The only thing I’d insist on, when I gave my briefing, was a full and comprehensive warning to Eleanor: your husband has enemies who want him dead. I’d taken care of one, but I was leaving American shores. She’d have to take over the watch.
But I trusted she could do it.
It occurred to me that when I pulled the trigger tonight—first on the marksman, then on Alexei—I had not once intoned my desperate prayer of Don’t miss. Perhaps Eleanor’s lesson had finally sunk home: the knowledge that even if I’d missed, I’d have gotten up, fired again, kept going until I succeeded. Until I saved the American president; until I saved myself.
Kostia was still looking at me, gaze urgent enough to burn. What do you need? he was telling me. How can I help? I just nestled into his chest, floating somewhere between warmth and cold, between the dregs of old fury and the restlessness of a finished hunt, burrowing into this oasis of warmth and safety before I’d have to rise and make my report. I saw the marksman lying in the creek, an enigma to the end. I saw Alexei’s eyes staring up at the gibbous moon, empty as glass. I wondered what the official excuse would be when he failed to return to the Soviet Union. Would they say he’d defected or—
My eyes snapped suddenly wide at the word defected, half stupefied though I was by the warmth creeping through my limbs and the leak of adrenaline seeping out of them. “Kostia, where have you been tonight?” He’d skipped the farewell dinner and he’d clearly come to some decision during that time, but how?
“The Soviet embassy,” he said into my shoulder blade. “I’ve been heading back there every week, whenever I had a few hours free. I needed a Cyrillic typewriter.”
I blinked. “A Cyrillic typewriter?”
“I can’t give you diamonds.” Kostia nodded at the glittering heap on my desk, raising himself on one elbow to reach a pile of paper sitting on the nightstand. “All I could think of was this. I finished it tonight.”
I snaked an arm out from under the coverlet to take the pages, reading the title at the top in neatly typed Cyrillic letters. “ ‘Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Ukraine’s accession to Russia in 1654, and the activities of the Pereyaslav Council: a student dissertation by Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko,’ ” I read in astonishment. “You . . . you retyped my dissertation?”
“Pecked it out with two fingers.” Kostia kissed the back of my neck. “You had blood all over the last one.”
I wondered if this had been intended as a goodbye gift. Maybe, as he typed through my final footnotes tonight, he’d changed his mind about leaving. Or maybe finishing it had been a way to keep himself from turning toward the life that beckoned here.
Time enough to talk about that later, once we had real privacy.
“Thank you,” I whispered, smoothing my hand over the pages. The marksman had given me diamonds. My husband had utterly ignored anything I told him I wanted, because he always knew better.
My sniper partner had retyped my dissertation with two fingers on a borrowed machine.
Kostia was sliding toward sleep in the way that snipers did, still full of questions, and full of tension too, but the body taking any opportunity for rest that it could. Careful not to wake him, I slid out of bed and into some fresh clothes, wondering if we’d all still be departing for Canada tomorrow or not.
As I stood sorting the bullets from the diamond jewelry and those odd little rough rocks I’d taken from the marksman’s pocket, I found an unfamiliar lump. In Rock Creek Park, I’d automatically collected the shells from my shots that killed Alexei and the marksman—my hand had evidently swept up another lump of metal from the dead leaves. I blinked in bemusement at the modest gold signet ring with tiny dirtied chips of diamond, sized for a man’s finger, metal dulled as though it had been buried from sunlight for decades. Inside the band were worn English letters—I couldn’t make out the first, but the second was definitely an R.