WHERE WAS I? RIGHT. Fox kisses me on the lips, as a new husband should, and squeezes my hand. His palm is perfectly dry, the nerveless bastard. I myself am trembling, a fact of which I’m sure he’s aware—hence the peck and the squeeze. The plane slows and then spins nimbly around, preparing to trundle to the terminal. Fox leans his mouth to my ear and murmurs lovingly, “Don’t worry so much.”

Easy for him to say. He’s done this kind of thing before, I feel certain. Marriage, obviously, but also operating undercover. I have all kinds of questions I know he won’t answer—questions I don’t really want to hear answered, I suspect—and that ought to make me feel secure. He knows what he’s doing! All I have to worry about is the cover story. I think it’s strange, for example, that he’s using his real name. Won’t the Soviets know Sumner Fox works for the FBI?

Unlikely, he said, because he’s always worked under a code name, per standard tradecraft. And his employment records plainly indicate that he works for a corporate law firm in Washington, not the FBI.

What if they investigate? I wanted to know. What if they ask around and find out we didn’t meet at the Yale Club on the first of January, that nobody in Newport knows anything about a wedding between Mr. Sumner Fox and Miss Ruth Macallister?

He said they’d filed all the paperwork with the town hall in Newport, for one thing. Hudson’s been briefed, he’ll cover for us. Vivian’s been briefed about the beautiful wedding at dawn on Bailey’s Beach, how she cried buckets of tears, how Tiny and Pepper and Little Viv were my bridesmaids and all kinds of rubbish, and nobody lies quite so convincingly as Aunt Vivian.

“How the hell do you know so much about Aunt Vivian?” I asked.

“As I said,” he answered placidly, “we’ve been working on an extraction plan for some time, just in case.”

All right to all that, but I still feel as if I’m missing something, and I tell myself that’s the reason for the bad behavior of my nerves, which usually perform so well in moments of high excitement. The airplane comes to stop outside the terminal. I catch a glimpse of a pair of men in dark suits, watching the workers in their boiler suits wheel the stairs into place. The stewardess opens the door and a moment later, the two men duck through the hatch and scan the interior.

“Mr. and Mrs. Fox?” says the man on the right, who has light brown hair and a pointed face like a rabbit.

Fox lifts his arm. “Right here.”