“Natalie,” I asked politely, “have you considered where that chicken is going to shit?”
Nat stared at the chicken for a long minute. “No,” she said in a small voice.
Mary Alice groaned and Natalie turned on her. “Well, excuse me for attempting to introduce a little verisimilitude to my cover, Mary Alice. Posing as a missionary from Iowa will give you every opportunity to play the judgmental bitch card. I’m sure you have a full house by now.”
Mary Alice turned to lambaste her, and I held up a hand.“Not now. We’re supposed to be strangers, remember? Fighting is for people who know each other.”
Helen and Nat murmured noises that I decided to take as agreement. Mary Alice gave me a sullen look. “Idaho,” she grumbled to Natalie.
“Pardon me?” Nat asked with exaggerated politeness.
“It’s not Iowa. It’s Idaho.”
“And I know just where you can shove your potatoes, Mary Alice.” Before Nat could get herself on a roll, the chicken started making soft clucking noises. “I hope you’re happy. You have upset my chicken.”
“That chicken is going to be soup before this trip is over with,” Mary Alice promised her.
“Enough,” I said with just enough edge in my voice to make them sit up. “No more English for you two,” I said to Helen and Nat. “You’re supposed to be unobtrusive—at least as unobtrusive as you can manage.” I shoved a phrase book at Mary Alice. “And you’re supposed to be learning. Look up how to ask people about the state of their souls and if they’ll send money to your church.”
“ ‘Da li pricate Engleski?’ ” she read out, butchering the pronunciation. While she did that, Helen and I, nearest the window, kept a discreet lookout for anything interesting. Helen’s gaze was raised just above the newspaper she held in front of her face. I pretended to study a travel guide as we surveyed the passengers still boarding. There weren’t many. Trains used to make this route in seven hours, and they were always packed. But with the decline of the rolling stock, the trip had lengthened. It was scheduled for twelve hours but often tookmore than fourteen. Montenegrins who could afford their own cars drove them, abandoning the train for hatchbacks and minivans. Now it was mostly less affluent locals and some crunchy granola backpacker types who made the trip by rail, and carriages were never crowded. Conductors didn’t much care where you sat, and dining cars were a distant memory. Instead there was a guy who boarded at Podgorica with a cooler full of beers he sold for a euro each before hopping off again. It was a pretty good hustle, I thought, although I’d have been happier to see someone with a box full of tacos.
We waved off the beer seller, focused on the people mingling on the platform. Galina and Tamara had left Venice by train, and Minka had been able to confirm for us that they’d changed a few times but kept a slow, steady progress towards Podgorica, following Pasha’s original itinerary. But if we were right about their reasons for being on the train, whoever they were meeting would be boarding here.
People watching is always fascinating, and never more so than when you’re assessing a crowd for a potential mark. Most of the people we kill are not very nice; they’re aware of the fact that there are folks who’d like to see them dead, so they take precautions. They might travel with a pack of bodyguards which is a nuisance but never insurmountable. In fact, having bodyguards often means peoplelowertheir watchfulness because they’re paying someone else to sniff out threats. (See: Lazarov, Pasha.) Or they might become reclusive—a complete pain in the ass because it means setting up a cover identity you have to inhabit for months in order to get close enough to kill them. Or they might take to wearing disguises—anoption they choose more often than you’d expect, mostly because it’s fun, I think. People have always enjoyed an excuse to wear a mask—Carnevale, Halloween, costume parties. They love dressing up and trying on a new face. The problem is, most people aren’t nearly as good as they think they are at test-driving a new personality. Identity isn’t just your collection of facial features and the clothes on your back. It’s how you hold yourself, how you communicate, how you move through the world. It’s a thousand little details that are so ingrained in our behavior, they might as well be etched in cathedral stone. It takes years of training and careful study to be able to truly inhabit a new skin, and if you know your mark well enough, you can spot them through any disguise.
With Galina, we had almost nothing to draw on, no Provenance dossier, no social media profile. She was less than a shadow; she was a silhouette projected on a white screen, the details completely obscured. That wasn’t surprising. Lots of our marks kept a low profile and someone running a club drug operation wouldn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention—from law enforcement agencies or from criminals higher up in the food chain who might decide to take a bite out of her business. Or she might have just been so damaged from her father’s assassination and her mother’s death that she had kept herself aloof, clutching her privacy like a security blanket. Who am I to psychoanalyze anybody?
There was a final flurry of activity and the train began to move, although it always looks to me like it’s the platform moving away from the train and not the other way around. We pulled out of the station and in a matter of minutes were out ofPodgorica proper and on our way. Podgorica was only an hour from the coast, at the foot of the mountains. The route we followed to the east climbed the Dinaric Alps, the landscape changing from canyons to forests to river gorges and everything in between. It was rugged country with no highway system, just the same narrow byways that had been cart tracks under the feet of Roman centurions. Those roads had been traveled by a lot of folks since—Greeks, Illyrians, Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians. Anybody who’d had an empire in that part of the world had crossed Montenegro at some point.
“What do you think it is?” Nat asked. The chicken had settled down politely at her feet but I still didn’t trust it. Chickens have reptile eyes and my policy is never to turn my back on one.
“What do we think what is?” Helen asked.
“The thing Galina is after. Schematics for a new superweapon? Priceless statue? Only child of the kingpin of a narco-collective?”
“A child?” Mary Alice stared. “You think she is stealing a child?”
Natalie shrugged. “For ransom. Nobody thinks it’s going to happen until it does.”
“What even is a narco-collective? Did you just make that up?”
“Of course not. I read about it in—”
That’s the point when I tuned out. Natalie and Mary Alice can spar for days, and as long as it didn’t end in bloodshed, I wasn’t going to put a stop to it. We were all feeling out of sorts and maybe a little friendly sniping would take the edge off.
Instead I followed my own train of thought, considering the question Nat had just posed. The possible answers were too many to count. Galina could be after just about anything. Lots of folks in the west think that since Montenegro joined NATO, it’s one of us. But like most places in the Balkans, it’s not that simple. Russians still kept an eagle eye on the warm-water ports of its Adriatic coast, and while Montenegro was a democracy, it was a flawed one. If that assessment sounds harsh, it isn’t mine. BlameTheEconomistIntelligence Unit. They’re paid to evaluate the realpolitik of various countries so other people can decide where to put their money. Stable governments make for good investments, but there’s money to be had in rocky ones too. Montenegro’s most prominent politicians kept power by circulating through different offices in order to circumvent term limitations. Returning to private life is a luxury you can’t afford if you’re afraid of being prosecuted for a little light corruption or attempting a coup or two. The last coup attempt—allegedly—had been done at the behest of the Russians and it wasn’t as far in the past as you might think. And Russians sniffing around all but guaranteed Chinese interest. Beijing had been loud and proud about wanting to spend a fair bit of coin in Montenegro to build a highway system as part of their modern Silk Road project. Being meddled with by two much larger countries would have divided Montenegrins enough, but there are always the usual historical Balkan issues of Serb vs. Croat vs. Albanian vs. Greek—you get the picture. And then there were the folks who kept a candle burning in front of Tito’s picture with a rheumy-eyed longing for the old days. Sure, he might havebeen a dictator and they didn’t get to vote very often, but crime rates were low, employment was high, and there had always been a chicken in every pot when Josip was in charge, they would tell you.
So what pretty crumbs did any of that leave for Galina? Club drugs were lucrative, but pretty small potatoes, criminally speaking. It made sense that she was looking to level up in the underworld, maybe branch into something really juicy. Blackmail material on a Montenegrin politician? Something that could help her engineer a coup of her own? Plans for a secret military base? None of that seemed likely, and even if it were, so what? It didn’t change our job. She was out to kill us, so our only option was to get there first.
There’s a moment in every trip where the train picks up speed and everybody seems to settle in to traveling. We hit that point just outside of Podgorica. The noise lessened considerably. A conductor moved through the cars, checking tickets, but without any of the urgency you find on slicker trains. He gave our tickets the most cursory of glances and didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the chicken.
“Told you,” Nat muttered as he left. She craned out the compartment to watch him move to the next car. “He’s gone. It’s time.”
We’d gone over the plan enough to know what we were doing. We’d split into teams of two to check the entire train, Nat and Helen going forward, Mary Alice and I aft. We were looking for Galina or Tamara, but failing that, anything out of the ordinary. We had our notifications set to push on the Menopaws app, our only means of communication when wewere separated. Nat said good-bye to the chicken, who clucked softly to herself as we left. We’d decided not to be precious about it. Whoever found Galina got to kill her, it was that simple. We weren’t going to waste time on making a full posse out of it.
With one final look, we split up. Nat and Helen moved up the corridor while Mary Alice and I turned the opposite direction. We glanced into each compartment as we went, surprising a few folks, but most just gave us curious looks and went back to what they’d been doing. There were grandmas—none with chickens though—and grubby-looking backpackers doing the Bar-to-Belgrade trip. A small group of scouts took up several compartments, shooting spitballs at each other as their troop leaders passed out sandwiches and smacked the perpetrators gently on their heads. Beyond that lay the toilet, which doesn’t bear thinking about, so I won’t.
Mary Alice put her mouth close to my ear. “Unless she’s disguised herself as a Boy Scout, I think this car is clear.”