Declare

his school text-books—but a moment later he wasn’t sure he had shouted in English.
    In any case he had drawn the attention of the storm away from Cassagnac and onto himself and Elena. He clung to the truck’s steering wheel as his weight increased and the Brandenburg Gate pillars swung from left to right beyond the streaming windscreen, and the engine was roaring as the rear wheels spun free of traction in the air.
    But their momentum was still westward, and when the truck crashed back down onto its wheels it was on the rubbled raised pavement at the north end of the gate, uprooting bushes and exploding bricks and broken stones in all directions; the back end was sliding around to the right as the truck rocked down off the west side of the raised pavement in a hail of leaves and mortar fragments, and the windscreen was abruptly crazed with a white spiderweb pattern of cracks as the boat’s bow crunched a dent into the steel roof over Hale’s head, and in the driver’s mirror he glimpsed the boat’s toppling mast and upturning keel as the vessel rolled heavily off of the truck bed.
    He whipped the steering wheel to the right and shifted back down to first gear, and when he hit the accelerator, the truck shuddered and coughed, then ground forward across the western Charlottenburg Chaussee lanes, thumping and shaking on at least two flat tires. The crane stood off to their left, apparently abandoned in place over the hole where the man had been shot that afternoon. Hale and Elena were now west of the place where the anchor stone had been installed.
    And so was Cassagnac, now. As Hale spun the wheel to steer south, staring out the open side window back toward the Unter den Linden lanes beyond the Brandenburg Gate, he saw a closer figure, running west—and when Hale trod on the brake pedal and tapped out the Rote Kapelle here code on the horn, Cassagnac slanted his course toward the truck.
    Cassagnac was waving both empty hands, and on the whipping wind Hale heard snatches of the man’s shouting voice: “Alibi—go back there—all evening, dinner—I’ll—tomorrow—”
    Hale waved acknowledgment, and he switched off the headlamps as he steered the laboring truck back to the right, leaning his head out of the window into the rain to see where he was going. Figures scattered away in the darkness, but he couldn’t tell if they were Soviet soldiers or civilians.
    When he had driven the wrecked truck more than halfway across the distance to the skeletal dome of the Reich stag, he stamped on the brake. None of the anonymous pedestrians had followed them.
    “Now we go back to where we had dinner,” he said breathlessly as he levered open the driver’s-side door. “We want to establish that we never left.”
    “Incredible,” said Elena as she climbed out on her side.
    Hale led Elena back through the kitchen entrance into the smoky restaurant, so that they wouldn’t be seen to have entered through the street door; and the table at which they had sat earlier was still unoccupied. Both of them were soaked, dripping on the stone floor, but many of the dozen other diners were nearly as wet. Hale was at least profoundly glad to look around the long room and see that Philby was no longer present.
    Hale paid for a plate of Sturdy Max with a cellophane-sealed pack of Chesterfields, and when he had carried the plate across to their table and sat down, he discovered that he was in fact very hungry.
    Elena apparently was not. When the same old aproned waiter came to the table, she just ordered another brandy, frowning and speaking almost too quietly to be heard, without looking at him or at Hale; and Hale curtly told the man to make it four brandies.
    Elena had taken off her long woolen coat and laid it with unnecessary care on the bench beside her; the long-sleeved blue sweater she’d had on underneath it was not obviously wet, and she had pulled her white hair back over her shoulders. Hale’s sport coat glistened with moisture, but he didn’t take it off because his clinging shirt would look worse.
    He wasn’t eager to speak, either. He could still vividly recall the heavy inertia of the dagger-ankh in his right hand, and in his mind he saw again the whirlwind bowing to one side and then the other as he had swung the ankh back and forth. And the thing had heard him, had responded , when he had called to it the old challenge from his dreams. He knew that soon he might discount these recollections, but he could