"You are not to kill him. Do please pay attention. You are not on any account to kill Philby, even to save yourself. You are to shoot him in the back, from a sufficient distance so that the shot will penetrate widely around his spine but not be focused in any kind of tight pattern. We certainly don't want the 'rat-hole' effect! The goal is to leave him able to walk away, to Moscow, with at least one pellet in his flesh that cannot be removed surgically."

Hale's arms were suddenly cold. "She's a ghul," he whispered, using the Arabic word for djinn who haunt graveyards and eat the dead in their graves, extracting up through the soil as souvenirs any bits of metal-rings, gold teeth-that the cadavers might have contained. "A ghulah," he corrected himself, using the feminine form.

"Very good, Mr. Hale! Yes, she is. And when-"

Hale remembered Mammalian's question this morning. "And she sometimes appears as an Arabic woman with a string of gold rings around her neck, right? I've met her. And since 1883 she has been the guardian angel of Russia."

"Machikha Nash, the Rabkrin call her. Yes. And-"

"And!" interrupted Hale, "if Philby goes to Moscow, after this-and I presume he'll be given no choice-he'll eventually die there. He'll be buried in a Moscow cemetery."

Hartsik's eyes narrowed in a smile. "Ex-act-ly. And the guardian angel will not neglect to devour him, and to draw up, in her spiral way, the metal that is in him, including at least one of these shot pellets. And she will thus assimilate into herself the shape of djinn death." He sat back. "And she will die, and the Soviet Union will lose its guardian angel. I can't imagine the U.S.S.R. surviving Philby by more than three or four years."

Hale recalled what Prime Minister Macmillan had said six days ago: I suppose we can't simply shoot spies, as we did in the war-but they should be discovered and then played back in the old double-cross way, with or without their knowledge-never arrested. And Hale thought that Macmillan would be pleased with the way Theodora had orchestrated this use of Kim Philby.

It seemed to call for a drink. Hale picked up the Laphroaig bottle and took another aromatic mouthful from the neck of it. "In London," he said hoarsely, "I was told that Philby does not want to participate in this expedition to Ararat; that I'll have to threaten him to get him to go along. What's the basis for his reluctance?"

"That's right. His father-your father-died, here in Beirut, a little more than two years ago. I'm, uh, sorry."

"Stop it." Hale could hardly remember the text of The Empty Quarter, which his father had written; and that book was his only link to the old man. Any feeling of...loss, here, he reminded himself, would be sheer affectation. But he did remember standing on the steep escarpment at the windy Edge-of-the-Wold when he had been a boy, looking down at the roofs of Evesham and the River Isbourne on the plain below the Cotswolds highlands, and speculating that his father was a missionary priest "somewhere east o' Suez," and imagining how the two of them might one day meet. And then he remembered walking across the grassy quad at the University College of Weybridge on many late afternoons in the 1950s, picturing an eventual reunion with Elena. How shabbily these fond dreams work out, he thought-and he was glad that Farid had hit him again, for he was afraid that some of the tears leaking from his swollen left eye were tears of purest self-pity.

"What did Philby's father have to do with it?" he asked harshly.

Hartsik took Hale's cue. "Philby's father was always very protective of Kim; clearly he blamed himself-altogether justly-for having crippled the boy's standing in the supernatural world by indulging his own-his-"

"Lust for my mother."

"Well, not to put too fine a point on it. Now old St. John saved the life of a fox in '32, in the Empty Quarter desert, the Rub' al-Khali-his Bedouins were going to kill it, but St. John intervened and set it free. He may have been able to tell somehow that this particular fox contained a djinn, who had been abridged down into this form-in any case, it did, and in gratitude the djinn gave St. John certain powers over foxes-even over fox furs. Several times St. John used this power to protect Kim. When Kim was a war correspondent in Spain in 1936, St. John gave him a mad-looking Arab coat with a fox-fur collar, and he told Kim to wear it whenever he was in peril, especially on his birthday. Kim still has certain magical protections, as you may too, but they become transparent on his birthday-vos anniversaire. And sure enough, on December thirty-first of 1937, Kim was in a car that was hit with an artillery shell; Kim was wearing the fox-fur coat, and he came through with a scratch, though the men with him were all killed-and St. John, who was in Alexandria at the time, was knocked down, bleeding from the ears. Neither of them was seriously hurt, you see-the fox-fur magic dissipated the blow."

"I assume that protection has been gone since 1960, when the old man died."

"Well, it's gone now. But Philby didn't really lose it until three months ago, in late September of last year. On Easter of '62, he got hold of a fox cub-he named it Jackie, and kept it in his apartment in the Rue Kantari here. The animal reportedly liked whiskey, and would sometimes suck on the stem of a pipe. And Philby was still gung-ho to go along on the Rabkrin expedition to Ararat, to become at last the full-fledged rafiq to the djinn. And then, on September twenty-eighth, precisely on the second anniversary of his father's original death, someone pushed the fox off the balcony of Philby's apartment while he wasn't home. The animal died, and Philby spent two days weeping drunk, and then he began surreptitiously trying to get out of the expedition; he wrote to The Observer, the paper he writes articles for, asking for London leave-and he's been trying to defect to France-and if the SIS offers him any kind of immunity deal, he will want to leap at it."

Defect to France, thought Hale; that must be why Elena is in Beirut. But why did she try to kill Philby?

Don't even think about her, he told himself. "Easter of last year, Philby got the fox?" he said, forcing himself to concentrate on what Hartsik had said. "A good day for rising from the dead, I suppose. Where had the old man's ghost been, in the intervening year and a half?"

"Haunting the Bashura cemetery, where he was buried-only about three blocks south of here on the Rue de Basta. St. John was a convert to Islam, you know-what the Turks call a ' Burma,' which is to say a turncoat, not someone to be trusted. According to Arab folklore, two angels, Munkir and Nakir, visit a man in his grave right after his burial and quiz him on his faith-if he acknowledges Allah, they let him rest in peace; but if he believes another faith to be true, they thrash him with iron maces until his cries are heard 'from east to west, except by men and djinn.'"

Hale smiled. "Did a lot of dogs howl, locally, after St. John was buried?"

"We didn't notice. But the SIS Beirut station picked up a heavy traffic on the service bandwidth; it was en clair, but they thought it must be code because it was all nursery rhymes-'the man in the moon came down too soon,' 'but when she got there the cupboard was bare,' 'how many miles to Babylon'-that kind of thing. The SIS triangulated the signal and found that it seemed to originate in the Bashura cemetery, but they could never find a transmitter, and the signal faded after a month, and they blamed the vagaries of the Heaviside Layer; but we in Declare knew that it was St. John's ghost, catching hell from the Moslem angels."

"I wonder what faith he believed was the true one."

"Maybe your mother is laughing in her grave," Hartsik agreed magnanimously.

"So what would the fox have provided, in this Rabkrin expedition, that Philby cannot do without?"

"The same thing as always-dissipation of a blow, sharing an injury, taking the brunt of it, even; and old St. John's guilt was so strong that he never refused. Kim loved his father, which is to say that he needed him; needed him to take Kim's punishments, mainly. You see, becoming the rafiq to the djinn will be an ordeal. Kim is not properly split, because of your divisive birth, and in the ceremony on the mountain he will be called on to face one of the djinn, eye to eye, be recognized by it. The old sacrament. He didn't fear this in '48, because he was wearing his fox-fur and his father was in Riyadh. Even four months ago he was eager to try Ararat again, because he could bring along the live fox that contained his father's identity-if anyone's mind was to be broken, it would be good old long-suffering St. John's. But now Philby is alone-and he's afraid that the sacrament, undiluted, will leave him half-witted, or insane."

"Did Declare kill the fox?"

"No. Guy Burgess did, acting for the Rabkrin. The Rabkrin would prefer that their rafiq to the djinn be a little simpleminded; and Philby is too sneaky and ambitious by half. Burgess has always been Philby's handler for the Rabkrin-he understands him, having known Philby since they were schoolmates at Cambridge; Philby used to call him 'your Demoncy,' because his full name is Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess. And Burgess has undergone the djinn sacrament too."

"He has? I had the idea he grew up in England."

"That's right, in Hampshire. But his father was born in Aden and was on the staff of the rear admiral in Egypt during the First World War. And apparently his father was 'embraced by a piece of tender air' at some point in those eastern lands-he requested early retirement in '22 and returned to his family in Hampshire, but two years later young Guy was awakened in the middle of the night by his mother's screams, and he got up and burst into his parents' bedroom." Hartsik pursed his lips. "The house was dark. He was thirteen years old. His father had expired in the midst of sexual intercourse with his mother-Guy's mother was pinned beneath the corpse, and it may have been simply that that had set her screaming-but young Guy could see over her head, out the window his father must have been facing, and the boy found himself eye to eye, exchanging recognition, with the far-traveling 'piece of empty air' that had followed Guy's father all the way from Egypt to Hampshire: a djinn, perhaps not bothering to assume a completely human aspect." Hartsik shrugged. "Burgess is now a hopeless alcoholic, and a flagrant homosexual."

Tags: Tim Powers Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net