When the journalist had taken his leave, Kalitin instantly took a heart pill.
It was not just the ratlines that had amazed him.
In his previous life he had known only one German scientist who had worked in a concentration camp. He had been brought back as a trophy after the war by Uncle Igor, Igor Yuryevich Zakharyevsky.
Officially, the German did not exist. The closed city was his prison. But he was a sinister specialist, who had performed experiments that even they would not have countenanced; he had looked much farther beyond the edge of pain and death—and he was ready to share his experience scrupulously.
Kalitin remembered how Zakharyevsky told him the prisoner’s story. Kalitin was outraged, even though he had already taken more than one life. But that German, he might have tortured and killed our soldiers; perhaps Kalitin’s maternal grandfather, a mathematician who fought in the artillery and died in a POW camp, had fallen into his hands.
Kalitin was ready to kill the German. But a few days later, he noticed that his anger had waned. He still hated the prisoner scientist, he thought, but he was ready to work with him.
First of all, Zakharyevsky wanted that to happen: his plan was to develop a substance based on the previous generation elaborated by the German. Second, Kalitin appreciated the prisoner’s verified scientific method. And third, he felt, despite his upbringing, despite the compulsory image of the enemy he was taught, that there was a strange, forbidden affinity in their inner desires, that went deeper than nationality, ideology, enmity: to find the shortest path to knowledge that makes one an indispensable creator regardless of the circumstances. This gives the greatest protection and power. The German proved by his own example that it was possible.
Guessing his new colleague’s feelings, the German did not push himself forward, did not force himself on him, did not talk about the past. He just worked: steadily and swiftly. Eventually Kalitin realized that this lonely old man was closer to him than the general and Party bosses who ran the laboratory. They were his own people by blood and citizenship, but alien by their nature, while the German was alien, as much as one could be, and yet his own. One of the people who hid from the state within the state, making it serve him and paying with loyal service, merging with it to the point where you could not tell who directed whom.
It was that German who, once he understood that his junior colleague was ready for the next, even more difficult level of knowledge, opened his eyes to the shadow within the shadow: the dual past of the laboratory, that is, of the place, the Island, where it was located. The German had been there before—before the war, before Hitler was chancellor, when a secret joint Soviet-German testing ground was located there.
Even though he knew some of the dark secrets of the Island, Kalitin refused to believe this. Then the German described the installation from memory—the location of the airfield, the wooden laboratory building, staff barracks, the menagerie, the guardhouse, the fence line; he told him where in the present-day, enlarged testing ground you could find old foxholes and craters left by artillery fire; he took Kalitin there, dug around with a stick in the dried grass, showed him a shell casing left after an explosion. It had German markings. Seeing that Kalitin still had doubts, the German took him to the archives; there was a special section for documents brought out from various European countries after the war, heaps of papers from various scientific institutes, some charred, warped by water. No one had gone through them carefully; Klaus opened a nondescript army box for Kalitin. It held reports on joint experiments. In 1933, German scientists took them to Germany. In 1945 a special NKVD team found them in the ruins and brought them back.
Kalitin read, recognizing the locations described, the names of scientists from the Soviet side. Zakharyevsky’s name appeared. Kalitin knew it all: the specifics of the climate that appeared in the course of the experiments, the scientific logic.
And there was Klaus’s last name.
He sensed that he no longer consider Klaus an enemy.
Having said goodbye to the journalist, Kalitin started thinking about Klaus. The knowledge he had revealed. Kalitin pondered the systematic tautologies of history, elicited by the extreme rareness of truly secret places, good for hiding, for protecting a secret. He thought about himself and how he had chosen a house on someone’s old path. A ratline. That meant he could count on its patronage, on the enduring luck of refugees, since the people who had been protecting him now wanted to kill him.
The journalist had shown him copies of the interrogation pages. The guard officer who had a technical education gave evidence about the experiments in the camp. There was much he did not know, he mixed up terminology, but Kalitin instantly understood: it was the work of a butcher. Cheap, crude death for masses herded to slaughter. Visible, obvious death that did not hide itself. They must have taken the documentation with them or hidden it somewhere along the way—like a bank deposit, like stocks that had temporarily lost value but could have their former prices restored if the new masters of Europe, hiding their mutual hostility, should need to kill someone: Communists, for example. Or the capitalist bourgeoisie.
Kalitin had left a secret cache like that in his homeland, a tube buried beneath an inconspicuous tree in the woods. It was like looking into an ideal, absolute mirror, and he looked without surprise, without anxiety, as if he had lived all those disjointed lives, separated by time. Or at least was the link connecting them.
Ever since that meeting, Kalitin imagined there might be a rat in the house. He lived cleanly, far from the village, why would rats come there—and yet he kept imagining a gray shadow.
He took off his coat and lit the fire. Twilight was falling rapidly. Darkness came quickly in the valley, as if the hills, trees, and grasses radiated it. He looked out the window. A plane flew above the dimmed and darkened clouds. Its feathery trail was still reddish yellow in the light. Splitting wood the old way for kindling, Kalitin thought about the plane and the people in it. Where was it going, was the captain competent, how old was the plane?
Kalitin was ready to think about anything at all, do whatever, split kindling, haul firewood—anything to put off the moment when he would be home for good, and the thought of death would return with new, almost overwhelming force; it would go on the attack.
He knew he was in for a sleepless night. A long night of fear and memory. He wanted flames in the fireplace, the humming updraft in the chimney, and the sweet smoke of apple logs, so hard they made a ringing sound, unyielding to fire.
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 subje
ct 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.
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