Declare

III, I suppose, but we would lose all credibility worldwide—the present Conser vative government would collapse, we’d have Harold Wilson and the Labour Party in charge!”
    “Haven’t you got—I seem to recall— ears, in Number 10 Downing Street? How likely is it that this Conservative government will survive the year in any case? The Profumo scandal drove Macmillan out last year—how long do you think Douglas-Home can hold the Conservative reins?”
    “Until a general election, in October,” Theodora said glumly. “And then, yes, I do happen to know that we’ll have Harold Wilson for Prime Minister. And I have similarly good reason to believe that Wilson will not… expand the scope of the secret services.”
    “Then it’s now or never,” said Hale. “The Conservatives may as well have some decisive reason for going out, don’t you think?— not just the declining pound and rising interest rates.”
    Theodora was nodding, squinting out across the newly green spring lawns. “It’s impossible, my boy. You’d need a real SIS purpose in going to Moscow, a plausible cover story for Whitehall, and you could never sell the Foreign Office on any particle of what you’ve told me.”
    “What would be a plausible cover story to sell to the Foreign Office?”
    “Well! Just for the sake of argument—something fairly low-key, routine administration type of thing.” Theodora swiveled on his heels, crushing the thyme. “The KGB resident in London, Nikolai Grigoryevich Begrichev, has been increasing the size of the residency outrageously; and all these Tass representatives and cultural counselors are ser vicing the Soviet trade delegations and the Soviet students at our universities, all of them active agents—MI5’s mobile surveillance operations are already completely compromised. And it’s likely to go on escalating. And the Foreign Secretary knows that a Labour government will only be interested in appeasement, not any saber-rattling. And our embassy in Moscow is simply a KGB snuggery—we are required to hire all the maids, janitors, chauffeurs, even translators, from the Moscow Burobin employment agency, which is simply a branch of the KGB Second Chief Directorate, the counter-intelligence directorate. If the SIS could get some evidence of Burobin treachery, it would serve as an excuse for Douglas-Home to expel a good number of the Soviet Embassy staff in London. It would arguably be the last chance to do that.”
    “Most natural thing in the world, then, for the SIS to send an agent to Moscow under journalistic cover. An old wartime leftover agent; experienced but ultimately unreliable, as it will turn out.”
    Theodora revolved on the sundial, staring blankly at the lawns and high walls of Batsford House, as he estimated the flurry of decipher-yourself telegrams that would erupt from the Moscow embassy after Philby’s assassination—and then the international headlines, the outraged statements by Khrushchev, and then by Douglas-Home. Lyndon Johnson would weigh in with denunciations, McCone would scramble to distance the CIA from the lunatic British secret ser vices.
    But two or three years from now, he thought, the Soviet Union would stop being a Union. The gross, artificially maintained flower of Communism would lose its hothouse protection, and it would wither in the unhindered winds of the world, and brash young weeds would spring up from the fallow Russian ground and choke it.
    “You’d have to find your own gun,” he said at last. “Whitehall could not possibly provide you with the gun.”
    Hale kept his face expressionless and simply nodded, but he felt the tension of the last thirty hours relax out of his shoulders. “I can find my own gun.”
    “I gather you don’t intend to be caught, but you do intend to be identified, as a British SIS agent. Do you seriously think a retirement identity for you in the United Kingdom is a question that need occupy me?”
    “I’ll make my way back across the Channel,” said Hale.
    Theodora frowned, possibly with genuine concern. “You’ve got plenty of field experience, my boy, but you’ve never been on the wrong side of the Curtain. It’s a whole other world. Moscow was Looking-Glass Land even when I was there with Lockhart and Reilly, back in the innocent days of 1918, when our great plan was to capture Lenin and Trotsky, and then pull off their trousers and parade them through the streets in their undershorts, to make laughingstocks