At eight o’clock precisely, the telephone rings on the table in the operations room. Lyudmila lifts the receiver. The line is secure, or at least as secure as Lyudmila can possibly ensure. On the other end is an operative at a telephone in one of the safe houses Lyudmila maintains for operations such as this one.
“Ivanova,” she snaps.
“The birds left the nest this morning at a quarter past seven,” the man tells her.
“Good. You must follow at a distance, do you hear me? He cannot know your man is there.”
“Affirmative.”
“You are not to allow anyone to interfere with the progress of that car, remember. You may take whatever measures are necessary, including lethal force, to ensure it remains unmolested. I will deal with the consequences.”
“Affirmative.”
A firm click comes down the line. Lyudmila replaces the receiver and sips her tea to calm her nerves. So far, so good. She opens a manila folder from her surveillance team, which contains the transcripts from the night before. She pulls them out. They’re rough, typed out without much punctuation or spelling by a translator on a headset, and sometimes Lyudmila has to puzzle out their meaning. Still, having examined the transcripts of the past few nights, she knows she’s unlikely to encounter any interesting information. She can tell, for example, that Mr. and Mrs. Fox are either exactly what they claim—a pair of newlyweds very much in love—or else very much aware of the microphones in the walls. She suspects the latter. The words and phrases are almost too loving, too cinematic. What husband is possibly so attentive to his bride’s every need? What wife is really so enthusiastic about the act of intercourse? Lyudmila regards the typed lines before her with cynicism and a touch of salt, and without any expectation of surprise.
A moment later, she reaches for the telephone.
No one plays innocent like Vashnikov, which is remarkable because he looks exactly like a pig. “This is shocking,” he says. “I am surprised at you, Ivanova, for not ensuring they were better guarded. Anything might have happened!”
“We both know they were perfectly well guarded. We both know that your man ordered mine to stand down.”
“You should have them arrested, for dereliction of duty and for lying.”
“What were you looking for, Vashnikov? Perhaps something you didn’t find at HAMPTON’s apartment? Something you suspect Mrs. Fox might have collected for safekeeping?”
“An interesting theory, if the Foxes were not so entirely engrossed in fucking each other instead.”
“You’ll never be promoted head of the agency, Vashnikov. Your mind only goes in one direction. Never mind. I’ll find out. Whatever it is, the Americans will be carrying it. And my men won’t bungle the job.”
She hangs up the phone. Someone knocks on the door immediately, as if waiting for her to finish.
“Come in,” she says.
Dubrovskaya enters with a telephone message from Kedrov, who arrived on schedule at the hospital this morning to accompany Mrs. Digby, her baby, and her sister in an ambulance to Rizhsky Station, where a train will take them to Riga.
Lyudmila sits back in her chair and exhales with relief.
Now all she can do is wait, like a spider in the center of an exquisite web.
Ruth
July 1952
Moscow
Wouldn’t you know it, the clouds push in around seven o’clock in the morning. From the back seat of the car I watch the gray stuffing creep over the summer-blue sky, swallowing all joy. How dismal Moscow looks without the sun. The lonesome turrets and bleak apartment blocks stand tragically still while the gloom overcomes them.
I turn to Fox and make some crack about the dying of the light. He doesn’t even smile. Inside his jacket are the passports and identification papers and the gun he retrieved from the dead drop yesterday. I guess the weight of them killed his sense of humor. His face looks as it did the day I met him, sculpted by a blunt hatchet. The pale, colorless eyes reflect the world back like a pair of tiny mirrors.
At the hospital, the lumpy white ambulance waits in the drive, engine rumbling. I don’t like all the fuss; some human instinct recoils against accepting this extravagant Soviet hospitality when we’re only going to betray them with it. I hurry inside with Kedrov. He wears the same dark suit as before, the same expression of pained diplomacy—diplomacy at all costs—diplomacy if it kills him. We turn down a couple of corridors until we reach the waiting room in the maternity wing, where Iris sits in a wheelchair, wanly holding Gregory, who screams bloody murder. Nearby, the English-speaking doctor scribbles on a clipboard. He looks up fiercely at me and nods.