Free Declare by Tim Powers Page B

” whispered Hale, wishing he had been allowed to keep his own coat.
    “This is nothing.” Theodora’s withered old face creased in a strained smile. “Know, O Papist, that White was in the Vatican two weeks ago, having a secret audience with Pius XII .”
    In fact, they did not literally go “through the green door”—the glossy plaster walls of the downward-slanting corridor soon gave way to old Tudor brick, and by the time they arrived at a set of ascending stone stairs, Hale thought they must have traversed the fabled eighteenth-century Cockpit Passage, and even skirted whatever might remain of Henry VIII’s tennis court, a wall of which had been revealed by a 1940 bomb. The stairs led up to a tiny ivy-hung garden under a plane tree; a red-roofed building blocked the view in front of them, and Hale realized that the door Theodora now knocked at must be a side entrance to Number 10. His right hand instinctively sprang up to make the sign of the cross, but after a momentary hesitation he covered the twitch by pulling off the false moustache.
    It was the Prime Minister himself, Harold Macmillan, who opened the door. The lean old patrician face was expressionless, but Hale thought there was banked fury behind the hooded eyes. Macmillan apparently recognized Theodora, and wordlessly stood aside to let them enter.
    Theodora led the way down a hall to a small windowless room that was paneled up to waist height, with white plaster and framed portraits above; a couple of middle-aged men already sat in two of the tall green leather chairs around the narrow table, and as he followed Theodora’s example and joined them, Hale supposed that one of them must be Dick White. Sconces on the walls threw yellow electric light across the bare, gleaming tabletop.
    Macmillan didn’t sit down, but stood behind one of the chairs with his arms crossed over the top of it. The air in the room was warm and smelled faintly of furniture polish.
    “We haven’t all been introduced to one another,” said Theodora, “and I think we can leave it that way. We’re here to deal with the culmination, one way or another, of Operation Declare.”
    The ankh was suddenly heavier in Hale’s pocket. “ Declare is still live?” he burst out, almost irritably; he had been confident that it had been closed as a failure nearly fifteen years ago. Then, abashed at having spoken up, he sat back and mumbled, “That’s a… longrunning operation.”
    Theodora smiled lazily at him. “It was an old operation before any of us were born, my dear. Lawrence of Arabia,” he said, in a patronizing drawl that probably indicated distaste for the popular David Lean movie of the year before, “was a second-or third-generation agent in it.”
    Hale had never seen Theodora this relaxed before, and it occurred to him that the old man was in some trouble here; and that therefore he himself probably was too. Theodora reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an ivory stick, which proved to be a folding Chinese fan when he flicked it open and began waving it under his sagging chin. The fan rattled faintly at each stroke.
    One of the men who had already been at the table leaned forward now, his lean face creased in a frown. “You are still bound by the Official Secrets Act, at the very least,” he said quietly to Hale. He pursed his lips and then went on, “In fact our Registry books now indicate that you never left the force, that you’ve been taking your full pay all along, in the capacity of deep-cover recruiter and safe-house proprietor, working out of your Weybridge college. Salary in cash, of course, no endorsed checks needed to be forged. So you’ve got more than twenty years of uninterrupted service, on paper. Are you still a willing player?”
    “Yes, of course,” said Hale stiffly. This was evidently the current C, Dick White, who according to Theodora had come out of plodding MI5.
    “You didn’t need to wave the pension at him before you asked,”