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"Bring the car around to the front drive, would you, Nigel?" said Theodora thoughtfully, rapping the dottle out of his pipe on the ancient table. To London, to London, he thought-to arrange a spot of humiliation for myself.
"Nigel is still in Southborough," said the well-remembered voice of Andrew Hale. "I'm taking over for him for the rest of the day."
Theodora opened his mouth in a laugh that was too quiet to be picked up by any microphones that MI5 might have installed. "Well, I don't want the car anyway," he said lightly, "now that I think of it. I believe I'll go for a walk in the gardens instead."
Of course he came over early, the old man thought. He learned that from the GRU during the war. I should have expected it.
Theodora noted wryly that his heartbeat was suddenly rapid.
At last he tucked his pipe away in the pocket of his corduroy jacket and looked toward the door.
Hale had apparently been in sunny climes-his face and hands were tanned a dark brown-and his sandy hair was newly gray at the temples. He hadn't shaved recently, and the bristles on his chin were white. No doubt it had been a stressful year. The man was dressed in Nigel's clothes-white shirt, black jacket and tie-though his shoulders were broader than Nigel's, and Theodora doubted that he would be able to button the jacket.
Hale's right hand was in the pocket of the black trousers.
Theodora unbolted the door that led right out to one of the smaller gardens, having to rock the bolt to get it to slide back-probably it had not been opened since 1945-and when he had pulled the door open he walked carefully down the old stone steps, the grass-and-stone-scented morning breeze ruffling his fine white hair.
He heard Hale scuff down the steps after him.
Theodora's boots crunched along the gravel path that led to the sundial. The kitchen sundial at Batsford House was on a mound, and the triangular sections below the iron gnomon were each planted in a different variety of thyme-silver thyme and bright yellow-and-green variegated thyme on the morning slope, darker creeping thyme on the afternoon decline. Theodora stepped up to the crest of the mound, crushing the noon thymus vulgaris, and turned around to face Hale.
"You're late in reporting, sir!" Theodora said. "It was in January of last year that I sent you out. I remember saying that I believed you'd be back within the month."
Hale nodded, but he was glancing back at the high south wall of the house, a cliff of uneven tan stones and widely separated windows. "I was here, during the war," he said. "Had no idea it was yours." He glanced at Theodora with neutral, pale eyes. "Batsford, Theodora."
"A widowed Lady Batsford married a cloth merchant Theodora around the time of Waterloo. It used to be grander-one of the bedrooms still has a railing across the middle of the floor, so that any king who might be visiting could greet his subjects without getting out of bed. Two Earls once got into a serious fight in that room, the issue being which of them was to have the privilege of dressing George the Third. Bloody noses, broken furniture-I believe George wound up having to put on his own shirt. And I remember standing right here at night, as a boy-this would have been late '90s, 1900-and looking up to watch the servants carrying torches across the rooftops, as they made their way to the bedrooms in the turrets."
"Of course I've got a gun, Jimmie," said Hale.
"Of course you have," Theodora agreed. "And some sort of proposal, I imagine."
"I trust I'm still...on the rolls. I want to be sent out one more time, and then I want to retire here. Scotland, Wales, I don't care. Ireland, even. I came in through the London Docks yesterday, on a Canadian passport-it was a friend who sent the cable from Helsinki. I wanted to have a chance to discuss terms privately, before a lot of definitions were made, photographs taken."
"Terms," said Theodora.
"Well, I've got it all down in a little book, haven't I? Declare. With enough names and dates to make it convincing; and it's compelling reading too-T. E. Lawrence, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Kim Philby, Noah's Ark. A Belgian solicitor has it, and if a New Year's Day goes by without me having sent him a Christmas card, the whole works will be sent to every newspaper in the United States, and in Europe-oh, and Pravda. When I turn sixty-two, twenty years from now, I give you my word I'll destroy it. By then I doubt anyone will still care."
"Scopolamine," sighed Theodora, "sodium Pentothal. Plain old torture."
"A photograph of myself in with the Christmas card, every year. With a newspaper visible, to establish the date. The solicitor has a large staff, many offices, and he does a lot of international crime work-bodyguards, security-he's tremendously cautious."
Theodora shrugged, conceding the point. "'Sent out one more time,'" he said.
"To Moscow, under journalist cover. SIS can arrange that easily enough. I want to cash out the Machikha Nash account. Khrushchev can be the last Premier of the Soviet Union."
Hale was proposing to kill Kim Philby, his half-brother, and thus set into motion the chain of events that would culminate with the ghulahguardian angel ingesting the Shihab-shot from Philby's buried corpse. "Well, Khrushchev wouldn't be the last anyway," Theodora said, stalling. "I doubt the Soviet empire would come crashing down immediately after the guardian angel was killed, and it doesn't look as though Khrushchev will last out the year. Russia had a bad harvest last year, and he had to use hard currency to buy wheat from the West. The KGB had to become grain brokers, and the KGB head, Shelepin, wants Khrushchev out. Leonid Brezhnev seems to be the likeliest replacement."
"Is my brother covering himself with glory, over there?"
"Well, no. It turns out he's what they call a 'secret collaborator,' not a Soviet intelligence officer, as I'm sure they had told him he would be. He's got a nice apartment, and access to a chauffeur-driven car, but he's apparently drinking a good deal, and his main value to the KGB is that he's still being debriefed, these fourteen months later. The only actual work he's doing is for the Novosti news agency-and his work needs to be translated. He's never learned Russian."
"Cremation is very common in Russia," Hale said. "If he dies years from now, as just an embarrassing old drunk left over from a previous regime, he's likely to be cremated."
And the precious shot pellets will be melted, thought Theodora. I won't live that long, but it would fret me to die thinking that the main operation of my career had not come to full fruition.
"Right now," Hale went on, "the people who vouched for him are still in charge, unwilling to concede that he's nothing but a drunk old Englishman. If he dies a hero's death now, a properly vindicating death, he'll be buried with honors at one of the Moscow cemeteries. Buried."
"What would be a hero's death?" asked Theodora. "A vindicating death?"
