It was a mission that would attract little attention in Moscow.

Even still, she knew the risk she was taking. A statistic that shocked many foreigners, but not Russians, was that the GRU spent more of its resources monitoring its own people than those of other countries.

It had to.

Tatyana was a good agent, with a clean record, but there was a defection-risk profile for agents like her. She was an unmarried female under thirty with no children, no living relatives, and few reasons to miss Moscow if it should ever transpire she couldn’t go back.

That was the reason they paid so well. The Russians realized long ago, after an embarrassing number of defections, that if they wanted to send young women overseas to seduce foreigners, they had to give them a lifestyle they wouldn’t willingly throw away. At a time when Russian GDP per capita was under eight thousand dollars, Igor’s budget per widow was three million. Line items for specific operations were in addition.

Tatyana traveled with GRU credit cards and could buy whatever she wanted. As long as she kept coming home after assignments, the faucet would keep flowing. And as long as everything she bought was chargeable to American Express, and didn’t look like it would be useful to a person planning a life outside Russia, no one asked any questions.

That meant no real estate, no securities, no transferable assets, no savings.

Just luxuries. Things of no use to a defector.

Which was fine by her. She was authorized to shop, and shop she would.

It would have been suspicious if she didn’t.

Besides, the boutiques in the hotel lobby alone would put Moscow’s luxury district to shame.

She got to the hotel and checked in under the same name as the passport she’d entered the country under.

Widows generally traveled under one of two honeytrap covers.

Either they were the young, disaffected trophy-wife of some rich oligarch, or they were a penniless translator toiling in a low-paying government job at the nearest Russian embassy. Either way, they were desperate for a savior, a foreign man, who would whisk them away from their drab reality into the glamor and sparkle of the west.

That it worked at all was proof to Tatyana of how the world really operated. James Brown had it right all along. It was a man’s world. And Tatyana had learned that men were driven by one thing. Not lust, not greed, not even the desire for power.

The force that really made the world go round was the delicate, tender, all-too-easily-wounded snowflake that was the male ego. That was what brought nations to war, what brought soldiers to the battlefield, and what brought men to women’s beds.