Well, let him thrash.
I look back at the rearview mirror, just in time to catch Fox watching me again. This time he holds my gaze for a beat or two, because we’re the only ones left awake inside this peculiar world—even Kip dozes off against the window glass—and because it seems we might be in love.
At last Fox presses the brakes and turns off onto an unpaved road. The car lurches and wallows, waking everybody up. Grunts and groans float through the back of the seat from the trunk. Gregory starts to cry and Iris finds the strength to gather him up in her arms.
“Poah Thathdy,” Claire says solemnly around her thumb, which she’s stuck into her mouth.
“Poor Daddy,” I agree.
“We’re driving on sand!” Jack announces, and sure enough, when I look through the window at the blue-tinted world, that sliver of time between sunset and twilight, I see nothing but pale dunes and tall seagrass.
“You’re sure this is the place?” I ask.
“Yes,” Fox replies.
He stops the car and tells us to wait.
“Wait for what? I want to get out of here. I need some air.”
“I’m just going to scout ahead for a moment. Could you pass me the flashlight under the seat?”
Claire wriggles onto the floor of the car and finds it for him. It’s funny how the kids just trust him, this stranger who killed a man and then kidnapped them in a KGB car. I hope they didn’t see him do the deed. No doubt Fox did his best to conceal it from them.
“Thank you,” he says gravely to Claire. He opens the door and lights the flashlight, covering the bulb with his palm so it’s not so bright. Before he leaves, he ducks his head back in and says to me, “There’s a gun in the glove compartment if you need it.”
Do I need to mention that—among other things—Fox showed me how to fire a gun? It was the day before we left for Moscow. We borrowed Orlovsky’s car and drove in bizarre zigzags through the city for an hour to throw off any possible tail. （Who’s going to tail us? I asked, and Fox just shrugged and said you never know, you should always assume somebody is watching you.） At last, just as I was about to ask him to pull over so I could throw up my breakfast in the gutter, we zoomed out of the city and wound our way into the hills somewhere, until Fox decided we were far enough from any living thing and pulled over.
We used a tree for a target. I didn’t know a thing about guns, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a good eye and a steady hand. Fox showed me how to aim it and fire it, how to load more bullets if I needed to. I said I hoped I wouldn’t need to fire the thing at all, and Fox sat me down and opened up a couple of bottles of lemonade and delivered me this lecture on how guns were a last resort—they were like an admission you had failed at the finer arts of espionage. But if he failed, and I failed, then he sure as the devil didn’t want me to die for it. He said this sincerely, and I believed him. Then we packed up our little picnic and went back to Rome.
Now we sat in the gloaming on a sand dune on the Baltic coast somewhere—and yes, I could find the Baltic Sea on a map, but only because I’d spent four years poring over those charts of Europe that appeared daily in the newspapers throughout the war. I pondered whether I should reach over the seat and retrieve that gun from the glove compartment, just in case, even though I hated the cold, lethal feel of a gun in my hand, the terrible foreboding that something might go wrong and I’d end up killing somebody, possibly myself.
I hear the echo of Fox’s words in my head. If I fail and you fail, I sure as the devil don’t want you to die for it.
But I’m sitting in a carful of precious children. I can’t take that chance.
Outside the window, a light jogs toward us.
“Thank God,” I whisper.
Fox comes right up to the rear door, where I’m sitting, and opens it. “Come out,” he says.
But there’s something funny about his voice, and when I look up, I realize this man isn’t Fox at all. He holds a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, which he points at my head.
Sasha
July 1952
Near Riga, Latvia
He recognizes the woman across the table, though he can’t remember where or how. Some debriefing, perhaps, when they first arrived in the Soviet Union? Or later—some lecture or training session? Or both. She’s extremely attractive in an unremarkable way, like a woman in a magazine advertisement, each feature flawless and bland. She’s not wearing cosmetics, not even lipstick, and her dark hair sits in a tidy knot at the nape of her neck. Not the tiniest emotion manifests itself on her face—maybe that’s why it’s so forgettable. An asset in her line of work, he reminds himself, and a skill he was never able to master. He always had to get by on his other strengths.