He smiled. It was the same open smile she remembered from the day they met in the park. “Yes,” he said. “If we both make it.”
She threw her arms around him. She held him as tightly as she could, trying to memorize the warmth of him, the smell of his skin, the beat of his heart under the heavy coat. Then she made herself step back.
He gave her a light push between the shoulders. “Go.” And she did.
She started down into the ravine, sinking into the snow to her knees. Halfway down she turned and looked back.
He was still standing at the edge, a dark solitary figure against the stars. She raised her hand. He raised his.
Then she turned and climbed toward the other side, toward her own people. Anna did not learn the truth about Dmitry’s fate until twenty years after the war. Until then, she knew nothing.
She did not know whether he had lived or died. Every official request she filed went unanswered. “The information you requested remains classified,” she was told.
“Please be patient.” So she waited. Anna continued working in intelligence until 1953.
After leaving the service, she went on to teach at a university language department in the capital. She never remarried. Not because she lacked opportunities, but because she did not want to.
Deep down, she was still waiting for Dmitry. Then, in 1965, she was unexpectedly called to central intelligence headquarters. She walked the long institutional corridors past one numbered door after another, with no idea why she had been summoned after so many years.
Maybe it was some old paperwork. Maybe a routine review. Maybe something else. She was shown into a small office where a colonel with completely gray temples sat behind a desk.
When she entered, he stood and motioned her to the chair across from him. “Please sit down, Anna,” he said. “I have important news.”
He placed a thick old file on the desk. Across the front was stamped: TOP SECRET. He removed the restriction and pushed it toward her. “This is your late husband’s file,” he said quietly.
“It was partially declassified only recently. You now have the right to read it.” Anna spent hours with those papers.
She turned the yellowed pages with shaking hands. She looked at old photographs clipped inside, read reports and memoranda, and slowly the full picture came together.
Dmitry had continued his work successfully until the end of 1944. For eight months after her extraction, he had gone on playing General von Riedel. During that time he passed along intelligence that saved thousands of lives.
His reports helped stop several major German counterattacks. They helped command plan a large offensive and speed the liberation of occupied territory. Then Kranz finally found him.
Exactly how the compromise happened was not fully explained in the file. There was only one short note in the margin. “Highly valuable agent exposed as a result of betrayal within the German staff network”…
