Declare

Wadi in 1917? Why did the American President Wilson suffer a stroke immediately upon returning to America from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where he had reluctantly agreed to take the League of Nations mandate to occupy eastern Turkey, in spite of the advice of the experts—experts on ancient Persian languages and the Crusades!—in his secret Inquiry group? Why did Lenin suffer the strokes that killed him in ’22 and ’23, after the Red Army had recaptured and then lost the Kars and Van districts in eastern Turkey? Idiot! Will you walk out of here still a knight without a protecting lord, without a covenant? Where will you walk—how far? I offer you a staff—say to me, about your old betrayed reed, ‘I break it now.’ Your statement will be witnessed.”
    Ice would have been rattling in Hale’s glass, for his hand was trembling—but with sheer excitement, for this was the very highest-stakes table of the Great Game, and he didn’t suppress a tight smile as he said, “I break it now.”
    Ishmael was breathing hard, as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. “Surrender your weapon.”
    Hale reached into the inner pocket of his new coat and dragged out the tinfoil ankh, and as the parrots and roosters shouted around him he tore it apart into impotent glittering shreds and let them fall like twisted airplane wreckage onto the spotlit flagstones.
    “I break it now,” he repeated.
    Ishmael said, “Would you die for our cause, your new cause?”
    Hale barked out two syllables of a surprised laugh. “No!”
    “I would. Would you kill for us?”
    “Well, it’s your cause, isn’t it? Makes a world of difference. I haven’t got one of those any longer, aside from enlightened self-preservation. Kill for you?” Hale shrugged. “In some circumstances.”
    Ishmael pursed his wrinkled lips, clearly recognizing that this indifference, distasteful though he might find it, was a small point in Hale’s favor—an infiltrated double might well have been told to feign more commitment. “What did Cassagnac say?” the old man snapped. “What does Whitehall know?”
    Hale took a deep breath and opened his mouth—and then discovered that he had an almost physical difficulty in telling Ishmael the answers. As recently as yesterday, Hale would have undergone torture rather than tell a Rabkrin operative these things.
    He exhaled without speaking, aware of a chill of sudden dampness on his forehead. But it’s all wrong , he told himself, you can tell this man the old math because it’s—apparently—invalid; but! —but it is nevertheless the math I put together, discovered! —to deceive and checkmate Ishmael’s people—and it’s so internally consistent, so convincing—
    Ishmael was staring at him with eager attention, and Hale realized that his own hesitancy here was obviously genuine… and he knew that Theodora had arranged all this so that it would be.
    And so at last Hale began talking, haltingly telling his questioner everything the Declare operatives had known in 1948, and describing, as if it were the still-current plan, his own earnest, painstaking strategy for countering that Soviet attempt to awaken what slept uneasily on the top of Mount Ararat.
    The birds appeared to want to listen, and Ishmael had to summon the boy and make him beat the cages with a stick to get them all shouting and cawing again.

EIGHT

    Ain al’ Abd, 1963
… it was noticeable that whenever the Church of England dealt with a human problem she was likely to call in the Church of Rome.
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
    When the stars had begun to fade in the east, Hale and his host shared a breakfast of hot saffron rice with eggs beaten into it, accompanied by a choice of beer or camel’s milk, of which Hale chose beer; and then Ishmael gave him a clearly secondhand set of Bedu clothes to change into: a patched cotton dishdasha smock with an aba robe to drape over it, and a once-white kaffiyeh headcloth and an agal cord to tie it on with. Ishmael looked like a prosperous town Arab in his long white shirt and robe and white kaffiyeh , while Hale’s smock had been patched with so many different fabrics that he sourly thought he looked like a dervish; and his bare feet were obscenely white, and soon achingly numb with cold from standing on the dewy flagstones.
    In the frosty overcast dawn Salim bin Jalawi returned with the jaunty blue Chevrolet, and Hale and Ishmael climbed into the back as Ishmael gave bin Jalawi directions