Now all she can do is wait, like a spider in the center of an exquisite web.

Ruth

JULY 1952

Moscow

Wouldn’t you know it, the clouds push in around seven o’clock in the morning. From the back seat of the car I watch the gray stuffing creep over the summer-blue sky, swallowing all joy. How dismal Moscow looks without the sun. The lonesome turrets and bleak apartment blocks stand tragically still while the gloom overcomes them.

I turn to Fox and make some crack about the dying of the light. He doesn’t even smile. Inside his jacket are the passports and identification papers and the gun he retrieved from the dead drop yesterday. I guess the weight of them killed his sense of humor. His face looks as it did the day I met him, sculpted by a blunt hatchet. The pale, colorless eyes reflect the world back like a pair of tiny mirrors.

At the hospital, the lumpy white ambulance waits in the drive, engine rumbling. I don’t like all the fuss; some human instinct recoils against accepting this extravagant Soviet hospitality when we’re only going to betray them with it. I hurry inside with Kedrov. He wears the same dark suit as before, the same expression of pained diplomacy—diplomacy at all costs—diplomacy if it kills him. We turn down a couple of corridors until we reach the waiting room in the maternity wing, where Iris sits in a wheelchair, wanly holding Gregory, who screams bloody murder. Nearby, the English-speaking doctor scribbles on a clipboard. He looks up fiercely at me and nods.

“Have a good journey,” he orders me.

“Thank you. You’ve been such a great help to her.”

The doctor shrugs and turns away, and for a moment I stand there helplessly. I wonder what’s the story of his life, and whether he has some inkling what he’s doing and how he’s helping us. Whether he will pay a price for what happens next.

I take charge of the wheelchair myself and push Iris down the corridors until we reach the entrance. Kedrov holds open the door. The black car’s still there, right behind the ambulance, inside a fog of exhaust. Fox stands next to the rear door. When he sees us emerge, he walks over briskly. First, he bends down and kisses Iris’s cheek, like an affectionate brother-in-law; then he straightens and kisses me on the lips, exactly the way a husband bids his wife farewell.

“Travel safely, darling. We’ll meet you there in a few days.”

I help Iris and the baby into the back of the ambulance, and Fox climbs into the back of the official car, and we roar off on our separate ways under the overcast sky.