She heard Spaight talking softly-it was Pappy Johnson he was talking to. Pappy was out of breath from his run. “Wrap him up,” Spaight said, “and put him with the Baron.”
She felt herself sag and suddenly Alex was there, holding her. She half-heard Spaight:
“He had to keep it secret from the rest of us-his own twisted reasons but they make a horrible kind of sense. If you people had known it was the Americans who’d blown you, you’d have told the world.”
Alex turned; he almost lost his balance. “Were you in on this, John?”
“No. For God’s sake-what do you think of me?”
“He’s telling the truth,” she said.
Alex dipped his head groggily. “Buckner must have had Vassily killed. I guess he wanted to work with an Americanized Russian-someone he thought he could control. Me. Then he had somebody shoot at me in Boston-shoot to miss. That was to throw suspicion off but the next one wasn’t. The one in Scotland. That was to scare me, make me think my life was in danger-he thought I’d tell him the plan then.” He looked at Spaight then. “There’s something worse than any of that. We don’t know if it was his own initiative-or if he had orders to do it the way he did it.”
Spaight’s face went wide and then crumpled when the impact reached him. “Sweet sweet Jesus.”
Under the thin noon sun she watched the airplanes lift off into the cold sky. The guns murmured on the Russian front. She felt the pressure of Alex’s hands on her shoulders. They stood utterly alone on the runway. She leaned back against him and let him take her weight.
“What are we going to do?”
He said, “I don’t know.”