Declare

the Middle East, Kuwait probably, under the cover of the Combined Research Planning Office, known jocularly as Creepo.”
    “The Middle East,” said Hale thoughtfully. He had been hungry all morning, but now he felt distinctly nauseated; and he knew that it was fear that had quickened his heartbeat—but this was the next step farther in , on the way to learning the very deepest secrets of the world, of the most powerful and most hidden world. He flexed his right hand, remembering how the whirlwind had bowed in the rain when he had waved the ankh…
    Theodora nodded. “Not totally a surprise, I daresay. Before you go, I will acquaint you with the big picture, the biggest picture— and then, finally, indoctrinate you for clearance to what we have called Operation Declare.”

BOOK TWO

    Know, Not Think It

ELEVEN

    Beirut, 1963
And the two of them, laying him east and west, that the mysterious earth currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon— bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by nerve.
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
    Kim Philby sat back in his chair by the window-side table in the Normandy Hotel bar, and he licked his lips, tasting her lipstick. The woman on the other side of the table simply stared at him for a moment, then took a long inhalation on her cigarette. Out beyond the window glass the late afternoon sky was gold over the purple sea.
    Philby smiled at her, but he was nettled. He found her prematurely bone-white hair very erotic, but her lips had been as inert as the back of her hand would have been; and he wished his head were not ludicrously wrapped in white bandages. “I do b-beg your p-pardon, Miss C-B. My Sov-oviet handler was in the l-lobby, with some cadaverous specimen, j-just now. They d-didden did not come in, but if you do in-snit— insist on meeting me in my—office this way, we had b-better pretend to be h-having an extramerry-extramartial-extramarital—”
    “I understand,” said Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga in careful English. She sighed out a puff of smoke, then picked up her glass of Dubonnet. “In our work we have to emulate Judas sometimes.” She finished the red drink in two gulps, raising her disconcertingly dark eyebrows at him over the rim. “Your office, this hotel bar is?” she asked when she had put the glass down.
    “I g-get my mail here, and the c-concierge keeps a tah-tah-typewriter here, for my use. I’m a j- journalist , you know, these days.” He picked up his own glass, swirling the gin among the diminished ice cubes. “But Judas, you say? The outfit I pro-propose to b-b-b—betray!—is hardly the aqua-equi-equivalent of the Son of man, even in my atheistic c-consideration.” He smiled more broadly. “Or maybe you mean I turn out to have betrayed you?”
    Elena stubbed out her cigarette. “I haven’t seen you since Turkey in 1948,” she said, getting to her feet and smoothing her skirt. “If you and I had a—had anything at all—then, I’m sure I can’t recall it.” She glanced around at the tables and the beaded curtain that led into the lobby. “Is there another way out of here? I’d never have been so careless as to approach you here, if I’d known you still had a—damned handler about. Bad craft, I apologize—we assumed you were in retirement here in Beirut.” She spoke calmly, but he could see a quicker pulse in the side of her neck.
    Philby tipped up his glass for the last mouthful of gin. “Beirut is a neutral city,” he told her. “And my employers are not ee-eager right now to be doing any such—con-conspicuously robust operations—as k-kidnapping agents of a f-f-foreign power. But you’re right, we probably shhh—should not be seen together.” He waved toward the bar. “Anwar will let us leave by the delivery dock in back.” He set down his glass, reached under the table to be sure the snub-nose .38 was still secure in the elastic ankle holster and that his trouser cuff was tugged over it, and then he stood up.
    As they walked across the tile floor toward the mahogany-and-brass bar, he said, “ ‘If we had anything at all, then—you’re sure y-you can’t recall it.’ I have a fucking b-bullet-hole in my head; do take note of the f-fact that you have n-n-not got one in yours.”
    He was pleased to see her face redden, at that.
    “I—I know,” she said as she stepped behind the bar and nodded distractedly at the