The years after she was wounded were hard for Anna, in exile in her gilded Westchester gulag.

Her injuries hadn’t been serious. A proper medic, like the ones in Russia, would have given her a realistic evaluation. The doctors in America were marred by decadence. Her eyesight was almost perfect. She could drive. She could see well enough to shoot. She certainly could have continued to take photographs. With her arm she could tell she’d lost a little range of movement, but not so much that anyone else would notice. She made sure to keep the scar covered up. She’d suffered no loss of strength. And if anyone said otherwise, give her two minutes with them in the dojo, her “good” arm tied behind her back, and she’d make them eat their words.

During her first months in the McGrath house Anna found herself harboring violent fantasies. She was mad at everyone else who’d applied for the job. They must have put up a pretty poor effort if they couldn’t even beat a disabled foreigner. She was resentful of her own people when it dawned on her that they must have had a hand in tipping the scales. She was driven crazy by Mr. McGrath, who’d retired altogether from espionage when his wife died and was hypocritically trying to bring his son up as a pacifist. She’d read his file. Incomplete as it was, she’d seen enough to know the kind of things he was capable of. Cabin fever set in. She had nothing worthwhile to do. And nowhere to go other than the grocery store, and that was nothing more than a temple to the worst excesses of rampant consumerism. She tried to escape via the TV, but was tortured by the mad clown who kept constantly popping up on her screen. She couldn’t believe that the feeble-minded freak had somehow gotten elected president not once, but twice. It was like she’d become an unwilling participant in a live-action demonstration of the shortcomings of Western democracy.

As bad as things were in America, though, she knew they were worse at home. She wasn’t supposed to show any interest, but she was very discreet. She read about the fatal blow that was struck in November ’89, in her room with tears in her eyes, as her German comrades succumbed to the degeneracy of their western neighbors and dismantled the antifascist bulwark that had kept East Berlin safe since 1961. The union clung on for another eighteen months, then Yugoslavia crumbled. The Baltic states disintegrated. And finally, on Boxing Day 1991, the unthinkable happened. The USSR was officially dissolved. She took to her bed for a week. She felt like her comrade cosmonauts who were marooned on the space station Mir when the terrible news was broken. One of them was from Leningrad, too. Their country had disappeared while none of them were there. At least the cosmonauts were able to land again on friendly soil. Eventually. Whereas she was trapped in a vacuum. She signaled her handler, asking permission to return home. His response took two days to arrive. Request denied. Remain on station. Await instructions.

Instructions that never came.

Anna considered killing herself. She considered going back to Russia and killing the traitor Gorbachev. Eventually she settled for an uneasy compromise between boredom and anxiety. She was proficient at the mundane chores that were expected of her. Mr. McGrath’s son, Paul, was growing up and becoming more interesting. She was amused to see how completely he failed to buy into his father’s bogus pacifist agenda. How funny it would be if Paul followed in his father’s real footsteps. So she helped him, and guided him whenever she could. She continued to watch Mr. McGrath in the vain hope that he’d return to some real work. Then he might reveal something that she could parlay into a reason to return home. Or at least capture her interest. But when he did finally make a move, it wasn’t anything she’d expected. He started digging into the availability of a certain piece of real estate. A brownstone in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.

The property had been owned by the Soviet Union. After the place had been compromised by the Americans it couldn’t be used as a safe house any longer, so it was mothballed. It wasn’t disposed of, because transactions leave trails and the Kremlin valued secrecy above all else. But now there was no Soviet Union. Its successor, the Russian Federation, was tainted by capitalism and desperate for hard currency. Who knew what it would do with all the miscellaneous assets it had inherited? Evidently Mr. McGrath knew what he hoped it would do. Sell them. But did he want to buy the place to keep it out of the hands of developers, and maintain it as a kind of shrine to his wife? Or did he hope to find some clues there about how she’d died? And who’d been present at the time?

Anna signaled her handler for assistance. She needed information. Above all she needed to know what had happened to the American monitoring system. Was it still in place at the house? Or had it been torn out for study, or disposal? She got no response. Her go-bag was ready, as always. The habit was too deeply ingrained for it not to be. So should she run? She was tempted. It’s always safest to assume the worst. But where would she go? There was no more Soviet Union, after all. Leningrad—St. Petersburg, she supposed she should say now—was overrun with oligarchs, by all accounts. Maybe evacuation was premature. The house might have been sanitized. There was bound to be a lot of bureaucracy to contend with, Soviet Union or not, so Mr. McGrath may never complete the purchase. Someone else could come along with more money or better connections, who wouldn’t be the same kind of threat as an owner. She should hold her position.

She should hold, but she should also raise her alert status. Find out as much as possible about the degree of risk Mr. McGrath acquiring the brownstone could pose. She should start by going back to Mr. McGrath’s wife’s records. The files and folders of notes and diagrams he kept boxed up in the room he pretended she died in. Anna had skimmed through everything soon after she’d moved into the house. She knew some of the papers related to the monitoring system, but she hadn’t sweated the details. She knew the brownstone was bugged, because she’d been there. The presence of the invention wasn’t a surprise. But now she needed to understand its operation in more depth. There was one detail in particular that was critical. Had the system been monitored remotely? Or had there been a recording device at the premises? It was the kind of difference that could determine whether someone lived or died. But it was also moot, unless Mr. McGrath bought the house.

Mr. McGrath bought the house. It took a few more years, but he was nothing if not persistent. He didn’t hide what he was doing, which Anna took as a good sign. He passed it off as a business thing, which he’d developed a habit of talking about. Anna claimed to have a personal interest in the project, pretending that her father had been a joiner who’d worked in that area. She asked if she could visit the house with him the next time he went there. He agreed, and proposed one day the following week.

Anna pretended to have errands to run in the city first, so they agreed on a time to meet in front of the house. Mr. McGrath was there early. He unlocked the front door and stood aside for Anna to go in ahead of him. She was fine while she was in the hallway, but when she reached the living room all she could smell was smoke, from the guns and the grenade that had shattered the peace more than a decade ago. Her eyes watered, and Mr. McGrath thought she must be crying over something to do with her father. She was too distracted to deny it, battling to keep on an even keel in the room where her “husband” and Mr. McGrath’s wife had died, and her life had changed forever. It was a struggle not to gawk at the floor by the doorway where his wife’s fatal blood had flowed. To scan the walls for a hole left by the bullet that had torn through Misha’s chest. To search for traces of brains on the hallway plasterwork, where the American operative had fallen. The only encouragement Anna felt was that Mr. McGrath showed no signs of knowing the significance of the room. She thought she saw him paying a little extra attention to the wall where the green sofa had been, but he soon looked away and offered to show her the rest of the house.

When they reached the ballroom on the top floor Anna pretended she needed to use the bathroom. She left Mr. McGrath gazing out over the Hudson and hurried back downstairs. She went into the living room. Took out the current detector she’d bought at a hardware store on 23rd Street. Checked that it was set to silent. Fired it up and held it against the wall near the place where Misha had been sitting when she’d tested the camera. The needle sprang across its dial. That was one question answered. The wiring from the monitoring system had not been removed. But the query remained, how much else of the system was left intact?

There was still no need to panic, Anna told herself. If Mr. McGrath planned to keep the house as a shrine, she was in no danger. But if he brought in demolition contractors or electricians or security system installers, it would be a different story. The key would be to have enough warning. It was time to put some precautions in place.