Like any competent agent, Hale had his passport and money in his pockets—along with the Scandinavian Air tickets, two seats booked on a flight leaving tomorrow morning from Vnukovo Airport, bound for Stockholm. He couldn’t use his—perhaps he could give one to Elena, if she needed it.
Then a thought occurred to him that almost brought him to a halt—what if Elena had also incurred the wrath of the Heaviside Layer angels by participating in the destruction of the Black Ark last January, and what if she had tried since to fly above 10,000 feet? Hale had only survived the djinn-attack on his Air Liban Caravelle turbojet in February because the crippled plane had been able to land in the Persian Gulf.
If she’s dead, he told himself steadily, then she won’t be here. She may not be here anyway. See to it that you’re in the church, at noon.
He pushed back the bunched pink sleeve of his coat to look at his watch—it was twelve right now. The cathedral was still a hundred yards away, and he broke into a jog; but after only a few paces he slowed back to a walk, his heart thudding and his face suddenly chilly.
A dozen men in dark brown uniforms stood in the shade around the cathedral’s north arch. Even from this distance Hale could see campaign ribbons on their chests, but their visored caps made them look more like policemen than soldiers. Hale had no idea what agency they might represent; and he wondered if they were on the watch for him.
Hale knew he cut a peculiar figure here; and after a moment he felt a hot trickle of blood run down behind his left ear, and he realized that his brief jog had opened the cut in his scalp.
I can’t go in to see if she’s there, he thought helplessly. Even if they’re not after me, I’d be drawing needless attention to her.
But what if they’re after her? If Elena is in the church, lighting the candle she promised to the Virgin Mary, unaware of this dragnet outside, I could at least provide a distraction.
His ribs tingled almost with vertigo at the thought, as if he had been standing on the narrowest, highest coping of the Saviour’s Tower, looking up.
He could probably walk past on the right, safely—and then just trudge all the way down to the foot of the Moskva River Bridge. And leave Elena to whatever action was going on at the cathedral. She wasn’t expecting Hale, after all, and probably wouldn’t welcome the sight of him.
In the end he simply couldn’t do it. You didn’t go to all the trouble to get yourself sewn up in a mule skin, he thought, and let yourself be carried by the eagle all the way up to the inaccessible peak, just to try to find a way to climb back down.
He walked straight ahead into the shadow of the bulging domes, and when the uniformed men saw that he was going to pass among them, he nodded politely to the ones who were staring coldly at him. Trying to look like a Russian, he stepped between two of them and tapped up the stone stairs as if he had every sort of legitimate reason to be visiting the cathedral. He didn’t look back, but only glanced at his watch as he gripped the vertical brass handles of the ten-foot-tall gold-paneled doors. He was only a minute and twenty seconds late.
The doors weren’t locked. He pulled them both open, and peered into the chandelier-lit dimness of the vast church.
There was no crucifix visible anywhere on the high walls he could see from the entry, and no pews to interrupt the expanse of polished-stone floor, but the walls and the broad pillars were dense with the frescoed silhouettes of saints and angels and apostles.
There were policemen in here too, a number of them—it was hard to know how many, for each of the tall pillars that stood up from the floor was as wide as a car viewed head-on; but there were at least six of the uniformed figures standing at various points across the dim nave. Hale didn’t glance squarely at any of them, but he imagined that the intrusion of his ragged self must have drawn the unfriendly attention of every one of them.
He couldn’t just stand in the doorway.
A tiny constellation of candle flames lit the low reaches of the gold walls in a far corner, and when he began slowly walking across the floor toward the glow, he saw three or four black-hooded women kneeling in front of an iron table with the candles arranged on it in ranks. The candles were tall thin tapers, not the short votive candles in jars he remembered from his youth. The place should have smelled of incense and frail missal-pages, but the only scents he was aware of were damp stone and a diesel taint on the cold air that he had let in from outside. At least he could detect none of the rancid oil reek.
Two of the policemen were standing immediately to the left of the kneeling women, almost leaning against the frescoed wall; Hale pretended to be indifferent to them.
He hesitated and stopped when he was still a dozen feet away from the candles, and he stared at the backs of the women; and his heart began thudding even before he was sure that he recognized the figure and posture of the woman closest to the wall.
She was here, she had arrived safely this far, at least, after all the perilous years and betrayed loyalties. Was she about to be arrested now, and taken back to the Lubyanka?
For more than twenty years she had occupied Hale’s thoughts and brightened or tormented his dreams, but the only period in which the two of them had known each other, lived and worked and eaten and joked together, had been the three months in Nazi-occupied Paris, at the end of 1941, more than twenty-two years ago.
During his years as a lecturer at the University College of Weybridge, he had imagined one day meeting her again, and courting her, and marrying her; but under the gaze of the police in this cold Moscow church, those daydreams seemed all-of-a-piece with the bright, naïve ambitions of his Cotswolds boyhood, and he didn’t dare to hope for anything at all now, not even continued liberty.
He stirred himself and walked forward, digging into the pocket of his corduroy trousers for Philby’s two kopeks. The women were kneeling on a black leather kneeler in front of the candles, and Hale lowered himself down onto the yard of it to Elena’s right, so that she was between him and the nearest policeman; and Hale reached out to drop the two coins into the slot in the iron money box.
They fell to the floor of the box with a noise that seemed as loud as a couple of .22 shots.
From the corner of his left eye he could see that she was looking at him, and he was resentful that he dared not meet her gaze.
He saw her right hand move—she had made the sign of the cross. He crossed himself in turn, and he was genuinely praying to God too when he said softly, “Segne mich.”
The words were German for Bless me.
It was the old GRU Rote Kapelle code phrase: Things are not what they seem—trust me. Though he had spoken in a near-whisper, the words echoed back down at him from the remote arched ceiling.
He forced his hand not to tremble as he reached out and picked up one of the matchboxes on the iron table, and he managed to light one of the matches on the first strike. He held it to the curled black wick of one of the candles that had been extinguished, and shook it out when the wick flared in a tall yellow flame.
He made the sign of the cross again and stood up, staring at the candle flame and trying to see Elena as clearly as he could in his peripheral vision. Her white hair was conspicuous under the black hood, and he could make out her big Castilian eyes and the smooth, graceful sweep of her jaw.