Declare

stylized pattern of circles had been burned decoratively into the leather strap. Thunder rumbled away on the north side of the river.
    “You should be the one to wear it,” he told Elena as they paused on the sidewalk under the shop’s awning; rain was drumming loudly on the canvas over their heads and tapping rings in the puddled gutter. “I’ll bet it’s a woman’s belt.”
    “No,” she said, “look at it, it buckles right over left—it’s a man’s belt.”
    Hale nodded and shrugged irritably, and only when he glanced at her a moment later, and saw her deadpan expression, did he realize that of course the belt could be worn either way.
    “I don’t think either of us should wear it,” he said, his breath steaming away in the cold fresh air. “It’s conspicuous—and since he insisted on it, it must be some kind of recognition signal, and he said himself that we don’t want to be recognized for a while.”
    Elena stepped quickly out into the rain, and Hale followed, stuffing the belt into his coat pocket. She started to say something, then paused; finally she squinted back at him and said, “The guardian angel he mentioned—did you get the impression that it was real, or a figure of speech?”
    “A figure of speech,” he said tightly. Implicit in his tone were the words, of course. “Oh.” His answer seemed to have disconcerted her. She stopped in the rainy street and turned around to take hold of his shoulders and stare straight into his eyes; and, in English, she said, “ ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.’ ”
    “I’m missing this,” he said helplessly, in French. He blinked away cold water that was dripping from his eyebrows. “That’s from the Book of Job—and not the Catholic Douay Version. It doesn’t say ‘Declare’ in the Catholic version.” He pushed a lock of sodden blond hair back from his forehead with his free hand, while she just kept frowning up at him. “We should have bought an umbrella back there,” he said at last, awkwardly. “Though probably all they had were iron umbrellas.”
    She let go of his shoulders and resumed trudging across the wet pavement toward the Boulevard St.-Germain and their current home. Amber lights glowed behind the leaded glass of shop windows, but there were no other pedestrians out on the street. “It was an Englishman,” she said over her shoulder, “no doubt a Protestant, who quoted it to a group of us in Albacete. He’d been pretending to be a Comintern recruit in the International Brigades, but actually he was a spy, a member of the British secret service. The Party had caught and exposed him, and Andre Marty shot him through the forehead a moment after he quoted that Bible verse; Marty used to be the leader of the Party here in France, before he went to Spain to command the Brigades. Nine-millimeter Luger. Blood flew forward as well as back, and some got on my dress. I was twelve… or thirteen or so, and I was a wireless telegrapher for the Brigades.”
    “Good God.” Hale shivered, and not just because of the cold rainwater that was battering his face, as he lengthened his stride to catch up to her. “I’m—that must have been horrible. But why quote that verse to me now?”
    “I can work a radio,” she said. “I can copy and send International Morse, and I’ve been the assigned WT agent in several Soviet networks before this: here, and in Belgium, and back then, in Albacete. But in this current configuration I’m the one who travels around and meets couriers, and Centre wants each network to have one agent whose sole job is to manage the ciphers and the radio, and they don’t want anyone else besides that person to do any sending; their operators in Moscow quickly learned the characteristics of your ‘fist,’ as they call it, your particular style on the telegraph key, and they’d get suspicious if I or anyone but you was to do any of the sending for our network now. But I could. And I think—I’m certain—that, if I’d been working the radio a week ago, we wouldn’t have got the accelerated signal and the burned floor.”
    Hale nodded nervously, not wanting to discuss that night. “And that’s why you quoted Job to me.”
    “Marty killed hundreds of Comintern agents in Spain, on the pretext that they had Trotskyite sympathies. But I think he was trying to weed out agents who had gradually become members of a transcendent order, a