Declare

dark winter of ’51, after Burgess and Maclean defected and Philby was suspected of complicity, Elliott had been Philby’s staunchest defender in Broadway. Eventually Elliott had helped Philby get journalism work with The Observer and The Economist , and had steered a lot of under-the-table SIS work his way, mainly so that Philby wouldn’t starve.
    But on that Friday afternoon in Beirut nearly two weeks ago, Elliott’s eyes had been cold behind his horn-rimmed glasses, and he’d said, “Stop it, Kim. We know what you’ve done. You took me in for years—and now I’ll get the truth out of you, even if I have to drag you to Ham Common myself. I once looked up to you—my God, how I despise you now. I hope you’ve enough decency left to under stand why.”
    Well, it had been the SIS confronting him at last, hadn’t it—and, as Hale had said, they were offering immunity in exchange for Philby’s full confession. You will pretend to cooperate , Hale had told Philby, but you will not tell him about the Ararat operation, and you will not return to En gland. And so Philby had flippantly conceded his guilt and typed out a rubbishy confession, admitting only to having spied for the Comintern and claiming to have quit in ’49, when the Attlee government’s reforms had “disproved Marxism.” God!
    But it had all gone down well enough with Elliott.
    Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga had sidled up to Philby at the Khayats Bookshop in Avenue Bliss the next day, and over the stacks of Life and Paris Match she had told him that the SDECE was prepared to exfiltrate him to France right then, from the bookstore; a news delivery lorry was in the alley behind the shop, its engine idling. He had put her off, said he needed to clock in with Mammalian first, and had got her to agree to meet him again by the Pigeon Grotto on the cliffs at Chouron Street, that evening—and then he had gone back to the Normandy Hotel and told Mammalian that the French SDECE agent Ceniza-Bendiga was in Beirut, and that she had approached him with a defection proposal; he told Mammalian when and where he had agreed to meet her, and he had then gone upstairs and got drunk alone in his room.
    Philby had not seen Elena since then. Perhaps Mammalian had killed her—Philby hadn’t asked.
    Nicholas Elliott had taken Philby and Eleanor to dinner that night at Le Temporel, and both men had tried to talk and laugh as if their old friendship had not been a betrayal from the start. Poor Eleanor had sipped her wine nervously, glancing from her husband to Elliott and back, clearly aware of the forced tone. In the men’s room Philby had passed Elliott two more typewritten pages of chicken-feed confession.
    Two days later Elliott had flown back to London, telling Philby that Peter Lunn would take over the interrogation and make arrangements for Philby’s return to England. Lunn had clearly been embarrassed by the spectacle of a Cambridge-and-Athenaeum-Club man confessing to having been a Soviet spy, and Philby had no difficulty in postponing their first meeting for a week—and then on the night of the twenty-third, the Rabkrin expedition had left Beirut.
    January twenty-third, Philby thought forlornly.
    Now, shuddering in mountaineering boots and a parka on a windy glacier 13,000 feet above sea-level, Philby allowed himself the useless fantasy of reconsidering his decision. He could have stayed with Eleanor, his wife of very nearly four years. Perhaps the SIS and the MI5 together could have protected him from facing “the truth” at the hands of Jimmie’s ultra-covert old SOE, in England, at least—but he didn’t believe that. According to legend, Declare had dealt with the code-breaker Alan Turing, and T. E. Lawrence, and even Lord Kitchener, drowned off the Scapa Flow in 1916. Philby clenched his mittened fists in frail bravado. Very well, so what if they would have killed him, eventually? Or even as soon as he was released from interrogation at Ham Common? He could have died as a loyal husband and father. If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of England that is forever a foreign land! The thought made a hash of Rupert Brooke’s scansion, but Philby smiled at it. And in the eighteenth century Edward Young had written, Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow. But more recently Eugene Fitch Ware had countered it: We fixed him up an epitaph, “Death loves a mining shark.” And it was something more like a mining shark that