The trick was keeping people in the dark, making each target feel like he was the only one who’d been caught, making him feel isolated.

In most cases, just having the footage was enough. It would never be leaked. Never viewed. Just stored on a server somewhere in Russia, along with similar footage on literally thousands of other men from countries all over the planet. A diplomat in Estonia. A congressional staffer in DC. A trader on Wall Street. A journalist in London. All that footage added up to a massive arsenal of influence.

And once they got a target to do something small for them, tip them off on a story, or send the minutes of a meeting, even something that wasn’t illegal, something of limited value, something in the public domain like the phone number of a judge, once they did anything, the GRU owned them.

Because then, they hadn’t just cheated on their wife, reprehensible as that was, they’d aided the enemy. They’d crossed the line.

That was when you really had something. That was when you had the first step on a path that led all the way from law-abiding citizen, to out-and-out treason.

That was the kompromat game, and it was Tatyana’s bread and butter. It was what she and the other widows lived and breathed. It was what paid their bills and kept the lights on. And it was what kept Russia in the top tier, even now, with its military spending down to ninth in the world, barely above that of South Korea, and well below countries like France, Germany and Britain.

With its economy slipping, its military faltering, its super power status nothing more than a memory, kompromat, human intelligence, good old fashioned espionage, was what kept Russia on page one of the President’s Daily Brief, and had since the final days of Hitler, and Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito.

Igor had sent photos. The target was balding, jowly, the bottom half of his face reminded Tatyana of the bullmastiff a neighbor in her building in Moscow owned. The animal drooled nonstop, left big globs on the carpet in the elevator.

The target’s reported income in the previous year was over two million dollars, mostly earned lobbying the state senate in Providence on behalf of Elmaria Mutual, Northern Citizen Bank, and other large financial companies with a significant presence in Rhode Island.

Despite his church attendance and apparently happy marriage, he’d been deemed corruptible by the GRU. Tatyana looked at that part of the report closest. It was the part that affected her most. It said he’d traveled to Beijing six months earlier. It wasn’t government work, something on behalf of one of his financial clients, but being on the list meant a junior member of the diplomatic staff at the Russian consulate in Beijing wrote a report.