Eduard Stroganov

The tobacco was good. Real, not mixed with whatever rubbish they'd been using in recent years. Eduard smoked, holding the cigarette slightly to the side so the smoke wouldn't drift into his face. He stood by the window, not at the desk—positioned so he could see the courtyard and the reflection of the room in the glass simultaneously. A habit that had long since ceased to be a conscious effort.

A folder lay on the desk. Thin. He knew its contents almost by heart: dates, addresses, habits, connections. The name of the man he had been watching for nearly six months. A few photographs. Nothing superfluous.

He closed the folder without reading it. He adjusted his cuff with a single, precise movement. His gaze swept over the courtyard below—two people by the entrance, a woman with a bag, a car by the gates. Everything was as usual. Everything was in its place.

It was time.

He stepped out unhurriedly. Not because he had nowhere to rush to—haste gives you away. And he had long ago decided that he would not give himself away, even to an empty alleyway.

The street met him with a damp chill and the scent of melting snow. He walked steadily, head slightly lowered, hands in his coat pockets. To an observer, he was just an ordinary man, one of the thousands in Moscow. No one turned around. No one remembered him.

He spotted the target from a distance.

The man from his folder was standing by a shop window—as usual. The posture was familiar down to the smallest detail: weight on the left leg, right hand slightly in his pocket, head turned as if examining something in the glass. Eduard knew that no one was actually examining anything. He was waiting. Or pretending to wait.

Eduard neither quickened nor slowed his pace. He simply drew closer—to a distance from which one could speak quietly without drawing attention.

— Comrade, — he called out evenly, without pressure, without threat. Just a name and patronymic, spoken the way people speak when they know each other through business.

Eduard stopped when he saw the eyes.

Not because he had seen something impossible. The appearance was the same—the face, the height, the coat, even the way the target held his hands. Everything matched. Everything was correct.

Except for the gaze.

The gaze was as if they were meeting for the first time. The way one looks at a stranger. Without recognition, without preparation, without that barely perceptible internal tension that appears in a man who has been watched for a long time and knows it.

Eduard said nothing.

He tilted his head slightly—that same gesture he made when he was thinking—and looked just to the side, as if past him. A second. Two. He noticed everything at once: the breathing. The position of the shoulders. The placement of the hands. Where did the target look after turning around—at him, past him, behind him?

Not him.

The thought came calmly, without surprise. Surprise was a luxury he hadn't allowed himself since he was fourteen. It was simply a fact. Simply a new variable.

He pulled his hands from his pockets—slowly, so as not to startle him. He took no step forward. And he spoke again—just as evenly, just as quietly, as if nothing had happened. As if they were continuing a conversation started long ago.

— Have you been standing here long? — he asked, — It's cold. You'll catch a chill, — and he fell silent, beginning to stare.

He did not know that the body of the man suspected of espionage had just been occupied by someone from the year 2026.