Anna’s mother and father had been scared of their daughter for most of her childhood. She was a pretty child, and her beauty had only grown as she got older. But so had the darkness that seemed to sit deep within her. She was quick to anger, and sought revenge for even the smallest slight. By the time she was ten, they suspected she was responsible for at least three broken bones among the local children. They tried their best to shelter her from the world—and the world from her.

When the war started, she was kept in the family home in the south of Dresden almost all day with her mother while her father worked long hours in a munitions factory in the west.

The whole family was at home the night the RAF dropped the first wave of bombs on the city. They rushed to their cellar as they heard the explosions getting louder and close enough to shake the walls of their house and smash her mother’s prized collection of Dresden’s famed porcelain. Then a direct hit brought their home down on top of them.

When the dust from the blast began to settle, the ringing in Anna’s ears was replaced by the screams of her mother as she tried to dig her husband out from under the rubble that had crushed his body and was forcing blood out of his mouth with every shallow breath. Anna, who was serenely calm in the chaos, understood that nothing could be done to save her father. So she picked up a large chunk of brick and used it to cave in his head. Then, when her mother’s screams got even louder, delirious and desperate, and Anna realised there was no way she could survive without the man who had been by her side for forty years, she strangled her.

The KGB agents didn’t know whether to lock Anna up or execute her, put a bullet in her head and bury her somewhere in the city to be forgotten. But Ivan Egorov, the head of the newly established Line Z, had another idea. He wanted to recruit her.

Line Z was only a few months old, one of the many experiments the KGB had dreamed up to work out how to take advantage of the new territorial and collateral resources the Soviet Union had acquired after defeating Nazi Germany, and to prepare for the predicted cooling of relations with its wartime allies.

Anna was sent to a military base near Bernau bei Berlin, a small town north of the German capital that had also been bombed by the Allies and left to rot by the Soviets.