Declare

a rectangle with a loop at the top; the Egyptian anchors had been carved out of stone, and one of his informants drew a picture of one for him, and even drew a cross on the rectangle, so that the resemblance to the Egyptian looped cross, the ankh , was obvious. And many of the Muscovite fugitives mentioned the peculiar rancid, metallic smell of Moscow air, which was attributed to cheap Soviet diesel oil.
    Hale pondered the words anchor, Ankara, Yakor, Lubyanka —and ankh.
    In his capacity as a special agent on loan to the SOE from Section One, he was able to ask for many categories of current files, and he pressed hard to get any information on a female GRU agent who had run a black radio network in Paris in late ’41 and who might be known as Delphine St.-Simon. He learned that the French and Belgian Soviet networks, among which he and Elena had worked, had been collectively known to the Gestapo as the Rote Kapelle, which meant the Red Orchestra or the Red Chapel, and that most of the agents in it had been arrested before Christmas of ’42; quite a number of them were executed very quickly, because of a German tradition that no executions occur between December 24 and January 6. The rest of the captured Rote Kapelle agents were turned to playback uses, and Hale wondered where Claude Cassagnac had wound up. Information from Moscow was harder to get, and though he read secondhand accounts of many executions in the Lubyanka cellars, none of the victims seemed to have been Elena.
    In the summer of Hale’s twenty-third year the London air-raid sirens seemed to wail all day and all night, punctuated by the hammering of anti-aircraft guns and the clatter of shrapnel falling in the streets and the regular window-rattling thunder of the new German buzz-bomb explosions. He slept on a cot in his office, and on many nights when sleep was impossible he would get drunk and join the midnight revelers in Green Park, and in the diffuse white searchlight glow around the army encampment known as the Bomber’s Moon he would try to lead the wild spontaneous dancing into a park-spanning clochard -style nothing-right-here step that would shelter the whole city of London from the roaring sky. He succeeded only in exhausting himself enough to make sleep possible, and in the hungover mornings the sirens still wailed.
    But across the Channel the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches in June and liberated Paris by September, and Rome fell to the American Fifth Army, and the Russians pushed the Germans all the way back into Lithuania and Poland, and American B-17s were bombing Berlin. From his office window Hale could see the vapor trails of the flying bombs in the blue sky, but the lilacs and plane trees and apple trees in St. James’s Park were all in vivid bloom as if it were spring instead of late summer, and all the old hands in Broadway Buildings were confident that the war would be over within six months.
    Of course Hale never set foot in the senior officers’ bar in the Broadway basement, where the Robber Barons drank and traded old stories and current news, but he did pick up interdepartmental gossip. In that summer he heard rumors that Colonel Felix Cowgill, the head of the counter-espionage Section Five, whose return from New York in February of 1942 had saved Hale from falling under Kim Philby’s authority, might be cracking under the strain of his work. According to the office talk, Cowgill had lately summoned all his sub-section heads and told them that he had to go on another consulting mission to the Americas—he hadn’t clearly said why, only that private researches of his own made the trip imperative, and he hinted at some huge, hostile service that threatened his counter-espionage department; and he had finished with the puzzling declaration, “My own view is that it has something to do with the Arabs. Wherever I look in this case, I see Arabs!” Cowgill’s mysterious overseas mission dragged on for a month and turned out to include visits to unspecified points in the Middle East—but when Cowgill finally returned in late September, he found that in his absence Kim Philby had effectively taken his job away from him: a new section, Section Nine, had been created specifically to penetrate Soviet espionage networks in the imminent postwar world, and the old Section Five was being incorporated into it, and Philby had been made Head of Section Nine. Whatever information Cowgill had found during his trip was now