Declare

EPILOGUE: Declare

Kim stole out and away, as unremarkable a figure as ever carried his own and a few score thousand other folks’ fate slung round his neck.

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

—Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát, Edward J. FitzGerald translation

Batsford House in Tunbridge Wells had been one of the English country homes that had been turned over to the SOE during the war, and the sweeping green lawn visible from the south kitchen window still showed the humps of bunkers and trenches that had been dug for infiltration practice and to keep German aircraft from landing. A dozen cows were visible in the middle distance now, cropping the grass around the old mounds. The morning sun was shining in brightly enough to show too the heating and water pipes that the SOE had installed along the high stone wall and ceiling, above even the unreachable topmost row of copper skillets, but the old man was grateful for those alterations. Somehow the mess officers had hung too a vast government-issue print of a cow in profile, with dotted lines outlining the various cuts of beef, right up under the ceiling, and no one had ever managed to take it down in the more than twenty years since.

The vaulted eighteenth-century ceiling arched thirty feet above the flagstone floor, and as he struck a match on the windowsill and puffed his pipe alight, Jimmie Theodora recalled several conferences that had been held right in this kitchen, at the battered old table that stretched across more than twenty feet of the space between the window and the huge fireplace. In January of 1944, when the south lawn had been a small village of snow-covered tents, Winston Churchill had met here with Theodora and Bertram Ramsey and Arthur Tedder to privately assess Eisenhower’s proposed SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force that was to be run by the Americans, and to discuss the most-secret details of Operation Overlord, which five months later had been decisively put into effect as the Normandy invasion. And before that, twenty-year-old Andrew Hale had interviewed Turkish and Russian fugitives at this table, gradually assembling the history of the Russian involvement with eastern Turkey and Mount Ararat. Twenty years later, Operation Declare had finally been consummated and closed, and Theodora had at last been able to retire—at the age of seventy-three!—to tend the gardens here at his old ancestral home.

And now his retirement had been compromised. A cable from the SIS’s new headquarters in Century House on the south side of the Thames—Broadway Buildings no longer!—had arrived yesterday, and it appeared that MI5 was involved as well. It all promised no end of bother and embarrassment, and even some faint risk of legal trouble; and personal, face-to-face humiliation, if some hasty sort of establishment-of-truth couldn’t be arranged quickly in Helsinki.

In the forty-eight hours since receiving the cable Theodora had not tried to mobilize the old leave-behind networks to arrange it— not, he realized now, because of any admittedly valid doubts about the viability these days of the networks, but because he felt he deserved some degree of humiliation, even of punishment.

Andrew Hale had apparently walked into the British Embassy in Helsinki two days ago. He had dictated a cable to Century House, proposing terms according to which he would take a flight to Heathrow Airport outside London. More than a year after the successful termination of Operation Declare, Hale wanted to return to the United Kingdom.

On reflection, Theodora was not surprised to learn that Hale was still alive. In July of last year the Soviet paper Izvestia had announced that Kim Philby had been made a citizen of the Soviet Union, but Theodora knew too that Philby had been rushed to the Semenskoya clinic outside Moscow on the twenty-eighth of January, for treatment of a gunshot wound. That would have been Hale’s work, as ordered. And Hale’s had not been one of the burned, frozen bodies that had been recovered from below the Parrot glacier by the Turks last summer. That Hale could have disappeared for a year in the Middle East was hardly a surprising idea. Nor was Theodora surprised to learn that Hale wanted to come home, now, at the age of forty-two; he remembered that in the briefing at Number 10 Downing Street, fifteen months ago now, Hale had proposed retiring after Declare to the Cotswold village where he had grown up.

Hale was approaching the British secret services cautiously. Clearly he knew that he had been slated for verification as soon as the djinn had been slain on Mount Ararat.

It had certainly been obvious to Theodora that Hale could not go on being in the picture afterward. Theodora recalled his late-1962 conversation with the leveraged minister who gingerly sponsored the fugitive SOE, after the minister had objected to the idea of killing Hale: Think about it, man! Theodora had said. By agreeing to have Hale send Philby to Moscow with a skin-full of Shihab-shot, the Prime Minister is authorizing a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union! That’s what it is, if our math is correct. Nobody’s indoctrinated for this. We may have to kill you. I may have to kill myself. Even if Hale doesn’t succeed, he would be in a position to stir up enough old evidence to make it plausibly clear that we did attempt exactly that—and by demonstrably sorcerous means! The Prime Minister! McCone at the CIA wouldn’t give us Manhattan street maps, after that. Hale will be a hero if he can pull off this Ararat operation—but we’ve killed bigger heroes, famous ones, to keep this a secret.

It had been true then, a year and a half ago, and it was still true now. The SIS interrogation center wasn’t at Ham Common in Richmond anymore—with a pang Theodora recalled recruiting Hale into the SOE there, in the corridor outside the kitchen at Latchmere House, in February of 1942—but Hale would have to be lured back, and debriefed, and then given a Cold War hero’s retirement: a quiet, painless death, and the undisturbed, enduring disgrace of his last cover.

And Theodora would probably have to face Hale, before it was all over. He remembered the young ex-nun he had found in Cairo in 1924, living in a Misr al-Qadimah flat with her priceless illegitimate child, the issue of St. John Philby’s folly; and he remembered meeting that child again when the boy was seven years old, on the day his mother brought him to the SIS headquarters in Whitehall Court. Theodora recalled now that the boy Andrew had nearly passed out from hunger in that interview, having fasted since the previous midnight in order to take his first Catholic Communion. And Theodora could still recall the long conversation he had had with Hale in the ruins around St. Paul’s Cathedral in the late summer of 1941, among the antique wildflowers whose entombed seeds had been liberated by the German bombs.

And Hale had ultimately proven to be worth the long, costly investment. Theodora’s battles with eight Prime Ministers and five Chiefs of the SIS, even his brief imprisonment on suspicion of treasonous acts in the first weeks of 1942, had been vindicated: the power on Mount Ararat was killed. And if Kim Philby would eventually die in the Soviet Union, preferably right in Moscow, the Soviet Union would lose the guardian angel that had protected Russia since 1883.

I do owe it to Hale to face him one more time.

At the other end of the enormous stone room, the door creaked open.

“Bring the car around to the front drive, would you, Nigel?” said Theodora thoughtfully, rapping the dottle out of his pipe on the ancient table. To London, to London, he thought—to arrange a spot of humiliation for myself.

“Nigel is still in Southborough,” said the well-remembered voice of Andrew Hale. “I’m taking over for him for the rest of the day.”

Theodora opened his mouth in a laugh that was too quiet to be picked up by any microphones that MI5 might have installed. “Well, I don’t want the car anyway,” he said lightly, “now that I think of it. I believe I’ll go for a walk in the gardens instead.”

Of course he came over early, the old man thought. He learned that from the GRU during the war. I should have expected it.

Theodora noted wryly that his heartbeat was suddenly rapid.

At last he tucked his pipe away in the pocket of his corduroy jacket and looked toward the door.

Hale had apparently been in sunny climes—his face and hands were tanned a dark brown—and his sandy hair was newly gray at the temples. He hadn’t shaved recently, and the bristles on his chin were white. No doubt it had been a stressful year. The man was dressed in Nigel’s clothes—white shirt, black jacket and tie— though his shoulders were broader than Nigel’s, and Theodora doubted that he would be able to button the jacket.

Hale’s right hand was in the pocket of the black trousers.

Theodora unbolted the door that led right out to one of the smaller gardens, having to rock the bolt to get it to slide back— probably it had not been opened since 1945—and when he had pulled the door open he walked carefully down the old stone steps, the grass-and-stone-scented morning breeze ruffling his fine white hair.

He heard Hale scuff down the steps after him.

Theodora’s boots crunched along the gravel path that led to the sundial. The kitchen sundial at Batsford House was on a mound, and the triangular sections below the iron gnomon were each planted in a different variety of thyme—silver thyme and bright yellow-and-green variegated thyme on the morning slope, darker creeping thyme on the afternoon decline. Theodora stepped up to the crest of the mound, crushing the noon thymus vulgaris, and turned around to face Hale.

“You’re late in reporting, sir!” Theodora said. “It was in January of last year that I sent you out. I remember saying that I believed you’d be back within the month.”

Hale nodded, but he was glancing back at the high south wall of the house, a cliff of uneven tan stones and widely separated windows. “I was here, during the war,” he said. “Had no idea it was yours.” He glanced at Theodora with neutral, pale eyes. “Batsford, Theodora.”

“A widowed Lady Batsford married a cloth merchant Theodora around the time of Waterloo. It used to be grander—one of the bedrooms still has a railing across the middle of the floor, so that any king who might be visiting could greet his subjects without getting out of bed. Two Earls once got into a serious fight in that room, the issue being which of them was to have the privilege of dressing George the Third. Bloody noses, broken furniture—I believe George wound up having to put on his own shirt. And I remember standing right here at night, as a boy—this would have been late ’90s, 1900—and looking up to watch the servants carrying torches across the rooftops, as they made their way to the bedrooms in the turrets.”

“Of course I’ve got a gun, Jimmie,” said Hale.

“Of course you have,” Theodora agreed. “And some sort of proposal, I imagine.”

“I trust I’m still… on the rolls. I want to be sent out one more time, and then I want to retire here. Scotland, Wales, I don’t care. Ireland, even. I came in through the London Docks yesterday, on a Canadian passport—it was a friend who sent the cable from Helsinki. I wanted to have a chance to discuss terms privately, before a lot of definitions were made, photographs taken.”

“Terms,” said Theodora.

“Well, I’ve got it all down in a little book, haven’t I? Declare. With enough names and dates to make it convincing; and it’s compelling reading too—T. E. Lawrence, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Kim Philby, Noah’s Ark. A Belgian solicitor has it, and if a New Year’s Day goes by without me having sent him a Christmas card, the whole works will be sent to every newspaper in the United States, and in Europe—oh, and Pravda. When I turn sixty-two, twenty years from now, I give you my word I’ll destroy it. By then I doubt anyone will still care.”

“Scopolamine,” sighed Theodora, “sodium Pentothal. Plain old torture.”

“A photograph of myself in with the Christmas card, every year. With a newspaper visible, to establish the date. The solicitor has a large staff, many offices, and he does a lot of international crime work—bodyguards, security—he’s tremendously cautious.”

Theodora shrugged, conceding the point. “ ‘Sent out one more time,’ ” he said.

“To Moscow, under journalist cover. SIS can arrange that easily enough. I want to cash out the Machikha Nash account. Khrushchev can be the last Premier of the Soviet Union.”

Hale was proposing to kill Kim Philby, his half-brother, and thus set into motion the chain of events that would culminate with the ghulah guardian angel ingesting the Shihab-shot from Philby’s buried corpse. “Well, Khrushchev wouldn’t be the last anyway,” Theodora said, stalling. “I doubt the Soviet empire would come crashing down immediately after the guardian angel was killed, and it doesn’t look as though Khrushchev will last out the year. Russia had a bad harvest last year, and he had to use hard currency to buy wheat from the West. The KGB had to become grain brokers, and the KGB head, Shelepin, wants Khrushchev out. Leonid Brezhnev seems to be the likeliest replacement.”

“Is my brother covering himself with glory, over there?”

“Well, no. It turns out he’s what they call a ‘secret collaborator,’ not a Soviet intelligence officer, as I’m sure they had told him he would be. He’s got a nice apartment, and access to a chauffeur-driven car, but he’s apparently drinking a good deal, and his main value to the KGB is that he’s still being debriefed, these fourteen months later. The only actual work he’s doing is for the Novosti news agency—and his work needs to be translated. He’s never learned Russian.”

“Cremation is very common in Russia,” Hale said. “If he dies years from now, as just an embarrassing old drunk left over from a previous regime, he’s likely to be cremated.”

And the precious shot pellets will be melted, thought Theodora. I won’t live that long, but it would fret me to die thinking that the main operation of my career had not come to full fruition.

“Right now,” Hale went on, “the people who vouched for him are still in charge, unwilling to concede that he’s nothing but a drunk old Englishman. If he dies a hero’s death now, a properly vindicating death, he’ll be buried with honors at one of the Moscow cemeteries. Buried.”

“What would be a hero’s death?” asked Theodora. “A vindicating death?”

“He must be shot, killed, publicly and conspicuously, by an Englishman who can be proved to have been working for the SIS. Simple logic—if we considered him worth killing, obviously he must have been a Soviet hero.”

Theodora laughed incredulously. “My dear boy, do you have any conception of the havoc that would cause? Consider the abuse the United States endured when one of their mere U-2 spy planes was shot down over Russia four years ago! It would not start World War III, I suppose, but we would lose all credibility worldwide—the present Conser vative government would collapse, we’d have Harold Wilson and the Labour Party in charge!”

“Haven’t you got—I seem to recall— ears, in Number 10 Downing Street? How likely is it that this Conservative government will survive the year in any case? The Profumo scandal drove Macmillan out last year—how long do you think Douglas-Home can hold the Conservative reins?”

“Until a general election, in October,” Theodora said glumly. “And then, yes, I do happen to know that we’ll have Harold Wilson for Prime Minister. And I have similarly good reason to believe that Wilson will not… expand the scope of the secret services.”

“Then it’s now or never,” said Hale. “The Conservatives may as well have some decisive reason for going out, don’t you think?— not just the declining pound and rising interest rates.”

Theodora was nodding, squinting out across the newly green spring lawns. “It’s impossible, my boy. You’d need a real SIS purpose in going to Moscow, a plausible cover story for Whitehall, and you could never sell the Foreign Office on any particle of what you’ve told me.”

“What would be a plausible cover story to sell to the Foreign Office?”

“Well! Just for the sake of argument—something fairly low-key, routine administration type of thing.” Theodora swiveled on his heels, crushing the thyme. “The KGB resident in London, Nikolai Grigoryevich Begrichev, has been increasing the size of the residency outrageously; and all these Tass representatives and cultural counselors are ser vicing the Soviet trade delegations and the Soviet students at our universities, all of them active agents—MI5’s mobile surveillance operations are already completely compromised. And it’s likely to go on escalating. And the Foreign Secretary knows that a Labour government will only be interested in appeasement, not any saber-rattling. And our embassy in Moscow is simply a KGB snuggery—we are required to hire all the maids, janitors, chauffeurs, even translators, from the Moscow Burobin employment agency, which is simply a branch of the KGB Second Chief Directorate, the counter-intelligence directorate. If the SIS could get some evidence of Burobin treachery, it would serve as an excuse for Douglas-Home to expel a good number of the Soviet Embassy staff in London. It would arguably be the last chance to do that.”

“Most natural thing in the world, then, for the SIS to send an agent to Moscow under journalistic cover. An old wartime leftover agent; experienced but ultimately unreliable, as it will turn out.”

Theodora revolved on the sundial, staring blankly at the lawns and high walls of Batsford House, as he estimated the flurry of decipher-yourself telegrams that would erupt from the Moscow embassy after Philby’s assassination—and then the international headlines, the outraged statements by Khrushchev, and then by Douglas-Home. Lyndon Johnson would weigh in with denunciations, McCone would scramble to distance the CIA from the lunatic British secret ser vices.

But two or three years from now, he thought, the Soviet Union would stop being a Union. The gross, artificially maintained flower of Communism would lose its hothouse protection, and it would wither in the unhindered winds of the world, and brash young weeds would spring up from the fallow Russian ground and choke it.

“You’d have to find your own gun,” he said at last. “Whitehall could not possibly provide you with the gun.”

Hale kept his face expressionless and simply nodded, but he felt the tension of the last thirty hours relax out of his shoulders. “I can find my own gun.”

“I gather you don’t intend to be caught, but you do intend to be identified, as a British SIS agent. Do you seriously think a retirement identity for you in the United Kingdom is a question that need occupy me?”

“I’ll make my way back across the Channel,” said Hale.

Theodora frowned, possibly with genuine concern. “You’ve got plenty of field experience, my boy, but you’ve never been on the wrong side of the Curtain. It’s a whole other world. Moscow was Looking-Glass Land even when I was there with Lockhart and Reilly, back in the innocent days of 1918, when our great plan was to capture Lenin and Trotsky, and then pull off their trousers and parade them through the streets in their undershorts, to make laughingstocks of them.” The old man smiled, showing the shape of his skull under the wrinkled, parchment skin. “We were MI-1C in those days, and the Petrograd station chief vetoed our idea; but I still think that would have nipped the whole Communist enterprise in the bud.”

“I’ll nip it in the… sere and yellow leaf.” Hale released the grip of the Seecamp .32 in Nigel’s trouser pocket and stretched in the chilly spring morning breeze. From somewhere high up on the stone wall he could hear pigeons cooing, and the sound made him sleepy—he hadn’t slept or eaten or changed his shirt for thirty hours, and above the spicy scent of crushed thyme he could smell his own old sweat. “Do keep in mind too that I’m the only one who can do this. If you establish the truth about me, then you won’t ever be able to do the same for Philby, much as you might one day wish to. He’s vulnerable to injury on his birthday, of course—but you know the Kremlin will keep him in a bomb-proof subterranean vault on that day, every year; and on any other day of the three-hundred-and-sixty-five, the only person who can get past his magical defenses to injure him is the one other person who also is him at least according to the angels’ silhouette-recognition cards.”

“But they’re all dead. The angels.”

Hale stared at Theodora. “Jimmie. The ones on Ararat are all dead. With luck. But in Arabia, Egypt, India—no. China, even, probably.”

“Oh. No, of course not, I do see. China. Hmm.”

Watching the old man’s sagging gray face now in the morning sunlight, Hale thought that in fact Theodora had not known that Declare had killed only one major colony, albeit probably the biggest colony in the world, of djinn. And for several seconds Hale didn’t speak, but let Theodora arrive on his own at the conclusion that the destruction of the Soviet Union must stand as the major accomplishment of the old man’s career. And don’t forget the risk of cremation if you wait, Jimmie, Hale thought.

“I came across the Channel on a French cattle boat,” Hale added finally, with some tension, “because I can’t fly in an airplane over about ten thousand feet anymore. I learned that bit of data on an Air Liban flight out of Kuwait a month ago—the plane had to land in the gulf, off Bahrain, with half the fuselage ripped off. The spirits of the upper air are still up there in the Heaviside Layer, and they’re aware of me when I get up that close to them; and they’re—angry at me, still.”

“Really.” The old man was staring off across the lawns, nodding slowly. “That must have been exciting. You’ll have to travel by boat, then, and overland by rail—but that will look good, actually, not at all the behavior of a modern spy.”

He sighed heavily. “Yes, very well, I’ll get you reactivated and assigned to Moscow, under journalistic cover, with orders to investigate the Burobin employment agency. Human interest angle, ostensibly, focus on the little people who keep the show rolling, as it were; hobbies, filthy ethnic foods, framed pictures of the old Bolshevik parents on the shabby apartment walls. There are still newspapers that will let us force a foreign correspondent on them. And then—I’ll be as shocked as anyone else, if you do something crazy while you’re in Moscow.”

“And of course in the meantime,” said Hale gently, “you’ll make sure that any old verification orders concerning me are switched off.”

“Oh, my dear, I’m sure there never was anything like that!” Was there an ironic glint in the old man’s eye? “You insult me. But of course I will get on the telephone and explain your status. It might be best for you to stay here tonight, not try to go into the city. Right? We should certainly have you in Moscow by the middle of April, even at your slow rate of travel.”

That will do, thought Hale. He allowed himself to sit down on the damp green grass.

He recalled a story in the Thousand Nights and One Night, in which a poor traveler had been hired by a jewel merchant to allow himself to be sewn into the skin of a freshly killed mule. When it had been done, an enormous eagle snatched up the dead mule with the traveler hidden inside and flew to an otherwise inaccessible mountain peak, and the bird flew away in surprise when the man climbed out of the carcass. He found that the mountain-top was littered with human and mule bones, but also that the stones lying about were all jewels; and, from the valley below, the jewel merchant was calling up to him to throw down as many of the gems as he could lift. The traveler obediently flung down more than two hundred fabulously valuable stones, but eventually he paused to rest and called down a question about the route he would have to take to get back down—and at that point the jewel merchant gathered the jewels scattered in the valley, packed up his own mule and departed without a backward look. The abandoned traveler had pressed onward up the mountain and eventually after many hardships found a green valley, where he met and fell in love with a daughter of the djinn. She had loved him too, and had taken him down the mountain and dwelt with him as a human woman for a year. At the end of the year she had flown away—and the grief-stricken traveler had found his way back to the city where he had started; the jewel merchant did not recognize him, and hired him again to be sewn into a fresh mule skin. And this time, after the eagle had carried the carcass to the mountain-top and taken flight after a living man crawled out of it, the traveler ignored the jewel merchant’s cries from the valley and threw down no jewels, but set off at once for the remembered valley where he might once again find the daughter of the djinn.

“I’ll impose on your hospitality for a bath,” he said, “and some food and drink—and sleep.”

And then, he thought, you can sew me up, Jimmie.

Theodora drove Hale to London two days later in his old Continental Bentley, but instead of crossing the river to Century House he proceeded to Artillery Mansions near Westminster Hall. London Station ran a department from Artillery Mansions known as DP4, which was in the business of inserting SIS agents into eastern Europe and Russia—students, businessmen, journalists; as a lowly DP4 operative, Hale would be beneath the notice of Dick White, who was still C.

Theodora’s proposal was approved without objection by Dickie Franks, the DP4 chief, with routine authorization from the Foreign Office, and at the end of the week Andrew Hale boarded the Polish liner Topolewski. After three days at sea, with stops at Rotterdam and Copenhagen, Hale arrived at the Baltic Sea port of Danzig in northern Poland. His British passport identified him as Varnum Leonard, a non-staff foreign correspondent for the Evening Standard, and its pages were stamped with many visas from Eastern Bloc countries such as Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic; and in the Brest railway station on April 8, the passport’s last empty page was stamped with the red star of the U.S.S.R. visa.

Across the Soviet border now, he boarded a crowded train that took him over the course of several days through Minsk and Smolensk, and finally on the evening of Sunday the twelfth he watched through his sleeping compartment window as the outlying villages of Moscow, quaint snow-covered log cabins and narrow lanes animated with horse-drawn sleds, gave way to paved streets and new apartment buildings with television antennas on the roofs. It was full dark by the time his train squealed to a steaming halt in the Belorussia Station on the Leningrad Prospect, only a short Metro ride from the apartment which Intourist had assigned to him on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya ring road.

His apartment building proved to be an elegant Stalinist-baroque ghetto for Western journalists, insulated from surrounding buildings by high cement walls and a sentry box manned by KGB agents in police uniforms. During his first days there, he picked up from the other foreign correspondents the habit of referring to the broad avenue on which they lived as “Sad Sam.” The term was just a two-syllable abbreviation to the Burobin Russian interpreters who generally accompanied the journalists out into the city, but for other Westerners it carried a flavor of good-humored desperation. The other correspondents always spoke of coming “into” or going “out of” the Soviet Union, never saying simply “to” or “from,” and even the ones who were most at-home in Moscow, speaking the language and knowing where the bars were, were careful to schedule frequent trips back out to London, or New York, or Rome, or any other place where the standard drink was not “a hundred grams” of vodka, and where people didn’t select a wine by its alcohol content, as in “give me something at 19 percent.”

Hale quickly learned enough phrases in the Russian language to apologize and ask directions, and he began exploring the city without an interpreter—the Intourist and Novosti Press Agency authorities permitted this, since all press releases were censored and no photographers could be obtained except from Novosti.

Moscow within the Sadovaya ring was physically daunting—the streets and squares were vast, though automobile traffic was sparse, and it seemed to Hale in his first days that the industrial-Gothic architecture of the Stalinist skyscrapers, crowned with giant red stars that lit the night sky like the Devil’s own landing-lights, were contrasted only by the medieval bastions and towers of the Kremlin wall and the new blocks of modernist pre-fabricated apartment buildings, which appeared to have been assembled with rust streaks and pock-marks already applied. Later he found the Bolshoi Theatre with its ornate Corinthian pillars, and the wrought-iron balconies and bridges and hanging lanterns of the vast GUM department store on Red Square, but these were forlorn remnants of the tsarist nineteenth century—like the palatial Gastronom 1 on Gorky Street, where grim-faced shoppers now waited in long lines to buy turnips and bottles of cheap red and blue syrups under the old gilt cherubs and chandeliers.

On the Moskva River embankment he stared at the twelve-foot-by-thirty-foot movie posters, trying to puzzle out the names of the stars, whose faces he didn’t recognize; farther up the embankment, outside the Kremlin wall by the Taynitskaya Tower, he could sometimes hear the scuffle-and-thump of a volleyball game, presumably among the guards, on the other side of the high wall; and for half an hour one day he watched a flock of crows busily dropping chestnuts down the top of a drainpipe on the tower and flying down to the pavement to retrieve the nuts when they rolled out at the bottom, and then flying up to do it again.

He felt like one of the birds. He had two things to do—and now that he was so close to defining the course of the rest of his life, he was postponing considering either of them.

When he had gone to the GUM department store he had seen the colorful spires and onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, standing like some fantastic Walt Disney island hundreds of yards away at the south end of Red Square, and he had stared at its crimson walls and gold-and-blue spiraled domes. And when he realized that he was so anxious about his imminent intrusion there—on the twenty-second of April, forty years after 1924, only a week away now— that he was afraid to approach it, he made himself walk all the way across the plain of the cobblestoned square, past the ranked snow-plow trucks and the raised cement ring of the Lobinoye Mesto where criminals had been publicly beheaded in the tsarist days, to the cathedral’s rococo north arch. He walked up the stone stairs beyond and found that the tall doors stood open, with the cavernous aisles of the sixteenth-century church dimly visible inside.

With one finger he made a tiny, furtive sign of the cross on the front of his overcoat, and he stepped over the threshold onto the polished stone floor; and then—defensively, afraid to hope—he occupied himself with noting the placement of the doors in the far walls and the width and separation of the towering pillars, only peripherally aware of the chandeliers and the ranks of saints painted in luminous fresco on the high walls.

His heart was thudding alarmingly in his chest as he left the church and strode away across Red Square, and in his head he was telling himself, She may not be able to come, she may have forgotten, she may be dead, she certainly hates you.

But he had brought along a package from the remote Zagros mountain village of Siamand Barakat Khan, and he did need to find Kim Philby—though not in order to kill him: Hale also had two Scandinavian Airlines tickets that he had purchased with a casse gueule passport in Finland late in March. The names and passport numbers for the tickets had not yet been filled in.

Philby’s was of course a famous name in Moscow, especially among the Western journalists, some of whom had known him during his six years as a correspondent for The Economist and The Observer in Beirut. It had only been in July of last year that British Secretary of State Edward Heath confirmed that Philby had been the legendary “third man” in the Burgess and Maclean spy scandal of 1951, and Philby had arrived in Moscow in a season when spies were trendy—everyone was reading Vadim Kozhevnikov’s Shield and Sword, a novel about a brave Soviet spy in World War II, and the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda was running a serial about the adventures of a beautiful KGB girl named Natasha—but Philby seemed to have become a recluse.

None of the journalists could tell Hale how to find Philby, and he didn’t dare to show more than casual, morbid interest. A New York Times man told Hale that he had seen Philby dining at the Aragvy Restaurant by the Bolshoi Theatre with two KGB men, who were distinguishable as such because they had been wearing the new pale-green fedoras available only in the privileged hard-currency stores; and a woman from The Saturday Evening Post told Hale that she had seen a man who looked like Kim Philby trying, speaking English, to order a new Pagoda brand washing machine in a parking-lot black market on the southern loop of the Sad Sam. The most recent Moscow telephone directory had been published in 1958, and the four-volume set had gone out of print immediately and had never been reprinted. Journalists and Muscovites amassed private telephone directories by writing down and sharing the names of all the parties they had got by wrong number connections—which were frequent—but none of these informal telephone books that Hale could get a look at had a listing for Philby.

Hale made no effort to live his journalistic cover story. He walked by the Aragvy Restaurant every day at noon and dusk, hoping to glimpse Philby, and in the evenings he nibbled cucumber-and-tomato zakusi in the bar of the Metropol, drank vodka at the Soviet-skaya and purple vermouth koktels at the Moskva—but he did not succeed in catching a glimpse of his half-brother.

When there were only three days left until the twenty-second of April, Hale reluctantly decided to look for Philby among the Gray People. This was the name given by the Sad Sam journalists to the Western expatriates who had defected and become Soviet citizens, and who all seemed to work for the Foreign Languages Publishing House, paid by the line for translating the speeches of Party members into English. They were said to be a furtive colony, inordinately proud of their various shabby treasons, and sure that the CIA or the SIS or the SDECE would pay dearly for the chance of arresting them. And all of them would reportedly turn pale with envy at the sight of a valid Western passport.

It was bad form to try to socialize with them, and Hale understood too that any such efforts were likely to draw the attention of the KGB, with the probable consequence of revocation of one’s visa, and speedy expulsion from the U.S.S.R.

Hale had considered simply going to St. Basil’s Cathedral on Wednesday the twenty-second of April, without visiting Philby first. But he did want to be able to fly out of the Soviet Union, afterward.

And Hale finally found the Gray People on the afternoon of Tuesday the twenty-first, in Khokhlovskaya Square on the eastern loop of the Sadovaya Samotechnaya ring road, at the black market for books. Here, unmolested even by the city police, the Moscow intellectuals in their shapeless clothes sorted through stacks of books in the watery sunlight, looking for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care and illegal mimeographed copies of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The many mimeograph texts, stapled or sewn with yarn, were known as samizdat and were illegal, lacking the Glavlit stamp of approval; aside from the Pasternak, these blurry texts seemed to be mostly modern poetry, anti-government satire, crude witchcraft, and pornography.

The native Muscovites were easily distinguishable from the Gray People. The latter tended either to cluster together in threes and fours or to visibly avoid their fellows, and their voices were quieter, petulant, and nervous.

Hale picked out one middle-aged man who had snapped, “Leave me alone, will you?” to another man in English, and Hale followed him when he began shambling away alone with—good sign!—a samizdat copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satire of the Stalinist regime, The Master and Margarita, wrapped tightly in brown paper.

Hale managed to hurry around through the linden trees in front of his quarry, so as to approach him from ahead; and he made sure to have a British ten-pound note in his hand when he spoke.

“Excuse me,” Hale said, smiling, “I appear to be lost. Do you know the city well?”

The man had flinched at the English sentences, but his eyes were caught by the banknote—Hale had been in Moscow long enough to know that this hard currency, unlike the flimsy rubles, would be honored in the elite Ber ioska stores in the downtown hotels, where it would buy fabulous items like American cigarettes and Scotch whiskey.

“Where did you want to go?” the man asked finally, in a south-of-the-Thames British accent. His face was pale, and he didn’t look around. On the broad lanes of the Sadovaya ring road to Hale’s right, a few drab Moskvich and Zhiguli-Fiat sedans roared past, but no pedestrians were nearby.

“I need to find an old pal of mine—his name is Kim Philby. I can’t seem to get his phone number from Information.”

“I—don’t know him.”

“Well, you don’t need to know him to have heard where he lives, right? This tenner is yours if you can tell me.”

The man sighed, blowing stale vodka fumes at Hale. “I know who he is, of course. I suppose you’re a journalist—or an SIS assassin. It’s as much as my life is worth to tell you where he lives.”

“No doubt. But it’s also worth a British ten-pound note. Which would you rather be sure of having?”

The man licked his lips nervously, his fingers flexing on the paper-wrapped book he carried.

Hale was watching his eyes, and from long practice saw the flicker that meant he would lie. “ ‘O fish,’ ” said Hale then, impulsively, “ ‘are you constant to the old covenant?’ ”

The man blushed deeply. “I was never—out there I was never— damn you! No, I don’t mean that, it’s only—” His hairline was suddenly beaded with sweat, and he appeared to be blinking away tears. “I was a clerk in the Admiralty Military Branch, and I only photographed documents having to do with NATO naval policy. I thought I was doing it for the WPO, the World Peace Organization, in Austria! NATO is just a tool of American imperialism …” He had been looking at the pavement, but now he met Hale’s gaze, sickly. He sighed, and then in a hoarse voice said, “ ‘Return, and we return. Keep faith, and so will we.’ ”

Hale spoke gently. “Where does Philby live?”

“Is this a test? You must know.” He shrugged. “I don’t know the address. At Patriarch’s Pond, they say.” He yawned, and Hale recognized it as a reflex of tension, not boredom.

Hale knew he should leave now, but he was shaken at how well his gambit had worked. “You weren’t working for the WPO,” he said. “When did you learn who you were really working for?”

“Even when I defected,” the man said in an injured tone, “I thought I was working for the KGB. All of us did, or for the GRU, or the Comintern, or something. Something rational. It’s only when we’ve surrendered our passports and we’re here, for life, that we learn we work for…”

“For… ?” pressed Hale, impatient now to get away from this doomed specimen.

The man looked up at Hale with a bent smile. “You know who she is.”

Hale nodded reluctantly. “Machikha Nash,” he said.

The pale man gave a whinnying cry, and he glanced anxiously past Hale at the lanes of the ring road; and almost immediately his face blanched as white as bone, and the eyes rolled up in his head a moment before his knees, his book, and then his forehead smacked the sidewalk pavement.

The chilly spring breeze was suddenly rancid in Hale’s nostrils with the smell of metallic oil.

As the man’s still-shivering body toppled over onto one hip, Hale stepped away from him and glanced over his shoulder at the street.

Sunlight glittered on the teeth of the robed, dark-eyed woman on the far pavement—but Hale could see the individual gold rings and teeth strung around her neck, so she must actually have been much closer than that; and then it seemed that the ring road was rotating on the axis of the Kremlin, in fact on the axis of the tomb in which Lenin’s preserved body defied decomposition—the image had sprung into his head—and although the woman’s black, hungry eyes held his gaze, he was aware that the white sun was moving around the horizon.

He opened his mouth to speak the first words of the Our Father, but realized that he had forgotten them; and so he quoted the words he remembered Elena saying, on the deck of the Arab boat on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin in 1945: “Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores—”

The dark woman was more clearly on the far side of the lanes now; and her teeth were bared in a snarl. The street had stopped seeming to spin. Hale was able to break his gaze free from hers, and he walked away heavily, as clumsy as if his legs had gone to sleep. The first time he looked back she seemed to be closer, seemed to be standing between him and the body of the unfortunate Admiralty clerk; and Hale tried to make his numb legs work faster. But when he peered over his shoulder again, a few seconds later, she was nowhere to be seen—the sidewalk was empty except for the tumbled body a hundred feet back, and no figures at all stood between him and the bleak windows of the office buildings on the far side of the street.

He walked until he saw a northbound bus unloading passengers, and he hastily climbed aboard, paid his five kopeks, and then during the course of an hour rode the bus for one and a half circuits of the Sadovaya ring, counterclockwise.

He climbed down from the bus by the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall at the Gorky Street intersection. He recognized the nineteenth-century stone steeples and office buildings, for he was only eight blocks northwest of the Aragvy Restaurant; and the old residential neighborhood known as Patriarch’s Pond was two blocks further south on the Sad Sam ring, in a warren of narrow lanes around the pond that was filled every winter to provide a rink for skating.

The sun was already sinking behind the tall pines of the zoo park, and the sky had begun to take on the soft silvery glow of far-northern sunsets, with only the faintest tinges of pink.

As he began walking south along the sidewalk, Hale reached inside his overcoat to pat the pocket of his jacket, and he was reassured to feel his passport and press credentials; if he was stopped by the police or the KGB, his journalism cover would stand up here— Pushkin Square, the lovely old narrow lanes, the graybeards playing dominoes under the linden trees…

He turned right, into a cobbled street overhung by Muscovy plane trees, and he felt as though he were fencing. He knew that if Philby lived in this area every pedestrian would be watched, and he walked down the center of the cobblestone street for now, not making any feints toward the shingle-roofed stone houses on either side. Prewar apartment buildings were looming through the budding branches ahead, and it was likely that Philby would be put up in one of those places, where tighter security could be maintained.

The lane zigzagged past tiny parks with cement tables set out on the grass, though any dominoes players had by now retired for the evening. Hale could smell wood smoke from the old chimneys, and boiling cabbage, but he didn’t see any pedestrians until he stepped into the littered entryway of one of the apartment buidings; as soon as he was in out of the wind, a man in a black overcoat strode down the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and Hale suppressed a smile at the sight of the green fedora on the man’s head.

A twitch of the blade, Hale thought, but not a full parry. This isn’t the building. He dug a pack of Trud cigarettes out of a pocket and shook one out and struck a match to it. Half the length of the black cigarette was an empty cardboard tube.

He stepped back out onto the sidewalk and resumed walking in the direction of the pond. Soon the street curved away to the west, and an alley was the only route by which to move farther south, but he didn’t hesitate before stepping into the shadows between the high brick walls.

The windows he passed were painted over, though he heard voices behind a couple of them, and the vertical iron pipes radiated heat. Just as he came out the far end of the alley, he heard a soft scuff echo behind him.

Hale was in a cul-de-sac now, with flower gardens in the gaps between the old yellow-brick houses on his left. The view to his right was blocked by one of the prewar apartment buildings, an eight-story gray-faced stone edifice with butcher-paper packages and milk bottles visible in the windows, between the insulating double panes of glass.

Hale took a deep draw on his Russian cigarette, and a throat-full of hot air let him know that he had used up all the tobacco in it. He ground it out under his heel and began walking out across the pavement toward the apartment building.

Immediately two men in green fedoras had stepped up from a set of basement stairs, and they made straight for Hale. One of them asked a question in Russian.

“Dobriy vyechyir,” said Hale amiably. It meant Good evening. “Vi gavrarityeh pa angliski?” he went on. “Nyimyetski? Frantsuski?” Do you speak English? German? French?

In German the KGB officer said, “Let me see your passport. What are you doing here?” His companion had stepped to the side, probably to have a clear shot at Hale.

“I am an English journalist for the London Evening Standard,” replied Hale in German. With his right hand he pulled open his overcoat, and with two fingers of his left hand he slowly drew out his passport. “I wish to write an article about Pushkin Square and the picturesque old neighborhoods around it.”

“This is a restricted area,” the KGB agent said, handing the passport to his companion. “You are staying at the hotel on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya?”

“Var-noom Leeyonard,” said the agent with Hale’s passport, and it took Hale a moment to realize that the man was pronouncing the name on the passport, Varnum Leonard.

Hale nodded. “That’s right.”

“Joor-nalist,” the man added.

“Right again.”

“Do not come here again,” said the first man, waving Hale back the way he had come.

Hale retrieved his passport, nodded apologetically, and walked back toward the alley. The culde-sac was in deepening shadow, and he noticed that there were no streetlamps.

A committed parry, he thought with satisfaction. That’s the place. And probably there’ll be a new shift of guards tomorrow morning.

At the alley-mouth he glanced back, and he saw a pair of lighted windows on the eighth floor of the apartment building. Are you at home, Kim? he thought. I hope you’re an early riser—I need to be at St. Basil’s Cathedral at noon.

The prospect of his visit to the cathedral was much more troubling than the thought of cornering Kim Philby tomorrow morning.

That night Hale sat up drinking Glenlivet Scotch whiskey with the New York Times man, watching Russian television on the fourteen-inch black-and-white television set in the lobby of their Sad Sam hotel. One of the two available channels was airing a special on collective farms in the Ukraine, with lots of footage of modern harvest combines moving through fields of wheat; the other channel featured a show about steel-workers, and Hale and his companion stared befuddled at a view of white-hot steel ingots bumping down a ramp.

“I’ve got to get out again soon,” the New York Times man mumbled as he switched off the set and got up to stagger toward his room. “I’m starting to root for their Five-Year Plans.”

Hale nodded sympathetically, but sat for a while with his whiskey and stared at the dark television screen. From another room he could hear a radio playing some rock-and-roll—a song called “ Sie Liebt Dich,” by a Hamburg group called, apparently, The Beetles.

She loves you, the lyrics meant. Ja, ja, ja.

Nein, nein, nein, he thought bleakly, refilling his glass. She loved me, she loves me not.

Entschuldig Dich, the lyrics advised. Apologize. But I didn’t do what she believes I did, he thought; and if I had done it, no apology would be possible.

Hale wondered if Theodora could have set it up that way deliberately: killing Claude Cassagnac and then blaming Hale for the death, just to preclude any renewal of intimacy between Hale and Elena in Beirut. Theodora would have wanted to minimize any involvement by the French SDECE—though in fact the SDECE did manage at least to blow the Black Ark site to smithereens, moments after Hale had delivered the death-blow to the djinn. Once again he wondered if Elena had been aboard that unmarked French Alouette III helicopter, and if she had been the pilot who had veered off or the machine-gunner who had nearly given Hale the last truth; and he wondered if she believed he died there. She must know Philby survived—anybody in the world who read newspapers knew that.

For the first time in many years, he let his mind dwell freely on his last night in Paris in ’41 and on his last night in Berlin in ’45.

I can’t not try, he thought, putting down his glass and struggling to his feet to climb the stairs to his room.

He wound his alarm clock, set the alarm hand at six o’clock and fell asleep in his clothes. In his dreams he took Elena’s hand and ran across the bumpy pavement of Red Square, fleeing from KGB agents in green hats, but when he paused by the river embankment and looked back at her, the creature he had by the hand was the dark-eyed Arabic woman with the wedding-ring necklace, and she lifted his hand to her lips and began to bite off his fingers.

At eight the next morning Hale stood in chilly sunlight over two old men playing dominoes on one of the cement tables near Philby’s apartment building. Hale had managed to nick his chin while shaving, and now a blob of white cotton was stuck below his lip; he consoled himself with the thought that it was a disguise of sorts—or at least a distraction. And his graying sandy hair had not cooperated with the comb, and now stood up in spikes in the back.

Hale had brought along a Russian-language edition of Tolstoi and a bottle of vodka in a paper bag; and he had borrowed a shapeless wool coat, a leather hat with ear-flaps, and an ill-fitting old pair of bell-bottom trousers. Altogether he felt that he looked like a native, not worth special scrutiny by the KGB.

The spring thaw had definitely arrived upon Moscow. Green buds and even tiny pink flowers dotted the black boughs of the apple trees; Patriarch’s Pond itself, which he could see through a gap between two houses, had thawed out in the middle, with broken ice clinging around the grassy shore.

At nine Hale saw two alert men emerge from the basement stairs at the foot of Philby’s building, and though they were wearing snap-brim felt hats, with the eccentricity of having no dents in the crowns, he guessed they were KGB; and it was confirmed when Philby himself came blinking up into the sunlight right behind them.

Hale realized that in spite of his pouchy face Philby had always been slim; he wasn’t any longer. It was a stocky, gray-haired figure that came lumbering across the pavement, and his features were coarser, blunter, now. Hale had been sitting on a bench, trying to puzzle out the Cyrillic syllables in the Tolstoi and taking an occasional mouthful of the chilly vodka, and now he stood up. He opened his book and folded it around with the pages on the outside, and then closed it again, to make a furtive white flash. It was a standard SIS sign.

And Philby saw it from thirty feet away. The man’s eyes lifted from the book to Hale’s face, and Hale caught a gleam of surprised recognition, quickly concealed. Kim Philby stopped walking and frowned up at the sky for a moment, then shrugged out of his heavy overcoat—and while he was getting his arm out of the sleeve, he gave Hale the old SIS hand-signal that meant Follow, at a distance.

Fair enough, thought Hale cautiously as he ambled across the cul-de-sac at an angle behind Philby. I’ve got three hours before high noon. As soon as he saw that Philby intended to walk down Spiridonovka Street, Hale hurried around a block to get in front of Philby and his KGB escorts. Now Philby could see him and cooperate in maintaining visual contact, and the KGB men, for all their deadpan vigilance, had apparently not considered that someone might be following Philby from in front.

This neighborhood, inside the Sadovaya ring and south of Patriarch’s Pond, was all foreign embassies—the American Embassy was only a block or two ahead—and Hale wondered if Philby intended to dart into one and ask for asylum. Hale could have told him that all the embassy chauffeurs and maids would be Burobin agents, KGB.

But Hale kept walking ahead, glancing into windows or up at the street-spanning rooftop banners in order to glance back peripherally and make sure that Philby was still behind him. He knew enough Russian to translate the text of only one of the huge red banners— GLORY TO WORK . It seemed a depressing thought.

When Hale had walked past the crenellated bell tower of a Russian Orthodox church, he glanced up at the clock and then let his gaze fall behind him—and he saw that Philby had stopped on the sidewalk by an arch that led into the church grounds.

Hale paused to lift his bagged bottle and take a sip, feeling safe in facing back along his track to do it, and two full seconds later Philby stepped through the arch. The two KGB men followed, though Hale thought he saw them exchange a glance before they too disappeared.

Hale quickly shuffled sidways into the recessed doorway of a restaurant on the other side of the street, and after putting down his bottle and tossing his leather hat and the blob of cotton, he shrugged out of his coat and pulled its sleeves inside-out before putting it back on; then, hatless, and with the coat’s pink-satin lining on the outside now so that he seemed to be wearing a decrepit Oriental smoking jacket, he retrieved his bottle and emerged from the door-way and strode purposefully across the street to the stone arch. He took a deep breath and stepped through.

The arch led into an old walled cemetery, and Hale walked forward out of the shadow of the wall into a patch of still sunlight. For a moment he smelled the grass and the tulips, but then he caught the familiar whiff of rancid oil. His eyes were watering in the sun glare.

He was suddenly dizzy, and after only a few more steps along the gravel walk he gripped a bronze double-barred cross on the nearest gravestone to keep from falling. A thought that was not his own echoed in his head: What brings thee in to me?

Hale glanced around for Philby—and he saw only the two KGB men, who were striding between the upright stones in evident alarm.

Philby had evaded them—but where was he? Hale took a deep breath and stepped away from the gravestone.

And he noticed with a sort of ringing tunnel vision that he was casting two shadows across the gravel—or, rather, that he stood between two shadows, with no evidence that his own body was stopping the sunlight at all. He raised his arm, and so did the shadow a foot away to his right. He looked up to his left, where the person casting the other shadow should be standing, and for a moment he saw the back of his own head, with the hair still standing up in spikes, and saw below it the shoulders of the crazy-looking quilted pink-satin coat.

A moment later the vision was gone, and aside from his two shadows he seemed to be alone on the gravel path.

His left leg flexed forward into an involuntary step, and in his left ear he heard a whisper: “Walk back out. Drink your vodka as you go.”

In his disorientation Hale would have gone along with almost any proposal, and he obediently lurched back toward the arch, tipping the bottle up for a slug of vodka.

He saw bubbles wobble up through the clear liquor, and heard them gurgling, but no liquid reached his mouth. Then his arm was pulled back down, and the whispering voice in his ear said, “Ahh,” and Hale could smell vodka fumes over the metallic oil reek. “Straight ahead, across the street,” the voice went on, “there’s a park where drunks sun themselves, two blocks away, just alleys to get there.”

Hale stumbled out through the arch and swayed and shuffled across the street like a man with a concussion. When he had stumbled up onto the far sidewalk his left leg flexed again, and he wobbled away in that direction. If the KGB men had observed him at all, they must have dismissed him as an unsignifying drunk.

Within a few steps Hale had turned right, off the Spiridonovka; and when he had walked one block down an alley that led away to the north, past windowsill flower boxes and the back doors of old wooden houses, he regained his balance. Out of the corner of his left eye he could see Philby walking along beside him now, and he could hear Philby’s boots crunching on the pavement; but Hale didn’t look directly at him for fear of overlapping him again. Hale did notice with relief that his own shadow stretched ahead properly from his own feet now, and that Philby’s was moving normally beside it, not alarmingly close to it.

As if this ordinary sight were a signal, Hale’s heartbeat was suddenly very fast in his chest, and he was panting. “What—” he said hoarsely, “—happened?”

“I often duck in there, or into any cemetery,” said Philby quietly, his own voice sounding a little strained, “when I want to lose my escorts. The guardian angel is present in such places, and when she is focusing on me, other people seem to have difficulty doing it.” He took a deep breath and sighed gustily. “I guess you’re my other half, right enough, my ten-years-delayed twin—today she obviously mistook you and I, authoritatively, for one person.” Hale saw the shadow of Philby’s head lift and turn in profile toward him. “Not very flattering to me, I must say,” Philby added. “What is that garment?”

“Overcoat,” said Hale shortly. “Inside-out.”

Neither of them said anything more until they had reached the park Philby had mentioned, a narrow grassy square with wooden benches around the periphery. And several of the old men on the benches were holding bottles.

Hale and Philby found an unoccupied bench in the far corner, and sat down heavily enough to creak the boards.

Philby was staring at Hale. “ ‘What brings thee in to me,’ ” he said, “ ‘seeing that thou art not of my kind and canst not therefore be assured of safety from violence or ill-usage?’ ”

“The way in which I am of your kind outweighs all the rest,” Hale told him, his voice still shaky. “I’ve come to propose a trade.” His heartbeat was slowing down, and at least he was able to speak without gasping. “Do you still have Theo Maly’s instructions for preparation of the amomon root? Specifically a copy of those instructions?”

Philby stared at him blankly. “Yes.”

“Well, I want a copy. In exchange for that, and for one other thing, I will give you directions to a dead-letter box, a dubok, that I’ve found here in the city. In the dubok is an inhabited amomon root, wrapped up in waxed paper and rubber bands. It’s my suspicion that the Soviet authorities will not have seen fit to provide you with one.”

Philby shifted on the bench, then held out his hand for the bottle, which Hale passed to him. “Where,” Philby whispered after he had taken a swallow, “did you get a live amomon root?” “In the Zagros mountains, last spring. The djinn-kill on Ararat was massive—there were whole hillsides of blooming amomon thistles.”

“Ah,” Philby said. “Yes, there would have been.”

Hale took the bottle back and lifted it for another sip. He had to keep reminding himself that Philby had cold-bloodedly betrayed Hale’s men in the Ahora Gorge in 1948, for what Hale was proposing here was a cruel fraud: even if Philby should correctly ingest an inhabited amomon root, his bloodstream would spin the primitive djinn past the Shihab shot pellets that were probably still imbedded in his back, and the amomon djinn would be killed instantly, uselessly. There could be no amomon immortality for Philby, though Hale needed him to believe that it was possible.

“What is the ‘one other thing’ you want, in exchange?” asked Philby.

“The diamond that Prince Feisal gave you in 1919,” said Hale, making himself speak without emphasis. “The rafiq stone.”

Philby was laughing softly, his puffy face gray in the cold sunlight. “Oh, Andrew! And here you are, devoted boy, in Moscow, on her fortieth birthday! Like Gershwin’s Porgy, looking for Bess! I daresay you’ve got airline tickets, and so you need the rafiq diamond in order to fly out of the Soviet Union with her, unmolested by the angry angels at cruising altitudes! To where, boy? Back to your Bedouins?”

Hale’s whole body had gone cold. “She—t-told you?” he said— and remotely it occurred to him that Philby had lost his own stammer. “You?”

“I’ve always been good about remembering birthdays,” Philby said placidly. “Yes, in Dogubayezit she told me about her vow, on the day after nobody succeeded in the Ahora Gorge. 1948, you must remember it. She made a prayer to the Blessed Virgin, right?— when she was imprisoned in the Lubyanka here, during the war: ‘I vow that on my fortieth birthday at high noon I will light a candle for you right here in Moscow’—O Mother of God!—‘at St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square.’ Very devout young lady, I gathered, though she and I—” He chuckled and shook his head, then said, clearly reciting, “ ‘Blue the sky from east to west arches, and the world is wide, though the girl he loves the best rouses from another’s side.’ ” He glanced at Hale. “That’s—”

“Housman, I know.” Hale ignored the implication. He hadn’t allowed for Philby knowing that Elena was supposed to be at the cathedral on this day, and he reconsidered the lines-of-compulsion in his proposed deal with him. “I will give you directions to the dubok that contains the inhabited thistle root—it should be testably genuine, able to animate cigarette ashes placed near it, or to wiggle the legs of freshly killed flies, for example, small agitations—and as soon as I have Maly’s directions and the rafiq diamond—”

“My wife Eleanor is living with me here in Moscow,” Philby interrupted. “I don’t think you met her, back in Beirut, did you? Lovely woman, but her passport expires in July, three months from now, and she’s determined to be back in the United States by then. She’s got a daughter there, by a previous marriage. She loves me, you understand, but she doesn’t want to become just one more of the ring-road birds.”

Hale decided to let Philby ramble—it was dangerous to let him control the conversation this way, but Hale might learn something that could be useful as leverage. “Ring-road birds?” he said.

“ ‘Dust is their food and clay is their meat, and they are clothed like birds in garments of feathers,’ ” Philby said. “Have you met them, the expatriates who’ve defected, given up their old citizenships—in the service, as they come unhappily to learn, of her? I swear their breath doesn’t steam, on winter days!—as if they have no more body heat than trees, or lichens. When it was clear that Eleanor couldn’t be dissuaded from catching an Aeroflot flight here to join me, my old pal Nicholas bloody Elliott took her to a London cinema and made her watch The Birds, that new Alfred Hitchcock movie. Have you seen it? Attractive, independent-minded young lady undertakes troublesome travel to be with the fascinating man, but brings down on herself the injurious wrath of the ordinarily timid fowls, and ends up in shock, mute and infirm. I could be a, a king, among that sad population… if I was willing to let go of what shreds of humanity I still possess.”

“I met one of them yesterday,” Hale said. “He—pitched over dead of fright, while I was talking to him.”

Philby laughed and shook his head. “They’re frail,” he agreed, “individually. In a group, though, they have a certain spiteful power. And their eyes just glitter with sick envy when they learn that Eleanor still has a valid passport! Even Donald Maclean simply shivers when she speaks of flying back to—New York, London. And she is resolved to fly out, in June. And so”—he shrugged and smiled—“I will be without a wife, my boy! I think it was Heming-way who said that the state of being married is unimaginable until you’ve entered it, and then once you’ve been married you can’t ever imagine not being. I’ve had three wives, and I’m vigorous enough for at least one more.”

“What if,” said Hale unsteadily, “Elena doesn’t… want you?”

“Do you think that will matter? Here? Droit de komissar, my boy!” Philby reached out one blunt-fingered hand to tousle Hale’s hair affectionately, but Hale flinched back when he felt a blade cut his scalp. Philby was unfolding a handkerchief now and scraping onto the monogrammed silk the shred of bloody hair he had cut off with a tiny folding knife.

“There,” Philby said with satisfaction as he refolded the handkerchief and tucked it away. “Cheat me now, and I’ll have the Mother of Catastrophes on you like a bloodhound, long before you can walk to the nearest border crossing. I don’t relish the idea of summoning her and conversing, but I would make a point of it, in this case.”

Hale’s left hand was pressing his scalp above his ear, and he could feel hot blood matting his hair. He was nervously aware that he had lost control of this meeting. “I’m not going to cheat you. The terms I propose—”

“Are irrelevant, Andrew!” Philby slapped his palms on his knees and stood up. “Excuse me for a moment, would you? while I talk to these good comrades.”

Then Philby had strolled away across the grass toward the old men on the benches, and he had pulled a wad of banknotes from his pocket.

Hale set the vodka bottle down on the bench beside him to grope for a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his inside-out overcoat— his scalp was still bleeding, and his left palm was red with blood. This was not going well at all. But surely Philby wanted the amomon root!

And Hale needed the rafiq diamond. He did not want to have to try to take trains and boats out of the Soviet Union—and he certainly didn’t want to walk out.

Philby was striding back to the bench now, with a cigarette-pack-sized cardboard box in his hand instead of the bills.

“How could there not be a gambler,” said Philby cheerfully as he sat down on the other side of the bottle, “among a crowd of Russian alcoholics? You recall Dostoyevsky!” The box he was holding was, Hale saw, a red pack of playing cards. “No, Andrew, the terms of our deal were defined fifteen years ago! The rafiq diamond resided in my guts then, and it stays with me now, though not so intimately; I was on Ararat too, a year ago, I too incurred the wrath of the stratospheric angels just as much as you did, and I might want to travel by air myself one day.” When Hale just stared at him, Philby explained patiently, “The thing is, we never finished our card game. Seven-card-stud, high-low declare—the high hand wins Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, the low hand wins the amomon procedure.” He held up his hand. “And—all three of the roots you brought are part of the amomon unit, and go in the pot. I know you brought one for yourself too, and one for Elena.”

Philby was right, of course, beyond plausible contradiction— Hale had hidden two other inhabited roots in the journalists’ hotel in the Sad Sam.

“Yes,” he admitted.

Hale kept the angry frown on his face as he pressed the handkerchief to his scalp. But this was a rout. He had hoped to exchange one of the magical thistle roots for the diamond, and then go away on his own to meet Elena; now, though, the jewel seemed to be a lost cause, and it looked as though he’d be lucky just to be able to be the one to meet Elena! And Philby had cut a piece out of his scalp! For the first time, Hale had some professional respect for Philby as an agent-runner.

Hale must at least seem passionately to want the amomon, for the sake of letting Philby seem to have won something by taking all three of the roots; but of course in the end Hale would declare high. He had brought along the two other amomon roots simply because he’d had them, and they had value; and because it had seemed too high-handed for Hale to decide, for Elena, that she did not want to avail herself of the magical longevity the amomon offered.

But he was sure she would reject the option. She was, after all, a practicing Catholic, as Hale had been himself now for more than a year, and taking immortality from a fallen angel was hardly in accord with Catholic doctrine.

In fact, Elena would almost certainly reject Hale, if he approached her in the cathedral. And the djinn-thistle, supplemented with Maly’s instructions, would probably give him genuine immortality, if he won it.

Suddenly, sickeningly, Hale was very far from sure that he did not want to be the one to win the amomon.

“You want,” he said carefully, “to deal a hand of—”

“No, my boy, that would call for fresh rules, fresh definitions! Wild cards, cut-for-the-deal, dealer’s choice, no end of arguments! No, I simply want to finish the hand that was interrupted by the earthquake in 1948. Here are cards, here are the players—here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the doors and see Elena! If you won’t play, if you forfeit the game, you lose—and I’ll at least be the one to go meet Elena in an hour, and I’ll have a good try too at getting the KGB to wring the dubok location out of you.”

Hale’s forehead was chilly with a dew of sweat. “But those cards were scattered.”

“I remember mine. And I remember what you were showing on the board—a three, seven, ten, and nine, of different suits. Do you remember?”

Actually, Hale did remember the hand, with hallucinatory clarity; he remembered too the rain drumming on the corrugated steel roof of the little war-surplus Anderson bomb shelter, and the tan woolen Army blankets, and the bottle of Macallan Scotch that they had rolled back and forth between them. “Yes. And you were showing an Ace, four, six, and eight; the six and the eight were diamonds. But are we to— trust each other, to choose the same hole cards we held then?”

“That’s an insulting remark from an Oxford man to a Cambridge man. And in any case it’s high-low—unless one of us declares both ways, each of us gets half the pot. The girl—or life everlasting.” Philby stretched, yawning. “I wonder if she’s kept her looks, our Elena? The white hair fetched me, I must say.” He smacked his lips and blinked at Hale. “You could probably kill me, right now—the old Fort Monkton skills—but of course then you’d never see Maly’s instructions. And I took the Fort Monkton course too, remember, and I do have my little knife.”

It was riskier than Philby had said. The ranks of the hands would be almost superfluous, since Philby would certainly choose new hole cards to maximally improve his own hand in one direction or the other, high or low, and he would assume that Hale would do the same—it would be more important here to guess which way the other man would declare.

Philby leaned back and spoke into the sky: “ ‘We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,’ ” he said, reciting from Chesterton’s Lepanto now, “ ‘of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.’ ” He smiled at Hale. “That will have called witnesses, don’t you think? You spoke the name of Solomon in that bomb shelter, if you recall, and it did summon attention then.”

Hale could feel a pressure against his mind now—not the full, thought-scattering scrutiny of a corporeal djinn, but a quiver of alien attention, and he thought the grasses were moving more than the wind could explain. He exhaled to clear his nose of a new whiff of the metallic oil smell.

Philby had moved the vodka bottle and was sorting through the cards, now laying one face-up on the bench, now tucking one under his thigh. After a minute there were three cards under his thigh and the predetermined Ace, four, six, and eight lying face-up.

He held the remainder of the deck out toward Hale. “Now find yours.”

Hale’s scalp seemed to have stopped bleeding, and he shoved the handkerchief into his overcoat. He took the cards and stared at Philby’s exposed cards as he slowly shuffled through the deck. Philby could have selected a two, three, and five for his hole cards, giving him the perfect low hand, if he wanted to go that way. Hale couldn’t even construct a hand that would beat it. Or Philby could have chosen three Aces for his hole cards, which would give him four of them—a high hand Hale couldn’t possibly beat.

But Philby could not have assembled a hand that would assuredly win both ways. The best he could do for that would be the Ace-to-five straight, and Hale could have three more nines hidden, and the four-of-a-kind would beat the straight.

Hale began laying out the cards he had had showing in 1948: the three, the seven, the ten, the nine.

The declaration alone would be the verdict—if they both chose in the same direction, Philby would win.

Hale coughed to conceal an involuntary sigh. All delusions aside, he knew which way he had to declare.

Hale chose three cards at random for his hole cards and wedged them under his knee. Beyond Philby he saw that several of the old drunks had got up and were shambling away, doubtless troubled by the itchy resonance of the supernatural attention that Philby had summoned by speaking the name of Solomon.

Philby was digging in a pocket of his trousers. “I’ll fetch us six kopeks, for the declare,” he said breathlessly. When he had pulled out a handful of coins and begun fingering them, he squinted up at Hale. “Don’t you wish it were our birthday, today, instead of Elena’s, and we could read each other’s minds?”

“I think we can anyway,” said Hale.

Philby frowned, and suddenly Hale guessed that Philby had assembled the Ace-to-five straight, and arrogantly meant to declare both ways—confident that Hale would declare for low, that Hale would choose the good chance of immortality over the uncertainty of Elena’s dubious reception.

“She hates you, you know,” Philby said quickly. “In Beirut she learned that you had supposedly killed that Frenchman, that Cassagnac fellow. She told me—word of honor!—that she meant to kill you.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Hale said, reaching across to select three coins from Philby’s palm. He shook them inside his cupped hands like dice. “I’m willing to put it to the test.”

Philby forced a hearty laugh. “There spoke bluff! She’s forty— she hates you—and there is an infinity of other women in the world.” His gaze focused past Hale then, and he drew in a sharp breath. “Ach, and now the groundlings have arrived.”

Hale made himself look around slowly, and he was afraid he would see the peculiar hats of the KGB—but the figures that had shambled into the park were thin, pale-faced men and women in shabby overcoats. Hale saw tweeds, and tartans, and even an unmistakable Old Etonian tie. These were the Gray People, the ring-road birds. I could be a king among that sad population, Philby had said. They made no sounds, and almost seemed to ripple with the breeze.

For Philby to declare low here would be the equivalent, in the context of this crowd, of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. It would be declaring, To hell with love, and eventual payment of the death I owe to God. I willingly choose this existence of bitterness, envy, and cherished lies, on the condition that I can be assured of it for eternity.

Hale was certain that it was what Philby would choose, would have to choose, now that Hale’s own decision had been made to seem problematical. If Philby were forced to choose between love and grubby security, the course of his life would have left him no alternative but to choose grubby security.

“I’m willing to put it to the test,” Hale said again. He slid two coins into his right fist and held it out.

Philby rubbed his hands together for nearly a full minute, baring his teeth in a grimace of indecision—and then at last he made a fist and struck it hard against his chest. “Mea culpa!” he whispered.

“Declare,” said Hale, opening his hand to show the two coins.

Philby lowered his hand pronated, and he opened his fingers and let the single kopek drop into the grass.

The air seemed to twang, a released tension felt in the abdomen rather than heard.

All Hale had won, after all this, had been the right to go meet Elena, as he had planned to do all along.

“The r-roots,” Philby was gabbling, “wh-wh-where are the roots?”

Hale stood up and looked at his watch—he had twenty minutes to get to St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, a bit more than a mile away to the east. “Two are in a high cupboard in the kitchen at the journalists’ hotel on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya, behind an old wooden tray; the other is in the bookstore next door to the Ararat Restaurant, behind the red-leather collected works of Marx. You can unleash Machikha Nash on me if you don’t find them. Oh, and—” he held out his hand. “Here are your two kopeks back.”

“Keep them,” snarled Philby, “to be p-put on your eyes, after you’re d-d- dead! What can you h-have left, thirty summers, at the m-most? And the last duh-duh- dozen of them impotent, s-senile! How many is th-thirty? Three prints of your h-hands in mud!”

Hale had turned and was striding away across the grass, and behind him Philby raised his voice nearly in a scream: “While I’ll be y-you- youthful still, d-drinking claret, reading Shakespeare, f-f-fathering children! You l- lost here, today, Hale! Don’t doubt it! You l-lost!”

Hale paused at the alley and looked back. Kim Philby was sitting on the bench, still shouting, but he was surrounded now by the Gray People, and seemed as insubstantial as any of them.

Enjoy the illusion of immortality, thought Hale sadly, O my brother. The amomon djinn will die as soon as you digest it. If I’ve got thirty years left, you’ve got twenty. Two prints of your hands.

“You l-l-lost!” came Philby’s voice, sounding thin and birdlike at this distance.

Hale smiled tightly as he turned away.

No, he thought as he hurried down the sun-dappled cobblestone alley toward the lanes of Spiridonovka. Whatever the outcome, I declared high.

Hale made himself walk, rather than run or even jog, down the wide quarter mile of paving stones toward the fantastic spires of St. Basil’s Cathedral on the hazy middle-distance horizon. His watch showed only eight minutes to noon, but he was wary of the Soviet Army honor guards in their gray fur hats and gray uniforms with bright red collar tabs and epaulettes. Clusters of Army guards marched across various empty quadrants of the square, and individual guards stood like buoys at the widely separated corners of the line of Moscow citizens that stretched like a boundary fence across the square, enclosing the concrete bleachers and terminating at the temple-like mausoleum in which Lenin’s preserved corpse could be viewed. In the eleven days he had been in Moscow, Hale had twice seen these guards knock a person out of the line and pummel him to the stones for some apparently minor violation of security, and he didn’t want to attract their attention today at all.

It was far too late now to pull the long, quilted sleeves back through his overcoat and put it on correctly; it would take some minutes to walk all the way past the longest, bleacher-spanning segment of the mausoleum line, and he would have to march the whole distance with the pink-satin lining-side of the garment out, looking like a performer in some crude satire on Chinamen, or Tibetans. And it was the fashion among the stilyagi, the stylish young Moscow hooligans, to go about anarchistically hatless; but at least Hale’s graying hair and ludicrous coat would save him from being mistaken for one of them.

Hale had not eaten for more than twelve hours, and the vodka he had drunk with Philby was making him dizzy. A hundred yards away to his left rose the gray stone arches and towers of the GUM department store, as sternly grand as the Houses of Parliament; far off ahead of him to his right the Saviour’s Tower stood up from the brick-red Kremlin wall, incongruously crowned with a giant red star; and straight ahead, its bulbous blue-and-gold striped domes looking like bellied sails on a sultan’s ship of state, St. Basil’s Cathedral loomed on the broad, gently rippled sea of paving stones.

Hale was trying desperately to convince himself that Philby would not send KGB agents down here to arrest him and Elena. Hale knew that Philby had been a turned agent, working for the SOE against the Soviets, since 1951; and at a KGB trial he could testify that Philby had cooperated in the Declare sabotage of the Rabkrin expedition on Mount Ararat a year ago. Surely the mere accusations would be likely to get Philby into trouble!—and Theodora had said that Philby was not highly regarded by the Soviet authorities these days.

Like any competent agent, Hale had his passport and money in his pockets—along with the Scandinavian Air tickets, two seats booked on a flight leaving tomorrow morning from Vnukovo Airport, bound for Stockholm. He couldn’t use his—perhaps he could give one to Elena, if she needed it.

Then a thought occurred to him that almost brought him to a halt—what if Elena had also incurred the wrath of the Heaviside Layer angels by participating in the destruction of the Black Ark last January, and what if she had tried since to fly above 10,000 feet? Hale had only survived the djinn-attack on his Air Liban Caravelle turbojet in February because the crippled plane had been able to land in the Persian Gulf.

If she’s dead, he told himself steadily, then she won’t be here. She may not be here anyway. See to it that you’re in the church, at noon.

He pushed back the bunched pink sleeve of his coat to look at his watch—it was twelve right now. The cathedral was still a hundred yards away, and he broke into a jog; but after only a few paces he slowed back to a walk, his heart thudding and his face suddenly chilly.

A dozen men in dark brown uniforms stood in the shade around the cathedral’s north arch. Even from this distance Hale could see campaign ribbons on their chests, but their visored caps made them look more like policemen than soldiers. Hale had no idea what agency they might represent; and he wondered if they were on the watch for him.

Hale knew he cut a peculiar figure here; and after a moment he felt a hot trickle of blood run down behind his left ear, and he realized that his brief jog had opened the cut in his scalp.

I can’t go in to see if she’s there, he thought helplessly. Even if they’re not after me, I’d be drawing needless attention to her.

But what if they’re after her? If Elena is in the church, lighting the candle she promised to the Virgin Mary, unaware of this dragnet outside, I could at least provide a distraction.

His ribs tingled almost with vertigo at the thought, as if he had been standing on the narrowest, highest coping of the Saviour’s Tower, looking up.

He could probably walk past on the right, safely—and then just trudge all the way down to the foot of the Moskva River Bridge. And leave Elena to whatever action was going on at the cathedral. She wasn’t expecting Hale, after all, and probably wouldn’t welcome the sight of him.

In the end he simply couldn’t do it. You didn’t go to all the trouble to get yourself sewn up in a mule skin, he thought, and let yourself be carried by the eagle all the way up to the inaccessible peak, just to try to find a way to climb back down.

He walked straight ahead into the shadow of the bulging domes, and when the uniformed men saw that he was going to pass among them, he nodded politely to the ones who were staring coldly at him. Trying to look like a Russian, he stepped between two of them and tapped up the stone stairs as if he had every sort of legitimate reason to be visiting the cathedral. He didn’t look back, but only glanced at his watch as he gripped the vertical brass handles of the ten-foot-tall gold-paneled doors. He was only a minute and twenty seconds late.

The doors weren’t locked. He pulled them both open, and peered into the chandelier-lit dimness of the vast church.

There was no crucifix visible anywhere on the high walls he could see from the entry, and no pews to interrupt the expanse of polished-stone floor, but the walls and the broad pillars were dense with the frescoed silhouettes of saints and angels and apostles.

There were policemen in here too, a number of them—it was hard to know how many, for each of the tall pillars that stood up from the floor was as wide as a car viewed head-on; but there were at least six of the uniformed figures standing at various points across the dim nave. Hale didn’t glance squarely at any of them, but he imagined that the intrusion of his ragged self must have drawn the unfriendly attention of every one of them.

He couldn’t just stand in the doorway.

A tiny constellation of candle flames lit the low reaches of the gold walls in a far corner, and when he began slowly walking across the floor toward the glow, he saw three or four black-hooded women kneeling in front of an iron table with the candles arranged on it in ranks. The candles were tall thin tapers, not the short votive candles in jars he remembered from his youth. The place should have smelled of incense and frail missal-pages, but the only scents he was aware of were damp stone and a diesel taint on the cold air that he had let in from outside. At least he could detect none of the rancid oil reek.

Two of the policemen were standing immediately to the left of the kneeling women, almost leaning against the frescoed wall; Hale pretended to be indifferent to them.

He hesitated and stopped when he was still a dozen feet away from the candles, and he stared at the backs of the women; and his heart began thudding even before he was sure that he recognized the figure and posture of the woman closest to the wall.

She was here, she had arrived safely this far, at least, after all the perilous years and betrayed loyalties. Was she about to be arrested now, and taken back to the Lubyanka?

For more than twenty years she had occupied Hale’s thoughts and brightened or tormented his dreams, but the only period in which the two of them had known each other, lived and worked and eaten and joked together, had been the three months in Nazi-occupied Paris, at the end of 1941, more than twenty-two years ago.

During his years as a lecturer at the University College of Weybridge, he had imagined one day meeting her again, and courting her, and marrying her; but under the gaze of the police in this cold Moscow church, those daydreams seemed all-of-a-piece with the bright, naïve ambitions of his Cotswolds boyhood, and he didn’t dare to hope for anything at all now, not even continued liberty.

He stirred himself and walked forward, digging into the pocket of his corduroy trousers for Philby’s two kopeks. The women were kneeling on a black leather kneeler in front of the candles, and Hale lowered himself down onto the yard of it to Elena’s right, so that she was between him and the nearest policeman; and Hale reached out to drop the two coins into the slot in the iron money box.

They fell to the floor of the box with a noise that seemed as loud as a couple of .22 shots.

From the corner of his left eye he could see that she was looking at him, and he was resentful that he dared not meet her gaze.

He saw her right hand move—she had made the sign of the cross. He crossed himself in turn, and he was genuinely praying to God too when he said softly, “Segne mich.”

The words were German for Bless me.

It was the old GRU Rote Kapelle code phrase: Things are not what they seem—trust me. Though he had spoken in a near-whisper, the words echoed back down at him from the remote arched ceiling.

He forced his hand not to tremble as he reached out and picked up one of the matchboxes on the iron table, and he managed to light one of the matches on the first strike. He held it to the curled black wick of one of the candles that had been extinguished, and shook it out when the wick flared in a tall yellow flame.

He made the sign of the cross again and stood up, staring at the candle flame and trying to see Elena as clearly as he could in his peripheral vision. Her white hair was conspicuous under the black hood, and he could make out her big Castilian eyes and the smooth, graceful sweep of her jaw.

God knew what she made of him, with his graying hair and strange, blood-spotted clothing.

He turned away and began walking toward the south entrance, where the tall doors stood open and he could see a segment of distant gray overcast indented by the Moscow skyline south of the river.

No one stopped him as he scuffed across the stone floor past the massive pillars. He stepped out between the open doors into the cold breeze, and walked down the first couple of steps, and then he heard someone’s footsteps behind him.

Two or three of the uniformed men stood at the foot of the stairs, but Hale slowed and let the person behind him gradually catch up. It was Elena, heartbreakingly slim and straight in a long black dress. He let himself look into her face finally, and though there were new lines under her eyes and down her cheeks, her blue eyes were still youthful, and vulnerable.

He let his left eyelid flutter in a faint wink, and then he had stepped ahead and was leading the way left, toward the sidewalk on the eastern side of the cathedral island. He could hear the tap of her shoe-soles on the cement behind him, and he didn’t look around to see if the policemen were watching them.

When they had reached the sidewalk, where the wind was swirled into eddies by the curtained black ZIL limousines that swept past, one of them possibly transporting Brezhnev himself from some meeting of the Communist Party Presidium at the Kremlin Palace, Hale whispered back over his shoulder, “I’m Varnum Leonard, journalist for the London Evening Standard. Solid cover until this morning, but now Philby’s talked to me, I’m compromised.” He was dizzy, and he took a deep breath. “I did not kill Cassagnac.”

From behind him she said softly, “Gitana Sandoval, Spanish movie producer, location-scouting via Intourist.”

And both of us, Hale thought, are in the old GRU records, and certainly in the more recent KGB records too—not to mention Rabkrin—if anybody should be interested in checking.

He could hear clocking footsteps approaching from some distance behind, and he shuffled for two paces and nearly tripped, for he had instinctively begun to tap out the old clochard nothing-right-here rhythm—but in nearly the same instant he had remembered the uses those rhythms had been put to in the Ahora Gorge fifteen years ago, and he had awkwardly tried to resume his former pace.

Elena’s shoes had scuffled on the pavement too, for a moment; and now she was again walking normally. Ultimately, Hale thought with a sort of solemn pleasure, we both know which way to declare.

The footsteps behind were closer, and sounded like boots. Elena was walking beside Hale on his right now, and she took hold of his hand, and squeezed. “I knew, after a while, that you had not,” she said quietly. “I knew when I ordered the helicopter to veer east.”

She was holding his hand so tightly that he could feel the fast beat of her pulse; and a moment later he realized that it was precisely matching his own, as if they were one person on the sidewalk.

With her free hand she fetched up from her coat pocket a little mirror—apparently the same old tortoise-backed one she had had in Paris—and when she held it out in front of them, Hale could see her face and his, half-overlapped in the cracked glass.

The footsteps from behind faltered, and then broke from a concerted group into unmatched individuals—and then the policemen had passed them and were craning their necks to peer up and down the lanes of this south end of Red Square, as if, Hale thought giddily, they were watching for a taxi.

“Grace,” said Elena. “Not magic.”

“I have airline tickets,” said Hale, “but I can’t fly and I can’t go back to England. I’m more or less going to have to walk out, and God knows across which border.”

“You remembered my birthday,” she said, still holding his hand tightly, though she was staring past him at the cathedral. “Did—did Philby?”

“Yes. We played a game of cards, to decide which of us would come to meet you in the cathedral. The loser to win three of the inhabited amomon roots.”

“Immortality!” she said. “He was happy to lose.”

“Not happy—resigned. I was happy to win. I would have come even if I had not won.”

She laughed, and it was the first time he had heard her laugh since Berlin in 1945, nearly twenty years ago. “Walking out,” she said, “would be easier for a couple than for one person alone.”

They were a peculiar-looking couple—the man in the clownish overcoat, who had fired the shot that would one day topple the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the woman dressed in black like a Spanish duena, who would at long last become his wife—but they attracted no attention at all as they strolled away hand-in-hand past the southernmost corner of the Kremlin Wall and on to the embankments of the Moskva River.