January twenty-third, Philby thought forlornly.

Now, shuddering in mountaineering boots and a parka on a windy glacier 13,000 feet above sea-level, Philby allowed himself the useless fantasy of reconsidering his decision. He could have stayed with Eleanor, his wife of very nearly four years. Perhaps the SIS and the MI5 together could have protected him from facing “the truth” at the hands of Jimmie’s ultra-covert old SOE, in England, at least-but he didn’t believe that. According to legend, Declare had dealt with the code-breaker Alan Turing, and T. E. Lawrence, and even Lord Kitchener, drowned off the Scapa Flow in 1916. Philby clenched his mittened fists in frail bravado. Very well, so what if they would have killed him, eventually? Or even as soon as he was released from interrogation at Ham Common? He could have died as a loyal husband and father. If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of England that is forever a foreign land! The thought made a hash of Rupert Brooke’s scansion, but Philby smiled at it. And in the eighteenth century Edward Young had written, Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow. But more recently Eugene Fitch Ware had countered it: We fixed him up an epitaph, “Death loves a mining shark.” And it was something more like a mining shark that Philby had become, in his furtive career-burrowing, hiding, voracious, without conscience.

And, he was honest enough to admit to himself, profoundly afraid of dying. Meet your Maker…! At least if vile Hale was successful here, there would be a very large-scale dying of djinn. The idiotically ghoulish amomon thistle would be blooming in the wastelands, probably even in Soviet Armenia. And he still had Theo Maly’s sealed instructions.

What had Maly called it? A more profane sort of eternal life.

To his credit, he felt, Philby had actually tried to give his children the better sort of eternal life-though admittedly he had been maudlin drunk each time. Did it still count, he wondered now on this cold flank of Mount Ararat, if it was administered by a drunk? A resolutely atheist drunk? With the older four of his children he had found opportunities to spill water onto their heads, and then, while seeming to try to wipe it off, covertly make the feared Papist sign of the cross on their foreheads-he had cringed to do it, and his teeth had actually hurt each time as he had mumbled, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen-but in the case of poor young Harry, his youngest son by his previous wife, Philby had eventually resorted to pushing the boy out of a rowboat on the Dog River, near Ajaltoun in the Lebanon mountains, mumbling the hated litany as he’d pulled the boy back aboard and pushed the wet hair out of his eyes, up and then sideways.

And he was always aware of the power of birthdays and anniversaries. The zodiac wheel was in precisely the same position again on such days, and the events they commemorated were in a sense repeated in all their vulnerabilities, renewed in their purposes.

And so of course the Rabkrin expedition had left Beirut on the twenty-third of January! At five o’clock on that rainy evening, with no warning, Mammalian had given him a passport in the name of Villi Maris and ordered him to get into a Turkish truck bound for the Syrian border. “We go now,” Mammalian had told him. But Philby and Eleanor had been expected at a dinner at the house of the First Secretary of the British Embassy on that night, and Philby had simply demanded to be allowed to call Eleanor and tell her to go on without him, that he would meet her there later. Mammalian had eventually given in and driven him through the downpour to a telephone kiosk from which he could make the call. When Philby had dialed the number, thirteen-year-old Harry had answered the telephone, and in every hour since then Philby had wished that Eleanor had picked up the extension, so that he could have heard her voice one more time; but in the rain-drumming telephone kiosk, with Mammalian scowling at him over his dripping beard in the open doorway, Philby had only dared to say, “Tell your m-mother I’m-g-going to be late, H-Harry-my b-boy. I’ll m-meet her at the B-Balfour-Pauls’ at eight.” While he had fumbled for words to say more, Mammalian had reached across him and pressed down the plunger.

The next day, the twenty-fourth, would have been Philby’s and Eleanor’s fourth wedding anniversary.

Till Death do us part, Philby thought now as he blinked rapidly to keep tears from spilling down his cheeks, where they might freeze the snow-goggles to his skin. Thin veils of dry snow were blowing past him down the snowpack slope, like white dust.

Off to his left he could see a couple of the others lumbering out of the nearest tent, looking like polar bears in their hooded parkas and boots. One was Mammalian, the tallest; the other would be one of the Turk Rabkrin agents. There had been no snow last night, and they were standing in the darker, tromped-flat area around the tents. The commandos who had been standing watch slung their white Kalashnikov machine guns and began trudging to the farther tent-hourly rotation of watch, Philby recalled.

“Sutle ekmek!” called one of the Turks to Philby, his voice thin in the chilly air. Bread and milk, and it would be sour milk.

“Ben onsuz yapabilirum,” Philby shouted to him across the snow. I can do without it.

“And briefing,” called Mammalian over the wind. “Synchronizing our watches, girding up our loins for battle, revelations of secrets not to be divulged down in the lowlands. Come in here.”

Philby sighed a gust of steam and plodded back across the wavy snow, planting his boots in the same holes they had made when he had walked away from the tents; and the sky was too overcast for him to throw much of a shadow. Perhaps he was not really walking back to the tent at all.

Oddly, and he smiled wryly at it, he was feeling an extra bit of guilt here-Hale and I didn’t finish that poker game in 1948, he thought, but I took the whole pot anyway: I had Señorita Ceniza-Bendiga the next day in Dogubayezit, and I kept Maly’s amomon instructions too.

Andrew Hale looked up from his cup of tepid tea when Philby came stamping back into the tent.

Hakob Mammalian was right behind him, followed by the surlier of the two Turks, Fuad.

“Sit,” said Mammalian as he ponderously lowered himself into a cross-legged position on the rubberized canvas floor, scattering floury snow from his boots. Philby and Fuad sat down, and the Turk by the little paraffin stove began handing disks of flat bread to Hale, who passed them to Mammalian. Hale was just wearing his tan wool liner gloves, and he could feel that the bread was hot.

“When we were here in ’48,” Mammalian said, his breath steaming in the razory cold air, “we did not come this high. We did not presume to knock at their door, but called them down to the gorge. We were cautious because of some old stories-St. Hippolytus wrote in the third century that climbers who tried to ascend Ararat were thrown down to the valley floor by demons; and in the fourth century, Faustus of Byzantium recorded the story of an Armenian bishop, Jacob-”

Fuad snorted around a mouthful of the bread. “An Armenian named Jacob!” he said in English. “Was he a saint?”

“He was,” said Mammalian imperturbably. “And he climbed partway up the mountain, hoping to see the Ark. Where he slept, a spring burst out of the rocks; we passed that spring in the gorge yesterday, by the cairn of rocks that marks his grave, though the shrine that used to stand there was destroyed in the 1840 earthquake. He too found himself abruptly at the foot of the mountain-but he had been carried there by an angel, who gave him a piece of wood from the Ark and told him that it was God’s will that he not attempt to climb the mountain. That piece of wood is today in the Armenian Orthodox monastery in Echmiadzen, in Soviet Armenia. The angel was a Christian one, and knew that Jacob might be killed if he climbed higher. With my own eyes as a boy I saw a demon face staring angrily from the Ark. Perhaps we Armenians are in a privileged position; my father and I were not molested.”