Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Lavrenti bridled, “I don’t have time.”

“Then you make time, find time.”

He faced his father, was a little taller than the older man. “A Jew, a little businessman, a nobody. Why should I meet him?”

“Because of what he has.”

“Maybe, maybe when I have finished in Murmansk.”

He saw colour spread in his father’s cheeks and realised that a rising temper was only narrowly controlled, but he did not back off, and the veins protruded on his father’s forehead. They had a scant relationship, he had never been hugged and held by his father, seldom been congratulated for any academic effort at school, and his ambitions in hockey had been ridiculed, and he had known that his entry to the élite training college for FSB fast-track recruits had been smoothed. His father’s voice rose.

“Not ‘maybe’, not later. Tomorrow before you go back north.”

“There is not time.”

“You see him if it means you shit, shower, dress before dawn.” A gnarled finger, scarred and narrow to the shape of the bone from grenade shrapnel, poked persistently at Lavrenti’s chest. His wife would have told him that he had stayed in his room, when her friends brought their daughters to the apartment.

“And why? Why is it necessary for me to chase after this Jew? Why?”

“I did not think you so fucking stupid. He has holdings north of the Arctic Circle. You know what is there? Are you too much of an idiot to know? There are minerals waiting and begging to be dug from the ground – copper, coal, gold, uranium, tungsten, diamonds. His holding is around an area of the Yenisei River. He is a small man and he bought well. What does he want now?” Spittle spluttered from his father’s mouth, some finding a place on Lavrenti’s cheeks and nose.

“You know, you tell me.” Facetious, sarcastic, almost as if he dared his father to hit him. Never had. Had mostly ignored him. He thought his father would have known about him from quizzing the two minders, Boris and Mikki… and once he had finished in Murmansk he would shed them.

“Protection. Wants a roof. Wants people close to him who will watch his back, have influence, keep away the jackals and wolves. Needs a roof under which he can sit. Clear? You give him a roof.”

“What is it to me?”

“Fucking idiot… What age am I? Past seventy. I wheeze, hack and cough, can no longer run. Death beckons. Dead, I cannot offer the roof. You can. You are the coming man because of my efforts, and fuck-all thanks – and your mother who still has to wipe your arse and also fuck-all thanks. Your future rests with people who make money and who come looking for men prepared to offer a roof. You… I tell you…”

He thought his father indestructible. Could not imagine life without him. His father made a ‘victim’ of Lavrenti, and the old intelligence officer was a man happy only in the company of cronies. Over drinks, they would have discussed the bad times in the Afghan war, and the awful times of the Yeltsin presidency, and now talked of financial opportunities and pledged loyalty to the regime that supplied them. Would not have known how to make conversation with his son.

“As you always do.”

“First I tell you this… you changed, you came back from Syria and were a different boy. We came back from Afghanistan, and had lost, and were the same men but harder, stronger. You are just cold. One day, if you have time, remind me to ask you why you changed. We fought a skilled enemy, you fought peasants… What I tell you, it does not last for ever. The regime will not. When it collapses, and it will be fast because of no prepared and acceptable succession, but a vulture feast on the corpse, the clever man will have his money well secreted outside Russia. Outside, or lose everything. Make what you can while the opportunity is there, get it to London, be ready. Do you hear me?”

Never spoken of before. Brusque exchanges when he returned on the big transporter from the Latakia base, and a grudging acknowledgement of the award of a gallantry medal, along with promotion, but never a table covered with bottles and a detailed critique of how the war in Syria progressed… nor ever a mention of a future beyond the life expectancy of the President, almost as if treason were being discussed. As if a cold breeze fluttered on the hairs at the back of his neck, like the past came and charged at him. He submitted.

“I hear you. What is the Jew’s name, what is his number?… I will call him, I will meet the Jew.”

His father, the brigadier general, clenched his fist, clubbed Lavrenti on the shoulder, which was as far as his affection reached.

Arthur Jennings pursued his goal, quietly, held the attention of the man he briefed, and who might – just might – pull the rug from the enterprise.

“We put a man in there who watched Lavrenti Volkov through a bestial and long day. He makes the positive identification and that is all we want of him. Stands across a street in Murmansk and is brought there by a sleeper that we have woken. He’s useless but the family are on the books and have been bleeding our resources for five decades, unable to get us decent military stuff from the dockyards, but he can chauffeur our man. What do we get, Dickie, that is attractive? Try this: the friendship of the community when it starts a life again in that place, and perhaps more than friendship – could be devotion, gratitude. Which leads to a small and unremarkable oasis of support for our aims, a warehouse of intelligence on that road, in that area, eyes and ears for the foreseeable future. It’s long-term and will pay dividends, cheap at the price and so much more useful than an ‘eye in the sky’ or some turned clerk in their internal ministry. Above that, we gain a useful location into which to insert special forces or returning regime defectors in the future. A short-term bed-and-breakfast. It’s very worthwhile, Dickie, and we’ll get our man in just as soon as the planning gets done. He’s a good fellow, was with Special Reconnaissance Regiment when he was the witness through a long day. Then invalided out, then identified with that wretched PTSD thing, but we’re satisfied he can manage what’s asked of him. Knacker told him that we’d be doing him a favour, giving him back self-esteem, but then Knacker always had a way with words. Get him in and get him out, and…”

“Sorry, Arthur, but isn’t Murmansk quite an unfriendly place, stiff with security and suspicion? And won’t this Lavrenti whatever have a concept of personal protection? Arthur, is it not dangerous?”

“Probably you don’t want to know more than the bones of the business… Except that it’s a big prize, and Knacker’s confident – as always.”

Sitting on a stone and swatting away the horseflies that hovered close, ready to snap at him, Knacker looked out towards the north.

He was alone, not a problem for him. He often felt his own company was preferred to anyone else’s, with the exception sometimes of his wife, Maude. No hurry, and the evening light was good and the view stretched far into the distance. Maude was an amateur archaeologist and currently scraped and scratched at mud and clay and stones at a site down the road towards Hexham, and was not yet ready for his appearance and would eke out a few more hours of work, and not take interruption kindly.

Before sitting, close to cattle who watched him as they lay chewing on the grass, he had walked down a slope and reached the temple to Mithras, first dedicated to that all-powerful Roman empire god in the third century. Quite a senior officer had done the honours, the commander of the First Cohort of Batavians, and those troops had looked for divine help when faced with a resourceful, dangerous – and ruthless – enemy. He supposed that it was reasonable for him to assume that such a man who honoured the Charioteer of the Sun would have had a rank and status similar to Knacker’s own. He had spent quarter of an hour there and had squatted on the stone parapets of the building, until he had seen a hiking party approaching which had seemed the correct time to begin a more important vigil, the one that cleansed his mind. This was a place he came to each time that Maude was active with her excavation team and when he had worries clogging his clear thinking. He had climbed the slope, left the clean scoured walls of the temple behind him, and had taken a viewpoint where a ridge facilitated a grand expanse of open countryside, and the low light enhanced the distance as far as he could see.