Declare

"'Traitor.' You were born in Palestine, and the service you worked for planned to kill you even before you fled, a week ago. Do you suppose that in 1948 they went looking for the SAS men in your party who had gone mad on the mountain? Well, perhaps they did-to kill them, 'give them the truth.' No, my friend, you are simply devoting all of your energies and recollections now to a new cause-one that will allow you to sire children in the next century, and the century after that."

"'Take the cash in hand, and waive the rest,'" quoted Hale, shaking his head. "Children in another century! How is all this live-forever stuff supposed to happen, precisely?"

"You are skeptical, after all that you have seen!" Mammalian bared his white teeth in a grin. "Perhaps you will become the consort of a goddess, Andrew Hale, and share in her immortality. Perhaps you will have a djinn for a body slave, who will protect you from every ill, even from age. If all else fails, you will eat a salad of enchanted thistles, and never die. Believe me, the 'cash in hand' will be the most trivial of your rewards. You do a service for angels here."

"And for Russians."

"The angels do not distinguish among our nations."

Seem reckless and belligerent, Hale thought. "The Russians...kidnapped one of your angels," he said, "in 1883, didn't they? Took it back to Moscow, moored it with drogue stones, anchors, in the Lubyanka basement and at the Soviet borders. I would think his fellows-" He remembered the thing he had seen in Berlin, and corrected himself: "Her fellows, would look unkindly on that."

Mammalian's face was expressionless. "If we-when we succeed, on the mountain, this time-" He raised a hand hesitantly. "You needn't fear that there will be injustice."

Hale quickly looked over his shoulder, as if impatient for his vodka-for Mammalian, hungover himself, had given away more than he had meant to, and there was no advantage for Hale in seeming to have noticed.

But Hale was certain now that Mammalian's loyalty here was to the djinn themselves, and not to the Rabkrin. And Hale wondered if Mammalian had even been a devout Communist during the Rabkrin attempt in 1948.

In fact the waiter was now striding back toward their table, carrying a tray; and neither of the seated men spoke as the two glasses and the coffee cup were set down on the glass tabletop. But as the young man was stepping away Hale called, "Another vodka here, please! And a cold Almaza beer with it to put out the fire." He bolted the glass of vodka in two hard swallows.

The waiter nodded without looking back.

"You will be useless before noon, at this rate!" exclaimed Mammalian in dismay. "And Charles Garner drinks arak!"

Hale's nose stung with the vodka fumes, and his eyes were watering. "I'm worse'n useless now," he said, carefully pretending to be more drunk than he was. "And I don't wanna be Charles Garner. I wanna be Tommo Burks."

Mammalian frowned and stirred his coffee, and Hale recognized, from the other side now, the agitation of a handler dealing with a skittish agent. Mammalian appeared to decide something, and stared straight at Hale. "Have you ever," he asked, "met a woman, an Arabic woman, with a string of gold rings around her neck? She would not have spoken."

Not bad, Hale thought. Last night I didn't bother to mention the woman I saw by Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin in '45, but I do remember her, and it's interesting to learn that she figures somehow. Apparently I was likely to meet her!

But he had to get onto the street, get his briefing, before he met Philby.

He stood up, so unsteadily that the table rocked and nearly spilled Mammalian's coffee and arak. "I won't-incidentally-work with Kim Philby. See. He told the Russians-he told you-where my SAS team was going to be, in the Ararat Gorge. The Ahora Gorge. Know, O Armenian, that I quit. Sod you all."

He walked quickly away between the other tables, artfully bumping one with his hip; he heard a glass roll and then break on the cement deck as he reached the top of the stairs that led down to the hotel driveway; a chair's legs scraped as it was pushed back, and hurried footsteps were coming up from behind him, but two uniformed surete officers were even now tapping briskly up the steps from below.

Hale deliberately snagged his shoe behind his calf and tumbled forward, driving his shoulder into the midsection of the officer on the right; somehow all three of them wound up sitting and bumping and flailing down the steps to the parking lot pavement, and before Hale could even pull his legs down off the bottom two steps, he felt the ring of a handcuff close on his wrist and ratchet shut.

While the policemen were barking questions at him in French-through the ringing in his ears he caught the word ivresse, drunkenness-Hale squinted back up the stairs; but Mammalian had apparently decided not to interfere in a civil arrest. The only person peering down was a tanned woman in big sunglasses and a towel wrapped around her head.

The Beirut Municipal Jail was in one of the modern buildings at the Place des Martyrs, only seven blocks south off of Weygand Street, and when the police car rocked to a halt in an alley beside the Direction of Police, Hale was pulled out of the back seat and marched in through a side door.

Briefly he glimpsed a crowded yellow waiting room, with civilians and uniformed officers standing in lines before a row of windows under fluorescent lights, and then he was pushed along a narrow beige-painted corridor and around a corner.

This stretch of the corridor was momentarily empty except for a brown-haired Caucasian man in a damp white shirt, who stood with his hands open at his sides and stared straight at Hale with something like apprehension; and in the same instant the two surete officers let go of Hale's arms and took hold of the stranger's, and a door was pulled open at Hale's right.

In the dimly lit office beyond the door, a bald man in a jacket and tie beckoned to Hale impatiently. "Here's a bloody list," he whispered, "one-two-three-four."

Hale heard a scuffle ahead of him and looked up in time to see one of the surete officers drive a fist into the face of the brown-haired stranger who was now being led away. Hale took a long step sideways into the office.

The bald man winced at the sound of the blow as he pulled the door closed behind Hale.

"They hit him?" the man asked. "Sit down," he said, waving toward a wooden chair beside a gray metal desk. The smell of hot coffee drew Hale's attention to a chugging urn on a nearby table even before the man said, "Or help yourself to coffee."

Hale nodded and stepped to the table, and he looked around as he held a ceramic cup under the tap-the room, lit by an electric lamp on the desk, had no windows-and he sat down in the chair while the bald man turned a key in the door lock and walked around to the other side of the desk.

"Yes," said Hale, setting the steaming cup on the bare desktop. "They hit him."

"I am sorry." The man shrugged and smiled. "Verisimilitude!"