His job had been to read intercepts, to categorize them. Someone else, higher up the chain, would decide what they meant. In sixteen years, he must have read over fifty thousand intercepts. While some related to important developments like troop movements along the frontier, or the location of NATO defensive missile systems in former socialist states, the vast majority were exceedingly mundane. They covered topics like the seating arrangement at a formal function in Paris, or the maintenance records for water heaters at a military housing facility in Berlin, or parking permits for visitors at the American embassy in Madrid.

Igor read them all, and in sixteen years, no one ever asked him his opinion on them.

They should have. Because alone in his closet, Igor was paying attention. The names and codenames gradually became actual people to him. When ambassadors’ wives sat next to each other at dinner parties, he pictured them in their gowns and pearls. He imagined what they spoke of. He figured out who liked each other, who were friends, and who hated each other. When someone lost their parking spot at an embassy, or gained a corner office at a consulate, Igor noticed.

He had a talent for picking up on patterns, and the intercepts formed a vast tapestry in his mind. The people became more real to him than the people in his own life. Their petty communications took on the status of groundbreaking revelations.

He became a machine for decoding the soap opera of intrigues that played out across thirty nations, from the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the shores of Turkish Anatolia, and from the Finnish Arctic to the North African coast.

He saw NATO for what it was. He saw the players as characters in a tragic play. They were a different species to him, people who loved, and laughed, and cried, and had hopes and dreams. They were people who lived life.

Igor was not a person like that. Igor was the person who watched.

And when a low-level embassy staffer in Vilnius began passing information to a contact she met at a Paris ball, Igor saw it with all the vividness of an opera.

And when a member of the German parliament was assassinated in his Berlin apartment a few days later, Igor felt like he was watching the blade actually slit the man’s throat.

And, of course, he made the connection. He saw how the two events, a thousand kilometers apart, were connected.

He saw the bigger picture.

And more importantly, he saw how to exploit it.

Bringing his findings to his bosses had been a gamble, but within six months he was on the eighth floor. Two years later, he was in the direktor’s office, with its view, and its nubile secretaries, and its armed guards in brass-buttoned uniforms.

Now, for the second time in his life, he was going to take a risk.