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.”
Her mouth twisted in an expression of irony. “And the goose got away, too.”
“You’re referring to Mr. Molotov, I presume. I got a cable from Mr. Harriman, in code, of course, explaining that Molotov was at the heart of the theft and that nothing could be done about him. He also mentioned that your life was endangered more than once, but I’ll leave you to tell the details.”
She let out a long breath and would have preferred not to talk about it at all, but clearly, reporting was her primary duty.
“Oh, where should I begin?” she said dully. “I uncovered major deficiencies at a factory where the foreign minister had assured me our deliveries had been received. I naïvely reported the discovery to Mr. Molotov, or attempted to, not realizing he was part of it. Within minutes, he had me detained. With the flimsy excuse that I should attend a Lend-Lease delivery, he put me on a plane with two thugs who were supposed to dispose of me in the air.”
“Oh, my Lord. It’s like a bad novel. How did you escape them?”
“The Luftwaffe shot us down. I survived the crash and was rescued by a Soviet unit on the front line. Unfortunately, their commander reported my presence to STAVKA and planned to return me to Moscow, where of course Molotov would trap me again. But an air attack on the ambulance convoy enabled me to escape and join the local infantry division.” She thought for a moment, then snorted. “Imagine that. Saved twice by the Luftwaffe.”
His eyebrows seemed to rise to their maximum height. “You joined the Red Army!? Just like that!?”
“Yes, as a sniper,” she said dully. The word had too many tragic associations for her to enjoy the shock value.
“A sniper. Well, this just gets better and better. And then?”
“Well, we fought all the way to Pskov, where I was wounded again, this time more severely.”
“In the shoulder.” He nodded toward the bandage.
“Yes, fractured clavicle and shoulder blade, and a collapsed lung. That meant I had to be carried with the other wounded back to Novgorod and eventually Moscow. I managed to get to the embassy, but then someone I had become close to was arrested for trying to save me, and when Molotov tracked me down, I… um… blackmailed him to have her released, with the threat of revealing his crime to Stalin.”
“You blackmailed the Russian foreign minister!?” Hopkins’s eyebrows had nowhere left to go, but his voice rose a note higher.
“I tried to. But he outmaneuvered me by telling Stalin that he and I together had uncovered the thief and that it was Nazarov, some lower-level guy in the group. At that point, my friend and I tried to leave Moscow with Mr. Churchill, but Molotov tracked us down and seized her from the plane. I was allowed, well, forced, actually, to go home.”
Hopkins sat in silence blinking, for a few moments, while his eyebrows finally relaxed.
“I think you need to tell that to the president.”
“So that’s what kept me away for so long.” Mia had concluded her story once again.
Roosevelt screwed a Chesterfield into the front of his cigarette holder. “My Lord. What a tale!” he exclaimed. “Though I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to help, my dear. I can’t even protest. At the moment, Molotov is number two at the Kremlin. Besides, the Russians have done far worse things than embezzle and threaten a diplomat, and we’ve had to overlook them.” He lit the cigarette and took the first puff, then shrugged. “With the fate of Europe resting on our agreements with them at the next conference, we can’t afford to antagonize them. No matter how horrendous the crime.”