Declare

window. The man appeared to be in his late forties, and under a white bandage his face was deeply lined and pouchy; he looked fit enough, though, and his rumpled jacket was clearly a product of British tailoring. But it was the woman that Hale stared at—slim and still youthful-looking in spite of her salt-white hair, she was smoothing her linen skirt with one hand and tapping the ash from a cigarette with the other.
    She was Elena—Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, ETC, Hale’s beloved partner during the fugitive months in occupied Paris, the woman whom Claude Cassagnac had whimsically pronounced Hale’s bride on a perilous night in Berlin in 1945. Kiss the bride quick, Andrew, before you die. Hale could taste the remembered kiss now, rusty with blood and earnest with love and the imminent prospect of merciless violent death. He ached to run between these little tables to her now, as he had done when he had first seen her on that night in Berlin, and tell her who he was, and take her hands in his and just babble out his whole truthful story to her.
    But the man with her was Kim Philby. At least from across the dim room he looked no older now than he had when he had been the SIS Head of Station in Turkey in 1948—secretly in the pay of Moscow even then, it had turned out, and responsible for the betrayal of Declare. But Hale’s instant memory was of his first encounter with Philby, in early 1942, when Hale had been a prisoner at the MI5 compound at Ham Common in Richmond and Philby had been trying to get custody of him, very likely in order to kill him.
    Three nights ago Ishmael had asked Hale where Elena was—and she was here, with Philby, who evidently didn’t know she was the one who had shot him in the head. Did Philby know the Rabkrin was looking for her? Was Mammalian aware of her, and who did he think she was? Again Hale wondered what he would have been told at the canceled briefing in Kuwait.
    Now Philby raised his bandaged head and glanced around the bar—his gaze didn’t pause on this hollow-cheeked, dark-haired figure silhouetted in the doorway—and he leaned over the table to kiss Elena on the lips. She might or might not have responded—in any case she did not push him away.
    Hale let the beaded curtain swing across his view of the bar as he took a step back into the hotel lobby, bumping into Mammalian.
    “I’m… too filthy,” he said hoarsely, “for…”
    “Well,” said Mammalian in a judicious tone, “it’s true, you are. You smell like an Iraqi Bedouin, my friend. I will take you to your room.”
    Hale let himself be led away past the couches and the registration desk toward the stairs; he didn’t look back, but he felt as though this were a ghost that the Armenian was leading away, and that the real, physical Andrew Hale was still standing back there, transfixed with dismay, staring in through the bar archway.

NINE

    Berlin, 1945
It was said once to me that it is inexpedient to write the names of strangers concerned in any matter, because by the naming of names many good plans are brought to confusion.
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
    Hale’s second encounter with Kim Philby had been in February of 1942, a month after their brief and hostile first meeting in the Latchmere House dining room at Ham Common.
    Hale had been working at the SIS headquarters in Broadway Buildings in London for only three days, and he was startled to see striding toward him down the linoleum hallway the same stuttering man who had berated him on that well-remembered occasion. Philby was wearing the brown wool tunic of an Army uniform now, but without any badges of rank on the epaulettes, and he was deep in conversation with an older man in shirtsleeves.
    But the intelligent eyes in the blunt face lit up on seeing Hale. “Why it’s J-Jimmie’s boy!” Philby drawled; and then in an affected, whining voice he quoted what Hale had told the interrogation panel a month earlier: “ ‘But I wasn’t doing anything the Theodora person had told me to do!’ ” In his normal Oxbridge accent he went on, “And yet I d-discover that you are somehow working in S-Section One, on loan from Juh-Jimmie’s det-te- test -able SOE!” He turned toward the older man beside him, whom Hale belatedly recognized as his own boss, David Footman, the head of SIS Section One. “What work is our dishonest boy here d-d-doing for you, David?”
    Footman peered uncertainly at Hale. “It’s 1-K, isn’t it?” he said.
    “Yes, sir,”