—Kostia
“Are you all right?” My mother’s hand flew to my forehead. “You look so strange—”
“I’m all right, Mama.” I looked up from my partner’s letter with a smile that felt like it stretched all the way down to my toes. “You just brought me the first good news I’ve had in months.”
Kostia alive. My partner, my shadow, my other half. Some dark bottomless ache in me eased, as though one of my legs had gone to sleep and now blood was flowing back through it, prickling me with the painful yet welcome sensation that it was still there and whole.
Kostia, alive.
I hugged my mother so hard her toes left the ground. “Put on the finest dress you’ve got in that bag, Mamochka. You’re going to see everything in Moscow this week, starting with the ballet.”
“Ballet!” Mama chuckled. “Remember your ballerina friend Vika? I heard she walked out of a starring role in Odessa to drive a T-34 in the tank corps! A ballerina becoming a tank driver, the things this war does to us. Thank goodness you’re home from the front . . .”
I didn’t tell her that all I wanted was to go back there. Collect my partner, get him assigned to my new platoon, and then go back to war. Because the job wasn’t done yet, and right now I wasn’t good for anything else.
“GOOD NEWS, LYUDMILA Mikhailovna! You’re headed back to war.”
I blinked exhaustion-gritty eyes, surprised. I had served a twenty-four-hour shift on instruction duty at the training center, done my rounds of the various personnel offices inquiring if Kostia had reached the Moscow military district yet, then helped organize four trucks of newly arrived weaponry. And now here I was summoned to the first secretary’s office, looking at an entire cluster of men, some in uniform and some in suits. “My orders are in? Orders to the front?”
“Not that war.” The secretariat laughed. “The most important war of all—the war of propaganda.”
I stared at him in utter confusion.
“You’re going too fast,” a familiar voice said behind me, and I turned to see Alexei’s smiling face. I hadn’t seen him since Sevastopol or thought of him since Petrov told me he’d been evacuated. I’d assumed he was off polishing his shiny new decoration and angling for a better post. Now he was here?
“Hello, kroshka.” He kissed both my cheeks in breezy greeting. “We’re going to America.”
The Soviet Delegation:
Day 1
August 27, 1942
Washington, D.C.
Chapter 24
If there was anything the marksman disliked, it was having to reassure nervous clients. You want to be soothed, go see a headshrinker. He didn’t let his impatience show, strolling down a hot Washington sidewalk with Pocket Square, but he was annoyed. He’d already given the man an update this morning before the White House breakfast; a second meeting was excessive. He preferred to keep contact with his employers minimal, for God’s sake—the fewer points of connection, the safer they’d all be. Yet here he was, being required to soothe and reassure.
“We need to know.” Pocket Square glanced behind him, perspiring more than ever. He was already in agony because the marksman had refused to meet in some dark whiskey-scented bar to discuss all this, but bars had eavesdroppers, which was why the marksman kept his business discussions outside. “You said you’d know more after the welcome breakfast. Well?”
“Things are in hand.” The marksman picked up the pace as they turned the final corner toward the Soviet embassy. In one hour, the Soviet delegation would address the nation on live radio.
“But we want details,” Pocket Square hissed.