If the strangers were friendly, they would soon be waving their head-cloths in the air and then dismounting to toss up handfuls of sand.

So far they were not doing it.

“’Al-Murra?” asked Hale nervously, unable to keep himself from glancing back at the pool. The bulbous approximations of eyes and lips had broken up into churning random shapes below the curls of vapor. “Manasir?”

“As much as our party is Mutair, probably,” Ishmael said in a flat voice. “But they’re KGB-or conceivably Mossad, or the French SDECE. We have no time.” He tugged back the fluttering flap of his kaffiyeh, and his exposed face was gray. “Bin Jalawi!” the old man shouted.

Hale’s friend looked away from the unknown riders, toward the pool, and goaded his camel into a fast walk this way when Ishmael beckoned.

Ishmael’s raised arm swept down with surprising weight onto Hale’s shoulder, turning him back around to face the djinn in the pool.

“Say ‘I break it now,’” the old man hissed in Hale’s ear.

Hale crouched, clawing the sand and digging in with his toes-for an instant he thought he was about to fall into the pool-and then he realized that the nearest ten-foot quadrant of it had tilted up more than forty-five degrees, like a slanted glass bunker wall. Steaming black spray was fringing away along the rounded top and sides of the raised section of water, and as he watched, the smoothly convex surface began churning in a dozen concave vortices.

Hale straightened up dizzily, but Ishmael’s hand was bearing down on his shoulder.

“Kneel,” said Ishmael’s voice urgently.

The vortices deepened into holes like clarinet bells, and as steam puffed out of the deep chambers, a dozen deep voices in unison said, “My name is Legion. Worship us.” Two, then three of the holes combined into a bigger one.

Break it now, Hale thought as his heart thudded like a hammer in his chest. You’ve been coat-trailing for the opposition, and it’s worked, they’ve been fooled so far, they’ve picked you up. They’ve at least provisionally bought into your role as a renegade ex-Declare agent. Live your role, “Know, not think it.” And…

And it would be membership, initiation, a way to get leagues farther in! What on earth-or above it or under it!-might you not learn, and become able to do, if you obey this creature or cluster of creatures and kneel to it, prostrate yourself before it? What kingdoms in the clouds…

To his own surprise Hale realized that he had not even shifted the weight on his bare feet; and a moment later he knew coldly that he was not going to obey.

Ishmael had stepped back, to Hale’s right, and at a glimpsed glint of silver in the old man’s hand Hale turned toward him. Ishmael was holding an American.45 Army Colt automatic pistol pointed straight at his face.

“Kneel, damn you,” Ishmael snarled.

Don’t worry about anything, C had told him in 1929, when Andrew Hale had been seven years old. You’re on our rolls. And that had been the very day of Hale’s first Holy Communion, when he had consumed the body and blood of God.

Steam like sulfurous breath touched his left cheek, but from the corner of his eye he could see that the black wall was holding its position for now, ten feet away down the slope.

It had been a.45 for Cassagnac, at the end, out of a revolver. Hale had seen men hit by the.45 slug. It had knocked them right down, breathless and pale and dying.

I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.

But you don’t believe in God anymore! he told himself tensely. You kneel to check the air pressure in a tire, or to open a low dresser drawer-why can’t you kneel here? Finish Operation Declare, redeem the deaths on Ararat, save your own life-

He could hear the hooves of bin Jalawi’s camel, and he heard the stamp-and-slither as bin Jalawi must have seen the uptilted section of the black pool and frantically reined in the camel.

Speak you of the wrath of God? bin Jalawi had asked angrily on the drive down to Magwa.

Hale glanced to his left, squinting down the slope against the sandy whirlwind. All the holes had merged into one yard-wide mouth, and a ring of jagged rocks whirled around its circumference like a wheel of wet tan teeth.

A deep, inorganic voice groaned out of the black-water mouth: “Adore-us,” it tolled, “bin Hajji.”

Hale was still able to think. Bin Hajji meant son of a pilgrim, son of a devout Moslem who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Perhaps it was a taunt, a challenge. At the Ham Common camp in ’42, Philby had said, Our Hajji which art in Amman…

Finally, it was simply impossible to prostrate himself before this unnatural thing in the sight of his old Bedu friend, Soviet tool though the old friend might be.

“I-won’t do it,” Hale said, exhaling. The old man was just a few paces too far away for Hale to have any hope of springing at him and grabbing the gun before it would be fired; and to dive to Ishmael’s right, forcing the old man to swing the barrel out to the side, would be to jump down the slope and right into the spinning mouth. Better to stand still and only perhaps die. He looked past Ishmael and the monster, at the infinite extent of the Arabian desert, and he was oddly contented with the possibility that he had come back here at the age of forty to be killed. Elena was long lost to him. “Who is my father?” he asked curiously.

“This is the son,” groaned the spinning hole in the wall of black water. The whole surface was quivering, and the fringe of steamy spray was flying away, beading up in the sky or kicking up splashes and sand below it, as if flung by centrifugal force. “This is the Nazrani son.”

Abruptly Ishmael surprised Hale by throwing the gun to him, and then the old man reached inside his robe and pulled out a walkie-talkie-sized radio and yanked up the telescoping antenna.

Hale had caught the gun carefully by the grip, and he half-tossed it to grasp it firmly, his finger outside the trigger guard. He realized that he had been holding his breath, and he began panting. It was all he could do not to point the muzzle, uselessly, at the turbulent wall of water.

“Kill Salim bin Jalawi,” Ishmael snapped. “That’s an order, a condition of employment, a proof of your sincerity.” He twisted a dial on the radio and then cupped his hand around the microphone and began to speak into it quickly in Russian, his eyes on the no-longer-distant riders.

Bin Jalawi knelt atop his camel fifteen paces across the sand toward the south; his voice now was loud and steady, and it must have required courage for the Bedu to speak at all in the terrible presence of the djinn: “Will you shoot me, bin Sikkah?”

Ishmael gave Hale a fierce nod. For the first time, he seemed more frightened than irritable. Peripherally Hale could see that the ring of stones was spinning more rapidly in the steaming mouth.

Hale laughed dizzily, still doubtful that any of them would live to leave this place. “No, my friend,” he called over the whistling wind to bin Jalawi. And I do wonder if you would not shoot me, if our positions were reversed, old friend.

Ishmael stared at Hale, then after a moment of openmouthed hesitation pronounced some flat, clear Russian syllables into the radio, after which he dropped it onto the sand. “There is a ship off the Ras Khabji headland”-he spat out the words in English-“and a helicopter from it is now heading this way, fast, tracing the Al-Maqta stream. It is Rabkrin, get aboard it.” He stepped sideways to face Hale squarely. “Kill me, then,” he said. “I have told them on the radio that you are genuine-the devil confirms your identity, and certainly no SOE infiltrator would have perversely refused my orders-my part of the task is finished. The things of the water demand a life in exchange for their testimony, and we cannot possibly offend any ambassadors of theirs right now-kill me.”