There was a time not too long before when that would have been unthinkable. But ten years was an eternity in the espionage business. The old KGB men were retiring out of the service or moving up to desk jobs. The void was now being filled by young agents for whom the old Soviet system was something that had been dismantled while they were still laughing as children on playgrounds. Those same children-now grown-had known adulthood only in the new Russia.
Petrovina had not been groomed for the espionage business from early childhood or plucked out of school by a keen-eyed KGB scout. When she completed her studies, she entered the job market like anyone else. Her language skills and intelligence quickly landed her a dull desk job with the SVR. She might have stayed for years in that dreary little out-of-the-way position if her personnel file hadn't found its way into a special set of hands.
It had all started nineteen months before.
The events unfolded so quickly Petrovina was fuzzy on all the details. She was working at her desk one Friday morning translating English-language intercepts from Kosovo when her supervisor came to collect her.
Petrovina wasn't sure what was going on. The man brought her to the back of the building, to a corridor and elevator that she hadn't known existed. Two minutes later she was stunned when she found herself being ushered into the office of Pavel Zatsyrko, the head of the SVR.
As a lowly language clerk toiling away in the basement, she had never had cause to catch the eye of someone so important. Briefly she wondered if she was being fired.
Zatsyrko did not offer her a chair. He sat behind his desk, the slats of the blinds closed on the morning sun.
"You have been reassigned," the SVR head announced dully. He didn't look her in the eye. He was looking down at the file on his desk.
"Sir?" Petrovina questioned.
"Here."
He slid her the file. Hesitantly-for she still did not know what was going on-she picked it up. She was surprised to see the file was her own. All of her employment records, all of the data that had been collected on her when she joined the SVR, her entire life-everything was in the file.
"Bring this with you to your new assignment. Your desk has already been emptied. Collect the box with your personal belongings on your way out. If you are asked, you never worked here. The rest will be explained when you get there."
Confused, Petrovina asked where "there" was. Pavel Zatsyrko offered her a withering look and pointed to the file before turning his attention to his desktop and other, more important matters of his workday.
Petrovina found a small scrap of paper in the back of her personnel file. A pink Post-it note with an address.
She took the bus-back then she could only afford public transportation-as far as it would go, then walked the rest of the way. She found the building in an out-of-the-way corner of a bustling Moscow district. It was an impossibly huge slab of concrete that occupied an entire city block.
As she drove her Thunderbird up to the building this day, she thought of herself nineteen months ago. This day she had the top down on her car. Her tousled mane of glorious hair blew wild in the cold, its raven hue matching the twinkling cunning of her coal black eyes.
Back then she was a timid mouse, hair pulled back into a sensible ponytail. When she was ushered through the gate back then, she didn't know what to think. It felt as if she were walking inside a prison.
But that was ages ago. Another lifetime. A different Petrovina Bulganin.
She stopped the Thunderbird at the gate. Her pass card got her through. She waved to the woman at the security window as she drove into the first-floor garage.
There were a few other cars inside. Not very many for a building this size.
The size of the building did strike Petrovina as odd. There never seemed to be very many people there. On that first day more than a year and a half earlier, she had not asked why so large a building was needed for so small a staff. She was too busy absorbing new information.
On that day she had been ushered into a basement office. A honey-blond-haired woman of about forty sat waiting patiently behind a small desk. The woman's name, Petrovina learned, was Anna Chutesov. She was director of an agency so secret that few outside a tight circle knew of its existence.
"We are called the Institute," Director Chutesov had explained. "I act as an adviser to our president. But I am understaffed." She seemed puzzled at the admission. As if she had worked there for many years, never having noticed that she was, alone in the drafty concrete building. "There have been a few instances during my tenure here where simple advising has not been sufficient. But I have no field agents. That has changed. I have recently gotten permission and funding to increase Institute staff."
"So I am to be transferred from the SVR?" Petrovina asked, confused. She was a nervous little thing back then. So timid, so fearful. The big building was cold. She hugged herself for warmth.
"You have already been transferred," Director Chutesov had said blandly. "You work for the Institute now. For me. Give me your personnel file."
Petrovina still held the manila folder she had been given back at Pavel Zatsyrko's office. Her clenching hand had made a wet imprint on the light cardboard. She gave the file to Director Anna Chutesov.
The Institute head opened the file and began feeding it piece by piece through the shredder beside her desk. The confetti curls of Petrovina Bulganin's life whirred out the far end.
"You are dead to the SVR," Director Chutesov said. "They have expunged your files. You never worked for them. Nor do you work for me. At least as far as the world knows." She offered a mirthless smile. "Welcome to the world of espionage, Agent Dvah."
In Russian, dvah was two; adeen was one. Bewildered, Petrovina asked if Director Chutesov was Agent Adeen.
"No," Director Chutesov had replied. "And never ask that question again."
Petrovina thought there was some sort of dreadful mistake. She was not a spy. Even when she began her training, she expressed doubts to all her instructors.
No one listened to her protests. Eventually, as the months wore on, she stopped protesting, due mainly to the fact that the training began to draw out elements of her personality that she had not even known existed.
Marksmanship and limited martial-arts training weren't a problem. Petrovina had taken several self-defense courses while at the SVR. A single girl in Moscow couldn't be too careful. She had a good eye with weapons and had always had an athletic bent. So said her SVR file.
But as her skills increased, so, too, did her coldness. A veneer of icy confidence slowly emerged from the shell of the timid little language expert. By the end, Petrovina was the ugly duckling that became the beautiful, deadly swan.
In under a year's time Agent Dvah was on assignment, becoming the Institute's first official field agent, answerable only to Director Chutesov herself. It was a life Petrovina Bulganin had been born to live and that, but for the intervention of the Institute's director, she would never have discovered.
Now, months since that first assignment and already in her mind a seasoned pro, Petrovina danced through the labyrinthine hallways of the Institute building.
The scattered workers she passed were all women. There was not a single male face among them.
She found her way downstairs to the special room in the private corridor. There was no secretary. She knocked on the door. Petrovina heard the sound of a bolt clicking back. She pushed the door open.
Director Chutesov sat behind her desk. There was a computer monitor sitting on the corner near the shredder. Her vacant ice-blue eyes watched the pulses of the screen without really seeing them. She said not a word as her finger retreated from the switch that had unlocked the door.