In spite of the glasses, the headwind battered tears out of the corners of Hale’s eyes as the motorcycle left behind the mediocre modern buildings of 1963 London and leaned alarmingly fast to the right around the north side of Westminster Abbey and then left up St. Margaret and Parliament streets to Whitehall; Hale pressed his face against his own shoulder to keep the moustache from being peeled off. When they passed the Cenotaph monument in the middle of the street, the rider began rapidly downshifting, and he pulled in to the curb by the new Cabinet Office in the old Treasury building, not far from Downing Street. As Hale shakily got off the back of the machine, his sweaty trousers clinging to his thighs, the rider nodded toward the entry stairs.
A familiar white-haired figure in an overcoat and a homburg hat was just then strolling up the pavement, and in spite of himself Hale had to suppress a smile at the neatness of it all as he followed Theodora through a door marked PRIVY COUNCIL OFFICE below the main steps.
“Anchors aweigh,” whispered Theodora after the door had closed and audibly locked behind them. He pulled a black iron ankh from his overcoat pocket and waved it at the pair of guards who stood behind a desk at the side of the fluorescent-lit passage; when they had nodded he tucked the thing into a vest pocket and then shrugged out of his overcoat and hat and laid them them across the papers on the desk with thoughtless Etonian arrogance.
Hale obediently fumbled the ankh out of his new jacket and held it up as he passed the two men, who stared at it as carefully as if it were a top-security pass.
The Foreign Office was at the far end of this building, and Hale wondered if they had come here with such elaborate precautions merely to help get permission for some proposed SIS-connected operation. Hale recalled that, in his day, FO permission for routine projects like infiltrating an agent into a hostile country could be taken for granted; planting a microphone in a consulate required that C consult the FO liaison, who would likely call on the Permanent Secretary to authorize it. Only if bad political consequences looked possible would C have to clear an operation with the Foreign Secretary in person. Who was Chief of SIS these days? Not still Menzies, surely.
“Who’s C now?” he whispered to Theodora as he dropped the ankh into his pocket and wiped his hand on his lapel. A moment later he took off the glasses and tucked them in after it.
“You don’t need to-oh hell, it’s Dick White. He was in MI5 when you were a player.”
Hale raised his eyebrows; MI5 was the domestic Security Service, generally looked down on by the cowboys in SIS.
“Bothering the Foreign Secretary for this, are we?” Hale said.
Theodora gave him a blank stare. “We’re going through the green door for this.”
“Oh,” said Hale humbly. They weren’t going to the Foreign Office at all; even the Cabinet Secretary, who was the one responsible for all the secret services, the one who accounted for Parliament’s Secret Vote funding of them and who oversaw the Joint Intelligence Secretariat, was not the ultimate authority. And though the Cabinet Office was separated from Number 10 Downing Street only by a connecting green baize door, the door was always locked, and even the Cabinet Secretary had to telephone the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary to get clearance to step through.
The approval of the Prime Minister himself was required for the most secret, most robust operations-big sabotage, substantial loss of life, serious risk of war. “We’re to see Macmillan?” 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…long-running 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,” said Theodora to the man who had spoken. “Andrew has always been the Crown’s good servant.”
Across from Theodora sat a lean red-headed man whose well-cut gray wool suit was somehow made to look flashy by his tan and the deep lines in his cheeks. His quick and obviously characteristic grin flicked back to a squinting frown, and Hale wondered if he was frightened, and who he was in all this.