Untraceable

CHAPTER 6

Shershnev enjoyed being involved with the operations. Everything that came before—setting the task, the instructions—was the obligatory prelude to the moment when he opened the file and was left one-on-one with the subject.

First of all, that’s what officers in his unit were taught: operations management and extreme action. The Spetsnaz skills, the interrogation tactics—that was additional training. During the domestic war their unit was not used for its intended purpose, they were thrown in as reinforcements, and Shershnev was happy to get back to their original tasks, to the familiar style of action.

Some men, Shershnev knew, experienced the pathetic pleasure of peeping schoolboys when they read operative materials. Yes, he admitted, their work, especially surveillance, was in part like voyeurism. He once studied the case of a bohemian artist, womanizer and libertine, who as if to mock them, picked up a new girl every week, took her out to dinner or a movie and then brought her home, and they had to work up a file on each lover, find out who she was and whether she was in their files. By the time the report came back, the artist was sleeping with a new one, and they had to start over. It seemed the colossal operations mechanism was spinning its wheels, the surveillance cars wasted time and gas, the tape recorders captured the same scores of romantic arias, the cameras photographed the same scenes: on the porch of a restaurant, on the street, at the car door. But Shershnev was certain that it was not so. It was their work’s irrational redundancy, the ability to randomly expend resources, to the point of ridiculous excess—attempting to keep tabs on every moment and person, as with the libertine artist—that constituted the ritual foundation of their service. Regardless of the result, or whether the agent reports were informative—the surveillance and documentation would continue, because sifting through dust is the manifestation of total power; whoever falls under their purview, their gaze, whoever becomes part of a case becomes significant, exists, is transformed from a nullity, from no one, into the subject.

Shershnev remembered their code names, sometimes written on the cover of a file, sometimes hidden inside.

Stranger. Orpheus. Joker. Wise Guy. Forester. Methodist.

The operative designation: “Treason.” “Ideological Diversion.”

Lists of agents involved in the case. Lists of accounting incentives. Signatures of colleagues.

The hefty case files. The physical manifestation of the Cheka’s special power. The usual ones were two or three volumes. The big ones had eight or ten. The gigantic ones had dozens. Regulations limited their thickness, no more than three hundred pages per volume, so the volumes multiplied, filling the shelves.

The archive repository was the primary venue for their service. Its hidden Hades holding the sealed and sorted sinners. Removing operations files from there gave Shershnev one hundred percent confidence in his own rectitude.

He felt it particularly keenly when he read the file on a former Chechen field commander hiding out in the mountains who had created a legend about himself as born fighter for independence. Yet not so long ago, he had been chairman of a kolkhoz and had been part of a case they were working on: speculation, selling off part of the harvest, illegal acquisition of hard currency. They had reports on this from their agent on the kolkhoz board. Utterances against the state. His brother was arrested for embezzlement. His father died in exile in Kazakhstan.

The operations case was started when Shershnev was still in school, only dreaming of joining the service. That fact was additional confirmation of the right Shershnev had to take over the case. The actual materials in the file, collected by other officers who might be retired by now, formatted, entered, and numbered, predetermined their interactions with the subject. Attentive Shershnev found an unnoticed hook that allowed them to recruit the man who would hand over the worry beads; just one inconspicuous line in an old agent’s report turned into a successful operation.

That’s why Shershnev liked working with operations files. But he had never seen anything like this before.

Twenty-four volumes. A personal record for him.

They did not give him the actual volumes. Only some rather unconnected copied excerpts. Essentially, Shershnev had only the beginning and the end of an enormous file. He knew he would not have been given even that much, but he had to be able to identify the subject with total certainty, even his appearance had changed many times; computer reconstructions of possible features did not guarantee one hundred percent recognition.

When they told him that an undercover chemist was the subject this time, he assumed that the documents would have gaps, redacted names of special products and special factories. Shershnev always considered these internal secrecy measures necessary and sometimes pointed out any lapses to the archivists.

But here Shershnev felt a vague whiff of anxiety for the first time. They had not given him enough time to prepare, to familiarize himself with the situation on location and they were rushing him.

The expurgated file added to uncertainty: Would everything be taken into account, would things go as needed?

Shershnev understood that this was his big moment, delayed by his previous success. He had no doubts about the right of his bosses to give the order, its fairness, or his readiness to carry it out.

But deep in a far corner of his mind lay the wish that the order had been given to someone else. It was the quiet voice of professional superstition. It was all too much of a coincidence the way that old operation and this new order dovetailed.

There wasn’t a single word in the file that said what the chemist heading a secret laboratory had worked on. But Shershnev, naturally, guessed where the substance they used on the worry beads had originated. For the first time in his career, he felt a strange, superfluous closeness to the subject.

Shershnev rubbed his temples. Yesterday came up in his memory. The mock execution of his son. The return trip, Maxim’s silence. The jokes and laughter of his friends. The Pioneer camp, a twin of the one left in the foothills of the Caucasus. The long line of trucks carrying shipping containers that crossed the intersection while they waited.

It’s all nonsense, he told himself. The worries, false fears, imaginary signs at the start of a truly important case. Just don’t notice them. Endure them. Pull yourself together. He would talk to Maxim when he got back. There was no time now. Shershnev did not like putting things off like this until he got back; he usually felt that no loose threads should be hanging, but now he changed his own rule.

He breathed in and held it. He waited thirty seconds. Blinked hard. And opened the file again. Well, he’d work with what they had. He would try to look into the abyss, into emptiness.

Shershnev never believed that you could learn anything about a person from his childhood and adolescence. Take that field commander, who had been born in a mud hut on the steppe, who had returned with his pardoned people from Kazakhstan, where they were sent by Stalin, to the Chechen mountains that he had never seen, graduated from college and was elected chairman of a kolkhoz—could he have ever imagined on the eve of 1991 that he would be a commander in a few years, or how many soldiers would be in his unit, or how his life would intersect with Shershnev’s?

Now however, with only the beginning and end of another man’s life, Shershnev felt a new kind of thrill.

Shershnev undid the binding and moved the photograph submitted by the applicant closer to the light.