Untraceable

CHAPTER 8

Shershnev was in the first row of economy. Next to him, in 6C, was Major Grebenyuk. His partner. They had been offered business class, but Shershnev refused: no need to be so visible.

The lieutenant colonel looked at his boarding pass once again: ALEXANDER IVANOV, 6D. He had a passport and visa in that name. Although they were brought through a special corridor bypassing customs control and inspection, a border officer still stamped the passport.

The crew—it was a state airline—had been alerted there were special passengers on board. His partner, a military technician, an engineer with epaulets, had a bottle of deodorant from an expensive toiletries line in his carry-on that complied with airline requirements: under three ounces or one hundred milliliters. The specialists chose the brand, deciding which bottle was more convenient to accurately reproduce. They had considered sending the substance by diplomatic pouch and picking it up on the other side of the border, but they decided that bringing it along was faster and safer, since they would not have to meet up with the embassy courier, who could be tailed.

They flew at night. A late flight that would land early in the morning, when the sleepy, tired border guards and customs agents would be less picky. His partner was settling down to sleep. He leaned back his seat, even though that was not allowed during takeoff. The cabin purser did not reprimand him—she knew who they were.

The plane was still at the gate. They were waiting for some idiots in business class. Probably blotto, thought Shershnev. Afraid of flying, so they drank for courage.

He wouldn’t have refused a shot himself. He felt uncomfortable. Behind them was a foreign couple—Czechs, he thought—with two children. The infant, despite his concern, fell asleep quickly. But the girl seated behind Shershnev, an active, skinny kid with thin blond braids, whom he had noted at check-in, when she tried to jump onto the baggage conveyor belt, kept kicking his seat.

The blows hurt his lower back. It was economy class; the upholstery was pathetic. Shershnev regretted not taking business class. He had turned around once already, glaring at her. She seemed to quiet down. But a minute later, she was kicking his seat again, harder, more persistently.

They were under orders to keep a low profile on the plane. No changing places with other passengers. No getting into arguments. The girl must have sensed it and mocked Shershnev. He spoke to the parents in English and in Russian. They either did not understand or because they could not control the child pretended not to understand. He made gestures to show that their daughter was disturbing him, but the mother merely smiled and shrugged.

Passengers bored by the wait were looking at them from neighboring rows. Shershnev thought it better to get back in his seat and not call the stewardess. Everything the state had provided him with was useless against a little brat who took him for a weakling who could not fight back.

He even thought about the bottle in his partner’s carry-on bag. How he could get it out and…

Suddenly he imagined that the girl was sensing his hidden thoughts. In the ether. She sensed Shershnev, not Ivanov. The real Shershnev. Unusual, nervous children can do that. He knew. When Shershnev returned from his second tour in the Chechen war, Maxim, an infant, cried hysterically whenever he picked him up. He grew rigid, lost his breath, screamed until he was hoarse—and calmed down easily in Marina’s arms. A few weeks later, Shershnev felt that he was getting over his wartime experiences—and his son allowed his father to hold him.

The girl could see right through him. And she was protecting herself as best she could.

Shershnev turned and peered into the space between seats. The girl looked back at him: with incomprehension and anxious curiosity. Shershnev wanted to crush her with his stare. But then he remembered a game he used to play with Maxim long ago. He got his pen and drew a funny face on the fleshy pillow between thumb and forefinger, bending his fingers to make it look like the little person wanted to talk.

The girl smiled and relaxed, she fell asleep before his eyes, as if she had just needed a small dose of fun to relieve her tension. Shershnev wiped off the ink and also relaxed. The late passengers finally arrived, and the plane pulled back from the gate. The crew started the safety instructions, a cork popped softly in business class and champagne fizzed.

Shershnev liked being in the sky, in a plane. His thoughts were especially clear in flight. Naturally, the lieutenant colonel could not bring along even a line of documentation about the subject. He was a completely different person now, the businessman Ivanov, traveling with his friend to drink beer and eat sausages, pick up pretty girls, buy gifts. But Shershnev had memorized the most important things, and now he intended to think things through and pull it all together. He didn’t have to do it, analysis was not required of him. However, the subject was no longer an abstract, theoretical target, as he should have been, but a phantom, a shadow looming in the distance. He had taken on a strange, illusory freedom of behavior, and Shershnev wanted to subordinate him again, reassert his own power over him, the power that Shershnev had had over the doomed field commander.

But his mind wandered, as if the subject tried to defend himself from being understood and enslaved, tried to slip away. Then Shershnev started thinking about another person capable—that was the operative system in finding approaches to the subject—of leading him to the right conclusions.

Igor Yuryevich Zakharyevsky. He died as an academician, lieutenant general in the medical service. Laureate and so on. Zakharyevsky was too significant to be hidden entirely, so he had a public, overt identity.

An academician. Distant relative. Luminary.

Naturally his emblem, the bowl and snake, was a cover. He didn’t do medicine. What he did do Shershnev was not supposed to know. But no one could stop him from guessing.

Zakharyevsky. He remembered that name.

When Shershnev began working, there was almost no one left in the ranks with prewar experience. Those who had served during the period of “violations of socialist legality,” as they called it in the political training classes. The father of one of Shershnev’s colleagues was a retired colonel, in scientific counterintelligence.

Winter. Yes, winter. A departmental house of light brick in the middle of Moscow. A birthday party. Cognac sent for the guest of honor from somewhere in the Caucasus; his old colleagues supplied the gift. Smoking breaks in the kitchen. Their youthful drunken argument about what “one of us” meant and can you recognize a future traitor by intuition, by sixth sense.

The retired officer listened in silence. Then he chopped his hand through the air, as if chopping off someone’s head. With unexpected force, seemingly trying to convince himself as well as them, he told them about Zakharyevsky. Zakharyevsky’s cousin, also a scientist and specialist in cattle breeding, had been accused of falsifying results of experiments in order to sabotage the upturn in agriculture. He was executed on the sentence handed down by a troika, a military tribunal, in 1937. And rehabilitated in 1959.

“Zakharyevsky, however,” he said firmly, albeit with a heavy asthmatic wheeze, “became an academician. Even though he could have nursed a deep anger against the Soviet regime because of his cousin. But he understood that a mistake had been made. The Party trusted him. And he merited that trust. One of us,” the former counterintelligence agent summarized, stretching out the word “us,” to confirm his commonality with Zakharyevsky and declare publicly the state’s and service’s claim upon the academician, in which he played a small personal part.

Now things came together for Shershnev. Zakharyevsky. So he must have used his position to help his cousin’s relatives get work in a closed city. Work they should not have been given: it didn’t matter that the executed zoologist had been rehabilitated later, children of enemies were trusted very selectively. Thanks to Zakharyevsky, they cunningly gained access to the storehouse of secrets, where everything was special, even the police and prosecutors. No surprise that the subject had become his student and successor.

At the briefing they told Shershnev there was a great probability that the subject wanted to return to the homeland. He was unconsciously waiting to be punished and was unlikely to resist. On the contrary, he would accept vengeance as his due.

But his guess about Zakharyevsky’s cunning, having accepted the loss of his cousin—and had he?—while managing to obtain cover for relatives, told Shershnev: no. The subject would not surrender just like that. He would try to save himself—at any cost.

Strangely, that pleased Shershnev.