Declare

put on his own shirt. And I remember standing right here at night, as a boy—this would have been late ’90s, 1900—and looking up to watch the servants carrying torches across the rooftops, as they made their way to the bedrooms in the turrets.”
    “Of course I’ve got a gun, Jimmie,” said Hale.
    “Of course you have,” Theodora agreed. “And some sort of proposal, I imagine.”
    “I trust I’m still… on the rolls. I want to be sent out one more time, and then I want to retire here. Scotland, Wales, I don’t care. Ireland, even. I came in through the London Docks yesterday, on a Canadian passport—it was a friend who sent the cable from Helsinki. I wanted to have a chance to discuss terms privately, before a lot of definitions were made, photographs taken.”
    “Terms,” said Theodora.
    “Well, I’ve got it all down in a little book, haven’t I? Declare. With enough names and dates to make it convincing; and it’s compelling reading too—T. E. Lawrence, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Kim Philby, Noah’s Ark. A Belgian solicitor has it, and if a New Year’s Day goes by without me having sent him a Christmas card, the whole works will be sent to every newspaper in the United States, and in Europe—oh, and Pravda . When I turn sixty-two, twenty years from now, I give you my word I’ll destroy it. By then I doubt anyone will still care.”
    “Scopolamine,” sighed Theodora, “sodium Pentothal. Plain old torture.”
    “A photograph of myself in with the Christmas card, every year. With a newspaper visible, to establish the date. The solicitor has a large staff, many offices, and he does a lot of international crime work—bodyguards, security—he’s tremendously cautious.”
    Theodora shrugged, conceding the point. “ ‘Sent out one more time,’ ” he said.
    “To Moscow, under journalist cover. SIS can arrange that easily enough. I want to cash out the Machikha Nash account. Khrushchev can be the last Premier of the Soviet Union.”
    Hale was proposing to kill Kim Philby, his half-brother, and thus set into motion the chain of events that would culminate with the ghulah guardian angel ingesting the Shihab-shot from Philby’s buried corpse. “Well, Khrushchev wouldn’t be the last anyway,” Theodora said, stalling. “I doubt the Soviet empire would come crashing down immediately after the guardian angel was killed, and it doesn’t look as though Khrushchev will last out the year. Russia had a bad harvest last year, and he had to use hard currency to buy wheat from the West. The KGB had to become grain brokers, and the KGB head, Shelepin, wants Khrushchev out. Leonid Brezhnev seems to be the likeliest replacement.”
    “Is my brother covering himself with glory, over there?”
    “Well, no. It turns out he’s what they call a ‘secret collaborator,’ not a Soviet intelligence officer, as I’m sure they had told him he would be. He’s got a nice apartment, and access to a chauffeur-driven car, but he’s apparently drinking a good deal, and his main value to the KGB is that he’s still being debriefed, these fourteen months later. The only actual work he’s doing is for the Novosti news agency—and his work needs to be translated. He’s never learned Russian.”
    “Cremation is very common in Russia,” Hale said. “If he dies years from now, as just an embarrassing old drunk left over from a previous regime, he’s likely to be cremated.”
    And the precious shot pellets will be melted, thought Theodora. I won’t live that long, but it would fret me to die thinking that the main operation of my career had not come to full fruition.
    “Right now,” Hale went on, “the people who vouched for him are still in charge, unwilling to concede that he’s nothing but a drunk old Englishman. If he dies a hero’s death now, a properly vindicating death, he’ll be buried with honors at one of the Moscow cemeteries. Buried.”
    “What would be a hero’s death?” asked Theodora. “A vindicating death?”
    “He must be shot, killed, publicly and conspicuously, by an Englishman who can be proved to have been working for the SIS. Simple logic—if we considered him worth killing, obviously he must have been a Soviet hero.”
    Theodora laughed incredulously. “My dear boy, do you have any conception of the havoc that would cause? Consider the abuse the United States endured when one of their mere U-2 spy planes was shot down over Russia four years ago! It would not start World War