“That’s right,” Andrew told him. “Student branch in Oxford. I’m here for the meeting. I’m to meet a young lady.”
“Ah—well, I’m afraid our jail cells are segregated by gender, sir. Perhaps you’ll be able to write her a letter, if the censors have no objections.”
Belatedly Hale noticed the shape of a City police helmet, and his ribs tingled and his face went cold several seconds before he realized that he was frightened—if only he had answered, Certainly not, isn’t this Garrick’s? a mere twenty seconds ago!
“It’s not… against the law to belong to the Party,” he said, trying to speak in a reasonable tone. Three months earlier Germany had finally invaded Russia, violating their non-aggression pact and making the Soviet Union at least nominally a British ally.
“Espionage and subversion still are, sir, very much so. There’s a document on our air strategy that’s been lifted from the Air Ministry’s files. Our men are inside, trying to stop you lot from incinerating papers.” Hale now saw that a dark van was parked farther up the street, with a dimly visible blur of smoke fluttering at the exhaust. “I’ll have to ask you to come with me,” the policeman said, taking Hale’s elbow.
At last Hale realized what it was that he was afraid of: not the police, not jail, nor even possible expulsion from Magdalen College, but the man in the Haslemere railway station, or another of his sort, one Hale wouldn’t even recognize. Being here tonight suddenly looked a lot like disobeying orders during wartime.
With a despairing moan, Hale yanked his arm free of the policeman’s grip and began running back the way his taxi had come, panting more from panic than from exertion as the hard soles of his shoes skidded noisily on the unseen pavement. Suddenly there were torch beams and tall-helmeted silhouettes everywhere in the darkness—what were City police doing out here in Covent Garden?— and after sprinting and dodging for two hundred yards, Hale was cornered on the moonlit steps of the little St. Paul’s church in the Piazza. He held up his hands palms-outward against the dazzling yellow lights until the pursuing figures had cautiously shuffled close enough to seize his arms and twist him around and yank down the shoulders of his jacket; he heard a seam rip, and the autumn evening breeze was chilly through his sweat-soaked dress shirt.
The policeman who had grabbed him down the street came puffing up as others were snapping manacles onto Hale’s wrists and rifling his pockets. “If your name,” the man wheezed angrily, “isn’t—bloody Hale, I’m going to thrash you—right here on the church steps.”
“The name’s—in my notecase,” panted Hale. He could hear the van accelerating in reverse, audibly weaving in the lane as it came fast the wrong way up King Street in the dark. Had there been nobody else to arrest? “Andrew Hale.”
Makes you wonder why we still bother.
Hale had started to slant his stride to the right, away from the direction Theodora was taking across the wet grass of Green Park, and after a moment he realized that this was the old training kicking in; the plot here said that he had given an elderly stranger advice to do with the map, and that the two of them didn’t know each other, weren’t together. Hale squinted to the right, as if considering walking west toward Hyde Park Corner tube station, but dutifully kept the figure of the old man clearly in his peripheral vision.
Now Theodora reached up with his gnarled left hand and took off the black homburg. Even out of the corner of his eye Hale could see the spotty bald scalp and the neatly styled white hair, so different from the black locks he remembered seeing as a boy; and he nearly didn’t notice the signal—the old man had whirled the hat on one finger before flipping it back onto his head. Get in the car, that move meant.
“Not so fast,” Hale whispered through clenched teeth. These were real enemy-territory contact procedures, and for the first time in many years he was experiencing the old anxiety that was somehow more immediate than fear of capture— don’t slip up, don’t let down the side.
Beyond the beech trunks ahead, he could see vehicles driving east down the lanes of Constitution Hill, all their colors drab on this gray day. Keep your pace steady, he told himself. Don’t try to help. They’ll have got this timed.
This? he wondered helplessly. What, did Khrushchev only pretend to back down from Kennedy’s ultimatum about the Cuban missiles two months ago, have all the legal Soviet and Sov Bloc residencies disappeared from their embassies at once, gone covert and illegal, is war the next card to be dealt? But why are we miming? Or has there been some sort of in-house coup at SIS, so that old peripheral agents are being reactivated and concealed from the present victors? Am I in a faction here?
When he passed the bordering trees and stepped off the grass onto the pavement, the old man was an anonymous figure twenty yards away to his left, and Hale just hoped no more signals were being given. When Hale paused at the curb—even as he shrilly wondered, What car?—a blue Peugeot sedan came grinding up to rock to a halt right in front of him. The passenger-side door was levered open from inside, and he bent over and climbed in; and the car had pulled away from the curb even before he had yanked the door closed.
The driver was a thin woman with iron-gray hair, and he thought he recognized her chin-up profile from the fourth-floor offices at Broadway during the war. He knew better than to ask.
“There’s a jacket on the floor,” she said. “When I dogleg through Pall Mall, ditch yours and put it on. Not now.”
She made a fast but controlled left into the narrower corridor of Basingstoke Road and sped between the briefly glimpsed gray stone porticoes of St. James’s Palace and Lancaster House, and then turned left again into the westernmost block of Pall Mall. Hale was gripping the strap on the inside of the passenger door.
“Now,” she said, her gaze darting from the cars ahead to her mirrors and back as she juggled the Peugeot rapidly across the lanes. “Glasses and a moustache in the jacket pocket.” Hale smiled nervously at the notion of a false moustache, but his face went blank when, after a beat, she added, “Iron anchor in the inside pocket.”
He heard his own voice say, “Shit.” With his feet braced against the floorboards he shrugged out of his coat without conspicuous contortion, wondering remotely if he would ever get the coat back and if his test questions would still be in the pocket if he did, but his attention was on the gray wool jacket he now snatched up from the floor; he squeezed the lapel, and even through the cloth his fingers found the heavy iron shape of the looped Egyptian cross, properly called an ankh. And he was bleakly sure now that the route his driver was tracing would be widdershins, a counterclockwise circle, and that it would loop right around Buckingham Palace to end in Whitehall.
“And lose the tie,” she said. “You’ll be getting on the back of a motorcycle pretty prompt here.”
They were speeding up St. James’s Street now, past gentlemen’s hat and shoe shops, but as he obediently pulled loose the knot of his tie, Hale didn’t look out through the windscreen nor at his driver; he was staring blindly at the fascia panel, remembering the ankhs that had failed to work as anchors for the men he had led up the Ahora Gorge below Mount Ararat in ’48, on the night that the starry sky had spun like a ponderous unbalanced wheel over their doomed heads. He was certain now that this new year’s business would have nothing to do with any recognized Soviet residents in London, nor with factions that could possibly still be on the active force at SIS.