Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

They had been heady times. Comrade Gorbachev had recently become Party secretary, his approach to leadership bringing a new self respect and confidence to the body politic. Darya was a Party member and her entry into the junior ranks of the KGB had been straightforward. By the autumn of 1989 she was twenty-six years old, a rising star in the field of human intelligence and with a degree of expertise in signals intelligence as well. The world was loosening up, the West was encouraging more dialogue with the socialist nations. Socialism had a foot in the door.

The next six months sent her reeling. Left her wandering in a void. One by one, Moscow’s allies capitulated, dropping all pretence of idealism and morality and damned guts . By the spring of 1990 the only holdouts were basket-case countries like Albania.

She stayed on. She was kept on, which was a sort of validation, she supposed. The KGB became the FSK, then split into the FSB, concerned with domestic security, and the SVR, the foreign s wthe foroperations agency. Boris Yeltsin’s star waxed and waned. Darya Krupina did her job faithfully, switching her attention to the nouveau riche gangster scum of Moscow and St Petersburg (the name sounded so wrong to her, compared with Leningrad) and gathering enough evidence on some of them to have the bloodsucking ghouls put away for life.

At the end of the decade Yeltsin stood down. The new president changed everything. It wasn’t quite like the Gorbachev days. The sense of purpose was less well defined. And she was thirty-seven, not twenty-two. Ageing leached zest from one’s life, there was no avoiding it.

Still, there was much to be celebrated about the new direction. Mother Russia was no longer ruled by a buffoon. She had oil, and gas. Lots of gas. The West, Europe especially, was nervous. Not scared pantsless, but on edge.

Krupina’s father had died at the age of eighty seven, six years earlier. On the mattress under the summer heat in the Petersburg apartment, he’d pulled his only daughter’s lank greying head close and whispered, ‘Look, Dascha.’ And he’d yanked up his pyjama legs and pointed at the fishbelly-pallid scars of his leg stumps and hissed: ‘The scars of a life lived well. If you can do this for your country, you can die having lived.’

He’d punctuated the melodrama with a cackle which, over the years, Darya Krupina had analysed for traces of bitterness. She’d concluded that there were none, that Yaroslav Petrovich Krupin had been genuinely proud to concede his legs for the glory of Russia.

And what had she done, Darya Yaroslavovna Krupina? Apart from graduating like a supernova in 1985, more than a quarter century ago, in another world? After eight years’ service in the FSB, she’d been transferred to the overseas arena, under the SVR. She’d carried out one major job in Western Europe. For her own protection, she was told, she’d subsequently been farmed out to the SVR’s clandestine — unofficial, illegal, non-embassy — desk, in Prague, the capital of a country that had once been one of Soviet Russia’s most robust allies but was now a member of the enemy alliance. She was, oh joy of joys, the head of that desk. There was no Embassy support. The Embassy FSB and SVR staff despised her, tried to pretend she and her people didn’t exist. She was left with the crappy jobs, the nasty ones, the operations that the Kremlin could deny if they went wrong.

But she had her little crew. She had her boys, Gleb and Arkady, and young Yevgenia, and Lev and Oleg, the two older stalwarts whom she couldn’t exactly call boys but for whom she felt great affection nonetheless. She had an office of her own, and cigarettes. If purpose was missing from her life, had she any right to complain?

But purpose had just landed on her lap.

*

She fingered the letter, probing the expensive paper as though it were supple leather whose texture was to be savoured. She reread the words.

TALPA. The Mole. The British mole, the one they’d never been able to find. Deep in the heart of the Kremlin. In its afflin. Insoul. So deep that its influence had directed the course of history in the last twenty years.

The Kremlin’s priority target.

And somebody here in Prague knew who it was.

Krupina looked across at the ikon nailed to the wall. She was an unbeliever but her mother had been devout, discreetly so until her death in 1978 when she’d pressed the tacky crucifix into the teenage Darya’s palm and rasped: ‘Rebirth.’

Krupina lit a fresh cigarette and bounced a stream of smoke off the grey, grimy window. Forty nine years old, and deathbed life lessons from her parents all of a sudden meant something.

She picked up her mobile phone, took a moment to work out the buttons.

He answered on the second ring. ‘Tamarkin.’

‘Get in here.’

‘I’m out buying your sandwich — ’

‘Just get back in here, for Christ’s sake.’

*

Bartos Blazek’s nieces called him Uncle K without knowing why. Certain family members, and people of his inner circle who weren’t blood, called him the Kodiak. It was his size, of course, but also his beariness . He liked the idea. Hugeness, strength, cuddliness and power, combined. And, yes, he was hairy. Not so much on his head, any more. But his arms, his chest and back and legs, were pelted. He was proud.

Magda had, as usual, organised matters with the skill of the born hostess. The twins squealed and squirmed between the legs of tables and adult guests, dirtying their party clothes within minutes. The handful of school friends giggled, their initial shyness loosening. Their parents either remained frozen to the walls in awe or mingled, chattering too blatantly. Nobody approached Bartos apart from Magda, who squeezed close to him after the drinks had started flowing, rubbing her hip against his. He smiled down at her — she was tall, at five ten, but half a foot shorter than him — and planted a kiss on the side of her mouth.

‘Excellent.’

He doubled over as Karel, the elder of the twins by ten minutes, barrelled headfirst into his gut. Helena dashed to join in, and held her hands up to her father’s face, trying to get the fingers right.

‘No, that’s nine. Yes — eight’s right. Eight years old.’

Bartos knuckled his son’s head and ruffled his daughter’s. He squatted and squeezed each of the twins’ faces against one of his stubbled cheeks. They shrieked and recoiled.

Over their black heads he gazed at his firstborn son, Janos, leaning against the wall across the room. Dressed in one of his trademark skinny Italian suits, he was laughing from the side of his mouth at some inanity his cuintanity hrrent girlfriend was spewing into his right ear. In his left hand he clasped a balloon of brandy. Bartos thought he could see white grains on the boy’s left nostril.

His eyes were angled across the room, raised halfway.

Bartos turned his head, following Janos’s sightline.

Janos was staring at Magda’s breasts.

Bartos looked back at Janos and at the same instant Janos shifted his gaze to Bartos crouching at his children. For a second Janos’s eyes flickered with primitive embarrassment. With guilt. Then, a flicker of fear kindled into a blaze.

He raised his glass in Bartos’s direction and bared his teeth in what Bartos had heard the Americans call a shit-eating grin .

Bartos watched him. Didn’t smile.

Someone was tapping at his shoulder and he brushed at it. Magda’s voice roused him and he turned his head. She handed him the phone.

He listened.

‘On my way,’ he said.

Bartos clasped his twins close, stood and murmured in his wife’s ear, felt her nod as he pulled her to him and kissed her hair. Then he left, not looking back. He felt Janos’s terror cast after him like a fishing net.