“Not yet, pumpkin,” I tell her. “Come with me.”
I help her up with one arm, while my other arm holds Gregory. She leans heavily on me as we walk to the door. The ticket clerk glances up, watches us for a second or two, then returns to his book. We pass through the doorway and pause on the steps. The station seems to be on the outskirts of town, and the nearby streets are quiet, except for a large black car creeping down the road that fronts the station. I stand where I am, supporting Iris with my arm. The sunlight glints off the car’s windows. It looks just like the vehicles we saw speeding through the Moscow streets, big sleek black machines that Fox told me—under his breath—belonged to the KGB.
The car slows and stops. My heart might pound right out of my chest. Iris’s hand grips my wrist. Every instinct screams at me to duck back inside, into the shadows of the waiting room, but I force myself to remain just outside the entrance, under the shallow portico—visible if you’re looking for me.
An eternity passes before the driver’s door opens and a man steps out. He wears a dark suit and a fedora atop his dark hair. He closes the door and turns to face us. His big shoulders strain the jacket of his suit, the sleeves of which stop a couple of inches above each wrist.
My knees start to buckle. I have to lock them to stay upright, and even then I wobble. But the man’s already started forward from the car. He climbs the steps two at a time. I catch the flash of his pale eyes before I hand Iris off to him. He guides her carefully down the steps to the waiting car. I follow them, cradling Gregory in both arms.
“It’s going to be all right,” I tell my nephew. “We’re going to be just fine.”
Lyudmila
July 1952
Moscow
When the secure telephone rings in Lyudmila’s basement operations room, the caller is not the person Lyudmila expects.
“It’s your daughter, Comrade Ivanova,” says Anna Dubrovskaya, a little warily.
“My daughter! She’s supposed to be in school!” The astonished words pop out before Lyudmila can stop them, and this failure of self-control shocks her further. She takes a deep breath and says, more calmly, “Connect her, please.”
“Mama?” comes Marina’s voice.
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, Marina. Where are you?”
“I’m at Kip Dubinin’s apartment,” she says.
Lyudmila’s so stunned, she thinks at first that she didn’t hear Marina correctly. She thinks maybe she’s heard certain words echoing from her own head, because she’s so deeply immersed in this operation that she can’t tell the difference between what’s outside her head and what’s inside. “What did you say?” she gasps.
“Kip Dubinin. Mama, you have to help me. He and his brother never came to school today, and somebody said he saw them drive by in some kind of KGB car early this morning—”
“Who said that?”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“Yes, it does!” Lyudmila thunders.
“Well, I won’t tell you!” Marina says, in her calm, defiant voice that reminds Lyudmila of Dmitri.
Lyudmila grinds her teeth together. It’s a bad habit and she’ll reprimand herself later, when she’s finished with this daughter of hers—when she’s cooled her mind and encircled these strange, impossible pieces of information and brought them under control. “Why,” she says coldly, “are you at the Dubinins’ apartment when you are supposed to be at school?”
“I told you. Something’s happened to them. I just had a feeling in my gut, Mama, when Nik—when the person told me that he was sure he saw them in the back seat of a KGB car this morning, on the way to school. And then Kip never came to class, and he never came to lunch, and Oleg in second form said that Jack never came to class either. So after lunch I left—”
“You left school. In the middle of the day! What were you thinking, Marina?”
“I was worried! And I got to the apartment and the door was unlocked, Mama, and nobody was inside but everything was messy, like it had been searched.”
Marina pauses. She seems out of breath, not from exertion but from emotion and from speaking too much and too fast. Now she waits for her mother to say something.
What on earth is Lyudmila going to say to her?
“Tell me, Marina. Why do you care so much about young Dubinin?”
Another pause crackles down the secure line. Only it’s not so secure, is it? A line is only as secure as the connection at the other end, and the Dubinins’ telephone is, of course, bugged. Lyudmila realizes this fact the same way a snowball hits your chest—hard and cold, enough to break your ribs. She wants to bite off her tongue. If only she weren’t so occupied by the operation—if only Marina didn’t surprise her like this—she should have grasped the danger instantly. Probably Vashnikov is listening this second!