Declare

Philby had become, in his furtive career— burrowing, hiding, voracious, without conscience.
    And, he was honest enough to admit to himself, profoundly afraid of dying. Meet your Maker… ! At least if vile Hale was successful here, there would be a very large-scale dying of djinn. The idiotically ghoulish amomon thistle would be blooming in the wastelands, probably even in Soviet Armenia. And he still had Theo Maly’s sealed instructions.
    What had Maly called it? A more profane sort of eternal life.
    To his credit, he felt, Philby had actually tried to give his children the better sort of eternal life—though admittedly he had been maudlin drunk each time. Did it still count, he wondered now on this cold flank of Mount Ararat, if it was administered by a drunk? A resolutely atheist drunk? With the older four of his children he had found opportunities to spill water onto their heads, and then, while seeming to try to wipe it off, covertly make the feared Papist sign of the cross on their foreheads—he had cringed to do it, and his teeth had actually hurt each time as he had mumbled, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen — but in the case of poor young Harry, his youngest son by his previous wife, Philby had eventually resorted to pushing the boy out of a rowboat on the Dog River, near Ajaltoun in the Lebanon mountains, mumbling the hated litany as he’d pulled the boy back aboard and pushed the wet hair out of his eyes, up and then sideways.
    And he was always aware of the power of birthdays and anniversaries. The zodiac wheel was in precisely the same position again on such days, and the events they commemorated were in a sense repeated in all their vulnerabilities, renewed in their purposes.
    And so of course the Rabkrin expedition had left Beirut on the twenty-third of January! At five o’clock on that rainy evening, with no warning, Mammalian had given him a passport in the name of Villi Maris and ordered him to get into a Turkish truck bound for the Syrian border. “We go now,” Mammalian had told him. But Philby and Eleanor had been expected at a dinner at the house of the First Secretary of the British Embassy on that night, and Philby had simply demanded to be allowed to call Eleanor and tell her to go on without him, that he would meet her there later. Mammalian had eventually given in and driven him through the downpour to a telephone kiosk from which he could make the call. When Philby had dialed the number, thirteen-year-old Harry had answered the telephone, and in every hour since then Philby had wished that Eleanor had picked up the extension, so that he could have heard her voice one more time; but in the rain-drumming telephone kiosk, with Mammalian scowling at him over his dripping beard in the open doorway, Philby had only dared to say, “Tell your m-mother I’m— g-going to be late, H-Harry—my b-boy. I’ll m-meet her at the B-Balfour-Pauls’ at eight.” While he had fumbled for words to say more, Mammalian had reached across him and pressed down the plunger.
    The next day, the twenty-fourth, would have been Philby’s and Eleanor’s fourth wedding anniversary.
    Till Death do us part, Philby thought now as he blinked rapidly to keep tears from spilling down his cheeks, where they might freeze the snow-goggles to his skin. Thin veils of dry snow were blowing past him down the snowpack slope, like white dust.
    Off to his left he could see a couple of the others lumbering out of the nearest tent, looking like polar bears in their hooded parkas and boots. One was Mammalian, the tallest; the other would be one of the Turk Rabkrin agents. There had been no snow last night, and they were standing in the darker, tromped-flat area around the tents. The commandos who had been standing watch slung their white Kalashnikov machine guns and began trudging to the farther tent— hourly rotation of watch, Philby recalled.
    “Sutle ekmek!” called one of the Turks to Philby, his voice thin in the chilly air. Bread and milk , and it would be sour milk.
    “Ben onsuz yapabilirum,” Philby shouted to him across the snow. I can do without it.
    “And briefing,” called Mammalian over the wind. “Synchronizing our watches, girding up our loins for battle, revelations of secrets not to be divulged down in the lowlands. Come in here.”
    Philby sighed a gust of steam and plodded back across the wavy snow, planting his boots in the same holes they had