and Ian opened the car door for her. “But he was someone. He has things he was nervous about hiding, enough to pay Kolb for a new name.” Ian closed the door after Nina, slid in on his own side. “A camp clerk? A Gestapo guard? One of those Reich doctors who culled the unfit from the ranks of the master race?”
Ian heard his voice growing louder and halted himself. He’d wanted so badly for it to be Lorelei Vogt. He wanted that door to open and show him the woman who killed his brother.
“We come back for this mudak some other time,” Nina said, kicking off her heeled pumps. “We know where he is, what he looks like. Later, after die Jägerin, we get him. Whoever he is.”
“He’s a goddamned Nazi,” Ian said. “But not the one we’re looking for.” He wasn’t even aware of making a fist before he drove it hard into the wheel.
“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,