Yegerova had found her first traitor when she was ten, the summer after the end of the Great Patriotic War. She’d seen a worker stealing potatoes from the collectivised farm in central Georgia her mother had been left to run after her father had been marched to his death at Stalingrad, along with half a million other Soviet souls. The thief had been severely punished, and Yegerova had been heavily rewarded, and singled out for her burgeoning zealotry.

She’d been a Little Octobrist, and had already traded her red five-pointed-star pin badge with its portrait of a young Lenin for the red neckerchief of the Young Pioneers. When she turned fourteen she graduated to the Komsomol, the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League. By then, the local Party had serious ambitions for her to continue the legacy of Georgia’s greatest Soviet child, Joseph Stalin. However, Yegerova’s own ambitions stretched further than attending youth rallies in Tbilisi and giving rousing speeches about the humble value of endless work at farms and factories. She wanted to follow Stalin’s footsteps all the way to Moscow, and she wanted to join the KGB.

She’d never forgotten the feeling of glorious justice that had filled her after she’d informed on the potato thief. She knew the Soviet Union was under constant threat from enemies within its own ranks as well as from the West, and she wanted to root out as many of them as she could.

‘Do not go beyond yourself,’ she’d been told when she’d announced her desire to attend School 101, more formally known as the Higher Intelligence School, the advanced KGB training centre on the fringes of the Soviet capital, when she was twenty-one. ‘They will just look down on you.’

‘Then I must go,’ she’d replied, full of her ever-present righteousness. ‘We are all comrades and if they disagree then I will expose them. And if they disregard me then they won’t suspect me, and that will be their mistake.’

Her application had been accepted, and she’d left Georgia for good the following spring. As her old mentors had predicted, she’d been alternatingly taunted and ignored by the other students. They thought she was a backward farm girl, and she thought they were all apostate metropolitan elites. She was surrounded by people who had been sent to the KGB by their families to be handed jobs that would keep them clean and dry and, if they played the game they’d been born into right, give them unquestioned power.