She had been undercover before but had never passed from one country to another with a fraudulent identity. She had planned for this moment and prepared for it. But still, her palms moistened. Her blouse stuck to her ribs. She felt as if a monarch butterfly was fluttering around in her stomach.
Oh, Lord! The officer was looking at the screen too long. Much too long.
It went through her head: something had glitched with the passport. Some chunk of old Soviet style computer science had pegged her fake documents.
She turned and scanned the room. No one she knew. Nowhere to run.
The immigration officer frowned. The sweat poured off her. Now it felt as if a dozen butterflies were doing a bizarre mating dance in her stomach.
He was a nice-looking man in his mid twenties. Clean cut, fair-skinned, and blond. Looked a little like a cop or a guy she’d gone to college with, which made it all the more weird. He refused to smile.
His blue eyes slid from the computer screen to her. He spoke Ukrainian.
“Dyplomat?” he asked.
“Tak,” she said. Yes.
She fumbled slightly but pressed on. “Diplomat, sort of. United States Department of Commerce,” she said.
“You are Anna Tavares?”
A beat. “I am Anna Tavares.”
Still in Ukrainian: “You are sure you are Miss Anna Tavares?”
She couldn’t tell if he was flirting or trying to catch a spy. She stayed with it.
“Who else would I be?” she asked, trying to make a joke of it.
He closed her passport and placed it on the desk in front of her, out of her reach. He switched to English. “You will now please wait,” he said. “I call superior officers.”
“What!? Why!?”
“Because for you, this passport, I must.”
He looked to his left. Two security people approached, black uniforms, blue and yellow trim. Guns. Police clubs. A dog the size of a Volkswagen. A large man and a larger matron who looked like Olga’s steroidal big sister. Their eyes were on her; they hulked in her direction and they didn’t look happy. Her head snapped back to the immigration officer.
“What’s the problem?” she said. “What have I done wrong?”
Her nerves were in open revolt against her common sense now. She wanted to be anywhere else in the world than here. In the back of Alex’s mind, a prayer had kicked in.
The young man turned back to her. “There is no problem,” the officer said. “Our country’s courtesy to you. You are an American diplomat. We will escort you past the long lines.”
“Oh…”
Her insides completely unraveled.
“Have a good stay, Anna Tavares,” he said, returning to English and giving her a smile. He opened her passport, stamped her entry, and pushed it back in her direction. Then he winked at her. “American women are always so beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you,” she answered.
Her jaw closed tight. She took back her passport. The two security people then, with the utmost politeness, bypassed a hundred other travelers, led her through an official portal, and guided her into the reception area.
There she found herself face-to-face with a young man holding a piece of paper with US Commerce on it. She approached him and smiled.
“Anna Tavares?” he said.
“That’s me. A bit frazzled. But me.”
“I’m Richard Friedman. I’m with the commercial attaché’s office. I’m also your control officer while you’re here. Welcome to Kiev.”
“Thank you.”
They shook hands. He grabbed her bags.
Friedman was about her age, maybe a shade older, likeable, with a round face, glasses, and a smart look through the eyes. He wore a suit and tie beneath an open overcoat.
He carried her luggage and guided her to a waiting car and driver.
The car was French, a Peugeot, perky, deep green, and brand new. In contrast, the driver, Stosh, was a brooding Ukrainian in his fifties with a short gray beard and a three-inch scar across his left temple.
“Everything go well at immigration?” Friedman asked.
“Perfectly.”
“Glad to hear it, Anna. It doesn’t always. They’re usually a pretty sour bunch. Still paranoid from the Soviet era. Always looking for spies.”
“Imagine that,” she said. “Well, if I see any I’ll let them know.”
They both laughed.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Soon they were rolling toward Kiev. Alex was in the back seat with Friedman, a pair of attaché cases on the seat between them.
She peered out the window, missing nothing, taking in a city she had never seen before today. The road was straight as an arrow and flat as an ironing board, with pine trees interspersed with surprisingly large houses and entrances to gated developments.
“The new rich,” Friedman said, noticing her interest in what was beyond the car windows. “The FSNs tell me this all used to be forest up until independence. Now a lot of locals have gotten rich and foreign money has moved in.”
“FSNs?” she asked.
“Foreign Service Nationals,” he said. “Local people employed by the embassy.”
She nodded. “How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Me?” Friedman answered, “Two years. The department just extended me, so I’ll be here three more. I don’t mind. My last posting was Yemen. At least this is in Europe.”
Her nerves were still returning to earth from the immigration incident. And she was worn out by two long back-to-back flights.
The road led to a long bridge that it shared with a metro line and then climbed up onto a bluff. There sat most of Kiev, largely separate from its river.
They were in a surprisingly picturesque city, the city she had glimpsed from her airplane, with intricately styled old buildings from before the Russian Revolution of 1917. The ancient was mixed with a smattering of small stores and new structures.
Then the older buildings ended. Alex, Friedman, and their driver were in the middle of Stalinist “wedding cake” architecture, a style characterized by massive buildings as expressions of Communist state power, intimidation of the masses via steel, concrete, and glass. The combination of overwhelming size, patriotic decoration as mural decoration, and traditional motifs had always been the most vivid examples of Soviet architecture.
“This is Khreshchatyk,” Friedman said. “Just Khreschatyk, not Khreschatyk Avenue or Street or Boulevard. It’s like Broadway in New York.”
“It’s unreal,” Alex said. She felt as if she were seeing a city from another era, another world. In a way, she was.
“Most of Kiev was spared in the big war because the Germans crossed the river elsewhere,” Friedman said. “But the Russian NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor, booby-trapped the buildings on Khreshchatyk with dynamite. They figured the Germans would use them. Then they blew them all up with the German soldiers in them. Wicked, huh? After the war the street was rebuilt to Stalin’s taste.” He pointed to a massive, ornate building with terra cotta tiles. “See how high the portal is, the square columns, the windows suggesting twenty-five foot ceilings? Architecture designed to intimidate.”
Strangely enough, the buildings today looked harmless to Alex, with people strolling peacefully beside them. Time had exorcised some of the political demons.
Stalin was gone. So was Lenin, so were Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. The curtain had been pulled away, and the Soviet wizards of yore were no longer objects of fear. The current day people, she knew, were a different story.
Friedman lifted his eyes to the driver. “No one misses the Russians, right, Stosh?”
The comment elicited an amused sneer out of Stosh, the driver, who didn’t answer further, but studied the rearview mirror as he listened in.
“Oh, by the way,” Friedman said, reaching, into his overcoat pocket. He found a new cell phone and gave it to her. “This will work here. It’s programmed with all the numbers you need, and there’s a Ukrainian SIM card in it. Keep it with you.”