When Lyudmila arrives home from work, her head full of the ASCOT case, Marina calls to her from the tiny kitchen, where she’s making dinner. “Coming, pet,” says Lyudmila. She sets down her briefcase and takes off her shoes and her small hat and pads across the living room. Marina looks up from the stove. Her blue eyes are exactly like her father’s, crisp and smiling, surrounded by wet black lashes.

“How was your day, Mama?” she asks.

“Good. What are you making?”

“Solyanka.”

“Hmm. My favorite soup, is it? Have you been misbehaving at school again?”

Marina gives her a playful look. “Maybe.”

They eat the soup together at the little table in the corner of the tiny living room. Marina does her homework and Lyudmila checks it carefully. Of course, there are no mistakes. Dmitri was an electrical engineer when he was sent to the gulag; he had been the smartest boy in school, when they were children. He also had a rebellious streak, which he passed on to his daughter.

“Mama,” Marina says, once they’re settled on the sofa—Lyudmila reading a KGB training manual, Marina reading Tolstoy for school tomorrow—“how old were you when you met my father?”

Lyudmila thinks for a moment. “I was twelve years old.”

“Ah. The same as me.”

“A little older.”

“Oh, a few months,” Marina says impatiently.

She returns to her book and Lyudmila returns to her training manual, but thanks to Marina’s strange question she can’t concentrate. She keeps thinking about Dmitri, and how he used to shield her from some of the other children, who teased her because she was so smart and serious and wore clothes even uglier and shabbier than the other girls. She thought he was just being kind, but when she turned seventeen he told her it was because he fell in love with her that first day at school, when they were both twelve years old.

THE NEXT DAY, LYUDMILA receives word of an unusual request from the American embassy. Mrs. Alexander Digby, who has a history of difficult childbirth, has apparently invited her sister to stay with her in Moscow, during and after the period of her delivery. The sister wishes to formally apply for two visas to enter the Soviet Union, one for herself and one for her husband, to whom she is newly married.

Lyudmila’s skin prickles as she reads this report. She holds no truck with sentiment, but instinct is a KGB officer’s most valuable asset.

She picks up her telephone and asks to speak to the head of the American section.

Ruth

JUNE 1952

Rome, Italy