Declare

under the rug, as he had been.
    Here’s a list, he thought bitterly as he stepped on the clutch and touched the brake pedal: Walsingham’s Elizabethan secret service, Richelieu’s Cabinet Noir, the Russian Oprichnina, the SOE—that’s four, speak up! They’re all just footnotes in history. Probably there’s an unconsidered routine at the present-day SIS headquarters to call agents of all the defunct wartime services and recite to them an uncomprehended old code, once every ten years. He recalled hearing of a temporary wartime petrol-storage tank in Kent that had been wired to ring a certain Army telephone number whenever its fuel level was too low; somehow the old circuitry had come on again during the 1950s, long after the tank itself had been dismantled, and had begun once a month calling the old number, which had by that time been assigned to some London physician. Doubtless this was the same sort of mix-up. Probably SIS had telephoned the old lady’s boardinghouse in Weybridge before trying the college exchange.
    Still, do bring a raincoat.
    He had stopped the car in the narrow street now, half a dozen yards short of his gravel driveway and partly concealed from the house by the boughs of a dense pine tree on the next-door property. Of course the only cars parked at the curbs were a Hillman and a Morris that belonged to his neighbors. From here he couldn’t see the bowed drawing room windows, but the recessed front door certainly didn’t give any obvious sign of having been forced since he’d locked it early this morning, and the driveway gravel didn’t look any different; even the cleaning woman wasn’t due until Friday.
    The television antenna on the shingled roof swayed faintly in the wind against the gray sky… and now, for the first time, it reminded him of the ranked herringbone short-wave antennae on the high roof of the old Broadway Buildings headquarters of the SIS, and on the roof of the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Gardens, and then even of the makeshift antenna he had at one time and another furtively strung out the gabled windows of a succession of top-floor rooms in occupied Paris…
    Et bloody cetera, he thought savagely, trying not to think of the last night of 1941.
    In the old SOE code, raincoat had meant “violated-cover procedures,” and until the false-alarm summons ten years ago he had never heard it used in a domestic context.
    There was a gun in the house, though he’d have to dig through a trunk nowadays to find it: a .45 revolver that he’d modified according to Captain Fairbairn’s advice, with the hammer-spur and the trigger guard and all but two inches of the barrel sawn off, and deep grooves cut into the wooden grips so that his fingers would always hold the gun the same way. It wasn’t a gun for competition accuracy, but Captain Fairbairn had pointed out that most “shooting affrays” occurred at distances of less than four yards.
    But it wouldn’t be of much use across the expansive lawns of Green Park. And according to violated-cover procedures, he must consider himself blown here; his address was even printed in the telephone directory. Play by the old rules, he told himself with a shaky sigh, if only in respectful memory of the old Great Game.
    He could get along without an actual raincoat, and he had at least ten pounds in his notecase.
    He relaxed the pressure of his foot on the brake pedal and let the Vauxhall roll back down the street until he was able to turn it around in a neighbor’s driveway, and then he shifted rapidly up through the gears as he drove off toward the road that would take him to the A316 and, in an hour or so, to some tube station not too far from the old Green Park in London.
    Only three days earlier he had been out in his lifeless garden hanging blocks of suet on strings from the bare oak limbs. The stuff stayed hard in the winter air, and the wild thrushes that would have worms to eat come spring were able to sustain themselves on this butcher shop provender until those sunnier days arrived. He was absently whistling “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover” now as he drove, and he tried to estimate how long those suet blocks would last, before new ones would have to be hung; not all the way until spring, he thought fretfully. But surely whatever happened he would be back long before then.
    His restless gaze was jumping from the windscreen to the driving mirrors and back, and with a chill he realized that he