Declare

doorway. Halted in his singing, Hale glanced up and recognized the man, and dropped the ladle into the soup. “I should,” Theodora went on, “recall that you must have had some hair-raising experiences in Europe, no doubt a good deal worse than what I’ve been having in London. Nevertheless, to find that I risked my career and possibly my liberty in order to make a good kitchen scullion out of you is… maddening.”
    For a moment neither of them spoke. Hale slowly reached up to the shelf to switch off the radio, noticing Theodora’s rumpled suit and tie and aware of his own stained apron.
    “Are you here in authority,” Hale asked finally in the sudden quiet, “or as another prisoner?”
    “Oh, I’m reinstated in SIS, my dear.” He smiled, but Hale thought he had lost weight, and the dark circles under his eyes implied that he had not been getting much sleep lately. “And I’ve come to take you to Broadway, where you will make a detailed report of your undercover experiences. It might take a couple of days.”
    “Can you find out the status of a Soviet network agent who’s been summoned from Paris to Moscow?”
    Theodora was probably about fifty then, but for a moment he looked older. “That would be Delphine St.-Simon,” he said, and sighed. “Sometimes we can. We haven’t heard anything about her.”
    Hale turned off the fire under the soup pot and began untying his apron. “My felonies—” he began.
    “Are dismissed, erased, forgotten. Cowgill is back from North America, all is forgiven—it’s quite safe now for you to leave this camp. Cowgill is the head of Section Five, the counter-espionage section of SIS; he was opening a branch of the British secret service in New York, flogging some most-secret decrypts of ours to the Americans, even as the Japs bombed Hawaii. Gave some extra force to his arguments, I gather.”
    Hale scouted up one of the other cooks and told him that he was leaving; and as he followed Theodora down the hall toward the duty officer’s desk, the older man said quietly over his shoulder, “It would probably be possible now to get you back into your Oxford college.”
    Theodora’s drawl had been more pronounced as he said it, and Hale asked cautiously, “What would be the alternative?”
    “A post in Broadway. Continue working for SIS, but on the official payroll now. It could be argued that your country needs you there.”
    And, as he was to find again twenty-one years later, his academic career seemed like an inconsequential pastime now that he had become a player in what Kipling had called the Great Game.
    “When do I start?”
    “Well, today, lad. Did you think you’d get a period of leave? We’re at war, you must have read about it.”

SEVEN

    Kuwait, 1963
You want to know the Secret—so did I ,
Low in the dust I sought it, and on high
Sought it in awful flight from star to star ,
The Sultan’s watchman of the starry sky.
—Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát , Edward J. FitzGerald translation
    And behind the temporary overt war had been an enduring secret war, one that had started long before Hale was born and was apparently still churning—above or below the radar of newspaper headlines, in the remote border regions and the fastnesses of unnamed government corridors where the Great Game was played.
    From his window seat on the starboard side of the big Vickers Viscount, Hale stared out at storm clouds over the Persian Gulf, and the unchanging background whine of the four turbine engines seemed to emphasize the astronomical silence of the miles-distant storm front.
    The Great Game. Kipling had used the term in his book Kim , a novel about an orphaned British boy, raised as a native beggar in India, who had become a roving agent of the fin de siècle British secret service; and Hale wondered now if the one-legged Chief he had met thirty-three years ago had been a youthful agent in the service in those days. During the long night in the Anderson bomb shelter below the angry peak of Ararat in ’48, Kim Philby had told Hale that he himself had been born in India in the last days of the colonial Raj, and had spoken Hindi before he spoke En glish, and that his father had given him his nickname after the Kipling character. And now Hale was winging his way back to “somewhere east o’ Suez,” under the indelible cover of disgrace and treason, to threaten Philby with death and then to accompany him… to Ararat, again.
    The sun was setting over the Arabian