Shut her up!” yelled Philby now to Elena.

The voice in the toy had paused, as if it had heard him; then it went on, “To impose a memory-shape onto their physical makeup is to forcibly impose an experience—which, in the case of a Shihab meteorite’s imprint, is death.”

The speaker had not raised his voice, but at the word death the volume had increased, and Philby dropped the toy telephone when the abruptly loud word impacted his eardrum.

And the birds scattered away into the darkening sky, as if all released at once from invisible tethers. Philby turned awkwardly from the waist to watch as many of them as he could—he had no peripheral vision—and when he saw a Chevrolet sedan swerving in toward this cliff-side curb he whispered, “Fuck.”

But perhaps they were simply stopping because of the birds and the panicky tourists.

He was shaking from the enigmatic encounter with the animated birds and the figure on the rock and the hatif call, and from the ordeal of having begun at long last to confess his real career before that; he had been living on nerves and gin ever since passing his proposal to the SDECE five days ago—and he was fifty years old now and felt every conflicted day of it.

He took Elena’s elbow and led her away, toward the nearest crosswalk. “Don’t look b-back,” he said. “That’s r-rogue CIA in the Chevrolet behind us, n-not working through CIA Beirut, but sent independently by the head of their Office of Special Operations in Washington.”

Could they be here for me? he wondered tensely; could they be planning finally to grab me, kidnap me out of Beirut? Why?—why now, after three years of simply harassing me, and putting surveil-lance on me, and bribing the Lebanese sûreté to detain me from time to time for fruitless interrogation? Have they now learned about Mammalian, and the imminent Ararat expedition? Is this a pre-emptive detainment, meant to frustrate the operation I’ve for-Christ’s-sake already decided I cannot perform? If the Americans arrest me, with the intention of flying me back to Washington and publicly trying me for espionage against their government back in ’49 and ’50, the French will surely withdraw their offer. The SDECE might even have told Elena to kill me, if I look like getting out of the French net. She might be able to do it too. And even if she did not, I’d spend all the rest of my birthdays in an American prison. The CIA, and Hoover at the FBI, will never agree to any immunity deal. And if my Soviet handlers thought I was about to be arrested by any Western government, they would surely kill me. I am being torn to pieces by East and West. I am being torn to pieces between East and West.

Sweat rolled down his forehead from the bandage, and he blinked it away. They’ll have heard I was shot, I’m conspicuous in this bloody bandage.

When they had crossed the street to the landward sidewalk, he took Elena’s shoulders and faced her, so that she was blocking their view of him; and quickly he hiked his ankle up and snagged the revolver out of the elastic holster and dropped it into his coat pocket.

Elena had raised one eyebrow at the momentary glimpse of the gun, but now she fell into step beside him as he began walking south along the sidewalk below the amber-lit lobby of the Carlton Hotel.

“I suppose they suspect your KGB complicity,” she said. Her emphasis confirmed that she was well aware of his work for the deeper, older, vastly more secret agency.

“Suspect, yes—they’ve s-s- suspected me ever since Burgess d-defected to Moscow eleven years ago. Listen,” he said, speaking quickly, “I won’t let them arrest me. The deal I’m offering your people is jjj-genuine, damn it, it’s richtig, understand? This isn’t a Soviet t-trick, I swear by—by the heart that is still beating beneath your b-breast. My father was my protector, my shield, in this business, and he’s gone now, and I can’t do what the Rab—what the Soviets—well, what the Rabkrin wants me to do now. I cannot go up the mountain.” In spite of his frantic unhappiness, he found that there was something distinctly sexy about exposing his momentous secrets to her; and even though his cold fingers were clamped on the grip of the revolver, he found himself thinking about their unsatisfactory kiss in the bar. “Have you g-got SDECE w-watching us now? Exfiltrate m-me right now, this nin-nin-instant.”

She shook her head. “We can exfiltrate you from Beirut as soon as I am convinced that you’ll tell us everything. I need to know—” She didn’t go on, and he glanced at her. For a moment her face was blank, neither young nor old but as cold as a statue’s. “—I need to know what happened on Mount Ararat in May of 1948.”

“I can tell you all of th-that. If we get so-so-separated tonight, I’m meeting the S-Soviet team tomorrow m-morning at eleven—I’ve toe-told them to meet me on the t-terrace at the St. Georges Hotel. After that I sh-should be mom-mom- unobserved—follow me from there.”

“I’ll get in touch with you again, no fear. I’ll decide when and where.”

“You think I have no capacity for loyalty,” he said hoarsely, “but I will be honest with your people. I was l-loyal to the rrrRussians for decades, for far longer than anyone would be who was not genuinely in l-love with the Communist ideal. I was a p-protégé of Maly’s, and they feared he had told me the s-secret of the amomon rhythms, so in the great purr-purr— purge season they tried to kill me too—on my b-birthday in 1937—”

Instantly he glanced to the left, past her shoulder, and said, “Let’s get off the street. A drink in the Carlton, what do you say?”—but he was horrified to realize that in his besotted confessional passion he had nearly betrayed his real birthday. I’m falling apart, he thought remotely. Breaking in two, at least; who was that, talking about djinn on the hatif telephone?

As he led Elena through the glass doors and across the carpeted lobby toward the bar—a good deal dressier than the Normandy’s, with wood paneling and upholstered booths—he was remembering that frosty last day of 1937, when he had been out driving from Saragossa toward Tereuel, in Spain, under cover as a war correspondent for the London Times; an artillery shell had landed squarely on the car he and three other correspondents had been driving in, and his three companions had been blown to pieces, while Philby himself had suffered only a couple of cuts. The shell had been a Russian 12.40-centimeter round, certainly deliberately aimed, even deliberately scheduled—but, because it was his true birthday, Philby had taken the precaution of wearing the bright green, fox-fur lined Arab coat his father had given him, and so he had survived the explosion with only scratches. He had received a telegram the next day from his father in Alexandria—the old man had abruptly fainted the day before, bleeding from the nose and ears, at the very hour when Philby’s car had been hit, and the elder Philby had been anxious now to know if his son had been hurt.

“Your birthday in ’37?” prompted Elena when Philby had walked her to a booth against the doorway wall. She was looking at him as she sat down.

“Maly g-gave me a simple code with which to write hopefully innocent-looking l-letters to a cover address in Paris, a safe house where s-some NKVD courier would p-pick up the mail,” Philby said, sitting down across from her and waving to the waiter. “You know the kind of code: ‘Six couches arrived yesterday, but the midwife says they’re not the edible kind—the dog needs more tooth-brushes.’ Not that bad, I suppose, but definitely d-disjointed; one hoped that the censors saw a lot of mail from genuine chatty l-l-lunatics.” He was beginning to relax—this story was verifiably true, and Maly had given him the code sometime very early in ’37, and it might even have been on his ostensible New Year’s Day birthday. “I only found out in 1945, when I was Head of Section Nine and v-visiting the liberated c-capitals of Europe, that the address I had been writing to on the rue de Grenelle eight years earlier had been the Soviet Embassy! There was n-no safe house at all, n-no s-security measures—any censor who might have gone to the t-trouble of checking the address I was writing to would have r-reported me as a Soviet agent in an instant!”

Elena had fished matches and a pack of Gauloises from her purse, and she looked at him through narrowed eyes as she lit a cigarette. “Careless and negligent, surely—contemptuous, even—but I’d hardly call that an attempt to purge you, kill you.”

She was not deflected. “Well,” he said with affected mildness, “to me it seemed as if they had g-given me a ticking time bomb to hold. Two G-Gordon’s gins, please, neat,” he said then to the waiter who had finally come to the table. “Those are for me,” he added, giving Elena his most charming grin. “What will you have? I believe you were drinking b-brandy, in Berlin.”

“Can the bartender make a Berliner Weisse mit Schuss?” Elena asked the waiter. “That’s beer with raspberry syrup,” she added.

The waiter concealed any repugnance and simply said, “Mais oui, madame,” and bowed and stepped away.

Philby remembered the mug of odd pink beer that had been on the table in Berlin. “That was your drink, that night?”

“Do you disapprove? As I recall, you were drinking insecticide.”

Philby nodded glumly. “Djinn repellent, the old Cairo hands used to call it. If my f-father had thought to give me a glass of insecticide before we flew over Lake Tiberias, I would not have c-contracted ‘malaria.’ They… bud off, like cactus, in periods of activity, and the l-little… djinnlings!… can be attracted to and c-cling to someone who has—someone who bears the m-mark of previous djinn-recognition. They get in through your m-mouth, and they interfere with your thoughts, and exorcising them later is a tiresome bother. My father t-told me that some of the old lads in the Arab Bureau in Cairo would even rinse their m-mouths with a shot of petrol, if they were going out to some place where the m-monsters were likely to be. Volatile smells repel them, the y-young ones, at least, and a couple of shots of warm jjj- gin here ought to drive off any who came up over the cliff just now with the b-birds.”

Elena was blushing, and Philby remembered asking her if she had not found this business vaguely shameful. “That was a, a female one, in Berlin,” she said.

Philby could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, even at this late and cynical date, as he said softly, “That was Russia’s very g-guardian angel, my dear—Machikha Nash, Our Stepmother— inspecting the n-new boundaries of her k-kingdom in person, in stormy person. I was there to monitor the installation of her bound-ary stone, and I watched it all from a parked car in the Charlotten-burg Chaussee on the western side. She was… splendid, wasn’t she? I remember thinking of Byron’s line, ‘She walks in Beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies.’ What w-were you doing there?”

Philby didn’t look away from her, but he was aware of the two men who walked into the bar, and he simply shrugged and gave her a frail smile when they stopped in front of his table.

One of the men seemed to say, “Allah, beastly ass,” but a moment later Philby realized that he had said, in an American accent, I’ll obviously ask; and the man went on, “Who’s your girlfriend, Kim?”

Philby looked up at his CIA inquisitors. Both were sandy-haired Americans in gray suits with wide lapels, and they both seemed offensively fit and young.

“Miss Weiss is a French m-magazine editor,” Philby said. “I’m t-trying to sell her s-some non-fiction work.”

“We’d love to read some of your non-fiction work, Kim,” said the taller of the two. “Scoot over, Miss Weiss.” When Elena shifted away across the booth seat, the man sat down beside her.

His companion folded himself into the booth beside Philby, so that Philby and Elena were both blocked in. “I’m Dr. Tarr,” said the man beside Philby, “and my colleague there is Professor Feather. Our boss across the water is very curious about this gathering of the old hands that’s going on here in Beirut.”

“I’m not aware of it,” said Philby carefully. He wanted to pant with relief, for clearly this was not to be a kidnap. With some confidence he went on, “Are you g-going to have the sûreté h-h-haul me in to their p-p- police station one more time, just so I can s-say the same th-thing there for a few hours?”

“More like watch-and-wait,” said the man identified as Professor Feather. “You still do odd jobs for your old firm, don’t you, Kim? Peter Lunn gives you off-paper travel assignments?”

Lunn was the SIS Head of Station in Beirut now, and in fact he had not had any professional conversation with Philby at all. But until three months ago the Head of Station had been Nicholas Elliott, an old friend of Philby’s and one of his loyal defenders in the Burgess defection scandal that had cost Philby his SIS job in 1951. And in these last two years Elliott had indeed given Philby all kinds of off-paper assignments—to Riyadh, and Cairo, and Baghdad, and a dozen other Middle East cities—to mingle with the Arabs who had known Philby’s father, and gauge the extent and purpose of the huge increase in the number of Soviet military advisors throughout the Arab nations.

Philby had been in a quandary: it had been starkly clear that Burgess at the Rabkrin headquarters in Moscow, as well as Petrukhov, Philby’s more pedestrian KGB handler in Beirut, both required him to pass on immediately any information he might learn about the SIS response to the Soviet escalation—but Philby had been aware too that the SIS chiefs in London who believed him guilty of espionage would see to it that he was given “barium meal” information, custom-scripted false data that might later be detected in monitored Moscow traffic. If that were to happen, Philby would logically be isolated as the only possible source of the information, and the SIS could then arrest him for treason; and until this last September, when Philby’s pet fox had been intolerably killed and further work with the Rabkrin had become unthinkable, Philby had not wanted the SIS to arrest him. Even now, he wanted to surrender only on specific terms, what he thought of as his three non-negotiable “itties”: immunity, a new identity, and a comfortable annuity. Definitely not the deal Theodora’s old fugitive SOE had offered him in ’52.

“Or isn’t it for Lunn?” went on Professor Feather. “Are you still running errands for—” He looked across the table at Dr. Tarr. “What was his name?”

“Petrukhov,” said Dr. Tarr. “Of the Soviet trade mission in Lebanon. He’s the local handler, runner.”

“Any t-traveling I do,” Philby said mildly, “has b-been for the stories I write.”

“That’s odd, you know,” said Dr. Tarr. “You always charge your airline tickets on your IATA card, don’t you? Well, we’ve clocked your stories in The Observer and The Economist, and compared them to the records from the International Air Transport Association in Montreal, and we find that your travel grossly outweighs your journalistic output. Could I have a bourbon-and-water, please,” he said to the waiter, who had just then walked up with the two gins and the pink beer on a tray.

“Same here,” said Dr. Tarr.

The waiter set the drinks on the table, nodded and strode back toward the bar.

Ignoring her ludicrous drink, Elena picked up her purse from beside her and said, “The dealings of the American Internal Revenue Service do not interest me. Mr. Philby, I’ll be in touch—”

Professor Feather didn’t budge. “Stay, Miss Weiss,” he said coldly. “You play a musical instrument, don’t you? Something about the size of a saxophone?”

“The U.S. government will pick up the drinks tab,” added Dr. Tarr cheerfully, “though not precisely in its IRS capacity.”

Philby thought the saxophone remark had seemed to jar her; but now she just sighed and said, “No, I don’t play any instrument. But—I suppose I can’t resist the opportunity to deplete the American treasury.” She put her purse back down.

“And we even took your pseudonyms into account,” said Professor Feather to Philby. “Charles Garner and all. It still doesn’t add up.”

Philby had already begun shaking his head dismissively, and he didn’t stop now—but he was chilled by this new factor. The CIA knew that Charles Garner was one of his pseudonyms!—and Mammalian’s new agent was to be using that identity as cover! Philby wondered if he should warn Mammalian, or let the CIA discover the Garner impostor; if Elena’s SDECE people could “exfiltrate” him very soon, it wouldn’t matter.

“You obviously know n-nothing about j-journalistic work,” said Philby, picking up one of his glasses of gin. “Some of the seeds fall upon st-stony places, and w-wither in the sun because they have no root. For every story I file, a d-dozen prove to be false alarms.” He lifted the glass to his lips and swirled the warm liquor over his tongue.

“That’s from the thirteenth chapter of Matthew,” said Dr. Tarr, “your seed analogy is. It properly refers to people, of course—and do remember the next verse: ‘And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up, and choked them.’ ”

And to Philby’s embarrassment, a trickle of the gin slipped down his windpipe, and he coughed gin out through his nostrils; the stinging liquor burned in his nose and brought tears to his eyes, and the CIA men laughed as he continued coughing.

“Oh, a palpable hit!” said Dr. Tarr. “You like to act as if you’re out of play these days, Kim—the retired cold warrior—but lately Moscow is scrambling to make the Red Sea a Red Army sea, and make the Persian Gulf a…”

“Potemkin bluff?” suggested Elena. She was staring at Philby with distaste.

“Too reached-for,” said Professor Feather, shaking his head.

“Anyway,” Dr. Tarr went on, “they were ready to make the Caribbean a Soviet pond too, until Kennedy made them back down two months ago. Now the last time the Soviets tried a big grab like this was in ’48, when they blockaded Berlin and incidentally annexed Czechoslovakia and got a Communist Party member in as president of Hungary. Less overtly, there was also some action at that time around the Aras River, between Turkey and Soviet Armenia—specifically in the Ahora Gorge on Mount Ararat. And there are a lot of people in Beirut right now who were there then; including Miss Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga herself.”

Elena lifted her glass of pink beer in a tired salute and took a gulp of it.

“A couple of the old cast are not here, though,” said Professor Feather, “or not obviously or not yet. Your old house-mate Burgess is unlikely to show up, I suppose, Kim; our Brit colleagues would arrest him if he strayed out of the Soviet Union. But Andrew Hale fled England on Wednesday, the second, and the SIS managed to track him to Kuwait, but lost him the next day. It seems timely. Have you heard anything about him?”

“N-no,” said Philby, “I s-scarcely remember the boy.” But his mind was whirling, trying to figure out how this new piece on the chessboard might change the lines of consequence. Hale was Theodora’s star protégé, Philby thought, and he appeared to be fired after his failure on Ararat; was that a feint? God help me if Theodora is still in this in any way. Surely that old ultimatum with the SOE no longer applies! He remembered Theodora’s words at the Turkish–Soviet border in 1952: Report to us any contact from the Soviets; and participate in any action they order you into; and report it all to us; or die.

Elena took another sip of her polluted beer. “ ‘Fled En gland,’ ” she said; “ ‘lost him the next day.’ Is he a fugitive?” And with a chill Philby remembered that Hale had been bitterly in love with her, in ’48, and he remembered the high-low seven-card stud game he had played with Hale in the Anderson bomb shelter on that last terrible night: Low hand wins Maly’s amomon instructions.

“The news is five days old, even at newspaper-level,” said Professor Feather; “I’m surprised the SDECE hasn’t relayed it to you. Hale was to be arrested for old embezzlements committed during his residency in Kuwait right after the war—on Wednesday MI5 sent an agent to negotiate a possible immunity deal with him, contingent on doing some work for the SIS, and Hale killed the agent and fled. He killed a cop too.”

“Claude Cassagnac,” said Dr. Tarr.

“What about Claude Cassagnac?” asked Elena quickly.

Philby recalled that she had mentioned the name Cassagnac earlier this evening: Maly did talk to me about this! I will have to tell old Cassagnac that my answer in 1941 was not accurate.

“That was the MI5 agent Hale killed,” said Dr. Tarr. “I gather he was more a consultant than an agent, actually.”

“What proof is this?” demanded Elena, quaintly using in English what Philby recognized as an old bit of Spanish Civil War slang.

“This is two hundred proof, ma’am, solid spirit right over the top of the still,” said Professor Feather, staring curiously at her. “Like I said, it’s even newspaper-level.” He stood up out of the booth, unblocking her way. “If you’re through with your drink, you can leave.”

“I’m not through with my drink,” she said.

“Kim’s not really for sale right now, Miss Ceniza-Bendiga.” Professor Feather looked across the table to where Philby sat hemmed in by Dr. Tarr. “We intend to read your non-fiction, Kim. And not as… excerpts, in a French translation.”

Right, you haven’t got a “special relationship” with the SDECE, thought Philby, the way you have with the SIS. But neither you fellows nor, apparently, my disappointing old SIS colleagues, are offering me any itties. Tout au contraire, in fact.

The prolonged nervous strain of this evening, along with the cumulative effects of drink and his throbbing, wounded head, was goading Philby toward something like hysteria. I’ve got to end this, he thought.

“Oh well,” he said with desperately affected breeziness, “Miss Weiss is only interested in—d-d-domestic reminiscences, human-interest m-material. Travels with my f-father, the traumas of a raw-raw- religious education, the d-death of my pet ffffox—upon my honor, nothing that would attain to your ‘n-newspaper level.’ ” He finished his first gin and picked up the second. “And now if you’ll both excuse us…”

Dr. Tarr stood up from beside Philby and leaned down over Philby’s bandaged head. “Applewhite doesn’t think you were ever a spy for the Soviets,” he said; Applewhite was the CIA station chief in Beirut. “The Philbys and the Applewhites go out together for picnics in the mountains by Ajaltoun. Applewhite thinks we’re scound rels for hassling you and rousting you all the time.”

Cautiously, Philby allowed himself an indulgent laugh, and it came out convincingly enough; but when he tried to speak he found that he was babbling nervously: “Oh, th-that successive—that’s excessive, surely—you s-seem like a couple of clean-cut Woodminster—I mean, Midwestern—”

“But we’re not under Applewhite,” Dr. Tarr went on almost in a snarl. “We work directly for the Office of Special Operations in Washington. And our boss”—he pressed his lips together—“our boss is very aware of your father, your pet fox.”

Philby felt as though the man had punched him in the stomach. The CIA knows that my father’s ghost was inhabiting that fox? But they can’t know much more than that, they can’t even know that, not with any certainty.

He had raised his eyebrows, and now he tensely opened his mouth to try to express… weary puzzlement, impatience, mounting irritability…

But Professor Feather stepped well back from Elena and delivered another punch: “While you’re dickering with the SDECE, ask Miss Ceniza-Bendiga to show you where she lay prone on the roof of a Rue Kantari office building Tuesday night, across the street from your place. She brought the rifle in a saxophone case, and I guess she must have joggled the telescopic sight a little during the taxi ride.”

“You two have a pleasant evening now, hear?” said Dr. Tarr cheerfully, and the two CIA men strode out of the bar.

Philby had snatched the revolver out of his coat pocket and was now pointing it under the table directly at Elena’s abdomen. “Dum-dums,” he said evenly, though he was breathing hard. “Paralysis, peritonitis—those would be good news.”

He was remembering last Tuesday night—the stunning blow to the head while he stood in front of the toilet in his bathroom, and then his own drunken, confused effort to bash his head again, against the radiator, to conceal from his wife the fact that he had been shot—his wife dragging him half-conscious to the bedroom, with blood jetting from his scalp and spattering the wall and ruining the pillows—and then the Lebanese doctor that poor Eleanor had somehow got to come over to the apartment, and Philby’s inarticulate reluctance to be taken away to a hospital while an assassin might be waiting outside for a second shot—

Elena smiled at him coldly and slowly lifted the palms of both hands from the table. “I don’t have the rifle now. And that was just… personal regards, Tuesday night, disobedience—not my orders. France is willing to buy you—even if France’s temperamental emissary would rather have seen you dead, that night—and you do still need a nation that will give you protection and immunity. You don’t dare go up the mountain with the Russian expedition, do you, now that your protector and shield is all the way gone? You told me that your father’s body died two years ago—when did the fox die?”

“September,” whispered Philby, lowering the barrel of the gun. “Somebody p-pushed him over the railing of our apartment. Pushed her, if you like—the f-fox was a female. Fifth floor.”

“I’ll deny having shot at you,” she said. She took a deep breath, and then, her eyes bright with tears as she stared straight at him, she added with clear deliberateness, “And what would have been the point of trying to kill you last Tuesday, in any case?—since”—she visibly braced herself—“since during our talk tonight I’ve gathered that January first isn’t your true birthday after all? Your real birthday, the real day on which you’re mortally vulnerable, is the date when something happened to nearly kill you in ’37, right?”

The barrel was up again, leveled at her, but he made himself lift his finger out of the trigger guard. No, he thought, she’s only giving you the truth: you will not be permitted to keep any part of you opaque; in the end you will be left with no secrets at all. “You— nearly got it, just then,” he said, his whisper very shaky now. “Did you— know you were attempting suicide, by saying that to me?”

“I—I know you’re solicitous of suicidal women.” She exhaled on a downward whistling note, and her shoulders sagged. “And so you leave me with a different person to try to kill.”

Philby nodded slowly, comprehending. “Andrew Hale,” he said.

TWELVE: Beirut, 1963 / Wabar, 1948

The child turned on the cushion of the huge corded arms and looked at Kim through heavy eyelids. “And was it all worthless?” Kim asked, with easy interest.

“All worthless—all worthless,” said the child, lips cracking with fever.

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Earlier in the evening, when the sky had still been gold beyond the blowing gauze curtains, Hale had reluctantly pulled up a chair at one side of his hotel room desk.

He stared without enthusiasm at the glasses of arak that Mammalian had poured before sitting down in the chair opposite him; and as Hale watched, Mammalian topped up each glass from the water pitcher on the desk, and the clear liquor was abruptly streaked with milky cloudiness. Hale had never been seasick or airsick, but he was sweating and nauseated right now with a profounder sort of deficiency in traction. The Mezon wire recorder at Mammalian’s elbow hissed faintly as its spools turned.

“You are ill at ease,” said Mammalian quietly, stroking his black beard as he looked out the window at the purple Mediterranean sea. “You are like a man nerving himself to climb a steep mountain, anticipating all sorts of chasms, hard challenges, muscles flexed to cramping. But it is not a mountain—it is a flat beach, and you are only going to walk into the surf.” He shrugged and rocked his head. “It will be cold, and the breath will perhaps seem to stop in your throat at times, but you will get through it by relaxing. All your adult life you have kept up a tense guard, a tight, clinging posture—your task tonight is simply to lower the guard, let your fists unclench.” He turned away from the window to look at Hale, and he laughed softly. “Drink, my friend.”

Hale nodded and lifted one of the glasses with a shaky hand. The liquor was sharp with the taste of anise, but when he had swal-lowed it he was glad of the expanding heat in his chest.

“What,” said Mammalian thoughtfully, “has the British secret service learned about our plans involving Mount Ararat?”

“We—got the first hints of it when—Volkov—tried to defect from the Soviet NKGB, in Istanbul in ’45,” said Hale. He clanked the glass down, and a few drops flew out and beaded like pearls on the polished dark wood. In spite of what Mammalian had said, he was so tense that it was a conscious effort to breathe. Somehow it didn’t help that he had gone over this same ground four days earlier with Ishmael. Ishmael’s subsequent death had been a reprieve, a negation of it.

“But the NKGB killed Konstantin Volkov,” said Mammalian, “before he could defect.”

“True,” said Hale. He forced his shoulders to relax, and he spread his hands on the desktop.

“Just wade slowly into the surf. It is cold, but still very shallow.”

Hale nodded. “Volkov was a walk-in,” he said. “He apparently just went to the British Consulate General building one day in August of ’45, and said he wanted to sell information; he had a lot of—names of Soviet agents, even of doubles working in the British service, but the—the big item—was details about a most-secret impending Soviet operation in eastern Turkey.”

“Go on. Take your time.”

Hale filled his lungs, and then just let the words tumble out in a rush: “Volkov was the NKGB deputy resident, under cover as the local Soviet consul general, and in exchange for his full deposition he wanted a lot of money and a laissez-passer to Cyprus for himself and his wife. Unfortunately our ambassador was on vacation, and his chargé d’affaires didn’t approve of espionage, so he didn’t relay the offer to Cyril Machray, the SIS station commander. Both Machray and the ambassador had been indoctrinated into the outlines of our fugitive-SOE operation and would have relayed him to our man in Turkey. As it happened, though, Volkov’s offer was simply sent by diplomatic bag to the SIS Section Nine in Broadway, in London, where Kim Philby was in charge. Philby took control of Volkov’s case and somehow didn’t manage to drag himself down to Istanbul until a month had passed since Volkov’s visit; and by that time Volkov and his wife had been loaded into a Moscow-bound airplane—on stretchers, wrapped in bandages.”

He had been unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice, and Mammalian smiled sympathetically. “Ah, well, Philby was one of ours, you know. He couldn’t let Volkov talk to you people. In fact he told his London handler about it immediately, and Moscow Centre took care of the rest.”

Hale wiped his damp forehead with his shirtsleeve and took another sip of the arak. “But!—our consulate office had taken routine photographs of the contents of Volkov’s samples-package, the documents he had brought in to show his authority, before sending the originals to Philby in London; I was stationed in Kuwait then, and prints were eventually circulated to me for study.”

“Why to you?”

“Because during the war I’d become one of the listed referees in the topics the documents dealt with—Volkov’s samples included aerial photographs of Mount Ararat, with maps of the mountain’s Ahora Gorge indicating the locations of what he called ‘drogue stones,’ which are—”

“Anchors,” said Mammalian.

Hale nodded uncomittally; then he went on, more easily than before, “Or the five points of a pentagram, say, if there’s a ring of these drogue stones, as there appeared to be on Ararat. A containment, an imposed ground state.” The sea breeze from the window was chilly on his sweaty face, but now he felt as though a fever had broken; and he recalled that he had felt this way with Ishmael too, after a few minutes of talking. “It was autumn of ’47 when the ne glected Volkov prints were finally relayed to my office in the British Embassy at Al-Kuwait, and by that time I had got to know the local Bedu tribes—I had even traveled with the Mutair during the previous winter, and I had—”

Hale paused and took another sip of the candy-flavored drink. He was always vaguely but specifically humiliated to refer to experiences with the supernatural.

“I had by then met several of the oldest inhabitants of the desert,” he said flatly, not looking at Mammalian. “Do you know the creatures to whom I refer.”

He shivered as he remembered at times cowering before tall sandstorms that boomed out the old rhythmic syllables across the dunes, and remembered at other times actually conversing in cautious, archaic Arabic with depleted or confined members of the unnatural species: by means of radios carried down into wells too deep to receive human broadcasts, or with codes plucked by box canyon winds on Aeolian harps, or in flocks of caged birds that generally died in the stress of conveying vigorous answers to questions. Never surprise them, he had learned; never reason with them.

Mammalian reached across the hotel room desk to squeeze Hale’s shoulder with one big brown hand, and his bearded face was creased in a wincing smile. “They are angels, Charles Garner!” he said earnestly. “Fallen, yes, but they are nevertheless pure spirits, who must take up the physical matter at hand in order to appear to us at all. They are a bigger category of thing than we are, and their proximity must needs diminish and humble us, by comparison.”

Hale sat back in his chair, freeing his shoulder from the other man’s hand; sympathy in this, even companionship, seemed perverse. “I had seen one of them in the summer of ’45,” he said in a resolutely matter-of-fact tone, “in Berlin. And from my wartime studies I knew that the drogue stone that had drawn it there had ultimately come from Mount Ararat in 1883. So Volkov’s long-delayed information did two things for me: it bolstered my suspicions that a colony of djinn existed on Mount Ararat, and—”

“A kingdom,” said Mammalian.

“Very well, a kingdom of djinn. And it let me know that the most-secret agency of the Soviets was planning to go again to the Ahora Gorge on Ararat—perhaps to fetch out another of the creatures, perhaps to establish some diplomatic alliance with the whole tribe.” He smiled. “Perhaps both.”

“It is both,” said Mammalian. He looked away from Hale, out the window at the darkening sky. “And ultimately it will be an alliance with mankind, rather than with this nation or that. You, and even Kim Philby, and even myself, are in fortunate positions in this transcendent work. We will live forever, and we will be like gods.” He blinked several times, and then looked back at Hale. “Your Operation Declare—it was a frustrated attempt to kill the angels on the mountain. How was it intended to work?”

And here we are at last, thought Hale. “It was,” he began, and then he paused, waiting to see if God would provide an interruption; but the wind kept fluttering the curtains, the wire spools rotated steadily, and Mammalian simply stared at him. “Oh well.” He sighed deeply. “I was trying to forcibly impose upon the djinn the experience of death.”

“Yes, of course. But how?”

“It was a refinement of a technique the wartime French DGSS had used to try to kill the one in Berlin. Their scientists in Algiers had cut a cylinder from what was allegedly a Shihab meteorite, one of the spent ‘shooting stars’ that has knocked down and killed a djinn. Our SOE was able to get the specs on the operation, and the meteoric iron the French had used did have a peculiar internal structure: fine straight fissures—something like the Neumann lines that are found in ordinary meteorite cross-sections, and which result from interstellar collisions—but these were all at precise right angles, and the French had concluded that this configuration was a unique result of fatal collision with a djinn. The scientists believed”—how had poor old Cassagnac put it?—“that the iron ‘contained the death of one of these creatures,’ and that firing the death into the Berlin djinn would kill it.”

“We had not known all this,” said Mammalian softly. “We knew only that someone had fired some sort of gun at the angel.”

“And of course the DGSS bullet didn’t affect your angel at all. So I went back and studied the djinn. I read the oldest fragments of the Hezar Efsan, which was the core of the Thousand Nights and One Night; and in the Midian mountains of the Hejaz I found communities of Magians, fire-worshippers, and traded gold and medical-supply whole blood and thermite bombs for the privilege of witnessing their distressing mountain-top liturgies. And I found that in all the very oldest records, djinn are described as being killed by… trivial-seeming things: someone carelessly throwing a date-stone at one of them, or accidentally hitting one with a misaimed fowling arrow, or even by taking a sparrow out of a hidden nest. Eventually I decided that the way to kill a djinn was to change the shape of its animated substance in a particular way.”

“I am glad we stopped you on Ararat fourteen years ago,” said Mammalian, lifting his own glass and draining it in one gulp.

“I decided that a Shihab meteorite would comprise the death of a djinn—not in the stone’s internal structure, but in its melted and rehardened shape. The meteorites are always pitted with round holes, like bubbles, uniform in their dimensions but of all sizes, even down to microscopic; I concluded that the concavities in the surface of the meteorite are the imprint of a djinn’s death, repeated at every possible scale, and that if I could summon the djinn down from the mountain peak to the stone in the gorge, and then explode it in the midst of them, the pieces would be propelled into the substances of the creatures, forcing their stuff to assume the complementary convex shape.”

Hale paused. For the last several seconds he had been hearing a telephone ringing in some nearby room; but Mammalian hadn’t paid any attention to it, and now Hale realized that it had stopped.

“The djinn are supposed to have existed before mankind,” Hale went on, “and in many ways they are a more primitive sort of life, more crude. Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events, wind and fire and sandstorms, gross and literal. What the djinn imagine is done: for them to imagine it is to have done it, and for them to be reminded of it is for them to do it again. Their thoughts are things, things in motion, and their memories are literal things too, preserved for potential reference—wedding rings and gold teeth looted from graves, and bones in the sand, and scorch-marks on floors, all ready to spring into renewed activity again at a reminder. To impose—”

He jumped in his chair then, for he had clearly heard a British man’s voice shout, “Shut her up!”

It must have come from the beach outside, and Mammalian was simply waiting for him to go on.

Hale wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve again. “To impose a memory-shape onto their physical makeup is to forcibly impose an experience—which, in the case of a Shihab meteorite’s imprint, is death.”

Mammalian’s eyes were wide, and he was shaking his head mournfully. “In 1948 your people brought a big chunk of meteoric iron to the mountain and set it high in the Ahora Gorge, with explo-sives under it. The meteorite is still on the slope there now, rusting—though as soon as we finish talking here I will radio instructions that it be retrieved and ground to dust. Where did you get it, and how do you know it has killed a djinn?”

Ground to dust, thought Hale dully. This is all part of your plan, Jimmie?—that we lose the meteorite that poor Salim bin Jalawi and I worked so hard to find, worked so hard to retrieve—

“We got it,” he said, “at the site of an ancient city that had been wiped out by a meteor strike—it’s mentioned in the Koran—south of the well at Um al-Hadid in the Rub’ al-Khali desert—the A’adite city of Wabar.”

As he began to tell Mammalian the story, and the reels of wire hissed slowly between the recorder’s spools, Hale did finally relax; the meteorite was gone, Elena was gone, and perhaps if he told his own story with objective, emptying thoroughness, drinking as much as possible as he told it, he might at least for a while lose the unwelcome burden of his own identity.

The Volkov documents had been the initial clue.

It had been late in 1947 when Hale concluded from them that the Soviets had in 1945 intended to mobilize a covert expedition to Mount Ararat; and when he had made some inquiries with the Ankara SIS station and Broadway in London, and then traveled out to the Hejaz to talk with the reclusive old fire-worshippers in the mountains, he concluded uneasily that the Soviets had not yet done it, but intended to start very soon. Overflight photographs indicated that big new hangars and pools and railway yards were being constructed at the secret research stations in Soviet Armenia, just on the other side of the Aras River from Ararat; and Hale was told by the Bedu who roamed the Hassa desert west of Kuwait that all over the Arabian peninsula sandstorms were lately calling urgently to each other across the wastes, and that hatif voices from the darkness were keeping Bedu up praying loudly all night, and that the roaring of the djinn who were confined to desolate pools could be heard for miles over the sands.

The most-secret agency of the Soviets was planning to go again to the Ahora Gorge on Ararat, for the first time since 1883— perhaps to fetch out another of the creatures, perhaps to establish some diplomatic alliance with the whole tribe. Perhaps both.

Hale had come up with the plan to cart a genuine Shihab mete-orite way up into the Ahora Gorge on Mount Ararat, and use ankhs to summon the djinn down to the stone, and then explode it in their midst. It would be an SOE operation rather than an SIS one—and since the SOE no longer officially existed, the only person whose clearance he needed was Theodora’s. The decipher-yourself code message okaying the plan arrived at Hale’s CRPO office in the Al-Kuwait British Embassy less than an hour after he had telegraphed the proposal.

And so the twenty-five-year-old Captain Hale of the Combined Research Planning Office had set about finding a Shihab meteorite.

He learned that there was a covert traffic in the objects in the black-magic Al-Sahr shops down by the Ahmadi docks south of town, but the stones offered for sale in those furtive establishments had no real provenances and were often simply smoked sandstone or granite. He had turned to historical records then, hoping to find mention of a meteor strike that might be said to have killed a djinn.

It proved to be easy to find, in a book called The Empty Quarter, published by Holt as recently as 1933; and the very name of the author was intriguing—the book had been written by H. St. John Philby, the father of Kim Philby. In the book the senior Philby recounted his expedition into the Rub’ al-Khali desert to find the lost city of Wabar.

Many passages in the Koran described Allah’s angry destruction of the city of the idolatrous A’adites, and Arab folklore recalled the city as having been called Wabar or Ubar, and placed it in the great southern Arabian desert. St. John Philby had trekked by camel caravan to the reputed site, but instead of ruined foundations he had found the black volcanic walls of two meteor craters; in his book St. John Philby described black pellets of fused glass which his Bedu guides had thought were the pearls of perished A’adite ladies, and he mentioned a Bedu legend that a big piece of iron lay somewhere in the area, though Philby had not succeeded in finding it.

The elder Philby had assumed that the vaguely constructed-looking black crater walls must have been the only basis for the Bedu identification of the site as the legendary Wabar; apparently it had not occurred to him that the fabled city might actually have stood there, and literally have been destroyed by fire from the heavens.

Several times during Hale’s research the old, half-welcome excited nausea had kept him fearfully reading all night, drinking contraband Scotch and wishing he could bring himself to follow Elena’s example and return to the Catholic faith.

In the chapter on Wabar, St. John Philby had described the dreams he had had as his caravan had approached the craters— nightmares of the desert spinning around him in radiating rays of gravel, while he tried uselessly to take bearings with a surveyor’s instrument.

And in the fragmentary Hezar Efsan, Hale was troubled to read the story enigmatically preserved as “The Fisherman and the Genie” in the Thousand Nights and One Night. In the ancient story, a genie tricked a fisherman into catching fish from a miraculously preserved lake in the desert; when the fish were put into a frying pan, a solid wall opened and a black giant described as “a mountain, or one of the survivors of the tribe of A’ ad” appeared and asked the fish, “O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?”—to which the fish replied, “Return, and we return; keep faith, and so will we.”

Clearly, in his childhood end-of-the-year nightmares, Hale had been in touch with some hidden world—a disturbingly contrarational world, perhaps older than rationality, but still secretly alive and active.

Hale was nervously certain that the A’adites had been fallen angels, and that Wabar had been a kingdom of djinn, destroyed by some kind of meteor strike—and he resolved to find the meteoric stone that St. John Philby had failed to find there.

And so Captain Andrew Hale had quietly taken a vacation from the CRPO—while, as the Canadian Tommo Burks, he had flown to Al-Hufuf and begun outfitting an expedition to the Rub’ al-Khali region of Saudi Arabia, under forged authorization documents from the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.

In the Jafurah desert settlements outside Al-Hufuf he hired ten Bedu tribesmen for the expedition, including several from the ’Al-Murra tribes to act as guides and rafiq escorts, and he set his agent Salim bin Jalawi to assembling thirty desert-bred ’ Umaniya camels and purchasing enough rice, dates, coffee, first-aid supplies, and ammunition for a month-long trip.

He had planned to leave at the end of January in 1948, and had applied to King Saud for permission to travel in the Saudi interior—but on January 6, his birthday, Hale had received word that the king had forbidden the trip. The ’Al-Murra tribes were at war with the Manasir, Hale was told, and the situation was complicated by the fact that the king’s tax collectors were in the area collecting the zakat tribute. But the ’Al-Murra tribesmen Hale had enlisted for the trip had not heard of any fighting with the Manasir, and Hale knew that the zakat was always collected in June and July, when the summer’s lack of grazing forced the Bedu to camp on their home wells.

“He doesn’t want a Nazrani out in the sands,” said bin Jalawi philosophically, sipping coffee at a sidewalk café in the Al-Hufuf town square. “Not when the spirits have got everybody stirred up in this way. Even the yakhakh are animated. Perhaps, Tommo Burks, it is the end of the world.”

Yakhakh were locusts, and in fact a net had been draped over the café’s awning poles to keep the flying grasshoppers off the tables; every three or four years the insects migrated up from Abyssinia, and today the sky was actually darkened by clouds of them passing overhead toward Kuwait, as if the sun were eclipsed.

Hale drummed his fingers on the wooden table. “National Geographic he treats this way!” he said angrily. “I wish I were a journalist, I’d write a story about him.” He frowned at bin Jalawi. “Can you… sell off the supplies we’ve bought, and the camels, and dismiss the men we’ve hired? I think I’ll be buying a plane ticket back to Kuwait.”

“Certainly.” Bin Jalawi cupped his hand and rubbed his thumb across the inside of his index finger in a universal gesture. “The men will want pay for the time they’ve waited—I can distribute it.”

I’ll bet you can, Hale thought. “But could you secretly hold back some of the supplies, after making a big scene with trying to get the best prices in returning the rest of them?—and quietly keep a couple of the best guides on our payroll, after noisily firing the rest?”

“Alahumma!” said bin Jalawi; the phrase meant to be sure or unless possibly. “This would be in order to disobey the king—to be subject to arrest, in the company of an infidel Nazrani in the sands. A greater pay-scale would be required from the Creepo.”

“ ‘You limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust,’ ” sighed Hale, quoting Kipling’s Gunga Din at him, as he often did. “Yes, double the pay—it’ll still be cheaper than hiring all ten of them at the old rate. And keep back six or eight of the best camels. Eight. I’ll get somebody to board the Kuwait plane as Tommo Burks. And then I’ll meet you and the camels and the two guides at the Jabrin oasis in… what, a week?”

“If we ride hard. And how are you going to get to Jabrin?”

“I’ll drive a jeep there. The camel route from Hassa to Jabrin would be navigable in a jeep.”

“The journey will destroy the jeep.”

“Well, I haven’t got to drive it back, have I? I’ll ride one of the unburdened supply camels on the return trip, and just abandon the vehicle at Jabrin. And when you sell back the supplies, don’t sell the sled, understand? Nor the ropes and shovels.”

Hale had bought a sand sled that could be pulled by camels, and he was hoping the meteorite could be dragged to a gravel plain where an RAF aircraft could land.

“If the tribes get word of a Nazrani in the sands, it will be all they will talk about. Ibn Saud’s men will hear of it.”

“We’ll be fast,” said Hale confidently, “and if we meet any Bedu I’ll speak only in order to return greetings, in Arabic with some northern accent like Ruwala—”

“And not get off your camel,” added bin Jalawi. He had often told Hale that his huge English feet left monstrous footprints in the sand.

The 150-mile camel route from Hasa to Jabrin was mostly polished tracks slanting across gravel plains, but a number of times Hale did have to drive the commandeered RAF jeep over dunes, with the big 900-x-15 tires spinning heavily and sand thumping like deep water in the wheel wells. He had left Hufuf in the frosty dawn, but by the time he drove the jeep around the last sand ridge and finally saw below him the palm plantations of Jabrin, the sky was red with twilight, and a bandage from the jeep’s first-aid kit was wrapped tightly around a splitting radiator hose, and the radiator itself had been patched by a helpful Bedu family at the last well, with a paste of flour and camel dung. The generator had been screeching for the last hour.

Through the jolting, dust-powdered windscreen he squinted around at the Jabrin basin. Though some of the tracts of palm trees were still flourishing in orderly rows, most were decimated and choked with wild acacia bushes, and several stretches showed only toppled, dry trunks. Until the jeep clattered down to the level of the oasis he could see the broken walls and foundation-lines of ruined buildings.

Salim bin Jalawi’s party was camped on a flinty steppe by three well mounds, and out of sheer mercy for their eardrums Hale tromped on the brake pedal when he was still a couple of hundred feet away; and at long last he switched off the jeep’s laboring engine.

The shrill whine of the generator blessedly squeaked to a halt, but in the sudden desert silence he felt even more conspicuous. He climbed stiffly out of the driver’s seat and plodded around to the back, and as he unstrapped his two cases he squinted over his shoulder at the campfire and the tents and the humps of camels grazing beyond, and his nostrils flared at the warm aroma of boiled rice and butter on the alkali breeze.

The three men by the fire had stood up when the engine died, and Hale straightened the dusty kaffiyeh on his head and then hefted his cases and stepped away from the jeep. In spite of the head-cloth’s protection and the cloudy sky throughout the long day, he could feel the sting of sunburn on his nose and forehead.

He trudged slowly across the gravel to the fires, noting that the camels had already been watered—the nearest well mound had been cleared of sand and its cover of lumber and skins had been pulled away, to be conscientiously replaced before leaving tomorrow morning, and the mound, a cement of sand and a hundred years of accumulated camel dung, glinted with muddy moisture in the firelight.

“Al Kuwa,” he called. God give you strength. These men knew he was English—a Frank, a nominal Christian, a Nazrani—but he wanted to say nothing to emphasize it.

“Allah-i-gauik,” the three of them replied, civilly enough. God strengthen you.

“You camp right at the well?” Hale went on in Arabic when he had laid down his cases and embraced bin Jalawi. From one of the other men he accepted a small cup of hot coffee made from the well water, and drank it—it tasted fresh, but he knew that a laboratory analysis would show high concentrations of albuminoid ammonia, indicating contamination of camel urine in the well water.

“We are on the border of the desolation of A’ad,” said the man who had handed Hale the cup. He was a lean, black-haired ’Al-Murra tribesman with a leather cartridge belt over his shoulder and what looked like an old single-shot .450 rifle propped against a camel saddle beside him. “Even the Saar tribes will have the sense to stay out of the Rub’ al-Khali in these nights.” He laughed quietly.

“Or even in the days,” said bin Jalawi helpfully, crouching to sit by the fire again. “Men’s hopes are confounded when angels bend their courses down to earth.” Squinting up at Hale, he said, “I’ll wager the dibba came to Hufuf, after we left?”

“Yes,” Hale admitted. Dibba was the Arab term for locusts in the wingless, crawling stage, and armies of them often followed the airborne migrations. “Nothing extraordinary.” In fact the dibba had advanced on Hufuf from out of the southern desert in a front four miles wide and two miles deep, and black masses of them had stripped the date trees so bare that they appeared to have been burned. When Hale had driven out of town at dawn, he had seemed to be driving over crunching black snow, and on the road he had seen half a dozen dog-sized monitor lizards springing up in the chilly air to catch strays from the low-flying last wave of winged locusts.

“ ‘Nothing extraordinary,’ ” echoed bin Jalawi in a thoughtful tone, and the other two Bedu muttered to each other as they spread their robes and sat down. “Perhaps to the Franks the end of the world is nothing extraordinary.”

Hale found a place to sit on the windward side of the fire, and he accepted a plate of rice ladled from the pan that would recently have served as the camels’ drinking trough. He dug in hungrily with his right hand, licking his fingers, for he had brought only bread and cheese to sustain him during the day’s jolting drive.

“A few million bugs don’t make the end of the world,” he said to bin Jalawi around a mouthful of rice.

“It is metaphorical,” said bin Jalawi, using the English word.

In the twilight Hale could see several of the ruined forts of ancient Jabrin silhouetted against the purple sky. He knew that Jabrin had been a prosperous city long ago and that at some point the citizens had been driven out into the desert by a killing fever; the illness had abided at the place like a curse, and struck all the Arabs who had periodically made the attempt to live here since then. Oddly, travelers who stopped at the oasis never contracted the malady, and now the Bedu visited Jabrin only to use the wells and gather dates from the hundreds of date palms, which no one ever tended anymore.

Butterflies fluttered around Hale’s face as he ate—little orange and black painted ladies—and bin Jalawi nodded somberly when he saw Hale brushing them away.

“You know better than to inhale one of them, bin Sikkah,” he said, using Hale’s Bedu name now that they were in the sands, rather than the city name Tommo Burks. “But don’t crush them, or needlessly knock them into the fire.”

“Poor ghosts,” agreed one of the ’Al-Murra tribesmen. His gaunt face was sculpted into chiaroscuro gullies and prominences by the firelight as he too glanced around at the horizon notches that were the old forts. He wrung his hands for a moment as if washing them, then spread them to the sides, palm down. “At least they’re the ghosts of men. South of here will be ghosts of other things.”

Hale had read in the Hezar Efsan about ghosts of the A’adites. “The walking stones,” he said.

“Uskut!” the man exclaimed; the Arabic word meant shut up! “Name them not!”

One of the butterflies had landed on bin Jalawi’s palm, and he breathed softly on it, ruffling its wings but not dislodging it. “If you can hear,” he said to it, “and think, remember us in your morning prayers; even the Nazrani.”

Hale smiled sourly, but he was sure that if the butterflies were indeed ghosts, they were fragments of identity too minimal to be capable of thought. He sniffed the stone-scented wind and thought that there was no sentience at all in the miles of dark desert surrounding them; far away to the north and south might be hidden isolated clusters of warm Bedu tents, with perhaps overhead in the dark sky the astronomical distortions that indicated the passage of djinn through the Heaviside Layer, but the Jabrin region felt empty.

He knew that the desert south of them would not be empty; and he tried to pray, but in spite of his best efforts he found that his mental Pater Nosters quickly degenerated into a sterile recitation of the London Underground stations. Once again he envied Elena her faith.

“Bug,” he said in useless English to the fluttering nullity on bin Jalawi’s palm, “in your orisons, be all my sins remembered.”

When he had finished the rice and scoured the plate with a couple of handfuls of sand, he wiped his hands on his dishdasha robe and then unzipped the longer of the two leather cases he had carried from the jeep; he lifted out of it a slim Mannlicher 9.5-millimeter carbine and a canvas bag of loaded stripper-clips, and another canvas bag that contained four custom-machined iron ankhs, wrapped in linen cloths to prevent clinking. Doubtless his Bedu companions imagined that the second bag contained spare cartridges on clips like the first—they would be scandalized by the sight of the devilish ankhs—and Hale decided not to trouble them with an explanation of the Egyptian looped crosses until the party had reached the regions where their protection would be necessary.

Hale didn’t have to goad his Bedu companions to ride hard during the cool January days; his only worry was that one or even all three of them might be missing at prayer time one dawn.

The wind was steadily at their backs from the north. When the sun was bright and there were high dunes to be crested—with the wind casting long dazzling streamers of sand from the topmost ridges, and the camels plunging single-file down the lee slopes to expose streaks of lighter-colored sand under the dark tan top layer—Hale dizzily felt that somehow they had climbed up into the sky and were plodding across the top surfaces of clouds. And when they crossed the desert’s gypsum stone floor between dunes in thrashing rain, with the camels’ hooves clattering among primordial seashells, he imagined he was in the vanguard of the Pharaoh’s army, pursuing Moses across the floor of the Red Sea in the moments before the unnaturally sustained walls of water would break and crash back in.

And he came to appreciate the expertise of his guides; most of the covered wells were mounds identifiable by the camel tracks that led to them and the camel dung and date-stones that paved their surroundings, but several times he saw one of his guides ride directly to an anonymous sand hummock in a trackless landscape and confidently dismount and kick away drifted sand to expose the hides and timbers that covered a hidden well. Some of the wells they found had deliberately been left uncovered, either by raiding parties or by home tribes wanting to keep invaders from getting the water, and these wells had been filled in and covered by the drifting dunes. He was told that clearing the sand out of the shafts was not an impossible task for a tribe, and that in fact all the well shafts in the desert had simply been found, and cleared by the Bedu, rather than actually bored; the wells, cut straight down through red sandstone and white limestone, were reputedly the work of a very old civilization that had flourished in the days when great rivers had flowed across the Rub’ al-Khali.

On the sixth day out from Jabrin they watered the camels and refilled the water-skins at the wells of Tuwairifah—and then they had left the last known wells behind, and they took extra care to strap the water-skins high up on the camels, secured against accidental bursting or puncture.

Under emptied blue skies the party of eight camels zigzagged onward southeast through the parallel dunes of the vast Bani Mukassar, keeping to the gravelly desert floor and crossing the dunes at shallow gaps that notched the mountains of sand like passes. All four of the travelers preferred to ride during the day, when the sun blotted out the malign stars, but twice when they had had to march for a long distance along a dune to find a crossing place, they made up for the lost time by riding at night—and though on one of these long, plodding nights there was no moon, the planet Jupiter glowed brightly enough in the sky to cast shadows on the dimly glowing sand, and Hale could see a faint luminosity around his companions and the camels. His party was now very far away from any outposts of men, and when he looked up at the stars of the Southern Cross in the infinite vault overhead, or gauged his course by the position of Antares in Scorpio on the southern horizon, it seemed that the postwar world of London and Paris and Berlin was astronomically distant and that he and his companions were the only human beings seeing these stars.

Riding or camping, they always spoke quietly at night; and even in the noon sun the oppression of the region kept his guides from indulging in the falsetto singing with which Bedu generally filled the time on long marches. They took turns standing guard while they were camped, and Hale saw that in the mornings one of his guides always paced out across the sands looking for the tracks of any stones that might have crept up out of the darkness to investigate the heat of their fire.

Hale saw a couple of larks and noted that the birds did not fly, but hopped along over the sand; bin Jalawi told him that this was to evade birds of prey, which would notice the moving shadow of a bird in flight. “They know better than to draw attention,” bin Jalawi said ponderously.

Several times his companions shot hares, and though the Bedu only squeezed out the contents of the intestines before adding the carcasses to the rice pot, leaving the stomachs filled with whatever desert grasses the hares had grazed on, Hale found that his hunger outweighed his fastidiousness. Several times they saw foxes bounding across the gravel plains, and Hale dreaded the thought of eating one; but though desert foxes were considered lawful to eat, bin Jalawi told him that it would be madness to kill one in the region around Wabar. “Here they might be the old citizens,” bin Jalawi said. “ ‘Honor him who has been great and is fallen, and him who has been rich and is now poor.’ ”

Hale’s party reached the three wells of Um al-Hadid at sunset on January 27. The wells were in the bottom of a sand basin, and though they were recognizable by their characteristic mounds of stratified camel dung, the desert sands had filled them in long ago, and Hale saw no litter of date seeds around the mounds.

“The wells are long dead,” said the elder of the ’Al-Murra guides, “but we camp here. Wabar is only half a day’s ride farther.”

They were not able to find any bushes or roots at all for a fire, and so their dinner consisted of dates and brackish Tuwairifah water. In the fruitless digging for roots Hale did find a broken ostrich egg; he pointed it out to his companions, for ostriches had been extinct in Arabia for fifty or sixty years.

“I’ll bet it was laid and hatched right here,” Hale said, turning over a piece of shell as he squatted over the find.

“Probably it was broken by fire-worshippers,” said one of the guides grimly. “Bird eggs are anathema to djinn, and the fire-worshippers curry favor.”

Hale was reminded of the story “Aleiddin and the Enchanted Lamp,” a late and enigmatic addition to the text of the Thousand Nights and One Night. In the story, Aleiddin was at one point tricked into asking an obligated djinn for a roc’s egg to serve as a dome for his palace; and in reply the djinn angrily refused to kill the Queen of the Djinn. Hale had never understood why the fetching of the roc egg should involve the death of a powerful djinn, and he sensed that he had found a clue to the explanation here, in this Bedu’s remark—but the Bedu refused to say more, and Hale was too exhausted to press him. He thought of distributing the ankhs, but decided that it might now seem too much like the fire-worshippers currying favor, and he decided to hand them out tomorrow, before approaching Wabar.

The wind that had buffeted their backs for twelve days died to stillness during the night. Hale awoke when it stopped, and he lay there in his blankets on the sand for several seconds, staring up at the crescent of the new moon, wondering what sound had awakened him, before he concluded that the change had been the total cessation of the wind.

Only when he next awoke, shortly before dawn, did he notice that the ’Al-Murra guides had stolen away with four of the camels during the night.

Choking back a curse, he threw off his warm blankets and got to his feet to assess the supplies they had left; and they seemed to have divided the food and water evenly.

At least they had not taken the sand sled.

Salim bin Jalawi was at his dawn prayers, kneeling at a half-circle he had scored in the sand, bowing toward the west and Mecca. Hale looked around and did not see another line in the sand; the ’Al-Murrah must have left before prayer time, and were probably kneeling at a traced half-circle in the Tara’iz sands right now. Certainly they would not neglect it.

At last bin Jalawi stood up from the line in the sand and stared impassively at Hale. The sky in the east was pale blue and pink, though the sun had not yet appeared over the rim of the basin, and the still air was cold enough to make steam of both men’s breath.

“If we ride hard,” said bin Jalawi, “we could catch up with them.”

“No,” said Hale in a hoarse, tired voice. He scratched his bristly beard and yawned. “No, we will go on and get the egg—I mean, the big piece of iron. I hope four camels will be enough to haul it on the sled.”

“The devil take your sled,” said bin Jalawi mildly. He looked around at the sand basin they had camped in, clearly replaying in his mind the previous evening’s search for fuel; and he must have concluded that it had been thorough, for he shrugged and said, “Allah gives and Allah is pleased to take away. Coffee must wait until we find wood at Wabar.” He cocked his head then, listening, and he said, “They… return… ?”

Soon Hale could hear it too, the almost liquid sound of camel hooves in sand. He crouched by his saddle and pulled the Mannlicher carbine out of the oiled-wool scabbard, then scrambled on all fours up the northwest sand slope; he slid the rifle barrel up to the crest of the slope, and then with his hand on the stock near the trigger guard he slowly raised his head to peer over the basin edge.

The four returning camels in head-on view were the only figures out in the lunar dawn landscape—and though saddlebags flopped at their sides as they plodded this way, there was no rider on any of the saddles.

“Fida’ at al Allah!” whispered bin Jalawi, who was now prone beside him. The phrase was one of farewell, meaning In the custody of God.

Clutching the carbine, Hale got to his feet and stepped slowly out across the still, icy sand to meet the camels. The beasts were walking normally, bobbing their big heads, and the saddlebags and water-skins didn’t appear to have been touched.

The guides might have been shot by bandits or a hostile tribe— but he and bin Jalawi would have heard shots in this stilled air, and the assailants would have taken the camels; and Hale couldn’t think of any other explanation… besides djinn. He was bleakly sure that he should have distributed the ankhs to the men last night.

The cold sky was a weight on his shoulders as he clucked his tongue at the camels and caught the reins of the leader. The beast lowered its head, and Hale slung the leather rifle strap over his shoulder and put his wool-booted foot on the camel’s neck and let it lift him up off the sand toward the saddle. The sun was a red point on the eastern horizon, and Hale imagined that it was peeking at him as he had peeked over the basin rim.

There was no blood on the flat board of the saddle; only, caught in the folds of the blanket and on the saddlebag flap buckles, a scatter of jewelry. Hale stepped across from the camel’s neck onto the small Oman saddle, and he knelt swayingly up there as he scraped and picked up a handful of the jewelry.

It was tiny sticks, some curved and some straight, made of glass and bone and bright gold; and not until he found a knobby round piece of gold as big as a marble and held it up to the light, and saw that it was a tiny scale model of a human skull, did he realize that the sticks were probably miniature sculptures of human bones.

He had heard Salim bin Jalawi’s footsteps approaching, and now bin Jalawi was up on the saddle of another of the returned camels, and Hale glanced over to see that he too was gathering up scattered jewelry.

“La-ila-il-l’Allah!” bin Jalawi exclaimed abruptly, flinging the handful of gold and glass and bone slivers away from him in the dawn sunlight. “Drop them, bin Sikkah!”

The man’s response had startled Hale so badly that he not only scattered the miniature bones but jumped right off of the saddle too. He landed unbalanced on his feet and sat down hard in the cold sand, the slung carbine barrel cracking him painfully over the ear. “What the hell?” he said irritably in English, getting quickly to his feet to dispel any impression of panic.

Bin Jalawi had climbed down with more dignity, but he was breathing fast as he led the camel forward toward the camp in the basin. “Djinn,” he panted, “duplicate things. If they ponder a thing, sometimes a copy of that thing appears, made of whatever is at hand. In the desert the copies are generally made of glass, which is melted sand, or gold, which is in the sand. Somewhere up near the Um al-Hadid wells I know there is right now a stretch of sand that is not cold. And hot bare bones too, though they will have shaved some to make their models of others.”

Hale was leading the camel he had jumped off of, and the two others were following placidly. “In miniature,” he said.

“In all sizes, bin Sikkah! Djinn cannot comprehend differences in size, only shapes. These small copies stayed on the saddles, caught in folds—but by the Um al-Hadid wells there are now certainly bones as big as cannon barrels, made of glass—aye, and skulls as big as chairs, made of gold. We are lucky these camels weren’t crushed.”

Hale’s forehead was damp with the sweat of nausea, and in order to appear unruffled he quoted an often-repeated speech from the Thousand Nights and One Night: “ ‘Thy story is a marvelous one! If it were graven with needles on the corners of the eye, it would serve as a warning to those that can profit by example.’ ”

Bin Jalawi snorted. “Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through. Tawaqal-na al Allah! We put our trust now in Allah. Let us quickly be finished with this business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.”

Hale had slung the canvas bag containing the iron ankhs around his neck, and now he reached into it and pulled out one of the linen-wrapped crosses. “Carry this,” he said, tossing it to bin Jalawi, “and perhaps you won’t die. Don’t unwrap it yet—it will hold the attention, distract the attention, of any djinn that might focus on you.”

Bin Jalawi caught it and hefted it, then after a hesitation nodded and tucked it into a pocket in his robe.

Back at the camp they redistributed the bales and saddlebags among the eight camels and then they mounted and rode south-west.

After a few miles they found themselves riding over glittering black sticks that protruded from the sand and threw thin blue shadows, and for one chest-hollowing moment when he first noticed them Hale thought they were skeleton fingers; but the things shattered under the camels’ hooves, and he realized that they were fragile fulgurites, rough glass tubes formed by lightning strikes, exposed now by the scouring wind of the previous days.

Ahead of them now stood a range of what the Bedu called quaid, solitary dunes two or three hundred feet high, which the winds had somehow not arranged into the usual long, regular lines; the northern faces were as steep as the sand grains would permit, and even in the stillness Hale could see patches of paler rose-colored sand appear as here and there the darker surface layer slid silently away.

A spot of still darker red bounded rapidly across the high crest of the nearest dune, right under the empty blue sky—it was a fox, running with apparent purpose—and the dark sand was falling behind the animal like a curtain sequentially dropped, exposing the rose underlayer—

—and suddenly the air throbbed with a loud roar like the harmonizing engines of a low-flying bomber. Hale flinched on his saddle at the sheer physical assault of the noise, and it was several seconds before he recognized the old rhythms—and then several seconds more before he realized that the drumming cycles were forming vast, slow words in a very archaic form of Arabic.

It was all Hale could do not to throw himself off of the high saddle and lie face-down in the sand—for the cyst of his own frail identity felt nearly negated by this “mountain, or one of the survivors of the tribe of A’ad” that was shaking the foundations of the world with its speech.

His stunned consciousness recognized the words for Why come the sons of Solomon son-of-David to the Kingdom of A’ad?—and he knew that no creatures who might in some sense survive here would know the term Nazrani. Their city had been destroyed by the wrath of Yahweh, the God of Solomon, long before Jesus of Nazareth was born.

Neither Hale nor bin Jalawi ventured an answer; and the eight imperturbable camels simply kept plodding forward toward a low gap in the sand between the dunes.

From the corner of his eye Hale saw another fox scampering across the ridge of the towering quaid dune that blocked the blue sky a hundred yards to their right. And as the ringing tones of the first dune shuddered away to silence this one took up the throbbing, rhythmic roar, repeating the same question.

Don’t answer, Hale told himself, mostly to maintain his own distinct identity, as he rocked numbly on the saddle. Don’t reason with them.

With a jarring thump that was almost drowned out by the syllables of the dunes, a geyser of sand shot hundreds of feet into the air from a point two hundred yards to the left; and as the upflung sand column began to dissolve into falling veils, another exploded up from the right. Abrupt collapses and avalanches in the slopes of two of the quaid dunes ahead made Hale think that similar detonations were happening under their weighty mass, and when he stared through the foggy rain of sand at the spot where the second geyser had erupted, he saw an age-weathered ring of stone exposed in the sand. It was a well. The wells of Wabar were violently expelling the sand that must have choked them for more than two thousand years.

A quarter of a mile away to the left, another dune began pronouncing the resonant question, and more tan jets burst up from the desert floor on all sides, out across the plain to a distance of half a mile or more. Hale’s nostrils twitched at a smell like cinnamon and old dry blood.

He was gritting his teeth, and tears were running from his slitted eyes into his beard. They might not know the term Nazrani, he thought, but I am baptized. Is that what this dead kingdom is responding to, that spiritual polarization? Old St. John Philby came here—but only after he had renounced his own baptism and converted to Islam.

He pushed the jangled thought away, unwilling to consider the notion that his baptism—“on the Palestine shore, at Allenby Bridge near Jericho”—might have made an important and recognizable change in him; and in any case he had more immediate urgencies.

Bumpy black objects as big as wrecked cars were rising out of the wells now, hovering in ripples of mirage over the masonry rings and glinting in the sun; Hale saw that they were made of stone, and when one of them, and then another, ponderously leaned to the side, the rim of its well was instantly crushed to an explosion of dust, and the black stones moved slowly forward, leaving behind them paths of deeply indented sand. A harsh, two-tone ringing had started up, as if in harmony with the repeated slow basso profundo syllables of the dunes.

Half a dozen of the black basalt rocks still floated heavily over their wells, but eight of the massive things—no, ten—more—were surging across the plain toward Hale and bin Jalawi from both sides and from behind. Their size made them seem to move slowly, but when Hale watched the steady extensions of their impactedsand tracks, he saw that they were moving at least as fast as his train of camels. Two of the knobby boulders were closing in from the left and right like black spinnaker sails and were at the moment only a few hundred feet away; and at last he noticed in their bumpy contours the shelves of eroded shoulders, the outcrop of hip and breast. They were giant, broken, headless stone torsos, facing him and advancing, and the dizzying ringing noise was vibrating out of their black glass cores, as if in reiterated inquiry, or warning, or rage. The earth’s harsh music seemed to be tolling the crystal vault of the air and shaking the remote clouds into dissipating mist.

Hale was panting in hoarse whimpers through his open mouth, and his memory and identity were indistinct vibrating blurs. He had forgotten how to turn a camel around, and his legs tingled with the unreasoned spinal intention of jumping down from the saddle and simply running away north, perhaps on all fours. Even in ruins this power was too much for a frail, short-lived mammal to bear.

But that indistinct admission stirred a spark of defiant anger in his mind. Angels, he thought, and holding a thought was like clinging to a filled glass while in free fall, so be it; but I am a man. He took a deep breath and raised his head; and from his all-but-abandoned memory he summoned a phrase from his Jesuit school boyhood: Sin by sensuality, and you sin as a beast; sin by dishonesty, and you sin as a man; sin by pride, and you sin as the angels.

“I,” he declared out loud, though his voice was lost in the inorganic cantata of the dunes and the moving boulders, “can sin as well as any of you fallen angels.” And even though he was forlornly sure that it wasn’t true, that he was in fact simply sinning as a man, the deliberate intention served as an anchor for his otherwise-fragmenting identity.

Hale’s hand darted into the canvas bag that hung on his chest, and as he fumbled out one of the linen-wrapped iron ankhs, he numbly saw that the advancing stones did not actually touch the sand, but impossibly floated over it, supported by some force that crushed the sand flat underneath.

He was able to glance to his right at bin Jalawi, who knelt resolutely on the saddle of the next camel; the scowling Bedu seemed defensive but secure, and Hale marveled at his Moslem endurance.

“Look!” he shouted at the stoic Bedu; and when bin Jalawi’s slitted eyes turned toward him, Hale flipped the cloth off of the looped cross and pushed it up over his head, as he had done two and a half years ago in Berlin. In En glish he whispered, “S-submit, you b-b-loody d-devils.”

The ringing sound became painfully shriller as the tall black stones rocked to a halt in the morning sunlight.

As in Berlin, he had had to push the cross up through the air to raise it, as if he were trying to move a spinning gyroscope, and now he had to brace himself on the saddle and flex the muscles in his left arm to drag the ankh through the resisting air to the left—but when he had done it, the stone torso on that side rocked back, cracking.

“Wave yours back,” Hale yelled to bin Jalawi.

The Arab had retrieved the ankh Hale had given him and freed it from the linen cloth, and now he held it up and then slowly forced it over to his right; and with a hard clang the stone on his side broke into two pieces that toppled apart and thudded heavily into the sand, flinging up a cloud of dust.

Salim bin Jalawi looked back at Hale, his eyes bright. “In whose name do we… kill the ghosts of angels?”

“In the name of… George the Sixth of England!” Hale stood up on his knees to turn around and face the stones that had been advancing from behind them. The limbless, headless stone torsos had all halted out there on the northern sand plain, but Hale effortfully swung the ankh across his view of them and they fell back, several of them breaking apart and tumbling in pieces to the sand.

The camels had now reached the crest of the low gap between the dunes, and Hale shifted around and looked forward, down into a broad basin that stretched for a good third of a mile from side to side. Out in the center of it stood the black rings of two craters, each of them at least a hundred yards across and filled with rippled expanses of sand.

And as his camel began to step down the inner slope, the sky-filling noise from behind rang to a halt, and Hale’s thoughts fell back into order.

He was panting as he dug his compass out of a saddlebag, and he tried to hold it steady as he bent his head to watch the rocking needle under the glass. It was swinging from side to side pointing behind him, toward the true north, but he was confident that it would point toward any big piece of meteoric iron if he could get close to it.

The basin appeared to slope away to flatness a couple of miles to the south, and he thought it would be easiest to drag the meteorite that way, and hope for gravel plains level and long enough to serve as a landing field for an RAF Dakota DC-3.

He stared at the jagged black crater walls as his camel train descended the slope toward them. In his book, old St. John Philby recounted having told his Bedu guides, This is the work of God, not man. The skeptical old Arabist had assumed that since this was clearly a meteor strike, it could not also be the site of the fabled city. Hale, though, had had the advantage of seeing the ghost guardians of the city and knew that he would put it differently: This is the work of angels, not man.

“You wait with the camels,” he told bin Jalawi when they had reached level sand. “I’ll trot around with the compass and try to get a reading on the iron stone.”

The Bedu was still clutching the ankh in one hand. “Are we through with devils?” he demanded angrily.

“Apparently. For now. Keep that looped cross where you can get at it again in a hurry, though.”

Salim bin Jalawi nodded and tapped his camel’s neck to get it to kneel. Hale took one last fearful look back up at the gap through which they had entered the basin, then turned away and goaded his camel out across the drifted sand toward the craters.

The ragged black walls stood up from the desert floor like eroded masonry, and Hale morbidly wondered what sentries might patrol the topmost rims on moonless nights, and he was glad that he and bin Jalawi had arrived while the sun was still in the morning half of the sky.

Widely separated boulders of igneous rock studded the sand, hinting at broader craters; perhaps the whole basin was a cluster of meteor strikes. Wabar might have been a city of respectable size.

When he had ridden south of the western crater, Hale’s compass became erratic—and two hundred yards farther on, when both the craters were behind him, the compass needle began pointing consistently in a direction that was ahead of him: south.

He goaded his camel into a faster walk; and when he saw a rounded stone that was brown, rather than igneous black, with the ridges of its surface islanded by the yellow sand that filled its grooves and holes and nearly covered it, he was sure that he had found the meteorite—the death of djinn.

It was roughly the size and shape of a big truck tire. It must weigh a ton, at least, he thought as he reined in his camel.

He glanced around from the height of the saddle, but the basin was still empty except for the distant figures of bin Jalawi and the kneeling camels to the north; and so Hale tapped his own beast’s neck and then swung his legs off the saddle as the camel folded its forelegs and lowered its hindquarters to the sand. He hopped to the sand, gripping the stock of his rifle.

He trudged over to the half-exposed stone and then crouched beside it, brushing away the hot sand to see the texture of its uneven surface. It was pitted with spherical depressions, some as small as buckshot and some as big as tennis balls; he rubbed his palm over it, and it was clearly a metallic rock rather than a glassy one.

The sand around him was scattered with shiny dark pellets, and he picked one up. It was a smooth black glass oval, apparently formed from sand at very high heat; and he remembered that St. John Philby’s Bedu guides had found things like these and had imagined that they were the scorched pearls of the ladies of Wabar. Hale scooped up a handful of the glass beads, shook the sand off them, and tucked them into the canvas bag at his chest.

He had just straightened up, intending to fire a shot into the air and summon bin Jalawi, when he heard the unmistakable cry of a parrot, not two hundred yards away—and it was followed by the crowing of a rooster.

The sounds had seemed to come from the larger of the two craters, northeast of him; he looked in that direction—and froze, his fingertips tingling.

The southwest face of the crater wall an eighth of a mile away had apparently been cut to vertical and then carved into gleaming black pillars and arches—how had he not noticed it until now?— and Hale was reminded of the city of Petra above Aqaba in Jordan, though the pillars and halls of Petra had been carved into solid red limestone.

Against the shadowy blackness of the central obsidian arch, he saw a figure that might have been a sitting man; then an arm was raised, and Hale knew that he and bin Jalawi were not alone in the waste of Wabar.

He unslung the slim Mannlicher and rocked the bolt back to be sure there was a cartridge in the chamber; and after he had closed the bolt he patted the canvas bag at his waist, and was reassured to feel the weight of the loaded clips. He began striding across the sand toward the strange black palace.

From this distance he could vaguely make out ornately carved lattices and minarets, but as he got closer, the details became blurred and irregular; and by the time he had approached closely enough to see the black beard and embroidered red robe of the man who was sitting cross-legged in the arch, the arch was nothing but a natural cavern mouth, and the meteor crater wall was just irregular bumpy black stone, ragged at the top edge.

What from farther back had appeared to be steps leading up to the arch were just tumbled black boulders, and Hale gripped his rifle carefully as he climbed up to the broad ledge on which the man sat.

The air was cool in the shadow of the tall cave mouth, and a breeze sighed out of the black depths as if a tunnel beyond led to underground caverns. A cluster of doves and chickens hopped around on the cave floor behind the sitting man, and a big green parrot stood by the man’s robe-covered knee.

Hale was standing a dozen feet to the man’s right, holding the rifle pointed in his direction—but he let the barrel swing down when he saw that both the man’s hands were open and empty on his knees and that there was no sign of anyone else in the cave behind him.

The parrot cocked one glistening eye at Hale and squawked in Arabic, “What brings you to me, seeing you are not of my kind and cannot be assured of safety from violence or ill usage?”

Hale stared at it in alarm, and in his disorientation had even taken a breath to answer it, when the sitting man opened his mouth and spoke.

His voice was rich and deep as he spoke in archaic Arabic: “You are hungry. You have come a long way. Wash your hands so that we may eat.”

The man leaned forward and began dipping his hands in the air and then rubbing one hand over the other, as if at an invisible bowl of water.

After a moment he looked up at Hale, his black eyebrows raised. “You stand while I sit? You do not join me at my table?”

Helplessly, Hale slung his rifle Bedu-style and elbowed the stock behind himself to sit down cross-legged on the rough stone a yard away from his host, facing him; and after a moment of plain embarrassment, Hale too began doing a pantomime of hand washing. What is this, he wondered dizzily, some ritual? Is this man insane? Could he simply be making fun of me?

Then the man flicked his hands and began moving his extended fingers from a point above his left knee to his mouth and back, his jaws working as if he were chewing.

“Do not be abashed,” the man said. “Try some of this bread— note how white it is!”

Hale nodded awkwardly and pretended to eat a piece of bread, darting a nervous glance at the parrot.

“Have you ever tasted anything like this?” the man asked.

“Never,” said Hale. He was sweating.

The man nodded with satisfaction. “You are a god?” he asked then.

“No,” said Hale cautiously. “A man.”

The smooth brown forehead above the topaz eyes creased in a mild frown. “But the ghosts of my people rose for you—and you drove them back.” He waved a hand dismissively. “You are not of our covenant. Perhaps you are an agent of the one god. Why do you examine the killing stone?”

Hale understood that the man was referring to the stone he had found out on the sand, and he was guardedly pleased to hear his estimation of it confirmed. “I am going to take it away with me.”

“That will not revive my people. My people are dead, irretrievably killed by it.” He looked at Hale’s hands. “I wonder to see you eating so sparingly. Do not stint yourself.”

Hale again mimed eating a piece of bread. “It is not my purpose,” he said as he pretended to chew, “to revive your people.”

The bearded man smiled. “My people and I are secure from judgment. We have made a covenant with the Destroyer of Delights, the Sunderer of Companies, he who lays waste the palaces and peoples the tombs. We stay here. We do not go on, we do not face—”

The man had paused, so Hale ventured to complete the thought. “Consequences,” Hale suggested softly. “Retribution.”

“Leveling. We remain distinct.”

At the sound of hooves in sand behind him, Hale spun up into a crouch, the rifle’s stock fitting quickly to his shoulder and his eye looking over the gold bead-sight at the end of the barrel; but Hale recognized the camel that was still a hundred yards off on the sunlit sand to the northwest, and a moment later he recognized bin Jalawi riding it.

Instantly he scuffled back around to bring the muzzle to bear on the man sitting across from him on the cave floor, but the man had not moved; and Hale shakily crossed his legs again, lowering the barrel and tucking the stock behind him. He was profoundly glad that the Bedu was coming up.

“I think you are only a man,” the sitting man said. “I am A’ad bin Kin’ad, king of Wabar.”

Hale automatically lifted another piece of the imaginary bread. “Are you a man?” he asked, then opened his mouth and pretended to chew.

“I am half a man. I am the son of an angel by a human woman.”

Hale recalled the giant Nephelim in the Book of Genesis, who were supposed to have had children by the daughters of men. He had read speculations that the Nephelim might have been fallen angels.

“Human enough to have survived the doom of your kingdom,” Hale observed. He didn’t change his expression, but he had to run his tongue around the inside of his mouth to be sure he had not actually eaten something, and he wished he had brought his water bottle with him when he had walked away from his camel—for his mouth was fouled with the woody taste of dry, long-stale bread.

The red lips smiled in the black beard, exposing white teeth, though there was no change of expression in the watchful eyes. “Human enough for half of me to have survived.”

Hale breathed in and out through his open mouth, trying to lose the taste. “How did the… the killing stone… kill your people?”

A’ad stared at Hale as if at an idiot. “Know, O man, that it fell upon them. It, and others like it.” He shook his head, then dipped his fingers over his right knee, by the blinking parrot’s head. “Do try this meat. You have never tasted anything as exquisite as the seasoning of this dish.”

“Akh al-Jahala!” cawed the parrot. The phrase meant brother of ignorance.

Oddly, this scene felt familiar in an agent-running context; and Hale realized that it was like debriefing an Arab agent who has lost respect for the handler and is about to stop cooperating. Get what you can, fast, he thought.

“Do you know about another kingdom of your father’s tribe,” Hale asked as he obediently pretended to pick a bit of meat out of an imaginary dish over the parrot’s head, “on Mount Ararat—in what you would know as the land of Urartu, a peak called Agri Dag, the Painful Mountain? I believe the tribe survived the great flood because their kingdom was at the top of the mountain.”

A’ad bin Kin’ad scowled, and Hale actually rocked back away from the rage that burned in the golden eyes.

“Great flood?” the king roared. “I am crippled, and my lands are dry desert, because of my denial of your one god. I evaded his wrath, half of me at least evaded the full killing and damning extent of his wrath, but the rivers of my kingdom are parched valleys now, my vineyards and pastures are dust under the sand! You are a man, but the ghosts of my people could see that you have not the black drop in the human heart. You talk to me about floods! In what flood did you wash out the black drop, as I, being half-human, never could?”

Hale just stared expressionlessly at the king of Wabar, ready to swing the rifle butt up very hard indeed under the man’s chin if he should spring at him. He was to doubt it later, but in that moment Hale was bleakly sure that the man was referring to Original Sin, from the consequences of which Hale had supposedly been saved by baptism.

Abruptly the king relaxed and smiled. “But you need food. Taste that meat—the animals were fattened on pistachios.”

Hale remembered the taste of bad old bread in his mouth, and irrationally he dreaded putting into his mouth the handful of air he held.

He hesitated. “What animals?” he asked.

“Eat. Would you dishonor my table?”

Hale looked over his shoulder when he heard boots chuffing in sand, and relaxed to see bin Jalawi just stepping up to the tumbled stones below the ledge, holding his rifle casually since Hale appeared to be at ease.

When he had clambered up onto the wide ledge, bin Jalawi swiveled his impassive gaze from the black-bearded king of Wabar to the parrot to the miscellaneous fowls in the cave. “Salam ’alaikum,” the Bedu said, formally, cutting a quick, questioning glance toward Hale.

“Indeed peace is on me,” said the king of Wabar, “because of who my father was. I am A’ad bin Kin’ad.”

Bin Jalawi’s eyes widened; clearly he believed it. “There is no might nor majesty except in God the most high and wonderful!” he exclaimed, using a common Arab phrase to express awed surprise.

“Yahweh, Allah, Elohim,” spat the king. To Hale he said, strongly, “Eat the flesh, damn you. Be a man, and nothing more.”

Hale shuddered and flicked his right hand as though throwing something away, resolving to wash that hand soon, in water, or whiskey, or gasoline.

“This place is a ruin, my lord,” said bin Jalawi to the king. “Will you come away with us, on one of our camels?”

“O calamity!” shrilled the parrot, spreading its orange-spotted green wings and fluttering up into the air.

“To where?” asked the king in a voice as deep as rumbling in a desert well. “ ‘To the house no one leaves, where the mute crownless kings sit forever in deepest shadow and have dust for bread and clay for meat, and are clothed like birds in robes of feathers; and over the bolted gate lie dust and silence’?”

Hale recognized the man’s words as the text of a Babylonian description of the afterworld, preserved in the Assyrian Gilgamesh clay tablets. He straightened his legs and slowly stood up, without taking his eyes off of the king of Wabar.

“Shall I walk?” demanded the king, opening the front of his embroidered red robe and flinging it back over his shoulders, scattering the clamoring chickens behind him. “Shall I ride a camel?”

Hale had flinched back with a smothered cry. The king’s naked body from the waist down was made of rough black stone, with no seam or crack visible where white skin bordered black petrification—and millennia of sandstorms had grotesquely eroded the contours of the stone. The genitals were gone, and the projecting stone knees and thighs had been weathered flat, so that they looked more like frail flippers than a man’s legs.

The robe must have been heavily padded, for the king’s chest was just white skin sagging over ribs and collar-bones and prominent shoulder sockets; and the king’s beard was patchy and white now. Hale could not see the robe on the cave floor, and he was suddenly sure that it had never been real.

“Stay,” whispered the king through a toothless mouth. “Die. Learn to relish our food.” One grimy, stringy white hand reached behind himself, and then he was holding a steel dagger by the point and nimbly cocking it back over his shoulder to throw.

Hale’s brown hand snapped to the trigger guard of his rifle beside his hip, and in one motion he levered the short barrel up horizontal and pulled the trigger.

The ringing crack of the rifle shot was stunning in the cave mouth, and Hale couldn’t hear anything as he instantly worked the bolt, ejecting the old shell and chambering a fresh cartridge.

By sheer luck the unaimed shot had punched a hole through the king’s upraised forearm; and in an instant the wrist and hand had turned black, and the knuckles clanked when the suddenly heavy arm hit the stone floor.

“Jesus,” said Hale blankly.

Tendons stood out in the king’s shoulder and elbow as he tried to lift his stone hand; and the knuckles dragged on the ledge surface a little way, but did not rise. Behind him the dagger clattered to a halt on the cave floor.

“I am still secure from judgment,” whispered the king, probably to himself. “I am still secure.”

“We,” said Hale, “are not.” Thank God, he added mentally. He took a deep breath and let it out, and he found that he had to step back and flex his hand away from the gunstock to keep himself from firing an aimed slug through the king’s heart, or through his head, out of sheer horror at the fact of him. “And we must leave you.”

Then Hale and bin Jalawi were hopping down over the tumbled stones and sprinting across the sand toward bin Jalawi’s camel, and beyond that Hale’s camel beside the meteorite; and all Hale could think of was the coming effort of digging a trench up to the mass of iron, and winching it down onto the sled, and then hitching all eight camels to the sled for the laborious march south out of the accursed basin of Wabar. The radio case was in his saddlebag, and he had to tell himself forcefully that he must wait until they had found a gravel plain wide enough for an RAF Dakota to land on, before he dared use the agreed-on frequency to talk to a human being in the rational outside world.

THIRTEEN: Turkey, 1948

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die; For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods…

—Genesis 3:4–5

Hale and bin Jalawi had ankhs and rifles ready to hand as they flailed their shovels and secured the winches, but the ghosts of Wabar had been effectively knocked down, and the king was an inert figure in the portico of the black mirage-castle.

Between the two of them they managed to get the camels to drag the meteorite four miles south, out of the Wabar basin to a broad gravel plain at the edge of the Al-Hibakah region; and after they had freed the ropes from the heavily encumbered sled and tied a conspicuous long red flag to it, Hale used the radio at last, briefly, to give the RAF bases in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi a triangulation on the meteorite’s new location.

He and bin Jalawi led the camels away to the northeast then, to arrive after five blessedly uneventful days at Abu Dhabi on the gulf coast. Here they sold the camels and got themselves on the ship’s manifest of a lateen-rigged Iraqi boom; the old ship changed its name at every port, and stayed well clear of the steamer lanes, and safely landed its cargo of mangrove poles in Kuwait after only three days at sea.

A telegram waiting for Hale at his office let him know that the pickup had been successful—the pitted chunk of iron was now in the hands of the bewildered SIS, and Hale did not see it again until the middle of May, a little more than three months later.

By this time the old wartime Special Operations Executive had been officially dissolved for three years. The agency had been separated from Foreign Office control back in 1940, and placed under the supervision of the Minister of Wartime Propaganda, and after 1945 Hale’s temporary seconding to SIS had been allowed to default into a permanent position. The CRPO was SIS cover, and Hale was on the SIS payroll, and he did field investigations for the SIS Head of Station in Al-Kuwait—but the SOE still functioned within SIS from a sort of administrative limbo, through Theodora with the secret sanction of one Cabinet minister, and Hale was still primarily an SOE agent.

The SOE had been covertly preserved solely in order to complete one operation—Declare.

In the early May of 1948 a decipher-yourself telegram arrived at Hale’s Al-Kuwait CRPO office from Broadway Buildings in London. It was SIS orders to report immediately to Erzurum in eastern Turkey, but Hale noted the keywords that indicated that the message had been sent by Theodora, and so he knew the orders had to do with Declare; another clue was the fact that the telegram used the pre-1945 code term for Turkey, 45.000, rather than the new SIS term, BFX. The old code was obsolete, and had been compromised even during the war—Germany had been designated by the number 12.000, and Hale recalled hearing of Germans in a Brussels bar in 1941 drunkenly singing “Zwolfland, Zwolfland uber alles.”

Kim Philby was the Head of Station in Turkey in 1948, working as First Secretary to the British Embassy in Istanbul; but Erzurum was more than six hundred miles east of Istanbul, and it was only a puzzled RAF commander who met Hale’s plane and handed him orders to take a car from the RAF base motor pool and drive directly to an address in Kars, an old city of tsarist origin still farther east, near the Soviet Armenia border.

Hale drove east all day in a big borrowed Oldsmobile, over roads whose paving blocks were so unevenly sunken that he drove many miles through the stubbled fields alongside the pavement, and as the sun sank behind him and the road climbed up into the Allaheukber highlands he had to turn on the car’s heater; the hill-slopes were green, but he didn’t see any trees until the road began descending toward Sarikamis, a cluster of wooden houses and a couple of petrol pumps tucked into the shade of pine-wooded hills. Hale bought petrol for the car with American dollars and pressed on, and by twilight he had reached the cobblestone streets and the old wooden buildings of Kars.

The address Hale had been given was a hotel, very nineteenth-century Russian-looking with its steep roof and narrow lamplit windows. Hale parked the Oldsmobile at the stone curb alongside a row of newly planted hawthorn trees, and when he stepped across the dirt strip and the flagstone sidewalk to push open the front door, he found Theodora in the hotel lobby, sitting placidly on a long wooden bench that ran along one wall.

An iron stove in a corner was filling the lobby with hot air and the scent of burning ox dung, and Hale closed the door behind him and began to unbutton his coat; but, “Let’s walk,” said Theodora, getting up from the bench and lifting an overcoat from beside him, and Hale sighed and turned up his collar.

He followed Theodora back out through the creaking lobby door and across the sidewalk, and even as the northwest wind from Russian Georgia found the gaps between his buttons, Hale knew better than to suggest they talk in the RAF car. The sun had set behind them, and Hale trudged down the center of the darkening cobblestone street beside the tall figure of Theodora, waiting for the older man to begin talking.

At last Theodora spoke. “The story for the SIS is that tomorrow morning you’re going to infiltrate some Armenians into the U.S.S.R. aboard the train that crosses the border by Kizilçakçak, thirty miles east of here. One of Biffy Dunderdale’s operations, supposedly, run out of Artillery Mansions rather than Broadway, so that Philby won’t expect to know the provenance. It’s not too implausible that SIS would try it; Philby has had no luck running Armenians over the border—his have all been caught and killed within sight of the barbed wire.”

“I daresay,” said Hale dryly.

“I don’t like him either, my dear, but hold your fire until you’ve got a clear shot. In any case, you won’t be stuffing Armenians into the train’s undercarriage tonight, so it’s academic. Tomorrow you’ll be at the border to watch the train go as if you had, and Philby will be along to observe—”

Hale almost tripped over a cobblestone. “Philby’s out here?”

“He will be by tomorrow morning. He’s Head of Station in Turkey, so of course he saw your orders; and of course he noted the inquiries you made to the Ankara desk last year, about Soviet activity around the Aras River. This present plan will go some way toward putting his mind at ease about those inquiries. Your story is that you and Dunderdale have been planning for months to put these Armenians across, so of course you wanted to know the lay of the land, right? In any case, directly after your tour of the border tomorrow, you’ll be moving south—secretly.”

“To Ararat,” said Hale. As soon as he had got his orders to fly to Erzurum, he had guessed that this was to be the execution of his plan for the Shihab meteorite, and he had to clench his jaws now to keep his teeth from chattering at the imminent prospect; but it wasn’t entirely fear that plucked at his tight nerves.

“Yes, indirectly,” said Theodora. “You’re to go by way of a Kurd village in the Armenian corner of Iran, so as to approach from the south, from the Agri district; these Kurds are like your precious Bedouins, they travel across borders virtually unregarded, and they’ve lived around the mountain for thousands of years.” Theodora laughed softly. “The Khan of the village is an ally of the Crown. During the war, his men gutted the local RAF depot, ready with their rifles and knives to go to war with the whole English tribe; of course the RAF simply sent bombers in to level their villages, and the Kurds took their sheep and goats and fled up into the mountains, waiting for English soldiers to march in and fight properly, with rifles. But we simply sent in more planes, and the Kurds had no palpable enemy to fight, and their women hated living in caves, and finally they sent an ultimatum to our headquarters— ‘If you do not come down and fight like men, we will be forced to surrender.’ Well, the RAF permitted them to, and the Kurds have been staunch allies of ours ever since.”

Hale laughed. “They do sound like Bedu,” he said, correcting Theodora’s pronunciation.

“ ‘Half-devil and half-child,’ ” said Theodora, quoting Kipling. “Today is Tuesday—you’ll have a day or so to go hiking with the Khan, and he’ll explain the mountains to you, and Ararat in particular. The big picture. Do listen to him. By Thursday your meteor stone should be in place—you certainly did choose a heavy one, didn’t you?—with its explosives attached and an Anderson bomb shelter set up nearby, and then you’ll be helicoptered to the plain below Ararat, where you’ll brief the commandos who’ll be going up with you— demolition experts from the war—good men, hard to surprise.”

“When is the Russian team going to arrive?”

“No sooner than Friday night, it seems. Ankara Station has been keeping track of a train that’s been moving south from Moscow, with clearances south all the way to Erivan on the Turkish border—it’s in Stalingrad now, bound south through Rostov and Tbilisi. Two known Rabkrin directors are aboard, as well as two renegade Catholic priests, ex-Jesuits—and there’s a prominent Marconi radio mast over one of the boxcars that happens to be in the shape of an ankh.”

Hale shivered in the chilly wind. “That does sound like the right lot.”

“You and your commandos will be waiting for them. And when this Russian team arrives on the mountain, and has ‘opened the gates,’ as you put it, of your djinn colony, you will detonate your, your exorcism.” He peered at Hale. “In your proposal, you said you plan to summon them, down to where your meteor is. How do you plan to do that?”

“Blood,” said Hale, trying to speak lightly. “Medical supply blood, a couple of bags of it. The Magians in the Hejaz mountains use fresh blood to call the creatures down for their worship, from out of the sky, and in Berlin the Arab ship was full of freshly dismembered bodies.”

“Lovely,” said Theodora quietly. “Well!—And once that little chore is over, back you’ll go to your Kuwait haunts.”

“Nothing to it,” said Hale.

“I think it’s a good plan,” said Theodora. “If it works, we’ll be able to put paid to Declare, and you can subside wholly into SIS. Face the challenging new postwar world, instead of grubbing about in—” He spread one hand, reluctant as always to refer to the super-natural.

“Devoutly to be wished,” said Hale, nodding—but he was remembering the effort of dragging an ankh through the attention field of a djinn, as if the ankh were a scepter; and he remembered the shudder of awe at the sight of the angels bowing before him, or breaking—Sin by pride, and you sin as the angels!—and he wondered what secrets the king of Wabar might have been able to tell him. What castles in the clouds… !

“But in the meantime!” said Theodora, “there is a SDECE team in a hotel in Dogubayezit, roughly fourteen miles southwest of Ararat. You remember that the French secret service was in Berlin too, three years ago. God knows what their sources are—perhaps some other fugitive like our poor Volkov walked into a French embassy somewhere, and got a better reception—but I assume they too are aware of the imminent Russian expedition on the mountain. One of their team is a woman—”

Hale just nodded, keeping his eyes on the dirt road.

“—probably the Ceniza-Bendiga woman”—Theodora went on, and Hale could peripherally see that the old man was looking at him—“of fond memory. If you should meet her… try to stop the SDECE from interfering on Ararat, delay them at least, and try to find out what they know, what their source is. And tell her—she won’t believe you, I suppose, but just for style—you can tell her the cover story about the fictitious Armenians you’re supposed to be running, tell her just as much as Philby knows. The orders and the names and biographical details of the Armenians are in your room. Learn them, even though you won’t be revealing them. Live your cover, right?”

“I’ll fill out the orders,” Hale said dutifully, “and learn their names and backgrounds…”

Hale was jolted out of his memories by a name that he had just recalled. He blinked around his room in the Normandy Hotel in Beirut—the sea beyond the fluttering white window curtains was indistinguishable from the night sky now, and the spools of the wire recorder were still slowly revolving. Hale gulped some of the soapy arak, and he wondered how many times Mammalian might have refilled the glass while Hale was lost in reminiscences—and how many times he might have changed the wire spools. The night breeze was chilly, and this strange new 1963 seemed like a year from a science fiction story.

Hale frowned across the polished table at Mammalian’s impassive, bearded face in the lamplight. “One of the Armenians,” he faltered, “one of the fictitious Armenians—”

“Was named Jacob Mammalian.”

“Yes.” Hale thought the other man too was shaken by this development. “Hakob, Jacob—did you cross the Turkish–Soviet border, then, in a train?” Hale asked.

Mammalian stood up to look out the window toward the muted roar of the invisible surf, and for a few moments Hale thought he wouldn’t answer. “Yes,” Mammalian said finally, “precisely then, in May of 1948. I had been an illegal Soviet spy working against Turkey, running agents in the military bases around Erzurum, until I was arrested in 1947. I had thought, until now, that it was the Soviet State Security who broke me out of the prison in Diyarbakir, and smuggled me onto the Kars train.” He turned to face Hale, frowning. “And by God it was! When I got across to the other side, I was met in Leninakan by Soviet soldiers! Does your Theodora work for the KGB as well as the British Crown?”

“He certainly could have planted doubles among the Soviets, secretly working for England. But why would he want to free you and repatriate you?”

“He must have wanted the Russians to try their Ararat approach, while you and your meteorite were handily in the area—and the Russians needed me in order to do it. I was their guide on the mountain then, as I am to be again now.” He returned to the table and sat back down in his chair. “When I was twelve, Andrew Hale, the Ottoman Turkish Army invaded the Kars and Van districts of eastern Turkey and drove out all the Armenians they could catch, herded them like cattle south to what’s now the Saudi Arabian desert. More than a million of my people died on that forced march. My family eluded the Turks and fled across the Aras river to Yerevan, on the Russian side; but Armenian fathers had been taking their sons up the mountain for centuries, each generation showing the next the location of Noah’s Ark. I had seen it on several occasions by the time we fled, and as a young man I twice stole across the river, past the border guards, to climb up that gorge again.”

Hale stared at the tanned, black-bearded man sitting across from him; and for a moment in his exhaustion he forgot about things like the whirlwind in Berlin, and the half-stone king of Wabar, and the djinn in the pool at Ain al’ Abd. Instead he was remembering the day he had stumbled upon the church of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris in 1941, and how, in spite of his atheism, he had been awed to comprehend that some drops of Christ’s blood had once supposedly been kept behind those stained-glass windows. And he remembered illustrations of Noah’s Ark from his religious text-books at the St. John’s boarding school in Windsor, when his mother had still been alive.

“You,” he said hoarsely, “have seen the Ark?” In 1948, Hale’s expedition had not ascended high enough, before disaster had struck, to have any hope of glimpsing some trace of the fabled vessel; and they had gone up the gorge at night. “It’s still up there, visible?”

Mammalian frowned impatiently. “Yes, Mr. Hale. Why would Theodora—”

“What—Jesus, man! What did it— look like?”

Mammalian reached toward the recorder, then visibly thought better of leaving an interruption on the wire. Instead he snatched up his glass of arak and drained it. “It looked—like a God-sized black coffin,” he said, “with one end, about ninety feet of it, sticking out of the ice, over a cliff with a lake at the base. I suppose the Ark was about six stories tall. My father shot a musket at it.”

Hale sat back. “Your father, Hakob, was a vandal.”

“The wood was petrified,” Mammalian said. “The shot bounced off. Now—”

“Why would he shoot at it?”

“It is inhabited, Andrew! Like a shell taken over by a hermit crab, a clan of hermit crabs. There were—voices, very loud voices, not human; and a face looked at us over the top. A— very big face.” “Oh.” Hale nodded impassively, all thought of Sainte-Chapelle and his days at St. John’s school dispelled. Somehow it had not ever occurred to him that Noah’s Ark might still be whole and accessible; and the news that the holy vessel was the dwelling place of things like the monsters he had seen in those past years was inordinately depressing. “You were,” he said, “asking about Theodora.”

“Yes.” The Armenian nodded and rubbed his forehead. “I wonder why Theodora led you to believe your Armenian infiltrators were imaginary.”

Hale sighed, remembering one item from the list of his coverstory crimes as Theodora had summarized them in the conference room at Number 10 Downing Street five days ago: Oh yes, and you took money from a now-deceased Russian illegal to break a couple of their agents out of a Turk prison and smuggle them safely back across the Soviet border; the illegal kept no records, so it can’t be disproved. There’s a good deal more, you’ll be briefed in Kuwait.

He did it so that my name would be on the SIS orders, Hale thought; I would certainly have been more circumspect if I had known that this “infiltration” was not only real but in effect a cooperative deal with the Russian secret ser vice! Even back then, in 1948, the old man was laying the groundwork for my eventual disgraceful cover story, in case it might one day be needed!

And he remembered again his suspicion that Theodora intended to “establish the truth about him,” have him assassinated, after this operation was completed.

“Why would he lead you to believe that?” Mammalian repeated. The man’s hands were clenched into fists on the table. “And why would he nevertheless give you my correct name?”

“Well, since it turns out you were a real person, I suppose I needed your correct name to put through the SIS paper-work consistently,” said Hale. “As to why he let me believe you were a fiction, invented to fool the SIS—I don’t know. I suppose so that I’d know as little as possible, if the SIS or the KGB were to question me.”

It chilled him now, in this disorienting 1963, to realize that he had been hiding from both services, in 1948. And he was even more of a fugitive from both now.

“But he deluded you,” Mammalian said, “and freed me, so that the Russian Ararat operation could take place. You weren’t to know that he wanted the operation to happen, wanted your men to run into opposition! Perhaps he was working for the KGB! Perhaps he is still!”

“No, that wasn’t it.” Hale rubbed his hands over his face. “He did want the Russians to awaken the djinn, but I’m sure he didn’t know about your… about the ambush you set up for us.” Set up with Philby’s help, he thought. “Theodora believed that our Shihab mete-orite couldn’t kill the djinn until they had… opened their gates to your party, and in that way become vulnerable to our attack. The possibility of effective opposition from—you—was a regrettable necessity.”

Mammalian was nodding, but skeptically. “That was and is true, that about the opened gates. Even buckshot bounces off, when the gates are closed. But I wonder if he is still deluding you—I wonder if he stage-managed it so that you would kill those two men last week in England and predictably flee to Kuwait, where we would predictably approach you.”

Hale’s chest was cold, for Mammalian was getting far too close to the truth—and he forced himself to frown as if at a difficult chess problem. “You think he’s running me now?”

Mammalian laughed softly. “And perhaps for the KGB! I don’t accuse you of dishonesty, my friend. I’m confident that if he is running you now, it is without your knowledge. I will certainly make sure that your Shihab stone is ground to powder and sifted into the sea! And even so, I may advise that we abort the operation. What did you learn from the Kurds?”

Hale’s mouth was dry at the thought that the operation might be canceled, that he might not get a chance to avenge the men he had led to their deaths on that wild night fourteen years ago—in spite of what he had told Mammalian earlier this evening, he did want vrej, vengeance—but he forced a laugh. “How could he have had me followed—”

“That is my worry, Andrew. What did you learn from the Kurds?”

Hale wished for hot coffee, but didn’t dare ask for it directly after a hard question; he had learned about Cassagnac’s precious amomon thistle from the Kurds, and he was sure that Theodora did not want him telling this Rabkrin agent anything at all about the amomon.

“First I went to the train crossing at the border. Let me tell it in order. Guy Burgess was there, with Philby.”

“Ah! I was there too, but hidden in the undercarriage of the baggage car.” Mammalian topped up their glasses with the clear liquor and clouded it with splashes of water.

The railway line that crossed the border by Kizilçakçak had been the only train crossing along the entire eastern Soviet border; the rails had been laid for the old Russian five-foot gauge, and the nineteenth-century locomotive that traversed it twice a week ran from Kars to a station only three miles into the Soviet territory, after which it retraced the route in reverse, with the locomotive pushing from behind.

The train had come chuffing up from the west on that chilly spring Wednesday morning, white smoke billowing up out of its Victorian smokestack and trailing away over the three cars it pulled, and it screeched to a steaming halt on the Turkish side of the iron bridge that marked the frontier—the tall barbed-wire fence stretched away to north and south on either side, strung down the center of a broad strip of dirt that was kept plowed to show the foot-prints of anyone who might cross.

Khaki-clad Turk askers stood with rifles beside the weathered sign that announced KARS– SOVIYET SINIRI, the border between the Soviet Union and the Kars district of Turkey, and four Russian soldiers in green uniforms marched across the bridge from a black Czech Tatra sedan parked on the eastern side; two of the Russians were clearly officers, with blue bands around the visors of their caps and gold epaulettes on their shoulders, while the other two were plain pogranichniki, border guards carrying rifles with bayonets. The Russians and the Turks saluted one another, and the Turk soldiers handed over a sheaf that presumably was the train crew’s passports and any bills of lading.

Hale was standing beside Philby and the stocky, red-faced Burgess in the shadow of a guard shack a hundred feet away from the tracks on the western side, and all three watched the two pogranichniki walk around the train cars, poking their bayonet blades into the spaces under the carriages.

“I h-hope your Armenians are s-s-stoical about a blade or two up their arses,” said Philby softly to Hale. They were dressed in anonymous khaki for this dawn outing, and they were being careful not to be heard speaking English. “Though some m-might like it, I sup-s-suppose. Do you f-fancy any of those pogranichniki, G-Guy?”

Hale was making a modest show of glancing covertly at the train, and he wished the other two Englishmen had not come along to observe. Philby had insisted on driving them all out here in an embassy-pool jeep, and he was the Head of Station.

“Pooh!” said Burgess, pouting his full lips toward the Russian soldiers. “Slavs have shovel faces. Slav probably means shovel in some Balkan language.”

“Be quiet,” whispered Hale.

Burgess turned from Philby to give Hale a pop-eyed stare. Perceiving that Hale was annoyed, he went on in a mock-reasonable tone. “It’s true. Look—you or I, if we were starving and saw a potato growing in the dirt, we’d dig it out and cook it.” His breath was sharp with vodka, though the sun was hardly above the eastern hills. “But Slavic facial features are clearly evolved for diving right into the dirt to eat the potato, dirt and all, not bothering with the hands: the teeth slant out, there’s no chin to get in the way, the cheekbones make fenders, and the eyes slant back and up, and the ears are set back to keep the dirt out.”

Philby was laughing softly.

The Russian soldiers a hundred feet away had stepped back from the train cars, and on the locomotive’s black flank the long connecting rods rose and shifted forward as the steel driving wheels began to roll and the train surged ahead, onto the bridge.

“Intermission,” said Philby as the train picked up speed and the first of the cars rattled up the metal bridge. “Half an hour from now it will return, backward. We can check then for blood on the brake riggings and the axle-boxes.”

Which there will of course not be, Hale thought, unless by co-incidence someone really did sneak across this morning—and who would want to sneak into the Soviet Union?

“No,” he said, nodding toward a watchtower that stood only a hundred yards away on the Soviet side of the border. “If they see a party hanging about to look at the undercarriage, they’ll know we sent someone across. We leave now.” He began trudging back toward Philby’s jeep, and was relieved to hear the other two following him.

“What were the names of your Armenians?” called Burgess from behind him.

Hale stepped up on the jeep’s running board and looked back at Philby and Burgess. “Laurelian and Hardyian,” he said.

“Oh, see, he’s a c-c-close-mouthed b-b- boy, Guy,” said Philby, puffing up to the left side, where the Ford jeep’s steering wheel was. “Don’t even t-try to draw him out with your sut-suttee-subtleties.”

Hale sat down cross-legged on a coil of rope in the bed of the vehicle, and as Burgess grunted and hoisted his portly frame up into the passenger seat, Hale noticed for the first time a steel ring welded onto the dashboard on that side, right next to the brass plate that showed the gear-shifting positions. And when Philby had started the jeep and clanked it abruptly into reverse, Hale grabbed at the rope coil and found himself gripping an oblong steel ring knotted to one end of the line; glancing down, he saw that the oblong ring could be opened at a spring-loaded gate—it was a carabiner, a snap-link. He was sure that the rope was meant to be secured to the ring on the dashboard, to drag something; but why not simply moor the line to the hitch on the back bumper?

As Philby rocked the jeep around in the yard behind the guard shack and shifted into first gear, Hale groped among the rope coils under him to find the other end. And when he found it he recognized the release-pin housing of a weather balloon launcher.

The rope wasn’t for dragging something—it was for towing an airborne balloon.

SIS business, he thought—but when he glanced up he caught Philby’s gaze in the rear-view mirror, and Philby’s eyes were narrowed with obvious displeasure.

Hale shrugged and dropped the end of the rope. “Weather balloon?” he said, loudly over the roar of the four-cylinder engine.

“Fuck me wept!” exclaimed Burgess, thrashing around in the passenger seat to goggle back at him.

“I’m doing,” said Philby clearly, as if to prevent any further outburst from the drunken Burgess, “a top-pop-pographical s-s- survey, of the border r-regions out here. Operation Spyglass, we sussur-surveillance wallahs are c-calling it. And in order to m-measure atmospheric presh-pressure, and t-temperature, and relative you-you-humidity, we attach a radiosonde t-transmitter to in-sin- instruments on a wet-wet-weather b-balloon, moored to a mobile receiving station: namely th-this jeep.” He cuffed sweat from his forehead as he steered the jeep along the dirt road back toward Kars. “Ultra-sensitive operation—k-keep it under your h-hat.”

“Fine,” said Hale easily, squinting out at the green hills. “Better you lot than me.”

But as he kept a distracted expression on his face, he was remembering the balloon he had glimpsed over the incongruous Arab boat on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin three years ago, in the oily warm rain—the balloon that had been engulfed, a moment later, by the sentient tornado. Like bait swallowed by a fish?—a lightning rod struck by lightning?

Philby had been in Berlin, then. Had he been monitoring that briefly glimpsed balloon, from a safe position on the western side of the gate?

Two alien thoughts had intruded themselves into Hale’s mind on that turbulent night: She walks in Beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and Zat al-Dawahi, Mistress of Misfortunes, look favorably upon our sacrifice! He had been sure then that he had picked up the thoughts like a badly tuned radio receiving two signals at once, and now in the back of this rocking jeep he wondered for the first time if the intruding thoughts could have been Kim Philby’s.

He recalled another night, nearly four years before that night in Berlin, when he had heard thoughts in an older man’s voice, and had even tasted the Scotch the other man had been drinking. It had happened when he and Elena had used the old clochard rhythms to flee the Rue le Regrattier house in Paris and had ended up walking blindly all the way to the end of the Île de la Cité.

It seemed to him now that that voice too had been Philby’s. And on the last night of 1941 he had seen Philby in a dream, in which Philby had split into two men; and that had been about seventy-two hours before Hale and Philby first actually met, in the interrogation room at Latchmere House in Richmond.

Hale swirled the milky liquor in his glass, and then gave Mammalian a look that he knew must appear frightened. “Why do I—seem to have some kind of psychic… link with Kim Philby?”

Across the polished table, Mammalian shifted in his chair and looked away. “I am not a theologian, Andrew,” he said. “He is ten years older than you, nearly to the day, if your stated birthdays are to be believed. I will tell you this—the Rabkrin is now convinced that both of you must be present on the mountain, working together, for this attempt to succeed.” Seeing Hale shiver, he stood up and walked around him, and as Hale stared into his glass he heard Mammalian pulling the window closed and latching it. From behind him the Armenian’s voice asked again, “What did you learn from the Kurds?”

Tell him something he already knows, thought Hale. “I learned that, in 1942, British Army engineers in the Iraq mountains above Mosul had extinguished the ‘burning, fiery furnace’ that’s mentioned in the Old Testament Book of Daniel—the perpetual natural-gas flare into which King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. We had to, the Luftwaffe was using it for night navigation.”

The Zagros mountain range was a vast snow-capped wilderness that extended from western Iran by the Persian Gulf up along the bound-aries of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. During the war the United States Army had run supply trains through the mountain passes to Russian bases on the Caspian Sea, and the Red Army had established transient outposts in the highlands above Teheran, but the Zagros Mountains had always belonged to the Kurds—who had been the Kardouchoi, described by Xenophon in the fourth century B.C. as “warlike people who dwelt up in the mountains,” and who had been the Medes who stormed Babylon and killed King Belshazar at his feast.

Hale was to find that time passed unevenly in the mountains, free of all calendars; things seemed to happen either at once, or never.

On the evening of the same day that had started at the train tracks by the border crossing, Hale was pushing his way through a mixed herd of donkeys and goats up a narrow street toward the house of Siamand Barakat Khan, the chief of this small village in the mountains above Sadarak and the Aras River. The southwest half of the sky was blocked by snowy peaks rimmed with pink in the last rays of the sun, but the winter had retreated from these lower slopes, and Hale was sweating as he shuffled forward between the furry beasts. In order to be inconspicuous he was dressed in baggy blue wool trousers and a Kurdish quilted felt vest like a life-preserver, with the horsehair fringes of a turban waving in front of his eyes—but the valise that he held above his head with both hands contained a short-wave radio, much more powerful and compact than the old models he and Elena had had to use in Paris seven years earlier.

An RAF Chevrolet truck had taken him up the steep mountain roads to within a mile of the village, and after dropping Hale off the driver had turned back, hoping to get to the British outpost at Aralik before full dark.

The only herder that Hale could see for all this livestock appeared to be a boy who was walking behind the beasts and scraping dung into a sack—but even as Hale braced himself for the last push through the donkeys that blocked his way and the goats that bit at his vest, the crowd of animals was separating into twos and threes, trotting purposefully away down this alley or that toward their familiar stables. Hale was at last able to lower the valise and stride freely across the packed dirt to the gate of the Khan’s house. Cold air down from the mountain peaks blew away the livestock smell.

Theodora had said that Hale would be expected and welcomed, and in fact the white-bearded Kurd who stood beside the gate stepped forward without unslinging the rifle from his shoulder and took Hale’s free hand and lifted it to his forehead.

“A joyful welcome, Hale Beg,” said the man in English as he released Hale’s hand. He too wore a turban with the fringe that was meant to keep off flies, but it didn’t appear to bother him. “How are you? Where have you come from? How are your children? I am Howkar Zeid.” He spread his arms in a gesture that took in the boy with the bag of donkey dung, and two women in blue robes who were hurrying past on the opposite side of the twilit street, as well as Hale; “Siamand Khan invites you all to sup with him!”

Hale had had enough experience of Bedu greetings to recognize these as formalities rather than challenges. “I am well, thank you, Howkar Zeid,” he told the man. He looked over his shoulder and saw the boy and the two women bowing and murmuring as they continued on their ways, and he guessed that the broadcast invitation had been a formality too, routinely declined. He was wondering whether he was expected to decline the invitation as well, when the old man took his elbow and led him in through the gate. Already Hale could smell roasted mutton and coffee, and again he was reminded of the Arab tribes.

The Khan’s house was a two-story structure, a wooden frame-work filled in with alternating sections of mud brick and rough stone; the windows were dimly lamplit squares of cloth set back in rectangles of stone coping.

Hale took off his shoes, and then was led in his stocking feet through a shadowy hallway to a broad stone-walled room that was brightly lit by a paraffin lamp hung on a chain from a ceiling beam. The dirt floor was almost entirely covered with expensive-looking red-and-purple rugs, and Hale’s host stood up from a European upholstered chair and strode forward across the floor.

Howkar Zeid was pouring coffee into tiny cups at an ornate black table in the corner, but Hale was looking warily at his host.

The Khan was dressed in a dark Western business suit and a knitted cap, with an orange silk scarf around his neck instead of a necktie; and Hale thought that even dressed this way he would have alarmed pedestrians in London or Paris, for the haggard brown face behind the white moustache was ferocious even in cheerful greeting, and the man moved on the balls of his feet with his big hands out to the sides, as if ready at any moment to spring into violent action.

Siamand Khan shook Hale’s hand like an American, strongly and vigorously.

“My friend!” exclaimed the Khan in English as he released Hale’s hand. His voice was a gravelly tenor. “Thank you for what you bring us!” He took a cup of coffee from Howkar Zeid and handed it to Hale with a bow.

Theodora had mentioned having sent a gift of rifles on ahead. “You’re welcome,” Hale said, bowing himself as he took the tiny cup.

“This is a radio!” the man observed, pointing at Hale’s valise. Two moustached men in vests like Hale’s and caps like the Khan’s had stepped into the room from an interior doorway.

“Yes.” Hale wondered if the man wanted it; and he supposed he could have it, once a helicopter had safely arrived in the level field Theodora had described on the village’s north slope.

“You will need it, not. From the roof we can see Agri Dag and the Russian border—the Turks have set up torches along the border, poles as tall as three men, wrapped in dry grass, each with a bottle of fuel in a box at the base. My men are out below the mountain and along the border now, on horseback, and when the Russians arrive at the mountain my men will light all the Turks’ torches, the whole length of the border.” He laughed merrily.

Hale recalled that Agri Dag was the Turkish name of Mount Ararat. “The radio will summon me—or the arrival of a helicopter, here, will!—to go to the mountain,” said Hale, “ before the Russians arrive.” He took a sip of the coffee—it was very good, hot and strong and thick with grounds, and the smells of cardamom and onions from some farther room were reminding him that he hadn’t eaten more than a sandwich today. “They won’t be starting for a day or so yet.”

“Russians don’t know what they think themselves, so how can you know? I have spoons, and forks. You will dine with me?”

“I—yes, I would be honored.”

“The honey is not such as to make you ill, of course,” said the Khan, stepping back. The two men behind him now carried out into the center of the room a round copper tray barely big enough for the dozen earthenware platters on it. They crouched to set it down on the carpeted dirt floor, and then Hale followed the Khan’s example and sat down cross-legged on the floor on the opposite side of the tray, on which he saw mutton kebabs and roasted quail and spinach and bowls of yogurt. And he did see a jar of honey.

“I’m sure the honey’s wonderful,” he said. A flat piece of peasant bread and a silver fork and tablespoon lay on the tray in front of him, and when he saw the Khan using his own spoon to ladle food onto a similar piece of bread, Hale began doing the same.

The Khan was squinting at Hale across the crowded, steaming tray. “In England people do not suffer from the honey fits,” he observed. “Bad headaches, then fall down like a dead man, and wake again healthy as a horse when the night comes. Even up here in the mountains it is uncommon—once when I was a child the children all got ill of it, and some of the men went down to the hills to search out the plant the bees had made the honey from. Those men are still alive today, black-haired and fathering sons! Even we children who only ate the honey are all still alive. This is what year?”

Hale swallowed a mouthful of roasted lamb. “This is 1948,” he said.

“I was already a young man of fighting age when your Light Brigade charged against the Russian guns at Balaklava. I was there, at Sevastopol.”

Hale realized that his mouth was open, and he shut it. The Battle of Balaklava had happened… ninety-four years ago. He remembered Claude Cassagnac’s question to Elena, in the Paris cellar in 1941: Thistles, flowers—plants; did Maly ever talk about such things with you, my dear? And he realized dizzily that he believed what this Kurd chieftan was telling him. “What—plant,” he asked hoarsely, “did the bees make the honey from?”

“Ah!” said the Khan, raising his white eybrows. “You thought I was thanking you for the rifles!” He laughed. “And I do! But six years ago your Theodora caused the English in Iraq to put out King Nebuchadnezzar’s fire in the mountains. The Magians, the fire-worshippers, they were dispersed from their monastery there, and so the angels on Agri Dag were left without their beacon and their human allies. And now the Russians have a man with them who they believe can get the angels to open the gates of their city.” He set down a quail breast to clap his hands. “You will meet my wife.”

Hale controlled his surprise. The Kurds, like the Bedu, were Sunni Moslems, and they nearly never introduced their wives or daughters to newly met Westerners.

A black-haired woman in baggy blue trousers stepped into the room from the inner doorway, and Hale didn’t look squarely at her until his host had caught his eye and nodded toward her.

She was dark-eyed and stocky—her hairline was hidden by a row of gold coins that hung on fine chains from a braided cap, and the buttons on her short woolen jacket were mother-of-pearl. She returned Hale’s gaze impassively.

“Sabry also was one of the children who ate the honey,” said Siamand Khan. “Show Hale Beg the back of your jacket,” he said to her.

The woman turned around, and Hale saw gold embroidery that traced a complicated figure, with loops at the sides and curled, drooping S-shapes at the top; and after a moment he recognized it as the stylized image of a flowering plant.

“It is an old, old design among my people,” said the Khan softly. “It is the amomon.” He waved at his wife, and she bowed and with-drew into the farther room.

“Is it a… thistle,” said Hale carefully.

“You have heard of it.”

“I think so, just a little—a Hungarian Communist is supposed to have known about it. Uh, and the Russian secret service killed him.”

“Some of the Russians want it, but are afraid of it; the secret police, the Cheka, are just afraid of it. When the angels die,” the Khan said quietly, glancing toward the cloth-covered windows, “they go down to the house of darkness, whence none return, where their food is clay, and they are clothed like birds in garments of feathers.”

Hale shivered, for he had heard of this ancient Hell only three months ago, from the half-petrified king of Wabar.

“But,” the Khan went on, “their strength they cannot take with them to a place of such weakness, and so the strength disperses— but only their own kind can use it. Some of the angels, when they were thrown down from Heaven at the beginning of the world, became this plant, the amomon. These are very much asleep, ordinarily, bulbs that lie under the ground no livelier than rocks—but when the strength of killed angels washes over them, they sprout, and bloom.” He bared his white teeth in a smile. “And the bees make the poisoned honey from their blooms, and we follow the bees, and we harvest them.”

“That,” said Hale, nodding with comprehension, “is our gift to you. If we succeed, we will be causing the amomon to bloom.”

“If you succeed in killing the angels on Agri Dag, dispersing their strength,” said Siamand Khan, “come back to my village in the spring. Our Yezidi priests will prepare a salad for you that will let you teach horsemanship to the grandchildren of your grandchildren, as I have done.”

Hale remembered Theodora telling him last night about the SDECE team at Dogubayezit. If I succeed, he thought, I will come back—and I will bring Elena with me.

“And I have a gift for you, Hale Beg,” said the Khan. “A fragment of a ghost—”

Someone shouted outside the window, and the Khan stood up all at once, simply by straightening his legs. He looked down at Hale. “The torches are lit. The Russians are moving.”

“Not yet,” said Hale, struggling to his feet. “And certainly not at night.”

“Come to the roof. I think you and I will not, after all, be able to go hiking in the mountains tomorrow.”

Hale followed the very old man out of the room, past hung garlands of onions and peppers and a smoky wood-burning iron stove in the narrow kitchen, to a brick alcove and an ascending flight of steps made of split cedar logs. The steps ended in a little hut on the mud-plastered beams of the roof, and by the time Hale stepped out onto the crackling surface, Siamand Khan was already dimly visible standing at the parapet, looking north, his coat flapping behind him in the wind.

Hale joined him. The cold wind was from the east now, blowing the horsehair turban fringe and the blond hair back from his fore-head; and he was glad the wind was cold, and that there was no oily smell on it. The moon was full behind the top edges of clouds mounting in the east.

Miles away in the night a string of bright yellow dots stretched across the black northern horizon, and when he had oriented himself he decided that they did indeed trace the Turkish–Soviet border.

The torches were lit; and he was bleakly sure the Khan was right too about the Russians having begun to move on Ararat. The train moving south from Moscow must have been a decoy. I should have remembered, he told himself—they always leave before their official departure time.

He hoped the French SDECE team in Dogubayezit was not aware of this, and that Elena would stay down on the plain tonight.

“I’ve got to get the radio up here on the roof,” he told Siamand Khan, wondering if a helicopter could land in this wind. “I need to know if the meteor stone is at the mountain yet, and find out if they can land a—”

But he could already hear the distant, throbbing drone of a helicopter in the mountain gorges.

The Khan waved to men who had gathered in the narrow dirt street below. “Light the torches around the clearing!” he shouted. And when they had shouted acknowledgment and sprinted away, the Khan turned to Hale, his face invisible in the black silhouette of his head. “And I need to give you a talisman for your effort tonight. It is piece of black stone no bigger than your fist, but it was broken from one of the mindless stone ghosts of the djinn, which walk in the deep southernmost desert. Living djinn will be repelled by it, I think.” He gripped Hale’s hand. “Succeed—kill them—and then come back here in the spring.”

FOURTEEN: Mount Ararat, 1948

Gilgamesh said, “I dreamed that we were standing in a deep mountain gorge, and in it we two seemed to be like tiny insects; and an avalanche fell from the mountain’s peak upon us.”

—Gilgamesh, II

The helicopter had been one of the new Bristol 171 Sycamores, painted in brown-and-black mountain camouflage, and after its downdraft had blown out half the torches that outlined the clearing, and the craft had come to a rocking, momentary rest on its three wheels, Hale had run crouching in under the whirling wooden rotors and climbed in, and then the Alvis Leonides piston engine had roared like a machine gun as the helicopter lifted off again. The engine was too loud for Hale to have tried to talk to the pilot, even if the man had not been wearing radio earphones, and so he just sat in the rocking passenger seat, clutching the black stone the Khan had given him, and watched the black point on the gray horizon that was Mount Ararat swing ever closer as the helicopter covered the twenty-six intervening miles at the speed of a hundred miles per hour. Below his left elbow he could see the bright-dotted line of the torches flickering past like slow tracer bullets.

The pilot was wearing khakis, and a beret that seemed in the darkness to be the same color. The wartime Special Air Service commandos had worn a beige beret, but the SAS had been disbanded right after the war; the War Office had subsequently created an SAS regiment within the old Territorial Army regiment known as the Artists’ Rifles, but Hale understood that they wore a maroon beret. Had the old SAS survived, covertly? Was this Ararat operation to be a joint effort between the fugitive SOE and the fugitive SAS?

The black shoulder of the mountain had eclipsed the purple western sky when the helicopter began descending, and though the pilot was showing no lights and Hale couldn’t distinguish any features on the ground, the aircraft settled smoothly to a flexing halt on a level field of grass beside a dirt track. In the waxing moonlight Hale could see that this plain below the mountain was studded with angular boulders, and though he knew that they were just the rubble that had tumbled down the mountain out of the Ahora Gorge in one of the nineteenth-century earthquakes, he remembered the stone ghosts that had risen out of the dead wells of Wabar, and he gripped the Khan’s black rock firmly.

The pilot had immediately killed the engine, and now he pulled off the headphones as the unpowered rotor blades began to clatter around more slowly.

“We’re still three miles short of the gorge,” the pilot said in a thick Yorkshire accent, “but I can’t promise you the Russians didn’t hear the motor.”

“The Russians are up there? Is the stone even up in the gorge yet?” asked Hale as he levered open the door and stepped down to the solid, grassy dirt. The wind from the east was colder now, and he wished his felt Kurd vest had sleeves.

“Talk to him,” the pilot said, nodding over Hale’s shoulder.

Hale turned around quickly—and jumped, for a man in a gray windbreaker was standing only two yards away from him. And now Hale could see by the cloud-filtered moonlight that there were four men standing behind this one, and that what had appeared to be a low hillock was now revealed to be two camouflage-painted Willys jeeps and a stack of bicycles, with a tarpaulin settling to the ground behind them. All five of the men carried slung Sten guns, the characteristic horizontal magazines standing out from behind them like longsword hilts.

“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Shannon, Captain Hale,” said the nearest man, without irony. “The Russian party came across the border about half an hour ago, dressed as Kurdish shepherds; we almost missed them—the pogranichniki staged a big crisis four miles south, with spotlights and gunfire, while this lot just walked across in the dark, through a hole in the wire, right under a watchtower that had its lights out; clear Soviet complicity. And the Turk soldiers at that point had conveniently been ordered to drive south to where the commotion was, as reinforcements. The Russians were met on this side by a party with a lorry; they all drove away up the gorge with their headlamps out.”

Hale made a mental note to find out later who had ordered the Turk guards to leave their post. “And the Shihab stone, the iron meteorite?”

“We placed your stone high up in the Ahora Gorge late this afternoon, sir—it’s been scored, incised, so as to fragment widely, and it’s got two Lewes bombs tucked under it, delayed-action charges ready to be set. We were going to bring up the war-surplus Anderson bomb shelter, but there’s clearly no time for that now—we’ll leave it here.” He nodded beyond the jeeps, and Hale noticed out in the dark field the curved corrugated-steel roof, like an American-frontier covered wagon, that had been such a familiar sight in the bombed lots of London four years ago.

The moonlight was bright enough for Hale to see the paler spot on the front of the man’s beret, in the shield shape of the SAS capbadge. Hale recalled that the SAS insignia had been a winged dagger over the motto WHO DARES WINS—and he recalled hearing that the shape of the wings had been modeled on ancient Egyptian drawings of scarab beetles. Maybe, Hale thought forlornly, these men won’t be too skeptical about the ankhs.

The SAS had done deadly effective covert demolition work in North Africa during the war, as well as in Germany and Italy. Their only failures had reportedly been operations that had been planned by other agencies—and Hale hoped that this Ararat expedition, planned by the SOE, would not be another.

“Have you got the blood?” asked Hale—gruffly, for he was embarrassed to be speaking of the filthy uses of magic with these hard-bitten professional soldiers. “Medical supply bags?”

Shannon’s voice was stoic as he said, “We have, sir—it’s in the water bottle pouch of a set of ’37 webbing, which you’ll wear.” He coughed and spat. “We can drive,” he went on more easily, “and be up there pretty quick and noisy, or ride bicycles. A bit of hiking involved either way, where it eventually gets too steep for wheels. Nothing taxing.”

Drive, Hale thought fretfully, or ride bicycles? “I hope you didn’t score through all the bubble holes on the stone,” he said, almost absently, as he pondered the choice. He wished he had time to brief these men properly, as Theodora had said he would have.

“The incised lines are zigzag, sir. We were told not to saw into any of the bubbles.”

Hale was aware of the weight of the cut-down .45 revolver in the shoulder holster under his vest, but its two-inch barrel would be of little use for accurate shooting over any distance. “I believe you were instructed to bring a spare gun, for me,” he said.

One of the men by the nearest jeep reached into the bed of it and hiked up another Sten gun, its skeletal stock making it look to Hale for a moment like some kind of modern orthopedic crutch.

“Right.” Hale took a deep breath and let it out. “I think the sound of a jeep’s motor would—”

He paused, for over the wind he could now hear the buzz of a distant motor, and from the sound and the cadence of gear-shifts he believed that in fact it was a jeep, somewhere out on the marshy plain to the south.

Exactly, he thought; you can hear the bloody thing for miles.

And then he heard a rumbling from the mountain—and even in the moonlight he could see the valley floor to the west rippling, in waves of shadow that were rushing across the grasslands toward him.

“Earthquake!” he said, crouching, even as the ground under his feet began to heave up and down like the bed of a speeding truck; and in spite of his stance, Hale sat down heavily on the jumping ground. The helicopter creaked on its wheels and the springs on the jeeps were squeaking as the vehicles rocked. The helicopter’s six-foot rotors had stopped spinning, but were bobbing up and down now.

When the ground had steadied and the rumble had rolled away to the cloudy east, Hale rocked forward onto his hands and knees and looked back up at the mountain. The sharp outlines of the gorge were blurred by clouds like smoke, and he knew they were dust or snow, shaken up from the crags.

And he remembered the earthquake that had jolted the rubbled lot in Berlin, in the instant when the weather balloon over the Arabian boat had been engulfed by the living whirlwind.

“They’ve started,” he said breathlessly, getting to his feet and stepping toward the nearest jeep, which had a spare set of suspension springs roped across the grille like an incongruously smiling mouth. “The djinn are awake now, they’ve opened their gates.” He took a deep breath. “They’re—goddammit, they’re genies, right?— up there. Monsters, like earth elementals—no joke. Use the anchors, the iron crosses, as a shield, to force them back—the way they do with crucifixes to Dracula in the movies. Your lives depend on this.” He was panting and sweating; the faces he could see were skeptical and noncommittal. “We’ve got to drive—and fast. To hell with the noise, there’s already a jeep banging around out here tonight.”

“McNally,” snapped Shannon, “you drive Captain Hale, behind the rest of us.”

Shannon and three of his men sprinted to the other jeep as Hale vaulted over the rear fender of the nearer one and crouched in the gritty ridged-steel bed, snatching up the Sten gun. “Did you understand me,” Hale nearly wailed, “about the anchors?”

Over the brief screeches of the jeep engines starting up, he could hear the men in the other jeep reply in the affirmative.

“Understood, sir,” loudly echoed the man in the driver’s seat of Hale’s jeep, whose name apparently was McNally.

The headlamps were not switched on, but abrupt acceleration threw Hale back against the tailgate. “And you do understand,” he added in a yell, “that this operation will involve the—the supernatural?”

“We have been told that, sir,” shouted McNally over the roar of the engine. “And we’ll believe it when we see it.”

The other jeep was in the lead as they sped up the steep dirt track in the moonlight, and Hale hung on and tried to watch the looming mountain through the dust. He could not yet see any whirlwinds, or patches of refracted starlight in the sky, but he was bleakly sure that the driver would be seeing some sort of “it” very soon.

Hale reached under his shirt to pull free the canvas bag that contained his own ankh; the bag hung on a twine loop around his neck, and he let it bounce on the front of his vest like a heavy scapular, easy to reach. Then he remembered to pull back the cocking handle on the machine gun in his lap and let it snap forward, and to check the change lever to be sure the gun was set for full-automatic fire. He held the weapon ready, but kept his finger away from the oversized trigger.

Within a minute the two Willys jeeps had begun the ascent up into the gorge, both audibly shifting down into low gear. The road was muddy now, and the windscreen of Hale’s jeep was soon spattered and smeared; the two drivers still hadn’t switched on the headlamps, and Hale couldn’t imagine how McNally could see to steer. Hale noticed that even the brake lights of the vehicle ahead didn’t flash, when it occasionally slowed.

A cluster of mud huts sat squarely on the delta slope of the gorge, one of them half-collapsed now under its spilled thatched roof, and beyond them the dirt road divided, one track slanting away south to trace the foot of the southern cliffs and the other proceeding more directly to the north wall of the valley. The surface of the northern path was freshly imprinted with the tire tracks of a heavy lorry, but the driver of the lead jeep steered his vehicle up onto the south road, at no less than fifty kilometers per hour, and the one Hale rode in rocked and bounced along right behind it.

They know where they put the Shihab stone, Hale told himself as he clung to the jerrycan rack on the side panel, hoping the vehicle wasn’t about to capsize. And they know how to blow it up. My job is to… use the blood to summon all the djinn down from the heights on the other side of the gorge to the area around the stone; and duck for some sort of cover when the explosion is due, with no bomb shelter, thank you, Jimmie; and then get myself and these men back down to the plain alive.

The Ahora Gorge was a long notch that slanted southwest up into the heart of the mountain, between walls sheared nearly vertical by old earthquakes, and all Hale could see in the deep moon-shadow darkness was dimly glowing patches of snow beside the black path. Soon the jeeps were grinding up a steeper track that was clearly not meant for motor vehicles, still moving straight uphill along the south flank of the gorge, and the wheels were spinning and hitching in slushy, pebbly mud; looking across the narrowed valley toward the northern wall, Hale could not see any sign of the Russian expedition on the faintly lighter patches that were probably snowy clearings and slopes, but he was cowed by the towering black cliffs that overhung the gorge on both sides, and by the parapets and crenellations of snow visible in the moonlight at the tops, right under the starry sky. The plain where the helicopter had landed was more than five thousand feet above sea level—the jeeps couldn’t be far short now of the eight-thousand-foot level, above which the Armenian shepherds had found that their sheep died for no reason; and he wished he dared to shout to the commandos in the jeep ahead of him, and tell them that the oppressive fear needling this chilly air was a projection from the djinn, and not a naturally arising human response.

At least the Russians are over there on the northern side of the valley, he thought.

He was braced in the bed of the jeep, trying to lean out to see around the left side of the windscreen, when something began tugging at his vest. He repressed a shout, but he did scramble back against the tailgate, beating at his clothing; something in his pocket was moving, and his first thought was that it was a rat.

But his knuckles felt rocky hardness through the quilted cloth, and he relaxed a little when he realized that it was the stone the Khan had given him. Gingerly he reached into his pocket, took hold of it, and tugged it out into the air; and he was dizzily startled at how heavy it had become—and it was heavy sideways—it was tugging horizontally northeast, away from the mountain peak.

I should certainly hang on to it, he thought—if it’s so magnetically repelled by the proximity of djinn, probably they will be repelled by it, as the Khan said.

But I don’t want to repel the djinn, he told himself, trying to concentrate in the gusty, rocking jeep bed. And even if I should want to, soon, that will be—would be—a mistake. I need to make contact with the creatures that live on this mountain—to destroy them, but first to see them! Even if I could keep this stone hidden and some-how damped, the fact of having it in my pocket might be an over-powering temptation to use it, if this operation becomes too robust.

The stone was tugging away more strongly now—he had to use both hands to hold on to it, bracing himself with his feet—and he told himself that it would soon be repelled with such force that even if he wedged it against the floor it would drag the jeep to a wheel-spinning halt.

I have to let it go, he thought with cautious satisfaction—nobody can blame me. I do thank you for the kind intention, Siamand Barakat Khan! but—

He moved his head well to the side and then let go of the stone, and it went silently cannonballing away into the night behind them.

Hale brushed his palms on his vest and hiked himself forward again. He was committed to this now, like Ulysses tied to the mast, like Cortés after burning the ships on the Mexican shore.

And he realized that these five men were committed too. He glanced back, but of course the stone was lost in the darkness— perhaps it would tumble all the long way back to Wabar.

Suddenly McNally yelled something that sounded like, “Bloody horses?”

The jeep in front had slewed to a stop in front of a jagged white mound of snow that blocked the way, and when Hale heard McNally stamp on the brake pedal he grabbed the back of the passenger seat to keep from falling forward as his jeep halted.

And Hale’s chest went cold in sudden fright when a man’s voice rang out of the darkness ahead, speaking loudly in Turkish over the rumble of the idling engines—Hale didn’t understand the words, but he thought he recognized the skewed vowels of a French accent; and at the same moment he saw the horses McNally had referred to: two four-legged silhouettes standing off to the right, dimly visible against the gray of the snow.

McNally had leaned sideways below the dashboard to unsling his rifle, and Hale knew that the four other SAS men must have done the same, and must be aiming their weapons toward the voice.

“Qui etes vous?” shouted Hale desperately. Who are you?

He could just make out the muzzle of his Sten gun in front of him, wobbling as the jeep engine chugged on in neutral.

The voice from the darkness was strained as it spoke again, in fluent French now: “Drop your weapons. Do you have shovels? Our companions are buried under this avalanche.”

“Don’t shoot,” called Hale in English to the SAS men; then he took a deep breath and yelled, in French, “Is Elena with you?”—for clearly this must be the SDECE team from Dogubayezit, and he needed to know right away that Elena was not one of the people who were under the snow and certainly dead.

And sweat of relief sprang out on his forehead when he heard Elena’s well-remembered voice cry, “Don’t shoot them! Andrew Hale, is it you?”

“They’re SDECE,” Hale shouted in English, “French—allies. Elena! Yes!”

“Bloody hell,” growled one of the men in the other jeep.

McNally had straightened up, and now he switched off the engine and began climbing out of the vehicle with his rifle still in his hands. “We hike now,” he told Hale quietly, “a bit farther than we planned. Even those horses would be no use from here on up. Now you’ve got a webbing to put on, with your— medical supplies in it.”

The other engine had been turned off too now, and in the sudden echoing silence Hale could hear the rippling clatter of a waterfall somewhere in the darkness far ahead. The air was cold and thin in his nostrils, but seemed resonant as if with some subsonic tone, and he was humiliated to find that he had to force himself to let go of the familiar seat-back and climb down out of the jeep to the slushy alien ground, slinging his rifle. He could feel his knees shaking, and his hands were numb with cold.

“Andrew!” shouted Elena’s voice. “Have you got entrenching tools? Help us dig!”

McNally was a blur in the darkness. “The stone is about a hundred yards up the slope, sir,” he said, “up by the waterfall you hear.”

Hale nodded tightly, though the gesture couldn’t be seen. I can’t, Elena, he thought. I can’t even order any of these men to. Why in hell did you have to come up here tonight? “Where is the blood?” he asked McNally—

—and in Hale’s head the question seemed to go on ringing, as—

—suddenly a blinding flare of white light ahead of him burned the silhouettes of McNally and the jeep’s windscreen frame into Hale’s retinas, and an instant later the night was shattered by the stuttering crash of gunfire.

Hale’s hands were on the jeep’s fender, and even through his numb fingers he felt hammering impacts against the vehicle’s steel body in the instant before he dropped to his knees in the icy mud on the side away from the gorge’s south wall. The sustained, deafening noise made it hard for him to unsling his rifle, and before he had got it into his hands he saw, by the razory-clear black-and-white illumination of the magnesium flare on the road ahead, the body of McNally tumble to the snowy mud by the right-front wheel of the jeep, his eyes wide and his throat punched open.

Black blood jetted from the wound—and Hale’s mind keened in pure fear to see the glistening black drops move slowly in mid-air, like obsidian beads falling through clear glycerine.

He was still hearing his own voice ask, Where is the blood?

A gust of wind from the north knocked Hale against the muddy rear wheel, and his nostrils flared at the smell of metallic, rancid oil.

His balance was gone, and thinking that another earthquake was shaking the mountain, he raised the gun to shade his eyes from the flare light and squinted up at the overhanging masses of snow on the gorge crests—but it was the sky that made him bare his teeth in dismay. Even through the glare-haze he could see that the world-spanning black vault of stars was spinning ponderously, and the whole gorge seemed to be reciprocally turning the opposite way, with slow but increasing force.

And a voice like a volcano tolled down from the stony heights of Ararat then, exploding his thoughts away in all directions like frightened birds—its slow, throbbing syllables were in Arabic, and among them he caught the word for brothers—and his left hand closed on the canvas bag strung around his neck, with no more conscious volition than a frightened bug scuttling for cover. With his right hand he clumsily fumbled out the iron ankh.

The ankh seemed hot in his cold fist, and it served as an anchor for his thoughts: Wave it, push them back—

But when he pushed the iron cross up through the icy resisting air, it was abruptly snatched away upward, tearing the skin of his palm.

At the same time McNally’s body had sat up in the white light, and now its arms flopped and then stood straight up over the lolling head; in the next moment the body had been yanked up onto its toes, and then right off its feet, so that it dangled unsupported in the air.

I should have held on to the Khan’s stone, Hale thought despairingly.

And then his chest was suddenly constricted as if between a giant thumb and finger, and he was forcibly lifted up by an invisible strength, and just for a moment he was suspended in a half-kneeling posture, facing the jeep, with his knees off the ground and his toes in the mud. McNally’s body fell away above him into the revolving sky, and Hale knew that he himself was about to follow the body up—

And in the Sten gun’s trigger guard his right forefinger, neurally remembering the telegraph key, began twitching out the old hitch-and-skip clochard rhythm in firing the gun.

The muzzle was pointed at the jeep’s right-rear tire, and snow and mud sprayed up into his face as the tire ruptured and the jeep’s back end clanked down on the springs—but Hale’s knees smacked into the mud as the invisible hand released him, and he made himself hang onto the jumping gun and keep blasting out the alien drum-beat.

In the few seconds it took for the magazine to be emptied, his pulse and breathing had taken on the pounding rhythm, and he let go of the gun and stood up to hammer out the beat on the lowered fender with his numb fists.

Then all the crashing sound ceased at once—not as though he had gone deaf, but as though a silent black surf had engulfed the gorge. The flare was glowing a golden orange now to his right, and the shooting certainly appeared to have stopped, though he could see spots of smoldering red in the darkness below the close south wall of the gorge, on the other side of the jeep. The Sten gun’s ejected shells glittered in the amber light, and though the brass shells turned slowly they did not fall out of the air.

As if the rhythm that now defined him constituted a matched bandwidth frequency, he found himself taking part in a vertiginously bigger frame of reference, a bigger perspective.

He didn’t seem to be in his own body anymore, nor thinking with Andrew Hale’s mind. He was looking down on Mount Ararat now— and from a wider viewpoint than just two close-set human eyes.

Bending down over the gorge, he held McNally’s body in a hand made of wind, and the upward-tumbling human body, with its random motions and unchanging appearance, was no less expressive than living men were. On another side of the McNally form he could see other men, and their constricted bendings held no meaning, and the clothes and hair that were their substances were as imbecilically constant as the shapes of the cliffs. Thought and identity consisted of moving agitation—the verb in the leap of stones, the whirling of mirth in infinite grains of sand in a storm, questions in falling rain and answers in the bubbling liberation of water into exploding steam—expressed across miles of desert or turbulent sea; and to this vibrant dialogue men could contribute only accidental statements, like the airplanes and bullets they moved through the air, or the narrow wave-sequences they projected from their mouths to kink the air and from their radios to flatten the fields of the sky.

Brothers. Only when men were split, mind as well as body, so that one half could therefore move in deliberate counterpoint to the other half, were they capable of expressing comprehensible thought. But this one that existed on both sides of the gorge had catastrophically been split again, and had therefore fallen back into opaque idiocy. It carried a rafiq diamond, an emblem of kinship with the rushing sky-powers, but the message or request it had brought to the mountain was lost in conflicted motion.

Hale felt his subsumed identity flex with deliberate effort, and then McNally’s leg was a crushed ruin tumbling separate from the body—and in the instant before he recoiled away from this incorporeal participation Hale tasted the hot blood and shattered bone and torn khaki.

The djinn were eating the men in the sky, and Hale, sharing their identity because he had aligned himself with their peculiar frequency, was doing it with them, in them.

Jesus, why didn’t I hang on to the stone?

He forced his hands and his lungs to stop moving in step with the rhythm, and horror had already made a staccato chaos of his heart-beat.

And then he sagged with sudden weight and was standing again beside the jeep in the muddy gorge, in the icy wind; interrupted screams crashed in on his ears, and some of the screams were echoing down from the sky, and dark drops that must have been blood were pattering onto the jeep fender and onto his hands. Choppy bursts of full-automatic gunfire still plowed the air, but the muzzle flashes were pointed into the sky now—and then the steaming breath was crushed from his chest as he was again tugged upward with frightening physical force.

Automatically his fists again pounded the telegraph-key rhythms onto the wet fender, and the breath in his throat choked out the resumed beat in a series of grudged coughs.

With a dizzying flutter his heartbeat fell into the same cadence, and the bigger perspective was at once his again, and this time he was aware of another man participating in the alien indulgence— but the music that defined this one was in a different key or octave, and he knew it was the kind of man called a woman.

A thought of Hale’s flickered across his subsumed awareness—it was Elena. She too was evading the doom of the men by aligning her frequency with the djinn, as they had both done in Paris.

And now she too was sharing in the consumption of the resisting bodies that spun through the air over the snowfields of Ararat’s peak. Helplessly surrendering to the transcendent wills of the fallen angels, the sparks that were Hale and Elena moved in concert with the angels as the bodies were torn apart—and the two frail sparks had no choice but to concede that it was only in wide-flying dismemberment that the men, in death, achieved something like coherent meaning.

Not all of the men in the gorge had been taken up into the sky— some had been killed and left to lie in the mud, and Hale was aware of three-squared that bent and unbent their autistic shapes to move down toward the plain, out of the mountain; but even the geometric patterns they formed as they moved were without conscious meaning, and along with the will of the skies he ignored them.

He found himself looking upward instead.

The highest of the moon-silvered clouds formed sweeping stair-ways to lattices and balconies among the stars, and the music was complete and comprehensible now with the base line of infrared radiation in the earth and the skirling arpeggios of the solar wind and ionized particles scattering in the vast halls of the upper atmosphere—the dance was eternal, defiant and endlessly fascinating, fast as a horizon-spanning arc of lightning and as slow as the shifting of the basalt-footed continents.

The knot of identity that was consciously Hale had to be careful not to flex away with the angels into the sky or into the stony heart of the mountain—he was diminishing as he held back from these seven-league steps—and after some period of time he realized that he was alone and small and discrete, and that he was Andrew Hale, Captain Andrew Hale of the fugitive SOE, twenty-six years old and… profoundly unhappy.

He was kneeling in the mud beside the shredded rear tire of the jeep, and the magnesium flare had gone out, leaving the gorge in darkness. Only the whistle of frigid wind against high stone cliffs intruded now on the mountain silence, and as Hale got shakily to his feet he knew that there would be no use in calling out to his SAS companions—they had either been killed in the ambush, or taken up alive into the sky, or had fled down the path.

Then he heard a scuffle only a few yards away, and a moment later a shrill neigh and the wet clop of hooves in the mud—apparently at least one of the horses had survived, and someone had succeeded in mounting it.

Hale had lurched quickly backward at the unexpected noise, and now Elena’s voice called harshly, in French, “Who is there?”

Hale was ashamed to speak, after the horror of their shared experience, but he made himself croak, “Elena—it’s me, Andrew.”

“Ach! Stay away from me— cannibale.”

He glimpsed a rushing shape in the darkness and then the horse had galloped past him, its hooves thudding away down the invisible slope.

He wanted to shout the plural down after her— cannibales!—but he could only despairingly agree with her assessment of him. His earlier question rang in his head again—Where is the blood?—and he knew that the blood was on his hands… on his very lips, morally if not literally.

Elena had apparently taken the only remaining horse, but the other jeep was still here; and when Hale limped stiffly across the mud to it, he could make it out clearly enough to know from its stance that its tires were still inflated. Feeling immensely old and bad and sad, Hale climbed wearily into the driver’s seat and forced his frozen fingers to press the starter—and when the engine roared into hot life, he clanked the gear-shift sideways into reverse and, hunching around in the seat to peer downhill through the steaming plume of his breath, began inching the vehicle back down.

After a few yards he realized that his panting had become sobbing.

Surely some of the SAS men had survived—they would know the jeep by its sound, and then they would recognize him in the dimness, if they looked closely. McNally is dead, Hale told himself, but the other four might still be alive—they’d have had a moment to dive for cover between the blaze of the flare and the start of the gunfire—they wouldn’t know that I—participated in the deaths, some of the deaths, helplessly—

But he remembered the sustained full-automatic fire that had raked the jeeps, and he quailed. It had to have been Russians who had ambushed them—but how had Russians known to be waiting there, beside the south wall? Had the SAS men been observed planting the stone, or had they been betrayed by someone in the West?

After no less than an hour of rocking down the slope in reverse, frequently braking and shifting to low gear to climb back up when the right side of the jeep seemed to be tilting into the gorge, Hale found a wider clearing in which he was able to turn the jeep around and drive forward; and he switched on the one remaining headlamp as he drove, peering through the shattered windscreen at the surface of the mud track ahead.

And soon he saw the upright shapes of three men in the headlamp glare, plodding and limping down the rutted path. Two wore the dark windbreakers the SAS men had been wearing, and one had on the turban and baggy trousers of a Kurd. None of them turned around at the sound of the engine or the illumination of the headlamps.

His heart thumping, Hale slowed the jeep a few yards behind them. The Sten gun was long gone, but he fumbled the chunky .45 revolver out of his shoulder holster—and then he called hoarsely through the broken windscreen, “Get in the vehicle! I’ll drive us down.”

They had ignored the light and the engine noise, but Hale’s voice seemed to galvanize them. The man in Kurdish clothing dove forward in a flailing cartwheel that carried him right off the path, and though the two SAS men stayed on the road, they were clearly insane—one began semaphoring wildly, hopping to use alternate legs as well as his arms and head, and the other turned toward the headlamps and dug his fingers into his face and tugged outward, as if trying to pull his head apart.

When Hale shifted the gearbox into neutral and ratcheted up the brake, intending to step out and try to grab them, they both went bounding away into the darkness, leaping high into the air at every step; to Hale they appeared to be trying to fly. In seconds they were lost to his sight.

Hale was sobbing again as he shoved the .45 back into its holster and released the brake and clanked the gear-shift back into first gear. He saw no more men on the slow drive back down to the plain, and he did not see the horse.

A cold rain began to fall as he drove the jeep across the dark miles of marshy road toward the spot where the Bristol Sycamore helicopter had landed. In the cloud-filtered moonlight he could see nothing on either side of the road except the grim boulders, and he had come to the conclusion that the pilot had flown the helicopter away and that he would have to drive twenty-five miles around the mountain to the town of Dogubayezit in the southwest, over God-knew-what sort of roads—when out of the corner of his left eye he caught a vertical thread of yellow glow in the night.

He stamped on the brake and peered in that direction, but he didn’t see the glow again; he backed the jeep in a wide arc onto the south shoulder of the path, to sweep the area on the opposite side with the headlamp beam—and he caught a gleam of reflected light on metal.

He rocked the gear-shift into first gear and drove slowly forward across the road, and soon recognized the stack of unused bicycles. The helicopter was indeed gone. But though he had not seen the vertical glow again, he knew that it must have shone from the Anderson bomb shelter in the field beyond.

Instantly he switched off the light and the engine; and he hefted the .45 revolver and swung his legs stiffly down out of the jeep and stood up on the muddy grass. As he stole silently toward what he believed was the black hump of the bomb shelter, he saw again the gleam of yellow light, and he realized that it was lamplight inside the shelter, escaping through the gap at the hinge side of the door.

A British voice from the darkness startled him so badly that he nearly pulled the trigger of the revolver: “Drop the g-gun, I’ve got you in my sights. I’ve h-heard you c-coming for the last t-t-ten m-miles.”

Hale didn’t move. “Philby,” he said, trying to speak levelly.

“Is it Andrew hay-hay-Hale?”

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, g-good. I’ve only got enough l-l-liquor for two m-men to get properly d-drunk tonight, while w-we w-wait for dawn. The road to dog-dog-Dogubayezit would be impossible at n-night, t-trust me.” Hale heard footsteps swishing laterally across the grass then, and a moment later the bomb shelter door was pulled open, spilling lamplight out across the wet grass.

“D-d-do step in, my b-boy—you m-must be f-fruh-freezing.”

Hale saw a figure in Kurd jacket and trousers crouch to step into the shelter, but he caught a glimpse of the face, and it was Philby’s pouchy, humorous eyes that glanced back at him.

Hale shoved the gun back into its holster and hurried out of the cold night into the glowing shelter.

The bomb shelter wasn’t tall enough to stand up in, and Philby was already sitting cross-legged against the corrugated steel wall at the back, with the paraffin lantern by his right elbow on a low shelf. A tan woolen Army blanket had been spread over the five-foot width of the floor, and Hale sat down on it after he had pulled the door closed behind him and pushed the bolt through the hasp.

Several more blankets were folded and stacked on a shelf under the curved-over metal ceiling; Hale reached up and pulled one down, and then tugged off the soaked Kurdish vest and wrapped himself snugly in the dry wool. The rain was coming down harder now outside, drumming on the steel roof over his head.

He leaned back against the bolted door, but even at this opposite end of the shelter he was only six feet away from Philby’s knees.

Philby was smiling as he twisted a cork into a nearly full bottle of Macallan Scotch and then rolled it across the floor toward Hale. Hale’s numb fingers managed to grab it, but he used his teeth to pull out the cork and spit it onto the blanket by his boots. He tilted the bottle up, and the cold golden liquor seemed to boom like an organ chord in his chest, spreading heat and blessed looseness through his cramped muscles. Dried blood, he noticed now, spotted his knuckles and the backs of his hands. He lowered the bottle to take a breath, then lifted it again for another solid swallow, impatient for the sense of forgiveness he knew was alcohol’s to bestow.

“Are all y-your SAS men d-dead?” Philby asked.

Hale wondered how Philby knew that an SAS patrol had been involved. “I thought the SAS was disbanded after the war,” he whispered, exhaling richly volatile Scotch fumes.

“Like the SOE.” Philby sighed, and recited, almost to himself, “ ‘When as a lion’s whelp shall to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches, which being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall the posthumous end their miseries, Britain be fortunate, and flourish in peace and plenty.’ ” For a moment he was glaring furiously at Hale. “ ‘Read, and declare the meaning.’ ”

Hale blinked at him in genuine bewilderment, careful to show no response to the word declare.

Philby hooded his eyes in a smile. “Sorry—Shakespeare, the prominent B-British playwright— Cymbeline, Act Five. Do you th-think that didn’t… b-b- bother me, as a child? ‘A lion’s whelp,’ ‘without seeking find’? What were you all d-d- doing up there? I am the Head of Station in T-T-Turkey. First a commotion on the So-So-Soviet border down by Sadarak, and th-then a thousand rounds of ammunition f-fired off in the ha-ha-Ahora G-Gorge!” He was still smiling, but Hale had blinked the exhausted blurriness out of his eyes, and he thought Philby looked desolated, as if by some enormous disappointment.

“I—heard it,” said Hale. “I drove around up there, but I wasn’t able to find out what was going on. Shooting, evidently, as you say.” He wondered what Philby would say when he got a look at the bullet-riddled jeep.

For the first time it occurred to him that his career, SIS or SOE, was probably over, after the disaster this operation had been. He took another sip of the Scotch, and then his hands had loosened up enough for him to shove the cork into the bottle and roll it back to Philby.

Philby opened his mouth to speak, then appeared to think better of it. “ ‘A lion’s whelp,’ ” he said again, catching the bottle and uncorking it for a liberal swallow. “My f-father is Harry St. John f-f-Philby—have you h-heard of him?”

Author of The Empty Quarter, thought Hale. “Noted Arabist, I believe.”

“Who was your ff-f-father?”

“A Catholic priest, according to the village gossip.”

Philby nodded owlishly at him. “Have you ever h-heard of Rudyard Kipling?”

Hale sighed. “He wrote a book called Kim. I have read it.”

“Ah! Well, my f-father gave me that n-nickname, because I reminded him of the b-b-boy in that very book. I was b-born in Ambala—that’s in-in—in India, Andrew!—in 1912. I spoke H-Hindi before I learned hig-ig-English. When and where were you born?”

“1922, in Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds.”

“Or possibly in polly-p-p-Palestine, as your SIS records c-claim. Were you khh—chriss— baptized in the J-Jordan River? My f-father t-took me along with him on a t-t-trip to collect s-samples of Jordan w-water, the year after your b-birth.”

“I certainly don’t recall.”

“Y-you were in Berlin thruh-three years ago, and n-now here you are at rahrah—Arararah—Agri Dag, damn it.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you have queer d-dreams on New Year’s Eve?”

Hale forced down his alarm and made himself smile quizzically. “I suppose so. And then wake up with a hangover.”

Philby nodded. “Let’s pass the t-time with a game of c-cards,” he said. He tipped the bottle up for another mouthful and set it down carefully, and then dug a pack of playing cards out from under his blue Kurd ish robe. Hale noticed for the first time that the man’s robe was nearly as soaked as Hale’s vest. “Poker,” Philby said as he opened the box and spilled the red-backed cards into his hand.

Hale laughed mechanically. “With promissory notes?” he said. “I’m afraid I left my notecase at the hotel in Kars.”

“And I b-brought a j-jewel, but I’m afraid I s-s- swallowed it. D-Did you know that poker d-derives from an old purr-Persian card game, known as As-Nas? It was an ancestor of the F-F-French Ambigu as well. We can play for her.”

Hale could feel the Scotch beginning to do its good work. He blinked at Philby in the lamplight. “Her? Who, this Ambigu?”

Philby pouted his lips and shook his head. “You know who I m-mean. She appears to f-fancy b-both of us, so the l-loser of this hand will agree to stay-stay out of the other m-man’s way, fair enough? Elena Ceniza-Bendiga.”

Hale’s face burned with suddenly renewed humiliation— Cannibale!—and he wished the bottle was up at his end. “I won’t play,” he muttered. He recalled Elena’s headlong gallop down the lightless mountain path. “She may be dead, in any case.”

“Then it’s p-probably academic, isn’t it?” Philby’s face was heavy and expressionless, his lower lip hanging away from his teeth; Hale was reminded of the gargoyles on Notre-Dame. “We can play for her,” Philby repeated, in a voice that made Hale think of heavy clay.

Dimly Hale realized that this was a moral choice, possibly an important one. But there was no God, and Elena loathed him; and through his mind flickered a bit of Swinburne’s verse: We thank, with brief thanksgiving, whatever gods may be, that no life lives for ever; that dead men rise up never; that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea. No resurrection, no judgment. The bottle rolled across the blanket and rapped his knuckles, and he picked it up. “Very well,” he said hoarsely. “Five-card draw?”

Philby’s charm had returned in the crinkling of his eyes and the quirk of his lips. “She’s not dead, by the way—she rode past here twenty minutes ago, on a horse. No, not five-draw. A different derivation of As-Nas, I think,” he said as he began shuffling the cards in a lazy, overhand style. “Seven-card stud—high-low—declare, not cards-speak.”

Again Hale made himself show no reaction to the word declare. “High-low?” he asked. “Low hand splits the pot? How can that work? We can’t split her, the way… the way King Solomon offered to split the baby those women brought to him.”

The thunder of rain on the roof was redoubled, and the ground under the steel floor shook with an aftershock of the earthquake, or perhaps at the impact of a close lightning strike. Fleetingly Hale thought of the rough glass fulgurites he had found in the Rub’ al-Khali desert three months ago.

Philby had paused in his shuffling to stare speculatively at the curved, ribbed ceiling. “You’re insane,” he remarked in a conversational tone, “to invoke that name here, tonight. But you have, at least, summoned witnesses! No, we won’t split her. High hand wins her, and the low hand wins this.”

Holding the deck of cards in one hand, he reached with the other inside his robe, and then tossed out onto the blanket a thick roll of buff-colored paper.

Hale stared curiously at it—it appeared to be a manila envelope, tightly rolled up and tied with a ribbon. Red wax had been smeared across the ribbon and over an ink signature on the outside of the envelope, and the paper was speckled with half-dried red drops, blotted in spots with a dampness that must be recent rain.

From where he sat, Hale could read the signature’s last name— Maly.

Hale widened his eyes at Philby.

“I was supposed to get that in ’37, from an old friend, a Soviet agent I had… doubled, and was running in England. An inheritance, last-wishes type of thing. I only got it tonight, and even so I had to take it off of a dead man.”

“And it is what?”

“It’s the true Eucharist, the guide to it, anyway; it’s the reason Stalin purged the GRU in ’37—what you’d have called the Razvedupr, during your Paris days. Did you know that even the GRU cooks and lavatory attendants were killed, in that purge? The illegals in Europe had stumbled on a discovery, learned it from the Communist Polish Jews who had fled to Palestine, in the 1920s, and run the undercover Unity network there. At first it was just a—well, you must have stumbled across it—a sort of beat, or cadence, used in telegraphy, to project signals better. But the illegals eventually discovered that this sort of cadence could evoke peculiar aid in all sorts of situations. Eventually this man”—he reached forward to tap the rolled envelope—“discovered how it could be used to—if used in a certain symbiosis—prevent death.”

At the word death the shelter shook with a hard gust of shotgunning rain.

“Yes!” Philby shouted at the roof. To Hale, he went on, “You know the amomon plant—your Kurds must have told you about it.”

Hale turned up one palm. “Remind me.”

“It’s what my father searched for in the Rub’ al-Khali desert, what Lawrence found and chose to die rather than use; it’s—well, it’s the way to avoid the ‘truth to be found on the unknown shore,’ be sure that you won’t ‘without seeking find.’ Stop anyone from establishing the truth about you, hmm? Evade the”—the corners of his lips turned down ironically—“ ‘the wrath of God.’ ”

“Not die, you mean,” said Hale. “Directions are in that envelope.”

“Your position is gone, you do know that, don’t you? You’re out of a job, old son; so why bother acting skeptical now? Yes, in this envelope! It’s… it’s partly a crude musical score, I’m told, and partly a recipe, for the preparation and awakening of the angel that slumbers in the thistle.” He smiled. “You were brought up a Catholic—evade the Last Judgment, husband your precious sins— live forever, without the necessity of a resurrection!”

“And you’re willing to gamble that against”—Hale paused to gulp some more of the Scotch—“just for an unobstructed way with Elena.”

Philby opened his mouth as if in a laugh, but if there was any sound it was too soft for Hale to hear over the drumming of the rain. “I’m confident I’ll get this again,” Philby said, “if not entry to immortality on a higher level of access. You’ll never see it again, that’s certain.”

And no djinn died on the mountain tonight, Hale thought dully. There will be no poisoned honey for the Kurds next spring, and I won’t be bringing Elena to the village of Siamand Barakat Khan. But I might be able, back in the Nafud or Summan regions of the desert outside Kuwait, to find and kill a djinn; and then the following spring take a party of the Mutair out to look for blooming thistles …

Live forever, evade the wrath of God.

The taste of khaki, and blood…

He shuddered. “Deal,” he said.

Thunder broke in vast syllables across the sky outside, and Hale remembered that Philby had said his reference to King Solomon had summoned witnesses. And it occurred to him that Philby was not so much playing here to gain something as to make Hale “cast lots” for Elena, betray his love of her. Philby was supposed to be a master at getting Soviet agents to defect—was he playing here simply to get Hale to damn his own soul?

But the cards were already spinning out across the blanket, two down and one up. Hale was showing a three, and his hole cards proved to be a pair of nines. Not a bad start toward the high hand.

Philby’s showing card was an Ace—good either way.

“We’re both already all-in,” said Philby in a voice like rocks rubbing together. “No further betting.” He dealt two more cards face-up—Hale got a seven; Philby got a four, and was looking good so far for making the low hand.

Philby’s eyes were as empty as glass. “She’s staying in Dogubayezit,” he groaned as he flipped out two more cards. Hale got a ten, no help, and Philby got a six, looking very good for the low hand. “And she’s got her own room, at the quaintly styled Ararat Hotel! I’ve got my jeep here, I can drive us to town at dawn, and the holder of the high hand can sneak right up to her room then, hmm?” His stiff demeanor made the jocularity of his words grotesque.

Hale’s face chilled as he realized that Philby’s two hole cards might be Aces, giving him three of them. Philby might have a lock on the high hand.

What have I done, here? thought Hale, trying to will away the fog of alcohol. Will this game have real consequences? Am I giving her to Philby? Her, to Philby? With a sickness in the pit of his stomach he realized that he couldn’t back out of the hand now—he would simply be forfeiting the entire pot. And Philby had said there were witnesses. Hale remembered wondering if Philby was trying more to damn Hale’s soul here than to win; and he realized that Philby had lost his stutter in the last minute or so, as if another entity, a devil, was speaking through his lips.

“She doesn’t—Elena doesn’t— fancy you,” said Hale thickly.

Two more cards flipped out: Hale got a nine, giving him three of them now, and Philby got an eight. The rocking lamp flared and dimmed.

Philby’s voice was an echoing growl: “Do you think that will matter, after this?”

The bomb shelter shook with a gust of wind, or thunder, or an aftershock—the earth and sky seemed to be agreeing with Philby.

“Last card,” said Philby in a tone like the hollow crack of artillery; “down and dirty.” He dealt each of them a card face-down, and Hale picked his up from the shaking floor with trembling fingers. The welded seams of the shelter were creaking now as the little structure rocked in the wind like a boat on a turbulent sea.

Down and dirty. The whole bomb shelter was vibrating now.

Hale’s last card was another seven, giving him a full boat, nines over sevens. That was a good high hand—but Philby might conceivably have a better high hand, Aces-full, or even four Aces. If Hale declared high and then lost, he would lose the entire pot: Elena’s safety from Philby and the immortality, both. And even if he should choose to abandon Elena to Philby, and try for the immortality—declare low—Philby could easily have a better low hand than Hale’s terrible pair of sevens and could declare that way, and again win the whole pot.

Philby looked at his last card and then placed it back on the shivering blanket, still face-down. “We need tokens, for the declaration,” he said peevishly, “to hold in our fists until the count of three—one token to declare for the low hand, two for the high, three for both ways. Do you have six… pennies, pebbles, matches?”

Slowly and thoughtfully, Hale dug his fingers into the canvas pouch that had contained his iron ankh.

And after a few seconds he tossed out onto the blanket six of the scorched black glass beads he had picked up from the sand by the meteorite, in Wabar.

And as the beads bounced on the blanket, the whole bomb shelter was abruptly kicked over sideways, and the western wall of it punched Hale in the head as the lantern flew against the opposite wall and shattered—and then the creaking structure had ponderously rolled all the way over, and Hale tumbled to the ceiling on his right shoulder, his knees following in the constricted somersault to thump against some part of Philby; spatters of burning lamp oil had splashed across the blankets and the clothing of the two men, and Hale scrambled up, his feet slipping on the flaming curved ceiling, and wrenched back the bolt of the inverted door. He butted it open with his head.

Cold rain thrashed against his face and cleared his nose of the smell of burning wool and hair, and he threw himself over the top of the doorway and then jackknifed out onto the puddled grass, rolling over and over in the darkness to extinguish all of the flaming paraffin that had splashed on him.

He supposed Philby had climbed out too, but Hale could only clutch the wet grass and sob into the mud, for the whole earth was booming and resounding and shaking under him, and he was irrationally sure that God was striding furiously across eastern Turkey, looking for him, to throw him into Hell, as he deserved.

Hale closed his eyes lest their glitter should give his position away, and he tried to burrow his body into the mud.

I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.

After some hundreds of heartbeats, the ground stopped jolting under him, but Hale could still feel an intermittent subsonic vibration swell and fade deep in the earth, and he was drunkenly sure that it was God’s wrathful attention sweeping the landscape. I let go of the Khan’s stone, because I wanted to command the djinn, he thought despairingly; I participated in the deaths of my men, in order not to be killed myself; and I tried to trade Elena for eternal life. He kept his face pressed into the wet grass.

The rain dwindled away and stopped before dawn, and the earth was quiet, waiting for the sun. The moment came when Hale dared to move—he got up stiffly on his hands and knees in the windy darkness, cowering, but no shout from the sky knocked him back down; and he crawled to the inverted bomb shelter and pulled himself up to peer in through the open door. The fires had burned out, and when he climbed cautiously inside he discovered that Philby was gone. Hale wrapped himself in charred, rain-damp blankets and closed his eyes.

He awoke with a jolt at the screech of a starter motor in the dawn air outside; gray sunlight was slanting into the steel box through the open door, and he disentangled himself from the smoke-reeking blankets and climbed stiffly out onto the grass, shivering and squinting around at the plain and the mountain.

A gray Willys jeep sat on the north side of the upended bomb shelter, and the scarecrow figure of Philby was hunched in the driver’s seat, fluttering the accelerator now to keep the cold engine from stalling. God only knew where the man had waited out the night.

Hale limped wide around the crumpled corrugated-steel walls, plodded across the wet grass to the vehicle, and wordlessly climbed into the passenger seat. Philby swiveled on him a look that was devoid of greeting, or of anger, or even of recognition; and eventually he clanked the engine into gear and began motoring across the bumpy field to the road that would take them to Dogubayezit.

Hale saw that a two-foot length of the rope he had seen yesterday in the jeep’s bed was knotted now to the ring on the dashboard, and he saw that its end was hacked, as if by frantic blows of a knife edge; the fibers of it were curled up and blackened, and the tan dashboard paint around the steel ring was charred. Hale thought that the ring was even bent upward.

The other end of the rope, now gone, had been attached to a weather balloon mooring.

He tried to comprehend the huge thought: this jeep was used to awaken the djinn last night. This is the jeep I heard driving on the plain, just before the earthquake. The man who was driving this vehicle last night was almost certainly working for the Soviet team.

Hale looked away, out at the boulder-studded grass plain in the watery sunlight, and he kept his breathing steady.

Hold your fire until you’ve got a clear shot, he told himself as his heart thudded in his chest and he thought of the five lost SAS men. Plain revenge is seldom the shrewdest move in espionage. It might have been Burgess—but could Burgess be an active Soviet agent in this without Philby’s complicity?

Hold your fire.

Neither man spoke, or even glanced again at the other, as the jeep bounced over the muddy road and the red sun slowly rose at their left, over Soviet Armenia.

Philby did not slow down as he drove through the silent main street of Dogubayezit, past the Ararat Hotel, and straight on toward the road that would take them back to Kars.

At Erzurum Hale was able to use an RAF radio to send a long decipher-yourself signal to Theodora in Broadway Buildings. In it he reported his failure, and he reported too his suspicion that Philby had participated in the operation, working on the Soviet side. Nearly immediately he received a telegram, but it was from the SIS personnel office rather than from Theodora. It was orders—he was to get aboard the next RAF flight to London and then report immediately to C, who in 1948 was Stuart Menzies.

And Hale had not seen Jimmie Theodora again until January second of this year, 1963, in Green Park.

When he had got out of the cab at Broadway Buildings by St. James’s Park in London he had thought again, for the first time in many years, of the old Broadway Tower in the Cotswolds and of how he used to hike out across the stubbled fields to stare at its medieval-looking turrets and limestone walls when he had been a boy. The SIS headquarters at Broadway Buildings had long since lost for him its storybook associations with that old isolated castle, but now it seemed almost as remote.

The guard at the reception desk had recognized him from the wartime service, and after showing the man his orders-telegram Hale had been directed straight to the “arcana,” the fourth-floor office from which white-haired old Stuart Menzies guided the worldwide concerns of the postwar SIS. The courtly old man had stood up from his desk to shake Hale’s hand, but had not seemed to know exactly what Hale’s work in Kuwait had been; and clearly he had not heard from the Turkish station about the recent disaster on Mount Ararat.

Perhaps imagining that Hale was simply a wartime agent demobbed very late, C had advised him to make a new life for himself in the private sector.

“I understand you were reading English at an Oxford college before we recruited you,” Menzies had told him kindly. “Go back to that, pick up your life from that point, and forget the backstage world, the way you would forget any other illogical nightmare. You’ll receive another year’s pay through Drummond’s in Admiralty Arch, and with attested wartime work in the Foreign Office you should have no difficulties getting an education grant. In the end, for all of us, ‘ Dulce et decorum est pro patria vanescere.’”

FIFTEEN: Beirut, 1963

“All women are thus.” Kim spoke as might have Solomon.

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga awoke in an unfamiliar bed before dawn, from a dream of Madrid; she was alone in the dark, and it took her several seconds to remember that she was nearly thirty-nine years old, and that she was in Beirut. After leaving Kim Philby last night in the bar of the Carlton Hotel on the southern shore, she had taken a series of cabs to the St. Georges Hotel and paid cash for a room on the northwest corner of the second floor, overlooking the beach and the terrace.

She could hardly remember Madrid before her parents had been killed—she could call to mind the sunlit palaces along the tree-lined Gran Avenida de la Libertad, and the metal barrel of the strolling barquillero, with a wheel on the top of the barrel that she would spin to see how many barquillos her centavo would buy; the barquillos were light sugared wafers, and when she won more than three of them her father made her carry the rest home in her handkerchief. And she remembered taking her first Holy Communion at San Francisco el Grande, on the city’s western bluff … solemn in a white dress, receiving on her tongue the wafer that was the body and blood of Jesus…

Then in April of 1931 King Alfonso had fled Spain, and riots had erupted in the streets—and on a stark Sunday afternoon in May, seven-year-old Elena had stood over the sprawled bodies and spilled blood of her father and mother, on the pavement of the Gran Via in front of a burning church.

Young Elena had apparently gone quietly mad and stopped eating for a while after that, and she recovered from the brain fever in the boardinghouse owned by her aunt Dolores. Her parents had been devout Catholics, members of the Accion Popular—but her aunt told her that the fascists of the Accion Popular had covertly set fire to the church themselves, in order to lay the blame on the Socialist Provisional Government; Elena’s deluded parents had threatened to go to the guardia civil with the story, and had been killed by the fascists.

Only after her stay in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow did it occur to Elena to doubt her aunt Dolores’s version of the story.

Tia Dolores was a Communist, and she enrolled Elena in the Pioneros youth organization, where the children had made big cardboard hammer-and-sickles and five-pointed Red Stars and learned to revere Lenin and Stalin and the Workers’ Paradise. When the army rebelled against the government and the Loyalist guns had fired on the barracks and driven the soldiers out of Madrid, Elena’s aunt had joined one of the citizens’ militias and got a couple of rifles from the Loyalist Ministry of Defense, and the old lady and the little girl had practiced marksmanship by shooting at the statue of Christopher Columbus in El Retiro park. At night Elena sat through Party meetings in the unheated Palacio del Congreso, under a framed photograph of La Pasionara, the nun-like old woman who was one of the Communist deputies in the Loyalist parliament and whose radio and street speeches could rouse the sick from their beds to take their places at the barricades—and on the walk home through the Madrid streets afterward, Elena and her aunt had looked as pale as drowned corpses, for all the streetlamps and automobile headlights had been painted blue to be less visible from the air.

The right-wing Nationalists had taken Spain’s army with them when they had rebelled, and the Loyalist army was just men in rope-soled shoes and coveralls and token red sashes, and women in smocks and forage caps, all equipped with unfamiliar rifles. Elena could still recall the sporadic banging of amateur target practice echoing in the streets—and she could recall too driving out the north road in a requisitioned Ford truck one morning in the summer of 1936, shouting Viva la Republica with everyone else, to stop the rebel army at the pass in the Sierra de Guadalarrama.

And the ragged militia had stopped the army, for a while. Twelve-year-old Elena had fired her rifle at a soldier that day, and had seen him fall; and that night she had not slept, and by the next morning she had come to the endurable conclusion that her parents had been fools, and that all priests were liars, and that there was, as Tia Dolores insisted, no God at all besides Man himself.

Her aunt was killed while crossing the Puerta del Sol one afternoon in August, struck in the spine by a stray Loyalist bullet.

Children were recruited for spy work because of their anonymity; Elena joined one of the International Brigades and learned the uses of wireless telegraphy and code groups and one-time pads, and she met the Communist Andre Marty in Albacete. She watched Marty shoot a British spy, and from Marty she learned more about the Communist Party which had replaced God in her chilled heart.

She had become an agent of the Soviet Red Army at the age of twelve—and in November of 1936, when the Nationalists had advanced all the way up to the Carabanchel suburb of Madrid, she had been ordered by Moscow Centre to take up new duties in Paris.

Escorted by a gruff old Soviet military advisor whose name she never learned, she traveled with hundreds of other fugitives north to Jaca in the foothills of the snowy Pyrenées, where they got on a bus full of Soviet officers and foreign journalists. Elena had sat by a window and watched the fir trees along the steep road disappear in the thickening mists as the bus labored up the Portalet Pass to halt at the French border, and while the Customs officers searched the bus, she had got out to sniff the cold mountain air and stare at the surrounding mountains—but when the bus had got under way again, and had driven down the Route des Pyrenées on the French side of the mountain range and stopped for petrol at Lourdes, she did not get out. The Blessed Virgin, Mary the Mother of God, was said to have appeared to a French peasant girl in a grotto at Lourdes eighty years earlier, and miraculous cures were now common here—and Elena was superstitiously afraid that her atheism might be cured by some supernatural intervention of the Virgin, and that her little red forage cap with its red star might be left among the stacks of discarded crutches and wheelchairs that were supposed to line the path to the grotto where Mary had appeared.

Elena stood up out of the hotel bed and crossed the carpeted floor to pull back the curtains—the Mediterranean Sea was purple, and the sky was red in the east over the Normandy Hotel. From the balcony outside her door she would be able to look down on the terrace where Philby would be meeting his Soviet controllers later this morning.

She thought of the CIA men who had braced her and Philby last night at the Carlton Hotel, and she considered the idea of using her radio to muster the SDECE team and exfiltrate Philby today, right after his meeting here, as he had suggested last night. She had dismissed the idea then, but now it seemed to be the prudent course. If she left him in play here, it was too likely that the CIA would kidnap him, or that the Soviets would pull up stakes and shift their base of operations out of Beirut, or even that Philby would crack, and have to be killed by one side or the other.

She did have to admit, against huge reluctance, that Philby’s offer to defect seemed genuine after all. When she had tried to kill him a week ago, she had planned to report that his offer had been a trap, a Soviet plot calculated to embarrass the French Pompidou Cabinet. And even after her ill-considered assassination attempt had failed, she had still hoped to find actual evidence that he was Soviet bait. She had wanted—she still wanted—an excuse to kill him, and thus erase the most shameful episode of her life; if she brought him home alive, that episode would surely be part of his recorded biography, and she would almost certainly have to resign.

She sat down on the bed and picked up her purse. Down behind the long-barrel .38 revolver was a pack of Gauloises with a book of matches tucked into the cellophane, and she lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deep into her lungs.

But if she brought Philby back alive, and if his deposition proved to be as valuable as it seemed likely to be, she would have delivered a damaging blow to Moscow, even as she ended her own career. And truly she hated Moscow as much—and as personally—as she hated Philby.

She didn’t want to let herself think, yet, about Andrew Hale; late last night she had composed a crash-priority inquiry about his current status to SDECE headquarters at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, and tonight she would tune in the Paris bandwidth for an answer.

On New Year’s Day of 1942 she had left Andrew sleeping in the room on the Île de la Cité and begun the first leg of her trip to Moscow. Her introduction to the Workers’ Paradise had been the Tupelov ANT-35 two-engine airplane that had flown her out of Tbilisi—the pilot told the passengers in halting German that the plane had been built without a lot of Eitelkeit, vanity, and this had proven to mean that there were no upholstered seats or safety belts or, apparently, wing-flaps; in order to take off, he ordered all the passengers to crowd up to the front of the plane so that he would be able to get the tail up, and even so the airplane cleared the fence at the end of the airfield with so little room to spare that Elena, pressed against a window, was able to see the individual barbs on the wire as it whipped past under them. Instruments too were apparently an Eitelkeit, for the pilot never took the plane higher than five hundred feet and was clearly following the highways visible below.

When the plane landed at a small snow-plowed airfield on the outskirts of Moscow, she was met by Leonid Moroz, the Moscow council member and Red Army intelligence liaison who was to be her boss. Elena quickly learned that she had not, in fact, been called to Moscow to be killed—Moroz was working with Section II of the Operations Division of the GRU, and he had been ordered to construct a new identity for Elena as an expatriate Spanish heiress, and to infiltrate her into Berlin. Moroz was pitifully anxious that the plan should succeed.

Elena was given a couple of furnished rooms on the Izvoznia Ulitza, a street of gray five-story buildings outside the Sadovaya ring road on the banks of the western loop of the Moskva River. She soon gathered that her flatblock was a prestigious address—the forty or fifty other flats in her building were occupied by wives of Soviet officers who were stationed at the front—but she also noticed that the walls of the concrete structure were four feet thick and that its narrow windows faced the Mojaisk Chaussee thorough-fare and the Kiev railway station; clearly the place had been built as a defensive fortress. And she hoped that if the Germans were to approach Moscow she would be given a rifle and allowed to participate in the defense.

Leonid Moroz was a Party member and took pains to look like one. The dark pouches under his eyes were a sign not only of virtue—indicating that he worked at his desk until the small hours—but of status as well. Party members were beyond having to bother with dressing as the common people did, and Moroz was vain about the double-breasted jacket he always wore with all three buttons fastened—it was too tight, but it had a velvet collar. His only concession to the proletariat was his cloth cap, and Lenin was always portrayed wearing one.

Moroz frequently called Elena to his office to describe in vague terms the studying she would have to do to perfect her cover, and to discuss with her the current state of the war, and to ask her to type letters. His office was always so cold that Elena had to wear an overcoat and scarf; Moroz had three telephones on his bare desk, though he never made any calls and they never rang, and the only furnishings aside from an implausible dozen straight-backed chairs were framed photographs of Stalin, Marx, and Molotov.

The GRU, or Razvedupr—the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Army General Staff—had been purged to the ground in 1937; and then after the Army had assembled a completely new staff for its intelligence directorate, all of its residencies abroad had been purged again in 1940—and Elena knew at first hand that the Razvedupr illegal networks in Paris were being rolled up last year, in 1941. The man behind the purges was Lavrenti Beria of the NKVD, and Moroz lived in fear of him. Moroz often made lunch of the pickled herring and vodka he kept in his desk, and once after drinking several inches of the vodka he told Elena that Beria was personally charming, an urbane little bald-headed flatterer in spectacles—but that he used the NKVD to kidnap attractive young women off the Moscow streets so that he could rape them; husbands or fathers who protested were never seen again. Moroz had been given the GRU-liaison post when he had become a member of the Moscow council, and he was desperate not to be connected with any error that might draw the placid, murderous gaze of Beria.

“Why does he want to uproot any plant, any feeblest seedling, that grows out of the Army’s intelligence efforts?” mourned Moroz more than once. “Is there truly something inherently perilous in an Army intelligence agency, so that it needs to be exterminated to the last man every few years? Beria is Stalin’s man, as the monster Yezhov was before him. The Army was founded by Trotsky—do you suppose that’s why Stalin must at every season sow salt in that scorched earth?” Moroz had already confessed to Elena that he wrote poetry.

Elena knew that Trotsky had been killed more than a year ago in Mexico; but she knew too that Stalin feared the man’s posthumous influences. Trotsky had been the founder of the Red Army, directly after the Revolution, as well as Lenin’s commissar of foreign affairs; and he had been a close confidant of Lenin’s, and was rumored to have helped Lenin organize a number of Soviet agencies so independent and secret that now Stalin himself could only guess at them. Perhaps there was some subterranean agency that Stalin especially feared, one that consistently tended to surface in the GRU, which was the agency founded to deal with threats against Mother Russia from abroad. Had some defensive posture proven more horrifying to Stalin than the foreign threat it was meant to counter?

Elena remembered Andre Marty executing alleged Trots kyites in Spain, and she remembered her suspicion that Marty was actually eliminating agents who had drifted into some transcendent order.

Sometimes Moroz thrust his hand into his pocket as he voiced his worries about Beria and the NKVD, and Elena guessed he was making the gesture known as fig v karmane, the fig in the pocket— the fig was the thumb thrust between the first two fingers in a clenched fist, expressing the universal “fuck you” defiance; but v karmane meant in the pocket—furtive, fearful. For all his frail charm, Moroz lived by the Soviet bureaucrat’s maxim: ugadat, ugodit, utselet, pay attention, ingratiate, survive.

“Nichevo,” Moroz would say, dismissing the subject—she gathered that the word expressed something like a despairing What’s the use, and a fatalistic So be it.

But Elena made a determined effort to love Moscow. She was allowed to supplement the basic diet of black bread and cabbage by buying food at a restricted General Staff shop, and she tried to buy only Russian items such as garlic sausage and eggs and Caucasian tea, and ignore the powdered milk and peanut butter, which were likely to be United States Army rations donated through the Lend-Lease program. But nearly half of the cars on the boulevards were American Lend-Lease Studebakers and Dodges. She never saw refrigerators in the shops and never saw a refrigerator car in the trains at the Kiev station.

She got used to the street loudspeakers that played the “Internationale” every morning at dawn and broadcast incomprehensible speeches all over the city all day long; and she made allowances for railings that came loose under her hand and new brick walls that had no mortar at all in some spots and were lumpy with excess in others; but she couldn’t bear the smell and the crowds at the public baths, and made do with towels and cold water in her room—but a dated chit from a bathhouse was necessary to buy a train ticket, and when heavy snow forced her to take the train to Moroz’s office she would buy a bath-chit on the black market. When the trains broke down, a porter would walk through the cars and take the electric lightbulbs out of the lamps so that they wouldn’t be stolen.

Elena learned to scan the newspapers that were posted in display cases on the street, looking for the Cyrillic symbols for Moroz’s name in the lists of Party officials; she had noticed that the lists weren’t arranged alphabetically, and gathered that the order of the names indicated their current standing with the Politburo.

And she noticed that Moroz’s name had fallen to the bottom of the list on the day after she met the Middle Eastern woman on the Sadovaya ring road by Arbat Street.

Elena had stopped at a sidewalk kiosk to spend a ruble on a scant shot of vodka, when she noticed the metallic glint of jewelry on a woman standing beside her; the popular costume jewelry was stamped out of colored plastic, so Elena assumed the gleam had come from one of the state medals that Muscovites always wore. But when she turned to look, the exotic face of the woman distracted her—it was a dark face, veiled across the nose and mouth so that only the glittering brown eyes could be seen under the black braided hair, and in spite of the intense cold the woman was dressed in a length of dark blue cloth draped over the shoulders and wound around the waist to hang in folds like a skirt. Her feet were bare on the pavement.

And even as Elena told herself that she must help this lost foreigner, must get her indoors somewhere out of the snow and find shoes and a coat for her, she noticed that the woman’s bare feet were in the center of a patch of cleared wet pavement; the woman’s feet had melted the snow on the sidewalk to a distance of nearly a yard; and now Elena could feel the heat that radiated from her, as palpable as radiant energy from a furnace.

The jewelry, Elena noticed finally, was a string of gold rings around the woman’s neck; and interspersed among the rings were holed lumps of steel and gold. Elena had seen many Muscovites with stainless-steel teeth—dental porcelain was scarce.

The woman rocked her head to the south, staring intently into Elena’s eyes—and Elena’s face was suddenly hot, for the gesture and the look had somehow conveyed an urgent sexual invitation, if not an order. One of Elena’s molars was gold, and she could imagine it strung among the lumps and the rings on the woman’s breast.

But Elena turned away and ran down the Arbat Street sidewalk, skidding on the ice and fearful of pursuit but somehow taking comfort in the grid of electrified streetcar wires that made a net overhead. When she stopped under the harsh neo-Gothic pillars of the Foreign Ministry and looked back, the woman had not moved— or only a little, perhaps: surely she seemed a little closer, a little bigger against the background of gray buildings, than she would have if she had not moved.

And the next day, when Elena checked the display copies of Pravda, the Cyrillic symbols for “Moroz” were at the bottom of the list of Moscow council members.

She walked on past the newspaper display and then turned up a side street to the left, away from Moroz’s office.

She felt like a swimmer out far past any thing to cling to, with the bottom leagues away below her flailing legs. If Moroz had been arrested, how could she safely find out? If he had been, she herself would surely share in his ruin. Her faith in the Party was subsumed in her terror of Beria—Each morning the NKVD executioners were given their rifles and their vodka, Cassagnac had said only three months ago, and after they had shot their dozens and bulldozed them into pits dug by convict labor, they went back to the guardrooms and drank themselves insensible. And even more recently Marcel Gruey, Lot, had told her, Cassagnac said that this generation of the Soviet secret services will be killed in their own turn before long, and that the next lot is likely to be more reasonable. But how could she take any evasion measures here? She had no contacts, she didn’t know the city, the nearest border was more than three hundred miles away at Latvia, and she didn’t even speak the language yet beyond a few utilitarian or slangy phrases.

She simply walked, east down the Gertsena street toward the medieval bastions that studded the gray Kremlin wall. She saw several police officers—mostly women in blue skirts and berets, directing traffic—but it wasn’t uniformed figures that would threaten her. And she saw old women bundled up in coats and scarves, shuffling along the sidewalks in heavy felt boots, sweeping the snow into the gutters with crude brooms. Elena envied them their secure identities.

She had walked past the northernmost towers of the Kremlin. The buildings she passed were pillared palaces now, and she knew one of them was the Bolshoi Theatre—but she hurried past without looking up at the Corinthian columns, and tried to step along in a businesslike way as she made straight for the shadows of a cobbled pedestrian underpass.

When she came up into the gray daylight again on the far side, she heard music—a song that Marcel Gruey had sometimes sung, an American song called “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”—echoing out across the snowy sidewalk from a hotel whose name she was able to figure out phonetically: Metropol. The clarity and imprecision let her know that the music was being produced by a live band rather than a radio speaker, and she hurried across the street and up the hotel steps. If she could meet some man, and get him to take her home, she could at least establish a temporary shelter from which to reconnoiter.

A moustached old man at the door mumbled something to her, and when she cocked her head inquiringly, he said, in English, “Thirty cents.” Uneasy that he had so instantly identified her as a foreigner, Elena gave him a ruble coin and hurried past him—into a corridor that opened on an ornate nineteenth-century ballroom, with a fountain and a marble pool out in the middle of the polished wood floor.

At the checkroom she handed her overcoat across the counter. Three girls in lumpy ski pants arrived right behind her, chattering in Russian, and they began hopping on one foot and the other to pull the pants off, afterward smoothing the dresses that they had worn crumpled up under the pants. Elena’s face went cold and expressionless to see two men in Red Army uniforms stepping up the hall now—but they were laughing as they took off their overcoats. Clearly they too had come simply to dance.

Elena shuffled nervously into the ballroom, eyeing the young men who seemed to be without partners. Everybody in Russia seemed to have come to the Metropol—men in coveralls were dancing with young women in wrinkled gowns, helmets rocked on the belts of gyrating soldiers, and even the aproned waiters were tap-dancing as they carried drinks on trays; Elena even heard English sentences, and after peering around spied a table of obvious Britishers drinking watery Zhigulovsky beer. Her first thought, instantly scorned, was to try to give them a message to take to Marcel Gruey, to poor gallant Lot—but she didn’t even know his real name, and in any case he was a sadly deficient Communist.

Elena had just steeled herself to approach a studious-looking young man whose dance partner had been deflected away by one of the Red Army soldiers, when she found herself in the arms of a lean-faced man who smiled at her with steel teeth. “Bless me,” the man said.

She nodded, recognizing the old Paris Razvedupr code: Things are not what they seem—trust me.

“You’ll have to tell us,” the man remarked quietly in her ear in French, “how you knew to avoid his office this morning. You were right—he’s gone, and so would you have been. We might or might not have been able to get you away from them. But why didn’t you simply follow her, when she approached you in her ring yesterday?”

Elena knew who it was that he must be referring to. “Her ring? The Sadovaya?”

“With her… earring stones? anchor stones?… installed around the periphery, at Patriarch’s Pond and Gorky Park and the Kursk Station, to keep her from becoming… disoriented?” The French word was désoriente, and he laughed as though he had made a joke.

He had whirled her to an arch on the other side of the high-ceilinged room, and he stepped back and let her last dance step link her arm through his, so that now they were walking down the corridor beyond without having paused.

Another man was holding open an outside door, and Elena found that she had been escorted down a set of cement steps and into the back seat of a black Ford sedan before she could catch her breath. She wondered if she would ever see her overcoat again.

The man who had met her on the dance floor glanced at his wrist-watch as the car accelerated away from the curb, driving in a counter-clockwise loop around the block and then speeding north up the Neglinaya boulevard. “Moroz is probably dead, by now,” he said, still speaking in French. “The NKVD has learned about your Palestinian lover in Paris.” He laughed and shook his head. “A Palestinian radio operator! You would be food for Zat al-Dawahi yourself if we hadn’t been tracking you closely. Moroz planned to send you to Berlin?”

“Who are you?” Elena demanded. “Hiding me from the NKVD—you’re not Russians!”

The driver turned his head around to look at her, and she quailed. Under a wool cap his hairless face was pure Cossack, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes. “We are the oldest Russians,” he said harshly in barbarous French, before turning back to the street ahead. “Our organization was old before Lenin returned to Petrograd from his Swiss exile in 1917,” he went on, “and Lenin blessed us and committed into our hands the protection of Russia.”

“The secret protection,” agreed her escort. “Stalin and his NKVD hate the measures we take, and so we protect the motherland while hiding in foxes’ earths that are secret even to the secret service, true to the old covenant. Andre Marty noted you, in Spain, and would have killed you as soon as he didn’t need your wireless telegraphy skills any longer, if we hadn’t used the GRU to summon you out of Madrid. Marty wrote a report to the NKVD, in which he said you were particularly dangerous—you were baptized but nevertheless sensitive to the most-secret world, and you were nearly virgin, still, in ’36.” The word he used was vierge, a term often used in speaking of unexposed photographic film.

“I was a virgin then!” protested Elena; and a moment later she could feel herself blushing.

“A virgin in the sense of not having killed anyone,” her escort explained. “Marty said you had shot a Nationalist soldier, but it was before you had reached puberty, and we think you have probably killed no one else since, and never anyone up close. A soul’s first few bloody murders have a sacramental power that must not be spent promiscuously.”

“We were at war,” said Elena now. “It was not a murder!”

The man shrugged impatiently. “Killing, execution, riposte, establishment of truth. We don’t want you wasting any more of your baptized sanctity until you can spend it effectively.” He looked away from her, out the window at the old women sweeping snow from the sidewalks. “And not in Berlin.”

These are Russians, she told herself; and they apparently want me to perform an assassination. She remembered her sleepless night after shooting the Nationalist soldier at the Sierra de Guadalarrama pass, but she took a deep breath and said, “I am at the command of the Party.”

“The Politburo consigns you to us with her left hand,” dryly said the man she had danced with. “Our headquarters is in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs on the Kuznetsky Bridge, where we still operate out of the Spets Otdel, the Special Department, of the NKVD. They don’t quite know who we are, and our very presence in so secret an institution forbids them to inquire.”

Elena never saw her flat on the Izvoznia Ulitza again—she was quartered now in a single-story log cabin in one of the “Alsatias” down at the southwestern bend of the Moskva River, by the Lenin Stadium. The Alsatias were rookeries dating from before the Revolution, tangles of old streets and open sewers that had been slated for leveling and reconstruction before the war had intervened. The Alsatias were a perfect sanctuary for “hooligans”—criminals and deserters—and in fact a fugitive division of Azerbaijan troops had lately taken up residence in Elena’s neighborhood, and frequently could be heard firing their Army-issue rifles at the cavalry patrols who enforced the midnight-to-five curfew. Elena’s roommates were Betsy, an American-Armenian woman who, lured by the promise of a farm of her own in a new Armenia, had moved from New Jersey to Moscow in 1935 and irretrievably surrendered her American passport, and Pavel, a Roman Catholic priest who was generally too drunk to speak. Elena gathered that they were all working for the same unnamed agency, but it was never discussed.

The man who had danced with her at the Metropol told her his name was Utechin, and he led her with cheery confidence through the mazes of the Soviet secret world. As his secretary, she went with him to the offices of various commissars and ministers, always having to pass through two sets of padded-leather doors with brass plates over the keyholes, to discuss everything from weapon shipments to the selection of operas to be performed at the Bolshoi. Once she watched him preside over the disposition of a shipment of American Lend-Lease leather—the Army wanted it all for boots, and the Minister of Health wanted some of it for the construction of artificial limbs, while the Minister of Trade wanted enough to make a lot of industrial belting; Utechin later prepared conflicting reports to make each of them imagine that he had got what he had wanted, while in fact a full third of the leather was diverted to partisan groups in Astrakhan and Baku on the Caspian Sea coast, for the construction of assault-coracles—boats powered by outboard motors, each with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted at the stern. “The hulls have to be animal-stuff,” Utechin told her merrily, “for our allies there to be able to distinguish our boats from the Germans’.”

And he took her on tours of graveyards. In the Vagankov and Danilovskoye cemeteries they shoveled away the drifted snow to note the patterns of little holes punched upward out of fresh graves, and Utechin pointed out that the graves of the affluent dead had more such punctures than those of the poor. “The rich can afford gold teeth and jewelry,” he told Elena once as they made a picnic of vodka and hard-boiled eggs and bloodwurst on a snow-covered grave mound. “It’s only right that they should be called to give them up at the end. There is too much gold anyway, in our country—teeth from the dead, plating from the old church domes. If our angel wants our gold, so be it.”

“Nichevo,” Elena had agreed bewilderedly, reaching for the vodka bottle.

He nodded. “Drink more,” he told her. “A fledgling agent should live more in drunkenness than in sobriety, in order to achieve distance from the deformity which is bourgeois conscience.”

The preserved body of Lenin had been moved to Kuibyshev when the Nazis had begun their advance toward Moscow, but Utechin took her to the empty mausoleum, right across the broad expanse of Red Square from the palatial GUM department store. Utechin showed a pass to the guards at the tall portal, and he and Elena walked into the mausoleum and followed a counterclockwise route to a set of descending stairs, then turned right several times to get to the crypt room. Net zero, Elena thought.

Though it was empty, the glass coffin in the middle of the floor was brightly lit by electric lights. “If the Politburo has any sense,” whispered Utechin as he ran his hand over the glass, apparently feeling for pits or scratches, “they will leave him in Kuibyshev. Why tease her with this?”

Elena was afraid she knew who Utechin referred to—and her suspicion was confirmed only a day or two later, when she received her ideological confirmation at the Spets-Otdel office on the Kuznetsky Bridge.

Utechin fed her six glasses of vodka before sitting her down in a chair across the desk from him. “You are elevated? Out of the twitching, gag-reflexing body? Good. Listen to me, girl—Mother Russia has a guardian angel, a very literal one. She can take a number of physical forms—you met her in one form, on the Sadovaya ring. In her remote youth she was known as Zat al-Dawahi, which is Arabic for Mistress of Misfortunes, but we call her Machikha Nash, Our Stepmother…”

And so, in the uncritical credulity of drunkenness, Elena had learned about the supernatural creature who had been captured on Mount Ararat after the earthquake of 1883 had knocked down the old confining drogue stones; and she learned that the guardian angel demanded deaths in return for her protection of the Soviet empire— such a constant cascade of deaths that Utechin’s agency had been forced to assist and even encourage the NKVD in its insane whole-sale purges. Elena was told that the great famine in the Ukraine during the winter of 1932 and 1933 had not been an accidental consequence of collectivizing agriculture and relocation of the land-owning farmers, the despised kulaks; the famine had been deliberately set into motion, and the Ukraine had been cut off from the rest of the world by heavily armed OGPU detachments at the Kiev and Ukrainian–Russian borders. “Machikha Nash demanded sacramental cannibalism,” Utechin said blandly, “and the starving Ukrainians provided it for her, in the interval before they became her food in turn.”

And, finally, in order to “divest her of the Judeo–Christian spiritual gag reflex,” she had been driven to the Lubyanka, only three blocks east of the Metropol Hotel, and taken down many flights of stairs to the basements. After fasting and being kept awake by electric shocks for forty-eight hours, she was shown the ring of huge rectangular stones in one of the remotest chambers, each stone with a loop carved at its top, and inside the ring she saw the crushed, skinned, and eviscerated bodies that had lately been offered to Machikha Nash; and she was taken to a cell full of Polish and Romanian women, and was allowed to talk to them in pidgin German for a few minutes before being forcibly restrained while they were brutally and deafeningly killed by guards with machetes; and after she was finally allowed to eat, she was told something abominable about the stew she’d eaten. Throughout the three-day ordeal she was prevented from sleeping and was constantly forced to choke down glass after glass of harsh vodka.

At last she was marched into a wide, tiled room that shone a sulfurous yellow in the light of an electric bulb that hung on a cord from the ceiling; two wooden chairs stood facing each other across fifteen feet, with a drain in the floor between them. Elena was tied into one of the chairs and given a hypodermic injection, and then an old man in a white coat came in and talked droningly to her as he swung in front of her eyes a tiny, anatomically perfect gold skull. After some time a young woman was brought into the chamber by a couple of aproned guards; the girl was dressed in a blood-spattered smock that was a precise copy of the one Elena wore, and she had clearly been chosen because of her strong physical resemblance to Elena—auburn hair, thin face, sunken, haunted eyes. She too appeared to have been drugged, and she didn’t struggle when the guards tied her into the other chair, facing Elena.

“This woman is you,” the old doctor told Elena in guttural English as he stood behind the girl, with his hands on her shoulders, “and you are sitting right here, you can feel the ropes that confine you; the chair out there toward which I am looking is empty.” He was staring down at the top of the girl’s head as he spoke, though Elena was finding it difficult to focus her eyes. “You feel my hands on your shoulders, don’t you?”

Elena did—and when the doctor lit a cigarette and leaned down to blow smoke in the girl’s face, Elena smelled the burning tobacco. After some unguessable period of time, punctuated by more injections and electric shocks and many administrations of vodka through a rubber hose, Elena found that she was able to see from the girl’s eyes, and she could see that the doctor was right—the chair across the room was empty.

At last the old doctor stood away from her, with his back to the empty chair, and Elena saw him draw a revolver from the pocket of his lab coat. “Now you will be killed,” he informed her. He pointed the gun at her face, and she saw his finger whiten inside the trigger guard.

A wall seemed to break in Elena’s mind—and in the instant before the gun’s muzzle exploded in stunning and obliterating white light, she thought, Santa Maria, Madre de Dios—

And when consciousness, but not light, returned to her, along with the sensation of lying on a cold stone floor, the voice in her head resumed where it had left off, simply because she had no thoughts of her own: —ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora en esta hora de nuestra muerte.

Pray for us, sinners, now in this hour of our death. Because there were no thoughts in her head, her concussed memory simply repeated the prayer over and over again.

Another voice was saying similar words in the dark, in insistent Spanish and Russian, and she tried to attend to the other voice’s sentences too.

Then she was alone, lying in darkness for some period she could not estimate, without food or drink. She was able to move, and feel with her palms the texture of the stone floor and walls, and she could remember being hypnotized and told to identify herself with the girl who had been shot, but she was not at all certain that she was not in fact herself dead. And after the lights were turned on at last, and Utechin unlocked a barred door to run to where she lay and tip a glass of cold clear water to her cracked lips, she explained that the string she had tugged from her smock and tied into a series of knots had been her attempt to number the days of her confinement.

Her identity came back to her slowly. She pretended to have become the cold, truncated Party operative that they had worked so hard to make of her; and she kept deep within herself the memory that the string had been a makeshift rosary, and that in the long darkness she had made a binding vow to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. In the years to come, she was to tell only two people of that vow—Andrew Hale, and Kim Philby.

For two weeks she was allowed to rest in a yellow-brick dacha in the village of Zhukovka, on the Moskva River outside of the city. When she wasn’t sleeping she went for long walks in the green pine woods, never forgetting that she was being observed, careful not to move her lips or make the sign of the cross as she prayed.

And the day came when she saw the trim figure of Utechin striding up the path from the direction of the Moscow road, stepping around the laborers who were digging trenches to stop the Germans if they should get this far east.

In the kitchen of the dacha, over glasses of Caucusus tea—she was no longer required to drink vodka, which was fortunate since she could no longer bear the medicinal smell of it—Utechin told her, “You will now be called on to commit your second killing, the first real murder of your life. Is Elena Ceniza-Bendiga willing to spend her soul for the Party in this way?”

She smiled at him. “Elena Ceniza-Bendiga is dead—she was shot in the face in the Lubyanka basement. I will be happy to give the Party anything I have that was hers.”

She thought she caught a fleeting wince of sadness in Utechin’s face; but then he went on in a businesslike tone, “You and I will travel to Cairo. The German General Erwin Rommel has driven the British Eighth Army to a point west of Tobruk, in Libya, and we believe that Rommel is being assisted by the efforts of a very elderly scholar operating from a residence in the City of the Dead below Cairo, the ancient cemetery. You will kill that old scholar.”

Elena spread her hands. “Show me the way.”

That evening at dusk they boarded an Aeroflot Tupelov ANT-35, and took off on the first leg of the journey that would take them to Baghdad, Tel Aviv, and ultimately to Cairo.

Elena had seen photographs of the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, and so when the two-engine Tupelov had at last flown west over the straight silver blade of the Suez Canal and banked south over the Nile Delta in its descent toward the Heliopolis airfield, she gasped at her first sight of the Sphinx through the airplane window.

“He has moved!” she exclaimed to Utechin, who was sitting in the seat beside her. “The Sphinx is on top of one of the pyramids!”

This seemed to alarm Utechin, who leaned over her to look down.

“Ah!” he said in evident relief as he slumped back into his seat. “No, child. That ‘pyramid’ under her chin is a support made of sandbags, thousands of them stacked up—to keep her head from falling off, if German bombs strike nearby. The three pyramids are still where they belong, west of her.”

Elena leaned forward to peer back, and now she could see that the triangular slope under the scarred stone face was of a different tan color and texture than the three ancient stone monuments that dented the blue sky farther away. Elena knew that the Sphinx was a portrait of the Pharaoh Chephren, a man; evidently Utechin had confused it with the murderous female Sphinx of Greek mythology.

“Keep faith,” muttered Utechin, apparently to himself, “and so will we.” When Elena raised her eyebrows, he said, “The scholar in the City of the Dead knows of me; but, since he does not know I am coming to him, there can be no— truth to be established—for me in Cairo, on this trip.”

But when they had landed and carried their valises out to the side-walk to flag down a taxicab, Utechin was sweating through his sport coat, in spite of the cool breeze that rattled in the palm fronds over-head; and as he climbed into the back seat of the battered cab, he handed Elena a book-sized zippered leather case.

It was so heavy that she guessed it contained a handgun.

“American .45 automatic,” he whispered to her in French as she hitched up her skirt and climbed in beside him with the case in her lap like a purse. “1911 Army Colt. You must be familiar with it from Spain. If we are cut off, cornered by anyone—use it on them.”

Elena laughed easily, for she had long since decided to walk away from the Rabkrin in Cairo. “And promiscuously use up one of my sacramental bloody murders?”

Utechin’s sweating face clenched in a frown that made him look ill. “Do as I say,” he said softly. He tapped his lapel. “I am prepared too—and if you should fail to come to my assistance, you will not have any more heartbeats than I.”

She stared at him curiously as the cab accelerated away from the curb. “But if we have killed our consciences,” Elena said, speaking more loudly to be heard over the roaring automobile engine, “surely it was because there is no God?—and if there is no God, what is to be feared in dying?”

“No God,” said Utechin, nodding rapidly as he stared out through the taxicab window at the narrow-windowed white houses. “Marx said that, but Marx was no Russian. The NKVD says that, but the NKVD is an army of witless thugs. We have never said that. We work to circumvent Him.”

“Like a bull in the arena,” said Elena, forcing herself not to smile. “Ah, you will divert Him with your capework, and leave Him blinking stupidly at empty sand while you steal around behind Him.”

“This…merriment of yours may be an appropriate posture,” Utechin said irritably; then he gave her a weak smile. “But it is certainly a trying one. Could you please put on a becoming solemnity, at least until after I’ve been able to catch up on my drinking schedule?”

Elena nodded obediently, and didn’t speak until the taxicab had squeaked to a halt at the curb in front of Shepherd’s Hotel on Port Said Street.

“Let us walk around a few blocks and view the layout of the streets before we go in,” Utechin said as he climbed out. Elena had seen the United States star emblem on B-25 bombers at the Heliopolis airfield, and now she was staring at an American jeep swerving through the traffic of trolley cars and donkey carts on the broad boulevard; and Utechin added, “It will not be American soldiers, repellent though I grant you they are, who might assail us. Watch for… Egyptians, Arabs.”

And in the crowded street Elena saw flashes of many Arabic faces—from the toothy grins of ragged brown boys crying for

“Baksheesh!” to the white beards of Moslem elders, and she was nervous—even though she knew that Machikha Nash was confined within the borders of the Soviet Union—each time she met the eyes of an Arab woman staring at her from the slit above a black veil. It occurred to her that Utechin’s target might be forewarned, and that Utechin’s head and her own too might be centered in the sights of rifles in high windows even now. She hoped she might soon find a Coptic Catholic church—with luck, the priest wouldn’t even understand the language in which she would make her lengthy Confession.

… that I have sinned exceedingly, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do…

The architecture of the city had been plaster-fronted white houses and domed mosques at the northern end, but on this street nineteenth-century European buildings had intruded among the older houses, making the traditional overhanging latticed balconies look frail.

“That is the French Embassy,” said Utechin, nodding toward the Romanesque doorway of an ornate stone building front, “covert headquarters of the French secret service. They are hand-in-glove with the British Special Operations Executive. So is the American OSS, in the American Embassy, another block down this street.”

Elena had gathered that the British SOE contained a secret core that was the Western equivalent of the Rabkrin. Among Andre Marty’s Communists there had been rumors of a vast old British operation known as Declare, and from the way Marty had especially devoted his energies to killing any British agents who seemed aware of a supernatural element in the war, Elena was confident that Declare, if it existed, was opposed to the secret Soviet cult of Machikha Nash.

They had stepped off the curb and were crossing Port Said Street, among a mixed crowd of Europeans, Egyptians, American soldiers, and half a dozen goats that were being herded by children in loin-cloths and baseball caps. Elena unzipped the leather case Utechin had handed her.

On the sidewalk she slipped her hand into the case, and her palm fit familiarly around the .45’s grip. The safety catch was up, engaged, cocked-and-locked—and she thumbed it down. Finally she took a deep breath and pointed the concealed gun at Utechin’s back. “Look,” she said.

Utechin’s face went blank when he turned around and saw her hand inside the case. He stopped walking, and leaned against a lamppost. “Explain this, please,” he said. The concealed muzzle was now pointed at his abdomen.

“We will walk into the French Embassy,” Elena said. There was a quaver in her voice, but her hand was steady. “We will surrender to their secret service. Defect.”

Utechin licked his lips. “And… why?” he asked hoarsely.

“Because we are in front of it. If we were another block down the street, we would surrender to the Americans.”

He shook his head slowly, an expression of both sadness and surprise on his damp face. “Ach, Elena, so soon! It is my fault, for not taking more time with you.” And then he said, in Russian, “Take the death now.”

A spot on her forehead stung with a sudden chill, and the breath stopped in her throat and her knees began to fold—and she realized that she must have been given a precautionary post-hypnotic order to die, as if of the gunshot that had killed her double in the Lubyanka cellar, upon hearing this Russian phrase a second time.

But though she fell hard to her knees on the pavement, she was able to raise the hidden .45 and keep it pointed at him; and the spot of chill on her forehead was now hot, as if a priest had marked the Ash Wednesday sign of the cross there with still-smoldering palm-frond ashes; and she realized that the words of the post-hypnotic order had got tangled with the words of the Ave Maria that had been droning in her head both before and after the shot had been fired— ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora en esta hora nuestra muerte—

Pray for us, sinners, now in the hour of our death.

Apparently the inadvertent parallel had disrupted the lethal grammar of the order, broken its imprinted lines like a double exposure.

Utechin hesitated, and then he abruptly crouched, falling backward as his right hand sprang up and under his lapel.

Elena hammered her gun hand downward to follow his sudden drop, and she twitched the trigger three times rapidly.

Only the first shot fired, for the recoiling slide snagged on the inside of the case—but when she brought her right hand back down into line after the recoil, she saw that Utechin was lying flat on his back, with a spreading spot of bright red blood on his white shirt over the solar plexus. His eyes blinked once, and then simply stared up at the cloudy sky.

Elena was dimly glad that she was kneeling as she stared at the body, for she was suddenly dizzy, and she was reminded of having seemed to die when the girl in the Lubyanka basement was killed. We don’t want you wasting any more of your baptized sanctity, Utechin had told her in Moscow, until you can spend it effectively. At last, after no more than three stretched-taut seconds, she forced herself to look away.

The noise had been loud enough, but, muffled by the leather case, had not obviously been a gunshot; and the fact that Elena had fallen to her knees in the same moment that Utechin did had made the pedestrians duck away, fearful of whatever had apparently knocked these two down.

Glancing up at the rooftops now to suggest the idea of a sniper, Elena scuttled on her hands and knees up the gritty stone steps and through the swinging glass doors of the Cairo French Embassy.

Once inside, she got to her feet and walked directly to the reception desk. The man behind it had got to his feet to peer past her at the street, and she waved at him to catch his attention.

“I am a Soviet agent,” she told him in French, speaking clearly though her vision was blurred with tears of a vast, almost impersonal grief, “and I have just killed my handler. I wish to defect— and to report a Nazi collaborator who has been working out of the City of the Dead here in Cairo, assisting the German General Rommel.”

And after long interrogation in Algiers, she had been recruited into Colonel Passy’s wartime Central Bureau for Information and Military Action; she met other ex-Communist agents in the BCRAM, and in 1944, by which time the French secret service had been incorporated into the Direction Generale des Services Spéciaux, she was surprised and delighted to be assigned to work with Claude Cassagnac.

The DGSS counter-Machikha team in Algiers was deliberately assembled along the same lines as the American President Wilson’s Inquiry group of 1917, which had included experts on ancient Persian languages and the Crusades, and the British Admiralty’s Room 40, which during the First World War had included a scholar of the early Church fathers and the code-breaker Ronald Knox, who had become a Catholic priest after the war. The DGSS team also included a number of physicists and geologists and an astronomer.

The result of their researches had been the bullet, lathed from a nickel-iron Shihab meteorite, which Cassagnac had fired at Machikha Nash in Berlin in June of 1945.

Now, nearly eighteen years later, Elena crushed out a cigarette in an ashtray piled with cigarette butts, and she crossed again to the window of her room at the St. Georges Hotel. The sun from over the Jebel Liban mountains east of Beirut made the sails and the seagulls glow white against the dark blue Mediterranean, and she knew that the tables on the terrace below her door would be crowded with hotel guests having breakfast. She glanced at her radiumdial wrist-watch—but Philby would not be arriving there with his Soviet handlers for hours yet.

She walked barefoot across the carpet to the bathroom, and she began brushing her long white hair without turning on the light or glancing into the mirror.

Do you want to see a monkey?

Andrew Hale had been in Berlin in 1945, doing Declare work for the looking-glass SOE; her hair had been as white then as it was now, having grown in that way right after her… three days? her week?… in the Lubyanka cellars.

She didn’t want to think of Andrew Hale, nor of what she would have to do if she met him— wasting what’s left of your baptized sanctity, and this one would surely spend any last whiff of it that might still remain—and so she thought instead of her other one, the third man in her life after Hale and Cassagnac, whom she would apparently not be permitted to kill: Kim Philby.

But her time with Philby had been in Turkey, in May of 1948, and of course Andrew Hale had been there too.

Cannibale, she had called Hale. Nous cannibales would have been fairer. We cannibals.

In the Ahora Gorge on that terrible night she too had quickly figured out that using the old Parisian clochard rhythms was the only gambit that would save her from the supernatural death that leaned hugely down out of the turning sky. The other members of her French SDECE team were either killed in the Soviet ambush or, worse, were pulled away into the sky by the ravenous djinn that had somehow been summoned down from their mountain-peak fastnesses—and because she had aligned her mental rhythms, the rhythms of her very identity, to those of the inhuman djinn, she had found herself intolerably participating in the aerial dismemberment and devouring of her fellows.

—And she had not, she admitted, been helpless in that participation. Like Andrew Hale, she could have stopped drumming and breathing and pulsing the rhythm, could have stepped out of the dance—but then she would have been just another human figure on the ground, prey for the djinn.

She had told herself that she was not responsible for the deaths of the SDECE men—that they were being killed in any case, and that she herself would have been killed if she had not… psychically flown along with the creatures that were tearing the men apart in the sky and eating them—but on that dawn, when she had at last ridden the horse all the way back across the muddy Aras plain to the clapboard Ararat Hotel in Dogubayezit, she had been convinced that she was a murderess.

She curtly told the base team at the hotel that the other operatives had all been killed and that this operation too had been a failure, and she made them pack up their radios and drive back to the pickup site in Erzurum—but she had stayed on at the hotel, alone, lying in her muddy clothes on the bed in her room, drinking cognac and watching the slow ceiling fan and desperately hoping that Andrew Hale would come to her there. She had not locked the door. She wanted to beg his forgiveness for what she had called to him last night on the mountain; and she thought that if they were together, talking, the enormity of what they had done might diminish. In Paris he had told her that he had been raised as a Catholic—perhaps he might find some way for her to assimilate what she had done: some way to take hold of the sin, voluntarily bear the weight of it, and then lay it before an outraged God in gross presumption on His mercy.

Later in the morning she had heard the motor of a jeep grind past on the dirt street under her window, but it had not stopped, and by the time she had blundered to the window and clawed the curtains away from the frame, the vehicle had driven on out of sight.

She threw herself back down across the bed, sobbing. Hale would not be coming. There was no way to diminish the magnitude of what she’d done. Man had been created in the image of God, and probably cannibalism was the “sin against the Holy Ghost,” for which there was no forgiveness in this world or the next.

She slept heavily, and when she awoke with a start in darkness she thought for several seconds that she was lying in the Lubyanka basement, shot through the head.

That nameless Moscow girl had been killed on Elena’s account. Utechin had killed the wrong girl. If Elena had died there, she might have died in sanctifying grace, not in certain mortal sin, as she was now.

All she could do to put an end to her restless self-loathing was to finish the job Utechin had mismanaged six years ago. She had neglected to cork the cognac bottle, and it had soaked the mattress, but she was able to get several more swallows out of it.

At last she sat up and fumbled around among the litter on the bedside table until she had found a box of matches. When she had lit the lamp on the table, she shook out the match and drew her gun from the holster under her mud-stiffened jacket.

It was a semi-automatic Swiss SIG, standard issue for the SDECE, chambered for the French 7.65-millimeter cartridge. She popped out the magazine that she had emptied on the mountain and dug a heavy magazine from her jacket pocket and slid it up into the grip until it clicked.

Belatedly she realized that it had been the sound of a jeep motor that had awakened her—but it didn’t matter. It would not be Andrew Hale, for he would certainly be on his way back to London by now, or to wherever it might be that he was stationed—and if it were members of her SDECE base team that had missed the pickup and come back here in the jeep, they could not stop her.

She pulled the slide back against the resistance of the recoil-spring, paused, and then let it snap forward. A cartridge was in the chamber now, and of course the safety was off. Her nostrils twitched at the smell of gun oil over the cognac fumes.

She could hear footsteps in the corridor outside her room door.

She hefted the pistol and held it up to her forehead, butt out, with her right thumb inside the trigger guard. Straight through the center of the forehead was how the Moscow girl had been shot. This gun had been tucked under Elena’s arm while she slept, and the muzzle ring was warm. Aunt Dolores, she thought, give me strength.

She heard the squeak of the doorknob and let her eyes focus past her thumb to the door. The knob was turning—and she waited, curious in spite of herself, as the door creaked open.

But the man who stepped into the room’s dim lamplight was not Andrew Hale. It was the unpleasant stuttering Britisher from Berlin, the onetime chief of Section Nine, now SIS Head of Station in Turkey—Kim Philby.

He stared past the gun butt at her left eye. “Am I interrupting?” he said.

He had spoken in English, and she forced herself to frame an answer in that language. “I’ll only be a moment,” she told him.

He smiled and slowly closed the door at his back. “I say, could this wait—half an hour? I won you in a card game last night—well, it was interrupted, but the other fellow is long gone, and I believe I did have the high hand—and—well, damn it—it does just seem too bad of you to kill yourself the moment I arrive! What do you say? Twenty minutes!—for a spot of fornication? You and I halfway did it on New Year’s Eve in 1941, proxy or vicarious or something. Hey? There’s a good girl!”

She reversed the gun in her right hand and lowered it, pointing it at him. For a moment neither of them spoke, and she was trying to figure out if this was a humanitarian gambit on his part—distract her with insult so as to have a chance to talk her out of it—or if he really had meant what he had said.

“That would be a mortal sin,” she said carefully. “Adultery, even—I happen to know you’re married, Mr. Philby.” She had also read that he suffered from a terrible stammer; but he seemed to be talking smoothly enough right now.

“Ceniza-Bendiga,” he said. He waved at the wooden chair against the plaster wall. “Do you mind if I sit? Thank you. Spanish, that is. Mortal sin! Are you a Catholic?”

“Devout,” she said with a nod.

“Ah! I’m an atheist myself, sorry. I thought you lot were down on suicide.”

“Will you do me a favor, Mr. Philby?”

“If you’ll do me one.” He smiled and held up his hands, palms out.

“Will you? This is a—” She shifted on the mattress. “A deathbed request.”

“I will,” he said levelly. “If you will.” Clearly he had meant what he had said a few moments ago.

She was sick at the idea, and at the abrupt immediacy of it. The fumy brandy surged up into the back of her throat.

But what if it’s all you can do? she thought. It is all you can do. And who are you now to treasure scruples, souvenirs? You have abdicated yourself.

She waited several seconds, but there was no providential inter-ruption. “Very well,” she whispered. She took a deep breath and went on, “So listen. I will be missing an appointment I made six years ago—breaking a promise I made. It can’t be helped, but— when I was in the Lubyanka, and it seemed that they were going to kill me, I made a promise to the Virgin Mary—she doesn’t like communism, you know. I made a vow. Will you swear to keep it for me?”

Philby shifted uneasily in his chair. “Why were you in the Lubyanka?”

“I was being trained as an agent. I was an atheist then—my mother and father were shot down in a Madrid street by the right-wing Catholic monarchists in 1931, right in front of me; and when I was twelve years old I was a wireless telegrapher with Andre Marty. But in Moscow I saw the true face of communism. Will you swear on your own mother and father to keep my vow for me?”

Philby puffed out his cheeks. “Well, that’s not really my line of territory. What was the vow?”

“I told the Virgin: ‘If you will intercede with your Son to get me out of Russia alive, I vow that on my—’ ” Elena frowned. “I wanted to give it time, selfishly wait until my youth was safely gone, I think—I said, ‘I vow that on my fortieth birthday at high noon I will light a candle for you right here in Moscow, at St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, in the heart of your enemy’s kingdom, the way you put your heel on the serpent’s head.’ And I promised her that I would—”

After several seconds Philby shook his head and raised his eyebrows. “What’s the harm of being honest now, here? On your deathbed?”

“Oh God,” Elena sighed. “I promised her that I would be a chaste wife from then on. I didn’t want to embark on it too soon, there was a young man—gone now—”

“Chaste,” said Philby impatiently, “do go on. I don’t need to hear about your tiresome young men. Whom were you going to be married to, in your old age?” Philby himself was then thirty-six.

“I vowed that I would not marry until then, and that—that I would consider marrying—I was delirious—that I would take whomsoever she might elect to show me, after I had lit the candle. You see? I was humbly placing the selection in her hands. I think I imagined Prince Myshkin.” The gun was wobbling in her grip, and she told herself that she must soon return it to its position against her forehead. “If there is a man there, in the cathedral when you light the candle… give him my regrets.”

Philby nodded. “I can do that much—no prayers. When would be your fortieth birthday?”

“April the twenty-second—in 1964.”

“My calendar is free on that day, as it happens.” Philby stared at her in evident perplexity. “You’re about to— kill yourself, but you still believe all this business?”

“I wouldn’t kill myself if I didn’t believe this business.” She shivered. “Sin has real weight.”

“What, your men dying on Mount Ararat last night?” When she didn’t answer he shook his head and laughed, clearly not yet satisfied with her situation. “You know, I’ve never understood… faith. ‘Do the stars answer? in the night have ye found comfort? or by day have ye seen gods? What hope, what light, falls from the farthest starriest way on you that pray?’ ” She had realized that he was quoting something, and now he waved deprecatingly and said, “Swinburne.”

“Yes,” she said. When he raised his eyebrows, she went on, miserably, “Yes, the stars answer. God answers.”

Philby opened his mouth, then frowned and closed it; he appeared to shiver, and when he finally spoke, it was more quietly. “What d-does H-H-He say, ch-child?”

Elena blinked tears out of her eyes. “He says, ‘Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, save Me, save only Me?’ ” She sniffed. “Francis Thompson.”

“I n-know it,” he said. “ ‘Yet I was sore adread lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.’ ” Philby seemed agitated. “Tell mmmm—tell me!—when you g-go to your s-sacrament, of C-C-Confession!—do you really have a f-firm purpose of am-amendment?”

“Yes. It might not seem possible later, but—yes. ‘To sin no more.’ ”

“And in b-baptism you were freed of the—w-weight of s-s-sin? The b-black drop in the h-human heart?”

“Yes, I was.”

“I—” He sighed and shook his head. “But for m-me that would be g-going b-back to point zz-zero! At my age—at m-my age! It’s not for m-me, my dear. Too much tie-time invested.” He slapped his open palms on the thighs of his trousers and stood up. “But sss— suicide is n-not for you—‘the Everlasting hath fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,’ you n-know. Is this doubt, do you d-doubt that your ggg—your God, will f-forgive you, as p-promised? Or is it p-plain shame? ‘I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.’ O santisima Elena!—are you s-simply ashamed to approach H-H-Him as… just one m-more sinner, as b-bad as the rest of us? You w-w-won’t play, if you c-can’t wear the halo?” He laughed gently. “You’re n-not the-that egotistical, surely?” He took a step toward her across the threadbare carpet. “Test your m-monstrous villainy, my dear. Either sh-shoot me, or give me the g-gun.” He walked toward her with his palm out.

Elena’s hand twitched, as if to fire the gun at him or turn it on herself while she still could, but when his palm was below hers she opened her trembling fingers and let the gun fall.

Quickly he popped out the magazine, and he tugged the slide back and forth several times, ejecting the round that had been in the chamber. Finally he dry-fired the gun at the ceiling, and when it had clicked harmlessly he tossed it clattering onto the floor.

In her suddenly renewed drunkenness it seemed echoingly loud.

Elena covered her face with her hands, and all at once she was sobbing at the appalling prospect of living until tomorrow, and the day after that—and she only realized that he had sat down beside her when the mattress tilted under her.

In the morning he had been gone, but he had left a note on the bedside table under her retrieved gun, signed with a hasty pendrawing of three interlocked, leaping fish. The note had been brief: On second thought, I don’t think He’ll forgive you. I’ve reloaded your SIG. (Through the roof of the mouth is better, by the bye.)

She could tell by the weight of the gun that the full magazine had been replaced, but she had truly not believed that he would actually have chambered a live round, until she roused all the chickens and dogs of Dogubayezit by blowing out the hotel window with a tentative pull of the trigger.

Yesterday evening, in the Normandy Hotel bar, Philby had said to her, I have a fucking bullet hole in my head; do take note of the fact that you have not got one in yours.

That had been before he had learned that Elena had been the one who had shot him.

She remembered lying prone in the darkness on the office building roof, seeing that familiar pouchy face in the yellow square of the bathroom window across the street, divided into fleshy quadrants by the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight. He had turned away, toward the mirror, and she had centered the cross-hairs on the back of his head, and squeezed the trigger.

Even with the silencer the shot had sounded like a hammer-blow on a door, and she had hurried away to the fire escape, mentally preparing the report she would encode and radio to the SDECE headquarters in Paris— OFFER WAS A TRAP, DISCRETIONARY VERIFICATION OF THE DECOY BECAME NECESSARY—but later when she listened to the police band to confirm the kill, she learned instead that Philby had been taken, alive, to the American University Hospital.

She should have known that his birthday-of-record would not be his real one. And she could not deny now that his offer to defect was clearly genuine; the SDECE team would exfiltrate him, and soon the service would learn that she had slept with a Soviet agent directly after the infamous 1948 catastrophe in the Ahora Gorge.

Trying to kill Philby had not been part of her orders, had not been for the defense of France—it had been sheer attempted murder, a mortal sin. The next morning, with as much “firm purpose of amendment” she could muster, she had confessed it at the St. Francis Roman Catholic Church on Hamra Street.

She tied a towel around her white hair, put on a pair of oversized sunglasses, then opened her hotel room door and inhaled the chilly sea air.

She stepped to the rail and looked down at the crowded tables under the bright red umbrellas on the terrace—and fell back against the stucco wall, her heart racing and her face suddenly cold.

Andrew Hale was sitting at one of the tables, blinking up at a waiter.

SIXTEEN: Beirut, 1963

“Will they kill thee?”

“Oah, thatt is nothing. I am a good enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust, to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know. But—but they may beat me.”

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

The waiter said, “Here’s a list. Gin… Scotch… brandy… vodka…”

Hale’s attention had been caught by the man’s first sentence, and vodka made four. “Right,” said Hale hastily, “vodka.” God! he thought; after a night of arak! Why couldn’t the fourth word have been beer? But his thudding heartbeat had instantly become more rapid, for this was the old SOE recognition code; though of course the waiter might not be a player at all, might simply have sized Hale up as a man who needed strong drink this morning. Hale squinted up against the sunlight at the clean-shaven young waiter. He appeared to be Lebanese.

“On the rocks,” Hale added.

The table was on a railed cement deck on the Mediterranean-facing side of the St. Georges Hotel; a red umbrella shaded half of the table from the pre-noon sun, but Hale had chosen one of the white-painted wrought-iron chairs in the direct sunlight. Sweating seemed to lessen his headache, and his white shirt was already clinging to him.

Hakob Mammalian had knocked at Hale’s hotel room door at about ten o’clock, an hour ago, and said that Philby wanted to meet them up the street at the St. Georges Hotel, rather than at the Normandy; and Mammalian was now standing only six yards away, at the rail overlooking the beach and the white sails on the blue sea. Hale had got perhaps four hours of sleep after the long, recorded interview. At least he couldn’t remember any dreams.

“Shall I tally the bill now, sir?” the waiter asked.

Hale frowned in thought. I’ve got to think of a contrary and then a parallel or an example, he told himself. “Rather than me pay cash now,” he said haphazardly. “Why don’t you simply bill it to the Queen.” He caught the waiter’s eye and raised an eyebrow toward Mammalian. For God’s sake, Hale thought, don’t say anything here to compromise my cover!

The waiter smiled and nodded. “Do be careful not to overindulge, sir,” he said. “If you were inebriated on the street, you would be arrested—and taken to jail. Very routine, happens with frequency.”

He stepped away from the table to take Mammalian’s order, and Hale peered after him uncertainly. Had that been the deliberate recognition signal? Had Hale just been ordered to fake drunkenness so as to be arrested, and presumably receive his long-delayed Declare briefing in the local jail—or had that simply been a friendly warning from a plain hotel employee? He would have to assume the man was an SOE operative, and that it had been deliberate.

Hale heard Mammalian order coffee and arak, and then the big Armenian was shuffling back to the table, his blue-striped gown flapping in the wind.

“He’s right,” said Mammalian as he pulled out another chair and sat down. “You shouldn’t get drunk.”

The sea breeze was pleasantly cool on Hale’s forehead, but he would have to be moving soon. He had to bolt this drink and then get out onto the Avenue des Français, where, if he had understood the waiter correctly, sûreté officers were waiting to arrest him. “A sober traitor will cost you a lot more,” Hale said, putting irritation in his voice.

“Does it sting you, valuably, to use ugly words like that?” Mammalian was staring at him curiously.

“ ‘Sober’?”

“ ‘Traitor.’ You were born in Palestine, and the service you worked for planned to kill you even before you fled, a week ago. Do you suppose that in 1948 they went looking for the SAS men in your party who had gone mad on the mountain? Well, perhaps they did—to kill them, ‘give them the truth.’ No, my friend, you are simply devoting all of your energies and recollections now to a new cause—one that will allow you to sire children in the next century, and the century after that.”

“ ‘Take the cash in hand, and waive the rest,’ ” quoted Hale, shaking his head. “Children in another century! How is all this live-forever stuff supposed to happen, precisely?”

“You are skeptical, after all that you have seen!” Mammalian bared his white teeth in a grin. “Perhaps you will become the consort of a goddess, Andrew Hale, and share in her immortality. Perhaps you will have a djinn for a body slave, who will protect you from every ill, even from age. If all else fails, you will eat a salad of enchanted this-tles, and never die. Believe me, the ‘cash in hand’ will be the most trivial of your rewards. You do a service for angels here.”

“And for Russians.”

“The angels do not distinguish among our nations.”

Seem reckless and belligerent, Hale thought. “The Russians… kidnapped one of your angels,” he said, “in 1883, didn’t they? Took it back to Moscow, moored it with drogue stones, anchors, in the Lubyanka basement and at the Soviet borders. I would think his fellows—” He remembered the thing he had seen in Berlin, and corrected himself: “ Her fellows, would look unkindly on that.”

Mammalian’s face was expressionless. “If we—when we succeed, on the mountain, this time—” He raised a hand hesitantly. “You needn’t fear that there will be injustice.”

Hale quickly looked over his shoulder, as if impatient for his vodka—for Mammalian, hungover himself, had given away more than he had meant to, and there was no advantage for Hale in seeming to have noticed.

But Hale was certain now that Mammalian’s loyalty here was to the djinn themselves, and not to the Rabkrin. And Hale wondered if Mammalian had even been a devout Communist during the Rabkrin attempt in 1948.

In fact the waiter was now striding back toward their table, carrying a tray; and neither of the seated men spoke as the two glasses and the coffee cup were set down on the glass tabletop. But as the young man was stepping away Hale called, “Another vodka here, please! And a cold Almaza beer with it to put out the fire.” He bolted the glass of vodka in two hard swallows.

The waiter nodded without looking back.

“You will be useless before noon, at this rate!” exclaimed Mammalian in dismay. “And Charles Garner drinks arak!”

Hale’s nose stung with the vodka fumes, and his eyes were watering. “I’m worse’n useless now,” he said, carefully pretending to be more drunk than he was. “And I don’t wanna be Charles Garner. I wanna be Tommo Burks.”

Mammalian frowned and stirred his coffee, and Hale recognized, from the other side now, the agitation of a handler dealing with a skittish agent. Mammalian appeared to decide something, and stared straight at Hale. “Have you ever,” he asked, “met a woman, an Arabic woman, with a string of gold rings around her neck? She would not have spoken.”

Not bad, Hale thought. Last night I didn’t bother to mention the woman I saw by Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin in ’45, but I do remember her, and it’s interesting to learn that she figures somehow. Apparently I was likely to meet her!

But he had to get onto the street, get his briefing, before he met Philby.

He stood up, so unsteadily that the table rocked and nearly spilled Mammalian’s coffee and arak. “I won’t—incidentally—work with Kim Philby. See. He told the Russians—he told you—where my SAS team was going to be, in the Ararat Gorge. The Ahora Gorge. Know, O Armenian, that I quit. Sod you all.”

He walked quickly away between the other tables, artfully bumping one with his hip; he heard a glass roll and then break on the cement deck as he reached the top of the stairs that led down to the hotel driveway; a chair’s legs scraped as it was pushed back, and hurried footsteps were coming up from behind him, but two uniformed sûreté officers were even now tapping briskly up the steps from below.

Hale deliberately snagged his shoe behind his calf and tumbled forward, driving his shoulder into the midsection of the officer on the right; somehow all three of them wound up sitting and bumping and flailing down the steps to the parking lot pavement, and before Hale could even pull his legs down off the bottom two steps, he felt the ring of a handcuff close on his wrist and ratchet shut.

While the policemen were barking questions at him in French— through the ringing in his ears he caught the word ivresse, drunkenness—Hale squinted back up the stairs; but Mammalian had apparently decided not to interfere in a civil arrest. The only person peering down was a tanned woman in big sunglasses and a towel wrapped around her head.

The Beirut Municipal Jail was in one of the modern buildings at the Place des Martyrs, only seven blocks south off of Weygand Street, and when the police car rocked to a halt in an alley beside the Direction of Police, Hale was pulled out of the back seat and marched in through a side door.

Briefly he glimpsed a crowded yellow waiting room, with civilians and uniformed officers standing in lines before a row of windows under fluorescent lights, and then he was pushed along a narrow beige-painted corridor and around a corner.

This stretch of the corridor was momentarily empty except for a brown-haired Caucasian man in a damp white shirt, who stood with his hands open at his sides and stared straight at Hale with something like apprehension; and in the same instant the two sûreté officers let go of Hale’s arms and took hold of the stranger’s, and a door was pulled open at Hale’s right.

In the dimly lit office beyond the door, a bald man in a jacket and tie beckoned to Hale impatiently. “Here’s a bloody list,” he whispered, “one-two-three-four.”

Hale heard a scuffle ahead of him and looked up in time to see one of the sûreté officers drive a fist into the face of the brown-haired stranger who was now being led away. Hale took a long step sideways into the office.

The bald man winced at the sound of the blow as he pulled the door closed behind Hale.

“They hit him?” the man asked. “Sit down,” he said, waving toward a wooden chair beside a gray metal desk. The smell of hot coffee drew Hale’s attention to a chugging urn on a nearby table even before the man said, “Or help yourself to coffee.”

Hale nodded and stepped to the table, and he looked around as he held a ceramic cup under the tap—the room, lit by an electric lamp on the desk, had no windows—and he sat down in the chair while the bald man turned a key in the door lock and walked around to the other side of the desk.

“Yes,” said Hale, setting the steaming cup on the bare desk top. “They hit him.”

“I am sorry.” The man shrugged and smiled. “Verisimilitude!”

Hale nodded sourly and touched his own left cheek, wondering when and how he would be given an identical blow. Soon, probably, since bruises change appearance quickly.

“Somebody will shortly be bringing in a photo of his face,” Hale guessed.

“I expect so—well, a drawing, probably. To make it match. You gave the Rabkrin all the ’48 math?”

Hale only became aware that his shoulders were stiff with tension now that his muscles began to relax. “That was the orders,” he said, watching the man carefully. “Yes, I gave them everything.”

The man nodded. “I’m heartsick,” he seemed to say, and Hale’s face was abruptly cold; but the man quickly added, “I’m sorry, that’s my name, H-A-R-T-S-I-K. Polish. You’re Hale, I know. Pleased to meet you. No, you did the right thing, all that math was bad. And if you gave them some extra stuff too, we can afford it; it’ll just enhance the look of the old math, and with luck Declare is within a week or so of shutting down for good.”

“They’re going to destroy the Shihab stone,” Hale said. “They may be on the mountain now, to get it. Mammalian said it’s still up in the gorge, on Ararat.”

“They’re welcome to it, now,” said Hartsik. “Two months ago we sent a team of undercover agents up there to make rubber castings from it. They had to go up with a truck, and winches, to make it seem that their purpose was to retrieve the stone itself. They did get the rubber molds safely down, though several of the men were killed by the Turk oscars.” He raised his eyebrows. “More verisimilitude—the Rabkrin was strongly led to believe that we went up to fetch the stone. It’s been guarded, since.”

More deaths on my account, thought Hale. “What,” he asked wearily, “did I do wrong? In ’48,” he added, seeing Hartsik’s incomprehension.

“Oh! Convex versus concave. You mistook the mold for the bullets.” He pulled open a drawer of the desk and picked out a couple of irregular gray metal balls, which proved to be lead when he spilled them from his palm onto the desktop and they thudded and didn’t bounce. “These were cast from the mold they took on Ararat in November.”

One of the balls wobbled across and clinked against Hale’s coffee cup. He slowly reached out and picked it up between his thumb and forefinger. It was egg-shaped, and though it was heavy it forcibly reminded him of the black glass pellets he had found at Wabar and had later thrown down in the bomb shelter below Ararat.

Peering more closely at the thing, he noticed that it was incised with two fine equator lines at right angles, one around the middle and one around the ends.

“Three-dimensional crosses,” said Hartsik, “or wheels buggered out of usefulness by being folded into three dimensions, if you like, completed—on an oval, which is a sphere with two internal hubpoints, two foci. Mathematical severance of the geometric core. It’s the experience and expression of end-of-message, for djinn, and it will impose shut-down if it’s delivered spinning clockwise fast enough to match their own rotation, so that it becomes an integrated part of them. They can’t help but take it in—they’re hypnotized by right angles and ovals, like the shape of an ankh. Morbid of them, really.”

“If—my team—had been able to blow up the stone—”

“It would have been useless. For one thing, the open bubbles on the stone wouldn’t have created reciprocal balls, just… bumps, even if they struck impressionable mud. These leaden balls have been finished, trimmed. Djinn cast this shape when they die, they become hundreds of these balls, of all sizes, made out of whatever’s at hand; it’s as if they crystallize terminally into this configuration. The concave impressions in the Shihab stone are just the molten stone’s plastic response to the death-shape. You know what the djinn tend to be made of, from moment to moment—wind, dust, snow, sand, agitated water, swarms of bugs, hysterical mobs. All that stuff is already thoughts in fluid motion. You need to intrude a new memory—a seed-crystal, the physical experience of death.” He opened another drawer and hiked out a half-full bottle of Laphroaig Scotch. “Your exploded stone would have done no good—but a plain chicken’s egg, with the crossed-parallel lines scratched into the shell, might have worked, if you’d thrown it up in the air so that it was spinning.” He waved the bottle. “Purify your coffee?”

Hale was dizzy with the vodka he had bolted half an hour ago, and he shook his head.

“I’m to bring— those,” he said, waving at the lead balls, “up the gorge, this time? Will we be going all the way up to the Ark itself?” He was still depressed at the thought that the djinn were occupying Noah’s vessel.

“Well, it’s not the Ark, it seems,” Hartsik said, clunking the bottle down on the desk; “not Noah’s ship.”

“It’s not?” Hale was surprised at the extent to which this news cheered him. “You’re sure?”

“We’ve been busy on all this since you’ve been in storage. The situation has been clarified by study of overflight photos and a couple of furtive expeditions. In ’43 the Americans were flying provisions from the U.S. air base in Tunisia to the Soviet base in Brivan, and Ararat was right in the flight path, and we’ve got hold of films the pilots took; and then the Geodetic Institute of Turkey did an aerial survey in ’59, and our Turkish station was able to get prints of the relevant area. The American National Security Agency even consented to what appeared to be a most-secret request from the Foreign Office, and sent along some recent photos taken by their Ryan ‘Firebee’ drone. Of course, even with the Foreign Office the NSA is circumspect—a photo of Ararat isn’t intrinsically secret, but the mere fact of an overflight photo-survey of that area, the Russian– Turkish–Iranian border, is; and they often employ less-than-their-best photographic equipment on such flights because anybody can deduce the specifications of the camera that was used, by examining the photographs—resolution and instantaneous-field-of-view and so on. Still, altogether we’ve been able to establish that a formation in the Anatolian Akyayla range, some twenty miles southeast of Ararat, is probably the real, Biblical Ark. It wasn’t visible in the wartime photos—we believe it was exposed by the earthquake in ’48.” Hart-sik gave an uncertain wave. “Which you doubtless recall.”

Hale ignored the mention of the earthquake. “Twenty miles south?” He shook his head slowly. “But… what’s the thing Mammalian saw on Ararat?”

“Well—according to the old Arabic Kitab al-Unwan, at least— the Devil, or Iblis as the Arabs call him, survived the Flood because of clinging to the tail of the ass, who was in the Ark; and some rabbinical writers claimed that the giant Og, king of Bashan, saved himself by hanging onto the ship’s roof eaves. We think that when the Flood started”—Hartsik shrugged deprecatingly—“something malignant had a boat of its own, and hooked a tow-rope onto the Ark.”

“And ran aground on Ararat and cut the tow-line, while the real Ark went down with the floodwaters and landed farther south.”

“Exactly.”

Hale was glad that Noah, at least, was safely out of this. “But what am I in all this?” he asked. He remembered the djinn at Ain al’ Abd saying, This is the Nazrani son. “Who is my father?”

Hartsik sighed. “More relevant is who is your—” he began, but he was interrupted by a knock at the hallway door. “Excuse me.” He stood up and crossed to the door, his hand darting inside his tweed jacket. In Arabic he said, “Who is it?”

From the hallway a man’s voice replied, “Farid, Hartsik.”

Hartsik turned the key in the lock and stepped back, then relaxed and let his hand fall to the desktop when a short man in a blue Lebanese sûreté uniform stepped in and closed the door behind him. Hale saw that the Arab was holding a childish pencil drawing of a man’s face with a ring drawn below the left eye. The Arab’s eyes narrowed to slits as he gave Hale a grin that exposed many gold teeth. “Smite you now,” he said in English.

“Don’t put the whiskey away,” Hale told Hartsik. Then he turned around in his chair to face the Arab, and he closed his eyes. “Right,” he said through clenched teeth. “Go.”

For a full two seconds nothing happened, and Hale was about to open his eyes in a squint when the man’s bony fist abruptly crashed against his left cheekbone. Hale’s head snapped back, and for a moment his headache, and nausea induced by the metallic taste of the impact, made thought impossible; finally he took a deep breath, swallowed, and opened his eyes. His left eye was blinking rapidly and was too full of tears for him to see out of it.

The fist had been turning as it hit, and Hale could feel the sharp burn of a cut below his eye and a hot trickle of blood running down his cheek.

“Too hard,” said the Arab. “Other man not bleed.”

“Well then, go hit him again,” said Hartsik impatiently in Arabic. “Now get out of here.”

The Arab bowed and left the office, and Hartsik closed the door and turned the key. “Your double is being questioned,” he said as he crossed to the desk and resumed his seat opposite Hale. “You’ll get a transcript of the interrogation, but he’s been coached to say he’s Charles Garner, an expatriate British journalist, and to deny being in Beirut for any purposes other than business and dissipation. We happen to know that one of the clerks here is in the pay of the Soviets, and that clerk has been called in to work on his day off, so that Mammalian will be told by an eyewitness that you revealed nothing and were told nothing.”

Hartsik was holding the bottle over Hale’s coffee cup, but Hale twitched his fingers at it, and when the other man handed it to him he tipped the bottle up for a liberal mouthful. After he had swal-lowed it, he opened his mouth to inhale the warm fumes.

“Who is my father?” Hale said thickly.

“Harry St. John Philby,” said Hartsik. “Kim Philby is your half-brother.”

Hale’s breath had stopped—but a moment later he nodded slowly, remembering the times he had dreamed of Kim Philby, and had seemed to hear Philby’s voice in his head. Had Philby suspected this? Our Hajji which art in Amman… “He,” Hale said unsteadily, “the old man, he—raped my mother—” Tears were running down his cheek from his left eye.

“Apparently,” said Hartsik, “not. Old Philby was the British political agent in the court of King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan, in Amman, just on the other side of the Jordan River from Jerusalem, where your mother’s religious order was working in a British Army hospital; and by all reports he was, er, handsome and charming. Thirty-seven years old at the time, probably quite a—well. St. John seems to have been troubled by the fear that Christianity might be… real, the true story. Specifically he was afraid of Roman Catholicism, with all its… nasty old relics and sacraments and devotions, the whole distasteful Irish and Mediterranean air of it. He apparently thought that if he could persuade a so-called bride of Christ to forsake her vows—seduce her, I mean—”

Hale nodded impatiently. “I didn’t suppose he tried to force wealth on her.”

“Right. Well, he thought this would disprove the nun’s whole faith, you see, expose it as a morbid but harmless hypocrisy—like citing Popes who have had illegitimate children. I do wonder how Catholics justify—”

“Infallible, not impeccable,” snapped Hale; and he wondered why he was bothering to defend his forsaken old faith at all. “The Russians want both of St. John’s sons up on the mountain—working together this time. Why?”

“Because St. John’s dalliance with your mother was a very costly mistake for him—and for the Russians. Young Kim was supposed to be a human emissary to the djinn, taking the long-dormant job over from the Arab royalty—the son of King Saud relinquished an ancestral rafiq diamond to Kim, in 1919, when Kim was seven.”

“Rafiq?” said Hale, puzzled. “Do you mean in the Bedu sense? An introducer or guarantor?”

“Right, a member of the other tribe, who’ll vouch for you. Kim was supposed to be this person; and even now the diamond serves its rafiq purpose. Kim was given the djinn sacrament when he was an infant, deliberately, by his father. St. John received it by accident—he was born in Ceylon, and on that day a streak of light like a comet shot south over the Bay of Bengal and lit up several Ceylonese villages—but after that St. John was baptized, which blunted the non-human grace of it. St. John made sure that Kim was never baptized.”

“Uh,” said Hale, “djinn sacrament?”

“The splitting?” Hartsik raised his eyebrows, then shook his head in disappointment. “Huh. You remember the story in First Kings, about the two women who came before King Solomon? They had a live baby and a dead baby, and each woman claimed the live one was hers. According to the Bible, Solomon called for a sword and offered to cut the baby in half.”

“Yes. It always seemed implausible to me—that the lying woman would agree to that, would say, ‘Yes, cut him in half.’ ”

“Well, sure—because actually Solomon didn’t call for a ‘sword’ to settle the argument. The old copyists put in the word sword because it seemed to make more sense than the word that was in the oldest manuscripts—it began with the Hebrew letters cheth and resh, as sword does, but it was a neologism—paleologism, I suppose—a combination of blasphemy and destruction and potter’s wheel, which are all spelled similarly.”

A potter’s wheel, thought Hale—a changing form, rotating. “A djinn,” he said. “Solomon called for a djinn.”

“Right. Apparently Solomon really was able to confine the djinn, abbreviate and summarize their tumultuous thoughts down to something he could pop into a jug and then seal with”—he pointed at the lead balls on the desk—“a threaded cluster of those. Threaded, see? So that they’d have to be rotated, assimilated, for the djinn to get out; and assimilating those would kill the thing. In any case, if you expose a tabula rasa infant to the attention of a djinn, there’s a bond formed—neither side can help it, the child has no defensive mental walls yet, and the djinn is no more able to not look into the child’s eyes than water can not run downhill. The djinn almost adopts the child, recognizes it as family. Djinn apparently perceive humans as autistic—”

Hale suppressed a wince, remembering having shared that perception in the Ahora Gorge.

“—but they can tell that a baby is new—it’s not the child’s fault that it can’t express anything. Now this procedure, this sacrament, is fine for inter-species relations, but it’s hard on the child—the shock of it polarizes the child’s mind, as if you were to freeze a glass of gin and tonic—you’d wind up with liquid gin and solid tonic, right? The child becomes two children; that is, the child is able to be in two places at once, literally.” He shrugged. “It’s not so implausible that the lying woman in the Biblical story was willing to settle for half of such a split.”

“Jesus. This was done to Kim Philby?”

“Very shortly after his birth in India, yes. And until he was ten years old he was verifiably able to be in two places at once, and he seemed destined to be the rafiq to the djinn. But then St. John had to go and father an illegitimate baby—you—who was born on Kim Philby’s tenth birthday. December thirty-first, both of you, though your birthday has always been given as January sixth, so as not to rouse Philby’s suspicions, and he has always claimed January first as his own. But you were both born on the same day in the solar year, you see? The night sky was the same again on your birthday as it had been on Philby’s, and the djinn in their literal way confused you with Philby. The two of you became the polarized pair, and Philby wasn’t able to be in two places at the same time anymore.”

Again there was a knock at the office door; and when Hartsik got up and unlocked it to let Farid in, the Arab said, “I now smite the other man too hard. He bleeds more than this one.”

Hartsik stamped his foot on the floor. “For God’s sake, Farid! Very well, hit this fellow again, carefully, and then get out of here.” He glanced at Hale and shrugged. “I do apologize, old man.”

Hale stared at the Arab in disbelief. “No,” he told Hartsik. “I’ll just smear blood around.”

Hartsik shook his head. “This has to be perfect, I’m sorry. Mammalian will be very suspicious in any case—you must be a precise match for the man who’s being interrogated.”

Hale sighed deeply and turned toward Farid, bracing himself again. “If this becomes necessary one more time,” he told the Arab tightly, “I’ll smite you, I promise.”

“Has to be perfect!” protested Farid. “Hold still, please.”

Hale closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, and the fresh, hard blow on his already bruised cheekbone rocked his head and brought bile to the back of his throat; and he had to lower his head and breathe spittily through his mouth to keep the rainbow glitter of unconsciousness from filling his vision.

He didn’t see Farid leave, but over the ringing in his ears he heard the door click shut.

Hale took a deep breath and rocked his head back to blink at Hartsik out of his right eye. The man was relocking the door. “Does Philby know?” Hale asked thickly. “That he and I are half-brothers?”

“Not that we know of. He might well suspect that St. John had an illegitimate child, and that the birth ruined Kim’s prepared destiny; broke it in half.”

“Broke it. So Philby and I are two halves of one person.”

“Well, in a sense.” Hartsik walked back to his chair behind the desk and sat down. “We suspect that you’ve been able to hear each other’s thoughts, in the season when the sky has assumed the definition of you; and probably you dream each other’s dreams then. And you do appear to—” Hartsik paused, awkwardly.

“Don’t hesitate,” Hale said, “to add insult to injury.”

“Well, Philby appears to have got—this is imprecise, you understand, armchair speculation—he appears to have got all the family feeling, the—practically obsession, in his case—with hearth-and-home, parents and wife and children. He’s been married three times, and he’s got five children. He has, though, no comprehension of loyalty, duty. Those qualities all seem to have flowed your way.”

“And the Russians want—because the djinn require—the entire rafiq to be present.”

“That’s it. You were both there in the gorge in ’48, but not working together. They couldn’t see you properly. This time they will open their gates to the two of you—and you will kill them.”

“How?” Hale waved at the lead balls on the table. “Shoot them with these?”

“Yes—a lot of them, cast in a much smaller scale. Birdshot caliber. Several shops in Beirut are now manned with clerks who will sell you prepared shot shells and an American derringer, chambered for the American .410 shell and rifled to the right so that the pellets will emerge in a pattern that’s turning clockwise as it expands, to match the spinning of the djinn if you fire upward. The djinn will assimilate the shot pellets—which is to say, assimilate the experience of death. Dying, they will no doubt throw spontaneous egg-shapes of their own, made of mountain stone or whatever is at hand, and ideally a chain-reaction will ensue. You will buy several boxes of shells—but you must save one shell for Philby.”

Theodora had mentioned this, but Hale had not known then that Philby was his half-brother. “What about his protections?” Hale asked, mainly just to slow this discussion. “His Achilles-heel date isn’t due to come round again for nearly another year.”

“The protections aren’t against self-injury. You are virtually him, in this context; that will be especially true on Mount Ararat.”

The other half of me, Hale thought. The hearth-and-home half of me. “Very well,” he said unsteadily, “I’ll shoot him.” He may be my brother, he told himself, but Philby is still the man who betrayed my men in the gorge. I can shoot him for that.

“You are not to kill him. Do please pay attention. You are not on any account to kill Philby, even to save yourself. You are to shoot him in the back, from a sufficient distance so that the shot will penetrate widely around his spine but not be focused in any kind of tight pattern. We certainly don’t want the ‘rat-hole’ effect! The goal is to leave him able to walk away, to Moscow, with at least one pellet in his flesh that cannot be removed surgically.”

Hale’s arms were suddenly cold. “She’s a ghul,” he whispered, using the Arabic word for djinn who haunt graveyards and eat the dead in their graves, extracting up through the soil as souvenirs any bits of metal—rings, gold teeth—that the cadavers might have contained. “A ghulah,” he corrected himself, using the feminine form.

“Very good, Mr. Hale! Yes, she is. And when—”

Hale remembered Mammalian’s question this morning. “And she sometimes appears as an Arabic woman with a string of gold rings around her neck, right? I’ve met her. And since 1883 she has been the guardian angel of Russia.”

“Machikha Nash, the Rabkrin call her. Yes. And—”

“And!” interrupted Hale, “if Philby goes to Moscow, after this— and I presume he’ll be given no choice—he’ll eventually die there. He’ll be buried in a Moscow cemetery.”

Hartsik’s eyes narrowed in a smile. “Ex-act-ly. And the guardian angel will not neglect to devour him, and to draw up, in her spiral way, the metal that is in him, including at least one of these shot pellets. And she will thus assimilate into herself the shape of djinn death.” He sat back. “And she will die, and the Soviet Union will lose its guardian angel. I can’t imagine the U.S.S.R. surviving Philby by more than three or four years.”

Hale recalled what Prime Minister Macmillan had said six days ago: I suppose we can’t simply shoot spies, as we did in the war— but they should be discovered and then played back in the old double-cross way, with or without their knowledge—never arrested. And Hale thought that Macmillan would be pleased with the way Theodora had orchestrated this use of Kim Philby.

It seemed to call for a drink. Hale picked up the Laphroaig bottle and took another aromatic mouthful from the neck of it. “In London,” he said hoarsely, “I was told that Philby does not want to participate in this expedition to Ararat; that I’ll have to threaten him to get him to go along. What’s the basis for his reluctance?”

“That’s right. His father—your father—died, here in Beirut, a little more than two years ago. I’m, uh, sorry.”

“Stop it.” Hale could hardly remember the text of The Empty Quarter, which his father had written; and that book was his only link to the old man. Any feeling of… loss, here, he reminded himself, would be sheer affectation. But he did remember standing on the steep escarpment at the windy Edge-of-the-Wold when he had been a boy, looking down at the roofs of Evesham and the River Isbourne on the plain below the Cotswolds highlands, and speculating that his father was a missionary priest “somewhere east o’ Suez,” and imagining how the two of them might one day meet. And then he remembered walking across the grassy quad at the University College of Weybridge on many late afternoons in the 1950s, picturing an eventual reunion with Elena. How shabbily these fond dreams work out, he thought—and he was glad that Farid had hit him again, for he was afraid that some of the tears leaking from his swollen left eye were tears of purest self-pity.

“What did Philby’s father have to do with it?” he asked harshly.

Hartsik took Hale’s cue. “Philby’s father was always very protective of Kim; clearly he blamed himself—altogether justly—for having crippled the boy’s standing in the supernatural world by indulging his own—his—”

“Lust for my mother.”

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it. Now old St. John saved the life of a fox in ’32, in the Empty Quarter desert, the Rub’ al-Khali—his Bedouins were going to kill it, but St. John intervened and set it free. He may have been able to tell somehow that this particular fox contained a djinn, who had been abridged down into this form—in any case, it did, and in gratitude the djinn gave St. John certain powers over foxes—even over fox furs. Several times St. John used this power to protect Kim. When Kim was a war correspondent in Spain in 1936, St. John gave him a mad-looking Arab coat with a fox-fur collar, and he told Kim to wear it whenever he was in peril, especially on his birthday. Kim still has certain magical protections, as you may too, but they become transparent on his birthday— vos anniversaire. And sure enough, on December thirty-first of 1937, Kim was in a car that was hit with an artillery shell; Kim was wearing the fox-fur coat, and he came through with a scratch, though the men with him were all killed—and St. John, who was in Alexandria at the time, was knocked down, bleeding from the ears. Neither of them was seriously hurt, you see—the fox-fur magic dissipated the blow.”

“I assume that protection has been gone since 1960, when the old man died.”

“Well, it’s gone now. But Philby didn’t really lose it until three months ago, in late September of last year. On Easter of ’62, he got hold of a fox cub—he named it Jackie, and kept it in his apartment in the Rue Kantari here. The animal reportedly liked whiskey, and would sometimes suck on the stem of a pipe. And Philby was still gung-ho to go along on the Rabkrin expedition to Ararat, to become at last the full-fledged rafiq to the djinn. And then, on September twenty-eighth, precisely on the second anniversary of his father’s original death, someone pushed the fox off the balcony of Philby’s apartment while he wasn’t home. The animal died, and Philby spent two days weeping drunk, and then he began surreptitiously trying to get out of the expedition; he wrote to The Observer, the paper he writes articles for, asking for London leave—and he’s been trying to defect to France—and if the SIS offers him any kind of immunity deal, he will want to leap at it.”

Defect to France, thought Hale; that must be why Elena is in Beirut. But why did she try to kill Philby?

Don’t even think about her, he told himself. “Easter of last year, Philby got the fox?” he said, forcing himself to concentrate on what Hartsik had said. “A good day for rising from the dead, I suppose. Where had the old man’s ghost been, in the intervening year and a half?”

“Haunting the Bashura cemetery, where he was buried—only about three blocks south of here on the Rue de Basta. St. John was a convert to Islam, you know—what the Turks call a ‘Burma,’ which is to say a turncoat, not someone to be trusted. According to Arab folklore, two angels, Munkir and Nakir, visit a man in his grave right after his burial and quiz him on his faith—if he acknowledges Allah, they let him rest in peace; but if he believes another faith to be true, they thrash him with iron maces until his cries are heard ‘from east to west, except by men and djinn.’ ”

Hale smiled. “Did a lot of dogs howl, locally, after St. John was buried?”

“We didn’t notice. But the SIS Beirut station picked up a heavy traffic on the service bandwidth; it was en clair, but they thought it must be code because it was all nursery rhymes—‘the man in the moon came down too soon,’ ‘but when she got there the cupboard was bare,’ ‘how many miles to Babylon’—that kind of thing. The SIS triangulated the signal and found that it seemed to originate in the Bashura cemetery, but they could never find a transmitter, and the signal faded after a month, and they blamed the vagaries of the Heaviside Layer; but we in Declare knew that it was St. John’s ghost, catching hell from the Moslem angels.”

“I wonder what faith he believed was the true one.”

“Maybe your mother is laughing in her grave,” Hartsik agreed magnanimously.

“So what would the fox have provided, in this Rabkrin expedition, that Philby cannot do without?”

“The same thing as always—dissipation of a blow, sharing an injury, taking the brunt of it, even; and old St. John’s guilt was so strong that he never refused. Kim loved his father, which is to say that he needed him; needed him to take Kim’s punishments, mainly. You see, becoming the rafiq to the djinn will be an ordeal. Kim is not properly split, because of your divisive birth, and in the ceremony on the mountain he will be called on to face one of the djinn, eye to eye, be recognized by it. The old sacrament. He didn’t fear this in ’48, because he was wearing his fox-fur and his father was in Riyadh. Even four months ago he was eager to try Ararat again, because he could bring along the live fox that contained his father’s identity—if anyone’s mind was to be broken, it would be good old long-suffering St. John’s. But now Philby is alone—and he’s afraid that the sacrament, undiluted, will leave him half-witted, or insane.”

“Did Declare kill the fox?”

“No. Guy Burgess did, acting for the Rabkrin. The Rabkrin would prefer that their rafiq to the djinn be a little simpleminded; and Philby is too sneaky and ambitious by half. Burgess has always been Philby’s handler for the Rabkrin—he understands him, having known Philby since they were schoolmates at Cambridge; Philby used to call him ‘your Demoncy,’ because his full name is Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess. And Burgess has undergone the djinn sacrament too.”

“He has? I had the idea he grew up in England.”

“That’s right, in Hampshire. But his father was born in Aden and was on the staff of the rear admiral in Egypt during the First World War. And apparently his father was ‘embraced by a piece of tender air’ at some point in those eastern lands—he requested early retirement in ’22 and returned to his family in Hampshire, but two years later young Guy was awakened in the middle of the night by his mother’s screams, and he got up and burst into his parents’ bedroom.” Hartsik pursed his lips. “The house was dark. He was thirteen years old. His father had expired in the midst of sexual inter-course with his mother—Guy’s mother was pinned beneath the corpse, and it may have been simply that that had set her screaming—but young Guy could see over her head, out the window his father must have been facing, and the boy found himself eye to eye, exchanging recognition, with the far-traveling ‘piece of empty air’ that had followed Guy’s father all the way from Egypt to Hampshire: a djinn, perhaps not bothering to assume a completely human aspect.” Hartsik shrugged. “Burgess is now a hopeless alcoholic, and a flagrant homosexual.”

Hale’s eyebrows were raised, and he was remembering, with some sympathy now, the rude drunk he had met at the Turkish– Soviet border in 1948. “Hard to blame him.”

“Well, really. Burgess apparently derived no pleasure from being able to be in two places at once—he seems not to have had much control of his double, which probably embodied his Eton-and-England loyalties. The double nearly took over after the Molotov– Ribbentrop non-aggression pact in ’39. Finally Burgess simply ran over his double, in Dublin, during the war—drove a car over the thing. After that, there was nothing left of Burgess but alcoholism, homosexuality, and petulance.” Hartsik shrugged. “Many have prospered in the espionage trade with no more.”

Hale opened his mouth to say something, but was stopped by a knock on the office door; and even with his aching, swollen eye, he managed to give Hartsik a ferocious scowl as the man got up from the desk again.

It was Farid, this time carefully carrying a steaming cup. “Now they have thrown coffee onto the fellow’s shirt,” Farid explained.

Hale thought of his hours-long confession last night to Mammalian. For your penance, he told himself bleakly, take two blows to the face and a cup of coffee down your shirt. And I’ll be lucky if that’s the extent of it, here or on Ararat.

“Tell them I said to take it easy, for God’s sake,” said Hartsik shrilly. “Mr. Hale, I feel terrible about this—”

Hale just hiked his chair around to face Farid. “Get it right,” he said through clenched teeth.

The Arab bent over and carefully splashed gouts of the hot coffee onto several areas of Hale’s white shirt. Hale breathed deeply through flared nostrils and made no sound as the hot coffee scalded his stomach. At last Farid stood up, frowning and swirling the coffee that was left in the cup. Hale restrained himself from stretching out his leg and kicking the cup up into the man’s face.

“An artist should know when to walk away,” said Hartsik tightly. “Go.”

After Farid had bobbed back out into the hall and pulled the door closed, Hartsik did not sit down again. “I’ll tell you the rest briefly, before those sûreté decide to break that poor man’s legs. If your threat to Philby is effective, and he agrees to continue with the Rabkrin operation to Ararat, you will keep your wristwatch set to the correct local time; if Philby refuses, or if three days go by without a clear decision from him, you will set your watch six hours off—and then Kim Philby will find that his next glass of gin has been flavored with a poison that will get past any magical protections, birthday or no birthday. Holy water and—well, you’re Catholic, aren’t you?—you don’t want to know. At any rate, the old Rabkrin recognition phrase is: ‘O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?’” and the answer is—”

“ ‘Return, and we return,’ ” said Hale. “ ‘Keep faith, and so will we.’ ” He stared bleakly up at Hartsik. “Philby must have known that since he was a child—because I have.”

Hale was hurriedly shown photographs of the room in which his double was being interrogated, and then photographs of the officers who were asking the questions—a cup had been drawn in over the hand of the one who had thrown coffee on the prisoner. After that Hale was given a scrawled transcript of the questioning session and was made to read it several times. He had to admire the way “Andrew Hale” had stuck to his cover story—and the script was good, with the sûreté gradually becoming convinced that this really was just some British journalist named Charles Garner. To judge from the transcript, the sûreté officers had even been gruffly apologetic at the end.

At last Farid led into Hartsik’s office the man who had pretended to be Hale. Hale stood up, wondering who this unlucky Declare operative was. Looking at the man’s face was like looking into the forty-five-degree intersection of a pair of mirrors—Hale winced to see a duplicate of the jagged cut in his own left cheek, and the extent of the silvery bruise under his eye. He was even disoriented for a moment when he licked his lips and the other face didn’t do it too.

“I owe you a drink, when all this is over,” Hale said to the man.

“Not arak,” said his double.

“Right.” Hale was aware of being drunk, though the hour could not yet be noon, and he bit his tongue against the urge to ask the man if he had heard from Elena.

“This mistreated gentleman,” said Hartsik, waving at Hale’s double, “will stay here in my office until nightfall, and then leave in Arab dress, with his face concealed. In the meantime, one of the Rabkrin team has come to the station here to take you back to your hotel.” He stared at Hale. “It’s the one called Kim Philby.”

Hale nodded. “I know what to say to him.”

Hartsik unlocked the door and swung it open. “We won’t speak again,” he said quietly as Hale stepped out into the hall; “if you get into unmapped territory, improvise.”

Hale nodded, as much to the two sûreté officers who stood in the hall as in acknowledgment of Hartsik’s remark; and then he was escorted back down the hall to the yellow-painted waiting room. The police did not hold his arms now—Charles Garner had officially proven to be a harmless drunk.

Kim Philby was leaning against the wall by the alley door. He was wearing a sport coat and a tie, but his pouchy face was spotted and pale, and he was frowning.

My half-brother, thought Hale as he walked away from the police, toward the door.

“I was t-told it was you,” Philby said. He peered at Hale’s face. “They d-did m-mess you up, rather, didn’t they? There’s no bail to be p-paid—apparently they feel that your mistreatment here has been pa-pa-payment enough. I’d have said you rated another biff or two, but the sûreté and I d-don’t always see eye to eye.” He waved toward the wire-mesh glass door. “We’ll walk. I was also t-told you’re likely to be d-drunk. You can walk, can’t you?”

“I can walk.”

When they had stepped down to the alley pavement and crossed to the far sidewalk, Philby began talking in a low voice that barely reached Hale’s ringing ears. “Your indulgence of t-temper and intemperance th-this morning may have caused this operation to be can-can- canceled,” he said, and Hale thought there was a note of suppressed satisfaction in his voice. “You had better h-hope otherwise, because I don’t m-mind telling you that Mammalian will simply v-v-verify you if he does abort it, casually as swatting a fly. You were always a blundering f-f-fool, Hale, but this—”

Hale was suddenly very tired, and the prospect of walking a mile or so with Philby in this hectoring mode was beyond bearing. Brace him now, Hale thought, if only to change his tone.

“O Fish,” Hale interrupted, “are you constant to the old covenant?”

Philby stopped walking, and Hale had to halt and turn around to face him. “I want to buy a couple of guns,” Hale added. “Where’s the nearest shop for guns?”

“Return, and we return,” said Philby hollowly, staring at Hale in evident puzzlement. “Keep faith, and so will we. What do you m-mean?” he added in a cautious tone.

“It’s the Rabkrin exchange, Kim. You answered it correctly. We proceed.”

Philby stirred and began walking again. “B-But that’s—that’s old. How l-l-long have you been—? You? And it’s very high; not many p-people know that challenge. I don’t think Mammalian knows the exchange.” Hoarsely he said, “Who— are you?”

“It’s higher than you suppose, Kim. I’m not Rabkrin. Have you forgotten the bargain you made with Theodora in ’52, at the Turkish–Soviet border? I’ve been sent to remind you of it. An SIS representative will shortly be contacting you here, offering you immunity in exchange for your total memoirs. You will pretend to cooperate, but you will not tell him anything about Rabkrin or the Ararat operation, and you will not return to England.”

Philby had stopped again. “You can get g-guns at one of the import shops on Allenby,” he said absently. “Jimmie’s anachronistic SOE… that was t-t- ten years ago. And now you—has there truly b-been a British secret s-service that I was not aware of, all along? Was L-Lawrence one of you? How far in—” Philby’s pale face had lost all expression, but Hale could recognize baffled rage. “Are you with the fabled D-D-Declare? You?” He held out his hands and slowly closed them into fists. “Cassagnac’s murder!— your old c-crimes—your flight from England last week—this has all been c- cover?”

They were on the Weygand Street sidewalk now, and the wind from the north carried the salt smell of the Mediterranean, and Hale stared at Kim Philby in the late-morning sunight and didn’t bother to keep scorn out of his voice. “I was recruited by Captain Sir Mansfield Cummings in 1929, when the SIS headquarters was in Whitehall Court. I’ve been a Declare agent since the age of seven.” He held up one hand. “And you have been one, since the SOE doubled you in 1952. You agreed to participate in any operation the Soviets might want you for, as a covert British operative; the alternative offered then was that you would be killed, and that is still the only alternative. Are we clear on that? You won’t fly back to England—you won’t defect to France—Mammalian won’t cancel the Ararat operation—and you and I will go up the mountain with him. And immediately that’s done, you will defect to the U.S.S.R.—cross at the Aras River—and live out the rest of your life behind the Iron Curtain.” Hale’s lip quivered as he resisted an impulse to spit. “There won’t be any pay; you won’t need it in Utopia.”

Philby had recovered himself and begun chuckling while Hale spoke, and now he laughed out loud. “ ‘O Bre’r Fox!’ ” he said, “ ‘just don’ throw me into yonder briar patch!’ Defect to France! My dear f-fellow, as I understand this, you’re ordering me—on pain of d-death, no less!—to go to Ararat and become something akin to a g-g- god, and then retire to the c-country that has been my motherland since I was a b-boy!”

But Hale had noticed the beads of sweat on Philby’s hairline. “A half-wit god,” Hale said, not without sympathy, “Pa Fox being dead.”

Philby’s smile was gone, though his mouth was still open. “True,” he snapped finally. “And frankly Moscow d-does sound like ‘the house whence no one issues, whose inhabitants live in darkness, dust their bread and clay their meat, where over the bolted gate lie dust and silence.’ ” He gave Hale a squinting smile as he resumed walking, and in a particularly Oxbridge accent he said, “You seem awfully confident that I will not elect to be killed, rather. Do you remember Thomas Browne’s remark in Religio Medici?—‘I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof.’ ”

But Hale remembered the words of the half-stone king of Wabar: I am still secure from judgment. We do not go on, we do not face… leveling. And he guessed that Philby had always arrogantly lived on the assumption that although he might airily betray his country, he would never be so ill-bred as to… use the wrong fork, not be able to hold his liquor, not be able to quote Euripides in a proper Attic accent, be afraid to die. For all his treason, Philby was a product of the old British Raj, a graduate of Westminster and Cambridge accustomed to upper-class privilege, at home in the Athenaeum and Reform clubs of Pall Mall. But Hale suspected that, having renounced loyalty and honesty and faith, Philby would find that courage had correspondingly become an undercut platform, not able to take his weight. Philby might hate the idea of being a living prole in Moscow, but not as much as he hated the idea of being a dead aristocrat in Beirut.

“Yes,” remarked Hale, trudging along beside his half-brother, “I am awfully confident of that.”

Philby was silent for several steps, and then his only reply was a cry of “Serveece!” to one of the white taxicabs cruising past on Weygand Street; and there were already three Arab passengers in the cab as Hale and Philby climbed into the back seat, so it was only natural that the two spies did not speak until they had alighted on the curb at the Normandy Hotel.

“B-brace yourself for f-forty lashes,” said Philby to Hale as they climbed out of the cab.

Hakob Mammalian was waiting for them on the steps to the lobby, but he hurried across the sidewalk to where Hale and Philby stood, and without speaking he took hold of each of them by an elbow and turned them back toward the lanes of the Avenue des Français, and the blue sea beyond.

The three of them strode out across the breezy street, Philby and then Hale waving their free hands in apology as cars honked at them and donkey drivers shouted.

When they had reached the far sidewalk and stepped down from the pavement onto the hot pale sand, Mammalian turned to Hale and stared angrily into his face. Mammalian’s right hand was inside his blue-striped robe. After several seconds he reached up with his free hand and prodded Hale’s bruised cheek with one finger, and then scratched with his nail at the fresh cut.

Hale flinched back. Even though he was only wearing a shirt, he was already sweating in the direct sunlight. “What the hell, Hakob!” he protested.

“My hand is on a gun,” said Mammalian curtly. “Open your shirt.”

Hale sighed. “I assume you’ll tell me why,” he said as he began unbuttoning his coffee-stained shirt.

Mammalian prodded Hale’s bare stomach, looking into his eyes as Hale winced.

“When the sûreté was questioning you,” Mammalian snapped, “you said the arrest was like a dog. What kind of dog?”

“I, I told them it was a dog that wouldn’t hunt,” said Hale, remembering the remark from the hastily scrawled transcription he had read before leaving Hartsik’s office. It had in fact not struck him as the sort of thing he would say.

“What did you mean by that?”

“It’s an—ow,” Hale said, for Mammalian was still palpating his stomach. “Would you stop? It’s a saying. It means a plan that won’t work out; I meant that their arrest would not stand up—I wasn’t guilty of anything.”

Mammalian squinted at Philby. “Is that a common saying?”

Philby blew out air through his pursed lips. “Sure, one h-hears it.”

At last Mammalian stepped back from Hale, his right hand still inside his robe. “You were out of our sight for an hour. In a police station. Tell me one reason why I should not abort this mission.”

“Yes, yes,” said Hale, nodding, “I do see your point of view. I would worry too, in your place.” He shrugged and looked up and down the beach. “Let’s see—you know some of what was said. Do you know it all? Did it sound as if the police and I were talking in a code? Any of the three of us here could recognize code exchanges, I think.”

“No,” said Mammalian. “It did not sound like a code. But if you are an SIS plant, a Declare plant!—then there might have been only one thing you needed to learn or convey; and any one phrase could have accomplished that. A dog that won’t hunt!”

Hale mentally cursed his double for not speaking more simply. “If we were exchanging a code phrase, why would we choose something so awkward?” He touched his cheek. “I don’t care if you do abort it—as long as that doesn’t involve giving me the truth.”

“It would involve that. And right now I am inclined to abort it.”

“He w-wanted to buy a g-gun, after he was released,” put in Philby helpfully. “S-several guns.”

Hale didn’t bother to comment on that; and Mammalian flicked his fingers in the air impatiently. “Of course he would want to be armed, in any case.” After scowling at Hale for ten more seconds, Mammalian turned to Philby. “You have experience with the British secret service, and with this man—and it is in your interests that this Ararat plan not fail. Is it your feeling that we should abort it, or go ahead?”

Hale did not look at Philby—live prole or dead aristocrat? he thought—and finally, after a pause, he heard Philby sigh and then mutter, “I—” Peripherally Hale saw him wave a hand as if uncertain how to proceed. “Declare?—low on the l-list of likelihoods, I think. If H-Hale was really b-being run by Theodora, there wouldn’t be any n-need for a last-minute c-conference at a police station. Let’s—ah, God!—let’s proceed with it as p-p-planned.”

In Philby’s hesitant speech Hale had caught the phrase, I declare low. And he knew that the three words had been a reference, for him, to the interrupted high-low poker game the two of them had played in the bomb shelter below Mount Ararat nearly fifteen years earlier; Philby was conveying his decision, his cowardly decision, to choose life.

“Well, I do concur,” Hale said, trying not to breathe any more deeply than he had been doing a moment earlier; and he glanced at his wristwatch to be sure the hands were set for the correct local time.