Bar in the Departure zone. The story of one escape. Alexander Couprin

      CATCHING ECHOES OF THE PAST

      Attention passengers, please check in for your flight and note that the boarding gate has been announced. This is the final boarding call…

      The woman in the booth appeared confused.

      “Wait, so you are flying back to Germany now?”

      “Oh, sorry.” The traveler felt a crooked smile form at the corner of his mouth. “Is it forbidden?”

      “I just don’t understand. Your incoming flight just arrived, and you’re not even going into the city?”

      “No, I don’t care to.”

      The female control officer pressed a hidden lever, and the FSB officer began monitoring the conversation. The passenger is a US citizen named Dmitry Klimov. He is polite and pleasant, and his documentation is in order, but what does this mean? Getting off one plane, wandering around Sheremetyevo without leaving for the city, and then boarding another plane back to where he came from? The procedure to get here was arduous, with countless forms at the consulate, certifications, and photos required to obtain a Russian visa and purchase a business-class ticket. And all this only to take a walk around the airport?

      The FSB officer hunched over the monitor, listening to the conversation, and spoke quietly into the microphone. “Girls, take a look at the client in Area Four, male, athletic build, wearing a canvas jacket trimmed in leather, light brown shoes, and thick, blond hair – possibly a wig.”

      Once upon a time, Department 7, the section of the KGB responsible for surveilling foreigners, employed operatives of both sexes so that if the need arose, a target could even be accompanied to the toilet. KGB’s successor, FSB, is all about technology, and remote video surveillance is so tightly organized that “guiding” a target has become no more complicated than playing a computer game. However, physical surveillance is still used indoors and outdoors.

      In the arrivals hall, camera operators captured a passenger, followed him, and handed him off to customs control. There, legitimate customs officers and security personnel working undercover examined him thoroughly. The passenger was released into the city if no contraband or suspicious items were found.

      However, this passenger did not leave and wandered around the airport building, peering intently at the glass doors, stairs, and hallways. This behavior triggered all the government machinery. He was being tailed, video recordings were made, and personal data from the visa application form was urgently requested. Only the old installation engineer, who once served in the KGB and had access to the monitors, gloomily commented, “He is remembering, remembering, and comparing.”

      “What does he remember?” insisted the shift supervisor.

      “He’s a builder, most likely from Rutebau.”

      “What’s that, Valov? What does it mean?”

      “The firm that built the airport. The Germans built it – West German’s. The Rutebau company.”

      “Hmmm, I didn’t know.”

      And you’re a brainless piece of shit, sadly, thought the retiree. I wouldn’t have promoted you beyond a first-grade technician in the old days.

      But times had changed, and he was no longer an airport security boss as he was back in the 1980s. Ah, the 1980s… Yes, and he should already be at rest due to arrhythmia. What a distasteful word…

      He did not recognize the person on the monitor screens, although the thick hair remotely resembled someone from the distant past.

      After wandering around the airport for an hour and a half, the passenger returned to the check-in counter, passed through customs and passport control, and slowly ascended the escalator to the second floor in the departure area.

      Right there, where the stairs end, there was once a foreign currency bar well known to the outgoing Moscow elite. Rubles were also accepted, but not by everybody. Here, well-known athletes poured beer from outlandish aluminum cans, and diplomats focused on their caviar sandwiches. The poet Yevtushenko ordered green tea, and beloved artist Volodya Vysoskiy politely asked for cold vodka. All of them were famous and bohemian, and all those who would be granted the ridiculous foreign title “celebrity” had passed by this counter.

      The memories seemed to weaken the passenger’s knees. The bar was empty, and he chose a table at the edge, sat down, and threw his bag onto a vacant chair. A blue-shaven bartender with a military bearing leisurely approached him. He wanted to tell the visitors that they were on a technical break and that the chairs were not intended for luggage. He even raised a finger to point to the offending bag, but then the visitor’s phone rang. Ignoring the barman, he spoke into the phone in German. The bartender silently returned to his post behind the counter. After about five minutes, the traveler ended the conversation and sank into reverie. His eyes scanned the room, trying to recapture the past. Alas, there was nothing to grasp onto. Of course, this was not the same bar. Gone were the curved sofas and the odd barstools at a low and wide bar. And the bar itself was missing as the place had become more of a restaurant.

      The ring! Of course, the ring! Where was it – the hole left from the bronze ring in the ceiling, dislodged by a champagne cork? The entire airport ceiling comprised these rings – they clustered together and hung like brown honeycombs over thousands of bustling passenger bees. This was Sheremetyevo’s hallmark. No other airport, and probably no other building in the country, had anything like it. But the rings were gone. The ceiling was now wholly different, ordinary like any other airport.

      What had he and Anya been celebrating in the storage room? And why had he not allowed her to open the bottle? In his inexperienced hands, the champagne popped deafeningly; the heavy cork shot up like a bullet and stayed there. Seized by horror, they stared as one of the millions of those rings fell. It turned out that they were not metal but rather plastic with a bronze finish. Frightened to death, they quickly stopped the bottle with something and rushed to the exit, through the checkpoint to the bus.

      Dima searched the ceiling for a long time for the stuck cork until Uncle Vlad, the senior bartender-administrator, noticed and remarked, “They already know your face well enough. Stop looking up.”

      Yes, the airport’s ceiling was made up of rings to mask the lenses of surveillance cameras – it was a joke to all the employees of Sheremetyev-2 in those years, and the passengers presumably thought the same.

      “Es tut mir leid, geht es Ihnen gut?” asked the bartender with genuine concern as he touched the passenger’s shoulder and set a glass of cold water in front of him.

      “Oh, forgive me, for God’s sake,” he answered in Russian. “I just felt a bit dizzy. May I sit here for a few more minutes?”

      “Yes, as long as you like. Call me if you need anything. I’ll be over there working on some papers.”

      Oh, those papers… shift change schedules, the commodity report, warehouse requirements, and something else, and, finally, the most important thing is the report on the currency received. An error on any document could cost you your job. At the same time, if the figures