"For a moment, Nikolai was back in Chechnya, running counter-insurgency efforts, and looking out in the battlefield of churned, blasted earth and dead bodies broken up by mortar and by machine gun and by blast from tank turrets. He'd never been in combat, but in Chechnya? You were always in some kind of warzone."

"Seeing her then, among the bodies, Nikolai remembered how they first met, in a little town near the border with Russia. She'd been among the Chechnya insurgents, so beautiful to him that it had hurt to se her...hurt knowing that maybe he would have to kill her, believing her cover story as a new recruit skilled in explosives. But then, at a little gathering where theyd drunk cheap red wine out of coffee mugs, the smell of gunpowder and pot in the air, Marikova had leaned into him, one breast touching his arm. Her lips brushing against his ear, shed whispered, "Volya", and with the utternace of those two syllables, the new safe word given to him just a day before by his handler, he'd known she was also a Russian agent." pg. 80-81 Chapter 14