Theodora wasn’t speaking any louder than before, and Hale had to cock his head to hear him as he kept twisting the drilclass="underline" “It was a proper circus around Ararat for a week or so, with the ignorant KGB and the Red Army panicking on the Russian side of the Aras River, and therefore the Shah sending Iranian aircraft out to patrol their border—and the Russian expedition was indeed canceled, with no evidence that the circumstances had had anything to do with Philby, who obviously had no choice then but to return to England. So far so good, you’ll say.”
Hale straightened up from under the table to replace the drill and lift the pick and the little microphone. “Consider it said,” he told the old man in a conversational tone, and then ducked under the table again. The drill bit had been well chosen—the plastic cylinder slid tightly into the new, oblique hole without needing any help from the pick, and its fine antenna was invisible in the shadows. He knew Theodora wouldn’t be sending an activating signal to the microphone, making it vulnerable to electronic security sweeps, until such time as Macmillan’s government fell and a Labour Party Prime Minister took office.
“But the secret Russian directors were suspicious of Philby anyway,” he could hear Theodora saying over the rapid, covering rattle of the ivory fan, “clearly wondering if he had been turned there in Turkey, or in London the year before when MI5 interrogated him about Burgess and Maclean, or even right after the failure in ’48. They’ve always been so leery of Ararat, since Lenin got killed fooling with it, that they’d jump at any honorable excuse to leave it alone; we’ve had to nudge them at every turn to encourage them to try it again, so that we’ll be able to step in at the last moment and finally close down the whole show. And so we had to leave Philby out trailing his coat, for another six years, before they worked up the nerve to get back in contact with him.”
Hale pocketed the sawdust and wiped his hand on the pocket lining, then stood up and laid the pick on the handkerchief. “Six years of it,” he said respectfully as he slowly sat down in his chair, “and he wasn’t working for SIS anymore.” He reached for his own handkerchief, but it was in the coat he had left in the Peugeot; so he mopped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with the new coat’s rough sleeve.
“No,” agreed Theodora, nodding with evident satisfaction as he reached forward to fold the handkerchief and sweep it back into his own pocket, “he was as attractive as we could make him—virtually bankrupt and doing odd ghost-writing jobs, drinking too much, his wife going crazy, avoided by all his old friends. And then after the Prime Minister exonerated him in Parliament, SIS gave him some charity chicken-feed jobs in Beirut, where he’s been doing journalistic piecework. And Angleton’s CIA men in Lebanon have been harassing him and getting him arrested on trivial suspicions, which certainly hasn’t made it look as though he had any usefulness to anybody. We painted them a proper picture, with him. And still it was mere KGB that finally approached him, very tentatively, in ’58. But he continued to look genuinely abandoned—brilliant man, he even tried to get Indian citizenship in 1960!—and now he’s fully back on the old Russian force, as trusted by them as anybody ever is.” He finally clicked his fan closed and tucked it back into his pocket.
Hale pushed away the fresh memories of having installed the microphone, trying to do it so thoroughly that he would even be able to deny the action convincingly in a polygraph interrogation. He focused all his attention on the old man’s story. “And—me?” he asked now. Hale recalled Theodora telling him, in 1941, It’s not so much our plans for you that are at issue.
“Yes. Well, this has to move fast. Last night in Beirut”—he glanced at his wristwatch—“sixteen hours ago, someone shot Kim Philby as he stood too near the bathroom window of his Beirut apartment; it was a .30-caliber rifle round, fired from the roof of a building across the street. He’s alive—the bullet nearly missed, cracked his skull instead of exploding it. He’s had it put about that the injury was caused by a drunken fall, but he very nearly bled to death, and the wound took twenty-four stitches at a local hospital, and he isn’t expected to be receiving company for a few days. Peter Lunn has been head of the SIS Lebanon station in Beirut since October, and of course the hospital staff will have let him know that it’s a gunshot wound, and he knows that Philby has been doing allotment work for the service since his semi-vindication in ’55; Lunn doesn’t know yet about SIS’s new evidence against Philby, and the impending immunity offer, but he will certainly be calling Philby up soon, wanting to ask about this assassination attempt.”
Hale’s heartbeat had nearly slowed to normal. “Who would the shooter represent?” he asked. “Not us, I gather, nor the broader SIS, and not any of the powers out of Moscow.”
Theodora shrugged expansively. “The Turkish Security Inspectorate? The Service de Documentation Extérieure et d’Contre-Espionage? Mossad? Any of them would like to spike this covert Russian expedition, if they knew about it and didn’t trust us to effectively infiltrate a”—he waved at Hale—“a Trojan horse; or if they feared En gland might try to harness the Ararat power for herself, instead of simply killing it. We’re aware now of a woman with a forged Canadian passport who flew from Istanbul to Beirut yesterday morning, and a Beirut taxi driver remembers driving her to the Rue Kantari, where Philby lives, at sunset. She was carrying a case for a musical instrument the size of an alto saxophone. We made the Istanbul Head of Station get whatever he could out of the room she had vacated; but the room had been cleaned, and all they found was two slips of paper that had been in the waste bin—on one was written ‘Bueno Año,’ and on the other ‘Medio Año.’ ”
Only old practice kept Hale from twitching, and he narrowed his eyes to prevent Theodora from noticing his surely dilated pupils. “Spanish!” Hale said easily. “Good Year and Medium Year, those mean.”
“Yes. I suspect there was a third slip that said ‘Malo Año,’ Bad Year; most likely a brush-pass signal, with three possible messages, and she only knew yesterday morning which one to pass. I suppose the one she took away with her, Malo Año, meant I’m going off now to kill Philby.”
Hale’s ears were ringing, and he felt dizzy. I should have spoken up when he first mentioned the two slips, he thought; they’ve got nothing to do with any brush-pass signal. And if I don’t speak up now, I’m concealing vital information from him, concealing it from the service. “The Crown’s good servant” indeed! But—is she still working for the French Secret Service, the SDECE, as an assassin now? Or could she possibly be involved in this as an independent actor? Those slips of paper were no indication that she’s working with anyone, as Theodora thinks. Could her attempt to kill Philby have been personal?
To his surprise he felt an extra surge of anger toward Philby, and recognized it as jealousy.
She must actually have looked, this time—and got Malo Año.
I need to get there, he thought. Soon.
He remembered crawling out of bed in his rented room in Weybridge on many nights in 1953 and ’54, when nerves and resisted memories had made sleep impossible, and tuning the landlady’s short-wave set to random points near the 40-meter bandwidth, and then just sitting there in the dark parlor listening to the indecipherable dots and dashes of code groups being transmitted from God knew where in England or Western Europe—and wondering if one of those lonely signals was originating from her finger on a sending key, far out there in the night in some boulevard garret or harbor boat.