Early on in her work—the beginning, really—she learned to strip away all sentiment from her judgment. When is it possible to feel and to think at the same time? Never. So as Lyudmila pursued all possible candidates for the ASCOT leak over the past year, she didn’t regard past service to the Soviet Union, faithful or not; nor did she consult her opinion of the man’s character. There are only facts—did he have access to the information suspected to have been leaked? Did he have the opportunity and the means to communicate it? But until recently, there were not enough facts to guide her. No further ASCOT communications were intercepted. The agent seemed to have gone quiet.

Now she sits in her small, windowless office in Moscow Centre and contemplates a photograph. It was taken a year ago in Gorky Park, where a local team had intercepted a bundle of photographs and coded messages during a random search of an ice cream vendor. Under interrogation, the vendor admitted to operating a postbox for an agent whose name and identity he didn’t know. So the KGB sent a surveillance team. They had taken hundreds of photographs that yielded nothing useful, so the photographs had been filed away. Lyudmila had discovered their existence almost by accident, a conversation in the corridor with a secretary in the Moscow counterintelligence section.

To any ordinary observer, the scene’s perfectly innocent. A tall, gangly man buys ice cream for his family—a wife and three children, two boys and a girl—what is wrong with that? But Lyudmila recognizes this man. It’s HAMPTON, the American defector. HAMPTON now works primarily as an academic, lecturing on foreign relations at Moscow State University, but he’s also frequently employed by the KGB training program. He lives in Moscow with his three children and his wife, who (if Lyudmila’s not mistaken) is shortly to deliver another baby. Lyudmila knows all this not just because it’s her job to know what men like HAMPTON are up to, but because his two older children happen to attend the same school as her own daughter.

LYUDMILA HAS A DAUGHTER, yes. Marina was born at the end of 1940, nine months after Lyudmila discovered her husband in possession of a radio set, with which he regularly listened to broadcasts from the BBC and other Western sources. She was twenty-six years old and deeply in love, but it was her duty to report this subversive activity to the authorities and so she did. She kept the baby, however. She and her mother raised little Marina together, and the three of them were Lyudmila’s whole family until her mother—weakened by wartime deprivation—died five years ago. So now it’s only Lyudmila and Marina.