Declare

category so subtle and secret that the agents themselves didn’t even know they were in it—that is, didn’t know that they were in it too. I think there are more than one of these higher orders, I think there are partisan divisions. That English agent that Marty killed had been driving around the airfield at Guadalajara in a jeep, taking photographs—but it seemed he was taking pictures away from the airfield! Guadalajara was a Moorish city once, Moslem—its old name was Wadi al-Hijarah, Arabic for River of Stones, and the campesinos say black basalt stones walk in those hills at night. The Englishman may not even have known he was involved in something bigger than the British secret service … though he did seem to mean something when he quoted the verse from Job.”
    A roar in the sky that Hale had thought at first was thunder grew louder and droning, and then he flinched and glanced up as a trimotor Junkers 52 sailed heavily across the gray sky several hundred feet overhead, its broad silver wings rocking as it banked in for imminent touchdown at Orly.
    “The verse from Job,” he said too loudly, embarrassed at having been startled by the plane. “Well, it means nothing to me, besides Yahweh telling Job, rudely, that if the world is run according to any rules at all, those rules are beyond Job’s comprehension. Let’s move along faster here, we’re getting soaked.”
    “If the belt is a recognition signal,” she went on doggedly, almost pleadingly, “I don’t think we need to worry about its being one that would be recognized by any mere Razvedupr or Gestapo agents.”
    “Except Cassagnac,” Hale objected, “and whoever told him about it; and the man in London who told me to say I’d bought a belt in an ironmonger’s shop in Paris, as a password phrase.” He smiled and reached out and squeezed her shoulder under the sodden sweater. “Your angel will be able to recognize it even in my pocket.”
    “Eyeless in Gaza!” she burst out in English, suddenly very angry. Hale stepped back from her in bewilderment; this was another quote from an English poem—Milton? Samson Agonistes? —and Gaza was a town in Palestine. Elena turned away from him and strode on ahead, and Hale thought her voice was choked with tears when she called back to him, “You be sure to quote the Catholic version, when they shoot you.”
    Hale splashed hurriedly through the puddles at her heels, not at all sure of what she had meant; did she suspect that he too was a member of the British secret service? Surely not—he had almost forgotten it himself, until Cassagnac’s talk today had made him consider fleeing back to England, and he was certain that she would instantly turn him in if she ever suspected that he was a spy. No, she had simply seen him as one of these hypothetical agents who unwittingly begin to… what, operate in a higher category, like her friend Maly, and perhaps like herself.
    The thought made him consider again the idea of running, of finding his way back to England. If it had been one of the big Focke Achgelis helicopters, instead of a plane, with big rotor blades turning slowly enough to be seen … Resentfully, he thought of his year’s-end childhood nightmares, which Theodora had been so interested in; and then he remembered his and Elena’s predawn clochard walk ten days ago, which had somehow transported them from one island in the Seine to the far end of the other— You were born for this , she had said that night—and he recalled the terrible near-music in the earphones the next night, and the weirdly scorched floor…
    The implications of all this were simply too morbid and medieval to be true, or at least to be consistently true—he had been vaguely hoping that all these things would recede without consequence or sequel, and he had convinced himself that the emotion he had felt, when the radio had gone mad and the wind had been rattling the shingles outside the apartment window on that night, had not been fearful eagerness.
    To wear the belt would be to voluntarily participate in this filthy old business… which, really, he had started to do when he had begun tapping out his wireless signals in the insistent, pulsehopping rhythm.
    Recognition , he thought bleakly as he pulled the belt out of his pocket and slung it around his waist; and perhaps some awful sort of protection , by God knew what means, from God knew what threat.
    He sprinted through the rain to catch up with her, and