Declare

that he was Soviet bait. She had wanted—she still wanted—an excuse to kill him, and thus erase the most shameful episode of her life; if she brought him home alive, that episode would surely be part of his recorded biography, and she would almost certainly have to resign.
    She sat down on the bed and picked up her purse. Down behind the long-barrel .38 revolver was a pack of Gauloises with a book of matches tucked into the cellophane, and she lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deep into her lungs.
    But if she brought Philby back alive, and if his deposition proved to be as valuable as it seemed likely to be, she would have delivered a damaging blow to Moscow, even as she ended her own career. And truly she hated Moscow as much—and as personally—as she hated Philby.
    She didn’t want to let herself think, yet, about Andrew Hale; late last night she had composed a crash-priority inquiry about his current status to SDECE headquarters at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, and tonight she would tune in the Paris bandwidth for an answer.
    On New Year’s Day of 1942 she had left Andrew sleeping in the room on the Île de la Cité and begun the first leg of her trip to Moscow. Her introduction to the Workers’ Paradise had been the Tupelov ANT-35 two-engine airplane that had flown her out of Tbilisi—the pilot told the passengers in halting German that the plane had been built without a lot of Eitelkeit , vanity, and this had proven to mean that there were no upholstered seats or safety belts or, apparently, wing-flaps; in order to take off, he ordered all the passengers to crowd up to the front of the plane so that he would be able to get the tail up, and even so the airplane cleared the fence at the end of the airfield with so little room to spare that Elena, pressed against a window, was able to see the individual barbs on the wire as it whipped past under them. Instruments too were apparently an Eitelkeit , for the pilot never took the plane higher than five hundred feet and was clearly following the highways visible below.
    When the plane landed at a small snow-plowed airfield on the outskirts of Moscow, she was met by Leonid Moroz, the Moscow council member and Red Army intelligence liaison who was to be her boss. Elena quickly learned that she had not, in fact, been called to Moscow to be killed—Moroz was working with Section II of the Operations Division of the GRU, and he had been ordered to construct a new identity for Elena as an expatriate Spanish heiress, and to infiltrate her into Berlin. Moroz was pitifully anxious that the plan should succeed.
    Elena was given a couple of furnished rooms on the Izvoznia Ulitza, a street of gray five-story buildings outside the Sadovaya ring road on the banks of the western loop of the Moskva River. She soon gathered that her flatblock was a prestigious address—the forty or fifty other flats in her building were occupied by wives of Soviet officers who were stationed at the front—but she also noticed that the walls of the concrete structure were four feet thick and that its narrow windows faced the Mojaisk Chaussee thorough-fare and the Kiev railway station; clearly the place had been built as a defensive fortress. And she hoped that if the Germans were to approach Moscow she would be given a rifle and allowed to participate in the defense.
    Leonid Moroz was a Party member and took pains to look like one. The dark pouches under his eyes were a sign not only of virtue—indicating that he worked at his desk until the small hours—but of status as well. Party members were beyond having to bother with dressing as the common people did, and Moroz was vain about the double-breasted jacket he always wore with all three buttons fastened—it was too tight, but it had a velvet collar. His only concession to the proletariat was his cloth cap, and Lenin was always portrayed wearing one.
    Moroz frequently called Elena to his office to describe in vague terms the studying she would have to do to perfect her cover, and to discuss with her the current state of the war, and to ask her to type letters. His office was always so cold that Elena had to wear an overcoat and scarf; Moroz had three telephones on his bare desk, though he never made any calls and they never rang, and the only furnishings aside from an implausible dozen straight-backed chairs were framed photographs of Stalin, Marx, and Molotov.
    The GRU, or Razvedupr—the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Army