Free Declare by Tim Powers

there.”
    “He has turned it for wartime spy purposes over to MI5, a branch of the British secret service. We have comrades working there, covertly.” She opened her purse and tilted it toward him; he could see a folded buff envelope tucked in there. “In this envelope is a list, copied from the MI5 Registry files, of Comintern agents known by the British to be working in London. I am not a person who ordinarily meets comrades face-to-face, as I am doing now with you; this is important. We need to convey this list right away to a still-unsuspected agent in London, so that Moscow Centre will know who must be reassigned, where fresh agents must be put in place. Also here in photographic miniature are full specifications of the new Napier Sabre aero-engine that is powering the Hawker Typhoon aircraft; the British government has classified these specifications as ‘most-secret,’ not to be shared with allies. It is Soviet Russia that now is doing the greatest work of fighting Germany, at Riga and Minsk and Kiev; if— espionage —helps the Soviets to do this, is it right to impede it?”
    “No,” said Hale, trying to look resolute and not to think of the undergraduate who had advocated the destruction of all the Oxford colleges.
    “I cannot leave here today,” the woman said. “We want you to take a train to London, now. I will give you a hundred pounds for the travel and inconvenience. Tonight at eight o’clock you are to be standing under the—Eros?—statue in Piccadilly Square, you know what that is? Good. Hold a belt, you know?—for trousers?—in your right hand. A man carrying some fruit, an orange perhaps, will approach you and ask you where you bought the belt; you will tell him that you bought it in an ironmonger’s shop in Paris, and then you will ask him where you can buy an orange like his; he will offer to sell it to you for a penny. Hand this envelope to him then. He will have further work for you.”
    “Just… go, right now?” said Hale, wondering what would become of his trunk. “This seems awfully precipitate—”
    She interrupted him with, “Where did you buy the belt?”
    “In—an ironmonger’s shop,” he said. “In Paris.”
    “You were born in Palestine, I think,” said the woman.
    He blinked at her in surprise, wondering if Theodora would be unhappy to know that she was aware of this. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know that?”
    Without a smile she said, “A little bird told me. Here.” She handed him the buff envelope, and he folded it more sharply and tucked it into his coat pocket next to the letter from his tutor. “And here’s a hundred pounds,” she went on, handing him a letter-sized envelope. “I’ll need you to sign a receipt for it.”
    In spite of Theodora’s vapory assurances, Hale was numbingly aware that this constituted real, deliberate espionage, documentable treason; and he could feel the sudden heat in his face. “My—real name?”
    She had obviously noted his involuntary blush, and for the first time she smiled at him. “Yes, comrade,” she said softly, “your real name. Don’t worry, I won’t let it fall into the wrong hands.”
    And what, he wondered a moment later as he signed Andrew Hale in the notebook she had unwedged from her purse, would constitute the wrong hands, here?
    I’m on somebody’s rolls now.
    God help me, he thought.

THREE

    London, 1963
But cannot the government protect?
We of the game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our
names are blotted from the book. That is all.
Thou art safe in the te-rain, at least.
Live a year at the great game and tell me that again!
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
    The driver of the Peugeot swung in to a jolting halt in front of Overton’s oyster bar in Terminus Place, and the now bespectacled and moustached Hale followed her curt directions and sprinted through the restaurant and out the back, then down a breezeway to Victoria Street, where the specified black BMW motorcycle hummed at the