Valera could have stayed in Joensuu, found somewhere out of the way to rest and build up her strength for a day or two, or stowed away on a ship heading out onto Lake Pyhäselkä and disappeared into the network of waterways that criss-crossed Finland. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment she might be snatched up and taken back to Russia. The ties that bound Finland and its neighbour ran almost as deep as the divisions that separated them. Russia had exerted influence over Finland for centuries, and even after independence and multiple, bloody wars there were still plenty of people whose loyalties lay to the east. For every good Samaritan Valera might encounter, she might also meet someone looking to curry favour with Moscow.

She’d decided that she had to keep moving.

Her ride from Ilomantsi had dropped her off in the middle of Joensuu’s old town and, not wanting to expose herself as an outsider by asking for directions, she had spent almost an hour finding the main city bus station.

She’d tried to buy a ticket to Helsinki, but this time the clerk had refused her rubles. He’d said something to her, but Valera had no idea what. She’d tried, quietly, speaking to him in Swedish and then English, but he didn’t understand either.

Valera had felt the eyes of the queue behind her boring into her back, and then she’d felt a hand gently rest on her shoulder. She’d looked at the fat fingers curling round her clavicle and for one terrifying moment thought they belonged to Zukolev. But they didn’t. They were attached to an old man who had taken pity on her and translated the clerk’s instructions to go get her money changed into Finnish markka two desks down.

After she’d bought her ticket she went to the station’s small cafe, where she ate her first proper meal in days—a thick, meaty stew that she had to coax slowly down her throat. Then, an hour later, she’d got on another bus. Seven hours after that, she’d arrived in Helsinki. And just before five o’clock in the evening she’d walked through the doors of the Swedish embassy on the waterfront of the Finnish capital and requested political asylum.

Valera had no way of knowing that the CIA had a car permanently stationed in the ferry terminal car park across from the embassy and that the young agent sitting behind its steering wheel had taken her photo as she crossed the road and went inside. America had received its fair share of Soviet defectors in its European embassies over the years, and since Rudolf Nureyev, Russia’s greatest ballet star, had requested asylum in Paris a month ago the CIA had been watching at a long list of potential crossover points all over the continent.