"Yes, yes," said Hale, nodding, "I do see your point of view. I would worry too, in your place." He shrugged and looked up and down the beach. "Let's see-you know some of what was said. Do you know it all? Did it sound as if the police and I were talking in a code? Any of the three of us here could recognize code exchanges, I think."
"No," said Mammalian. "It did not sound like a code. But if you are an SIS plant, a Declare plant!-then there might have been only one thing you needed to learn or convey; and any one phrase could have accomplished that. A dog that won't hunt!"
Hale mentally cursed his double for not speaking more simply. "If we were exchanging a code phrase, why would we choose something so awkward?" He touched his cheek. "I don't care if you do abort it-as long as that doesn't involve giving me the truth."
"It would involve that. And right now I am inclined to abort it."
"He w-wanted to buy a g-gun, after he was released," put in Philby helpfully. "S-several guns."
Hale didn't bother to comment on that; and Mammalian flicked his fingers in the air impatiently. "Of course he would want to be armed, in any case." After scowling at Hale for ten more seconds, Mammalian turned to Philby. "You have experience with the British secret service, and with this man-and it is in your interests that this Ararat plan not fail. Is it your feeling that we should abort it, or go ahead?"
Hale did not look at Philby-live prole or dead aristocrat? he thought-and finally, after a pause, he heard Philby sigh and then mutter, "I-" Peripherally Hale saw him wave a hand as if uncertain how to proceed. "Declare?-low on the l-list of likelihoods, I think. If H-Hale was really b-being run by Theodora, there wouldn't be any n-need for a last-minute c-conference at a police station. Let's-ah, God!-let's proceed with it as p-p-planned."
In Philby's hesitant speech Hale had caught the phrase, I declare low. And he knew that the three words had been a reference, for him, to the interrupted high-low poker game the two of them had played in the bomb shelter below Mount Ararat nearly fifteen years earlier; Philby was conveying his decision, his cowardly decision, to choose life.
"Well, I do concur," Hale said, trying not to breathe any more deeply than he had been doing a moment earlier; and he glanced at his wristwatch to be sure the hands were set for the correct local time.
BOOK THREE. Mount Ararat
Mount Ararat, 1963
He pointed throught the window-opening into space that was filled with moonlight reflected from the snow-and threw out an empty whisky bottle.
"No need to listen for the fall. This is the world's end," he said, and swung off. The lama looked forth, a hand on either sill, with eyes that shone like yellow opals. From the enormous pit before him white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight. The rest was as the darkness of interstellar space.
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Chapter Seventeen
The morning breeze down from the high glaciers was positively Arctic.
Kim Philby had photographed Mount Ararat extensively during his posting as SIS Head of Station for Turkey, a job that had lasted from February of 1947 through September of 1949. Using as cover the SIS surveying operation code-named Spyglass, he had taken pictures of the Ahora Gorge from every angle, climbing as high as the 8,000-foot level to get clear pictures of the bottom slopes of the valley over the gorge, the glacier-choked Cehennem Dere. He had studied the accounts of previous explorers-Archbishop Nouri of the Nestorian Church in India, who at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 had made a plausible claim to have found the Ark on Ararat five years earlier; Hardwicke Knight, who in 1936 had climbed the western face of the Ahora Gorge in search of a legendary ruined Armenian monastery and found instead, at about the 14,000-foot level, a huge structure of ancient black timbers protruding from the glacial moraine; and the American Carveth Wells, who was reportedly led to the Ark by Armenian shepherds in 1943. Philby had not been able to fly a helicopter so near to the Iranian border, but Guy Burgess had relayed to him a sheaf of photographs taken in the mid-'40s from Mikoyan-Gurevich fighter planes out of the Soviet air base at Erivan-prints that clearly showed a boxy black shape overhanging a glacier lake near the Cehennem Dere, at the foot of the higher glacier known as Abich I. Each of these photographs included in the frame another MiG, flying at a lower altitude, as if to establish a Soviet claim.
The MiG photographs had been taken during the summer-the lake would be frozen now, in late January.
Mount Ararat was of primordial volcanic origin, and its slopes were littered with "pillow lava," smooth igneous stones formed when the magma had flowed out under sea water. And although the mountain had sunk, so that it was now surrounded by a moat-like caldera of snake-infested marshes, its nearly 17,000-foot height was imposing because it stood virtually alone on the Kars-Van plain, the northernmost sentinel of the Zagros mountain range.
Until the death of the fox in September of last year, Kim Philby had lived for the day when he should finally climb up to the structure that folklore had mis-identified as Noah's Ark, and take at last his destined role as human emissary to the djinn-rafiq to the spirits of the air.
Now that his father was irretrievably lost, though, his only hope was that Hale's Declare operation would ignobly succeed and that the djinn would all be killed before he could be subjected to the devastating recognition of the inhuman powers that inhabited the high glaciers.
Standing now on the broad face of the Cehennem Dere glacier above the Ahora Gorge, Philby looked back at the two white nylon tents, and at the two motionless Spetsnaz commandos in their white parkas, holding their white-painted automatic rifles; and he leaned his weight against the bitter wind and tried to comprehend the fact that the rest of his life lay north of this point-and east.
He shuffled around in the snow to peer through his goggles in that direction, the heels of his boots squeaking on the compacted dry powder; mists in the middle distance blurred the cliffs of the Ahora Gorge below him, and against the white blur of the winter sun he could not see the Aras River, twenty miles away to the northeast. But if today's climb were successful, he would be crossing that river, that Rubicon, tomorrow, never again to recross it. He would be greeted as a hero in Moscow, no doubt-he had been honorarily awarded the Soviet Order of the Red Banner after his assistance in placing the drogue-stone in Berlin in 1945, and had even been shown a photograph of the medal, with its red-and-white striped ribbon, gold-wreathed medallion, and enameled banner. He would be able to take physical possession of it, soon, and wear it to...state dinners at the Kremlin. Evenings at the Bolshoi.
He had never even bothered to try to learn Russian.
Truly he had always imagined that he would live undercover-know, not think it-for the rest of his life; that he would one day return to England with Eleanor, and there attend cricket matches, write for the Times, send his sons to Winchester and Cambridge. He had won his Commander of the British Empire in '46, and that was only two ranks below being knighted! And he would always have been warmed, as he watched the Derby from the Members' Stand at Epsom or drank malt whiskey with the lawyers and journalists in the Garrick Club, by the secret knowledge that he had done more to undermine this capitalist decadence than any other Soviet spy in history.
He had to tilt his head now, to see down the gorge past the fluttering fur fringe of his parka. The action reminded him of trying to see with the bandage on his head, back in Beirut.
Nicholas Elliott, who had been Head of the SIS Beirut Station until Peter Lunn had taken over in October of last year, had returned to Lebanon thirteen days ago. He had telephoned Philby the next day, a Friday, and proposed a meeting at the flat of Lunn's secretary. Philby's head had still been taped up with gauze then, and when he arrived at the flat the first thing he had said to Elliott had been, "You owe me a drink. I haven't had one since I did this to my skull on my birthday, ten days ago." Not strictly true, any of it-his skull had been cracked by Miss Ceniza-Bendiga's.30-caliber bullet, and he had been drinking like a champion ever since-but Philby had been smiling confidently as he spoke, holding out his right hand. Only three days had passed since Andrew Hale had frightened and insulted him on Weygand Street, and he'd been eager to numb the smart of that humiliation in reminiscences of braver, grander days.
Philby and Elliott had become friends at War Station XB in St. Albans during the war, and later in Broadway the two SIS men had worked together at trying to design a non-Communist postwar Germany -though, unknown to Elliott, Philby had seen to it that all the proposed agents were safely killed before the war ended. In 1948 it had been Elliott who had found a Swiss nerve specialist for Philby's second wife, after her incautious curiosity about Philby's work with Burgess had begun to cause her to lose her mind; and later, in the dark winter of '51, after Burgess and Maclean defected and Philby was suspected of complicity, Elliott had been Philby's staunchest defender in Broadway. Eventually Elliott had helped Philby get journalism work with The Observer and The Economist, and had steered a lot of under-the-table SIS work his way, mainly so that Philby wouldn't starve.
But on that Friday afternoon in Beirut nearly two weeks ago, Elliott's eyes had been cold behind his horn-rimmed glasses, and he'd said, "Stop it, Kim. We know what you've done. You took me in for years-and now I'll get the truth out of you, even if I have to drag you to Ham Common myself. I once looked up to you-my God, how I despise you now. I hope you've enough decency left to understand why."
Well, it had been the SIS confronting him at last, hadn't it-and, as Hale had said, they were offering immunity in exchange for Philby's full confession. You will pretend to cooperate, Hale had told Philby, but you will not tell him about the Ararat operation, and you will not return to England. And so Philby had flippantly conceded his guilt and typed out a rubbishy confession, admitting only to having spied for the Comintern and claiming to have quit in '49, when the Attlee government's reforms had "disproved Marxism." God!