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"In this world or the next," Philby agreed. "I can't say I'm sorry."
"Certainly not."
Hale struggled to his feet and pulled the parka hood forward over his head. He reached for the white Kalashnikov, but Fuad was suddenly pointing a revolver at him.
"The machine gun stays here," said Fuad. "Do you think I would hesitate killing you?"
"I th-think he would n-not hesitate," said Philby thoughtfully. "Do p-put it to the t-test, if you like."
After a moment Hale straightened, his hand still empty. "Fair enough," he said.
He shambled to the tent opening and climbed through, over the mounded snow that still half-blocked it. The wind outside instantly leached out of him all the scanty warmth he had absorbed in the tent, and it was all he could do not to shout with the shock of it.
His course was easy-downhill. The climb back down to the Ahora Gorge would be over broken serac, and should be easy enough if he took it slowly. After that would be just the long walk back down the gorge path, on the other side of the gorge from the path down which he had driven a jeep in reverse in 1948; but this time he would be leaving behind him avenged ghosts.
The snowstorm had faltered to a silent halt before he was out of the gorge, and the wind had shifted around to the north by the time he stumbled up through knee-high green grass to the three trucks on the plain; and when he had climbed into the cab of the Dodge truck and started the engine, he simply sat in the cab with the motor running and the heater blowing hot air at him. After a while he unsnapped his parka and contorted on the seat to pull the heavy garment off, but he did not rouse himself to clank the gear-shift into reverse until he saw, faintly over the high white shoulder of the mountain, the luminous chalk-line of the flare against the gray sky.
The Soviet helicopter would be rushing overhead within minutes. Hale backed the truck around, then shifted into first gear and began steering the truck along a shepherds' track that stretched away to the east, away from the mountain and Dogubayezit and all of civilization. The Soviet border lay twenty miles ahead, but he did not intend to drive quite that far.
The red sun was hovering over the distant peak of Ararat in his rear-view mirrors when Hale regretfully abandoned the truck in a snowdrift halfway up one of the narrow horse-cart tracks; he got back into his damp parka, climbed down from the heated cab, and proceeded up the steep track on foot, hoping to find the shelter he sought before dark. And though the sun had set by the time he reached the village in the Zagros Mountains, the gray sky was still bright enough for him to recognize the two-story stone house on the narrow main street, and his nostrils flared at the remembered smells of mutton and hot coffee on the icy wind.
Exhaustion robbed his vision of depth, and he stumbled on the cobblestones; but he didn't fall until he had at last reached the very gate.
He might actually have lost consciousness for a few moments; when he opened his eyes he was lying on his back on the stones, and a white-bearded man in baggy blue woolen trousers and a quilted felt vest was staring down at him. The old man hadn't unslung the rifle that rode on his back, but one brown hand was on the stock.
"Howkar Zeid," said Hale hoarsely. In English he added, "How are you?"
"It is Hale Beg!" said the old man wonderingly in the same language. He took his hand from the rifle and crouched to slide one arm under Hale's shoulders, and then he had effortlessly straightened up, hauling Hale back up onto his feet. "How are you? Where have you come from? How are your children?"
Hale knew that the questions were unthinking formalities, but he said, "I am-tired to death. I've come from-Hell, I think. My family is all lost. All lost." He sighed, though the effort of it nearly cost him his consciousness again. "Siamand Khan said I might come back." It had been nearly fifteen years ago, but Hale had at last fulfilled the Khan's request. "I'm early," Hale added. "He said to come back in the spring."
Howkar Zeid led Hale through the remembered shadowy hallway to the same broad whitewashed stone room in which Hale had dined with the Khan so long ago. Red and purple rugs shone in the yellow paraffin lamplight, and Hale sat down heavily to unsnap his soggy boots and tug them off before he stood up again and stepped across the dirt-floor threshold.
Siamand Khan was dressed in the same sort of trousers and vest as Howkar Zeid this evening. Hale remembered him as he had looked fifteen years ago, in a Western business suit and an orange scarf around his neck instead of a tie; but Siamand Khan still wore the knitted cap, and his stride was still graceful as he stood up from the long bench that spanned the far wall, and his brown face behind the white moustache was as ferociously cheerful as ever.
"My friend, sit!" he said, taking Hale by the hand and leading him to the middle section of the bench, on which lay so many cushions that Hale was able to rest his arms on them when he had sat down. To Howkar Zeid, the Khan called, "Coffee and cigarettes for our guest! A dish of pears from the cellar!"
Hale's vision was flickering. "I have just come down from Agri Dag," he said, his voice just a rasping whisper now. "The angels are killed. The amomon will bloom this spring. If I could-eat, and sleep here tonight-"
"You are nearly used up, my friend," said the Khan gently. "You will stay with us until your strength returns-indeed you will stay until spring. You and I will be able to go hiking in the mountains after all."
Hale had to keep focusing his eyes to remember where he had come to. When his vision blurred, he seemed again to be dozing over his one-time pads in the janitor's room on the roof of the house in the Rue le Regrattier, dimly aware that there was an emergency and that he should hurry down the stairs to Elena's room and awaken her; and he imagined that Jimmie Theodora, black-haired and somehow younger than Hale now, was giving him instructions he should be paying attention to, in the office in Whitehall Court with the candlestick telephones on the wall and the models of airplanes and submarines serving as bookends in the cluttered shelves on the wall; and finally the murmur of the Khan's words blurred away into the remembered voices of his grandfather and his mother, quarreling about some troubling passage in Scripture, and-in the moments before consciousness left him-he was weakly resolved to climb the narrow old stairs of the house in Chipping Campden and crawl into the old eighteenth-century box bed, and abandon himself at long last to dreamless sleep.
EPILOGUE. Declare
Moscow, 1964
Kim stole out and away, as unremarkable a figure as ever carried his own and a few score thousand other folks' fate slung round his neck.
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits-and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
- Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat,
Edward J. FitzGerald translation
Batsford House in Tunbridge Wells had been one of the English country homes that had been turned over to the SOE during the war, and the sweeping green lawn visible from the south kitchen window still showed the humps of bunkers and trenches that had been dug for infiltration practice and to keep German aircraft from landing. A dozen cows were visible in the middle distance now, cropping the grass around the old mounds. The morning sun was shining in brightly enough to show too the heating and water pipes that the SOE had installed along the high stone wall and ceiling, above even the unreachable topmost row of copper skillets, but the old man was grateful for those alterations. Somehow the mess officers had hung too a vast government-issue print of a cow in profile, with dotted lines outlining the various cuts of beef, right up under the ceiling, and no one had ever managed to take it down in the more than twenty years since.
