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"Yes," he told her, and he was surprised at the assurance with which he said it; she did represent his only hope of eventual reinstatement at Magdalen, but he had spoken from a sudden conviction that he had been waiting for this en garde ever since visiting the SIS headquarters at the age of seven; a conviction that all along he had been more a member of the world that included Theodora and this woman than of the world of St. John's and the City of London School and Oxford.
She nodded, and they resumed walking between the rows of flowers. "Do you know what they do in Blenheim Palace?" she asked.
Hale glanced at her, but she was looking ahead. Blenheim Palace was six miles north of Oxford. "The, uh, Duke of Marlborough lives there."
"He has turned it for wartime spy purposes over to MI5, a branch of the British secret service. We have comrades working there, covertly." She opened her purse and tilted it toward him; he could see a folded buff envelope tucked in there. "In this envelope is a list, copied from the MI5 Registry files, of Comintern agents known by the British to be working in London. I am not a person who ordinarily meets comrades face-to-face, as I am doing now with you; this is important. We need to convey this list right away to a still-unsuspected agent in London, so that Moscow Centre will know who must be reassigned, where fresh agents must be put in place. Also here in photographic miniature are full specifications of the new Napier Sabre aero-engine that is powering the Hawker Typhoon aircraft; the British government has classified these specifications as 'most-secret,' not to be shared with allies. It is Soviet Russia that now is doing the greatest work of fighting Germany, at Riga and Minsk and Kiev; if-espionage-helps the Soviets to do this, is it right to impede it?"
"No," said Hale, trying to look resolute and not to think of the undergraduate who had advocated the destruction of all the Oxford colleges.
"I cannot leave here today," the woman said. "We want you to take a train to London, now. I will give you a hundred pounds for the travel and inconvenience. Tonight at eight o'clock you are to be standing under the-Eros?-statue in Piccadilly Square, you know what that is? Good. Hold a belt, you know?-for trousers?-in your right hand. A man carrying some fruit, an orange perhaps, will approach you and ask you where you bought the belt; you will tell him that you bought it in an ironmonger's shop in Paris, and then you will ask him where you can buy an orange like his; he will offer to sell it to you for a penny. Hand this envelope to him then. He will have further work for you."
"Just...go, right now?" said Hale, wondering what would become of his trunk. "This seems awfully precipitate-"
She interrupted him with, "Where did you buy the belt?"
"In-an ironmonger's shop," he said. "In Paris."
"You were born in Palestine, I think," said the woman.
He blinked at her in surprise, wondering if Theodora would be unhappy to know that she was aware of this. "Yes," he said. "How did you know that?"
Without a smile she said, "A little bird told me. Here." She handed him the buff envelope, and he folded it more sharply and tucked it into his coat pocket next to the letter from his tutor. "And here's a hundred pounds," she went on, handing him a letter-sized envelope. "I'll need you to sign a receipt for it."
In spite of Theodora's vapory assurances, Hale was numbingly aware that this constituted real, deliberate espionage, documentable treason; and he could feel the sudden heat in his face. "My-real name?"
She had obviously noted his involuntary blush, and for the first time she smiled at him. "Yes, comrade," she said softly, "your real name. Don't worry, I won't let it fall into the wrong hands."
And what, he wondered a moment later as he signed Andrew Hale in the notebook she had unwedged from her purse, would constitute the wrong hands, here?
I'm on somebody's rolls now.
God help me, he thought.
Chapter Three
London, 1963
But cannot the government protect? We of the game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book. That is all. Thou art safe in the te-rain, at least. Live a year at the great game and tell me that again!
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
The driver of the Peugeot swung in to a jolting halt in front of Overton's oyster bar in Terminus Place, and the now bespectacled and moustached Hale followed her curt directions and sprinted through the restaurant and out the back, then down a breezeway to Victoria Street, where the specified black BMW motorcycle hummed at the curb. The rider was anonymous under a visored black helmet, and Hale swung a leg over the seat and sat down. Luckily the rider waited until Hale had got his feet onto the pegs and got a grip on his leather jacket before he let the clutch spring out and gunned the machine away up Victoria Street, weaving between the slower cars like a barracuda.>"No, my boy, dreams, visions you see when you're asleep."
"Oh." Coming right after thoughts about insanity, this topic was an uncomfortable one; perhaps the older man could be deflected to some other. "Well, I didn't have any dreams last night, certainly," he said with a forced laugh, "being chained in a chair. Did you know they chained-"
"Not in September, of course not," snapped Theodora, abruptly impatient. "You're nineteen now-has puberty occluded you? Even so, you must remember, nineteen winters, you must know what I'm talking about. What dreams have you had at the shift of the year, say on the last night of the year, any year?"
Hale took two long steps away from Theodora, his face suddenly stinging, and he had to force himself to keep breathing normally. He waved the older man back, not looking at him. What else did this man know about him, what could he not know, if he was already aware of so intimate and disturbing a secret? "Why," Hale said carefully, if a little too loudly, "did you ap-apparently want me to be-bebe arrested by the police?" He frowned, for usually he was only afflicted with a stutter right after Christmas, around the...around the time of the new year. "Sent down from college-disgrace, you said! And now you've been t-talking about an OBE!-for God's sake!-What's all this about, what are your-plans for m-me?"
The older man was laughing, his eyes wide open. "Oh my! He is touchy about his dreams, after all, isn't he! Allahumma! But we can put that off for a while, for a few hundred yards here." He had resumed picking his way over the canted pavement fragments, walking toward the sun that shone way out there over the bombed docks, and Hale exhaled and then plodded along beside him.
"Plans," Theodora went on, "for you. It's not so much our plans that are at issue." He was staring at the ground as he walked, and he held up a hand to forestall interruption. "I don't think I'll say much more than this: you speak and read German, you've subscribed to technical wireless magazines, and you've been arrested at a Communist Party meeting. I believe I can promise you that you'll soon be approached by-well, by a recruiter. We want you to be persuaded by this person. Don't act, that is don't pretend to hate England or anything of that sort; just be what you seem genuinely to be, a politically ignorant young man who's drifted into communism because it's the fashion, resentful now at being detained by the police and expelled from college for what strikes you as a trivial offense." He was looking away from Hale, squinting toward the rising sun. "Probably you'll be leaving the country illegally. There will in that case be a warrant issued for your arrest, charges of treason and whatnot. We'll see that it's all dismissed, afterward."
"I'm to be...a spy?" Having grasped the concept and come up with the word, Hale was too exhausted to go on and make a judgment about it.
"Would it upset you to be?"
"Ask me after I've had about twelve hours of sleep," said Hale absently, "and a big plate of eggs and bacon and grilled tomatoes, and a couple-or-three pints." Then he blinked around at the craters and the outlines of foundations, the rectangular pits of forlorn cellars, and his yawn was more from sudden nervousness than from exhaustion. This broken city was London, this besieged country was his own England, the England of Malory and More and Kipling and Chesterton-of lamplit nights with the rain thrashing down beyond the leaded-glass windows over miles of dark Cotswold hills, of sunny canoeing on the placid Windrush, the England his poor Tory mother had loved-and he couldn't pretend that he didn't ache to defend it against any further injury.
