Declare

forcible detainment, and Dick White is able to prove he wasn’t even in London today. Run to the ambiguous leave-behind networks and spare identities you must certainly have established during your posting there, like every other agent-runner. The Russians will find you, you’ll be approached by a recruiter; and we—want you to be persuaded by them.”
    This is the version she will get, Hale thought again. He remembered Claude Cassagnac telling the two of them, in a vaulted cellar near the Seine in 1941, It is the indispensable agents who are always the first to be purged … Claude, Claude! thought Hale now. Did you finally get trapped into becoming indispensable?
    Hale took a deep breath and let it out. “If I’m to sell myself to them as a—a koti-ahngleeyski , a turncoat, they’ll expect me to give them my whole story—our Ararat plans, everything. What script do you want me to give them?”
    Theodora stared at him dubiously. “I won’t tell you now.” After a full second he gave a decisive nod. “It would be redundant—you’ll be told that in Kuwait, that much certainly, even if the briefing falls through and our agent has to write it on his forehead and walk past you on the street. I warn you that you won’t like it; you’ll probably doubt its validity and want confirmation, which won’t be possible. So this right now, what I’m saying, is your confirmation-in-advance. If you hate it, it’s the genuine instructions , have you got that?”
    Hale felt sick. Good God, he thought. Who or what on earth does he want me to betray?
    “Have you got that?” Theodora repeated.
    No confirmation possible, Hale thought; if it’s abominable, it’s genuine. And whatever it is, it’s so abominable that he’s evidently afraid I’ll bolt if I learn it right now. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.
    “Very good. A lorry out front will take you to a stolen car in Hammersmith. There’s a great deal of money in the glove box, and an airline ticket out of Heathrow, and a passport, in the name of Andrew Hale; that’s unhandy, I know, but it’s a nice indication of haste. Inside the passport is a Kuwait address, and a name; go there untraceably to hear all the details of this and to pick up your equipment. And when you get back—probably by the end of the month!—we’ll set you up with a complete new identity anywhere you like, and you can even have the OBE I promised you once. Hell, you’re old enough for a Commander of the British Empire now.”
    Hale got shakily to his feet, not sure he was being dismissed. He wanted to find out one more thing here, first. It had to do with the wild birds that subsisted on the suet hung from his oak tree, as much as anything.
    “Put the moustache and glasses on again,” said Theodora. “You can toss them when you’re in the lorry—your picture won’t be released to the press until after your flight has taken off.”
    “Chipping Campden,” said Hale, mumbling as he pressed the wilted moustache back onto his upper lip.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds, is where I’d like to retire. I haven’t been there since I was thirteen—I’m forty now. Nobody’d recognize me, and I presume I’ll have been reported dead somewhere.”
    Theodora stared at him, and Hale wondered if he had asked for too much to be able to detect anything valuable in the old man’s response.
    “No, Andrew,” Theodora said. “You’re going to be in the papers , remember? Reporters will be all over that place. Remote England, if it’s to be England at all, right?”
    “I suppose.” He had indeed overplayed it; but if Theodora had agreed to so insecure a proposal, Hale would have been sure the old man intended to have him killed at the end of this operation. Now he could only speculate.
    The old euphemisms echoed in his head: resolve his status, establish the truth about him, give him the truth. He recalled a dinner in Berlin in ’45 at which Philby himself had said, of an erratic agent who seemed bound for resolution, “There is truth to be found on the unknown shore, and many will find what few would seek.”
    She had been at that dinner too, as an agent of the French Direction Générale des Services Spéciaux, the headquarters of which had still been in Algiers then, so recently had the war ended; and of course she had loved Claude Cassagnac too.
    In Broadway he had heard rumors that the 1935 motorcycle crash that had killed T. E. Lawrence had not been