Declare

had led up the Ahora Gorge below Mount Ararat in ’48, on the night that the starry sky had spun like a ponderous unbalanced wheel over their doomed heads. He was certain now that this new year’s business would have nothing to do with any recognized Soviet residents in London, nor with factions that could possibly still be on the active force at SIS.
    He pulled his necktie out of his collar and undid the top button of his shirt. “I wish I could ‘lose the tie,’ ” he said, his voice sounding childish and frightened in his own ears.
    This was going straight back to what had been the most-secret core of espionage in the first half of the century, the hidden power he had become dimly, fearfully aware of only in the last three and a half years of his service, after Berlin in ’45; the operational theater that it had been mortally perilous even to know about, more restricted by far than the German Ultra traffic had been during the war, or the Soviet Venona decrypts after; this had been the concealed war that, ironically, facilitated its own concealment simply by being beyond the capacity of most people to believe.
    Like someone tonguing a carious tooth to see if it still ached, he asked himself if he still believed it.
    He sighed finally and focused on the traffic, and then glanced around to be sure they were in fact passing the Tory Carlton Club, and Brooks’s. “They let buses drive in St. James’s Street now?” he asked.
    “Just in the last year or two,” said the woman at the wheel.
    He remembered Theodora saying, I hardly know where I am in London these days. Me too, Jimmy, he thought. And how do you suppose things are in Erzurum, Al-Kuwait, Berlin? Even Paris?
    He was to learn later that the old police station in Temple Lane had been exploded across the flower beds of the Inner Temple Garden by a November bomb; but even at nineteen and in the dark he had known at once that the dimly seen hut he’d been driven to in the police van was a wartime makeshift. Its roof was a semicircular arched sheet of corrugated metal, and as he was marched up to the door, he saw that the building sat like a sled on bolted steel beams in the middle of a patch of cleared pavement, a hundred yards from the pillared entry arch and raking cornices of St. Paul’s Cathedral—the big St. Paul’s, at this end of the ride, Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, its dark dome seeming to eclipse a full quarter of the cloudy nighttime sky.
    And even in his despairing panic he shivered at the sight, for he had motored past St. Paul’s Cathedral when he had been a student at the City of London School—and only the top of its dome had been visible then above the close-crowding newer buildings. Now it stood alone in the center of a bomb-cratered plain of low uneven walls, itself miraculously undamaged, like a durable mirage from a previous century.
    The night sky was quiet, and no searchlights swept across the patchy clouds; but the BUSINESS AS USUAL signs he had seen earlier in the evening, and the brave radio program music he had heard echoing out of gutted shops, seemed intolerably gallant and sad when recalled to mind on this viciously broken landscape, and the breath caught in his throat to imagine this supremely British old church, this heart of London, surrounded by walls of roaring flame as it lately must have been.
    “In you go, Ivan,” said one of the policemen, gripping his upper arm.
    After being ducked through a pair of velvet blackout curtains Hale had found himself in a little office lit by unshaded electric bulbs dangling from the curved ceiling, and in front of a tall desk or lectern he was unshackled so that each of his fingers in turn could be rolled on a stamp pad and then pressed onto squares printed on a card—an unusual procedure in a standard arrest, he believed. A teakettle hissed on a tiny electric stove in the corner.
    A white-haired officer was standing behind another desk, leaning forward with his hands flat on the blotter. “You’re being detained, Mr. Hale,” he said, speaking straight down at the desk, “for subversion and espionage. Treason too, I expect.” He looked up and stared across the little office at him, and even the shivering, distracted Hale could see the glitter of suspicion in the man’s narrowed eyes. “I’m told that you’re to be handed over to the Special Branch section of Scotland Yard within a few hours, but that we’re to formally charge and question you first. A