Tags:
United States,
Suspense,
Literature & Fiction,
Thrillers,
Espionage,
Mystery; Thriller & Suspense,
Conspiracies,
Contemporary Fiction,
Terrorism,
Thrillers & Suspense,
Spies & Politics,
Technothrillers
gleaned from the passport he presented at US Customs. Had they linked it to another of his passports? Or visa applications? If so, they were ahead of the game, and he would have to consider what changes to make in his itinerary. From his calculations they would be able to identify him as twenty-eight; a software engineer with American high school and work experience; from Grozny, Chechnya; and a graduate of a Russian technical university.
Other than that, he couldn’t think of anything particular that they knew about him. Who his parents were, perhaps, not that it mattered. His father was dead, dragged off in the middle of the night by Chechen rebels, never to be seen again, and Ilya did not grieve the loss. His father had been a drunk, abusive, and rarely at home. When he had been at home, Ilya had come to loathe him. Ilya’s mother was still alive, but she was a pensioner living in a retirement home in Tolyatti, in central Russia—a truly godforsaken bit of the motherland—and knew next to nothing about her son’s whereabouts or profession, and Ilya preferred it that way. He had long ago given up on any relationship with his biological family. And anyway, her last name bore no resemblance to his, and he doubted she was listed on many official documents. The war in Chechnya had made a mockery of accurate record keeping. That was one of the main reasons he had so many passports, and they were each, in their way, perfectly legitimate. Ilya was all of those people listed on his various documents: Markov, Markarov, Ilyanovich. And also none of them. Everyman and ghost at the same time.
He was nobody and he was everybody.
Ilya glanced at his watch and scanned the cars blasting down the avenue. Traffic was picking up. He shot a look over his shoulder back at the Motel 6. The army woman would be knocking on his door right about now. He hadn’t checked out; he’d simply left and figured the credit card would be charged. That reminded him. He pulled the offending American Express card out of his wallet and dropped it in a garbage can. The card was useless to him now. Worse than useless—dangerous.
Once the army woman busted down the hotel room door, they would find next to nothing inside. A roller bag he’d bought in Moscow, with some pants, T-shirts, and underwear, a dog-eared copy of Cryptonomicon . Nothing he couldn’t replace in the States, but he would miss the Stephenson novel. The book was dense, and complicated, and its plot gave Ilya’s mind a place of refuge and calm.
All his technology and cash—just under $1,000—and all his documents were on his shoulder now, in his backpack. That never left his sight. They were his tools of the trade, his weapons. He supposed they could pull his fingerprints from the hotel room desk and bathroom, but what good would that do them? He’d already given his fingerprints at passport control at the airport.
So what else could they know? As far as he could tell, nothing. Ilya had made it his life’s work to remain nearly invisible, keeping his name off documents, keeping his money in accounts spread across multiple countries, paying cash when possible, changing identities randomly and as the mood struck him. The ability to blend in was part and parcel of who he was, and it was integral to how he made a living. But that in itself begged the larger question—how had they spotted him so fast? And who was responsible?
He doubted very much that standard FBI alerts could have been triggered by his arrival. That had never happened before, and he had been in and out of the country four times in the last ten years. Homeland Security might have caught on, but that seemed like a stretch, given their mediocre record of identifying potential terrorist threats. They looked for ties to terror groups, and he had none. He hadn’t done anything wrong. At least, he’d never been caught at it. He was completely clean.
No, the person who figured out that Ilya was a person of interest was
Anne Elisabeth Stengl
Joyce Carol Oates
William Bernhardt
Jenna Howard
Lisa Kuehne
Holly Madison
Juliet E. McKenna
Janice Hanna
Denise Grover Swank
Marisa Chenery