Declare

the name on his new passport and drove him to a modern apartment in the Parioli district of Rome, and behind drawn curtains he managed to eat most of a quick, hindered dinner of lukewarm gnocchi and red wine even as the woman was cutting his hair in a bristly brush cut and then dyeing it and his eyebrows dark brown. When his hair was dry they took his photograph, and a couple of hours later he was given a British passport in the name of Charles Garner, with his new picture in it. The sky was pale above the electric trolley lines when he was bundled out of the apartment building and boosted into the back of a newspaper delivery van, and he fell asleep among bales of the daily Corriere della Sera as the van sped north up one of the new autostrade express highways. Finally at noon a dark-haired Charles Garner walked haggardly into the Malpensa Airport outside Milan and boarded a TWA flight for Beirut.
    The Beirut airport was at Khalde, on the coast seven miles south of the city. The terminal was a long white two-story building with louvered ground-floor windows and a modernistic but vaguely Arab-looking lattice over the broader windows on the upper floor. After presenting the entry visa he’d been given, and getting his passport stamped on one of the artfully few remaining blank pages, Hale shambled aimlessly out into the linoleum-floored lobby, blinking up at the painted airplane models hanging on wires from the high ceiling. He could smell his own stale sweat, and even though his shoes were too big for him to lift his feet comfortably, he walked outside to the car park; but the pine-scented afternoon breeze was chilly, and he soon pushed his way back in through the glass doors.
    This was Lebanon, and the loudspeakers broadcast arrivals and departures in English and Arabic and French; and a pair of Maronite Catholic nuns who stepped past him nodded and said Bon jour instead of Sabah al khair. Hale echoed their greeting—guiltily, for he was a lapsed Catholic and had spent time the previous day talking with a creature whose name was Legion.
    A big dark-bearded man by the auto-rentals desk was baring white teeth at him in a grin—he wore a blue-striped gown under a French-cut jacket, and a white kaffiyeh , and Hale thought he was probably an Arab, altogether—and now the man strode over and said, in English, “You flinched, Mr. Garner! Confess, you were taught by nuns.”
    “Jesuits, actually,” said Hale. “Same general effect.”
    The man laughed jovially and led Hale back out through the doors to the sidewalk. “That accidental encounter was a nice confirmation,” he said, his voice just loud enough for Hale to hear in the cold open air. “It is odd how many of the people destined for our wielding were tempered in the Church—Dzerzhinsky, Theo Maly, even our late friend Ishmael—and the SIS would never have the wit to cook us a Papist double out of their Anglican fish-pot.”
    You don’t know Jimmie Theodora, thought Hale. “No,” he said tiredly, “they’re not running me. They’d like to run me.”
    “And they would kill you afterward. This Volvo is ours,” he said, waving at a little gray station wagon among the ranks of Mercedes-Benzes and Oldsmobiles and Peugeots in the car park. “I tried to kill you, in 1948—I was with the Russians on the mountain, and if I had not been knocked unconscious by a British bullet, I think I would have been killed or driven mad. I am an Armenian—it is our mountain, not the Russians’ and not yours.”
    The steering wheel was on the left side, American-style, and Hale pulled open the passenger door. “Nothing’s mine anymore,” he said over the roof to his companion before getting in and closing the door.
    “True,” said the Armenian as he got in on his side, closed his door and started the engine. Hale noticed that the man’s breath reeked of garlic and licorice. “I am Hakob Mammalian, and I am your handler in this undertaking. I am not interested in killing you anymore.” He held out his big right hand toward Hale.
    Hale smiled and shook the warm, dry hand. “You people killed three of my men that night, I think.”
    Mammalian released Hale’s hand to shift the engine into reverse. “Consider what it was that you were trying to kill. The heart of the mountain! Do you still seek… vrej? ”
    The word, Hale knew, was Armenian for revenge. “Nothing’s mine anymore,” he said again. “I’m not after vrej.”
    “Remember that Charles Garner