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I took Illya back to my room. If Broz had any other henchmen they might know where Illya was staying.
We cleaned up our minor injuries, poured a couple stiff brandies, then I decided it was time for answers.
“So, I don’t think that little girl was your daughter. I saw her leaving with the girl who led you there and she was calling her ‘sister’.”
“No, I suspect she was just someone Broz used to trap me. I slipped a tracker on the woman’s purse when I handed it to her and I’d like to follow up and see what happened with them.”
“Okay, we’ll do that in the morning. We can also go back to the building, if the fire is out by then, and see what evidence we can find.”
I took another sip of brandy to consider how to approach the important part of the conversation. Illya was always guarded about his past, but I really needed to know what had happened and what was next.
“Ah, want to tell me why you were looking for a daughter you have never mentioned?”
“I never mentioned her because I didn’t know she existed until Friday.”
I just raised my eyebrows and waited.
“I met Nadiya Isaakivna Katenina at the University of Georgia. We were engineering students and were both a couple years younger than the rest of the students. She was brilliant, a true scientist who questioned everything. Not all her questions were safe, but she had courage. She became my best friend.”
“What did she look like? Pretty?”
“Small, skinny, bright red hair always frizzing out of her braid. Not conventionally pretty, but Nadenka was beautiful when you got to know her.
“We married the day after we graduated, had a five-day honeymoon in Moscow, then I reported for my Naval service and she went to Kharkiv for her graduate study.
“The next few years were difficult. Our leave schedules rarely matched up and the distances meant we would spend a lot of time traveling to be together for a single day. We wrote constantly, but it isn’t the same.
“When I returned from studying at the Sorbonne, I was given a recuperative leave at a Black Sea vacation resort. Nadiya was able to join me before she was transferred to Baikonur.”
“Baikonur. That is the top-secret space program location in Kazakhstan, isn’t it?”
Illya nodded, “Nadiya was a rocket propulsion specialist. One of the best.”
“You were married to a rocket scientist. Why am I not surprised?”
“You know I don’t share your predilection for women with the intelligence of a potato.”
“That’s not fair. Most of them are smart enough.”
“Smart enough for you means able to put their clothes back on in the morning. May I continue?”
I decided Illya had some cause to be surly, so I let it pass for now.
Illya continued, “We had two weeks during which we fought most of the time. Nadiya had always been a closer to her Jewish culture than was politically advisable. She wasn’t religious, but had become an ardent Zionist while I was away and wanted us to defect to Israel. She already had a KGB minder because of her security clearance and I was hardly free of scrutiny either. It would have been suicide and I wouldn’t let her risk it.
“We did make up at the end of the vacation, before we went back to our respective assignments. That was the last time I saw her.
“Shortly after I returned to Moscow, I was transferred to UNCLE.”
“Just after I left Survival School, Waverly brought me the news that Nadenka was killed while trying to defect.
“That was all I knew until I received an anonymous letter last Friday with a newspaper clipping of her death in Israel that mentions a child and the additional information that led me here.”
“So there is a child, but you don’t have any leads on where she is? We’ll have to start in Israel, I guess.”
Illya heaved a heavy sigh. “I think we will need UNCLE’s resources to even start the search. I resigned and they probably won’t take me back, but you should go back. Waverly will probably let you count this as another unscheduled vacation.”
“Once he knows your reason, he’ll take you back too, I’m sure of it. Anyway, we’re a team and he won’t want to lose his top two agents.”