Declare (79 page)

It had certainly been obvious to Theodora that Hale could not go on being in the picture afterward. Theodora recalled his late-1962 conversation with the leveraged minister who gingerly sponsored the fugitive SOE, after the minister had objected to the idea of killing Hale:
Think about it, man!
Theodora had said.
By agreeing to have Hale send Philby to Moscow with a skin-full of Shihab-shot, the Prime Minister is authorizing a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union! That’s what it is, if our math is correct.
Nobody’s
indoctrinated for this. We may have to kill
you.
I may have to kill myself. Even if Hale doesn’t succeed, he would be in a position to stir up enough old evidence to make it plausibly clear that we did attempt exactly that—and by demonstrably
sorcerous means!
The
Prime Minister!
McCone at the CIA wouldn’t give us Manhattan street maps, after that. Hale will be a hero if he can pull off this Ararat operation—but we’ve killed bigger heroes, famous ones, to keep this a secret.

It had been true then, a year and a half ago, and it was still true
now. The SIS interrogation center wasn’t at Ham Common in Richmond anymore—with a pang Theodora recalled recruiting Hale into the SOE there, in the corridor outside the kitchen at Latchmere House, in February of 1942—but Hale would have to be lured back, and debriefed, and then given a Cold War hero’s retirement: a quiet, painless death, and the undisturbed, enduring disgrace of his last cover.

And Theodora would probably have to face Hale, before it was all over. He remembered the young ex-nun he had found in Cairo in 1924, living in a Misr al-Qadimah flat with her priceless illegitimate child, the issue of St. John Philby’s folly; and he remembered meeting that child again when the boy was seven years old, on the day his mother brought him to the SIS headquarters in Whitehall Court. Theodora recalled now that the boy Andrew had nearly passed out from hunger in that interview, having fasted since the previous midnight in order to take his first Catholic Communion. And Theodora could still recall the long conversation he had had with Hale in the ruins around St. Paul’s Cathedral in the late summer of 1941, among the antique wildflowers whose entombed seeds had been liberated by the German bombs.

And Hale had ultimately proven to be worth the long, costly investment. Theodora’s battles with eight Prime Ministers and five Chiefs of the SIS, even his brief imprisonment on suspicion of treasonous acts in the first weeks of 1942, had been vindicated: the power on Mount Ararat was killed. And if Kim Philby would eventually die in the Soviet Union, preferably right in Moscow, the Soviet Union would lose the guardian angel that had protected Russia since 1883.

I do owe it to Hale to face him one more time.

At the other end of the enormous stone room, the door creaked open.

“Bring the car around to the front drive, would you, Nigel?” said Theodora thoughtfully, rapping the dottle out of his pipe on the ancient table. To London, to London, he thought—to arrange a spot of humiliation for myself.

“Nigel is still in Southborough,” said the well-remembered voice
of Andrew Hale. “I’m taking over for him for the rest of the day.”

Theodora opened his mouth in a laugh that was too quiet to be picked up by any microphones that MI5 might have installed. “Well, I don’t want the car anyway,” he said lightly, “now that I think of it. I believe I’ll go for a walk in the gardens instead.”

Of course he came over early, the old man thought. He learned that from the GRU during the war. I should have expected it.

Theodora noted wryly that his heartbeat was suddenly rapid.

At last he tucked his pipe away in the pocket of his corduroy jacket and looked toward the door.

Hale had apparently been in sunny climes—his face and hands were tanned a dark brown—and his sandy hair was newly gray at the temples. He hadn’t shaved recently, and the bristles on his chin were white. No doubt it had been a stressful year. The man was dressed in Nigel’s clothes—white shirt, black jacket and tie— though his shoulders were broader than Nigel’s, and Theodora doubted that he would be able to button the jacket.

Hale’s right hand was in the pocket of the black trousers.

Theodora unbolted the door that led right out to one of the smaller gardens, having to rock the bolt to get it to slide back— probably it had not been opened since 1945—and when he had pulled the door open he walked carefully down the old stone steps, the grass-and-stone-scented morning breeze ruffling his fine white hair.

He heard Hale scuff down the steps after him.

Theodora’s boots crunched along the gravel path that led to the sundial. The kitchen sundial at Batsford House was on a mound, and the triangular sections below the iron gnomon were each planted in a different variety of thyme—silver thyme and bright yellow-and-green variegated thyme on the morning slope, darker creeping thyme on the afternoon decline. Theodora stepped up to the crest of the mound, crushing the noon
thymus vulgaris,
and turned around to face Hale.

“You’re late in reporting, sir!” Theodora said. “It was in January of last year that I sent you out. I remember saying that I believed you’d be back within the month.”

Hale nodded, but he was glancing back at the high south wall of the house, a cliff of uneven tan stones and widely separated windows. “I was here, during the war,” he said. “Had no idea it was yours.” He glanced at Theodora with neutral, pale eyes. “Batsford, Theodora.”

“A widowed Lady Batsford married a cloth merchant Theodora around the time of Waterloo. It used to be grander—one of the bedrooms still has a railing across the middle of the floor, so that any king who might be visiting could greet his subjects without getting out of bed. Two Earls once got into a serious fight in that room, the issue being which of them was to have the privilege of dressing George the Third. Bloody noses, broken furniture—I believe George wound up having to put on his own shirt. And I remember standing right here at night, as a boy—this would have been late ’90s, 1900—and looking up to watch the servants carrying torches across the rooftops, as they made their way to the bedrooms in the turrets.”

“Of course I’ve got a gun, Jimmie,” said Hale.

“Of course you have,” Theodora agreed. “And some sort of proposal, I imagine.”

“I trust I’m still… on the rolls. I want to be sent out one more time, and then I want to retire here. Scotland, Wales, I don’t care. Ireland, even. I came in through the London Docks yesterday, on a Canadian passport—it was a friend who sent the cable from Helsinki. I wanted to have a chance to discuss terms privately, before a lot of definitions were made, photographs taken.”

“Terms,” said Theodora.

“Well, I’ve got it all down in a little book, haven’t I? Declare. With enough names and dates to make it convincing; and it’s compelling reading too—T. E. Lawrence, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Kim Philby, Noah’s Ark. A Belgian solicitor has it, and if a New Year’s Day goes by without me having sent him a Christmas card, the whole works will be sent to every newspaper in the United States, and in Europe—oh, and
Pravda
. When I turn sixty-two, twenty years from now, I give you my word I’ll destroy it. By then I doubt anyone will still care.”

“Scopolamine,” sighed Theodora, “sodium Pentothal. Plain old torture.”

“A photograph of myself in with the Christmas card, every year. With a newspaper visible, to establish the date. The solicitor has a large staff, many offices, and he does a lot of international crime work—bodyguards, security—he’s tremendously cautious.”

Theodora shrugged, conceding the point. “ ‘Sent out one more time,’ ” he said.

“To Moscow, under journalist cover. SIS can arrange that easily enough. I want to cash out the Machikha Nash account. Khrushchev can be the last Premier of the Soviet Union.”

Hale was proposing to kill Kim Philby, his half-brother, and thus set into motion the chain of events that would culminate with the
ghulah
guardian angel ingesting the Shihab-shot from Philby’s buried corpse. “Well, Khrushchev wouldn’t be the last anyway,” Theodora said, stalling. “I doubt the Soviet empire would come crashing down
immediately
after the guardian angel was killed, and it doesn’t look as though Khrushchev will last out the year. Russia had a bad harvest last year, and he had to use hard currency to buy wheat from the West. The KGB had to become grain brokers, and the KGB head, Shelepin, wants Khrushchev out. Leonid Brezhnev seems to be the likeliest replacement.”

“Is my brother covering himself with glory, over there?”

“Well, no. It turns out he’s what they call a ‘secret collaborator,’ not a Soviet intelligence
officer,
as I’m sure they had told him he would be. He’s got a nice apartment, and access to a chauffeur-driven car, but he’s apparently drinking a good deal, and his main value to the KGB is that he’s still being debriefed, these fourteen months later. The only actual work he’s doing is for the Novosti news agency—and his work needs to be translated. He’s never learned Russian.”

“Cremation is very common in Russia,” Hale said. “If he dies years from now, as just an embarrassing old drunk left over from a previous regime, he’s likely to be cremated.”

And the precious shot pellets will be melted, thought Theodora. I won’t live that long, but it
would
fret me to die thinking that the main operation of my career had not come to full fruition.

“Right now,” Hale went on, “the people who vouched for him are still in charge, unwilling to concede that he’s nothing but a drunk old Englishman. If he dies a hero’s death now, a properly vindicating death, he’ll be buried with honors at one of the Moscow cemeteries. Buried.”

“What would be a hero’s death?” asked Theodora. “A vindicating death?”

“He must be shot, killed, publicly and conspicuously, by an Englishman who can be proved to have been working for the SIS. Simple logic—if we considered him worth killing, obviously he must have been a Soviet hero.”

Theodora laughed incredulously. “My dear boy, do you have any conception of the havoc that would cause? Consider the abuse the United States endured when one of their mere U-2 spy planes was shot down over Russia four years ago! It would not start World War III, I suppose, but we would lose all credibility worldwide—the present Conser vative government would collapse, we’d have Harold Wilson and the Labour Party in charge!”

“Haven’t you got—I seem to recall—
ears,
in Number 10 Downing Street? How likely is it that this Conservative government will survive the year in any case? The Profumo scandal drove Macmillan out last year—how long do you think Douglas-Home can hold the Conservative reins?”

“Until a general election, in October,” Theodora said glumly. “And then, yes, I do happen to know that we’ll have Harold Wilson for Prime Minister. And I have similarly good reason to believe that Wilson will not… expand the scope of the secret services.”

“Then it’s now or never,” said Hale. “The Conservatives may as well have some decisive
reason
for going out, don’t you think?— not just the declining pound and rising interest rates.”

Theodora was nodding, squinting out across the newly green spring lawns. “It’s impossible, my boy. You’d need a real SIS purpose in going to Moscow, a plausible cover story for Whitehall, and you could never sell the Foreign Office on any particle of what you’ve told me.”

“What would be a plausible cover story to sell to the Foreign Office?”

“Well! Just for the sake of argument—something fairly low-key, routine administration type of thing.” Theodora swiveled on his heels, crushing the thyme. “The KGB resident in London, Nikolai Grigoryevich Begrichev, has been increasing the size of the residency outrageously; and all these Tass representatives and cultural counselors are ser vicing the Soviet trade delegations and the Soviet students at our universities, all of them active agents—MI5’s mobile surveillance operations are already completely compromised. And it’s likely to go on escalating. And the Foreign Secretary knows that a Labour government will only be interested in appeasement, not any saber-rattling. And our embassy in Moscow is simply a KGB snuggery—we are required to hire all the maids, janitors, chauffeurs, even
translators,
from the Moscow Burobin employment agency, which is simply a branch of the KGB Second Chief Directorate, the counter-intelligence directorate. If the SIS could get some evidence of Burobin treachery, it would serve as an excuse for Douglas-Home to expel a good number of the Soviet Embassy staff in London. It would arguably be the last chance to do that.”

“Most natural thing in the world, then, for the SIS to send an agent to Moscow under journalistic cover. An old wartime leftover agent; experienced but ultimately unreliable, as it will turn out.”

Theodora revolved on the sundial, staring blankly at the lawns and high walls of Batsford House, as he estimated the flurry of decipher-yourself telegrams that would erupt from the Moscow embassy after Philby’s assassination—and then the international headlines, the outraged statements by Khrushchev, and then by Douglas-Home. Lyndon Johnson would weigh in with denunciations, McCone would scramble to distance the CIA from the lunatic British secret ser vices.

But two or three years from now, he thought, the Soviet Union would stop being a Union. The gross, artificially maintained flower of Communism would lose its hothouse protection, and it would wither in the unhindered winds of the world, and brash young weeds would spring up from the fallow Russian ground and choke it.