She had been placed in an orphanage. Not a real orphanage, but a KGB orphanage where, as she liked to say, she had been raised by wolves. At a certain point—she could not recall when—her caretakers had stopped speaking to her in Russian. For a time she was raised in total silence, until the last traces of the Russian language had leaked from her memory. Then she was placed in the care of a unit that spoke to her only in English. She watched videos of British children’s programs and read British children’s books. The limited exposure to British culture did little for her accent. She spoke English, she said, like a newsreader for Radio Moscow.

The facility where she lived was in suburban Moscow, not far from the headquarters of the First Chief Directorate in Yasenevo, which the KGB referred to as Moscow Center. Eventually she was moved to a KGB training camp deep in the Russian interior, near a closed city that had no name, only a number. The camp contained a small English town, with high street shops, a park, a bus with an English-speaking driver, and a terrace of brick houses where the trainees lived together as families. In a separate part of the camp was a small American town with a theater that played popular American movies. And a short distance from the American town was a German village. It was run in concert with the East German Stasi. The food was flown in weekly from East Berlin: German sausage, beer, fresh German ham. Everyone agreed the German-speaking trainees had it best.

For the most part the trainees kept to their separate false worlds. Madeline lived with the man and woman who would eventually resettle with her in Britain. She attended a stern English school, had tea and crumpets in a little English shop, and played in an English park that was invariably buried beneath several inches of Russian snow. On occasion, however, she was allowed to watch an American movie in the American town, or to have dinner in the beer garden of the German village. It was on one such outing that she met Katerina.

“I assume she wasn’t living in the American village,” said Gabriel.

“No,” answered Madeline. “Katerina was a German girl.”

She was several years older than Madeline, an adolescent on the doorstep of womanhood. She was already beautiful, but not as beautiful as she would become. She spoke a bit of English—the trainees in the German program were taught to be bilingual—and she enjoyed practicing with Madeline, whose English, while oddly accented, was perfect. As a rule, friendships between trainees from different schools were discouraged, but in the case of Madeline and Katerina the trainers made an exception. Katerina had been depressed for some time. Her trainers were not at all convinced she was suited for life in the West as an illegal.