Declare

an accident—a black van had been seen passing him just before his crash, and witnesses were told not to refer to it in the inquest. Lawrence had supposedly found some ancient Biblical scrolls in a cave south of Jericho in 1918, by the Dead Sea, and been an unreliable agent ever since deciphering the primitive Hebrew texts; Knew toomuch , had been the laconic verdict. Makes a man unpredictable.
    Do you know you look like poor old Lawrence.
    It occurred to him that he would be protesting more, here— denouncing the shooting of poor old Cassagnac, demanding to be told his script right now, even frankly raising the mathematical possibility of his own assassination like a chess problem that needed to be solved—if he had not stepped out of honesty with Theodora, if instead he had instantly told the old man what he knew about the woman who had apparently shot at Philby.
    “I should tell you—” he said impulsively; he wanted to get out of this unfocused, less-than-honest posture right away, restore the perfect loyalty to the Crown which had always been his defining moral anchor, and which he had not violated in any of the hard conflicts in Paris and Berlin and the Arabian desert and the Ahora Gorge below Ararat; but if he explained who the woman was, Theodora would very likely have her killed, have her status resolved. Whatever her motivations, if she had tried to kill Philby she was imperiling Declare.
    Theodora was staring at him like an ancient, weary lizard.
    “—that I’m outraged by your use of Claude Cassagnac.” How pedestrian it sounded! And he had not stepped back into the old perfect accord. Where am I, now? he wondered. How am I to navigate, now?
    Theodora said, “ ‘Would you kill an apparently innocent person, on our orders?’ He was a player, boy, like us all. Go now. We’ve set you up, it’s Red’s turn to move.”

FOUR

    Paris, 1941
Across the margent of the world I fled ,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars ,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars;
         Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o’ the moon.
I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Eve: Be soon…
—Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven”
    He had first met her in German-occupied France in October of 1941, after doing two weeks of hasty training and occasional desultory courier work for what he had still assumed was the Comintern, in rural Norfolk eighty miles northeast of London. The Comintern was Communist International, a worldwide association of national Communist parties united in a “popular front” against fascism.
    Hale had pulled his own belt out of his pants before crossing Regent Street to step up to the Eros fountain in Piccadilly, and a smiling little fat man with an orange in his hand had indeed approached him and asked him about the belt; after the formal dialogue—“Well, I got it in an ironmonger’s shop, actually, believe it or not, in Paris” —Hale had taken the orange along when the little man escorted him up Regent Street. The man had not touched nor even looked at the envelope Hale had brought down on the train, but had advised him to leave it on the fountain coping, presumably either because it would be picked up by someone watching or because it had not contained any secrets in the first place.
    But over goulash and dark beer at Kempinski’s the little man’s ner vous cheer had abruptly evaporated, and in fact he had been visibly frightened, when he learned that Hale did not, in fact, know anything about radios or wireless telegraphy.
    “But,” the man sputtered, “are you sure? Our people have the idea that you’re an expert!”
    “I did subscribe to several magazines for a while,” Hale said, “about it. But I never really read them.” His companion just stared at him in dismay, so Hale shrugged, wide-eyed. “My mother wanted me to learn a trade! But I wanted to be a teacher, not a wireless operator. I’m sorry—was this crucial?—you can have back what’s left of the hundred pounds, uh, less what it’ll cost me to get back to Oxford.” Would this be the end of the whole thing? Hale didn’t know whether he was relieved or alarmed—or angry. “The woman who approached me there should have asked me about this radio business, I gather it would have saved me this trip.” And what’s become of my trunk by now? he wondered. I shouldn’t even have mentioned the hundred pounds to this fellow.
    “Woman? Don’t tell me about any woman.”