The size of the bubbles jolted his perspective, and he lifted his head and saw that he was on his hands and knees in warm surf on a sunlit beach; the egg shapes had been grains of sand in the relative darkness of his shadow.
A middle-aged man in a modern, rumpled sport coat and a cravat was striding toward him down the dazzling sand slope; the man's face was pouchy and tired, but it creased in a jovial smile as the mouth opened-from the man's arrogantly casual Marks & Spencer-style clothes Hale almost anticipated a plummy Oxbridge drawl-
But it was a shrill piping like the cries of birds that came skirling out of the open mouth, and Hale flinched at the savage rhythm of the harsh whistling-the mouth opened wider, cleaving the face vertically, and the division quickly extended down through the neck-and then the man had split down the middle, and it was two dressed men standing on the sand facing Hale. One was the middle-aged original; the other appeared younger, but Hale had a sudden conviction that if he were to look into the face of that one, he would die.
He spun away and threw himself toward the surf, but it had receded, and he fell toward the grains of sand; but as they rushed up in his vision, he saw that they were as immense and widely separated as planets or even stars, and then he was simply falling through a black abyss while incomprehensible constellations spun with titanic momentum around him.
When he awoke, Elena was gone, leaving the faint cutgrass smell of her hair on the pillow and half of their money on the table for him. And just as he had begun to worry seriously about Marcel Gruey's chances of getting a flight to Lisbon, he saw the note she had left:
The stone dog at the north corner-edge of the first house we lived in is a dubok -the head is loose and can be lifted off. The Philippe St.-Simon passport and travel papers are in a hollow inside; the Air France flight is at 1800. I compromise my proper husband to tell you this. Destroy this note, as you value my life. We will not meet again. I love you.-ETC.
Hale carefully burned the note in an ashtray and stirred the ashes. When he got to the Air France desk at Orly Airport, Philippe St.-Simon learned that his sister Delphine had arrived at the airport at dawn and had taken an empty seat on the 8 A.M. flight.
When the sturdy Air France Dewoitine 338 had finally begun its roaring descent over the Tejo River valley and banked around to land at the Sintra Airdrome on the outskirts of Lisbon, the sun had long since gone down over the Estremadura mountains, and electric lights illuminated the airfield runways and the terminal buildings; the glaring lights, and the sight of British, German and Italian insignia on the airplanes parked nearly side by side at the edges of the tarmac, were a forcible reminder to Hale that Lisbon was indeed a neutral city.
The first thing he did after climbing down the wheeled metal stairs to the pavement was to sprint in to the Air France desk and ask when the flight to Istanbul was; he learned that one had left two hours earlier, and that the next was to leave at noon tomorrow.
By showing the clerk his passport, Hale was able to coax the man into checking the passenger list, and it turned out that Delphine St.-Simon had once again taken an empty seat on the earlier flight. And as he stumbled away from the desk, Hale wondered if that had been the real plan all along, if Moscow Centre had arranged for unoccupied seats to be available on the earlier flights, so that he and Elena would be able to exit countries hours sooner than they were officially scheduled to, as a measure to impede capture.
Aware that Razvedupr agents might already be looking for the delinquent Philippe St.-Simon or Marcel Gruey, he used the one-man "nothing right here" walk that Elena had taught him as he strode out of the terminal; and it might have been effective, for no one approached him as he made his way out to the cabstand.
The St.-Simon ticket had been paid for by Moscow Centre through Simex, and so Hale had easily enough money to take a taxi from the airdrome into Lisbon-but for several minutes he just stood on the curb between the brightly lit sidewalk and the dark street pavement, actually considering waiting at the airfield until tomorrow and catching the noon flight to Istanbul. He probably wouldn't be able to get on the same train to Samsun, and he would have no hope at all of finding the smuggler's boat to Batumi-but finally it was only the bleak certainty that she would be unhappy to see him, and that he would be unable to talk her into retreating west with him, that made him spit out a harsh curse and wave for one of the idling cabs.
"Take me to the best hotel in town," he told the driver in Spanish.
But in the crowded lobby of the Hotel Aviz on the Avenida de Libertade he learned that there was no apartment or hotel room to be had in the whole city; refugees from all of occupied Europe had found their way to Lisbon, hoping for transport onward to England, or North Africa, or America; many were Jewish, or Americans who had had to flee occupied countries when the United States had entered the war three weeks earlier, and it seemed to Hale that all the conversations he overheard, in French and German and Spanish and English, were about rumored Basque fishermen who could take passengers to Tangier, or Spanish freighters bound for Brazil, or a Greek passenger ship soon to sail for New York. No more refugees were being permitted by the Portuguese government to enter the country, and Hale realized that he would never have been issued a Lisbon ticket in the Marcel Gruey identity, even a supposedly round-trip one.
The hotel newsstand carried papers from all over the world-the New York Times, the Deutsche Allgemiene Zeitung, the Lavora Fascista-and Hale bought a copy of the London Daily Mail and found a corner to sit in and wait for the British Embassy to open.
When his stinging eyes finally grew too blurry to read the print at all, he found that he had for some minutes been trying to project his thoughts to Elena, perhaps somewhere over Majorca or Sardinia by now-Turn back, turn back.
The passport control officer at the British Embassy in Lisbon was a tired, cheerful man named Philip Johns. His collar was open and his tie was already loosened at eleven in the morning.
"My dear boy," he said to Hale, who was sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair on the other side of the desk, "Special Branch can operate in Malaya and the Far East colonies- Singapore, Hong Kong-but not in Portugal. And," he added, touching Hale's St.-Simon passport on the desk, "they certainly don't operate with phony passports in German-occupied countries. What sort of 'investigation' were you 'assisting' them with?" He sat back and grinned at Hale in irritable puzzlement. "Are you sure it was Special Branch?"
Hale had finally been relayed to Johns by the Repatriation Office on the second floor, and he was afraid that the Embassy staff's next step would be to turn him back out into the street. He wished Theodora had given him a place of conspiracy and a recognition signal, as the Razvedupr had. His only plan was to somehow get word of his situation to the solicitor Corliss in Cirencester, who would in turn surely contact Theodora.
"I'll tell you the truth." His basic cover story was bound to come out soon anyway, so Hale took a deep breath and said, "I was arrested for espionage in London, in September, at a Communist Party meeting in King Street. I was released into the custody of Special Branch, and I eluded them and fled the country. Illegally." He had hardly spoken a dozen words in English since the end of September, and he found that he had to think about his phrasing. "Since then I have been living in Paris. Now I want to go home and...facethemusic."
"I hope you'll forgive me for assuming that you've been working these past three months as a Soviet spy. This passport says you're an employee of Simex. It seems to me I've heard of Simex." He leaned forward and said, clearly, "I am the passport control officer. At the British Embassy. Are you sure you don't have anything to"-he paused, almost seeming embarrassed-"declare?"
Hale realized that Johns must be the British Secret Intelligence Service representative in Lisbon, and that the man was inviting him to admit to working for SIS himself. But in Paris he had learned about hermetic, parallel networks, and he didn't think Theodora would want him sharing any information here.
"Just that Special Branch will want me shipped home." He smiled wanly. "In shackles, I expect."
Johns nodded a number of times, then stood up from his desk and crossed the carpet to the tall window. For several moments he just stared down at the street. "Hitler could take Portugal, you know," he said at last, "just by picking up the telephone. But I suppose the place has its value for Germany too, as a common ground between the occupied countries and the rest of the world. God knows every country in the world has spy networks here, all concentrated and distinct like...bacteria cultures on a petri dish, and the Germans probably do a fair job of infiltrating them, monitoring them."
He slouched back to his desk and sat down. "When I was a boy," he said, not looking at Hale, "we had one of those Russian dolls that twist apart in the middle to reveal a smaller one inside, which also twists apart, and so on ad infinitum; it was years before we discovered that what we had thought was the last, smallest one could be opened too, and that there was one more tiny one inside it. Astonishment, uproar among all of us children...though probably there was still another to be discovered, several more, microscope required finally." He sighed and stared at the ceiling. "There's value in...duplication, in having another, having a more secret one inside the already secret one. You didn't deny being a Soviet spy."
"I'm sorry, I thought denial went without saying. Surely no one admits to that here."
"Surely not. Who is Delphine St.-Simon?"
Hale exhaled so abruptly that it was a grunt. "Have you-detained her?" he asked with sudden hope. Perhaps the Air France clerk had been wrong in saying that she had caught the earlier flight.
Johns's right eyebrow was arched. "No, she was off to Istanbul before we even registered that she had arrived, and we didn't attach any importance to her anyway until you showed up downstairs this morning. So who is she?"
Hale slumped in his chair. "I don't know. I suppose St.-Simon is a common name."
Johns was nodding again, though suddenly he seemed very tired. "Your case is, marginally, interesting enough for me to check your bona fides-or mala fide-with the Security Service, of which Special Branch is the executive arm, in London. Not my outfit, but I'll see who I can reach over the WT. In the meantime I can hardly place you under detention-I don't even have any documentation to indicate that you're a British subject."
"I'd be happy to sign something," said Hale eagerly, "attesting that I am."
"You want to be detained? Is it the Gestapo you're afraid of, or the NKVD?"
"I'd-certainly hate to come to the attention of either agency."
"But you want to go back to England in shackles." He shrugged. "To be preferred, under the circumstances, I do see. Look, sit in the lobby downstairs for a few hours, right? Anybody who queries you can be told that you're waiting for me. If I haven't found grounds to arrest you by nightfall, I'll have security chase you out."
"Fair enough," said Hale, struggling to his feet and wishing he'd had a spare shirt and socks to bring along.
Hale did wear shackles when he flew back to England, accompanied by two British soldiers and the King's Messenger and the diplomatic bag, aboard an RAF Catalina flying boat that took off from the consulate dock at Cabo Ruivo. The seaplane landed six hours later, chopping the tops off the low gray Channel waves just northeast of the Dungeness lighthouse and then chugging up on the plane's pontoons to the RAF dock at New Romney.
Hale was immediately bundled across a chilly, snow-drifted yard into the back of a military lorry, along with two Army corporals who wore automatic pistols on their belts and who had apparently got the idea that he was a German spy; a tarpaulin had been laced over iron poles to make a windowless boxy tent of the truck bed, illuminated by an electric bulb that swung over the benches as the truck's engine ground through the gears along some sequence of icy rural roads, and one of his guards solemnly passed across to Hale an unskilled and obscene pencil caricature of Hitler, and then one of Goebbels, and then one of Goering. Hale simply nodded politely after scrutinizing each one and handing it back with both manacled hands, and when the little ceremony was done his guards sat back with a satisfied air. Hale was nearly choking on the fumes of diesel exhaust, though it was cold enough for him to see his breath.
When the lorry finally halted and the engine was switched off, the tarpaulin was pulled away from the rear of the vehicle and Hale was helped down to stand on the deeply rutted gravel driveway of a sprawling Victorian mansion; a gated iron fence was stitched in black poles and barbed wire across the snow behind him, and a forest of pine trees hid the surrounding countryside. He could hear the stationary roaring motor of a generator, but there were no sounds of city or even suburban traffic. When he was forcibly turned toward the house and kicked into a march, he noticed the bright metal filaments of new aerials sprouting from the snowy roof, and iron bars on several, but not all, of the windows. His manacled hands were clasped in front of him as if in prayer.
He was interrogated in what might have been a dining room-a green baize cloth was draped over a trestle table in front of a tall stone fireplace, and pale sections of the wood floor indicated where vast carpets had once lain; and the empty room echoed when one of the officers at the table asked him for his name and date of birth.
"Andrew Hale," said Hale, swaying with exhaustion and wondering if it would be rude to ask for a chair. "January 6, 1922."
"When did you join the Communist Party?"
"Last semester sometime-spring of last year. At Oxford. My solicitor can clear all this up." Corliss would surely contact Theodora, as he had done before. "His name is Corliss, and he's in Cirencester-"