Comrade Volkov cleared his throat and finally looked up from the paper in his hands. “I trust you read it?”

A brief nod. She didn’t need to defend the action—the telegram had been delivered to her, after all. Two weeks late, but relief greater than she was comfortable admitting had whooshed through her when it was placed in her hands. Evgeni was alive. Injured, but alive.

Volkov took a long drag on his cigarette, staring at the words again. “This is not good news. This brother of his . . . we were told he was just a linguist.”

Nadya curled her fingers into a tight fist behind her back. Of course that was what Evgeni claimed, what his brother claimed, what his whole department had claimed when the party had taken over their building in Moscow. But Nadya knew better. “He was Intelligence, Comrade. And I have reason to believe he knows about our Prussian.”

Volkov studied the paper, as if those very words would appear on it. “How can you be sure?”

She’d already reported this once, to someone in Moscow. But communication wasn’t yet what it needed to be. There was still far too much chaos in the party. Chaos that would only settle with time, time without outside interference. This was why they needed to know what that Prussian knew. Take action, if they could, to keep the war going in Europe. They must, at all costs, keep the White Army from getting aid.

She cleared her throat and reported it again. “The day I was sent to apprehend the Tarasova woman, she was in his house, preparing him a meal. While I was there, I went through his locked drawers, as I’d been instructed, and I found a series of telegrams sent to us—to the Bolsheviks. He had somehow intercepted them.”

Volkov frowned and leaned back in his chair. “Did you take these papers?”

“No. I’d been told to leave his house looking untouched. I simply made note of which ones they were. My superiors in Moscow instructed me to go back for them the next day, but it was too late. Marin had fled, the papers with him. Along with . . .”

The man’s steely brows lifted. “With?”

She moistened her lips. “Something that looked like codes. Keys, perhaps. I did not understand them and had asked whether they might be important too. This was the first hint we had that the elder Marin brother was in fact a cryptographer, not just a linguist.”

She had to admire the string of curses Volkov spat out as he sat forward—colorful and varied, both. “And we let him slip away? We aided him?”