Not knowing which way to go.

Unlike the voice in the poem, the destination for Leo had always been clear. The torment was that he could not get there. He knew what he wanted to achieve but could not achieve it. With the road empty, mumbling the words of the poem, Leo closed his eyes, taking his hands off the handlebars and stretching them out to the side, snaking his bicycle from side to side.

Greater Province of Kabul

City of Kabul - Kabul Police Headquarters

Dih Afghanan - Same Day

Trainee agent Nara Mir was content to read her books while waiting for her teacher Comrade Leo Demidov to arrive. He was several hours late, a not unusual occurrence. Unreliable and erratic, he was perhaps the most peculiar man she’d ever met, certainly the most foreign, quite alien to her sensibilities. Despite this, she looked forward to his classes even if it was hard to imagine that he’d once been a member of the world-renowned KGB. At twenty-three, her training was nearly complete and soon she would become an agent supervising ideological education at schools and monitoring the students, assessing them, deciding which were likely to be assets to the regime and should be marked for government jobs and which were likely to prove problematic, perhaps even a threat. She did not consider such work spying: every teacher evaluated their students asd I t of their job, whether they worked for the State intelligence service or not. Excited by the prospect, she was at the forefront of the social changes, presented with an opportunity that hadn’t existed for women just a few years ago.