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.”