Declare

did—to kill them, ‘give them the truth.’ No, my friend, you are simply devoting all of your energies and recollections now to a new cause—one that will allow you to sire children in the next century, and the century after that.”
    “ ‘Take the cash in hand, and waive the rest,’ ” quoted Hale, shaking his head. “Children in another century! How is all this live-forever stuff supposed to happen, precisely?”
    “You are skeptical, after all that you have seen!” Mammalian bared his white teeth in a grin. “Perhaps you will become the consort of a goddess, Andrew Hale, and share in her immortality. Perhaps you will have a djinn for a body slave, who will protect you from every ill, even from age. If all else fails, you will eat a salad of enchanted this-tles, and never die. Believe me, the ‘cash in hand’ will be the most trivial of your rewards. You do a service for angels here.”
    “And for Russians.”
    “The angels do not distinguish among our nations.”
    Seem reckless and belligerent, Hale thought. “The Russians… kidnapped one of your angels,” he said, “in 1883, didn’t they? Took it back to Moscow, moored it with drogue stones, anchors, in the Lubyanka basement and at the Soviet borders. I would think his fellows—” He remembered the thing he had seen in Berlin, and corrected himself: “ Her fellows, would look unkindly on that.”
    Mammalian’s face was expressionless. “If we—when we succeed, on the mountain, this time—” He raised a hand hesitantly. “You needn’t fear that there will be injustice.”
    Hale quickly looked over his shoulder, as if impatient for his vodka—for Mammalian, hungover himself, had given away more than he had meant to, and there was no advantage for Hale in seeming to have noticed.
    But Hale was certain now that Mammalian’s loyalty here was to the djinn themselves, and not to the Rabkrin. And Hale wondered if Mammalian had even been a devout Communist during the Rabkrin attempt in 1948.
    In fact the waiter was now striding back toward their table, carrying a tray; and neither of the seated men spoke as the two glasses and the coffee cup were set down on the glass tabletop. But as the young man was stepping away Hale called, “Another vodka here, please! And a cold Almaza beer with it to put out the fire.” He bolted the glass of vodka in two hard swallows.
    The waiter nodded without looking back.
    “You will be useless before noon, at this rate!” exclaimed Mammalian in dismay. “And Charles Garner drinks arak!”
    Hale’s nose stung with the vodka fumes, and his eyes were watering. “I’m worse’n useless now,” he said, carefully pretending to be more drunk than he was. “And I don’t wanna be Charles Garner. I wanna be Tommo Burks.”
    Mammalian frowned and stirred his coffee, and Hale recognized, from the other side now, the agitation of a handler dealing with a skittish agent. Mammalian appeared to decide something, and stared straight at Hale. “Have you ever,” he asked, “met a woman, an Arabic woman, with a string of gold rings around her neck? She would not have spoken.”
    Not bad, Hale thought. Last night I didn’t bother to mention the woman I saw by Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin in ’45, but I do remember her, and it’s interesting to learn that she figures somehow. Apparently I was likely to meet her!
    But he had to get onto the street, get his briefing, before he met Philby.
    He stood up, so unsteadily that the table rocked and nearly spilled Mammalian’s coffee and arak. “I won’t—incidentally—work with Kim Philby. See. He told the Russians—he told you —where my SAS team was going to be, in the Ararat Gorge. The Ahora Gorge. Know, O Armenian, that I quit. Sod you all.”
    He walked quickly away between the other tables, artfully bumping one with his hip; he heard a glass roll and then break on the cement deck as he reached the top of the stairs that led down to the hotel driveway; a chair’s legs scraped as it was pushed back, and hurried footsteps were coming up from behind him, but two uniformed sûreté officers were even now tapping briskly up the steps from below.
    Hale deliberately snagged his shoe behind his calf and tumbled forward, driving his shoulder into the midsection of the officer on the right; somehow all three of them wound up sitting and bumping and flailing down the steps to the parking lot pavement, and before Hale could even pull his legs down off the bottom two