“Yes, yes. Orlovsky told me all the stories.”
“Well, it left behind a legacy of fear. Nobody trusts anybody. So when Digby found himself adrift, cut off, his guiding purpose vanished from his life—well, he went off the rails. That was the summer of 1948. We were already on his trail at that point, waiting for him to make a move. I figured that if he broke down completely, we might be able to rescue him and possibly even turn him, risky as it was.”
“But he disappeared instead,” I say. “That was when he defected, wasn’t it? In the autumn of 1948, when he vanished with Iris and the kids.”
Fox fingers the edges of the papers in his hands. “One of our agents confirmed they’d arrived in Russia in November of 1948. Seems they were first taken to a sort of secure city outside of Moscow for a year or two, to make sure they were clean—that we hadn’t turned him—and then he seems to have been given an academic job of some kind, lecturing on foreign affairs, probably doing some instruction work with the KGB.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Local assets,” he says.
“So what’s changed? Why did Iris ask me for help? And what makes you think she wants to come back home altogether?”
Fox stands and walks to the window that overlooks the courtyard. In the manner of ancient buildings, the window is a small one, the stone walls thick, so you must stand close to really look out properly. He’s still holding the envelope and the documents in one hand, while he sets them both on his hips. Someone’s opened the window to allow in some fresh air, and the smell of lemons drifts up bright and clean from the lemon tree.
“A little over a year ago,” he says, “as you might have heard, a pair of English diplomats disappeared from a pleasure cruise off the coast of France—”
“I knew it!” I exclaim.
“—both of whom had held a series of extremely well-placed and sensitive positions within the British Foreign Office. One was already under investigation as a spy for the Soviets. The other we didn’t know about, only suspected. They successfully escaped through France and Switzerland and arrived safely in Moscow a few days later, and that’s when we first saw signs of trouble.”
“But I don’t understand. If all three of them were loyal Soviet agents, what danger could Burgess and Maclean have brought with them?”
“We don’t know.” Fox turns to face her. “It could be anything. Whatever it was, their arrival seems to have precipitated some kind of crisis. Not long after, we understood that the Digbys were in trouble. Afraid for their lives, in fact.”
“How did you learn that?”
“I’m afraid I can’t be more specific.” He holds out the envelope. I rise from the couch and take it. “I’ve spent a number of years drawing up various plans for a possible extraction of the Digby family—”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“Why would you want him back?”
For a moment, he looks flummoxed. Then he says, “Because of the information he could bring back with him, of course. If he wanted out, of course we’d try to do it. The problem is how. It’s not easy to get agents inside Russia—the Soviets are paranoid to a man. And now there’s the additional complication of Mrs. Digby’s pregnancy, which brings new and unacceptable risk to the original schemes. Then I read again what Mrs. Digby wrote to you, and I realized she might have been offering us a solution.”
“You mean me? I’m the solution?”
“If you’d stayed put in New York, as I asked, I would have had the opportunity to discuss this with you there. Thank God our man was keeping a close eye on you. You might have compromised the whole operation if you’d managed to get any further along.”
“What operation?”
“This one,” he says. “In which Iris Digby’s sister applies for special permission to travel to Moscow in order to care for Mrs. Digby during the weeks surrounding the delivery of her expected baby, an ordeal with which Mrs. Digby has a history of serious complications. Mrs. Digby will then be transported out of Moscow to receive medical treatment at a clinic in Riga, Latvia, in the company of her family. On their way to this clinic, the family will rendezvous with a ship off the coast of Latvia, in the Baltic Sea. That’s just the bare bones, naturally.”
“Naturally,” I say faintly.
“We’ll go over every aspect of the operation. I want you familiar with all the details, the contingencies. Once we get to Moscow—”
“We?”
He clears his throat. For the first time, he looks away from me—at my ear, possibly, or else some point beyond my ear.
“We recognized immediately,” he says, “that the complexity and potential danger of the operation—the knowledge of tactics and procedure—required an experienced agent to accompany and . . . well . . . and direct you.”
“I see. And where on earth could they find such an agent? I can’t imagine.”
Fox turns back to look on me straight. “Can you live with that?”
I look down at the passport in my hand, which has my picture in it. “But how exactly are you supposed to get permission to travel to the Soviet Union? And how . . . how are we supposed to . . .”
My voice trails off, because I’ve just realized that the name printed inside the passport is not my own. Not altogether, at any rate.
“I’ll be undercover,” he says. “As your spouse.”
Iris
August 1948
Dorset, England
At noon on the first day of August, a horse and cart ambled up the long drive to Honeysuckle Cottage under a blazing sun.
“Welcome to the land of petrol rationing!” Iris called out to Aunt Vivian, who sat in front next to Philip Beauchamp holding the reins. The three small girls waved frantically from among the suitcases piled in the box.
“Absolutely charming!” Aunt Vivian called back. In the next instant she reached back for one of her offspring, a towheaded monster attempting to climb over the edge. “Pepper! Bad girl!”
Iris hadn’t met either of the two younger girls, and Tiny—the oldest—was only a year old when Ruth and Iris left for Rome, just starting to toddle about and speak with an elegant lisp. Aunt Vivian, on the other hand. Aunt Vivian was her mother’s younger sister, who’d parlayed her wit and her long-limbed, blond beauty into a marriage with none other than Charles Schuyler III, scion of one of New York’s most prestigious families, an eligible bachelor if there ever was one. Everyone had whispered about what a fine match Aunt Vivian had made, as if this were the previous century and Aunt Vivian was some pert, pretty miss from the country, marrying above her station. Well, maybe she was. But Iris would always be loyal to Aunt Vivian. Say what you would—and people said plenty—Aunt Vivian had always stood in like another mother to Ruth and Iris, or maybe more like a worldly older sister.
Now she hauled the wriggling Pepper into her lap and gathered her pocketbook and hatbox while Philip set the brake and leapt off the box to help her down.
“Thank you,” Aunt Vivian said in that impeccable voice, more lockjaw than the toniest Long Island heiress. She dropped Pepper on the grass like a sack of unwanted potatoes and turned to lift Little Viv out of the cart. Iris ran forward to help Tiny. From inside the house, the boys came thundering onto the drive and stopped dead at the sight of the three blond girls in their neat matching dresses and Mary Jane shoes. Kip scratched his head. Jack scuffed his bare feet on the gravel.
“Boys! Come say hello to your cousins!” Iris called out.
“My God,” said Aunt Vivian, by way of greeting, “it’s like the OK Corral. How are you, darling? You look wonderful, all pink and plump. You’re not with child again, are you?”
“Of course not!” Iris gasped. She glanced at Philip as she returned Aunt Vivian’s embrace.
“Good. Nothing spoils your summer like a bun in the oven. This must be Cornelius.”
“Kip!” said Kip stoutly, holding his ground.
“Is that so? Kip it is, then.” She shook his hand and turned to Jack. “And this is little John.”