No more than thirty minutes after Kozlov had given her the second name and walked away, he’d been crushed under a trolley bus on Bolshoy Prospekt, less than a quarter mile from the entrance to the gardens. Helen had been scooped off the street moments later by one of the CIA countersurveillance teams watching over her, and driven straight to Pulkovo Airport, where she had been rushed on board a waiting Gulfstream jet. Barely an hour and a half later, a small convoy of armored SUVs had driven her onto the US embassy compound in Stockholm.

Kozlov’s words had haunted Helen. The pattern she’d ultimately deciphered was chilling, but it had taken her a number of years to figure it out.

The agency had kept her at the embassy for close to a week. The Langley team flew in the day of her arrival and dissected the time she had spent with Kozlov. Second by second. Word by word. Memory by memory. By day three, the team’s questioning had started to feel more like an interrogation than a debriefing to her. By the time they had wrapped up, she’d wished the Saint Petersburg fiasco had never happened. From what she’d gathered, so had the rest of the CIA officers involved in the operation. Preliminary investigative reporting on the Holmans hadn’t looked promising.

Denise Holman and her husband had fit the same profile as the Kelleys. Another possible sleeper team—collecting public pensions and living nowhere close to an obvious espionage target. Retired teachers who had spent the better part of the past three decades working, raising kids, and putting them through college, all while carving out a nice life for themselves in a middle-class suburb of Minneapolis. The once-frightening specter of a potentially devastating sleeper network on US soil was starting to look more and more like an unconnected collection of unused, retired agents.

It hadn’t taken long for the skeptics at Langley to start suggesting Kozlov had played the agency. That the GRU general had tried to pass off retired or deactivated sleepers in exchange for a cushy retirement in the United States. Unlike many of his high-ranking GRU colleagues, Kozlov hadn’t leveraged his position within the still-feared and influential intelligence agency to amass a personal fortune during the rush to privatize the Russian economy.

He’d kept plugging along in the role of the loyal general until his retirement, long after the new oligarch class had risen from the dust and stolen the last of the privatized shares from the people. From what the CIA could gather, Kozlov had little to show for his devoted service beyond a modest government pension, a two-bedroom apartment in a drab low-rise beyond the Third Ring Road, and a tiny, run-down dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. They’d speculated that bitterness and jealousy had pushed Kozlov into an inconsequential betrayal of his country.