Declare

after all, no idea how high up the slopes of Ararat the Rabkrin team intended to climb.
    She sat on the corrugated-steel deck beside the armament control panel in the stripped cargo bay, rocking with the sharp lifts and descents of the racing helicopter, puffing a Gauloise.
    The departure of the Rabkrin team from Beirut three nights ago had taken the SDECE by surprise; Elena had been monitoring the surveillance by radio from a motor yacht off the north Beirut shore, for since the night of January 12 she had not dared set foot in the city.
    On the evening of the seventh she had encoded and tapped out a message to SDECE headquarters in the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, saying that Philby’s defection offer appeared to be genuine, accompanied as it was by all the authentic signs of confusion and dislocated pride that one looked for in a ripely breaking defector; but then she had not been able to speak to Philby again until five days later, when he went into the Khayats Bookshop on Avenue Bliss, momentarily alone. He had been evasive then, too hearty in his greeting, and all the caution-warnings in her head had sounded when he proposed meeting her that night at the Pigeon Grotto cliffs.
    She had kept the assignation, but she brought along a full covering team of SDECE street-play experts—known as gamins des rues —and she stood on the inland side of the street, on the entry steps of Yazbeck’s all-night pharmacy. And even against the back-drop of a public building, she had been shot at.
    She had made sure to maintain a six-foot distance from every pedestrian, and, on the frail theory that a sniper required two full seconds to bring the crosshairs of a telescopic sight to bear on a target, she had been moving constantly, with many abrupt about-faces. In such a crowded, public place, with the whole Rabkrin team still in town , any kind of full-automatic fire seemed ruled out. Her legs were twitching with the urge to tap out one of the old clochard nothing-right-here rhythms, but she was afraid that such a move would hide her from Philby’s notice, if he did show up.
    She had been wearing body-armor under her coat, and her hat weighed ten pounds with the steel-and-resin-and-ceramic laminate of its low-hanging crown—but this was as perilous a game as tightrope-walking, and she made herself do it mainly in atonement for having prematurely tried to shoot Philby eleven nights earlier, on the evening of New Year’s Day. Surely this ordeal, putting herself in the way of a bullet, was adequate penance!
    A rifle bullet would have penetrated any of her protections—but by standing on the inland side of the street she had apparently disrupted any plans for placement of a rifle, and so it was just three fast 9-millimeter handgun rounds that hammered her hat and punched her twice in the spine. The impacts threw her forward onto her hands and knees on the sidewalk, but the gamins des rues were on her in an instant, and dragged her limp body into the pharmacy. The body armor had kept the bullets from reaching her, but the shot to the head had stunned her.
    She had been bundled into the backup vehicle, a flower-decked hearse, which accelerated away to a boat dock by the Place Côte d’Azur south of the city. Philby’s status was switched from exfiltration-target to a proposed assassination-target; but orders for an assassination would have to come from the Quai d’Orsay, and anyway Elena had been the only assassination-qualified SDECE agent in Beirut, and she was ordered to control the stalled operation from a boat in the north-shore marina.
    Philby had moved furtively after that, and the Rabkrin team had set up a protection cordon around his apartment building on the Rue Kantari, and the apartment’s curtains were always drawn.
    Andrew Hale had been kept even more secluded by the Rabkrin, after his arrest for public drunkenness on the morning of the eighth.
    It appeared that Hale really had defected to the Rabkrin side; Claude Cassagnac had been killed at Hale’s house in England three and a half weeks ago, and the SIS stations really did have Hale on their urgently-detain lists all over the Middle East. The cover identity the Rabkrin had given him must have been very solid, to get him through a sûreté interrogation. Oddly, the SDECE had not been able to get a transcript of the interrogation from the police.
    According to protocol, she would also need authorization from the Quai d’Orsay to kill Hale—if she proposed doing