Declare

Page 9

 

  "Declare wasn't finished yet," said Theodora mildly, "and it needed an independent, secure agency to run it. A number of the overseas wartime agencies didn't actually close down when the war ended, but stayed on the rolls under ambiguous categories. " He paused, languidly waving his rattling ivory fan, and Hale knew White must be wondering what other splinter secret services might still be hidden in his trackless payroll.

  "We took the warning about Philby seriously," Theodora went on. "We investigated and concluded that in fact he was, and had for some time been, a KGB agent. "

  Hale felt sick all over again, remembering the ambush into which he had led the men in his command. What were you all doing up there? Philby had blandly asked him, afterward. A thousand rounds of ammunition fired off in the Ahora Gorge!

  "And," Theodora went on, "late in '52 we braced him-confronted him with facts and threats-and turned him double. " He smiled at Hale. "We even called you up then with the old signal-now didn't we?-but it all happened too fast: he was in Turkey, on the Soviet border, and it turned out that Burgess was waiting for him right there on the red side of the Aras River, and they were on the verge of. . . trying it again. We managed to abort it and at the same time save Philby's face with the Russians, but I'm afraid we did leave you rather at loose ends in Green Park, that day. "

  Hale gave a tense flip of his fingers; the job interview he had missed ten years ago-even his current position at the University College of Weybridge-seemed like inconsequential pastimes now that he was again an active player in the deadly Great Game.

  "We," said White, "don't know the Soviet timetable on this; but I'm afraid we've got a deadline of our own. A year ago a KGB officer named Golitsyn defected to the CIA in Helsinki and was extensively debriefed in Maryland; and this last August a woman in Israel, one Flora Solomon, contacted an old MI5 agent and told him a secret she'd been keeping since the '30s. The upshot of their stories is that, as Mr. Theodora has known for ten years, Philby has been Moscow 's man all along, probably since 1934. And we at SIS-not having been told that he had already been confronted and turned!-well, I'm afraid steps are being taken, beyond my control now, to arrest him and offer him immunity in exchange for coming back to England and making a full confession. MI5 is aware of this too, and insists on getting him to their tough interrogation center at Ham Common in Richmond. "

  Hale remembered Ham Common-he had in fact been interrogated there himself, and by Kim Philby, some twenty years ago.

  "I don't like that," said Macmillan. "All these spies we've been arresting, exposing, admitting to! The Kroger couple and Lonsdale two years ago, the homosexual Vassal in September, this Fell woman giving MI5's secrets to the Yugoslav Embassy just last month! Damn it, when my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn't nail it up in the Master of the Foxhounds' drawing room; he buries it, out of sight. I suppose we can't simply shoot spies, as we did in the war-but they should be discovered and then played back in the old double-cross way, with or without their knowledge-never arrested. "

  "Philby is too likely to jump at the proposed SIS offer of immunity, you see," said Theodora. He shrugged and pursed his lips. "We, the old SOE, didn't offer him immunity in '52-we just told him that we'd kill him if he didn't fully report to us any further contact the Soviets might have with him; and, if the day came, participate in any operation they might want him for, but do it working for us now. So he must be. . . induced to refuse the SIS offer when it's made to him, and to follow through on his old agreement, go through with this big Soviet operation as our agent. He won't want to, he's boxed and. . . outfoxed. He'll want to come home and leave the Russians to play out their present game without him. "

  Hale managed a tight smile. "How am I to induce him to refuse the immunity offer?"

  Leather creaked faintly as the other men relaxed without changing their positions.

  "By pointing out to him," said Theodora, "that our offer, SOE's, takes precedence and still applies; that is, he can either work for the Russians in this thing as a double, reporting to us and doing what we tell him, or he can be killed. No other choice exists, regardless of what he may soon be hearing from an SIS representative. "

  "To what extent will that be a bluff?" asked Hale carefully. Would the Great-and-the-Good of the Foreign Office endorse the SOE's old lethal ultimatum?

  Macmillan sighed, and White said, "It will not be a bluff at all. " He looked up. "You'll do it, then. "

  "Yes, of course," said Hale.

  White stood up. "Then we'll leave you to get the details from Jimmie. "

  Macmillan gave Hale a respectful nod as he left the room, though the red-haired man, who probably knew more than the Prime Minister, didn't look at him.

  After the interior door clicked shut, Theodora stared at Hale and said, wonderingly, "Clearance from the top! We're legitimate, finally!"

  "This room is clean," guessed Hale.

  "Right you are, nobody wants any hint of what I'm going to tell you now. " He stared at the door. "Arrests, spy scandals! He doesn't know the half of it yet, poor man. This Conservative government is doomed already. His War Secretary, Jack Profumo, has been having an affair with the mistress of a Soviet naval attache-and it's not unrelated to our current problem that two weeks ago this bit of gossip was passed on to a Labour Party MP. It will be in the papers before the month is out. " He sighed. "I wonder who the new PM will be, and what his attitude will be toward the poor old services. " He clicked his ivory fan closed and laid it on the table.

  "And of course he's wrong to imagine that the Russians want any part of Turkey east of Erzurum," Hale noted bleakly. Britain needs you to end the damned misbegotten thing now, Macmillan had said. Carefully keeping any irony out of his voice, Hale now said, "I hope this isn't going to involve"-a return to Ararat, he thought-" Turkey, at all?"

  Theodora frowned at Hale, all his earlier relaxation gone now. "This is going to be brutal, Andrew. 'Crown's good servant' notwithstanding, are you still surrendered to the service?"

  Hale sighed. "Yes, Jimmie. "

  "Would you break the laws of England, if we ordered it?"

  "Are you confirming me again? I went through this before graduating from the Fort. " In the summer of 1945 Hale had belatedly gone through a six-week SOE training course in the paramilitary arts at Fort Monkton near Gosport, studying unarmed combat and "opposed border crossings" and the use of explosives; and the course had ended with a catechism that had begun this way. Theodora was frowning more deeply, so Hale hastily said, "Yes, I would. "

  "And go to prison, in disgrace, if it was the will of the Crown?"

  "I would. "

  "You already know-I hope you remember!-that this operation has sometimes involved-" Theodora paused and pursed his lips, as fastidious as a Victorian schoolmaster forced to refer to venereal disease. "Would you go into a situation in which you were likely to have to. . . fight magic with magic, if we ordered you to?"

  Of course this had not been in the paramilitary arts litany, and Hale forced himself not to touch the bulge of the ankh in his pocket. "For the Crown," he said flatly, "I would. " But his mouth had gone dry, and he could feel the old forlorn wail starting up in his head.

  "Would you kill an apparently innocent person, on our orders?"

  A relative relief: "Yes. "

  "Would you kill your brother, in those circumstances?"

  "I haven't got a brother. "

  "If you did, child. "

  "Yes, Jimmie. " He yawned tensely, squeezing tears out of his eyes. "Am I to resolve Philby's status?" he asked, using the old SOE euphemism. Hale had never done an assassination, but now that he was assured that Philby had indeed been a Soviet saboteur during that debacle in Turkey in 1948, he thought he could. "Establish the truth about him?" he added, using a related euphemism.

  "Why do you ask that?"

  "Why wouldn't I? It doesn't seem like a remote possibility that you might want him verified, r
esolved, at the end of this. " And I should be the man to do it, he thought.

  "Oh. No, quite the contrary. Though as a matter of fact you will at some point be called on to seem to try to kill him-you're to shoot him with a load of. 410 birdshot. "

  Hale nodded tiredly and reminded himself that plain revenge was seldom the shrewdest move in espionage. "I'm sure that will make sense, when we come to it. "

  "You won't like the math, but it will make sense. " The old man glanced around at the high corners of the room, then leaned sideways in his chair to reach into his coat pocket. "All this business with Nasser and Yemen and the Arabs is of course incidental to the main Soviet purpose. " From his pocket he lifted out a white handkerchief wrapped around something no bigger than a couple of pens; he laid the little bundle carefully, without a sound, on the tabletop. "The Soviets have their own. . . fugitive SOE, as you recall, quite a bit older than ours. "

  Rabkrin, thought Hale with a suppressed shiver. "I do recall. " He cocked an eyebrow curiously at the bundle.

  Theodora picked up his fan again and flicked it open. "Well, for five hours last month we had the. . . the tsar of kotiryssas in our lap. " Hale knew the term-literally it meant "house Russian," derived from kotikissa, "house cat," and it referred to a Soviet spy who has defected to the West.

  "We actually managed," Theodora went on, "to get a director of that oldest Russian agency to jump ship and come over to us, right here in London -a sickly, hypochondriacal old fellow called Zhlobin. His cover among his own people was as a KGB colonel, and the general-consumption cover for that was First Secretary in the Soviet Embassy. We were suspicious of him because he was posted here, right after Khrushchev knuckled under to Kennedy, apparently as a replacement for another old fellow whose main job had turned out to be flying kites on the embassy roof on moonless nights, hmm? Apostle to the Heaviside Layer. And clearly this Zhlobin was another joker in the residency deck-he had no apparent embassy duties, but he didn't seem to be meeting any agents either; and he obviously wasn't a cipher clerk, since he did go out into the city unescorted. Our watchers were right on him every time he stepped outside the embassy gate in Kensington Park Gardens, and even a brush-contact in a crowd would have been difficult to hide from them. He did nothing. But finally last month he went along on an official cultural outing-all aboveboard, with proper F. O. permission to go beyond the ordinary eighty-kilometer limit-on-travel for Eastern Bloc diplomats-a field trip to view the Roman ruins in Dorchester, out in Dorset. Our watchers went along, and Zhlobin got off the train by himself at Poole and took a taxi to a churchyard near Bovington, where, thinking he was unobserved, he commenced rooting around at one particular grave. Later in the day he caught the return train at Poole and went back to the embassy with his comrades, who no doubt assumed he had met some KGB-run agent. "

  "And whose grave was that?" asked Hale dutifully.

  "Thomas Edward Lawrence," pronounced Theodora. "Lawrence of Arabia himself, dead since 1935. " He cocked his head at Hale. "You'd never have met him, I suppose, but do you know you look like poor old Lawrence -same thin, worried face, same flyaway sandy hair. "

  "Thanks, Jimmie. Was your man Zhlobin trying to dig him up?"

  "Well, he was looking for fulgurites, actually-brittle tubes of glass and sand, imbedded in the dirt, generally caused by lightning strikes. He didn't find any, so never mind. " The old man fanned himself more rapidly.

  Hale just nodded; but he remembered coming across lightning tubes, in a desolate region where huge basalt stones moved like smoke and sand dunes roared like low-flying bomber aircraft engines, south of the well at Umm al-Hadid in the Arabian Rub'al-Khali desert, in early 1948. The wail in his head was louder, and he thought he might be sick.

  "But we knew what he was now, you see," said Theodora. "So we worked to achieve definition of his motivations for defection, as recruiters say-that is, exacerbate his problems. An agent of ours in the embassy was able to tell us that Zhlobin was forever taking pills and measuring his own blood pressure and running to the embassy doctor. "

  "So you-you crash-turned the doctor. "

  Theodora smiled. "Did we not. We showed that poor man KGB documents we'd got from our own sources and told him how we'd claim to have got them from him, and showed him composed photographs of himself in bed with an MI5 woman-he quickly agreed to give Zhlobin a convincing diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. " Theodora shrugged. "We figured that might soften him up for a pass, you know; we could even promise a cure as a prerequisite to any questioning, miracles of modern British medicine, since he didn't have the cancer anyway; but before we could approach him, Zhlobin went out solo, and he dived-he used every elusion trick in the book, pogo-sticking like a twenty-year-old all over Bloomsbury and Holborn, and even a quick four-car team of our watchers could scarcely keep him in sight! Well, he wasn't hiding from us, he was hiding from his own security people. And where do you think he went?"

  To a pub, thought Hale; to a whorehouse. "To St. Paul 's. "

  Theodora looked nettled. "Why did you say that? You're almost right-he went to a Catholic church near the Old Bailey and went to Confession! The Papist sacrament of that name! Some of our fellows were all for quick-miking the confessional, but I said to back off. I braced him on his way out of the church, and he immediately broke down weeping, in that Slavic way, and agreed to everything I said. I promised him citizenship and a new identity and stacks of money and total medical care-I didn't want to get too specific there-and we got him to one of our safe houses right off the Holborn Viaduct. For five hours he answered every question I put to him. " Theodora sighed. "Then he said he wanted a bath, and he pulled a radio into the tub with him, and that was the end of Zhlobin. "