Two years after that, another brother simply disappeared while working for Soviet intelligence in Germany, and as a result, when Lyudmila joined the intelligence service herself—at the time, it was called the NKVD—she underwent a rigorous interrogation. Miraculously, she survived. The fact that she had been the one to denounce her brother to the NKVD worked in her favor, as did her extensive knowledge of Marxist theory, her avowed disgust of bourgeois capitalist society, and her exceptionally ascetic lifestyle.

That was in 1932. Since then Lyudmila has survived the purges of the late 1930s and the slaughter of the Great Patriotic War, from which nobody else in her entering class at the NKVD—by now reformed into the KGB—was left alive. Lyudmila survives not because she’s extraordinarily brilliant, or strategic, or well connected. She survives because she has two rules. The first is not to attract attention to herself. Comrade Stalin doesn’t know her name. Beria of the secret police doesn’t know her name. She serves them quietly, anonymously. Others who clamored for recognition are now dead, or starving to death in a Siberian gulag. Not Lyudmila. She does all the dirty work. She finds girls to supply Beria’s particular needs, for example, and she finds ways to silence the grieved family members who demand some explanation. When it comes to sniffing out heretical thoughts, nobody has a more sensitive nose than Lyudmila. She’s particularly good at extracting confessions. Never once has she claimed credit for any of these acts of patriotism. She lets others claim the credit and then watches as they, too, fall victim to some denouncement. Some discovery of impurity in thought or deed. They all fall eventually.

The second rule is even more important: trust nobody. Trust nothing! Every single person she meets, inside the KGB and outside of it, is suspect. Every piece of information that crosses her desk, gathered from networks within the Soviet Union and without, is suspect. Lyudmila has one faith—the Communist state. Everything else falls sacrifice to this one idea, even herself.

LYUDMILA DOESN’T TRUST THIS particular man one bit, even though he’s supplied the KGB and its predecessors with valuable information from the British Foreign Office for the past twenty years. His name is Guy Burgess, and he’s recently arrived from London with a fellow spy named Donald Maclean. They defected together, just ahead of the authorities who were about to unmask them at last.