Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Timofey’s car was parked in a side street. He drove an under-powered Fiat 500, long past the date when it had any value other than for scrap. The car was good for Timofey and Natacha, painted a dull grey, hardly noticed, and would take him now to the gates of the gaol because this was the day she would be freed. He had not been to the trial and had not visited her in gaol. Would have been too easy for the bastards if he had done, would have identified himself. She would not have expected him to come, and he would be round a corner and beyond the cameras and she would exit though a small door in a big gate and would walk away and might just spit in the gutter and would go round that corner and the engine would be running, the passenger door open. She would slide in, would lift his hand and lay it between her legs, and he’d rev the engine and they’d be gone. He had missed her, had missed her bad.

He answered the phone, and heard heavy, gasped breathing. Timofey’s father was a drunk, a certified alcoholic. Most of his cronies in the block were drunk most days from cheap vodka. It sounded like his father was having a panic attack or was afraid or merely drunk.

“Yes…?”

A silence broken only by incoherent grunting.

“What is it? Are you too pissed to say? Why did you ring?”

He was answered. One word. Foreign, awkward on his father’s slurred tongue, and the obvious fear made its sound more indistinct. “ Matchless .”

“Say that again.”

“ Matchless .”

In Timofey’s language, honed in a tower block close to the church of the Saviour on Waters, that word was a clusterfuck moment.

It was the first time that Knacker had done it, woken a sleeper.

It had taken a committee meeting in emergency session. He had spoken to them with his mobile on ‘secure’, and Alice had given a presentation, and Fee had contributed with sharply constructed personality pictures of those involved. The matter had been tossed briefly in the air… the date and circumstances of the recruitment of a family in the then Soviet military port of Murmansk: their lack of use in half a century; the cost of maintaining their payment structure; and the risk that what had once been a sound signing might now be long past its date, the equivalent of a kettle made useless by aging limescale… The committee’s vote had been four to two in favour of Knacker’s request. The family in Murmansk were, in present-day terms, a ‘waste of space’, contributed nothing, and should receive a sharp tap on the ankle, that would jolt them from slumber. One member of the committee had said, ‘Wake a sleeper, and he belches, goes for a shit, looks in the mirror, and either runs a mile or is the individual you always wanted on board. One of the two, but you have to wake him to find out.’ They would need to send an agent to administer the kick. Alice had said that such an individual had been identified to do the donkey leg, and Fee had said that Knacker was on his case, should have it wrapped in the morning. They were working hard on the logistics, travel schedules, and pulling in increments. A parting shot: “This is all worthwhile, the effort of it and the sleeper woken?”

From Fee, who had worked a dozen years for Knacker: “If it works then we will pocket a grateful ally, small scale but well positioned, and because those people have long memories, the friendship and gratitude would linger over generations. In a heartland of Syria we would have assets and we would have a take on the movement of Assad forces and Russians and Iranians and Hezbollah… If it does not work out, then we will have lost next to nothing, might just have burned the sleepers. We should go with it.”

From Alice, who had been in the Yard with Knacker for fifteen years: “We send a man, known to us, and he links with the sleeper and is ferried round and gets a decent eyeball on the target. Then all he has to do is clarify the identification and give his location, and we get him clear. We have a good candidate for the role. A follow-up team moves in, does the necessary. Not connected to us. Decently removed. Early days, but looking good. Better, looking very good.”

All passed to Knacker, all predictable. His girls, Fee and Alice, could have extracted teeth from the committee without anaesthetic and were persuasive, and it was the sort of operation, small mission, that Round Table people were ideally suited for. Knacker supposed there was a file tucked away in the archives that carried the details of scores of sleepers tucked in their beds, snoring softly. Some would have been signed up for money, and God alone knew that Knacker was hardly generous with government funds. Some would have hated whatever regime of the far left or far right they confronted. Some would have been compromised, barbed hooks gone into their flesh, and he had dealt with that level of recruitment in Ireland and men had wept to be free of him and had not had their eyes dried or a sympathetic smile, and most were now dead. And some were afflicted with ego and the thrill of living the lie and cheating on friends and neighbours and employers and family, and had their vanities expertly massaged by Knacker. The girls had done well to dig out the sleeper, identify him, and start the process rolling. The codeword for shifting the wretch in Murmansk from his pit was Matchless .

He took a taxi. The girl, sweet soul, had said she would go back to her waitressing. He asked for the airport, the private side out amongst the warehouses.

A storm was coming up off the North Sea and must be channelling down the Elbe estuary. He was dropped off at the warehouses. Stood and peered about him and wanted to be greeted. A flashlight was shone at him.

“Are you the one they call Knacker… the name I was given.”

“It’s what I answer to.”

Knacker assumed the pilot to be former military. No laundered white shirt, no gold bars on epaulettes, no clip-on black tie. He wore one-piece overalls in a dull olive and had no rank badge and no ribbon strip and displayed no name tag, but had dark glasses half-buried in his hair. They walked together and turned a corner and in the lee of a hangar was a two-engine Cessna. To Knacker it looked pitifully small and he saw the wings flip a little in the wind.

“Your girl told me where we are going.”

“Good.”

“I have to say, it’s where the weather is tonight.”

“That so?”

“Myself, I wouldn’t put my cat out in it. We might bump a bit.”

“Will we get in?”

“Can but try. Not exactly bulging with alternative strips. But yes, probably.”

The winds lashed the island with the force of a scouring brush. The rain flushed the land clean and would have been running in rivers down lanes and creating waterfalls off the hills. The rain was a drumbeat and the wind made songs in the overhead wires.

On the floor, beside his bed, Gaz lay in the foetal position.

Those who were not among the island’s incomers were familiar with the ferocity of the storms that battered Westray and all the other Orkney islands. The few trawlers and crab boats would have been anchored close to shore in the bay in front of the hotel and the cemetery. The farmers would have been careful to ensure their livestock could weather the blow. The island was battened down and the school would be closed the next morning… and work for a handyman was suspended. A rug was rucked up by his body and he lay on his side on the hard smooth surface of the vinyl covering the floorboards. No one on the island knew that Gaz had been a soldier, had served in the desperate combat areas of Syria, of Afghanistan, or of Northern Ireland. He never talked of it, changed the subject if asked about his past, nor spoke of illness or the help of the psychiatrist, had told nobody of a girl getting punched and a policewoman slapping on handcuffs and time in the cells and in the dock. Had never spoken of the day that a storm – the same winds and the same rains – had come to a valley and a village close to a main highway that was believed to be of intelligence-gathering value. He did not know how Aggie would get across in the morning and expected the mobile to trill in his ear and to hear her voice telling him, Sorry and all that, Gaz, just can’t make it. Won’t last for ever. See you soon… She had not rung and his phone was beside him. Nor had he eaten that evening nor drunk anything, and was a grown man and a wreck.