Goma, Hotel Karibu Bay, night between the third and fourth of May, two ten in the morning. Landing of the Beechcraft with lights off on the private runway of Goma International, operated that week by Heritage East, registered in the Emirates. Eight men get off. He is the fourth. His name, on the receipt he will sign twenty minutes from now, is Andres Pacheco Restrepo. Thirty-four years old. Former sergeant in the Colombian army, discharged in 2019, two tours in Yemen as a contractor for a Dubai firm with legal headquarters in Cyprus, six months in Kabul, four in Khartoum. Landing in Goma for the first time in his life.

The handler is a South African with grey hair and a set to his mouth that comes from speaking Portuguese in Maputo. His name is Rian. He never asks to be called Rian. Andres will call him Rian because he hears the others do it.

Room at the entrance of the Karibu Bay, two halogen lamps, a table of varnished open-grain wood, a metal box the size of a microwave, already half full of passports. The handler calls them one by one. Pacheco. Lozano. Restrepo. Vargas. Four Colombians. Then the three Peruvians and the Venezuelan. Pacheco is the fourth to be called, the first to step up to the table.

He approaches. Rucksack on his right shoulder, passport in the inner pocket of his jacket, an unused Sudanese visa on page seventeen, a Yemeni visa on fourteen, an Afghan entry stamp on six. The handler opens the passport. He stops at fourteen. He does not comment. Pacheco notices.

"Which province of Colombia, Pacheco?"

"Antioquia."

That is not true. Andres Pacheco Restrepo was born in Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca, Pacific coast, a city in which in no year of any decade has any recruitment agency met a volunteer without first asking itself who he is running from. Antioquia is the answer he always gives, because Antioquia is the answer the handler wants to hear. Antioquia is Medellín, Antioquia is the province with the highest number of former military in private recruitment post-2002, Antioquia is the narrative filter.

The handler writes "Antioquia" on the A4 sheet in front of him. Andres watches him write it. The handler's pen is a fountain pen with a black nib, and it makes a very small dry sound with each letter. Andres counts seven letters, counts the dot of the i, counts the sound when the nib leaves the paper.

Now, the gesture.

Andres holds out the passport. He holds it out back-first, not palm-first. A minimal variation, a turn of the wrist, nothing a border officer would notice, but the handler is not a border officer, and he raises his eyes. For one second. Pacheco does not pull back. He leaves his hand there, back exposed, and the handler takes the passport from his fingers with his own right hand, and Pacheco feels his hand go empty.

In the moment his hand goes empty, he understands.

He understands that every time he handed over his passport in another country he had already been someone else. In Sana'a he had been Pacheco-not-Colombian. In Kabul he had been Pacheco-veteran. In Khartoum he had been Pacheco-good-soldier. Each country a small administrative death, each stamp a trace of someone he was no longer by the time the page was stamped. This time he knows it as it happens. Goma will be page eighteen. Pacheco-Antioquia. Another Pacheco.

He thinks of Buenaventura. The first thing that comes to him is the rain of March, that kind of rain that arrives in three minutes and empties the streets of the barrio Independencia, where his mother still works at sixty-two in a hair salon and where his younger brother, Andrés like him but called Mauricio in the family to avoid confusion, died at fourteen in 2010 in a gang fight. He thinks that his mother, if she called him now, would know he was in Africa from the country code, and would tell him as she does every time cuídate. He thinks that cuídate, when it comes down to it, is the word you say to someone who is already handing over the passport.

The handler puts the passport in the box.

Pacheco signs a receipt. Black Bic pen, pre-printed Heritage East form, amount to be settled at the end of the mission. Four thousand dollars. Bank transfer to a Bogotá account by the fifteenth of the following month. Below the signature line, a clause in English in six-point type: "the undersigned declares that he is providing services as a technical consultant in a special operations zone," a formula he has already read ten times and signed ten times without translating.

He leaves the room.

On the tarmac of the courtyard, the runway lights are off, the hotel lamps are on. Half yellow light, half blue light. The air is warm with the lake. The lake is there, behind the perimeter wall, felt more than seen. Pacheco makes the sign of the cross. Thumb on his forehead, thumb on his chest, on his left shoulder, on his right. He does it every time he lands, he does it every time he hands things over.

He lights a cigarette.

He thinks that Antioquia, he has never been there.