In a third-floor room at the Russian consulate, Oksana Stepanovna Kosenkina nervously snapped off the mid-afternoon news broadcast. She walked to one of the windows overlooking the courtyard below, and wrenched it open. She stood there a moment—a plump, distraught, middle-aged woman in a ruffled blue dress.
Then she jumped.
Her body hit a skein of telephone wires, caught for a second and plunged on, ripping the wires loose from the walls. She landed, groaning, on the cement courtyard, the wire still wrapped in a tangle around her legs. There was an instant of silence. Then the whole...