Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Knacker stood back. Not a man who regularly congratulated himself. He had been listened to, had been heard. It was his familiar speech on the eve of a mission, the last hours before a man was put in harm’s way. Minor variations, but done many times. Earlier in his life he had stayed close to the border and had watched his agent go over or under or through a fence. Or had seen him into the departure hall at an airport. Or had been on a platform when a night train pulled away, his man settling into a seat and ticking fast in his mind the details of the legend, a lifestyle story, he’d been provided with. There had been a few men, and one woman, who had believed they possessed the strength of will to change their minds late in the day, to step back, and say to his face they were no longer prepared to go, wanted out. None had succeeded. He had ridiculed them, had praised them to the hilt, used the poetry of inspiration, had threatened… Quite a considerable armoury of tax investigation, job loss, consequences that were brutal and which he would not flinch from employing. They’d all gone… a few had even come back.

He seldom lingered in the past, just a fast kaleidoscope of faces that seemed to blur the image of Gaz in front of him. There were enough of them who had gone boldly forward with his soft-spoken encouragement trilling in their heads. Some had died beyond the reach of help after experiencing the violence of interrogation cells, and some had gone to the penal colonies, and some would emerge as broken individuals, but Knacker could comfort himself that, the end had always justified the means. A couple lost in Iran and three in the Damascus hell-holes, but the outstanding majority had gone into the territory of the Russian Federation. In his experience, the men he sent put on a show of confidence. There were those who were traitors to their own regime, who loathed it, or were keen to accept Knacker’s money, intelligence officers or scientists, one from the military general staff. And some who worked in telephone exchanges or in central banking. Some would earnestly say to him, ‘I think I’ve done enough…’ He’d respond, total sincerity, that their safety was his paramount concern and ‘… just one more time, friend, just once more, then we’ll call it a day…’ They all did, and there was always a moment of reflection at the Round Table, when a new casualty was spoken of, a pause in laughter and gossip and a raised glass. And life moved on. His hand was in his pocket and his fingers played with the coins – sterling and euros and Norwegian kroner – and they rested on the one that Maude had stolen at the Wall. He liked that thought, being a Pict or a Cantabrian painted with woad, not wearing a suit and a waterproof against a change in the weather and pushing men forward towards that great Wall, or a simple fence, all in the interests of the greater good.

“Little bit more time to kill, and I’m relying on Fee having that flask, and those biscuits… then I’ll leave you with her and our good and competent local colleague. Just have to get back to town, tie up a few loose ends… See you when you come back out… First, a splash of coffee.”

He always tied loose ends, left everything tidy; Knacker believed in the value of tidiness. The coin was between his fingers and that evening he might get one of the girls to clean it.

“We’ll miss you, Major, miss you greatly.”

Many had echoed that, all lying bastards: he knew most would be anxious to see him gone. He represented power and influence beyond a level they could attain or dream of.

“Congratulations on your new appointment, Major, we have been fortunate to have you here.”

Murmansk had a fine new headquarters building, but it was a backwater and those who wished to earn promotion would want to be out of the place fast. Only an imbecile would want to be here in this city where for six weeks in summer there was no darkness, and for six weeks in winter there was no sunrise. His mother had travelled north for two visits in the twenty-three months he had been stationed there and he had seen the lustre leave her face and she had seemed to shrivel in the wind. On each occasion rain had fallen steadily. There was nothing to show her and she had remarked, when standing at the foot of the Alyosha monument, that she would have preferred a postcard of it to seeing it for herself.

“We hope you will have pleasant memories of the city, of us, Major, and remember us favourably, and we hope you will speak well of us and our work in Moscow.”

In the capital there were fine shopping opportunities, and worthwhile work and a chance to bead his gaze on the faces of the fidgeting men over whom he exercised control. And status. And the regular chance to manufacture an excuse to take a free flight down to Sochi where there was always a vacant villa or an apartment belonging to a friend of his father. The brigadier general had never come to see him. His father distrusted the navy, was an army man, had no interest in the affairs of the Northern Fleet. And work involving drugs dependency in the city would hardly have held his father’s attention, nor anything connected with the so called ‘green lobby’ that complained endlessly about the alleged dumping of nuclear waste from decommissioned submarines. He hoped he would never again have to deal with security problems involving the frontier, or monitoring foreign diplomats and occasional tourists, or the difficult relations with the naval security people, an arrogant crowd. His father had sent the two minders who lived in a neighbouring block and drove him around and mounted a loose guard over him.

“A privilege to work with you, Major, and our thanks for your insights.”

He would go out of the door and his desk would be cleared and the hard drive on his computer cleansed of his own work and a new man would soon have his feet under the table.

“Your replacement, Major, was here the day before yesterday. Seemed efficient and interested in his work. A wife and two children, and looking forward to our winter sports.”

No backward glance from him when Mikki and Boris travelled with him to the airport, and his few personal possessions would have been crated and would go south on the train. There had been no gathering of colleagues at the main entrance to see him off. Most of those serving in Murmansk looked for a lifetime of sinecure and making enough money to buy an apartment without a mortgage between the railway station and the Prospekt. Would be excited to handle a case history of the eco-people who tried to bring law suits against the government and needed warning off. He could have had the boys park his official transport at the back of the building where the cell block was located and where the closed yard and high gates prevented scrutiny. Lavrenti preferred to use the front entrance, the limited spaces for senior officers, to make a statement of his importance.

He sat alone in his room. The matronly woman who typed for him was in an outer office, the door between them closed. When he had first come to Murmansk, the same woman had managed to beard him in the staff canteen; sitting with her had been a girl in her early twenties, his assistant’s niece, and the introduction was blatant. He had, scarcely polite, turned it down. Had flushed red, had indicated that there was a significant ‘other’ in Moscow. It had been a poor lie… His phone did not ring, emails were no longer copied to him, and the room was bare of anything personal except for the last item in the room that he would take away with him. A monochrome photograph, enlarged and framed with an aged gold leaf effect which had been hard to achieve in Murmansk, showed his father beside the barbecue, the President, smiling in front of him. Lavrenti never referred to the occasion and was not in the picture, but everyone in the building on Prospekt would have known of the picture and his assistant would have spread word of it. He would take the picture down the next day and it would go in the cases to be sent south…