“Ah, yes. Deniability. I recognize that. Fine.”

Ambassador Harriman checked his watch and instructed the captain. “It doesn’t look like Churchill and entourage have arrived yet, but the Soviets are already on the field. It’s best you get into position at the far end of the terminal. Stay within the crowd. When the prime minister’s plane tests his propellers, you can escort the women out onto the field. The flight crew should be expecting them. In the meantime, I’ll be seeing to protocol.”

The ambassador turned his head at the sound of the military band. “That’s the honor guard starting the ceremonies. I’ve got to go now. Mia, it’s been a pleasure meeting you. Miss Mazarova, good luck to you.”

“Thank you so much, Ambassador,” Mia said. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you could arrange this. I hope I haven’t caused too many problems.”

“That’s quite all right. Sometimes one has to improvise. But please tell Harry he owes me one.”

Alexia was succinct. “Thank you for everything,” she said in Russian.

He shook hands with both of them and then was gone.

Captain Laughlin stepped into the lead, and they followed him silently. When they reached the end of the terminal, the crowd blocked their view of the field, but the distant sound of the British national anthem told them that Churchill had arrived.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” followed, and then the Soviet anthem, and Alexia looked pained. It was obviously not a good moment to hear patriotic music.

They edged forward and finally caught sight of the ceremonies. Mia could discern the main players: the tall, slender Anthony Eden; Molotov, looking nondescript; and the handsome, dark-haired Harriman standing next to white-haired Churchill.

Molotov stepped up to the microphone but was mercifully brief. Then Churchill addressed the crowd, and through the public speakers, she could hear his words. “The last two years have been ones of unbroken victory, the Russian Army has broken the spirit of the Wehrmacht, the final triumph will bring a better world for the majority of mankind.” A better world? God, she hoped so.

The British delegation’s B-24 bomber waiting out on the airfield tested its propellers, then taxied closer to the terminal to receive its passengers.

“Time to board,” Captain Laughlin announced, and marched ahead of them onto the field.

They were within a dozen yards of the plane when two guards approached them. “No one is allowed on board yet,” one of them said in Russian. Laughlin looked slightly perplexed. Alexia, who understood but dared not react, stared at the ground.

“We are authorized, and all of us have identification,” Mia said in Russian.

All three presented their papers, and Mia hoped the trembling in her hand was not obvious. But after several tense moments, they were allowed to pass. When they reached the plane, the captain opened the hatch toward the rear of the fuselage. Hands reached out and helped lift her inside.

The interior of the refitted B-24 Liberator heavy bomber was cavernous, no doubt the result of the removal of all the weaponry. The bomb bay doors were closed, and a temporary floor had been laid over the metal walkway, a portion of which was still visible at the far end.

Some ten rows of passenger seats had been installed, and she chose the last two seats at the rear of the plane, hoping to draw as little attention as possible.

The other passengers were largely military personnel, heavily decorated officers with their adjutants. Mia made no effort to talk to them.

After some twenty nerve-racking minutes, the hatchway opened again, and the rest of the delegation boarded: first Captain Laughlin, then more military, and finally Churchill and Eden. The prime minister appeared grumpy as he took his seat at the front and buckled himself in.

The plane began to taxi, and, in spite of the movement of the plane, one of the younger officers marched up the aisle to hand the prime minister a short glass of whiskey. He accepted it with a sullen nod.

The lack of windows made it impossible to tell how far they were from the terminal, but for Mia every moment they taxied brought them farther away from danger. In another five minutes, they’d be in the sky and on their way to freedom.

But the plane suddenly stopped. Churchill peered over his shoulder and grumbled, “What the devil…?”

Obviously someone from the control tower had contacted the pilot, because one of the flight crew left his post, came back to the hatch, and opened it.

Two Soviet officers stepped in, and their royal-blue caps revealed them as NKVD. Beside her, Alexia stiffened.

The prime minister had gotten out of his seat, as well as Captain Laughlin, and both stood in the aisle near the entrance way. Marching past them, the NKVD men stopped in front of Alexia. “Alexia Vassilievna Mazarova. You will come with us.”

Mia leapt up to confront them, but one of the men pushed her back down onto her seat. “No. You are required to leave.” The senior officer laid his hand on his holster.

“I say, what’s going on here?” Churchill gestured vaguely toward Mia with his whiskey glass.

The senior officer replied in English. “This one is Soviet citizen and deserter.” With that, the junior officer lifted Alexia from her seat with one hand and urged her toward the hatch. She offered no resistance.

Mia glanced desperately toward the prime minister. “Sir…”

He took a step toward the senior NKVD officer. “Oh, dear. I had no idea we had a stowaway. So sorry, Major. Please extend my heartfelt apologies to your government for this unfortunate incident. I shall certainly have words with my flight crew about that.” He stepped back and allowed the two men to escort Alexia through the hatchway and onto the tarmac.

Mia rose halfway up to follow, but Captain Laughlin laid a hand on her shoulder. “No. It’s best if you sit down again.”

Obeying the pressure of his hand, Mia fell back in her seat and watched with horror as the hatchway was sealed up again. Churchill turned away.

“Mr. Prime Minister, you promised. Why didn’t you do anything?” she called, outrage displacing all sense of propriety.

He turned back toward her again. “Sorry, my dear, but you must keep some perspective. Our negotiations with the Kremlin have not gone well. You may have lost your little deserter, but we’ve lost Eastern Europe.”

Holding his whiskey glass to his chest, he did an about-face and returned to his seat.

As soon as the prime minister was seated, the aircraft taxied onto the field. Moments later, they took off with a roar.

Stunned and broken, Mia laid her head in her hands.

Chapter Twenty-five

The trip to London, with a refueling stop in Stockholm, took place largely in daylight, but for Mia, it was the darkest night of her life. She sat the entire time with her head pressed against the bulkhead, bereft and crushed with guilt. She welcomed the constant ache in her still-bandaged shoulder because it distracted from the shame and regret that ate away at her.

Once or twice, a member of the British delegation ventured back to engage her, but she was monosyllabic, and each one, realizing she was a lost cause, retreated and left her in her misery.

Every image of every second of the arrest replayed itself in her memory in slow motion, like the still frames rotating inside a primitive zoetrope, recording the capture of the most precious thing in her life. And for the second time, she was responsible. Worse, only one outcome of this second arrest was likely. Alexia was a deserter, this time a genuine one, and would be executed.

The London arrival offered an end to the physical exhaustion of travel but not to the strain on her mind. She hadn’t felt such bereavement since the death of her mother, but even then, she’d suffered no guilt. Now she could barely make herself walk.

As a courtesy to Harry Hopkins, she presumed, the prime minister provided overnight accommodations for her at the Clairidge Hotel, and someone from his office booked her on a commercial flight the next morning back to Washington. She stumbled through every step, damaged, uncommunicative.

Three days after her departure from Moscow, she arrived in Washington with much the same luggage as she had departed with, her Lend-Lease documentation, now with an addendum in the form of the Molotov Report. She wore the clothing she’d left at the embassy—a wool skirt, cotton blouse, and blue sweater, with her bandaged arm folded inside—but now everything hung on her frame, which the battlefield and three days of not eating had rendered gaunt.

She took a taxi to the White House and forced herself along the path to the staff entrance. The security staff greeted her with genuine warmth, and that was comforting. Grateful, she nodded her thanks, though it took all her effort to climb the stairs to her tiny top-floor room. After almost seven months, it seemed to have shrunk in size and grown in dreariness. She washed at the corner sink and changed into the clothes she had left behind in the closet. Then she gathered the last of her forces and trudged down the stairs to report to Harry Hopkins.

“Oh, Miss Kramer, do come in,” he said, opening the door to her. “Security called me to say you’d arrived.” He gestured toward a chair. “We’re so glad you’re alive and safe. After you disappeared, we thought you’d become a fatality of war.”

“Not a fatality, but nearly, though I was in the war. It’s all in the report.”

“Of course I want to know the whole story, and so do several others here. I suppose the first thing I should tell you is that the disagreeable woman who was blackmailing you last March hasn’t been heard from again. Our plan, for you to temporarily leave the White House, was the right solution, though it was never intended to last so many months or to leave you injured. We may have protected the president, but your investigation, it seems, ended up being a wild-goose chase.”