Declare

the Khan so long ago. Red and purple rugs shone in the yellow paraffin lamplight, and Hale sat down heavily to unsnap his soggy boots and tug them off before he stood up again and stepped across the dirt-floor threshold.
    Siamand Khan was dressed in the same sort of trousers and vest as Howkar Zeid this evening. Hale remembered him as he had looked fifteen years ago, in a Western business suit and an orange scarf around his neck instead of a tie; but Siamand Khan still wore the knitted cap, and his stride was still graceful as he stood up from the long bench that spanned the far wall, and his brown face behind the white moustache was as ferociously cheerful as ever.
    “My friend, sit!” he said, taking Hale by the hand and leading him to the middle section of the bench, on which lay so many cushions that Hale was able to rest his arms on them when he had sat down. To Howkar Zeid, the Khan called, “Coffee and cigarettes for our guest! A dish of pears from the cellar!”
    Hale’s vision was flickering. “I have just come down from Agri Dag,” he said, his voice just a rasping whisper now. “The angels are killed. The amomon will bloom this spring. If I could—eat, and sleep here tonight—”
    “You are nearly used up, my friend,” said the Khan gent ly. “You will stay with us until your strength returns—indeed you will stay until spring. You and I will be able to go hiking in the mountains after all.”
    Hale had to keep focusing his eyes to remember where he had come to. When his vision blurred, he seemed again to be dozing over his one-time pads in the janitor’s room on the roof of the house in the Rue le Regrattier, dimly aware that there was an emergency and that he should hurry down the stairs to Elena’s room and awaken her; and he imagined that Jimmie Theodora, black-haired and somehow younger than Hale now, was giving him instructions he should be paying attention to, in the office in Whitehall Court with the candlestick telephones on the wall and the models of airplanes and submarines serving as bookends in the cluttered shelves on the wall; and finally the murmur of the Khan’s words blurred away into the remembered voices of his grandfather and his mother, quarreling about some troubling passage in Scripture, and—in the moments before consciousness left him—he was weakly resolved to climb the narrow old stairs of the house in Chipping Campden and crawl into the old eighteenth-century box bed, and abandon himself at long last to dreamless sleep.

EPILOGUE

    Declare

Moscow, 1964
Kim stole out and away, as unremarkable a figure as ever carried his own and a few score thousand other folks’ fate slung round his neck.
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
—Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát, Edward J. FitzGerald translation
    Batsford House in Tunbridge Wells had been one of the English country homes that had been turned over to the SOE during the war, and the sweeping green lawn visible from the south kitchen window still showed the humps of bunkers and trenches that had been dug for infiltration practice and to keep German aircraft from landing. A dozen cows were visible in the middle distance now, cropping the grass around the old mounds. The morning sun was shining in brightly enough to show too the heating and water pipes that the SOE had installed along the high stone wall and ceiling, above even the unreachable topmost row of copper skillets, but the old man was grateful for those alterations. Somehow the mess officers had hung too a vast government-issue print of a cow in profile, with dotted lines outlining the various cuts of beef, right up under the ceiling, and no one had ever managed to take it down in the more than twenty years since.
    The vaulted eighteenth-century ceiling arched thirty feet above the flagstone floor, and as he struck a match on the windowsill and puffed his pipe alight, Jimmie Theodora recalled several conferences that had been held right in this kitchen, at the battered old table that stretched across more than twenty feet of the space between the window and the huge fireplace. In January of 1944, when the south lawn had been a small village of snow-covered tents, Winston Churchill had met here with Theodora and Bertram Ramsey and Arthur Tedder to privately assess Eisenhower’s proposed SHAEF,