1st of 3 stories in the Secrets subseries of related tales set in the Mai Fisher universe. Released individually and then collected in .
"Mai Fisher's mother died when Mai was five years old. Or did she? Nearly 30 years after Mai's mother and father were executed as spies by the Taiwanese Secret Police, Alexei Bukharin learns that Katherine Maitland, Mai's mother, may have survived by defecting to the People's Republic of China."