“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.