“What about Mrs. Digby?” she says. “Is there any news of her health?”

Vashnikov shrugs and stubs out the cigarette. “She’s still pregnant, if that’s what you mean.”

“Good,” Lyudmila says, and walks out the door.

DOWNSTAIRS, SHE COMPOSES A cable and takes it down herself to the cipher room. It’s addressed to a KGB operative called SALT in Odessa, who has done excellent work for her before.

URGENT APPREHEND FEMALE ITALIAN NATIONAL IN SOCHI NAME DONNA ANNA ORLOVSKAYA AGE 15 CURRENTLY RESIDENT HOME OF GRANDFATHER SERGEI ORLOVSKY ADDRESS KAMANINI STREET STOP DETAIN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE STOP

Ruth

JULY 1952

Moscow

My first glimpse of Russia occurs between some clouds as we approach the airport in Moscow. I’ve been peering out the window for some time, hoping for any open seam in the almost unending blanket that’s covered the landscape since we took off from Berlin, while I smoked cigarette after cigarette until even my tolerant husband made a gentle cough from the seat next to me.

The aircraft is called a Lisunov something-or-other, but it’s really an old DC-3 built in Russia by license from the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, on account of the Soviet Union being our ally at the time. I haven’t flown in a DC-3 in years, but here it is again, the particular timbre of the propellers droning in my ears like a childhood memory. Actually, I find it comforting. Everything else around me is incomprehensibly foreign.

No, I lie. Inches away sits Sumner Fox, who’s somehow taken on all the familiarity of a long acquaintance in the short, packed days we’ve spent together. Was there ever a time I haven’t known him? I now recognize the smell of his shaving soap and the way he chews his meat, the vibration in his voice that signals impatience and the note that means he’s amused. I know he’s not strictly teetotal but only drinks wine on occasion, that he doesn’t smoke or swear but sometimes looks as if he wishes he did. I know he has an extraordinary facility for language. He mentioned, in an apologetic way, that he’d learned Russian in two months, including the Cyrillic lettering that I still couldn’t make heads or tails of. He also speaks Italian, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Urdu, Mandarin, Persian, and—of course—Japanese. (He stressed that he was only proficient in Mandarin and Urdu, not fluent.) As for Latin and ancient Greek, he picked them up as a schoolboy and studied classics at Yale. I told him the rhyme I learned at school: Latin’s a dead language, as dead as it could be. First it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me. He smiled and said he’d heard that one before.