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Philby felt as though the man had punched him in the stomach. The CIA knows that my father's ghost was inhabiting that fox? But they can't know much more than that, they can't even know that, not with any certainty.
He had raised his eyebrows, and now he tensely opened his mouth to try to express...weary puzzlement, impatience, mounting irritability...
But Professor Feather stepped well back from Elena and delivered another punch: "While you're dickering with the SDECE, ask Miss Ceniza-Bendiga to show you where she lay prone on the roof of a Rue Kantari office building Tuesday night, across the street from your place. She brought the rifle in a saxophone case, and I guess she must have joggled the telescopic sight a little during the taxi ride."
"You two have a pleasant evening now, hear?" said Dr. Tarr cheerfully, and the two CIA men strode out of the bar.
Philby had snatched the revolver out of his coat pocket and was now pointing it under the table directly at Elena's abdomen. "Dum-dums," he said evenly, though he was breathing hard. "Paralysis, peritonitis-those would be good news."
He was remembering last Tuesday night-the stunning blow to the head while he stood in front of the toilet in his bathroom, and then his own drunken, confused effort to bash his head again, against the radiator, to conceal from his wife the fact that he had been shot-his wife dragging him half-conscious to the bedroom, with blood jetting from his scalp and spattering the wall and ruining the pillows-and then the Lebanese doctor that poor Eleanor had somehow got to come over to the apartment, and Philby's inarticulate reluctance to be taken away to a hospital while an assassin might be waiting outside for a second shot-
Elena smiled at him coldly and slowly lifted the palms of both hands from the table. "I don't have the rifle now. And that was just...personal regards, Tuesday night, disobedience-not my orders. France is willing to buy you-even if France 's temperamental emissary would rather have seen you dead, that night-and you do still need a nation that will give you protection and immunity. You don't dare go up the mountain with the Russian expedition, do you, now that your protector and shield is all the way gone? You told me that your father's body died two years ago-when did the fox die?"
"September," whispered Philby, lowering the barrel of the gun. "Somebody p-pushed him over the railing of our apartment. Pushed her, if you like-the f-fox was a female. Fifth floor."
"I'll deny having shot at you," she said. She took a deep breath, and then, her eyes bright with tears as she stared straight at him, she added with clear deliberateness, "And what would have been the point of trying to kill you last Tuesday, in any case?-since"-she visibly braced herself-"since during our talk tonight I've gathered that January first isn't your true birthday after all? Your real birthday, the real day on which you're mortally vulnerable, is the date when something happened to nearly kill you in '37, right?"
The barrel was up again, leveled at her, but he made himself lift his finger out of the trigger guard. No, he thought, she's only giving you the truth: you will not be permitted to keep any part of you opaque; in the end you will be left with no secrets at all. "You-nearly got it, just then," he said, his whisper very shaky now. "Did you-know you were attempting suicide, by saying that to me?"
"I-I know you're solicitous of suicidal women." She exhaled on a downward whistling note, and her shoulders sagged. "And so you leave me with a different person to try to kill."
Philby nodded slowly, comprehending. "Andrew Hale," he said.
Chapter Twelve
Beirut, 1963/Wabar, 1948
The child turned on the cushion of the huge corded arms and looked at Kim through heavy eyelids. "And was it all worthless?" Kim asked, with easy interest.
"All worthless-all worthless," said the child, lips cracking with fever.
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Earlier in the evening, when the sky had still been gold beyond the blowing gauze curtains, Hale had reluctantly pulled up a chair at one side of his hotel room desk.
He stared without enthusiasm at the glasses of arak that Mammalian had poured before sitting down in the chair opposite him; and as Hale watched, Mammalian topped up each glass from the water pitcher on the desk, and the clear liquor was abruptly streaked with milky cloudiness. Hale had never been seasick or airsick, but he was sweating and nauseated right now with a profounder sort of deficiency in traction. The Mezon wire recorder at Mammalian's elbow hissed faintly as its spools turned.
"You are ill at ease," said Mammalian quietly, stroking his black beard as he looked out the window at the purple Mediterranean sea. "You are like a man nerving himself to climb a steep mountain, anticipating all sorts of chasms, hard challenges, muscles flexed to cramping. But it is not a mountain-it is a flat beach, and you are only going to walk into the surf." He shrugged and rocked his head. "It will be cold, and the breath will perhaps seem to stop in your throat at times, but you will get through it by relaxing. All your adult life you have kept up a tense guard, a tight, clinging posture-your task tonight is simply to lower the guard, let your fists unclench." He turned away from the window to look at Hale, and he laughed softly. "Drink, my friend."
Hale nodded and lifted one of the glasses with a shaky hand. The liquor was sharp with the taste of anise, but when he had swallowed it he was glad of the expanding heat in his chest.
"What," said Mammalian thoughtfully, "has the British secret service learned about our plans involving Mount Ararat?"
"We-got the first hints of it when-Volkov-tried to defect from the Soviet NKGB, in Istanbul in '45," said Hale. He clanked the glass down, and a few drops flew out and beaded like pearls on the polished dark wood. In spite of what Mammalian had said, he was so tense that it was a conscious effort to breathe. Somehow it didn't help that he had gone over this same ground four days earlier with Ishmael. Ishmael's subsequent death had been a reprieve, a negation of it.
"But the NKGB killed Konstantin Volkov," said Mammalian, "before he could defect."
"True," said Hale. He forced his shoulders to relax, and he spread his hands on the desktop.
"Just wade slowly into the surf. It is cold, but still very shallow."
Hale nodded. "Volkov was a walk-in," he said. "He apparently just went to the British Consulate General building one day in August of '45, and said he wanted to sell information; he had a lot of-names of Soviet agents, even of doubles working in the British service, but the-the big item-was details about a most-secret impending Soviet operation in eastern Turkey."
"Go on. Take your time."
Hale filled his lungs, and then just let the words tumble out in a rush: "Volkov was the NKGB deputy resident, under cover as the local Soviet consul general, and in exchange for his full deposition he wanted a lot of money and a laissez-passer to Cyprus for himself and his wife. Unfortunately our ambassador was on vacation, and his charge d'affaires didn't approve of espionage, so he didn't relay the offer to Cyril Machray, the SIS station commander. Both Machray and the ambassador had been indoctrinated into the outlines of our fugitive-SOE operation and would have relayed him to our man in Turkey. As it happened, though, Volkov's offer was simply sent by diplomatic bag to the SIS Section Nine in Broadway, in London, where Kim Philby was in charge. Philby took control of Volkov's case and somehow didn't manage to drag himself down to Istanbul until a month had passed since Volkov's visit; and by that time Volkov and his wife had been loaded into a Moscow-bound airplane-on stretchers, wrapped in bandages."
He had been unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice, and Mammalian smiled sympathetically. "Ah, well, Philby was one of ours, you know. He couldn't let Volkov talk to you people. In fact he told his London handler about it immediately, and Moscow Centre took care of the rest."
