When they had reached the far sidewalk and stepped down from the pavement onto the hot pale sand, Mammalian turned to Hale and stared angrily into his face. Mammalian's right hand was inside his blue-striped robe. After several seconds he reached up with his free hand and prodded Hale's bruised cheek with one finger, and then scratched with his nail at the fresh cut.
Hale flinched back. Even though he was only wearing a shirt, he was already sweating in the direct sunlight. "What the hell, Hakob!" he protested.
"My hand is on a gun," said Mammalian curtly. "Open your shirt."
Hale sighed. "I assume you'll tell me why," he said as he began unbuttoning his coffee-stained shirt.
Mammalian prodded Hale's bare stomach, looking into his eyes as Hale winced.
"When the surete was questioning you," Mammalian snapped, "you said the arrest was like a dog. What kind of dog?"
"I, I told them it was a dog that wouldn't hunt," said Hale, remembering the remark from the hastily scrawled transcription he had read before leaving Hartsik's office. It had in fact not struck him as the sort of thing he would say.
"What did you mean by that?"
"It's an-ow," Hale said, for Mammalian was still palpating his stomach. "Would you stop? It's a saying. It means a plan that won't work out; I meant that their arrest would not stand up-I wasn't guilty of anything."
Mammalian squinted at Philby. "Is that a common saying?"
Philby blew out air through his pursed lips. "Sure, one h-hears it."
At last Mammalian stepped back from Hale, his right hand still inside his robe. "You were out of our sight for an hour. In a police station. Tell me one reason why I should not abort this mission."
"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.