Sometimes she didn’t sleep, or woke drenched in a cold sweat so terrified she didn’t dare move until the sun came up.

Sometimes she went so many days without keeping food down that the doctors had to put her on an IV.

Sometimes she broke out in a rash that covered her entire body and had to be treated with antibiotics.

But it was a job. And it paid. And nothing lasted forever. One way or another, it would all come to an end.

She passed through immigration at JFK with doctored documents and made her way to the taxis in front of the terminal.

“Your bag, madam?” the driver said.

“Don’t bang it,” she said.

She got into the backseat and checked her phone.

“Where to?”

“The Four Seasons.”

“It’s between Park and Madison, right?”

The driver was Russian. She could tell from the accent.

“Yes,” she said in Russian.

“What street?”

“Fifty-eighth.”

They got out of the airport and he said, “Nice place.”

“The airport?”

“No, the Four Seasons.”

She nodded.

It was a nice place, one of her favorites. They called that stretch of the street Billionaire’s Row. Rooms started at a thousand a night. There was a penthouse suite, the third most expensive in the world according to the hotel’s website, that was over sixty-thousand.

According to agency legend, it was in that very suite that the Russian and Chinese presidents had met to discuss their new joint strategy. It was there they’d formulated the policy that set the future course of the GRU, and which would see Russia and China oppose American hegemony on every front in every theater.

If America was a mighty bison, Russia and China were the wolves nipping at its heels, letting it tire under its own lumbering weight until it faltered and they could get it by the throat.

It all served to give the hotel a special place in GRU lore, which was evinced by the fact they charged more nights there to their expense accounts than any other hotel in the world.

The driver was eager to talk but Tatyana stopped answering his questions. She was thinking about the operation.

After speaking to Sofia in Novouralsk, she realized that she needed to make contact with Spector. She needed to speak to him personally and make sure the Americans understood the seriousness of the virus she’d sent them. It had been easy to manipulate Igor into sending her to New York. There was a Canadian trade negotiator who she said was worth targeting. The target was real. He’d been to the Ukraine multiple times and his profile was rising on the GRU’s exhaustive list of people around the world worth pursuing. He was currently ranked 4,893rd. Not exactly a top priority, but enough to be plausible. Everyone was talking about Ukraine. The target was outside his home country, he was rated as corruptible. Why not hit him?