But she worked for the Main Directorate, Russia’s CIA, still referred to by its Soviet moniker, the GRU. It was an organization that required blind faith as much as any religion ever had.

She’d sworn an oath to the “Greatness of the Motherland.”

She had reasons to hate the Motherland, but she was too much of a pragmatist to do so.

Hate was a luxury. As was love.

If Tatyana believed in anything, it was austerity. Austerity of emotion. Austerity of hope. Austerity of despair.

It was the only way she could live in a world that killed so frequently and so callously.

She grew up in the post-Soviet era, but in many ways was better suited to the world that existed before. She understood those times. She related to them, and to the people who lived in them.

People who grew up in Communism understood things differently.

They did the things that had to be done.

Not because those things were necessary in themselves, but because if they were not done, there would be punishment.

They believed only in what they could see.

Steel, coal, grain, railway lines, nuclear reactors, rockets.

Those were things they could count on. Cold things. They offered nothing. They took more life than they gave.

But they were real, and only a madman or a liar would deny them.

She believed in the Akula-class submarine her father died on, suffocated when a freon leak sucked the oxygen out of his chamber.

Tatyana was in her mother’s womb at the time.

She believed in Saint Petersburg Hospital Number 40, which refused to admit her mother because she didn’t have the right paperwork. It was one of the largest hospitals on earth, and one of the most renowned. It had treated soldiers during the Russian Civil War. It was destroyed by the Germans during the Second World War and rebuilt larger and better. It was said to have treated a quarter of a million Soviet citizens by the time of the collapse.

Tatyana’s mother was not one of them. A bureaucrat refused to admit her. She died a month later of tuberculosis in their two-room apartment. Tatyana didn’t know it at the time, she was only four years old, but she later found out that tuberculosis had killed as many as one out of every seven people who’d ever lived.

That was until the cure was found.

In 1943, Streptomycin was discovered by doctors in the United States and by the 1950s, was being used to treat and cure tuberculosis all over the world. The UN listed it as one of the essential medicines every human on the planet should have access to.

The wholesale cost of a streptomycin treatment was thirty-eight cents.

That was what Tatyana believed in. A thirty-eight cent dose of Streptomycin. She thought of it every time a cashier handed her a few coins.