“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.