He wants me, thought Hale incredulously, to plant a bug in this secured conference room! In Number 10 Downing Street! I wonder what the new PM’s attitude will be toward the poor old services-the old man doesn’t intend to wait for hints.

Theodora held up his free hand. “But!-when we grabbed Philby at the Turkish-Soviet border in the winter of ’52 and forced him to switch sides, there wasn’t time to set up a sabotage of the Russian attempt on the mountain; we had to force them simply to abort it, so that they’d have to try it again at some later date, when we’d have something prepared.”

Would you break the laws of England, if we ordered it? thought Hale as he tried to pay attention to what Theodora was saying; Yes, I would. God help me. He sighed and glanced around the room as Theodora had done. There was no telephone, nor any window frame at all, much less a nice metal one to damp the microphone’s electromagnetic field, and Hale finally shrugged and pointed down at the table.

The old man nodded judiciously, and then went on, “We had to ask Philby himself!-who had then been a double agent of ours for only about ten minutes-what development would cause the Russians to call it off; and in his imperturbable way he advised fomenting an uprising among the native Kurds, with the Turkish government goaded to respond in force.”

Hale leaned forward to lift his chair by the arms, hike it back a yard, and then slowly and silently lower it to the wooden floor; then he slid the handkerchief and its burden closer to him and knelt carefully between the chair and the table.

“So we hastily burned some Kurd villages in the area,” Theodora said, waving his ivory fan to make it rattle, “shot a couple of the Oscars with Kurdish rifles, and got an excitable Turk captain to radio a grossly exaggerated report of it to Ankara, and then we bribed a Security Inspectorate bureaucrat there to send in the Turkish Air Force.”

Hale recalled that Oscar had been the enduring American mispronunciation of the Turk word asker, which meant soldier; and fleetingly, remembering the hospitality of a Khan in the Zagros Mountains, he hoped the Kurds had come through the contrived skirmish without too many casualties. He nodded, then picked up the tiny hand-drill and ducked his head under the tabletop and peered up at the underside; a hole for a counter-sunk screw in the corner-block nearest him looked like the best spot, and he pressed the bit of the drill at an angle into the hole and began twisting the handle, cupping his free hand under it to catch the curls of sawdust. The knees of the old man’s neatly pressed striped trousers were only a couple of feet in front of his face.

Theodora wasn’t speaking any louder than before, and Hale had to cock his head to hear him as he kept twisting the drill: “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 England 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.’”