“You left school. In the middle of the day! What were you thinking, Marina?”
“I was worried! And I got to the apartment and the door was unlocked, Mama, and nobody was inside but everything was messy, like it had been searched.”
Marina pauses. She seems out of breath, not from exertion but from emotion and from speaking too much and too fast. Now she waits for her mother to say something.
What on earth is Lyudmila going to say to her?
“Tell me, Marina. Why do you care so much about young Dubinin?”
Another pause crackles down the secure line. Only it’s not so secure, is it? A line is only as secure as the connection at the other end, and the Dubinins’ telephone is, of course, bugged. Lyudmila realizes this fact the same way a snowball hits your chest—hard and cold, enough to break your ribs. She wants to bite off her tongue. If only she weren’t so occupied by the operation—if only Marina didn’t surprise her like this—she should have grasped the danger instantly. Probably Vashnikov is listening this second!
Luckily, Marina was like any eleven-year-old girl when it came to discussing these matters with her mother.
“Mama, I don’t care about him. He’s just a boy at my school. But—”
“Never mind,” Lyudmila says hastily. “We’ll speak of it tonight, when you’re home from school.”
“I’ve already left school, and I’m not going back. I’m not doing anything until you tell me what’s going on.”
Lyudmila attempts a laugh. “Darling, so dramatic! Nothing’s going on. I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation. Didn’t his mother have a new baby? Maybe they’ve gone to the hospital today.”
“Mama—”
“In any case, I’m at the office now, as you know. I can’t speak about any personal matters.”
Marina makes a tiny noise that might be disgust or understanding—who can tell with a girl that age? And why in the name of reason has her daughter developed a fascination with this particular boy? What contrary fate placed the two of them together at the same school to begin with? Lyudmila feels a headache coming on. Her fingers flex to grasp one of the cigarettes she gave up during the war, when cigarettes were needed for the soldiers at the front. She stares at the bare gray-white walls, the speckled linoleum that covers the floor.
“All right,” Marina says quietly. “I guess I’ll see you at home, then.”
“Go back to school, darling. Everything will be all right.”
“Yes,” says her daughter.
Yes to what? Lyudmila thinks frantically. “Probably they started the summer holidays a few days early.”
“That’s not allowed,” Marina says flatly. “Good-bye, Mama.”
“Good-bye, Marina.”
The line clicks and goes dead. Lyudmila replaces the receiver and stares at the smooth black handle. The world, which seemed so orderly and so satisfactory a moment ago, has now gone haywire. All because of some impudent scrap of an eleven-year-old girl.
All right, Dmitri, she thinks. Have your revenge. Just remember she’s your daughter, too.
After that, the telephone goes quiet. Lyudmila resists the urge to pick up the receiver and ask Dubrovskaya if a message has come in, a cable. Of course, Dubrovskaya would bring down any message or cable instantly—she’s perfectly well trained, she’s as loyal as it’s possible to be loyal within these walls.
Trust nobody, Lyudmila reminds herself.
She stands and sits again. She flips through the papers on the desk before her—the cables, the transcripts, her own notes, all arranged in chronological order to tell the story of this operation. She rearranges the position of a stack or two. She sips her tea, which has gone cold.
The telephone rings, jarring her. She snatches up the receiver. “Ivanova!” she snaps.
Dubrovskaya’s voice, carefully neutral—“The head of your daughter’s school is on the telephone for you. Shall I take a message?”
It is invidious—invidious!—to sit in this low chair before Comrade Grievskaya’s desk as if one were a recalcitrant schoolchild. It’s invidious even to be here at all, in such a moment, when she’s supposed to be directing this operation that will possibly bring down the careers of several traitors to the Soviet people, if Lyudmila’s suspicions are accurate—and they always are, in these matters. Lyudmila wants to scream at this woman—Do you know I am a KGB officer in the middle of a major operation? Do you know I can bring down so much trouble upon your head, you’ll wish I would just execute you instead?
But she doesn’t. There’s something in the authority of a head of school that transcends even the authority of the KGB—the authority of the Kremlin itself.
Still. Her male colleagues would never find themselves in such a position, on such a day, in a chair specifically designed to make a person feel several inches shorter than the person behind the desk. They’ve never known these ritual humiliations. They have wives to deal with them.
Lyudmila starts with an offensive move, as she’s been trained. “I’m well aware that Marina has been absent from school today—”
“Yes, Comrade Ivanova,” says Grievskaya, “and we will address this infraction shortly. At the moment, however, I must bring a more serious matter to your attention.”
She pauses to examine Lyudmila over the rim of her spectacles. Lyudmila swallows and glances at the clock. Half past three.
“Yes?” she says.
Grievskaya steeples her hands above the blotter on her exemplary desk. “For some months—since the winter holidays, in fact—we have heard reports of a group of students meeting in secret to exchange subversive materials and discuss their contents.”
Oh, shit, Lyudmila thinks.
“Subversive materials?” she says, perfectly composed. “I don’t understand. How do young students get their hands on such things?”
Grievskaya waves her hand. “We are not yet concerned with how. Right now, we are concerned with who and where. Until recently, we were unable to identify even a single member of this clandestine group. It seems they are bound by a vow of absolute secrecy, to which they have proved remarkably loyal, given their ages. But this morning, a certain piece of information came to us by chance.”
Grievskaya plucks a sheet of paper from the blotter and hands it across the desk to Lyudmila, who takes it reluctantly, forcing her fingers not to tremble. She smooths it out before her. EMERGENCY MEETING, it reads. AFTER SCHOOL AT HEADQUARTERS.
Underneath those letters, a list of names—PETREL, BEAR, EAGLE, PEGASUS, LION, ELEPHANT, HORSE, RAT. All of them are crossed out except the last two.
“What’s this?”
“It was found on the floor of the cafeteria after lunch. It appears someone had dropped it.”
Lyudmila hands the note back to Grievskaya. “Well? What does this have to do with Marina? Her name’s not on the list.”
“No. These are code names, Comrade Ivanova. That is plain even to those of us not engaged in intelligence work. But one of our teachers has identified the handwriting as that of your daughter. Who, as we have already established, left school early today, without authorization. What is more, two additional students are absent without leave today—one of whom we have long suspected of subversive opinions—which suggests . . .”
Grievskaya’s voice trails away. She looks expectantly at Lyudmila.
“Suggests what, Comrade?” Lyudmila says. “What do you imply? I see nothing but some ordinary high spirits among young people, which is regrettable but hardly subversive.”
Grievskaya removes her spectacles and folds the arms together. She speaks tiredly, as one who’s repeated this lesson too many times already. “Out of little acorns, oak trees grow. As you very well know, Comrade, whose business it is to fell these oak trees. Would it not be preferable to root out the acorns before they can secure themselves in the soil and begin to sprout?”