Our Woman in Moscow: A Novel by Beatriz Williams

Author:Beatriz Williams [Williams, Beatriz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780063020818
Google: pjb6DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08H25CQPL
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

Sumner Fox, on the other hand. No doubt he believes firmly in heaven and hell, angels and purgatory and the devil himself, to go along with the God he wishes I wouldn’t curse. As a decent Christian, though, he doesn’t seem to judge me for my failure of faith. He just stands there waiting for me to make my decision.

I nod at the manila envelope I left on the couch.

“All right. What have you got for me?”

To my surprise, he holds his eyelids shut for an instant or two, betraying relief. Then he opens them and reaches for the envelope.

“A little background, first,” he says, motioning me to sit, which I do. Then he sits back down, a few inches closer than before, and removes some documents from the envelope. “We began formulating plans for the extraction of the Digbys as soon as we knew they’d defected—”

“Extraction? You mean like a tooth?”

“I apologize for the jargon. You see, we’d suspected Digby’s involvement with Soviet intelligence for some time, and to be perfectly honest, his defection was a relief. We couldn’t prosecute him on the evidence we had, because most of it was classified and highly sensitive, but we couldn’t allow him to stay where he was, feeding them more information. And if the Soviets knew he was compromised, they might try to eliminate him, because they couldn’t take a chance we’d turned him.”

“Turned him?”

“Convinced him to work for us instead, as a double agent. Even if we hadn’t, they’d be afraid he would break down under interrogation and compromise his handler—that’s the KGB officer who ran him—or any other agents in the network. Instead they convinced him to defect. I expect he’d been such a valuable agent, they thought he might be some use for them at Moscow Centre. KGB headquarters,” he adds.

“Yes, I know.”

“Anyway, about four years ago, Digby started showing signs of breakdown. The Soviets had broken off the network, because of some high-level defections to our side that compromised a number of their agents in the field.”

“You mean like Alger Hiss?”

“Hiss and others. You have to understand the degree of paranoia that prevails in Moscow Centre. Well, in Soviet Russia generally, but the Communist Party and the intelligence service in particular. On top of the usual backstabbings and betrayals you find in a revolutionary government, there was a series of purges in the 1930s that decimated the army and the NKVD, as the intelligence agency was then known—”

“Yes, yes. Orlovsky told me all the stories.”

“Well, it left behind a legacy of fear. Nobody trusts anybody. So when Digby found himself adrift, cut off, his guiding purpose vanished from his life—well, he went off the rails. That was the summer of 1948. We were already on his trail at that point, waiting for him to make a move. I figured that if he broke down completely, we might be able to rescue him and possibly even turn him, risky as it was.”

“But he disappeared instead,” I say. “That was when he defected, wasn’t it? In the autumn of 1948, when he vanished with Iris and the kids.

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