When he came to Moscow once a month, Fields-Hutton always stayed at the Rossiya, just east of the Kremlin, and took long breakfasts in their elegant café. It gave him time to read the newspapers from front to back. More importantly, constantly draining his teacup gave Andrei, the waiter, a reason to come over with refills and three, four, or sometimes five fresh tea bags. Attached to the string of every bag was a label that bore the name Chashka Chai on the outside. Inside each tag was a circular spot of microfilm which Fields-Hutton pocketed when no one was looking. Most of the time, the maître d' was looking, so Fields-Hutton had to recover the film when other patrons came into the restaurant, distracting him.

Andrei was one of Peggy's finds. His name came from a list of former soldiers, and she later learned that he had originally intended to make money working in a West Siberian oil settlement. But he was wounded in Afghanistan and, after back surgery, he could no longer lift heavy gear. After Gorbachev, he could no longer afford to live. He was the perfect man to shuttle data between deeply buried operatives whose names he didn't know, whose faces he never saw, and Fields-Hutton. If Andrei was ever caught, only Fields-Hutton was at risk… and that came with the territory.

Despite what many people outside the intelligence community believed, the KGB hadn't collapsed with the fall of Communism. To the contrary, as the new Ministry of security, it was more pervasive than ever. The agency had simply changed from an army of professionals into an even larger force of civilian freelancers. These operatives were paid for each solid lead they turned in. As a result, veterans and amateurs alike were looking everywhere for spies. Peggy called it a Russian version of Entertainment Tonight, with stringers everywhere. And she was right. The quarry was foreigners instead of celebrities, but the goal was the same: to report on furtive or suspicious activities. And because so many businesspeople assumed there was no longer a threat, they stumbled into trouble by helping Russian associates exchange rubles for dollars or marks, by bringing in jewelry or expensive clothes for the black market, or by spying on rival foreign companies doing business here. Instead of being prosecuted, foreign prisoners were typically allowed to buy their way out of trouble. Fields-Hutton joked that the ministry spent less time protecting national security than it did overseeing commerce. Japanese manufacturers alone paid Russian agents hundreds of millions of rubles a year to watch for competitors who might be keeping too close an eye on their activities in Russia. It was even rumored that the Japanese had put over 50 million rubles into the failed presidential bid of Interior Minister Nikolai Dogin to help protect the country from an influx of foreign investors.

The spy business was alive and well, and after seven years British agent Fields-Hutton was still in the thick of it.