" Moscow," said Elena, and Hale remembered her saying, I will always take what Moscow gives me. "Moscow Centre wants this to happen, this 'playback'?"

"Does a fencer want to be disarmed or break his blade when he does the passata sotto, the low pass? It is the common event. Playback is the natural last stage of any spy network. At first a couple of agents are arrested, and their motive for cooperating with the Gestapo at this stage is simply fear of torture and death, and the hope that cooperation will buy them mercy; so they use the security passwords and signals to lure other agents into capture. And these newly captured agents follow the example of their duplicitous companions, with uncanny ease, and soon the whole network, though unchanged in its routines and codes, has switched polarity-the network goes on with its radio work uninterrupted, but now it is conducted by the Gestapo, intending to deceive Moscow and discover her secret urgencies. In the agents a mood of mocking cynicism quickly replaces, or evolves from, their previous principles and ideals. And for the agents who have switched sides, for the best of them, at least, the governing passion now is no longer ideology but a disattached, professional pride in the art itself. If they survive, such agents can be reclaimed at a later date, can still be useful, in limited ways."

"What are we...hoping for?" asked Hale. Dutifully he tried to assess what information he had learned in these five weeks abroad, for clearly the time had come for him to get out of France and find a way to return to England-but Elena would never accompany him on that trip, and so he was hoping that Cassagnac would provide him with some justifiable reason to stay on in France, to stay with her.

"You are a radio operator who was born in Palestine." Cassagnac's pouchy eyes were merry. "Deny it as they will, Moscow does value the assistance of a few people like yourself, albeit on the old illegal basis-with the left hand, at arm's length, unacknowledged and deniable. If you stay out of the action in this current wave of purges, Centre will certainly go on using you...for at least another couple of years. And if by then you are alert enough to see the next purge coming, you may hide through that one as well. I am one of the old illegals, reduced now to working in my own country; but I hope to live to see real communism achieved in the world, and to that end I disappear from time to time, and I see to it that my skills are never indispensable-it is the indispensable agents who are always the first to be purged, because their very existence proves an inadequacy in the Party as a homogenous whole."

Hale blinked at the man. "You're saying don't trust the Party," he said levelly, hoping Elena was paying attention and that her faith in her corporate "husband" might be shaken.

"Not at all, comrade, don't misquote me. I'm saying the Party can be trusted absolutely to do what's best for humanity-and if you can find no way within the rules to avoid a death-sentence, you should trust the Party to be doing the best thing, and cooperate. Maly agreed with this, and obediently assented to his own death."

"That's right," said Elena slowly, nodding. "If I'm to die for the Party, I would prefer that it be at the Party's hand. So Lot and I will be obedient but not evident for a while."

Hale realized that he couldn't run back to England now, and abandon poor idealistic Elena in this insane chess game. "I'm glad to understand you correctly," he said. "That's what we'll do." But he drained his brandy and poured himself another full glass, understanding for the first time in his life something of what drunkards sought in alcohol.

Cassagnac rapped the table with his knuckle, and he said abruptly to Elena, "Thistles, flowers-plants; did Maly ever talk about such things with you, my dear?"

She stared at him. "I don't think so. He cooked a dinner for us once, he might have talked about herbs."

Cassagnac crinkled his eyes and nodded, then turned his penetrating gaze on Hale. "You were recruited in a garden. Why were you there?"

"I was in Piccadilly Circus -oh! the woman, before that. The botanical garden at Oxford." I was naked, and I hid myself, he thought. "I don't know. It was across the road from my college." He wondered helplessly if a new secret chemical weapon were based on a plant extract, the way some medicines were; he had read that aspirin was derived from willow bark.

Cassagnac stared from one of them to the other for a few seconds, then exhaled a laugh and tossed back his head. "Forgive me, I was instructed weeks ago to ask you both this at the earliest opportunity. And now I have." He pulled an envelope from inside his jacket and slid it across the table to Elena. "I have received no other instructions regarding you," he said, "so I certainly have no reason not to give you this lot of American dollars and French francs and deutschmarks; it should sustain you for several weeks. When I may next be in contact with Centre, I will relay your ignorance of botanical matters, and your request for instructions, and no doubt I will at that time be given orders having to do with you."

"I think it would be best if we-did not meet with you again," said Hale.

Cassagnac shrugged and smiled. "The arch directly to your right will lead you up a set of stairs to the basement of an ironmonger's shop in the Rue de Savoie. No one will be surprised to see you appear. Buy a belt there, before you go out onto the street. You won't forget?"

Through steamy windows at the back of the shop, Hale could see that it was raining outside, and water plunked into pails on the wooden floor. Hammers and shovels and tool kits crowded most of the racks under the dim electric bulbs, but when Hale asked about belts he was directed to a bin up by the street windows, next to a stack of rusty lightning rods. Elena lifted a belt from the bin and handed it to him.

Aside from pictures of the Egyptian looped cross in history books, this black iron belt buckle was the first ankh that Hale had ever seen. It looked too crude and bohemian even for his neglected embusque cover, but it was the only sort of belt the shop sold, so he obediently bought it; and he wasn't pleased to look at it out in the lowering gray daylight and see that a stylized pattern of circles had been burned decoratively into the leather strap. Thunder rumbled away on the north side of the river.

"You should be the one to wear it," he told Elena as they paused on the sidewalk under the shop's awning; rain was drumming loudly on the canvas over their heads and tapping rings in the puddled gutter. "I'll bet it's a woman's belt."

"No," she said, "look at it, it buckles right over left-it's a man's belt."

Hale nodded and shrugged irritably, and only when he glanced at her a moment later, and saw her deadpan expression, did he realize that of course the belt could be worn either way.

"I don't think either of us should wear it," he said, his breath steaming away in the cold fresh air. "It's conspicuous-and since he insisted on it, it must be some kind of recognition signal, and he said himself that we don't want to be recognized for a while."

Elena stepped quickly out into the rain, and Hale followed, stuffing the belt into his coat pocket. She started to say something, then paused; finally she squinted back at him and said, "The guardian angel he mentioned-did you get the impression that it was real, or a figure of speech?"

"A figure of speech," he said tightly. Implicit in his tone were the words, of course.

"Oh." His answer seemed to have disconcerted her. She stopped in the rainy street and turned around to take hold of his shoulders and stare straight into his eyes; and, in English, she said, "'Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.'"

"I'm missing this," he said helplessly, in French. He blinked away cold water that was dripping from his eyebrows. "That's from the Book of Job-and not the Catholic Douay Version. It doesn't say 'Declare' in the Catholic version." He pushed a lock of sodden blond hair back from his forehead with his free hand, while she just kept frowning up at him. "We should have bought an umbrella back there," he said at last, awkwardly. "Though probably all they had were iron umbrellas."

She let go of his shoulders and resumed trudging across the wet pavement toward the Boulevard St.-Germain and their current home. Amber lights glowed behind the leaded glass of shop windows, but there were no other pedestrians out on the street. "It was an Englishman," she said over her shoulder, "no doubt a Protestant, who quoted it to a group of us in Albacete. He'd been pretending to be a Comintern recruit in the International Brigades, but actually he was a spy, a member of the British secret service. The Party had caught and exposed him, and Andre Marty shot him through the forehead a moment after he quoted that Bible verse; Marty used to be the leader of the Party here in France, before he went to Spain to command the Brigades. Nine-millimeter Luger. Blood flew forward as well as back, and some got on my dress. I was twelve...or thirteen or so, and I was a wireless telegrapher for the Brigades."

"Good God." Hale shivered, and not just because of the cold rainwater that was battering his face, as he lengthened his stride to catch up to her. "I'm-that must have been horrible. But why quote that verse to me now?"

"I can work a radio," she said. "I can copy and send International Morse, and I've been the assigned WT agent in several Soviet networks before this: here, and in Belgium, and back then, in Albacete. But in this current configuration I'm the one who travels around and meets couriers, and Centre wants each network to have one agent whose sole job is to manage the ciphers and the radio, and they don't want anyone else besides that person to do any sending; their operators in Moscow quickly learned the characteristics of your 'fist,' as they call it, your particular style on the telegraph key, and they'd get suspicious if I or anyone but you was to do any of the sending for our network now. But I could. And I think-I'm certain-that, if I'd been working the radio a week ago, we wouldn't have got the accelerated signal and the burned floor."

Hale nodded nervously, not wanting to discuss that night. "And that's why you quoted Job to me."

"Marty killed hundreds of Comintern agents in Spain, on the pretext that they had Trotskyite sympathies. But I think he was trying to weed out agents who had gradually become members of a transcendent order, a category so subtle and secret that the agents themselves didn't even know they were in it-that is, didn't know that they were in it too. I think there are more than one of these higher orders, I think there are partisan divisions. That English agent that Marty killed had been driving around the airfield at Guadalajara in a jeep, taking photographs-but it seemed he was taking pictures away from the airfield! Guadalajara was a Moorish city once, Moslem-its old name was Wadi al-Hijarah, Arabic for River of Stones, and the campesinos say black basalt stones walk in those hills at night. The Englishman may not even have known he was involved in something bigger than the British secret service...though he did seem to mean something when he quoted the verse from Job."

A roar in the sky that Hale had thought at first was thunder grew louder and droning, and then he flinched and glanced up as a tri-motor Junkers 52 sailed heavily across the gray sky several hundred feet overhead, its broad silver wings rocking as it banked in for imminent touchdown at Orly.

"The verse from Job," he said too loudly, embarrassed at having been startled by the plane. "Well, it means nothing to me, besides Yahweh telling Job, rudely, that if the world is run according to any rules at all, those rules are beyond Job's comprehension. Let's move along faster here, we're getting soaked."

"If the belt is a recognition signal," she went on doggedly, almost pleadingly, "I don't think we need to worry about its being one that would be recognized by any mere Razvedupr or Gestapo agents."

"Except Cassagnac," Hale objected, "and whoever told him about it; and the man in London who told me to say I'd bought a belt in an ironmonger's shop in Paris, as a password phrase." He smiled and reached out and squeezed her shoulder under the sodden sweater. "Your angel will be able to recognize it even in my pocket."

"Eyeless in Gaza!" she burst out in English, suddenly very angry. Hale stepped back from her in bewilderment; this was another quote from an English poem- Milton? Samson Agonistes?-and Gaza was a town in Palestine. Elena turned away from him and strode on ahead, and Hale thought her voice was choked with tears when she called back to him, "You be sure to quote the Catholic version, when they shoot you."

Hale splashed hurriedly through the puddles at her heels, not at all sure of what she had meant; did she suspect that he too was a member of the British secret service? Surely not-he had almost forgotten it himself, until Cassagnac's talk today had made him consider fleeing back to England, and he was certain that she would instantly turn him in if she ever suspected that he was a spy. No, she had simply seen him as one of these hypothetical agents who unwittingly begin to...what, operate in a higher category, like her friend Maly, and perhaps like herself.

The thought made him consider again the idea of running, of finding his way back to England. If it had been one of the big Focke Achgelis helicopters, instead of a plane, with big rotor blades turning slowly enough to be seen...Resentfully, he thought of his year's-end childhood nightmares, which Theodora had been so interested in; and then he remembered his and Elena's predawn clochard walk ten days ago, which had somehow transported them from one island in the Seine to the far end of the other-You were born for this, she had said that night-and he recalled the terrible near-music in the earphones the next night, and the weirdly scorched floor...

The implications of all this were simply too morbid and medieval to be true, or at least to be consistently true-he had been vaguely hoping that all these things would recede without consequence or sequel, and he had convinced himself that the emotion he had felt, when the radio had gone mad and the wind had been rattling the shingles outside the apartment window on that night, had not been fearful eagerness.