“Yes, I know all that. I can’t think why you’ve kidnapped a perfect stranger in a London taxi to bring her up to date on all the stateside news. Unless you think I’m connected to this woman in some way? A housewife who hasn’t spent more than two months in America since the war started?”

Fox made a reflective noise. Iris thought this was the moment he’d take a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and light one up, but he didn’t. He fiddled with the hat on his knee and said, in his beautiful baritone drawl, “Miss Bentley first contacted authorities in November of 1945. Couple of months before that, a cipher clerk operating under illegal cover in the Soviet embassy in Ottowa put himself under the protection of Canadian officials and provided us with a great deal of additional information. As you know, agents are run under code names to protect their true identities. So it takes some legwork, you see, some investigation to follow all the clues and identify the possible suspects.”

“Sounds absolutely fascinating.”

“Oh, it’s boring as can be, most of the time. Spending hours cross-checking lists of embassy employees and dates of arrival and departure, that kind of thing. But every so often, you experience what we call a breakthrough.”

Iris curled her palms around the edge of the cloth seat to dry them. “Indeed.”

“I won’t bore you with the particulars, but a few months ago we were able to connect one of the code names provided by Miss Bentley with a fellow carrying out operations for us in Turkey at the end of 1944.”

“Anyone I know?”

He smoothed the felt on his fedora. “Your husband, Cornelius Digby.”

“That’s impossible. My husband is a loyal American.”

“And you’re a loyal wife. I can respect that, Mrs. Digby, believe me. That’s why there’s a law that says spouses can refuse to say anything to incriminate each other. But I want to assure you that my intention is not to arrest your husband. For one thing—I’ll lay my cards out—we don’t have enough evidence, and what we’ve got we can’t reveal in a court of law. For another thing, we’ve got reason to believe that the American intelligence service is honeycombed with men like your husband, fellow travelers as they call each other, who climbed on board the Soviet service in the 1930s when communism was all the rage. We also believe that one or two of those men sit at the very top, because every time we piece together a code name and connect that Soviet agent to an actual human being in our service, why—he slips the noose. Somebody tips him off. Or the other side of the coin—we send in an operative somewhere, maybe recruit a local agent—and within a month he disappears.”

“So why are you here?”