When Theodora had stood up straight and replaced his hat, he strode west along the shoulder, his hands clasped behind the tails of his coat and his head down to be sure of keeping his shoes out of puddles. Hale trudged along after him.
When they had walked a hundred feet away from the Renault, Theodora turned around and fixed Hale with a chilly stare. “Well?”
“The stone is buried under fresh cement, sir,” said Hale, “about two hundred feet from the Brandenburg Gate on the western side, pretty much centered. I’ve done drawings,” he added, reaching into his pocket for the diagrams he had made that morning, “indicating the exact position—I can amplify them to make them more precise, now.”
Theodora took the papers and glanced at them. “Good, I think this is clear.” Again he turned his cold eyes on Hale. “Go on. Tell me every detail.”
Hale began easily by telling him about his visit with the American Flannery and hearing that Kim Philby was in Berlin; then he recounted the pursuit of the fugitive from the Soviet Sector, and told Theodora how the man had seemed to be herded to the spot where the stone would soon be buried, and how the fugitive had been killed there. Hale became aware of a reluctance when he came to describing meeting Elena and Cassagnac at the restaurant by the Reich stag, and Philby’s intrusion and odd behavior with the insecticide. And when his narrative got to the point when he had stood up from the table to go get food, he abandoned the story he had concocted on the drive west to Helmstedt and just stopped talking.
“Food,” said Theodora impatiently, “right. Did you get some bloody food, or what?”
“No, sir, not then.” Hale felt dizzy, and he didn’t even know whether he hoped he was ending his SIS career here, or not. At last, slowly and deliberately, he went on: “There was a radio playing in the restaurant, and the music it had been playing was interrupted by—by an interference which I had learned in Paris meant—super-natural—attention—being paid.” He was sweating again, and he discovered that it was no easier going on with this than it had been starting. “Magic, that is, sir,” he said, feeling as if the words were coins he had tried to smuggle out, surrendered now as he pushed them out past his lips. “I think I should amplify the report I made to you concerning my three months in occupied Paris in ’41,” he added, “by the way.”
Theodora exhaled, and Hale wondered how long the man had been holding his breath. “Good lad. Good lad. So many promising agents manage to convince even themselves that they didn’t see what they saw—but go on. And don’t tell me, in tones of apology, that ‘It gets more weird’—I do know that.” “Right. Well …” Hale ground out the story of the rest of the night, omitting only the gallows-marriage on the boat and going to bed with Elena—in this version of the story, he and Elena had parted outside the restaurant.
The sun was high when at last, with relief, he described ditching the gun and driving back up the hole to the Helmstedt checkpoint.
Theodora strode away across the mud, careless now of his shoes. He was nodding, and after a few paces he turned around again to face Hale. “Good. I did want to know where the stone was put, and I’m glad to learn of Philby’s participation—oh, he was there about the stone too, lad, don’t doubt it—and I think I’m alarmed at how aware the French DGSS is—but this was a test, too, to find out if you’re worth all the years and money we’ve expended on you. Happily, you are. And I trust you are discreet with your little Spanish judy, no secrets revealed over the pillow. Eunuchs for agents would be best, I sometimes think. Impossible to get it past the Foreign Secretary, of course. Your work will be—of a different nature, now that you’re an initiate. You’ve learned all you can from the old files, I expect, and it’s time to put you in the field. When you get back to Broadway, you’ll be sent to Fort Monkton for a six-week training course in the paramilitary arts, and then you’ll be posted to the Middle East, Kuwait probably, under the cover of the Combined Research Planning Office, known jocularly as Creepo.”
“The Middle East,” said Hale thoughtfully. He had been hungry all morning, but now he felt distinctly nauseated; and he knew that it was fear that had quickened his heartbeat—but this was the next step farther in, on the way to learning the very deepest secrets of the world, of the most powerful and most hidden world. He flexed his right hand, remembering how the whirlwind had bowed in the rain when he had waved the ankh…
Theodora nodded. “Not totally a surprise, I daresay. Before you go, I will acquaint you with the big picture, the biggest picture— and then, finally, indoctrinate you for clearance to what we have called Operation Declare.”
BOOK TWO: Know, Not Think It
ELEVEN: Beirut, 1963
And the two of them, laying him east and west, that the mysterious earth currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon— bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by nerve.
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Kim Philby sat back in his chair by the window-side table in the Normandy Hotel bar, and he licked his lips, tasting her lipstick. The woman on the other side of the table simply stared at him for a moment, then took a long inhalation on her cigarette. Out beyond the window glass the late afternoon sky was gold over the purple sea.
Philby smiled at her, but he was nettled. He found her prematurely bone-white hair very erotic, but her lips had been as inert as the back of her hand would have been; and he wished his head were not ludicrously wrapped in white bandages. “I do b-beg your p-pardon, Miss C-B. My Sov-oviet handler was in the l-lobby, with some cadaverous specimen, j-just now. They d-didden did not come in, but if you do in-snit— insist on meeting me in my—office this way, we had b-better pretend to be h-having an extramerry-extramartial-extramarital—”
“I understand,” said Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga in careful English. She sighed out a puff of smoke, then picked up her glass of Dubonnet. “In our work we have to emulate Judas sometimes.” She finished the red drink in two gulps, raising her disconcertingly dark eyebrows at him over the rim. “Your office, this hotel bar is?” she asked when she had put the glass down.
“I g-get my mail here, and the c-concierge keeps a tah-tah-typewriter here, for my use. I’m a j- journalist, you know, these days.” He picked up his own glass, swirling the gin among the diminished ice cubes. “But Judas, you say? The outfit I pro-propose to b-b-b—betray!—is hardly the aqua-equi-equivalent of the Son of man, even in my atheistic c-consideration.” He smiled more broadly. “Or maybe you mean I turn out to have betrayed you?”
Elena stubbed out her cigarette. “I haven’t seen you since Turkey in 1948,” she said, getting to her feet and smoothing her skirt. “If you and I had a—had anything at all—then, I’m sure I can’t recall it.” She glanced around at the tables and the beaded curtain that led into the lobby. “Is there another way out of here? I’d never have been so careless as to approach you here, if I’d known you still had a—damned handler about. Bad craft, I apologize—we assumed you were in retirement here in Beirut.” She spoke calmly, but he could see a quicker pulse in the side of her neck.