Declare

been hugely startled when Centre’s signal had abruptly started chattering in his earphones, in fact completing a sentence that had been interrupted six weeks earlier. And in spite of her Party stoicism he could tell that Elena was unhappy to be ordered to take half of the radio work in addition to her old duties, and to quit the Simex job. The six weeks of radio silence from Moscow had been a vacation, and this new pace was more strenuous than early October’s had been, with even more hours spent at the telegraph key and the perilously live, oscillating transmitter.
    By Christmas both Hale and Elena had been short-tempered and absentminded from lack of sleep, frequently hungover and hungry, and clumsy in darkness and dazzled by daylight. Hale had begun meeting some of Elena’s contacts in her stead—wearily trudging to the meeting places, speaking the password phrases she gave him and pocketing the illegal reports to take back to whatever garret they were occupying on that day, and begin enciphering the texts— and any sluggish thought he gave to the Abwehr direction-finders was by this time in fatalistic terms of when rather than if. Hale’s only remaining goal was a cold determination to somehow get Elena away when the inevitable arrest occurred.
    At noon on the last day of the year, Hale was hurrying back to the pension at which they’d been staying for the last two nights; he had been to a boulangerie by the ruins of the Roman Arena off the Rue Monge, and he was carrying baguettes and a terrine of goose liver pâté wrapped in newspapers. Elena was sending on that morning, and she would be hungry when she could finally take off the earphones and switch off the set’s power. There had been no snow yet in Paris that year, but cold winds and rain had set the two miserable young spies to stuffing papers and scraps of cloth into the gaps between the window frames, and huddling together in coats and scarves during the few hours when they both had time to sleep, and now the cold wind at his back made Hale trot along more quickly.
    As always, he glanced quickly around at the pedestrians in front of the boardinghouse—and his frail attention was caught by the odd sight of a man whose briefcase was connected to his ear by a thin wire.
    Direction-finding was done with trucks, Hale believed; it needed heavy machinery and big rotating aerial rings. Not yet suspicious, he nevertheless glanced at the nearest vehicle, a grocer’s lorry that was even now driving up onto the curb and squeaking to a halt, and though the men levering open the doors and climbing out were dressed in grimy coveralls, the license plate bore only two letters: WL. Hale’s face and hands stung with sudden heat even in the instant before he remembered what Elena had told him they stood for.
    Wehrmacht Luftwaffe.
    Hale didn’t change his half-running pace, nor glance again at the men or the lorry; he ran on, past the alley on the far side of the boardinghouse, and tapped up the brick steps of the next house on the street, pushed open the front door and stepped inside. To the woman in the warm hallway who started to object he said, “Food, eat,” as he thrust his package at her; then he was pounding away up the carpeted stairs.
    The stairs appeared to end at the fourth floor, with no roof access that Hale could instantly see, so he kicked open a door on the side of the hall facing his pension and hurried past a couple of scared-looking children to the tall window in the far wall. He unlatched it and pushed it open, popping old rust deposits and shaking black dust down from the top edges, and the cold air billowed the curtains around him as he leaned out. Down on the street to his left he could see the back end of the Wehrmacht Luftwaffe truck, still rocking on its springs.
    The slanted shingled roof of the pension was a couple of yards below him and straight ahead, but separated from this building by the alley he had passed; and the alley appeared to be about ten feet wide.
    For a moment he could vividly imagine leaping across that gap, colliding hard and uselessly with the pension ’s gritty brick wall about six feet below the roof edge, and then spinning through thirty feet of cold, rushing air to abruptly snap his bones and rupture his guts against the unyielding paving stones so far below; broken teeth, wet white bone torn through his trouser fabric, split flesh torn wider open as the rough hands of Gestapo men hauled him to his