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door, checking the time on my iPhone every few seconds, as if it was going to get me to Katya any quicker.

7
    Katya and Anna had connected six or seven years before I arrived on the scene. Katya was from Cuba. Or, rather, her parents had been. Castro had sent them to study in the Soviet Union. They had decided to stay in Moscow and got married. Her father had held down some nameless job in the Communist hierarchy and they’d had two kids; a younger brother was floating about somewhere among the second-generation Hispanics and Africans that flooded the city, but Katya didn’t like to talk about him. She didn’t talk about much at all, really.
    I wasn’t sure what she thought of me, and wasn’t that fussed. All she knew was that I’d met Anna while I was working security for CNN, keeping the news crews’ noses clean. I guess I must have been Anna’s bit of rough.
    Katya had trained as an obstetrician and bumped into Anna while she was working for an NGO in Central America. Anna was reporting on the TB epidemic in Mexico City’s slums that Katya was trying to stem. They were the same age, well educated, and both from Moscow. They spoke English in the ‘World America’ accent CNN loved so much, and Katya’s Spanish made her the perfect interpreter.
    She’d faded out of sight until just over a year ago when Anna had got an email out of the blue to say she was coming back to Moscow to work for Magee WomanCare International, the largest non-profit private provider of women’s health services in theUSA. They had an outreach programme, trying to improve healthcare conditions for women and infants in the former Soviet Union.
    Almost immediately she was headhunted by one of the new private clinics that had sprung up to cater for the biggest collection of billionaires on the planet. She worked for the Perinatal Clinic in the south-west of the city, and rented a flat nearby. No more poverty, no more rickets and malnutrition, just women too posh to push, whose only problem was working out whether to use the blue birthing pool or the green. And that was where we’d been aiming for when Hospital Number Seventy had got in the way. Now she had to show what she was really made of.
    I willed the train to go faster. I drummed my fingers against the glass. I wanted Anna and my boy out of there and down to the posh place, with Katya in charge.
    Katya was even harder to pin down than I was. She didn’t drive, didn’t use cabs, kept herself very much to herself. She didn’t seem to have that many mates, and there were Masai tribesmen living in mud huts with more social networking presence. It looked like she was taking NATO’s perception of its threat to global stability very seriously indeed; they ranked the top six players with the power to fuck up the planet as China, India, Facebook, the USA, Twitter and Indonesia. Facebook and Twitter were more connected to their community than any of the other four, and that made them particularly scary. What if they started to have their own ideas about how our world should be run? That was something none of the others liked to think about.
    The reason I wasn’t online, however, wasn’t because I didn’t want to be part of the new revolution. I liked not being public property. And I’d fucked up or killed plenty of enemies of the state in my time. I had lots of good reasons to stay hidden. After two years undercover in Derry with 14 Intelligence Group, identifying Provisional IRA active-service units and recruiting sources, it wasn’t just my back I had to watch. I’d worked alongside Special Branch officers. If anyone managed to link my face and my CV to theirs, it would put them and their families at risk.And it wasn’t just in Northern Ireland that people had long memories. My old mates in the drug cartels did too.
    An old woman sitting under the no-smoking sign opposite me lit up a cigarette and gave me a glare that said: ‘It wasn’t like this when Khrushchev was in charge.’