Declare

hundred yards away on the Soviet side of the border. “If they see a party hanging about to look at the undercarriage, they’ll know we sent someone across. We leave now.” He began trudging back toward Philby’s jeep, and was relieved to hear the other two following him.
    “What were the names of your Armenians?” called Burgess from behind him.
    Hale stepped up on the jeep’s running board and looked back at Philby and Burgess. “Laurelian and Hardyian,” he said.
    “Oh, see, he’s a c-c-close-mouthed b-b- boy , Guy,” said Philby, puffing up to the left side, where the Ford jeep’s steering wheel was. “Don’t even t-try to draw him out with your sut-suttee- subtleties.”
    Hale sat down cross-legged on a coil of rope in the bed of the vehicle, and as Burgess grunted and hoisted his portly frame up into the passenger seat, Hale noticed for the first time a steel ring welded onto the dashboard on that side, right next to the brass plate that showed the gear-shifting positions. And when Philby had started the jeep and clanked it abruptly into reverse, Hale grabbed at the rope coil and found himself gripping an oblong steel ring knotted to one end of the line; glancing down, he saw that the oblong ring could be opened at a spring-loaded gate—it was a carabiner, a snap-link. He was sure that the rope was meant to be secured to the ring on the dashboard, to drag something; but why not simply moor the line to the hitch on the back bumper?
    As Philby rocked the jeep around in the yard behind the guard shack and shifted into first gear, Hale groped among the rope coils under him to find the other end. And when he found it he recognized the release-pin housing of a weather balloon launcher.
    The rope wasn’t for dragging something—it was for towing an airborne balloon.
    SIS business, he thought—but when he glanced up he caught Philby’s gaze in the rear-view mirror, and Philby’s eyes were narrowed with obvious displeasure.
    Hale shrugged and dropped the end of the rope. “Weather balloon?” he said, loudly over the roar of the four-cylinder engine.
    “Fuck me wept!” exclaimed Burgess, thrashing around in the passenger seat to goggle back at him.
    “I’m doing,” said Philby clearly, as if to prevent any further outburst from the drunken Burgess, “a top-pop-pographical s-s- survey , of the border r-regions out here. Operation Spyglass, we sussur-surveillance wallahs are c-calling it. And in order to m-measure atmospheric presh-pressure, and t-temperature, and relative you-you-humidity, we attach a radiosonde t-transmitter to in-sin- instruments on a wet-wet- weather b-balloon , moored to a mobile receiving station: namely th-this jeep.” He cuffed sweat from his forehead as he steered the jeep along the dirt road back toward Kars. “Ultra-sensitive operation—k-keep it under your h-hat.”
    “Fine,” said Hale easily, squinting out at the green hills. “Better you lot than me.”
    But as he kept a distracted expression on his face, he was remembering the balloon he had glimpsed over the incongruous Arab boat on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin three years ago, in the oily warm rain—the balloon that had been engulfed, a moment later, by the sentient tornado. Like bait swallowed by a fish?—a lightning rod struck by lightning?
    Philby had been in Berlin, then. Had he been monitoring that briefly glimpsed balloon, from a safe position on the western side of the gate?
    Two alien thoughts had intruded themselves into Hale’s mind on that turbulent night: She walks in Beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies , and Zat al-Dawahi, Mistress of Misfortunes, look favorably upon our sacrifice! He had been sure then that he had picked up the thoughts like a badly tuned radio receiving two signals at once, and now in the back of this rocking jeep he wondered for the first time if the intruding thoughts could have been Kim Philby’s.
    He recalled another night, nearly four years before that night in Berlin, when he had heard thoughts in an older man’s voice, and had even tasted the Scotch the other man had been drinking. It had happened when he and Elena had used the old clochard rhythms to flee the Rue le Regrattier house in Paris and had ended up walking blindly all the way to the end of the Île de la Cité.
    It seemed to him now that that voice too had been Philby’s. And on the last night of 1941 he had seen Philby in a dream, in which Philby had