Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  He relaxed and accepted the painful and impossible.

  In 1991 he had just a few months left to complete the synthesis and prepare his best creation for testing. The most stable, the most untraceable substance. Neophyte. To create not an experimental version but a balanced composition ready for production.

  For many years that ideal eluded him. But Kalitin overcame all obstacles, solved scientific puzzles, obtained increased financing. He felt that the birth of the desired higher substance could no longer be stopped, that it was as inevitable as sunrise.

  Of course, the administrative organism was already sick, falling apart as if the country had been poisoned. Delays in equipment. Delays in salaries. The uncertainty of the bosses. The unnoticeable van disguised as a bread truck stopped coming with its delivery of dummies from the prison. He needed another three, two, even just one.

  Kalitin had nothing of his own. They delivered everything to him, extracting it from the bowels of the earth, gathering it at factories, if necessary buying it for hard currency abroad; if they couldn’t buy it, they stole it, copied it, or manufactured a single device at an experimental factory at unbelievable cost.

  Suddenly this horn of plenty that covered every possible register and classification from bolts and wires to rare isotopes stopped working. Dried up.

  Worst of all, Kalitin no longer felt the directing and demanding will of the state in the people who had always been his trusted connections.

  Even when the Party had declared perestroika and glasnost, they had laughed and assured him that the changes would not affect their industry. Now the bosses vacillated and started conversations on conversion and disarmament, unheard of in the past.

  Kalitin remembered the day they told him the work would stop temporarily: allegedly they had to resolve issues of the laboratory’s administrative subordination.

  For the first time in his life, he felt that there existed something higher than him, higher than the laws of chemistry and physics, which he learned to understand and use. Kalitin knew how to overcome everything: rivals’ scientific intrigues, arguments between industrial and military bosses, the mysteries of matter; he had an inner power that broke through all human obstacles. And then the Soviet Union collapsed, an unknown force brought down the previously immutable building of the state, and the production version of Neophyte died under its rubble.

  He had never seriously thought about God and had worked fearlessly in his laboratory set up in the defiled chambers of a former monastery; on that one day Kalitin felt what he imagined was God for believers. The dark, impervious strength of matter that resists scientific understanding. That is afraid of titans like Kalitin who had begun a new era in science by learning to look deeper than other scientists into the essence of things—thanks to the merger of the technical capabilities of mass industry and the unlimited power of the planned state economy, which could concentrate previously unheard of resources on the achievement of a scientific goal and give the select scientists not only the means but also the direct, grievous power to achieve it.

  Kalitin was experiencing the dull bewilderment of total collapse. He could not take revenge on the destructive power or overcome it. But he so wanted to take revenge on its accomplices, those brainless fools, the cautious bosses, the craven generals with big shoulder boards who could manage nothing more than a cartoon coup attempt, their knees shaking! Or the blind people who wanted something called a free life, stupid people who abandoned their sensible places and labors!

  When Kalitin fled soon after, he took this hidden thirst for revenge as his guide. But as years passed it became clear that he had made a shortsighted mistake.

  He had rushed.

  When the former enemies rejected his knowledge and services, Kalitin could only dream of the restoration of the USSR. There was no life for him outside the laboratory, and a laboratory was possible, he thought, only inside the Soviet Union. He desired that resurrection with a passion greater than that of the million hard-core Communists who rallied in 1993, when the crowd, drunk on the red of hundreds of flags, crushed a policeman to death. He prayed—with the ungainly, doomed prayers of an atheist—to his Neophyte, the unborn divinity of secret weapons, calling on its help if it ever wanted to appear in the world in all its power.

  And one day, leafing through a newspaper left by a passenger on the train, Kalitin saw a story on the Chechen war in the Caucasus. He began reading it out of a vengeful curiosity: What problems are those crazy traitors and apostates having?

  He had a shaky grasp of his country’s geography—he spent decades in his laboratory bubble. So he did not quite understand where these cities and villages were. He was irritated by the alien sounds of Chechnya’s place-names and surprised by the weakness of the once-mighty army that could not wipe them off the map. Well, if that army could not defend itself, if its tanks and armored transporters were stopped by an unarmed crowd in the capital, then that army deserved this sort of humiliation, Kalitin thought.

  He did not believe the descriptions of the cleansings, torture, and internment centers or filtration camps, of course. Not because he found them morally incomprehensible. He just couldn’t believe that any journalist was capable of witnessing or even hearing of them.

  A boring trip. The article was in a foreign language, which for him was still riddled with holes of vocabulary and dark corners of grammar. Lazily he skimmed the article, skipping the resisting paragraphs. Suddenly, he was awake. He grew tense and read closely.

  The special correspondent apparently had sources among the fighters. Or had been on the wavering front lines. He wrote that a famous field commander had recently been poisoned in his base in a former Pioneer camp. The federal forces had bribed a traitor and had him give the commander some poisoned worry beads, allegedly an ancient and blessed relic. The fighters swore vengeance and called on the world to pay attention to this act of chemical terrorism.

  First Kalitin chuckled. A holy relic, poisoned worry beads! What won’t they make up next! Pure Shakespeare. The whole story was probably the journalist’s invention. Fake news.

  But at the same time he remembered his own early experiments with monkeys taken from their breeder. Some of the animals were sent to zoos for the public, and some to Kalitin and his many colleagues. One time at the zoo he looked for a sign of knowledge in the grimacing monkey faces that the sorter had spared them from a terrible fate—an experiment with one of his early formulations that was wonderfully absorbable and took immediate effect, but left a clear trace that he couldn’t get rid of.

  The animals were given carved wooden objects: spoons, dice, beads, bracelets, alphabet building blocks, pieces of molding, in order to determine how quickly the substance in the wood worked, which types of wood absorbed better, and what shape achieved maximal contact with the skin. Kalitin remembered the wrinkled faces contorted by death. That preparation was accepted and used in production.

  Could it be? When he got home, Kalitin read everything he could find about that incident. It all came together. It was his product. An early version he had disdained, but still his child.

  The substance was in the right hands. Clearly the special operations group was using it. They must have taken it from the warehouse, as its shelf life, unlike many other products, was unlimited. What if they had reopened the laboratory? Lights burning in the former monastery cells, and someone else sitting at Kalitin’s desk?

  Belated and useless hope and the sharpest envy tore Kalitin apart.

  For years and years with his special chemist’s eye he observed the behavior of substances, recognized or not by investigators, substances of different chemical classes and families. They left behind scattered, unexplained deaths that were not connected into a general picture, fatal accidents, established assassinations. They were easy to discern for a connoisseur of death masks of journalists, politicians, and defector agents.

  He recognized the substances made by competitors and his own. He felt something new and malevolent�
�a spree, an orgy—that had not existed in the past. Their time has come at last, Kalitin gloated. Whom could they have stopped in the turmoil of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991? You can’t poison a crowd. You can’t strike a blow against something without a center. But now, when there is no solidarity, when there are only separate, isolated figures subconsciously paralyzed by fear . . . the substances were the best choice.

  Kalitin knew that his inventions did not simply create specific weapons of death poured into ampoules. He also produced fear. He liked the simple yet paradoxical idea that the best poison is fear. The best poisoning is when people poison themselves. His creations were merely vectors, the sowers of fear. Even the perfect Neophyte. Albeit it was also unique in another of its qualities.

  Kalitin painfully regretted not being back on the other side of the border. He knew that they did not forgive people like him. So let them put him in prison, in a secret gulag lab, a sharashka, the way they did with scientists in the thirties and forties, let them sentence him to life in prison, if only he could work, work! But then Kalitin would recall the line in the contract he signed: “disclosure is punishable.” The sentence awaited him like a bride back home. He had strange, turbulent dreams about execution by firing squad: he experienced it as something intimate that reunited him with his homeland, with his laboratory on a distant island, with his old colleagues, with equipment that remembered his hand; the execution did not kill him, it let him be cleansed, reborn, undid his treason.

  But the wakeful daytime Kalitin was skeptical of the nocturnal Kalitin’s visions. He thought he knew how to weigh the hurts and the hopes rationally. After all, when he was deciding where to defect, he rejected the stump of Korea created by Stalin, and Communist China, and the states of the Near East.

  In part he feared that his homeland had too many eyes and ears there. But more important, he considered himself a man of the first world, not the third. He created methods of killing. But he did not want them used simply because some tribe that had just declared itself a new country hated another tribe. That motive seemed humiliating and unworthy of the scientific truths embodied in his weapons. He had once had a country worth his labors if only because it had enemies of a commensurate scale. That country was gone, so it was better to work for the enemies than for someone in a third, random state on the margins of the original battle.

  He had been to the Middle East only once—after the second Iraq campaign. He accompanied a group of inspectors looking for chemical weapons. Kalitin thought that he had already seen and experienced all that: statues pulled down from pedestals, cheering crowds in the streets, corridors of government buildings strewn with documents, bunkers and secret sites abandoned by fleeing guards, test animals dead in their enclosures, microscopes gone blind without electricity, rows of fragile ampoules in soft padded compartments . . .

  Now that Kalitin knew his diagnosis, he remembered something else from that trip: the shadow of forgotten and terrible states of antiquity, divine winged bulls and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the shadows of innumerable generations turned to silt and dust, to desert sand, so that the names of their rulers would remain in history; the shadow of dams built by pickax and shovel restraining mighty rivers, bearded faces of stone in the halls of ransacked museums, columns and foundations of destroyed temples—the ghosts whispered in a language Kalitin understood, as if he himself were a ghost, the disembodied remains of the past who could understand others who were gone.

  Kalitin also understood that even in his country, which was boundlessly generous in death and in honors, human life had never been valued so low and so high; without intervals. It was only there, beyond the edge of the ancient world, that they could help him: to create an entire medical institute if necessary, gather all the luminaries so that he could live, Kalitin, the creator of untraceable death.

  When his doctor came in, Kalitin understood just by the look on his face. He was too professionally compassionate. He listened attentively to the doctor’s sympathetic, encouraging words, but inside he ran through the names of countries as if they were the names of lifesaving medications the doctor did not know.

  He made his decision.

  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 wo
rry 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.