Declare: A Novel
Tim Powers
Language: English
Pages: 624
ISBN: 0062221388
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, in 1963, he will be forced to confront again the nightmare that has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare.
From the corridors of Whitehall to the Arabian desert, from postwar Berlin to the streets of Cold War Moscow, Hale's desperate quest draws him into international politics and gritty espionage tradecraft—and inexorably drives Hale, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, and Kim Philby, mysterious traitor to the British cause, to a deadly confrontation on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark.
Right, you haven’t got a “special relationship” with the SDECE, thought Philby, the way you have with the SIS. But neither you fellows nor, apparently, my disappointing old SIS colleagues, are offering me any itties. Tout au contraire, in fact. The prolonged nervous strain of this evening, along with the cumulative effects of drink and his throbbing, wounded head, was goading Philby toward something like hysteria. I’ve got to end this, he thought. “Oh well,” he said with desperately affected
Woodminster—I mean, Midwestern—” “But we’re not under Applewhite,” Dr. Tarr went on almost in a snarl. “We work directly for the Office of Special Operations in Washington. And our boss”—he pressed his lips together—“our boss is very aware of your father, your pet fox.” Philby felt as though the man had punched him in the stomach. The CIA knows that my father’s ghost was inhabiting that fox? But they can’t know much more than that, they can’t even know that, not with any certainty. He had
tried to talk and laugh as if their old friendship had not been a betrayal from the start. Poor Eleanor had sipped her wine nervously, glancing from her husband to Elliott and back, clearly aware of the forced tone. In the men’s room Philby had passed Elliott two more typewritten pages of chicken-feed confession. Two days later Elliott had flown back to London, telling Philby that Peter Lunn would take over the interrogation and make arrangements for Philby’s return to England. Lunn had clearly
the crenellated bell tower of a Russian Orthodox church, he glanced up at the clock and then let his gaze fall behind him—and he saw that Philby had stopped on the sidewalk by an arch that led into the church grounds. Hale paused to lift his bagged bottle and take a sip, feeling safe in facing back along his track to do it, and two full seconds later Philby stepped through the arch. The two KGB men followed, though Hale thought he saw them exchange a glance before they too disappeared. Hale
dear,” Cassagnac said kindly, refilling her glass. “Five years ago Centre purged all the great illegals, the non-Russian Communists who could work outside the diplomatic channels and who in times of trouble could be disowned with no risk. They were educated Europeans, men and women who came to communism through literature and philosophy and the wounds of atheism, and they served their intercessory purpose, and then Yezhov killed them all lest their intercession proceed to become invocation; each