Out in the world, the German Panzers fought their way east toward Stalingrad and the British Eighth Army defeated Rommel at El Alamein, but through some apparently random bureaucratic fiat Hale's time was spent in becoming an expert on obscure facets of late-nineteenth-century Moscow. The SIS mathematicians at Bletchley Park were rumored to have cracked a high-level German code, and the SOE cowboys were reportedly blowing up bridges in North Africa and parachuting agents into the Balkans, but the files routed to Hale's desk were all...treatises like "Evidences of Secret Construction in the Basement of the Anchor Insurance Company in Moscow in 1884" and "Coriolis Force Singularities: Incidence of Anomalous Rotational Meteorological Phenomena in Moscow, 1910-1930" and "Metallic Debris in Moscow Rainstorms (Spec.: Wedding Rings and Tooth-Fillings)."
Many of these files were addenda to older investigations, and in order to sign them off in good conscience Hale frequently had to locate and read as much as he could of the primary work. The SIS registry was a chaotic mess, with operational and personal files just stacked in boxes along the corridors, so he often took a car from the motor-pool garage and drove north to St. Albans, where the tidy MI5 Registry archives were kept in a Victorian mansion in King Harry Lane. To his initial surprise, his SOE/SIS credentials got him access to even the most-secret files, many of which were kept in cellophane envelopes and handled with tweezers because of having been charred in a 1940 bombing.
And for getting Russian documents translated he found himself having to consult the weird old women in the MI5 Soviet Transcription Center. This was located in another St. Albans house, in a tiny room which these fugitive White Russians had converted into a little anachronistic corner of Tsarist St. Petersburg, with carved wooden saint-icons standing among the dictaphone cylinders and acetate gramophone disks on the shelves, and a perpetual perfume of tea from the steaming samovar in the corner. To these wizened babushkas the NKVD was still the Cheka or even the pre-revolution Okhrana, and they took a particularly intense interest in Hale's researches, often pausing to cross themselves as they translated some musty old report of a Russian expedition to Turkey in 1883 or a description of burned grass around little coin-sized eruption holes in the grave plots of Moscow cemeteries. All of these old grandmothers were of the Russian Orthodox faith, but Hale noticed-uneasily-that their use of the term guardian angel was hesitant and fearful, and always accompanied by them splashing their lumpy old fingers in the holy water font by the locked door.
When carbon-copy transcripts of current SOE interrogations began to be delivered to his desk, relayed to him because of their being cross-referenced under the "Ararat" or "Lubyanka" or "Tsar Alexander III" categories, he felt that he had no honest choice but to visit the SOE establishments where the prisoners and refugees were being kept, and through translators ask the rootless foreigners about his antique concerns. The SOE had rented so many old country estates, in Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire and Surrey, that the acronym was said to stand for "Stately 'Omes of England," and Hale became accustomed to the sight of sandbags and steel tripods on old Tudor stairways, and trestle tables and wire baskets in paneled bedrooms, and cheap colored photographs of the King on walls where pale patches indicated grander pictures recently taken away.
Most of the foreigners he questioned knew nothing relevant to his disjointed researches, and the SOE personnel were sometimes impatient with his interruptions of operational interrogations, but his credentials led them all to believe that at the very least he was compiling some sort of official history, and they were often respectful and generally civil.
Ultimately Hale did begin to suspect that there was a single story behind many of the old reports and rumors he was investigating: from Armenian fugitives he learned that an earthquake had shaken Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey in 1883 and knocked down a lot of ancient standing stones around the 17,000-foot level; Russian and Turkish scientists had visited the site, and subsequently a Russian team went to the mountain with wagons, and then went away by train to Moscow; and until the Turkish Army evacuated all the Armenians from the area in 1915, Armenian blacksmiths had hammered on their anvils every day, even on Sundays and holidays, hoping by their staccato ringing noise to keep something from descending the mountain. And from White Russians and exiled Trotskyites he heard stories about ancient carved stones set up in the deepest cellars of the Yakor or Anchor Insurance Company at Bolshaya Lubyanka 11, which in 1918 became the headquarters of the Cheka and was known and dreaded forever after as the Lubyanka.
And there were clues that seemed related, but which he couldn't connect. He was told that an effigy had been made of the tunic and death mask and plaster-cast hands of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, and set up in a glass coffin at the NKVD Officers' Club near Red Square; and that novice NKVD officers were required to lay flowers and wreaths before the thing in certain seasons and pray to it, and that the thing sometimes shifted its plaster hands or even spoke through the parted plaster lips in response, though not in Russian. And he learned that the ancient name of Ankara might have been a Greek word for anchor, and that ancient Turkish coins bore the bas-relief of an Egyptian anchor, which was a rectangle with a loop at the top; the Egyptian anchors had been carved out of stone, and one of his informants drew a picture of one for him, and even drew a cross on the rectangle, so that the resemblance to the Egyptian looped cross, the ankh, was obvious. And many of the Muscovite fugitives mentioned the peculiar rancid, metallic smell of Moscow air, which was attributed to cheap Soviet diesel oil.
Hale pondered the words anchor, Ankara, Yakor, Lubyanka-and ankh.
In his capacity as a special agent on loan to the SOE from Section One, he was able to ask for many categories of current files, and he pressed hard to get any information on a female GRU agent who had run a black radio network in Paris in late '41 and who might be known as Delphine St.-Simon. He learned that the French and Belgian Soviet networks, among which he and Elena had worked, had been collectively known to the Gestapo as the Rote Kapelle, which meant the Red Orchestra or the Red Chapel, and that most of the agents in it had been arrested before Christmas of '42; quite a number of them were executed very quickly, because of a German tradition that no executions occur between December 24 and January 6. The rest of the captured Rote Kapelle agents were turned to playback uses, and Hale wondered where Claude Cassagnac had wound up. Information from Moscow was harder to get, and though he read secondhand accounts of many executions in the Lubyanka cellars, none of the victims seemed to have been Elena.
In the summer of Hale's twenty-third year the London air-raid sirens seemed to wail all day and all night, punctuated by the hammering of anti-aircraft guns and the clatter of shrapnel falling in the streets and the regular window-rattling thunder of the new German buzz-bomb explosions. He slept on a cot in his office, and on many nights when sleep was impossible he would get drunk and join the midnight revelers in Green Park, and in the diffuse white searchlight glow around the army encampment known as the Bomber's Moon he would try to lead the wild spontaneous dancing into a park-spanning clochard-style nothing-right-here step that would shelter the whole city of London from the roaring sky. He succeeded only in exhausting himself enough to make sleep possible, and in the hungover mornings the sirens still wailed.
But across the Channel the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches in June and liberated Paris by September, and Rome fell to the American Fifth Army, and the Russians pushed the Germans all the way back into Lithuania and Poland, and American B-17s were bombing Berlin. From his office window Hale could see the vapor trails of the flying bombs in the blue sky, but the lilacs and plane trees and apple trees in St. James's Park were all in vivid bloom as if it were spring instead of late summer, and all the old hands in Broadway Buildings were confident that the war would be over within six months.
Of course Hale never set foot in the senior officers' bar in the Broadway basement, where the Robber Barons drank and traded old stories and current news, but he did pick up interdepartmental gossip. In that summer he heard rumors that Colonel Felix Cowgill, the head of the counter-espionage Section Five, whose return from New York in February of 1942 had saved Hale from falling under Kim Philby's authority, might be cracking under the strain of his work. According to the office talk, Cowgill had lately summoned all his sub-section heads and told them that he had to go on another consulting mission to the Americas-he hadn't clearly said why, only that private researches of his own made the trip imperative, and he hinted at some huge, hostile service that threatened his counter-espionage department; and he had finished with the puzzling declaration, "My own view is that it has something to do with the Arabs. Wherever I look in this case, I see Arabs!" Cowgill's mysterious overseas mission dragged on for a month and turned out to include visits to unspecified points in the Middle East-but when Cowgill finally returned in late September, he found that in his absence Kim Philby had effectively taken his job away from him: a new section, Section Nine, had been created specifically to penetrate Soviet espionage networks in the imminent postwar world, and the old Section Five was being incorporated into it, and Philby had been made Head of Section Nine. Whatever information Cowgill had found during his trip was now Philby's to deal with or dismiss.
Cowgill resigned on New Year's Day of 1945, bitterly describing the action as "a birthday present for bloody Philby." Philby had previously been working at the Ryder Street headquarters of Section Five, in the elegant neighborhood of the Boodles and Brooks's clubs just east of Green Park, but now as a section head he had a fourth-floor office in Broadway Buildings and was a constant figure in the cluttered hallways.
Hale tried to keep out of his way. Section One, where Hale toiled away in his tiny alcove, was a corridor of cramped offices on the third floor; here Footman's staff assembled summaries of current political intelligence from all the foreign stations, amplified and connected by the researches of people like Hale. Their main "customers" were "CSS & FO"-the SIS Chief and the Foreign Office-but in February Philby got the Foreign Secretary to agree to an expanded charter for Section Nine, and after that Philby too was on Section One's direct circulation list, and everyone knew that Philby's recommendations for postwar budget cuts would be respected.
C was Stuart Menzies, who was now fifty-five years old, the mandatory retirement age; but Churchill had persuaded him to stay on, and Menzies relied on the ambitious, thirty-two-year-old Philby for day-to-day in-house decisions.
Though Philby was either jovially derisive or coldly rude to Hale when they passed in the corridors, Hale discovered that the man was generally admired; he reportedly had great personal charm, and women found his stutter endearing, and he was perceived as a welcome infusion of new blood into a service that had for too long been dominated by retired policemen from the Indian Civil Service.
Hale hadn't seen Theodora nor even received any note from him in more than a year, and it seemed clear that Hale could hope for no career in an agency in which Philby was a rising power; Hale's thoughts were of postwar Oxford, and during slow afternoons he mentally phrased a letter of resignation that he planned to write when the war and the wartime draft should finally be ended.
In the gossipy corridors of Broadway, Hale was eventually able to monitor the close of the war with an intimacy that the Times couldn't come close to providing. He learned that the American General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Forces, was reluctant to accept anything less than an unconditional surrender from Germany, and that this delay permitted the Russians to cross the Oder River; and then Eisenhower refused to allow British forces in Hanover to move east past the Elbe, and instead let the Red Army be the power that took Berlin.
Germany finally surrendered on May 8, but Hale had known four days earlier that Hitler had committed suicide in a Berlin bunker.
The war in Europe was over, and in Broadway Buildings a festive, end-of-term mood quickened the steps and brightened the voices of the young clerks and secretaries whose lives had been interrupted by the war, and many of them were glancing through out-of-town newspapers at their desks and talking about the Autumn term at Durham or Hull or Oxford.
As it happened, though, Kim Philby had been out of the country for two months when Germany surrendered; as the new Head of Section Nine, he had been off visiting Paris and Athens and other capitals of the newly liberated countries, reestablishing the prewar alliances and the old cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union. Hale postponed writing his letter of resignation, and for now simply kept reading and signing off the fifty-year-old files that were still piled on his desk every Monday.
And on the morning of June 20 he received crash-priority SOE orders to report immediately to a German city called Helmstedt, at the western end of the Helmstedt-Berlin Autobahn.
He was flown in an RAF De Havilland Mosquito to a landing strip in newly conquered Gottingen, and then spent a long afternoon riding in a train compartment with half a dozen morose and hungover American soldiers who were returning to Braunschweig from leave time spent in Paris; in the crowded Braunschweig railway station, all the windows of which had been broken out by Allied bombs, he changed to a local line that ran east, and he watched the sun go down over ruined buildings as the train crossed the Oker River on a temporary iron bridge, a stone's throw from the broken piers and twisted deck of a previous bridge.
Outside of the city limits he glimpsed German civilians in the rubbled lanes carrying big bundles of twigs in perambulators or on the backs of bicycles, and he realized that coal must be scarce-and he probed his conscience for guilt. But crowding out these immediate scenes were memories of panic in the faces of women and old men in London streets, and of feeling the same expression tightening his own eye sockets, when the throbbing motorcycle-roar of a V-1 rocket suddenly stopped-and of the subsequent ten seconds of scrambling for cover, before the air shook with shotgunning glass fragments as the almighty crack of the detonation seemed to reach right down into whatever corner he crouched in and pry the clawed hands away from his ducked head. He could still recall the chemical stink of high explosives, and the horrifying reek of living blood instantly rendered into a spray as fine as perfume out of an atomizer. And finally he took a bleak solace from the fact that he was able to discover in himself no particular satisfaction, at least, at the plight of these defeated Germans.
Like apparently all German railroad stations, the Helmstedt station platform was crowded with rootless-looking people sitting on luggage and napping or staring or list-lessly eating bread; but at the back of the platform he saw the tall, thin figure of Theodora, and when the now-gray-haired man turned away and walked toward a row of cars on the pavement outside the station, Hale followed at a distance. He lost sight of the spare silhouette between a couple of buses in a row far away from the electric arc lights, and was standing uncertainly on the pavement when a Renault roadster slowed beside him and the passenger door squeaked open.
Theodora was at the wheel, and Hale climbed in and pulled the door closed.
"Ready for action at last, Andrew?" asked Theodora with fatigued cheer as he shifted up through the gears. In the headlamp beams Hale could see only rushing pavement between lightless brick buildings. "Oh good God, I say, you can drive an automobile, can't you?"
"Yes," Hale told him, hanging onto the door panel strap. "But the war's over. You must have read about it."
"The real war didn't start in '39, my dear, and it surely didn't end six weeks ago. Listen, the Soviets have taken a third of Germany and apparently mean to keep it. But away out in the middle of that Red sea is Berlin, moored to the rest of the free world by one long autobahn, and though the Russians have the eastern half of the city, we Brits and the Americans and the French have each got a third of the western half. Hah! God knows how long this equilibrium can be maintained-the Russians might close the highway tomorrow, except for outgoing traffic. Who'd do anything more than protest? Truman? Churchill? Attlee? We've got a safe house you can sleep at tonight, but tomorrow you go down the hole alone."
"Down the hole," echoed Hale, though he had already guessed what the phrase meant. For the first time since stepping into the sanctuary of the British Embassy in Lisbon three years ago, he had the sensation of having left his heart and lungs and guts somewhere behind, replaced by a durable emptiness, and his hearing and vision seemed more acute.