My application pleased my father. I did it without thinking, through a compulsion that was stronger than my base instincts. All the years of Nana’s sharp but gentle influence were swept away by obedience to the powerful hold I allowed my father to exert on me. If anything, the years of absence from my parents increased my desire to please him.

Nana never said a word when I told her-and that told me all I needed to know. Nana couldn’t have passed a KGB exam to save her life, but she despised the organisation. She used to tell me jokes about the KGB, in the woods, with a carelessness that old people so magnificently grow into. Nana and Genghiz saw eye to eye on the subject of our intelligence services. While Genghiz mocked their guard dogs, Nana mocked them.

But Nana made one far-sighted remark, an illustration of the visionary or psychic power behind her watery grey eyes. And even though I didn’t understand her at the time, I see it now.

‘Something good will come of it,’ was all she said.

As I drifted almost in a dream state into the arms of our security services, I wondered how anything good could come from joining the KGB. And yet that was how I would meet Finn, my one true love.

5

THE KRASNOZNAMENNIY INSTITUTE, or KI, was where women trained for the KGB. I studied there for three years, and then went on to put my training into practice at Balashiha-2, in the forest to the east of Moscow. There I trained foreign female subversives, the nelegali, whose eventual role was to return to their own countries and undermine them with terrorist activities.