Anna Valentina was not a fan of Manhattan architecture. She felt that the buildings were ugly and gauche when compared with the magnificence of Leningrad. And she felt entitled to her opinion. She’d happily wager that over the preceding five years she’d looked at more buildings through her camera and taken more pictures of more structures than anyone else in the city. The fact that the buildings only played a supporting role in her photos made no difference to her. Her mind was made up on the matter.
Anna’s real subjects were always people. She’d been capturing their images with her trusty Zenit since her second day in America. It was a special model. It had two lenses—a dummy one at the front, in the regular place, which was connected to the viewfinder, and a real one hidden at the side, which operated blind. It enabled her to take anyone’s picture, completely undetected, and if the police or the FBI showed any interest, it would seem absolutely normal unless they took it to pieces. It was a powerful tool. There was only one problem. It wasn’t easy to use. It took great skill; otherwise you ended up with photographs of blank walls, or the sky, or a subject with no head. Expert operators were rare, and Anna was one of the best.
For four straight years her routine had been consistent. She was directed toward politicians. Diplomats. Businessmen. She followed them to the UN. To their embassies. Their offices. Their homes. The park. To restaurants and clubs and bars. She kept a meticulous record of everyone they met, and that helped the KGB resident stay current with the local players and their roles. Occasionally Anna would be sent on spicier assignments, to hotels. She only needed a regular camera for those jobs. She didn’t enjoy them. She found the business of kompromat distasteful, although she understood it was necessary. And she was glad she wasn’t required to be on the other side of the mirror, exercising an entirely different set of skills she’d learned in training.
During the last twelve months a new priority had emerged. In Afghanistan the Mujahideen had managed to get their hands on a supply of Cтрела missiles—or Strela-2s, as the Americans call them. Moscow suspected that the CIA had bought them in Egypt and smuggled them into the mountains via Pakistan. They weren’t great weapons, Anna knew from her studies. The design was fifteen years old, so they were fairly primitive. They were no use against MiGs, for example, because they were too slow and had no answer to the latest countermeasures. They could, however, be effective against slower, more basic aircraft, like helicopters.
Helicopters are attractive targets because they’re used to carry troops. The Mujahideen had enjoyed some success against them. The problem, Moscow believed, was that the rebels lacked the skill to operate the Strela-2s on their own. They must have been getting help. Deserters from Ukraine were suspected of providing it. Anna was disgusted when she heard about this. To her, Russians and Ukrainians were part of the same single Soviet people. To betray one’s brothers was appalling. Then Anna learned that some of the vile traitors had found their way to the United States. The KGB believed that four had settled in New York. A team was formed to find them so that they could be sent home and made an example of. Anna was assigned, and her pictures were pivotal in locating two of them. They were caught and successfully exfiltrated. To help find the others—and as a kind of reward, her handler hinted—Anna was to be the first operative on foreign soil to be issued a new kind of camera. It could take regular photographs. Moving pictures. And even record sound.
Anna was going to need to know how to use the new equipment, as well as assume responsibility for its maintenance and provide feedback on its performance in the field. Accordingly, an in-depth training session was arranged. A developer from the lab in Zagorsk was to handle the briefing personally. He was flown to New York specially, and a KGB safe house was lined up for the event so that no one—not even Anna’s handler—would be able to overhear the strictly classified details.
The safe house was located in a neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. That was appropriate, Anna thought, given that the city was full of capitalist devils who were obsessed with nothing but filling their stomachs. She arrived with her “husband,” Misha—her backup since the day she’d arrived in the United States—at the appointed time and used the code she’d been given to open the door. She stepped inside and was hit by a wave of unexpected nostalgia. The house was old and unreasonably large, and it was contaminated with abhorrent trappings of decadence, such as conspicuous displays of rare wood and swaths of degenerately decorated tile work, but the furniture was pure Soviet. It was solid. Functional. Reassuring. Their comrades in the Establishment Bureau must have brought it over specially to provide a psychological boost for any burned-out operatives in need of sanctuary. Anna stood for a moment, moved by the purity of its aesthetic, then sank gratefully into the corner of a green vinyl couch and gestured for Misha to join her while they waited for the expert to arrive.
Twenty minutes had passed before Anna and Misha heard the front door open again. They stood and greeted the expert when he bustled in. He was carrying a case—hard-sided, made of some kind of composite material rather than the canvas bag Anna used with the Zenit—and launched into his briefing without apology or preamble. Anna and Misha watched his demonstration. It was long and comprehensive—not too complex, though made harder to follow than it needed to be by the guy’s dull monotone delivery. But they were professionals, so they kept their focus. They memorized the procedures he outlined. Asked questions where appropriate. And finally reached the only part Anna was truly looking forward to. The hands-on test.
Anna picked the new camera up from the lid of its closed case, which the expert had been using as a table. She held it still for a moment, surprised by its weight. It was considerably heavier than her Zenit, which itself was by no means a light piece of equipment. That shouldn’t be a problem, she thought. She was confident she could adapt, given time. She examined the controls, replaying the expert’s instructions in her head. There was a regular-looking shutter release for stills. A button to activate the more advanced features. And a slim lever that worked with it to set the mode. There were three positions. Up was for video and audio. Center was for video only. Down was for audio only. It was a bit like the fire selector on the side of an AK-47, she thought, only her targets didn’t know she was taking shots of them. The pain they felt—if any—came later.
Anna raised the viewfinder to her eye, pointed the camera at Misha, flicked the lever up with her thumb, and hit the button. The room was instantly filled by a high-pitched, piercing shriek. It wasn’t loud enough to hurt her ears, but it was certainly a shock. It seemed to be coming from the wall behind the couch, just a few feet away. Anna didn’t know what was going on. The expert was on his feet, instantly, shouting at her to switch the camera off and not to say another word. He had a gun in one hand. He tore open the case with his other, grabbed the camera, and jammed it inside. The room was quiet now—the howling had stopped as soon as Anna released the button—and the crack of the case slamming shut echoed like a gunshot.
The expert snapped the locks and grabbed the handle. He ran for the door, ducking and twisting and jerking his body from side to side as he went. Anna saw another man rushing toward them from the corridor. He had a gun, too. He raised it and fired two quick shots. Both missed the expert. Behind her Anna heard Misha grunt and fall. She felt a burning in her arm, high up near her shoulder. The expert fired and the guy in the corridor pitched backward and crumpled onto the floor. The expert fired again. He was aiming at a woman. She was farther away, just passing the bottom of the staircase. He fired again and the woman clutched her neck and slumped to the side, leaning against the wall. Then the expert ran to the front door, clawed it open, and dashed out into the street.
Anna watched the woman stumble forward. She kept coming, sliding her shoulder along the wall for support, until she reached the living room doorway. She paused and the two women locked eyes for a second. Then Anna was aware of a green ball falling to the floor by the other woman’s feet. It bounced a couple of inches into the air, and the world turned a blinding, burning white.
Anna woke up on the living room floor. Her eyes were stinging from the smoke. Her ears were ringing. Her right arm was wet and sticky, but strangely warm. She touched it with her other hand and realized she was bleeding. Heavily. She raised her head and did her best to take stock of her situation. The expert was gone. Misha was lying to her side with a hole through his chest. He was clearly dead. The other man had been hit in the head, and half his brains were sprayed across the wall in the corridor. He was clearly dead. The woman was lying just inside the doorway. She had no visible injuries. She might not be dead. Not quite.
Anna tried to crawl across the floor. She found it hard to move. Her right hand was numb. Her arm couldn’t take any weight. Her head was swimming. She forced herself forward, and after what felt like hours of exhausting effort she reached the woman’s side. And immediately wished she hadn’t moved. The woman’s eyes were open but they were dark and empty, and the floor around her was slick with the blood that had drained from a neat, innocuous-looking hole in the flesh above her collarbone.
Anna’s handler visited her in the sick bay at the Soviet embassy two days later. He told her not to worry. The expert and the secret camera were safe. The mole who’d betrayed the briefing had been found. His character had evidently been weak, as he’d fallen prey to the advances of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, but he’d have plenty of time to work on remedying that defect in the gulag to which he was currently en route. Misha was dead. And so were two American operatives. One of them—the man—was known to the KGB. He was a veteran, and had survived postings all over the world. His time had come. The other—the woman—shouldn’t have been there at all. That was a mistake on the Americans’ part. She was a developer, not a field operative. She’d designed the monitoring system—which was old by Soviet standards, and unacceptably prone to feedback—and had evidently insisted on supervising the installation. An asset like that should have been pulled out of the house before the briefing began, but there’d apparently been a screwup over the timing.
Anna herself had been luckier. Relatively speaking. Her eyesight had been slightly degraded by the gas from the percussion grenade because she’d been so close when it exploded, and there was minor nerve damage to her arm from the bullet that grazed it. Her injuries could have been much more serious. She was expected to recover to the point where she could function to average standards. But nonetheless she wasn’t being returned to her previous posting. She was being given a different assignment. The researcher’s widower also had connections to American counterintelligence. He was a consultant for them now, semi-retired, using his business as a cover. Not much was known about him, and the KGB had been looking for a way to get close to him for years. Now he was left alone with a young son to raise. Maybe he’d need a nanny. A cook. A housekeeper. Whatever position he decided on, Anna was to fill it. Papers would be provided. References prepared. It would soon be time for a new role. A new place. And another new name.