Today was the day Irina would get the list of potential candidates. She didn't know anything about them, wasn't even sure how many there would be, but she was excited. Cuvee had said she would get to choose. She'd never been able to choose anything in her life. Her recruitment into the KGB had been a foregone conclusion - Derevkos were intelligence officers, and had been for generations. She hadn't been able to choose her assignment, either. Not that it had mattered, because most female agents were "swallows", and all the assignments were pretty much the same. The only outcome she'd managed to affect in her time at the KGB was being assigned to the US, and that was because she'd worked hard on her English. Now though, now she would get to choose her fate, and the prospect thrilled her no end.

"We've narrowed it down to three," Cuvee said, sliding the thick folders across his desk. "I hope they meet with your approval."

Irina smiled seductively. Her hand lingered over his as she took the folders from him.

"You chose them, didn't you? How could I not approve?"

His eyes lit with a gleam of self-satisfaction, like she knew they would. Men were so easy to manipulate. Besides, Cuvee was just smooth-talking her. It made no difference whether she approved of the candidates or not. At the end of the day, she would have to pick one, regardless of how she felt about them.

"You'll have the weekend to think it over," Cuvee said. "I'll expect your decision on Monday."

She nodded, and retreated with the files in hand.

At home sitting cross-legged on her bed, Irina spread all three folders out and put them in order from youngest to oldest. She took out the surveillance photos from each of the files and arrayed them in front of her.

The youngest was Brian Taylor. He was 24 with conventional good looks and an easy, confident smile. In one photo, his dark brown hair had been styled with a bit of gel, and his intense blue eyes seemed to sparkle with some inside joke. He wore cheap suits, as befitted a lower level agent's salary, but the shirt-tie combinations were in bold, bright colors. Apparently, he liked team sports and beer, and he had a predilection for expensive sunglasses. She skimmed his profile. He grew up in an upper middle class suburb of Seattle, Washington. He was the oldest of three children. He went to a small private university, where he played basketball. Irina shuddered. He was bright, athletic, devastatingly handsome, and had a bright future in the CIA. He was also thoroughly mundane.

In the middle was Jack Bristow. He smiled in none of the photos. He had cut his light brown hair short to keep it from curling out of control, although he'd made no additional effort to tame it with any kind of hair product. He had small eyes and big ears that stuck out of his broad face in a decidedly peculiar fashion. In one photo, he was having lunch with a colleague at a sidewalk café. He was leaning forward, intent on the conversation, a cup of coffee lifted halfway to his lips. Though impeccably dressed in all the photos, his shirt-tie combos were subdued, limited to blues and grays.

The third candidate was one Paul Sutton. He was the oldest of the three at 35. Dirty blonde hair, brown eyes, he had an ordinary, open face. It was a face you could trust, with neither Taylor's stunning looks nor Bristow's decidedly odd features. Like Bristow, he favored conservative suits, although they were of a better quality, which probably reflected his higher pay grade. One photo caught her eye, however. His tail had managed to photograph him meeting with an asset. It was a woman, attractive in a sleazy sort of way, the kind of woman her father never wanted her or her sisters to become. It wasn't the woman that drew her attention, though. It was Sutton – his eyes. The asset's back was turned to him, and the way he looked at her, with predatory lust, made Irina uneasy. She wasn't sure why, because it was just evidence of a weakness she could exploit. Then suddenly it struck her – that's the way Cuvee looked at her. It made him easy to control, but it also made her sick to her stomach.

Turning away from Sutton in disgust, she opened Bristow's folder. He was originally Canadian. She liked him better already, she decided with a soft snort. His father was a lawyer who abandoned his wife and child in favor of running off with his secretary. After the divorce, Bristow and his mother immigrated to the United States. They lived in a lower middle class suburb of Los Angeles until his mother died in his second year of college. He'd attended the local state school, but there were no notes in the file regarding any of the activities he participated in while there. Knowing how shallow Americans tended to be, she suspected that, strange looking boy that he was, he'd probably led a fairly marginalized existence courtesy of people like Agent Taylor.

She picked up one of Bristow's photos. He was in a bookshop, his nose buried in a book. She squinted at the cover, struggling to make out the title. Finally, it came to her. Utopia, by Thomas More. It had been required reading in school, but why would a CIA agent ruthlessly furthering the cause of American imperialism and the spread of capitalism be interested in a book about a communist utopia? She couldn't have been more shocked if he'd been reading Marx. She desperately wanted to know what he thought of the book, and was seized by a desire to engage him in conversation, to argue with him late into the night over apple pie and cups of watery American filter coffee. She imagined him listening to her with the same intensity she'd witnessed in the café photo, enthralled not only by her beauty but by her intelligence as well.

She grinned. She didn't think she would need the weekend to make her decision, but she would wait nonetheless. She would re-examine each file again, going over the details with a fine toothed comb. Perhaps she would change her mind in the coming days, but somehow, she didn't think so.