“Seven names on list,” Nina said. “Six more chances.”

He flexed his stinging fingers, and Nina made the gesture she’d made at the diner, hooking her trigger finger through his. Not a gesture intended to comfort—rather, it was a reminder. A promise that the hunters had yet to fire their shot. Ian looked down at her finger looped around his own, then at her calm blue eyes. Nina Markova, a hurricane in compact female form, outer chaos whirling around an eye of silent, startling serenity. He’d first felt that serenity when he realized they could sit across a diner table in wordless accord, and he felt it thrumming through his bones now despite the frustration of the hunt. He squeezed, and she squeezed back before pulling away and reaching for the maps, all business again.

I am falling for my wife, Ian thought. Damn you, Tony . . .

He put that revelation aside for later, with a gritting effort. They had work to do. “Hand me that list, comrade. Six more addresses, six more chances.”

But Lorelei Vogt wasn’t at the address in Maine either, or the one in New York or Connecticut or New Hampshire. At that point, two fruitless weeks having eaten almost every cent they had, Ian and Nina cursed and had to turn back toward Boston.

Chapter 41

Nina

September 1944

Western Poland

Time still had a tendency to shift and melt when Nina wasn’t paying attention, so she wasn’t sure if it was ten days or two weeks before she saw her first German.

She was back in the woods, after a tense series of days when the trees gave out and she had to move through open countryside, turning away from any signs that indicated towns, raiding isolated cottage gardens for carrots and turnips to augment the fire-roasted meat of whatever small animals she managed to snare. She’d considered knocking discreetly at one of those Polish cottages, seeing if she could trade game for bread, but Nina looked down at herself—dirty overalls, broken nails rimmed in dried blood. The first thing any Polish housewife would do if she saw Nina on her doorstep was scream, and who might come running then? A burly farmer with a pitchfork, or a German soldier? Nina was relieved when civilized fields melted back into woods. Just keep away from people, she thought—and that day, of course, she found five.

She was fighting her way up a bramble-choked slope when she heard a sharp cry and froze in place. That was no animal caught in a predator’s jaws. That sound had come from a man’s throat.

Another cry, a series of shouts, then a young man’s voice panicked and distinct: Nicht schiessen, nicht schiessen—

“Don’t shoot.” Even Nina knew that much German. If you didn’t manage to make your way back to friendly lines or kill yourself before you were captured, you raised your hands and said Nicht schiessen. Not that it would do much good, because everyone knew what the Germans did to prisoners.

Nina had been falling back the moment she heard human voices, but now that she knew a German with a gun was somewhere ahead of her, she stole forward. All the missions I’ve flown, she thought, all the bombs I’ve dropped, and I’ve never seen a German face-to-face. They’d been anonymous: the faceless pilots in the cockpits of Messerschmitts, the invisible fingers that triggered tracer fire into the sky.

Ahead of her, Nina heard a shot. A cry. The meaty thunk of a body hitting the ground.

She lowered her knapsack and sped forward, razor in one hand and pistol in the other, cursing herself for wasting her bullets driving off fever dreams, and went still behind a clump of underbrush. Held her breath, peering through.

Four men stood in the clearing. A fifth lay on the ground, thin arms outflung, drilled between the eyes by a bullet hole. His two companions stood behind him, hands raised, skinny as fence rails in uniforms Nina didn’t recognize. Two Germans held them frozen in place, neatly barbered and uniformed, the one nearest Nina still lifting his pistol away from the dead man, the other with his weapon leveled at the two prisoners. Everyone shouting in German and some other language Nina didn’t know, the younger dark-haired prisoner trying to plead, the larger towheaded one edging forward with some idea of attacking, the Fritzes clearly screaming at them to get back. Everyone shouting too loud to hear Nina emerge from the brush.

Her feet carried her forward before she even decided to move. She went straight for the nearest German, the one who had shot the man on the ground, and he didn’t notice until he saw the younger prisoner’s eyes spring wide at something behind him. The German whirled, and Nina caught a photographically clear flash of his face: young, dark haired, a well-fed throat pushing at his high collar. He backpedaled, bringing his pistol up, but it was too late, she was already on him like a wolf. For Nina he might as well have been every Hitlerite the Night Witches had ever faced. The night fighter who had shot eight women out of the sky, the Messerschmitt pilot who had chased the Rusalka down and holed her wings like a screen—this complacent German boy with the swastika clinging to his arm like a spider was all of them. Nina felt a rising howl tear out of her throat as she brought her razor around and laid his cheek open to the bone. Blood sprayed sudden and scarlet in the air. The German screamed, and a shot sounded somewhere as the second German lunged and the older prisoner went for his weapon, but Nina only saw flashes beyond the enemy in front of her. He went down, winnowed to the forest floor, and her arm never stopped swinging in wide scything cuts. By the time she looked up, he was a pulped mass on the pine needles and all was silent.

Slowly, Nina blinked blood out of her lashes. Her throat ached. The second German lay dead as well; the older prisoner, blond and bony, held his pistol. The young dark-haired prisoner had both palms clamped to his lower leg. Both stared at her with white around their eyes, and Nina realized the dripping razor still swung from one numbed hand. She tried to wipe it off on her sleeve and realized her overalls were drenched in blood. She leaned down, searching the German’s body and finding an astoundingly pristine handkerchief. Cleaning off her razor and her face, she dropped the resulting red rag on the ruin of his throat, feeling her soul float back into her own body from somewhere remote. “Lieutenant N. B. Markova of the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment,” she heard herself say distantly. “Hero of the Soviet Union, Order of the Red Banner, Order of the Red Star.”

The two men stared at her, and Nina’s remoteness disappeared under a wave of despair. Who knew if they were English or French, Dutch or American, but they didn’t understand her—they might as well have been rocks for all the legible conversation that was going to happen in this blood-laced clearing. Nina wondered bleakly if she was ever going to have another conversation with a human being again—if she’d die the next time she encountered a German, with the last exchange of words to ever leave her lips being that terrible night on a muddy airdrome where Yelena broke her heart.

Then the younger prisoner limped forward, still clutching his lower leg—dark haired, skinny as a railway spike, a long serious face. “Gunner Sebastian Graham, Sixth Battalion Royal West Kents, lately of Stalag XXI-D in Posen,” he said in slow, clear Russian. “Um . . . charmed to meet you.”

“BILL AND SAM AND I blitzed out this morning. We were carted out on a work detail, road repair—we did a bunk straight into the trees. We’ve been stumbling around in circles for hours, trying to find train tracks so we could hitch a railway car. The goons eventually picked up our trail.” Sebastian Graham shook his head. “Lucky thing for Bill and me, meeting you.”

Bill—William Digby of a regiment and rank Nina didn’t catch—grunted something in English that Nina would have bet was Not so lucky for Sam. The three of them hadn’t lingered in the clearing among the carnage—Sebastian knotted a wad of rags around his leg where the second German’s wild shot had clipped him, as Nina and the towheaded Bill stripped the two dead men of clothes, weapons, anything useful. Sebastian had to lurch along with his arm around Bill’s shoulder as Nina hauled the overloaded pack, guiding them back to a quiet glade with a stream she had trekked past earlier that morning. They all collapsed panting, drinking their fill, and now Bill was wolfing down a bar of chocolate found on the second German as Sebastian rolled up his trouser leg to look at his wound, and Nina raked through the rest of the German spoils. This morning she had been one, and now she had become three. It was dizzying.