Original subtitles

IN BRUSSELS

What happened?

Schneider...

What happened?

What do you know?

Everything, I think.

They don't have him.

They don't have him yet. The professor is safe, but...

They don't have him, Casterman.

No.

That was your job, Casterman.

The professor... That was what we had agreed.

What went wrong?

What is it that went wrong?

Here we go. Pay attention.

We are doing everything wrong, It's too early.

We will mess it all up.

There it is. That's the van.

Here we come. Stay alert.

Did you see him?

Yes...

Did you see him or not? – I think I did.

You think? Did you, or didn't you?

I don't know... I thought I saw him. You went by too fast.

What do you mean too fast? Did you see him or not?

Was he there or not?

I don't know.

I thought I saw the girl alone, but maybe there was someone else.

What do you mean "maybe"?

Did you see him or not?

The only thing you had to do was to tell if he was there or not.

The only thing you had to do.

I don't know. I think it was just the girl...

You went by too fast...

What are you doing?

I'm going back. Can't you see?

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

What am I doing?

I'm doing your job.

Have you lost your mind? They told us not to go back!

They told us not to go back under any circumstances!

You will screw it all up!

You've already screwed it all up.

You just had to say if he was there or not.

That was all we had to do.

I won't go back without knowing if he was there or not.

I will not look like an idiot.

They told us not to go back. "Whatever happens, don't go back."

I can't believe it.

They told us "whatever happens, don't go back." I can't believe it.

My God. This is a mistake.

Tell me, Casterman. What went wrong?

I don't know.

I need the professor, Casterman.

The professor is safe. I can assure you that...

I will send my man.

I will send my man, Casterman.

I'm really sorry.

Schneider.

That's all. Please, don't let your women intervene.

Good bye.

IN SOUTH AMERICA

It's fine. Don't worry...

I told you not to worry.

We won't go... We won't go...

We will stay here until you tell us... Right here...

Yes, I promise.

We're leaving. Now.

Where?

To work.

Come on, we have little time.

Something unexpected has come up.

Are you okay, Fox?

Yes.

Are you sure you are okay?

Yes. I'm fine...

Hurry up, then.

THREE HOURS BEFORE

THEY COME

TO KILL THEM

You don't sleep?

I'm asking why you don't sleep.

You don't sleep?

And why are they after you so badly?

What have you done?

Why are they after you?

Are you one of the good guys or the bad ones?

I mean, why are they after you.

Why are they after you?

And are you married?

If you have a wife.

Is she pretty?

Is she pretty?

Me? If I am married?

No, my friend...

Me, married?

No, no, no...

THE ASSASSINS

He was scrawny, tall and silent,

and he always seemed quiet,

and he was always attentive.

When she saw his photo in the file, she thought he was attractive.

One of the girls in Personnel told him:

Think of James Bond. A sort of James Bond.

But it wasn't true, he was not like James Bond.

James Bond attracted attention everywhere he went,

on the contrary, he liked being invisible.

He was a subtle, even elegant person

and she never heard him raise his voice,

or curse, or insult anyone.

James Bond speeded around in sports cars

and did skiing and drove motorboats.

He could do all those things too, but always as an obligation.

He would've never thought of running a race

with a girl in the Monte Carlo bends, for example.

In everything he did he was sober,

and it was always clear that for him all that nonsense was just work.

James Bond was all the time drinking his famous Martinis,

or popping open bottles of French champagne,

or stuff like that. He, on the contrary,

had been seen having a drink only a few times,

and when he drank, he always stopped in time,

never continued.

The same with women. Nothing.

He was shy and distant, almost a monk.

He was a tad melancholic, and it always seemed like

he was thinking of something else, reflecting,

and if there was something you could not say about Bond,

was that he was a thinker.

In all the time they shared, only at the end could she see

that in fact he was a loving and sweet guy,

and that he was not a holy man,

or a robot remotely controlled by some NASA expert.

When she discovered it, it was late, there was nothing that could be done,

and her head had a price in half of the countries in Europe,

and he was dead.

In that time, the world was divided in two,

and the two sides claimed to be right,

and said that if they won, everything would be better,

and everyone would be happier and freer.

And both sides had their assassins.

They had fallen in with the good ones.

The famous "Free World"; the decent half of the world.

They both killed Communists so that people in the old Europe

could keep wearing blue jeans and Mickey Mouse t-shirts,

so that they could keep seeing naked women in the Playboy magazine,

so they could go dancing to discos and chew bubble-gum

and, above all, so that some could become millionaires

selling cigarettes, or tyres, or soap, or screws.

They both killed people for that.

That was, in the end, their free world.

But none of them thought about that, and neither should we,

because this is not the time to discuss politics

but a love story between two assassins.

One of those stories in which two colleagues,

or two friends spend all their time together,

and the whole world thinks they are in love, but them.

That sort of story, but with assassins.

That sort of story where you see the two of them and think:

Sooner or later they will end up together.

Sooner or later, they will realize.

But time goes by, and life goes on, and they act like nothing happened,

and little by little, without noticing,

they start drifting apart,

and it's getting too late, and suddenly they lose it,

and maybe, later in time one of them starts thinking and realizes,

or maybe not even that, and the matter is lost,

inevitably, as if it had never existed,

and the world turns the page, and on to something else.

That, but with assassins.

The first time they worked together was in Bulgaria, in 1975 or 1976.

The 301 was Amanda and he was Angel.

The job was to get rid of a Lebanese banker

who financed some sort of nationalist movement.

The first scene is in an airport,

and there will be many more in airports.

Never big airports, crammed with agents,

with people watching and informing.

Always minor airports, in small cities,

where nobody cares too much about anything.

In one of those provincial airports,

they saw each other for the first time.

She arrived first and went to wait for him.

She had never seen a picture of him, or anything.

"There's no need," they told her.

"He will be wearing a raincoat, you'll recognize him."

They were supposed to be a couple of newlyweds,

and he was an international insurance broker,

or something of the sort.

They spent the whole day all lovey-dovey,

kissing, touring around

until the spies got bored of following them.

They went to see the Black Sea, they went to the history museum,

to the Revolution museum,

visited the antique shops and the old market.

They spent a long while looking at the street musicians

at the Cathedral's entrance

and they took a picture with the gypsy organ player

and his monkey,

who gave him a lucky card and a flower for her.

When the sun set, a horse carriage took them to the hotel

where they had booked their rooms.

The concierge told them the rooms were not ready,

that they could wait downstairs

and that the hotel would gladly take care of their luggage

while they finished cleaning them.

They did as told,

and while the spies searched their suitcases,

they got drunk with cheap champagne in the dining hall,

where they had prepared a warm welcome for them.

They stayed there until passed midnight,

sharing secrets, short poems,

risqué verses and intimate confessions.

When they noticed the spies were more tired than them,

they went upstairs.

I'm wiped...

I want to take a shower.

Are you coming?

No, honey... I'm too tired...

I really needed this.

It will be good for you, love.

I can't believe that this very morning

I was in that filthy office in Istanbul

and that now I'm here with you.

Yes, love... We have a whole long week for ourselves.

Did you check our reservations in Varna?

I asked Pavel to do it.

He told me not to worry.

I don't trust Pavel.

He thinks he does everything right, and he does everything wrong.

But, honey, he said everything was right.

301 played along for several minutes.

When the comedy was about to end, he came back.

They looked at each other.

Everything had gone smoothly.

I'm wiped... I need to lie down...

He threw himself onto the bed and fell asleep on the spot.

She couldn't sleep a wink.

She just lied there, still,

watching him sleep as if nothing had happened.

The following morning, they left the room,

he took her to a little harbor where her contact was waiting,

kissed her on the cheek and disappeared.

From that day on, they always worked together.

Once or twice a year, not more, three times at the most.

In 1978 they killed a communist diplomat in Stockholm.

In 1980, they blew up a car

that drove a couple of ETA guys in the Alps.

In 1981 they strangled another one in Budapest.

That same year, in Kiev, they shot an English man in the head

because he had defected, or was about to defect,

or someone thought was about to defect.

It was always the same number: the happy newlywed couple.

The provincial airport, the cuddling, the hotel room.

301 kept getting her name changed, but he was always "Angel".

None of them clearly remembered how many guys they had killed.

They were a lot, and very different,

but they mixed them up

like the many women in a Don Juan's memory.

They knew each other by heart,

and sometimes one uttered what the other was about to say,

using the same words.

They didn't allow themselves to be affectionate,

and none of them thought there could be something between them.

There simply was no space for that.

It was something confined to that first night.

Those were the rules:

romance during the day, nothing during the night.

She had understood that from the very first moment,

from the first kiss, and even from the first airport.

The man beside her was no Casanova.

He was rather an accountant, a clerical worker.

Land, kiss, kill and go back home.

Once, at the beginning,

she thought, does he find me attractive?

Does he have blood in his veins, this damn droid?"

But right away, she thought "Watch it, girl.

Get that nonsense off your head.

You are not sixteen anymore, and this is a dangerous game.

So, you'd better roll over and start counting sheep.

With time, those questions vanished,

and she often fell asleep before he did.

Actually, they fell asleep together,

like little siblings

or like two old people.

But there was a year, 1980 or '81, when everything changed.

She arrived several days ahead,

and there was no one waiting for her at the airport.

She spent several days by herself, gathering intel.

This was not Eastern Europe either, it was in the tropics,

in an old French colony in the Caribbean.

And when her partner finally arrived,

it was not Angel,

it was Mac the Knife.

Mac the Knife was a star.

He was German or French, from Alsace or Lorraine, who knows.

He was one of the most famous assassins in the world.

Haughty, arrogant, full of himself.

He had an unparalleled reputation.

Extremely expensive.

And he was also a famous heartbreaker

of whom it was said had slept with presidents' wives

and no less than five queens.

He was a legend.

The girls in Personnel pined for him like teenagers.

And were it not classified information,

they would have kept a picture of him on their desks,

as if he were Julio Iglesias.

And now they had assigned him to her.

She was the envy of all the girls.

She had been assigned Mac the Knife.

The script was different too this time.

There were no newlyweds.

They had to kill a man named Bobó,

an African revolutionary who prided himself

on killing more blacks than Mobuto and more Europeans than Amin.

301 was a journalist from France Press.

Bobó had seen her at a party and had wanted to meet her.

They had arranged an interview at the embassy

where Bobó had been granted asylum.

And he was anxiously expecting her, all perfumed up,

wearing his best dress suit.

That night they slept together, and of course Mac the Knife,

offered a performance for the annals of history.

But the following morning,

301 looked at that stupid blond

with whom she had had sex for hours

and found him repulsive.

She thought, "What am I doing here?

I don't want to be here.

I don't want to be by this clown.

I wish the earth would swallow him,

I wish the Russians would kidnap him and take him to the Moscow Circus,

to caper with the acrobats and the dancing bears.

I want to get out of here. I just want to get out of here."

That's what she thought.

But what she didn't think, or didn't dare to think was:

"I don't want to be here. I want to be with him.

I want to be with Angel.

Where are you, you apathetic sissy? Why have you ditched me?

We were supposed to be a duo.

What is this superhero they have sent in your place?

Where are you? I want to see you, partner.

I miss you".

The following time, it was awkward.

When she got to the airport, she was wondering:

"Who's gonna come? Will he come?"

When she saw him, she felt like smiling at him and hugging him

but she didn't.

Everything was different, from the get-go.

They didn't have to pretend being husband and wife.

This time they were colleagues, they didn't sleep together.

So they spent the whole day together, waiting, pretending

to be two decent well-thinking Europeans.

She noticed there was something off about him,

something was happening to him.

He was nervous, made jokes, couldn't look her in the eye.

At one point, she would even have sworn he blushed.

Something, something imperceptible had changed.

"Is it possible that he also...?"

she thought, but stopped herself there,

as if before a door.

The night was almost unbearable. They barely spoke.

She wanted to tell him something, to do something, anything,

but she remained silent once again.

They went to sleep, each to their room,

and once again, she couldn't sleep a wink.

Once again, after all those years.

The next day they did the job.

They had to kill a Palestinian,

some kind of Islamic leader who was now all the rage in Europe

and who the magazines compared to Che Guevara

due to his young, sexy style.

They were now pretending to be journalists.

Journalists working for Life, or Paris Match,

or something of the sort.

During that time they did those things.

Guerrilla leaders liked being on the magazine covers,

with great headlines,

talking and ranting about the Western world.

She watched Angel and thought,

"He's nervous. He's thinking about something else."

But she soon stopped herself.

"Stop it, you silly girl.

If you don't focus, you'll end up floating in the Dead Sea."

One hour later, they killed the guy with a bullet to the head,

and end of the story.

End of the story.

She saw him hide the body,

spray it with some kind of flammable liquid and get back to the jeep.

He then stood there for a while, still,

and finally turned towards her and waved at her.

She waved back at him.

He raised his hand, and though he couldn't see her,

she smiled. She smiled at him.

Then she turned her back on him and started to walk.

She walked for an hour across the desert

until an army helicopter picked her up and took her to a base in Israel.

Then a plane to Istanbul, a week in Istanbul,

and another plane to Paris.

They never saw each other again.

From then on, everything became clearer.

She smelled it from the very beginning.

She waited several months before showing her face.

After all, the business with the sexy Palestinian

had been something very big,

something the newspapers from all over the world had talked about,

and in fact, they kept putting bombs in coffee shops to avenge his death.

So she thought of it as a holiday.

She read magazines, studied English, practiced aerobics.

She went to a museum once.

But when a year later she still hadn't heard from them,

she knew it was all over.

She quite didn't know what to do.

All of a sudden, she was a free woman.

Free and unemployed.

What does an international assassin do when she is out of work?

Most surely, she doesn't do anything. Where does she begin?

Even so, little by little, she rearranged her life.

She had quite a lot of money, she could do whatever she wanted.

She could buy a house in Portugal, or in Greece, or in the Dolomites,

or a sail boat, or an Alfa Romeo sports car,

or travel to Nepal and wash away her sins in a Lama monastery.

But she didn't do any of that.

She didn't do anything at all.

She just stayed home, waiting for something.

Until one day something happened.

One day, the phone rang. A phone nobody had.

Not even the people from her previous job,

not even the Personnel girls.

A voice, maybe a man, maybe a woman, said some words to her.

Those words meant a place and a time in the outskirts of the city.

And when she got there, she received another call,

and then they gave her another place and another date.

There is a children's game that consists in exactly this,

you all must surely know it.

It's called treasure hunt.

Well, she kept playing treasure hunt for several days,

going from one place to another, from one phone to another,

following the indications like a fool.

Until the hunt came to an end.

The last place was too romantic,

of a romanticism that was almost tacky.

The ideal place for a date in a 19th century novel.

She thought it was a joke he was playing on her, and laughed a bit,

but then she stopped laughing because she found a letter.

It was a letter from him, handwritten,

and at that moment, she, who had killed dozens of people,

who had strangled people, who had stabbed people in cold blood,

who had poisoned people,

who had shot people in the head at point blank range,

felt a knot in her stomach and thought that she was scared

and that she could not read it and that she could not go on.

The letter was addressed to her, had her name, her real name,

that name she hadn't heard since school

and that nobody in her previous job knew,

least of all him.

And what followed was a love letter.

That is, it didn't say things

like "I love you", or "I've always loved you, I'll always love you"

or "I now see you were the love of my life",

or anything of the sort.

Nothing like that, but the person who had written the letter

had thought about her like nobody else,

and had watched her like nobody else,

and knew her like nobody else had known her until that moment.

In that letter was her.

Not like an adventuress, or a heroine,

nor driving across the desert with a turban wrapping her hair,

nor jumping from a moving train,

nor letting bullets whistle above her head impassively,

nor hanging from a rope over a precipice, nor skydiving,

nor walking across a marsh, soiled with sweat and mud.

She was there getting dressed with her back modestly turned to him,

in hundreds of different hotels,

all identical, all equally sad.

Getting dressed with her back turned to him, or wearing pajamas,

or freshly bathed.

And she was there in airports, waiting for him,

in hundreds of airports strewn across the world.

Waiting for him, standing, lonely, nailed there like a little girl.

She was there having fun, cracking jokes,

funny jokes she didn't remember having said,

or being moved by something,

by a dawn in the mountains, or over the ocean,

being moved without telling him anything,

or stroking a dog, and a lot of things she did without noticing,

things a woman who looked like her did, a woman who apparently was her.

And in that letter was him, too.

Him beside her, always watching her,

silently watching, watching her walk and watching her sleep

and watching her talk.

And he was there without her too, thinking about her,

remembering her in the endless months they didn't see each other,

speeding in some car,

or swimming in the sea, or visiting a distant country

to see if he could get a little bit of her back,

to see if that whole wide and fascinating world

could give her back a little,

and if something of her turned up in one of those places.

And she read the whole letter, and read it again,

and thought about destroying it, but in the end she kept it,

and spent a whole week without talking to anyone,

and she felt like crying, and in the end, she cried.

He was always there, she thought.

Much more than me. Much more than anyone.

And only three weeks later, or a month,

she realized the letter was a farewell,

or rather, a testament, or rather, a warning.

That he was saying goodbye and he was also saying "Watch out!"

That the people from the previous job knew everything,

knew that letter by heart even before he wrote it.

That like that, they were both useless to them.

That he was going to get killed, or had already been killed,

and that she would get killed as well.

Always by my side, partner, she thought.

Always with me.

She thought she would have liked to kiss him, at least once.

She made a couple of phone calls, she got a Swiss passport,

or Swedish, and disappeared.

Good morning. My name is Casterman.

And you are...?

Don't worry... There's no need. I apologize.

Casterman had a hard time finding her.

When she finally turned up, they talked for a long while.

They talked business, made small talk, until they reached an agreement.

After a while she had the nerve to ask.

What about him? She asked, almost with fear.

How is he?

Casterman, though cold-blooded and short-tempered,

didn't know what to answer.

Finally, he looked at her with all the tenderness he was capable of.

"Don't worry about him", he told her. "He is very good".

IN SOUTH AMERICA

TO KILL THEM

THEY COME TO KILL THEM

SOME MINUTES BEFORE THEY COME TO KILL THEM

This is our radio station giving you the time...

It's 6:00 AM.

Pressure: 1120 millibars.

Humidity: 50%.

Come on... Up...

Turn off the radio.

Do you know what it says there?

In that light?

In that lamp.

Do you know what it says?

"The night sun".

Isn't that funny?

"The night Sun".

It reminds me of something and I don't know what...

To the "iron horse".

And what's that?

The car?

The train...

And the submarine?

The iron fish...

And the plane,

the iron bird...

That's enough.

And the iron arrow?

The SA 18!

And the bomb?

Do you know what the bomb would be?

I said it's enough...

Then there's the "Iron lady".

And the "Iron Curtain"

The plane? Already?

Shut up!

It's not the plane. There's something else.

Stay here.

THE MOLE

First, there's the land.

That before anything else: the white, infinite plains,

semi-deserted miles and miles, spreading like a sea or like a galaxy,

boundless, hopeless, like an abyss.

Miles and miles where there's nothing, or nearly:

where there are no men, or nearly.

Sometimes, in the distance, some light, some house,

some chemical plant,

some barn, some windmill.

Even worse, even lonelier.

And that goes on for hundreds of thousands of miles,

for almost one third of the world.

Before anything else: that sad and filthy expanse of land.

The sad and filthy factories in Moscow,

the sad and filthy farms in Ukraine,

the sad and filthy Urals.

Sad and filthy are the Volga lowlands and the lonely Caspian, and the Altai,

appearing in the distance as if they were towers.

And then, like an infinite cry, Siberia,

distant like a wolf's howl,

distant even if you are there, distant and lonely,

like those scary hermits who live in caves.

Siberia, spreading out like a disease across the whole continent,

through miles and miles, through a third of the world,

spreading so much that there are mountains in the south

and frozen seas in the north,

and you think that they are there to stop it,

to curb so much filth and sadness.

Siberia, white as the ghosts are white,

white as the paper on which a will is written,

or a death sentence; white as a blind man's eyes;

white as a dead man's skin;

white as a skeleton abandoned for centuries;

white as the snow that falls

and kills what little is left of spring;

white as a wedding dress forgotten inside a closet;

white as the marble in a pagan temple nobody will ever return to;

white as the glass of milk

someone uses to poison a beautiful woman;

white as the gravestone of a powerful and unfair man;

white as the moon reflected on the eyes of a wolf

that howls with hunger and despair and sadness.

Before anything else, that. In one corner of the ring, that.

Then there's her. In the other corner of the ring.

She was Agent 50.

That meant she was one of the fifteen most important people

in the Party's Intelligence;

one of the thirty most powerful spies in the world.

Her life actually resembled that of a regular clerk.

She had her office, stark and grey, on the fifth floor of the "Centre",

which was the name they gave in Moscow

to the organization that gathered snitches,

spies and assassins.

Except for one or two weeks every year,

her life was always the same.

She would arrive, sit at her desk,

her secretary would bring her tea and the first reports.

Excuse me, comrade... – You may come in...

Well, let's see what's we got today...

Here.

Here.

Sixth floor.

Here.

Stockholm.

Stockholm.

She read. "Agent 741, destination Angola Embassy,

reports bank transactions."

She ordered: "To the 4th floor."

She read: "Agent 112, in Bern,

reports having gathered important information

and requests safe communication channel."

She decided: "Second floor."

That was all.

Four-hundred and fifty men lived under her control,

hidden, scattered across the world,

living under fake names and telling lies,

not knowing their luck was decided on that desk in Moscow.

That was the game.

They called it Nets and the fun was

that nobody knew very well what they were doing.

Each one did a part. Poisoned someone,

took a picture, took a package, stole some documents.

But nobody ever wholly understood

what each of those single acts was for.

A hundred years earlier, Karl Marx had talked

about that and had said all that was very wrong.

It doesn't matter. Karl Marx could be Karl Marx,

but he knew nothing about espionage.

Espionage, or following orders,

or doing as told without asking questions.

In contrast, her army of robots was understood that very clearly.

Someone gave the orders.

She gave the orders.

If she made a mistake, if she said "Third floor"

instead of "Fifth floor", hey were dead.

"There's your Cold War there," thought Casterman.

"A war fought by bureaucrats, receptionists,

file clerks, translators.

A war fought by writers.

That's where everything's decided.

That's where it's decided if someone wins or loses".

She knew it well.

She knew that was her war

and that she was a soldier in that war.

She had military training, she had Colonel rank,

she had been in the field in Afghanistan and Lapland:

fuck all that.

It wasn't a boy scouts war they were fighting.

Her place was that desk, that secretary,

that routine: Fourth floor, third floor.

She was a guard, a sentinel: her battlefield was the whole world

and she just had to ensure that nothing went off-course;

that everything was fine.

"Let others jump with parachutes or steal microfilms.

I, from this little room, will put up a fight."

Comrade,

I think you should see this.

Until one day everything went rotten.

A lot are arriving. – A lot, really...

She arrived, as always,

the secretary brought her everything, as always,

but instead of the routine reports,

she read something else.

What she read, what she saw was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

being humiliated,

turned into the laughingstock of all the spies in the world;

she saw, in a matter of seconds,

how the whole counter-espionage strategy sunk,

shattered, spinning down the Western world toilet,

amidst hideous and triumphant laughs.

In less than an hour, forty reports came in,

all confidential, all very serious.

Murdered agents, spoiled networks, aborted missions, missing documents.

What had happened?

How come the voodoo curse was sticking its pins all at once,

in one single blow?

It was a disaster, a masterstroke:

those weren't the lesser agents speaking.

It was the elite, the cream of the crop in the Service,

scared like little children.

The moles from Washington, Paris, London, United Nations,

Geneva were writing.

They were no longer the usual laconic reports;

they were requests for help,

desperate cries in the middle of a collapse.

The collapse:

that's how that day was called in the annals of the Moscow centre.

The day of the collapse, the day everything went to hell,

the day the party was over for us; the day we lost the war.

Those were the days of the Minsk Protocol.

That was the order that suddenly began to appear in every embassy,

in every Russian House of Culture,

in every Franco-soviet or German-soviet

or British-soviet cooperation office.

And in every other spy nest all over the world.

Minsk Protocol. And that meant it was over.

Disappear. Don't leave any trace. Set everything on fire.

Leave everything you are doing.

Nothing matters anymore. We are all dead.

What do I do?

What do I do? What floor do I send them to?

Comrade. May I leave?

The following scene takes place a month,

month and a half after the Collapse.

The place: the office of Admiral Ratnikov,

the major authority in counter-intelligence

within the Supreme Soviet.

Agent 50 is waiting.

She knows the Collapse has caused the major crisis

within the highest echelons in the party

since the cotton business in the mid seventies.

She knows many have gone to the other side,

and that this meeting might be her death sentence.

Ratnikov has not arrived yet, he keeps her waiting.

Only his Admiral cap and coat can be seen on a nearby armchair.

The office looks fancy,

different to all the offices in the regime,

no picture of Lenin, no picture of Gagarin,

no picture of Molotov, no picture of Breznev,

and on the desk there are no French pens, or Swiss watches,

or English tobacco.

Just some bust of some Russian naval hero: Makarov, or some other one.

And a picture of Ratnikov himself,

in sailor clothes as if he were a crewman

in the Potemkin Battleship.

That's all; that and that immense Neptune behind,

as if saying: the owner of this desk is a sea man, a man of action,

someone who knows danger and who has seen death in the eye.

He is not a shitty clerk like you, be careful.

Agent 50 knows it.

Agent 50 is more impatient than scared, but she is a bit scared.

Finally, Ratnikov appears.

At first, he is kind.

He calls her by her name, which he mysteriously knows.

He asks her not to call him Admiral, or Comrade

but to call him by his name.

"Call me Raiko," he tells her.

Ratnikov is Estonian; he is one of the first Estonians

to reach an important position in the Presidium,

and he seems to want to show that he is a simple guy,

that he still is a friendly, good-natured man from the Baltic,

that Moscow hasn't changed him.

They make small talk for a while, about his family,

his sail boat outings with his family.

He is torturing me, she thinks.

He knows he is going to kill me and talks to me about the sail boat.

Sadistic dwarf.

After a while, nonchalantly, he broaches the subject.

"Well," he tells her,

"you know this matter has given us quite a few headaches."

Agent 50 is shivering inside.

Well... You know this matter has given us quite a few headaches...

In the Navy, we have an expression, you know?

"Start the day with clams on the keel." Do you get it?

Well, it's a bit confusing to explain,

but let me assure it guarantees quite a headache,

a day of the most annoying job you could ever imagine.

Well, I think that from that day onwards, every morning

we start the day with clams on the keel.

Well... We also have another saying in the Navy.

"Too many feathers for the poor albatross."

Do you understand?

Too many feathers, comrade,

so that sooner or later something like this wouldn't happen.

We have nearly a thousand men out there, in the field.

We cannot know them all, right?

We cannot know for sure if one of them is lying to us from the very beginning.

There are too many evil minds at work at the same time.

"Too many feathers for the poor albatross!"

It is only then that Agent 50 discovers

where the other one is going. Ratnikov, sly as a fox, notices it.

I can see you understand me.

Well, yes...

Everything seems to indicate that some wolf has slipped into our flock.

That he has been among us and that he has finally bitten us,

while we were sleeping.

At some point you need to sleep.

We all need to sleep at some point. Isn't that right, Colonel?

Two hours later,

Agent 50 stepped out into the street, to the cold fall weather.

She had gone in around noon and it was already getting dark.

Nights were getting longer,

and a couple of days before it had already started to snow.

But her thoughts were not in the snow, or in the cold, or in the nights.

She just thought about one thing. One word. One name. Boris.

Tell me something, Colonel.

Does the name Podgorov mean anything to you?

Andrei Stepanovich Podgorov?

Boris, maybe?

Of course, it's such a common name, right?

Very well... Let me see... Andrei Stepanovich Podgorov.

Captain of the tenth Airborne Corps.

Graduated in military intelligence at the Grozny training centre

in '81 and my, oh my!

Recruited for active service at the Centre, in Minsk,

on March 2nd, 1982. By yourself, Colonel.

Assigned name: Boris.

We cannot remember them all, can we?

So that was it. Some Boris fellow,

someone nobody had ever seemed to notice,

had crept into the Centre like a ghost,

like a silent reptile and nobody suspected of him.

He had been there, invisible, for three years,

accessing all the information right in front of their noses,

quiet, sleeping, waiting.

Boris!

She had not seen him more than once, of which time she remembered nothing.

A tall, blond fellow, Ratnikov had told her.

You talked for some half an hour at a train station.

That was all.

It's all very clear here, this is your signature Colonel.

"That was all," she thought. "There were hundreds like him;

hundreds of tall blond fellows at train stations."

In those days, her life consisted of meetings with guys

at stations, so that they became spies.

Which one of them all was Boris?

Which one of all those blonds was the one

who had stuck a dagger in the back of the Cause of the People?

"That, Colonel, is for you to find out" Ratnikov had said.

"Yes, Colonel. We want you to find him."

But... Admiral...

We want you to find Boris.

It would be good for us to ask him some questions.

You have seen him.

Nobody else but you appears to have seen him.

We have been looking for him for a month, and nothing.

I'm sorry, Colonel.

We don't have many options.

Do we have any kind of...?

Yes.

We are certain he has not left. He is still here.

Here in Moscow?

Here in Russia.

Then the fantastic part of this story begins.

She, who until then was a bureaucrat, has been ordered to find a man,

hidden in some corner of an infinite territory.

She walks a few feet in the afternoon that is already turning into evening.

Where do I begin? She asks herself. This way? That way?

And she knows that, wherever she looks,

she has 8 million miles ahead;

more than three hundred million people.

Only one of them is Boris.

At first, the thing still makes sense.

She is still an agent in a secret mission.

She does things in an orderly and logic fashion.

She produces a list of people, of contacts,

and decides to interview them one by one.

For months, she travels from one place to another,

from Leningrad to Vladivostok,

from the dirty piers in Odessa to the ports in the north.

She is a detective.

Someone going from house to house

finding out, sniffing around, asking questions.

She works restlessly, not missing a day.

But a few months later her list of suspects is over,

and she still has nothing.

Nobody has seen Boris.

Nobody knows who he is or has heard of him.

She moves on.

She prepares another list and continues travelling.

She travels to farther places each time.

She travels to the Caucasus, to Baku,

she visits the lost towns in Ossetia and Bessarabia.

She travels through mountains, windy and rocky roads,

almost medieval villages

the Revolution does not seem to have reached.

And Boris is nowhere to be found.

When she runs out of names, she makes a new list,

with even more unlikely people, even more faraway.

Deep down, she knows that those names are becoming less important,

and that what really matters is to keep looking.

After eight or nine months of search, she starts with the trains.

Agent 50, the girl who, years later,

would become Agent 50 had learned at school

that the network of railway lines in the Soviet Union was so vast

that if you placed one track after the other,

you could circle the earth five times.

The truth is that when she has no more cities to check,

Agent 50 starts to look for the mole on trains,

and little by little, rains become her life.

Maybe she thinks:

"If the only time I saw him was at a train station,

perhaps that's where I will find him."

But maybe she doesn't think that,

and she just gets on the first train on a hunch,

or because someone tells her something,

or just because. Just because,

and she doesn't suspect that that railway landscape

will quickly become her life.

And the first year goes by,

and then another one, and another one, and her manhunt

becomes more and more unreal.

The mole is somewhere;

he's still there, and she knows it,

and chasing him up

across the endless steppes is all she has left,

as if nothing from before had ever existed.

Nothing from before: just the Soviet landscape

stretching out endlessly across the train window.

The snow, the frozen rivers,

the little wooden houses as in Bruegel the Elder's paintings.

The housing complexes sleeping motionless

as if they were mean hibernating bears who shouldn't be bothered.

The stations at night, empty,

spots you only see for a couple of seconds,

between waking up and falling back asleep,

and which get mixed with dreams.

And the factories, the chimneys, and the nuclear power plants,

and the smoke, always in the distance, like a ghost.

What are those years like?

What does she think about all that time?

Sometimes she thinks of Boris.

She thinks "Does he know I'm looking for him?

Does he know there is nothing else but him in my life,

and this succession of fields and desserts

and trees bare like splinters?"

In time, those train cars,

that cabin and that window become her house.

They become her refuge.

As if the whole train was a provincial hotel,

and she was there hiding, waiting,

looking through the window, safe from everything.

Until one day, the train stops at a random station and, distracted,

she will look through the window expecting the usual landscape:

the snow-covered platforms, the conductors,

the passengers about to get on.

What she ignores is that one of those waiting for the train is Boris,

and that when she sees him, she will recognize him

as if she had seen him a week ago.

The scene takes place in a lonely station,

which name we ignore and which barely matters

and which not even Agent 50,

if she's still alive, must remember.

The only thing that matters is that at that station,

the Mole is waiting for her.

At first, she does nothing.

She sits still for miles and miles, unable to move.

At some point, Boris stands up,

opens the door to her cabin, looks at her in the eye

and sits in front of her.

Adelante.

Boris' look is not threatening.

It's rather kind, as if they were old friends,

or old lovers who meet again after a very long time.

How are you, Nastasja Alexandrovna? he says.

"You have been looking for me all this time, isn't that right?

Well, here I am. Here you have me."

I'm the one you're looking for. You hate me? I don't think so.

I don't think you have any feelings towards me anymore.

But let me tell you something just in case.

You don't need to hate me.

You don't need that, Natalia.

D'you know why?

'Cause we you're just like me.

You're no different.

We don't exist anymore.

Neither of us.

We don't exist anymore.

And there's something else:

none of this exists any longer.

Neither the Cold War nor the reason you fight for

or the nation you've given your life to.

Everything will disappear, Natalia.

I'll disappear so soon you won't believe it.

They have won.

Soon after you can notice it,

their posters and noises will be all over the world.

Everybody will dance their songs and eat their food.

D'you know what?

They'll be happy.

They won't feel pain, humiliation or sorrow.

They won't miss us, Natalia.

They'll forget about us.

And not in one hundred years, or fifty, or ten...

but tomorrow.

We'll be disappeared by tomorrow.

Nobody will remember

we fight them over the world during one century.

Peasants and laborers fought bravely against them during one century

with their own weapons.

With their own weapons.

During one century, the flag that waved in half the world

wasn't neither an imperial house nor an eagle nor some swords

but a sickle and a hammer...

from the factories and farm fields.

We could have won, Natalia.

We're close.

But we lost.

And nobody will think about us anymore.

Get off the train.

Your trip is pointless.

Game's over.

Soon after, a month or even less,

Agent 50 leaves the Soviet Union and never comes back.

Somewhere in the world, at some point

that is now pointless to say, Casterman appears.

In South America

At the precise moment

They come to kill them

Schneider.

Casterman, my man is in position. He's coming in in a couple of seconds.

You are the customer, Schneider. The customer is always right.

Your women are not there, are they?

No.

Are we sure about that, Casterman?

There's something worrying me, Casterman.

Something in your group of women worries me.

There is one of them. One of them, Casterman.

She is a little mystery, isn't that so?

I don't know what you're talking about, Schneider.

Well, there aren't many options, are there, my friend?

The Polish girl and the girl from the Tropic we know quite well.

And our poor Bárbara... Well, we will miss her here.

I am really sorry, Schneider.

I don't mean them, Casterman.

I mean the other one,

the Blonde.

Fox.

Fox.

Fox, yes...

Well, she's new in this business, right, Casterman?

Well... She has done other jobs.

Not like this one, Casterman.

Not killing other agents. Not doing the dirty work.

She has been involved in difficult operations.

What you call "dirty work"

Not as dirty as this, Casterman.

Maybe not as much...

What do we know about her, Casterman?

She was born in a military base, in Pakistan, in the sixties.

Her father was an F-15 pilot.

Her mother, a Muslim, converted to Christianity.

She was raised in the base.

She piloted her first Bell at the age of 12.

At age 13 she was trained in Afghanistan to pilot the enemy MIGs.

She was the first woman ever to pilot an MIG, and the youngest.

Among soviet pilots, she was some sort of a myth, a girl that...!

And what about '75?

What about '75?

February 10, 1975.

The Chinook incident, Casterman.

What about it?

It was her, right?

It's unknown.

It was her, Casterman. She disobeyed the orders.

She fired against her own men.

It was never proved it was her.

What is she doing there, Casterman? Why her?

She is a good pilot. We needed someone who could fly.

We needed...

This is insane, Casterman.

There wasn't much time. We needed to find a pilot.

It was a mistake, Casterman.

A mistake.

I am really sorry.

In any case, they are not there, are they?

They will not interfere.

No.

Nobody will interfere with my man's job, right?

No.

Not them, not anyone.

Not them, not anyone.

I hope so, Casterman.

I hope so.

There's that idiot.

He will ruin it all.

He doesn't know who he's messing with.

What do we do?

Leave him.

Let the other women take care of him.

I'd say it even works to our favor.

Very well. This is what we'll do.

Listen to me carefully.

Schneider's man will strike any time now.

That's when we split in two.

Lena and I will go through the front.

When they have finished with Schneider's man, we open fire.

They won't see it coming. Is it clear, Lena?

It's clear, Ma'am...

Meanwhile, Bethania and Fox will circle the airfield from the back.

Bethania will take care of the scientist.

Fox will finish them off from behind.

They won't see it coming, I assure you.

Is it clear?

Crystal clear.

Fox?

What's wrong, Fox? Have you understood the plan or not?

I will not do it, Ma'am?

What the hell are you talking about, Fox?

I will not do it. I will not kill those women from behind.

What the hell is wrong with you, Fox? Are you crazy?

No, Ma'am. I'm not crazy. Those women are brave.

And Fox does not consent to the crime of murdering

four brave ones that way.