Declare

come back here at the age of forty to be killed. Elena was long lost to him. “Who is my father?” he asked curiously.
    “This is the son,” groaned the spinning hole in the wall of black water. The whole surface was quivering, and the fringe of steamy spray was flying away, beading up in the sky or kicking up splashes and sand below it, as if flung by centrifugal force. “This is the Nazrani son.”
    Abruptly Ishmael surprised Hale by throwing the gun to him, and then the old man reached inside his robe and pulled out a walkie-talkie-sized radio and yanked up the telescoping antenna.
    Hale had caught the gun carefully by the grip, and he half-tossed it to grasp it firmly, his finger outside the trigger guard. He realized that he had been holding his breath, and he began panting. It was all he could do not to point the muzzle, uselessly, at the turbulent wall of water.
    “Kill Salim bin Jalawi,” Ishmael snapped. “That’s an order, a condition of employment, a proof of your sincerity.” He twisted a dial on the radio and then cupped his hand around the microphone and began to speak into it quickly in Russian, his eyes on the no-longer-distant riders.
    Bin Jalawi knelt atop his camel fifteen paces across the sand toward the south; his voice now was loud and steady, and it must have required courage for the Bedu to speak at all in the terrible presence of the djinn: “Will you shoot me, bin Sikkah?”
    Ishmael gave Hale a fierce nod. For the first time, he seemed more frightened than irritable. Peripherally Hale could see that the ring of stones was spinning more rapidly in the steaming mouth.
    Hale laughed dizzily, still doubtful that any of them would live to leave this place. “No, my friend,” he called over the whistling wind to bin Jalawi. And I do wonder if you would not shoot me , if our positions were reversed, old friend.
    Ishmael stared at Hale, then after a moment of open-mouthed hesitation pronounced some flat, clear Russian syllables into the radio, after which he dropped it onto the sand. “There is a ship off the Ras Khabji headland”—he spat out the words in English— “and a helicopter from it is now heading this way, fast, tracing the Al-Maqta stream. It is Rabkrin, get aboard it.” He stepped side-ways to face Hale squarely. “Kill me , then,” he said. “I have told them on the radio that you are genuine—the devil confirms your identity, and certainly no SOE infiltrator would have perversely refused my orders—my part of the task is finished. The things of the water demand a life in exchange for their testimony, and we cannot possibly offend any ambassadors of theirs right now—kill me.”
    Hale heard the rapid multiple crunch of camel hooves, and saw that Ishmael’s group of Mutair and ’Awazim had goaded their camels into a rolling gallop toward the east; in the southwest the unknown riders were close enough for him to see that their camels also were running—stretching their long legs and holding their heads low. Bin Jalawi was still sitting imperturbably on his camel close at hand, but all of them needed to get moving right now.
    Nevertheless Ishmael had clearly meant what he had said, and it was probably true. If they cheated this, this oracle , the entire Rabkrin Soviet operation might misfire, which meant that Declare would misfire too.
    Hale flexed his hand on the checked wooden grip of the .45—but it had been nearly eighteen years since he had shot a man, and he had never simply executed anyone, and somehow the sight of the old man’s gray face and bare feet made shooting him impossible. “Kill yourself, then,” said Hale thickly. “But do it quickly—I need your rifle if we’re to get away from this hole.”
    The old man unslung the BAR from over his shoulder and simply tossed it through the air upright to Hale, who caught it by the stock with his left hand. The polished wood was warm, and the steel barrel was hot, and Hale noticed belatedly that the sky had cleared and the sun was a caloric weight on the landscape.
    Then Ishmael simply turned toward the pool and started walking down the crusty sand slope—and the fringes of black water were as distinct as tentacles now, though water and steam still flew from their ends; as Hale watched, they began to bend forward, like the spines of a huge black Venus’s-flytrap. The spinning rocks clattered like weighty castanets, and Hale could see the whirlpool mouth constricting and dilating until Ishmael