It was a semi-automatic Swiss SIG, standard issue for the SDECE, chambered for the French 7.65-millimeter cartridge. She popped out the magazine that she had emptied on the mountain and dug a heavy magazine from her jacket pocket and slid it up into the grip until it clicked.

Belatedly she realized that it had been the sound of a jeep motor that had awakened her-but it didn’t matter. It would not be Andrew Hale, for he would certainly be on his way back to London by now, or to wherever it might be that he was stationed-and if it were members of her SDECE base team that had missed the pickup and come back here in the jeep, they could not stop her.

She pulled the slide back against the resistance of the recoil-spring, paused, and then let it snap forward. A cartridge was in the chamber now, and of course the safety was off. Her nostrils twitched at the smell of gun oil over the cognac fumes.

She could hear footsteps in the corridor outside her room door.

She hefted the pistol and held it up to her forehead, butt out, with her right thumb inside the trigger guard. Straight through the center of the forehead was how the Moscow girl had been shot. This gun had been tucked under Elena’s arm while she slept, and the muzzle ring was warm. Aunt Dolores, she thought, give me strength.

She heard the squeak of the doorknob and let her eyes focus past her thumb to the door. The knob was turning-and she waited, curious in spite of herself, as the door creaked open.

But the man who stepped into the room’s dim lamplight was not Andrew Hale. It was the unpleasant stuttering Britisher from Berlin, the onetime chief of Section Nine, now SIS Head of Station in Turkey-Kim Philby.

He stared past the gun butt at her left eye. “Am I interrupting?” he said.

He had spoken in English, and she forced herself to frame an answer in that language. “I’ll only be a moment,” she told him.

He smiled and slowly closed the door at his back. “I say, could this wait-half an hour? I won you in a card game last night-well, it was interrupted, but the other fellow is long gone, and I believe I did have the high hand-and-well, damn it-it does just seem too bad of you to kill yourself the moment I arrive! What do you say? Twenty minutes!-for a spot of fornication? You and I halfway did it on New Year’s Eve in 1941, proxy or vicarious or something. Hey? There’s a good girl!”

She reversed the gun in her right hand and lowered it, pointing it at him. For a moment neither of them spoke, and she was trying to figure out if this was a humanitarian gambit on his part-distract her with insult so as to have a chance to talk her out of it-or if he really had meant what he had said.

“That would be a mortal sin,” she said carefully. “Adultery, even-I happen to know you’re married, Mr. Philby.” She had also read that he suffered from a terrible stammer; but he seemed to be talking smoothly enough right now.

“Ceniza-Bendiga,” he said. He waved at the wooden chair against the plaster wall. “Do you mind if I sit? Thank you. Spanish, that is. Mortal sin! Are you a Catholic?”

“Devout,” she said with a nod.

“Ah! I’m an atheist myself, sorry. I thought you lot were down on suicide.”

“Will you do me a favor, Mr. Philby?”

“If you’ll do me one.” He smiled and held up his hands, palms out.

“Will you? This is a-” She shifted on the mattress. “A deathbed request.”

“I will,” he said levelly. “If you will.” Clearly he had meant what he had said a few moments ago.

She was sick at the idea, and at the abrupt immediacy of it. The fumy brandy surged up into the back of her throat.

But what if it’s all you can do? she thought. It is all you can do. And who are you now to treasure scruples, souvenirs? You have abdicated yourself.

She waited several seconds, but there was no providential interruption. “Very well,” she whispered. She took a deep breath and went on, “So listen. I will be missing an appointment I made six years ago-breaking a promise I made. It can’t be helped, but-when I was in the Lubyanka, and it seemed that they were going to kill me, I made a promise to the Virgin Mary-she doesn’t like communism, you know. I made a vow. Will you swear to keep it for me?”

Philby shifted uneasily in his chair. “Why were you in the Lubyanka?”

“I was being trained as an agent. I was an atheist then-my mother and father were shot down in a Madrid street by the right-wing Catholic monarchists in 1931, right in front of me; and when I was twelve years old I was a wireless telegrapher with Andre Marty. But in Moscow I saw the true face of communism. Will you swear on your own mother and father to keep my vow for me?”

Philby puffed out his cheeks. “Well, that’s not really my line of territory. What was the vow?”

“I told the Virgin: ‘If you will intercede with your Son to get me out of Russia alive, I vow that on my-’” Elena frowned. “I wanted to give it time, selfishly wait until my youth was safely gone, I think-I said, ‘I vow that on my fortieth birthday at high noon I will light a candle for you right here in Moscow, at St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, in the heart of your enemy’s kingdom, the way you put your heel on the serpent’s head.’ And I promised her that I would-”

After several seconds Philby shook his head and raised his eyebrows. “What’s the harm of being honest now, here? On your deathbed?”

“Oh God,” Elena sighed. “I promised her that I would be a chaste wife from then on. I didn’t want to embark on it too soon, there was a young man-gone now-”

“Chaste,” said Philby impatiently, “do go on. I don’t need to hear about your tiresome young men. Whom were you going to be married to, in your old age?” Philby himself was then thirty-six.

“I vowed that I would not marry until then, and that-that I would consider marrying-I was delirious-that I would take whomsoever she might elect to show me, after I had lit the candle. You see? I was humbly placing the selection in her hands. I think I imagined Prince Myshkin.” The gun was wobbling in her grip, and she told herself that she must soon return it to its position against her forehead. “If there is a man there, in the cathedral when you light the candle…give him my regrets.”

Philby nodded. “I can do that much-no prayers. When would be your fortieth birthday?”

“April the twenty-second-in 1964.”

“My calendar is free on that day, as it happens.” Philby stared at her in evident perplexity. “You’re about to-kill yourself, but you still believe all this business?”

“I wouldn’t kill myself if I didn’t believe this business.” She shivered. “Sin has real weight.”

“What, your men dying on Mount Ararat last night?” When she didn’t answer he shook his head and laughed, clearly not yet satisfied with her situation. “You know, I’ve never understood…faith. ‘Do the stars answer? in the night have ye found comfort? or by day have ye seen gods? What hope, what light, falls from the farthest starriest way on you that pray?’” She had realized that he was quoting something, and now he waved deprecatingly and said, “Swinburne.”

“Yes,” she said. When he raised his eyebrows, she went on, miserably, “Yes, the stars answer. God answers.”

Philby opened his mouth, then frowned and closed it; he appeared to shiver, and when he finally spoke, it was more quietly. “What d-does H-H-He say, ch-child?”

Elena blinked tears out of her eyes. “He says, ‘Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, save Me, save only Me?’” She sniffed. “Francis Thompson.”

“I n-know it,” he said. “‘Yet I was sore adread lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.’” Philby seemed agitated. “Tell mmmm-tell me!-when you g-go to your s-sacrament, of C-C-Confession!-do you really have a f-firm purpose of am-amendment?”

“Yes. It might not seem possible later, but-yes. ‘To sin no more.’”