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Ivar Cousin and Malcolm Stoner, both on the CIA surveillance team from Burgess Whitcomb's office, had been sitting in their car across the street from Sabrina's condominium for six continuous hours.  They watched the black haired girl come out of the front of the building.  Their bored eyes followed her only because she was startlingly beautiful.

"It's her!" Ivar grabbed the binoculars. 

"Naw.  She has dark hair."  Malcolm said, yawning hugely.  He was near dozing in the warm car.

"I tell you, that's Sabrina Miller."

"First we see one blond.  Then there's two leaving the Ferd's Tanning Salon.  Now you say she has black hair?"

"I know that face.  I took pictures of her when she went into Ferd's place."

Ivar threw the binoculars at Malcolm and started the car.  The woman was walking quickly and he dodged around until he could park strategically a half block in front of her.  It was obvious Sabrina Miller had changed her hair color when they got a close-up view of her face as she walked past.

Both Ivar and Malcolm noticed the large Japanese men who had been hanging around the building trail behind the woman, surreptitiously taking pictures.  They watched her go into a small Mom & Pop grocery store.

Ivar was worried about this investigation.  There were requirements placed upon him that were serious enough to send him away from the freedom and abundance he now enjoyed.  He would never again take for granted his life here, now that it might be taken away. 

Years ago, it had been an immense relief when Glasnost had proclaimed a truce between the two super powers because he felt he no longer had to worry about divided loyalties and what he would do in the event of a physical confrontation.  Coming from a police state, he had learned to love freedom and he did not want to return to the creeping paralysis of paranoia that enormous bureaucracy produced, with chilling cold, boredom, and remote parents and relatives he loved, but now seemed part of another, lost life.

The network Ivar Cousin had come from had such a long history that even with the warming of the cold war it had not been dismantled.  The network consisted of people like himself, who had been placed in their respective cover situations for many years and who would, in all probability, never do anything much for their home country.  But it was also composed of those more highly placed who did report back to Russia on a continuing schedule, as if the relationship between the two countries had not changed in any respect.  The KGB is the one Soviet institution that had been almost unchanged by Gorbachev's political reforms, the political coup of 1991 and the regime of Boris Yeltsin.  Although it is much more covert than previously, the KGB continues to have enormous power.

Ivar had watched in anguish and guilty relief that he was not himself experiencing the cataclysmic changes in his country as it moved painfully from Communism toward a sorrowful and stilting type of democracy.  Through all the turmoil, he believed that he had been placed in America and forgotten.

Ivar had a nice apartment just a few blocks away from where he was now sitting.  He had optimistically convinced himself that he had been overlooked, when he got a message three days ago to be at a certain telephone booth at a particular time. 

Ivar had taken the necessary precautions required and had made the telephone rendezvous.  The man he talked to had spoken Russian, commanding Ivar to learn as much as possible about the investigation headed by Burgess Whitcomb.  Ivar had been given a telephone number to contact when he had the necessary information.  He memorized it immediately, as physical evidence was incriminating and unprofessional.  Now Ivar was alarmed because he had no idea why he was watching the beautiful Sabrina.

Ivar decided he would have to get nearer to the woman.  She must be doing something very significant if his KGB contact had chosen this moment to communicate with him. 

The fluke that had brought Ivar to America was that, as a boy, Ivar had been precocious in the art of mimicry.  It seemed there was no sound he could not imitate.  He could do all different kinds of birds, dogs, cats and chickens.  Even cows, horses, cars and airplanes.  And this proficiency had adjusted itself to foreign languages, especially English.

Upon graduation from school at seventeen, Ivar's special gift was well known enough that he was invited to Leningrad State University.  It was almost unheard of that someone not politically well positioned be taken there, but he was talented, and it was there that he learned to speak really excellent English.  He went through the mandatory two years of military service, and then into the Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, where it was decided that placement outside the country would be possible.  Then there was training in the KGB itself.

The KGB made Ivar expert in the use of all weapons and in the most lethal and deadly arts.  But it was also very effective in indoctrinating loyalty to his country and a disgust and hatred toward the nation where he was to be assigned.

To be planted in a deep cover required that he first learn French.  He lived outside Quebec for a few months, establishing himself, before moving into the United States.  The proper identity had been found for him; parents who had both died along with their infant son in an accident in Canada.  Ivar received his identity papers and became the son of Gretchen and Joseph Cousin, with dual citizenship in Canada and America.

Ivar had liked Canada.  The weather and rural situation was close to what he had known in the Soviet Union.  However, when he moved to Washington, the riches available to anyone astonished Ivar.  He had believed himself exempt of any passion for the luxurious lifestyle of the people in the United States.  But that was before he had a very profound experience in a grocery store.  He had walked the crowded Washington streets to familiarize himself with his new neighborhood, and finally found a grocery store that was brightly lit in the daytime.  He thought it must have tuna and bread.  It looked as big as a barn.  He went inside and stood looking at long, tall isles, disoriented by the size of the place.  Finally, he saw a sign proclaiming Produce.  Produce, Ivar thought, must be something man-made.  Maybe bread that way.  He turned a corner and stopped.

He was not aware his mouth had dropped open in astonishment.  He believed he was looking at brightly colored, plastic fruit and vegetables because the abundance could not be genuine.  He wanted everything and squeezed everything in his large hands in a shock-happy daze, believing he had entered paradise. 

Having come from a country where he routinely and drearily waited in long freezing lines in the snow to buy a few bruised beets to make borscht, and then queued up in another for the wilted beet greens, he had indeed entered paradise.

At the check-out counter it finally dawned on him that the United States was a very dangerous place.

As Ivar mused about his past, he saw Sabrina Miller come out of the grocery store with a small bag in her hand.  He watched with appreciation.  She moved with amazing strength and energy back to the apartment building.