Untraceable

CHAPTER 10

Standing in line at passport control, Shershnev felt neither anger nor impatience, even though things were dragging out; forty minutes wasted. When he started an assignment, he always thought he had tons of time. No matter the delays, whatever the obstacles, he would still be a step or two ahead of the subject.

They had chosen an entry point in a country that did not have its own strong counterintelligence. He and his partner were to go through control with the second dozen passengers from their flight: the first dozen received the most attention.

But first they had to change the broken boarding stairs. Then the bus circled the airport for a long time. When they were released into the arrivals hall, there were hundreds of passengers from flights that had arrived after them.

The border guards were in no hurry. There were only two counters for non-EU citizens. The bored guard in the third line for citizens kept chasing away people with the wrong passport. Asian passengers with duffel bags made a commotion, and the caterpillar line barely moved. But Shershnev stood calmly, having to rebuke his partner a few times with a frown for giving a woman in a hijab dirty looks.

Shershnev thought about the photographs taken by the surveillance people. The agents were sent from the embassy of a neighboring country which had done away with borders within the EU. They came and reported that they had done a clean job, no one noticed them, no counterintelligence activity had been noted, there were no bodyguards, the risk was minimal. The subject had not been seen. But inside the house—the security system was standard and easy to turn off—they found letters from the hospital. The subject was being examined and should be home soon.

He pictured the photographs taken by drone. The house on the edge of the forest. A deserted road. An ideal place, an easy place. No neighbors, no one would see, no one would find out. A hermit hidden in a secluded corner, setting his own trap.

The line had turned into a gypsy camp that seemed to have been there for years. The habit of a migrant life, of long, pointless waiting in crowded corridors in front of shut doors where your fate is being decided—that habit shaped people who had been so distinct forty minutes ago into a faceless conglomeration, an irrational but sensitive organism.

A rustle of movement, whispers—two yawning, grumpy border guards came and opened two more booths. The human porridge separated, with part flowing in their direction, stopping at the yellow line to wait their turn. Shershnev, who had noticed the men coming before anyone else, did not change his place. He did not like altering his decisions. A service psychologist called it passivity. But Shershnev knew the psychologist was wrong. He had always lacked that bit of agility, plain old luck, that lets people catch a train at the last moment and guess which line will move faster than others. If he started scurrying about, it made things worse, and the new line did not move at all and the train left from a different platform.

So he waited.

In a half hour, the crowd began to dissipate. A young couple went to the left booth, a stylishly dressed elderly man with a briefcase went to the right. Grebenyuk and he were next.

Shershnev had thought the old man and the couple would go through quickly—they usually don’t hassle people like that. But the couple didn’t have printouts of their return tickets, and the guard frowned and demanded all their hotel reservations. The man was also stuck, pointing at some paper in a plastic cover, instantly losing his glossy countenance and turning into an uncertain, intimidated supplicant.

The border guards were talking to one another. The crowd was shoving Shershnev. The sharp corner of a suitcase hit his anklebone hard. For a second, he thought this was a set up. Someone would grab him from behind, twisting his arm, while the idiot with the suitcase would pull out an automatic pistol. He suppressed the bad feeling.

Click, click, click—the magical sound of passports being stamped.

The metal doors opened. The old man left right away, and Grebenyuk took his place. The couple was holding things up. The girl was stuffing papers back in her bag, she dropped a file and pages flew out. She crouched to pick them up. Shershnev waited with discipline. Even though he was supposed to cross the border together with his partner.

Airport workers in bright vests pushed two wheelchairs, bypassing the line. Young black boys, just skin and bones, covered with blankets, were holding piles of messy papers in their laps.

Shershnev took a step forward. But the guard raised his eyebrows and motioned him to stop.

Grebenyuk left. The boys were wheeled to the booths.

The nearer boy had a clumsy, perhaps homemade, prosthesis sticking out of his worn pant leg. It was too small: the boy had grown, but not his artificial leg. “A land mine,” thought Shershnev. “Could have been one of ours. Where are they from? Somalia? Libya? Angola? Sudan?” He was sorry the mine had gone off at such a bad time. Now the explosion that took place many years ago on a different continent was holding him up. The other foot was wearing a brand-new sneaker, limp, with a puffy running sole. Just like the ones Maxim was wearing the day they played paintball. A day so near and so far.

The agent left his booth, examined the boy, and started leafing through the papers with the boy’s escort. Shershnev was the calmest person in the airport. The two men kept talking. The boy sat there, aloof, exhausted by the long flight. At last, the guard stamped a paper. The man in the vest pushed the wheelchair through. The officer waved to Shershnev: Come over.

Shershnev was prepared to give him his cover story. He had a new passport with a fresh visa. His first entry. Questions were possible, almost inevitable. But the guard, as if in apology—or perhaps as a reward for the passenger’s patience—ran the passport through the scanner, flipped through the pages and stamped it neatly, in the corner.

The door opened, and Shershnev stepped into the world he had left decades ago, when he went back home to go to military school.

His father was commander of a communications platoon. Shershnev grew up in an army garrison that had taken over the old nineteenth-century barracks of a cavalry regiment that died out in World War I. He had hoped to return there to join his mother and father after his studies, to be in a special army group in the GDR. He would serve in intelligence, face-to-face with the enemy, on the farthest edge, where you could see the white column, crowned with a faceted cupola, of the American listening station on Devil Mountain.

It turned out differently. His parents came to him. The garrison left its barracks. They brought tanks, rockets, and other supplies on trains. The army, without suffering a defeat, was nevertheless retreating to the East.

His father, who had been awarded an order in 1968 for helping to suppress the Prague Spring with Operation Danube, never could accept the troop withdrawal. The treachery. The collapse of the impoverished army. The forced move to the reserves. He drank himself to death at the dacha he bought with the money he had saved while serving abroad, amid the apple trees that would not bear fruit on the poor, peaty soil. Shershnev would have been very happy for his father to see him now.

He was coming back.

While departing Moscow, their baggage, unexamined, was deposited in the cart with the luggage of the other passengers. The baggage for the flight had long been unloaded now. Suitcases from Hurghada circled on the lone working carousel.

Grebenyuk learned that their flight had been unloaded on carousel four. He found the piled-up suitcases. Shershnev’s was not among them. They walked around the baggage claim area once again. Empty.

There were a dozen people at the Lost and Found counter. Shershnev recognized people from his flight: there was the bratty girl and her parents; there was the couple whose documents were spilled at passport control.

The counter was closed. No schedule, no notice. According to some cleaning person, the staff would come at five in the morning. Shershnev and Grebenyuk exchanged a look.

In principle, there was nothing in the suitcase of critical importance for the operation. Just everyday clothing, sensibly selected, good quality, and inconspicuous. Shershnev had proposed traveling without any luggage, even if it did not fit their image of guys on vacation looking for beer, girls, and presents. They needed only a few days. Then they would get back home. Nobody would care about the details of their cover stories. If they did, that meant the operation had gone south.

Despite the pressure and haste, they were outfitted more than adequately, good for months or years. The bosses had played it very safe, hedging their bets in case the operation failed. Now Shershnev felt that the loss of the suitcase was a good thing, as if all the additions, embellishments, and last-minute instructions were gone along with it. He taped his luggage tag to the counter, writing the name of his hotel on it. Let them send it, if they find it, they wouldn’t be there anymore.

Two people at the Green Corridor. A tubby man busy with his cell phone. A thin blonde, clearly his senior, was adjusting her badge. Shershnev walked slightly ahead and to the left, setting himself up to be checked and covering his partner. The blonde let him through, and then called to Grebenyuk as he was almost past her.

Grebenyuk stopped. His English was poor, just enough to pass a test and get a raise. Shershnev had to interpret for him.

“Are you together?”

Shershnev nodded.

“How much cash do you have?”

“Four thousand euros.” Shershnev obsequiously reached for his wallet.

“Open it.” She pointed to Grebenyuk’s bag.

He took it off his shoulder, laid it on the desk, and unzipped it. Shershnev checked the shiny panels of opaque glass in his peripheral vision; were there dark shadows of men in camouflage and masks, weapons ready? This was the best time to grab them, as they were the only four people in the corridor.

The fat man stopped staring at his phone and came over, blocking the way out. Grebenyuk was showing the customs officer his things. She pointed to his toiletry bag. Grebenyuk opened it unhesitatingly. The bottle glimmered in the light.

The woman looked at it with interest. She looked up at Grebenyuk. The major was of average height and big boned, dressed in expensive clothes, but still looked like a country hick who had been eating sunflower seeds and putting the shells in his pocket; he stood there quietly and calmly.

Shershnev’s heart dropped to his feet. Only now did the disparity become apparent between the expensive cologne and Grebenyuk’s appearance and the rest of the items in his bag.

Shershnev even imagined that she was sniffing the air to see if Grebenyuk was wearing that cologne.

Witch. She sensed something but could not tell where the deceit was; she was angry and she might even ask Grebenyuk to spray the bottle. Their instructions did not cover this possibility; everyone had been certain that the bottle would not attract notice. The technicians swore that the copy was exact, that even the manufacturer would not be able to tell, and that it weighed what the original did.

It was made by men, Shershnev thought. They could have messed up the color, using a similar shade instead of the correct one. They could have made a mistake in the ornate script. The female officer surely knew the duty-free assortment, she had a trained eye, and maybe her husband used that cologne. Or maybe her acute sense picked up on the container’s special aura. After all, the glass was not made at the factory but in their special technical shop; different hands polished it, with other thoughts, with other aims. Witch.

Shershnev was figuring out how to distract her. Drop his bag? Say something?

“Ken ve go?” Grebenyuk asked, with a horrible accent and the supplicating simplicity of a confused foreigner scared by foreign customs.

The official, as if waking up, nodded automatically. Grebenyuk adjusted the things in his bag without haste. As he closed it, the zipper caught on fabric, he pulled it up and down and then tried to pull out the lining from the teeth. She turned away. Other passengers, cursing loudly about the airport service, entered the corridor. Grebenyuk threw his bag over his shoulder. Shershnev felt sharp needles pricking his hands.

“Dying for a piss,” Grebenyuk said. “Where’s the john here?”

They walked past the drivers holding signboards bearing names. The air was filled with the odors of unfamiliar food, tobacco, and car exhaust, which seemed to smell differently than back home.

In the toilet, Grebenyuk urinated noisily for a long time, while Shershnev couldn’t start. It was only when Grebenyuk headed for the sink that the flow began from his penis. A cleaner came in, and Shershnev felt an overwhelming desire to knock over his cart, break the mop, and splash the bucket water on the walls.

He looked at himself in the mirror over the sink.

His face looked the same.