Except his note tonight—written, I realized hazily, in the same writing that had scrawled so many epithets in Cyrillic. His latest note, saying: We will meet again.
“Mila, I’ve been looking for you—” Alexei caught me by the arm as I came staggering out of the bushes onto one of the gravel paths. “I was going to tell you, Kostia is . . .” But my husband stopped, staring at the marks on my throat, the knife in my hand.
“The man we called William Jonson tried to kill President Roosevelt,” I managed to say, and saw the look of utter horror on Alexei’s face as I began half running and half stumbling after the man with the mud-colored eyes.
I SHOULDN’T HAVE done it that way. I should have stopped in my tracks and started screaming until White House personnel came running. But I’d already warned Eleanor; it was up to her and the Secret Service to shield the president now. The man who’d tried to kill him was getting away, fast, and I didn’t want to waste even the precious moments it would take me to explain what had happened to White House security. And it wasn’t in me to stop and scream when death reared its head around me and bullets threatened to sing—everything I’d learned in a year at the front told me not to stop and scream, but to run in silence.
So I went after him.
Alexei hurried along beside me as I arrowed through the dark gardens toward the front of the White House. My husband was pouring out words in a disjointed torrent—“He said he’d knock you out, get some embarrassing pictures of you like you were drunk. I just wanted to see you taken down a peg. I didn’t know, Mila, I didn’t know he was—” and even with my attention fractured into slivers, I took it in for what it was. If an assassin were looking for someone to take the blame for a presidential hit, a girl sniper from the Soviet Union fit the bill. And if you needed a way to get to that girl sniper, her disgruntled husband fit the bill, too.
“Mila, you have to believe me, I’d never be part of something like this, I don’t have a damned death wish, I wouldn’t piss about with American assassination plots—”
I kept thinking we’d run into presidential bodyguards, White House staff, whoever was responsible for protecting these grounds. NKVD would have had any assassin up against a wall and half his fingernails yanked out by now. But there was no knot of guards with a handcuffed figure, no matter how my eyes hunted, and I wondered if someone had taken care of that. A change of roster to clear his path . . .
Even so, he couldn’t go far. These grounds were fenced.
And then I realized someone had taken care of that for him too, as I came out through the dark gardens to the front of the White House where the Soviet embassy cars were pulled up for our departure . . . and saw, beyond them, a blue Packard driving fast but not suspiciously fast for the entry gates.
Stop and scream—that’s what I could have done, even then. But the car would be through the gates and gone before anyone could hear me out, and I was still in the grip of that raging imperative to fight, not stop. This man had been under my nose for weeks, and I’d missed him. Missed a threat to Eleanor’s husband, to the whole fragile alliance that was the only thing that would save my homeland, and now I had him on the run. I couldn’t have stopped myself going after him if he’d leaned out the driver’s side window and shot me in the head; I’d still have crawled blood-blind and dying after that Packard.
So I whirled and grabbed Alexei by the lapels, feeling an instant’s twisted howl of frustration that Kostia wasn’t here at my side tonight of all nights. “Alexei,” I panted, dragging him toward the nearest embassy car, where the White House stewards were loading up the last of the delegation gifts. “That man nearly made you into an assassination’s patsy. Help me now and you become the hero instead.”
I swear I saw calculation go through his eyes. Even now he was looking for the angle that benefited him most. “What—”
In the open trunk of the embassy car, I saw a familiar mahogany box: the twin pistols from Chicago, complete with two magazines of .45-caliber ammunition. I yanked the box out, slung it under my arm, banged the trunk, and stumbled around toward the passenger side. I’d never in my life had cause to regret not learning to drive, but I regretted it now. Too late. “Get the president into a bunker if he isn’t already, and tell your people to ask who drove a blue Packard onto the grounds,” I said to the nearest astonished White House steward, then collapsed into the seat. “Alexei,” I roared, slamming the door, “get in and drive.”