Sashenka

Your Excellency, I am most satisfied with the case of Agent 23X (‘Snowfox’) who has finally started to prove useful. As Your Excellency knows, I have now met clandestinely with this member of the RSWP (Russian Socialist Workers’ Party: Bolshevik faction) eleven times, counting the first interrogation. The hours of work have paid off and will yield considerable gains later. Using our surveillance teams of external agents, Snowfox’s movements have enabled us to arrest three nihilists of middling rank and to track the new printing press.

The price for the recruitment of this agent has been 1. philosophical—her conviction of my sympathy for her cause and her person (the rescuing of her mother from the Dark One’s apartment was particularly successful in gaining trust); and 2. tactical—the handover of the name of the doorman (new Party member code named Horseguards), which has cost our service nothing since we earlier failed to recruit him as an internal agent, despite the offer of the usual financial inducements (100 rubles/ month) as per P. Stolypin’s “Instructions on Organizational Conduct of Internal Agents.”

At today’s meeting, the agent surrendered the name of two revolutionists, a Menshevik factionist and a Bolshevik terrorist, who had long been sought by the Security Sections of Baku, Moscow and Petrograd. I will organize surveillance according to General Trusevich’s “Instructions for External Surveillance” and arrest forthwith. I request your permission to continue to handle Agent “Snowfox” in the future as I believe that her usefulness for the service depends on my management. It is possible that her Bolshevik handlers have ordered her to hand over these names but I believe that the threat of exposure to her own comrades will now make her submission easy to accomplish.

Our primary mission remains the arrest of Mendel Barmakid, her uncle (codename Clubfoot; alias Comrade Baramian, Comrade Furnace, etc.) and the Bolshevik faction’s Petrograd Committee, but I have absolute confidence that this organization is now hopelessly broken and incapable of any threat in the short to medium term…

Poor little Sashenka, he thought smugly—yet in his heart he knew she was the brightest star in his firmament.

He did not look forward to seeing his wife or General Globachev. If he had had his way, he would have met Sashenka at the safe house every night.