Declare

Peter Lunn gives you off-paper travel assignments?”
    Lunn was the SIS Head of Station in Beirut now, and in fact he had not had any professional conversation with Philby at all. But until three months ago the Head of Station had been Nicholas Elliott, an old friend of Philby’s and one of his loyal defenders in the Burgess defection scandal that had cost Philby his SIS job in 1951. And in these last two years Elliott had indeed given Philby all kinds of off-paper assignments—to Riyadh, and Cairo, and Baghdad, and a dozen other Middle East cities—to mingle with the Arabs who had known Philby’s father, and gauge the extent and purpose of the huge increase in the number of Soviet military advisors throughout the Arab nations.
    Philby had been in a quandary: it had been starkly clear that Burgess at the Rabkrin headquarters in Moscow, as well as Petrukhov, Philby’s more pedestrian KGB handler in Beirut, both required him to pass on immediately any information he might learn about the SIS response to the Soviet escalation—but Philby had been aware too that the SIS chiefs in London who believed him guilty of espionage would see to it that he was given “barium meal” information, custom-scripted false data that might later be detected in monitored Moscow traffic. If that were to happen, Philby would logically be isolated as the only possible source of the information, and the SIS could then arrest him for treason; and until this last September, when Philby’s pet fox had been intolerably killed and further work with the Rabkrin had become unthinkable, Philby had not wanted the SIS to arrest him. Even now, he wanted to surrender only on specific terms, what he thought of as his three non-negotiable “itties”: immunity, a new identity, and a comfortable annuity. Definitely not the deal Theodora’s old fugitive SOE had offered him in ’52.
    “Or isn’t it for Lunn?” went on Professor Feather. “Are you still running errands for—” He looked across the table at Dr. Tarr. “What was his name?”
    “Petrukhov,” said Dr. Tarr. “Of the Soviet trade mission in Lebanon. He’s the local handler, runner.”
    “Any t-traveling I do,” Philby said mildly, “has b-been for the stories I write.”
    “That’s odd, you know,” said Dr. Tarr. “You always charge your airline tickets on your IATA card, don’t you? Well, we’ve clocked your stories in The Observer and The Economist , and compared them to the records from the International Air Transport Association in Montreal, and we find that your travel grossly outweighs your journalistic output. Could I have a bourbon-and-water, please,” he said to the waiter, who had just then walked up with the two gins and the pink beer on a tray.
    “Same here,” said Dr. Tarr.
    The waiter set the drinks on the table, nodded and strode back toward the bar.
    Ignoring her ludicrous drink, Elena picked up her purse from beside her and said, “The dealings of the American Internal Revenue Service do not interest me. Mr. Philby, I’ll be in touch—”
    Professor Feather didn’t budge. “Stay, Miss Weiss,” he said coldly. “You play a musical instrument, don’t you? Something about the size of a saxophone?”
    “The U.S. government will pick up the drinks tab,” added Dr. Tarr cheerfully, “though not precisely in its IRS capacity.”
    Philby thought the saxophone remark had seemed to jar her; but now she just sighed and said, “No, I don’t play any instrument. But—I suppose I can’t resist the opportunity to deplete the American treasury.” She put her purse back down.
    “And we even took your pseudonyms into account,” said Professor Feather to Philby. “Charles Garner and all. It still doesn’t add up.”
    Philby had already begun shaking his head dismissively, and he didn’t stop now—but he was chilled by this new factor. The CIA knew that Charles Garner was one of his pseudonyms!—and Mammalian’s new agent was to be using that identity as cover! Philby wondered if he should warn Mammalian, or let the CIA discover the Garner impostor; if Elena’s SDECE people could “exfiltrate” him very soon, it wouldn’t matter.
    “You obviously know n-nothing about j-journalistic work,” said Philby, picking up one of his glasses of gin. “Some of the seeds fall upon st-stony places, and w-wither in the sun because they have no root. For every story I file, a d-dozen prove to be false alarms.” He lifted the glass to his lips and