In her late forties, she looked very old-fashioned in her long skirt, clunky shoes, and white blouse with a frilly collar. Her light blonde hair, interlaced with strands of silver, was very fine and cut to her shoulders, but she wore it back in a tight bun. Her face had no memorable features and she kept a penetrating pair of amber eyes mostly hidden behind thick lenses housed in very conservative frames. She would blend nicely into virtually any crowd. In reality, she had served with British intelligence for a dozen years, ran high-level counterintelligence ops on three continents, and had a Romanian-manufactured rifle bullet perilously near her spine. This injury had forced her premature retirement on a modest government pension. She’d quickly tired of puttering around her small garden before joining the professor.

“Why did he do it?” asked Dominic.

“You ask why Stalin killed?” snapped Mallory. “Why does a snake bite? Or why does a great white shark devour its prey with nearly inconceivable savagery? It was simply what he did, on a larger scale than almost anyone before or since. A madman.”

“But Stalin was also a madman with a motive,” interjected Reggie. She looked around the table. “He was trying to wipe out Ukrainian nationalism. And also to prevent the farmers from resisting collectivization of agriculture. It is said that there is not one Ukrainian living today who did not lose a family member through the Holodomor.”

Mallory smiled appreciatively. “You are an excellent student of history, Reggie.”

She gave him a stony gaze. “Not history, Professor. Horror.”

Whit looked confused. “Am I missing something? Because all that happened as you said in the 1930s. If he’s only sixty-three, Waller, or this Fedir Kuchin bloke, wasn’t even alive back then.”

Mallory made a steeple with his hands. “Do you think simply because Stalin died that the genocide stopped, Beckham? The communist regime persisted for several more decades after the monster breathed his last.”