Declare

will ensue. You will buy several boxes of shells—but you must save one shell for Philby.”
    Theodora had mentioned this, but Hale had not known then that Philby was his half-brother. “What about his protections?” Hale asked, mainly just to slow this discussion. “His Achilles-heel date isn’t due to come round again for nearly another year.”
    “The protections aren’t against self-injury. You are virtually him, in this context; that will be especially true on Mount Ararat.”
    The other half of me , Hale thought. The hearth-and-home half of me. “Very well,” he said unsteadily, “I’ll shoot him.” He may be my brother, he told himself, but Philby is still the man who betrayed my men in the gorge. I can shoot him for that.
    “You are not to kill him. Do please pay attention. You are not on any account to kill Philby, even to save yourself. You are to shoot him in the back, from a sufficient distance so that the shot will penetrate widely around his spine but not be focused in any kind of tight pattern. We certainly don’t want the ‘rat-hole’ effect! The goal is to leave him able to walk away, to Moscow, with at least one pellet in his flesh that cannot be removed surgically.”
    Hale’s arms were suddenly cold. “She’s a ghul,” he whispered, using the Arabic word for djinn who haunt graveyards and eat the dead in their graves, extracting up through the soil as souvenirs any bits of metal—rings, gold teeth—that the cadavers might have contained. “A ghulah,” he corrected himself, using the feminine form.
    “Very good, Mr. Hale! Yes, she is. And when—”
    Hale remembered Mammalian’s question this morning. “And she sometimes appears as an Arabic woman with a string of gold rings around her neck, right? I’ve met her. And since 1883 she has been the guardian angel of Russia.”
    “Machikha Nash, the Rabkrin call her. Yes. And—”
    “And!” interrupted Hale, “if Philby goes to Moscow, after this— and I presume he’ll be given no choice—he’ll eventually die there. He’ll be buried in a Moscow cemetery.”
    Hartsik’s eyes narrowed in a smile. “Ex-act-ly. And the guardian angel will not neglect to devour him, and to draw up, in her spiral way, the metal that is in him, including at least one of these shot pellets. And she will thus assimilate into herself the shape of djinn death.” He sat back. “And she will die, and the Soviet Union will lose its guardian angel. I can’t imagine the U.S.S.R. surviving Philby by more than three or four years.”
    Hale recalled what Prime Minister Macmillan had said six days ago: I suppose we can’t simply shoot spies, as we did in the war— but they should be discovered and then played back in the old double-cross way, with or without their knowledge—never arrested. And Hale thought that Macmillan would be pleased with the way Theodora had orchestrated this use of Kim Philby.
    It seemed to call for a drink. Hale picked up the Laphroaig bottle and took another aromatic mouthful from the neck of it. “In London,” he said hoarsely, “I was told that Philby does not want to participate in this expedition to Ararat; that I’ll have to threaten him to get him to go along. What’s the basis for his reluctance?”
    “That’s right. His father—your father—died, here in Beirut, a little more than two years ago. I’m, uh, sorry.”
    “Stop it.” Hale could hardly remember the text of The Empty Quarter , which his father had written; and that book was his only link to the old man. Any feeling of… loss , here, he reminded himself, would be sheer affectation. But he did remember standing on the steep escarpment at the windy Edge-of-the-Wold when he had been a boy, looking down at the roofs of Evesham and the River Isbourne on the plain below the Cotswolds highlands, and speculating that his father was a missionary priest “somewhere east o’ Suez,” and imagining how the two of them might one day meet. And then he remembered walking across the grassy quad at the University College of Weybridge on many late afternoons in the 1950s, picturing an eventual reunion with Elena. How shabbily these fond dreams work out, he thought—and he was glad that Farid had hit him again, for he was afraid that some of the tears leaking from his swollen left eye were tears of purest self-pity.
    “What did Philby’s father have to do with it?” he asked harshly.
    Hartsik took Hale’s cue. “Philby’s father was always very