Declare

"Catholic priest or no," the colonel growled, "I doubt Mr. Hale's father was ever engaged in activities prejudicial to the safety of the Realm." Philby turned on the officer with an expression Hale wasn't able to see; but the man went on imperturbably, staring straight back at Philby from under lowered white eyebrows, "And we'd certainly have heard if Mr. Hale had ever been editor of, oh, any periodical like Germany Today."

Bewilderedly, Hale wondered if these things were true of Philby's father and of Philby. Certainly the remarks had been offensively meant.

Philby gave a harsh laugh. "I c-came here to off-to offer Broadway's ass-assiss-assiss-Broadway's help," he said. "Unofficially, as a volatile-damn it-as a voluntary li-aison between the s-services." He waved behind him toward Hale. "This man came out of your-out of Europe through Lisbon, and even as head of the Iberian sub-section in Broadway I c-could have simply taken Hay-Hay-Hale's case right out of your hands. And allow me to inform you, in case you haven't b-been to town lately, that I am presently acting head of the entire counter-espionage section."

The civilian at the table had steepled his fingers and was nodding thoughtfully. "You could have," he agreed, frowning. "I think we would contest it now; in which case the Cabinet Secretary would likely just move to defer the question until the real head of section returns. I doubt your C would argue with that."

"Hale has ob-obviously been doing work for an officer of...for one of our old Robber Barons in Broadway."

"Possibly. Even probably. Not obviously."

The phrase Iberian sub-section, in that Oxbridge voice, was still echoing in Hale's head, and it had almost reminded him of something; but an officer who had not previously spoken now asked, plaintively, "So is bloody Hale a British spy or a Communist spy?"

The civilian at the table pushed back his chair and stood up. He wasn't looking at anyone, but Hale got the impression that his words were addressed to Philby: "We'll keep him-safe, here-until we can find out. He's had a medical examination and proves out fit; it would be very puzzling indeed if he were to-die, say, before all this is sorted out to everyone's satisfaction. Guard, escort Mr. Hale back to his room. Mr. Philby, it is good of you to have given us your time."

The place where Hale was being confined, he learned, was known as Camp 020, and it was only half a dozen miles southwest of London, at Ham Common in Richmond. The makeshift compound was an interrogation center and a prison for spies, and as a combination of those functions it was also a sort of espionage retooling center, in which captured German spies were induced to use their call-signs and their smuggled radios to conduct a deceptive traffic with Berlin, the receptions being monitored and the transmissions scripted by the counter-intelligence division of the British Security Service, known as MI5. Hale was reminded of Cassagnac's fatalistic dictum: Playback is the natural last stage of any spy network.

The civilian member of the board that had interviewed Hale proved to be an MI5 agent called Speas, and Speas would frequently escort Hale on walks around the camp's snowy perimeter and have him talk about the Communist networks he had had dealings with in England. "MI5 is concerned with espionage in England and the colonies," Speas told him more than once. "I'm not interested in whatever you did in France." And Hale was glad to tell the MI5 man about the woman who had approached him at Oxford and about the secret wireless school in Norfolk. True to his word, Speas never asked about the Paris network, and his references to Hale's arrest at the King Street Communist headquarters were incidental and only mildly ironic.

The playback operation was a joint effort among the three military services and SIS and MI5, but it was the B Division of MI5, the counter-espionage division, that ran the camp and maintained the various shacks and Quonset huts and the Victorian edifice of Latchmere House. Hale soon gathered that the opinion of his MI5 captors was that Philby had been correct, that Hale was just a very covert agent of Theodora's, though they were determined not to turn over custody of Hale to SIS before the head of Philby's section returned to England.

After a week Hale noticed that his door wasn't being locked at night, and, when he asked a guard if he was expected to grow a beard here, an unarmed orderly began leaving a basin and shaving kit on the windowsill. But the little mirror in the kit reminded him too clearly of Elena-Want to see a monkey?-and so he began carrying his razor and brush downstairs to the common staff lavatory. During one of their outdoor walks, he asked Speas if there was any way to trace a Soviet agent who had been summoned from Europe to Moscow, and Speas told him that that would be an SIS matter, difficult even for them, and that anyway any such agent would probably have been shot soon after arrival in Moscow; Hale then asked about the availability of liquor, and that night Speas brought him a nearly full bottle of Ballantine whisky, which was no longer nearly full by morning.

Hale was soon given cooking duties in the Latchmere House kitchen-the German prisoners were reportedly amazed to find meat and butter in England, after having been assured by their own intelligence service that the country was expiring in famine-and it was on the second day of February 1942, while he was bent over a pot of pea soup on the stove and singing along to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" as it was being sung by Judy Garland on the battered old kitchen radio, that Theodora found him.

"I shouldn't be angry," Theodora interrupted from the kitchen doorway. Halted in his singing, Hale glanced up and recognized the man, and dropped the ladle into the soup. "I should," Theodora went on, "recall that you must have had some hair-raising experiences in Europe, no doubt a good deal worse than what I've been having in London. Nevertheless, to find that I risked my career and possibly my liberty in order to make a good kitchen scullion out of you is...maddening."

For a moment neither of them spoke. Hale slowly reached up to the shelf to switch off the radio, noticing Theodora's rumpled suit and tie and aware of his own stained apron.

"Are you here in authority," Hale asked finally in the sudden quiet, "or as another prisoner?"

"Oh, I'm reinstated in SIS, my dear." He smiled, but Hale thought he had lost weight, and the dark circles under his eyes implied that he had not been getting much sleep lately. "And I've come to take you to Broadway, where you will make a detailed report of your undercover experiences. It might take a couple of days."

"Can you find out the status of a Soviet network agent who's been summoned from Paris to Moscow?"

Theodora was probably about fifty then, but for a moment he looked older. "That would be Delphine St.-Simon," he said, and sighed. "Sometimes we can. We haven't heard anything about her."

Hale turned off the fire under the soup pot and began untying his apron. "My felonies-" he began.

"Are dismissed, erased, forgotten. Cowgill is back from North America, all is forgiven-it's quite safe now for you to leave this camp. Cowgill is the head of Section Five, the counter-espionage section of SIS; he was opening a branch of the British secret service in New York, flogging some most-secret decrypts of ours to the Americans, even as the Japs bombed Hawaii. Gave some extra force to his arguments, I gather."

Hale scouted up one of the other cooks and told him that he was leaving; and as he followed Theodora down the hall toward the duty officer's desk, the older man said quietly over his shoulder, "It would probably be possible now to get you back into your Oxford college."

Theodora's drawl had been more pronounced as he said it, and Hale asked cautiously, "What would be the alternative?"

"A post in Broadway. Continue working for SIS, but on the official payroll now. It could be argued that your country needs you there."

And, as he was to find again twenty-one years later, his academic career seemed like an inconsequential pastime now that he had become a player in what Kipling had called the Great Game.

"When do I start?"

"Well, today, lad. Did you think you'd get a period of leave? We're at war, you must have read about it."

Chapter Seven

Kuwait, 1963

You want to know the Secret-so did I, Low in the dust I sought it, and on high Sought it in awful flight from star to star, The Sultan's watchman of the starry sky.