Hale stared at the tanned, black-bearded man sitting across from him; and for a moment in his exhaustion he forgot about things like the whirlwind in Berlin, and the half-stone king of Wabar, and the djinn in the pool at Ain al’ Abd. Instead he was remembering the day he had stumbled upon the church of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris in 1941, and how, in spite of his atheism, he had been awed to comprehend that some drops of Christ’s blood had once supposedly been kept behind those stained-glass windows. And he remembered illustrations of Noah’s Ark from his religious text-books at the St. John’s boarding school in Windsor, when his mother had still been alive.
“You,” he said hoarsely, “have seen the Ark?” In 1948, Hale’s expedition had not ascended high enough, before disaster had struck, to have any hope of glimpsing some trace of the fabled vessel; and they had gone up the gorge at night. “It’s still up there, visible?”
Mammalian frowned impatiently. “Yes, Mr. Hale. Why would Theodora—”
“What—Jesus, man! What did it— look like?”
Mammalian reached toward the recorder, then visibly thought better of leaving an interruption on the wire. Instead he snatched up his glass of arak and drained it. “It looked—like a God-sized black coffin,” he said, “with one end, about ninety feet of it, sticking out of the ice, over a cliff with a lake at the base. I suppose the Ark was about six stories tall. My father shot a musket at it.”
Hale sat back. “Your father, Hakob, was a vandal.”
“The wood was petrified,” Mammalian said. “The shot bounced off. Now—”
“Why would he shoot at it?”
“It is inhabited, Andrew! Like a shell taken over by a hermit crab, a clan of hermit crabs. There were—voices, very loud voices, not human; and a face looked at us over the top. A— very big face.” “Oh.” Hale nodded impassively, all thought of Sainte-Chapelle and his days at St. John’s school dispelled. Somehow it had not ever occurred to him that Noah’s Ark might still be whole and accessible; and the news that the holy vessel was the dwelling place of things like the monsters he had seen in those past years was inordinately depressing. “You were,” he said, “asking about Theodora.”
“Yes.” The Armenian nodded and rubbed his forehead. “I wonder why Theodora led you to believe your Armenian infiltrators were imaginary.”
Hale sighed, remembering one item from the list of his coverstory crimes as Theodora had summarized them in the conference room at Number 10 Downing Street five days ago: Oh yes, and you took money from a now-deceased Russian illegal to break a couple of their agents out of a Turk prison and smuggle them safely back across the Soviet border; the illegal kept no records, so it can’t be disproved. There’s a good deal more, you’ll be briefed in Kuwait.
He did it so that my name would be on the SIS orders, Hale thought; I would certainly have been more circumspect if I had known that this “infiltration” was not only real but in effect a cooperative deal with the Russian secret ser vice! Even back then, in 1948, the old man was laying the groundwork for my eventual disgraceful cover story, in case it might one day be needed!
And he remembered again his suspicion that Theodora intended to “establish the truth about him,” have him assassinated, after this operation was completed.
“Why would he lead you to believe that?” Mammalian repeated. The man’s hands were clenched into fists on the table. “And why would he nevertheless give you my correct name?”
“Well, since it turns out you were a real person, I suppose I needed your correct name to put through the SIS paper-work consistently,” said Hale. “As to why he let me believe you were a fiction, invented to fool the SIS—I don’t know. I suppose so that I’d know as little as possible, if the SIS or the KGB were to question me.”
It chilled him now, in this disorienting 1963, to realize that he had been hiding from both services, in 1948. And he was even more of a fugitive from both now.
“But he deluded you,” Mammalian said, “and freed me, so that the Russian Ararat operation could take place. You weren’t to know that he wanted the operation to happen, wanted your men to run into opposition! Perhaps he was working for the KGB! Perhaps he is still!”
“No, that wasn’t it.” Hale rubbed his hands over his face. “He did want the Russians to awaken the djinn, but I’m sure he didn’t know about your… about the ambush you set up for us.” Set up with Philby’s help, he thought. “Theodora believed that our Shihab mete-orite couldn’t kill the djinn until they had… opened their gates to your party, and in that way become vulnerable to our attack. The possibility of effective opposition from—you—was a regrettable necessity.”
Mammalian was nodding, but skeptically. “That was and is true, that about the opened gates. Even buckshot bounces off, when the gates are closed. But I wonder if he is still deluding you—I wonder if he stage-managed it so that you would kill those two men last week in England and predictably flee to Kuwait, where we would predictably approach you.”
Hale’s chest was cold, for Mammalian was getting far too close to the truth—and he forced himself to frown as if at a difficult chess problem. “You think he’s running me now?”
Mammalian laughed softly. “And perhaps for the KGB! I don’t accuse you of dishonesty, my friend. I’m confident that if he is running you now, it is without your knowledge. I will certainly make sure that your Shihab stone is ground to powder and sifted into the sea! And even so, I may advise that we abort the operation. What did you learn from the Kurds?”
Hale’s mouth was dry at the thought that the operation might be canceled, that he might not get a chance to avenge the men he had led to their deaths on that wild night fourteen years ago—in spite of what he had told Mammalian earlier this evening, he did want vrej, vengeance—but he forced a laugh. “How could he have had me followed—”
“That is my worry, Andrew. What did you learn from the Kurds?”
Hale wished for hot coffee, but didn’t dare ask for it directly after a hard question; he had learned about Cassagnac’s precious amomon thistle from the Kurds, and he was sure that Theodora did not want him telling this Rabkrin agent anything at all about the amomon.
“First I went to the train crossing at the border. Let me tell it in order. Guy Burgess was there, with Philby.”
“Ah! I was there too, but hidden in the undercarriage of the baggage car.” Mammalian topped up their glasses with the clear liquor and clouded it with splashes of water.
The railway line that crossed the border by Kizilçakçak had been the only train crossing along the entire eastern Soviet border; the rails had been laid for the old Russian five-foot gauge, and the nineteenth-century locomotive that traversed it twice a week ran from Kars to a station only three miles into the Soviet territory, after which it retraced the route in reverse, with the locomotive pushing from behind.
The train had come chuffing up from the west on that chilly spring Wednesday morning, white smoke billowing up out of its Victorian smokestack and trailing away over the three cars it pulled, and it screeched to a steaming halt on the Turkish side of the iron bridge that marked the frontier—the tall barbed-wire fence stretched away to north and south on either side, strung down the center of a broad strip of dirt that was kept plowed to show the foot-prints of anyone who might cross.
Khaki-clad Turk askers stood with rifles beside the weathered sign that announced KARS– SOVIYET SINIRI, the border between the Soviet Union and the Kars district of Turkey, and four Russian soldiers in green uniforms marched across the bridge from a black Czech Tatra sedan parked on the eastern side; two of the Russians were clearly officers, with blue bands around the visors of their caps and gold epaulettes on their shoulders, while the other two were plain pogranichniki, border guards carrying rifles with bayonets. The Russians and the Turks saluted one another, and the Turk soldiers handed over a sheaf that presumably was the train crew’s passports and any bills of lading.