Declare

brick-red Kremlin wall, incongruously crowned with a giant red star; and straight ahead, its bulbous blue-and-gold striped domes looking like bellied sails on a sultan’s ship of state, St. Basil’s Cathedral loomed on the broad, gently rippled sea of paving stones.
    Hale was trying desperately to convince himself that Philby would not send KGB agents down here to arrest him and Elena. Hale knew that Philby had been a turned agent, working for the SOE against the Soviets, since 1951; and at a KGB trial he could testify that Philby had cooperated in the Declare sabotage of the Rabkrin expedition on Mount Ararat a year ago. Surely the mere accusations would be likely to get Philby into trouble!—and Theodora had said that Philby was not highly regarded by the Soviet authorities these days.
    Like any competent agent, Hale had his passport and money in his pockets—along with the Scandinavian Air tickets, two seats booked on a flight leaving tomorrow morning from Vnukovo Airport, bound for Stockholm. He couldn’t use his—perhaps he could give one to Elena, if she needed it.
    Then a thought occurred to him that almost brought him to a halt—what if Elena had also incurred the wrath of the Heaviside Layer angels by participating in the destruction of the Black Ark last January, and what if she had tried since to fly above 10,000 feet? Hale had only survived the djinn-attack on his Air Liban Caravelle turbojet in February because the crippled plane had been able to land in the Persian Gulf.
    If she’s dead, he told himself steadily, then she won’t be here. She may not be here anyway. See to it that you’re in the church, at noon.
    He pushed back the bunched pink sleeve of his coat to look at his watch—it was twelve right now. The cathedral was still a hundred yards away, and he broke into a jog; but after only a few paces he slowed back to a walk, his heart thudding and his face suddenly chilly.
    A dozen men in dark brown uniforms stood in the shade around the cathedral’s north arch. Even from this distance Hale could see campaign ribbons on their chests, but their visored caps made them look more like policemen than soldiers. Hale had no idea what agency they might represent; and he wondered if they were on the watch for him .
    Hale knew he cut a peculiar figure here; and after a moment he felt a hot trickle of blood run down behind his left ear, and he realized that his brief jog had opened the cut in his scalp.
    I can’t go in to see if she’s there, he thought helplessly. Even if they’re not after me, I’d be drawing needless attention to her.
    But what if they’re after her? If Elena is in the church, lighting the candle she promised to the Virgin Mary, unaware of this dragnet outside, I could at least provide a distraction.
    His ribs tingled almost with vertigo at the thought, as if he had been standing on the narrowest, highest coping of the Saviour’s Tower, looking up.
    He could probably walk past on the right, safely—and then just trudge all the way down to the foot of the Moskva River Bridge. And leave Elena to whatever action was going on at the cathedral. She wasn’t expecting Hale, after all, and probably wouldn’t welcome the sight of him.
    In the end he simply couldn’t do it. You didn’t go to all the trouble to get yourself sewn up in a mule skin, he thought, and let yourself be carried by the eagle all the way up to the inaccessible peak, just to try to find a way to climb back down.
    He walked straight ahead into the shadow of the bulging domes, and when the uniformed men saw that he was going to pass among them, he nodded politely to the ones who were staring coldly at him. Trying to look like a Russian, he stepped between two of them and tapped up the stone stairs as if he had every sort of legitimate reason to be visiting the cathedral. He didn’t look back, but only glanced at his watch as he gripped the vertical brass handles of the ten-foot-tall gold-paneled doors. He was only a minute and twenty seconds late.
    The doors weren’t locked. He pulled them both open, and peered into the chandelier-lit dimness of the vast church.
    There was no crucifix visible anywhere on the high walls he could see from the entry, and no pews to interrupt the expanse of polished-stone floor, but the walls and the broad pillars were dense with the frescoed silhouettes of saints and angels and apostles.
    There were policemen in here too, a number of them—it was hard to know how many, for