Declare

arrested at Customs, but would not quickly provoke a canvassing of local hotels by the Kuwait Head of Station.
    And it made sense that he would not try to look up his old contacts in the changed city immediately upon his arrival, like a desperate fugitive. Obligations of hospitality and protection were taken with religious seriousness among the Arabs, but Hale’s relationship with his contacts had been as an agent-runner, and he had not been dealing exclusively with the most honorable citizens in those old days… and he remembered the Arab proverb: When the camel kneels down in exhaustion, out come the knives.
    Before stepping back inside, he glanced to the west, now as dark as the rest of the sky. Far away in that direction, out beyond the Syrian desert and past Damascus, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, Philby awaited him unaware in Beirut. What would the man’s response be, on being approached and threatened by a retired agent of the disbanded SOE?
    Hale remembered the lines from Cymbeline that Philby had quoted in the bomb shelter below Ararat: When from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches, which being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow…
    And Elena was in Beirut too—she had apparently been there last night, at least, and had not then succeeded in killing Philby. How soon would it be until she heard Hale’s cover story, got the scripted news that he had trecherously shot old Cassagnac? If Hale were to meet her, he could not tell her the absolving truth about that; wherever her loyalties lay now, clearly her plans were at radical odds with Operation Declare. And Hale did desperately need to complete the long-delayed assault on Ararat, needed to justify the deaths and broken minds of the five men he had led up that terrible road in 1948. And so Elena must be allowed to believe that Hale had shot and perhaps killed their loyal old friend, who had saved their lives in Berlin.
    According to Theodora, Malo Año was the slip of paper she had picked yesterday morning in Istanbul.
    In these past fourteen years Hale had often dreamed about his brief times of intimacy with Elena in Paris and Berlin; and even during his wakeful hours, as he had graded test papers or trudged across the green lawns of the University College, Weybridge, he had imagined somehow meeting her one more time, imagined himself impossibly convincing her to marry him at last, in spite of their histories, in spite of their last words on the Ahora Gorge road in 1948. He had never married, and he had liked to imagine that in the unguessed course of her life she had not either.
    The captain of a ship can perform marriages , Cassagnac had said with exhausted merriment on that Berlin night in 1945—the three of them had been crouched below the gunwales of a makeshift Ark on the bed of an American truck just east of the Brandenburg Gate, and though each of them had held a loaded pistol it had seemed likely that all three would be killed within minutes— and so I hereby pronounce you two man and wife. Kiss the bride quick, Andrew, before you die.
    Hale had kissed her, tasting blood from her cut lip, and then she had kissed Cassagnac too.
    Hale now flicked the cigarette out past the hotel balcony rail, over the broad new streets of the Kuwait that was no longer the city he remembered, and he watched the coal arc away through the night like a tiny shooting star.
    Now his bleak prayer was that he and Elena would not suffer the useless hurt and bitterness of meeting again, ever.
    Until the end of World War II, the standard cover for an SIS agent abroad had been passport control officer, attached to the local British Embassy; but when Hale had been an SIS agent in Kuwait in the late ’40s, the cover organization had been the Combined Research Planning Office, CRPO, known as “Creepo.” It had been run independently of the embassy and consulate, and largely even of Whitehall control, since a coincidence in the initials meant that a good deal of the secret correspondence from London was sent by mistake to the Combined Regimental Pay Office in Jerusalem, where it was generally lost.
    Hale had not been the first agent-runner in the Middle East to note the unique qualities of the Bedu—the nomadic herdsmen were as unregarded as gypsies, one tribe hardly distinguishable from another except among themselves, and they were free to cross the Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Trans-Jordan borders with no notice