Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

They would not be worried by Lavrenti. Both were Afghan veterans, devoted to his father. They’d have licked his backside. They’d have been overrun, so the account went, when the local bastards surrounded a patrol that was edging down an incline of loose rock. Twenty men, an under-strength platoon and all of them from the security division. Calm words from his father and a call to get close, to keep up the volume of aimed shots – not enough ammunition to blast away on automatic – stay low among the rocks and believe… A Soviet flag was tied proudly to a thorn bush. His father had called in an air strike. Had called it in right above them. Who believed in God’s hand? None of them, before the jets arrived from the strip at Jalalabad. All of them, when the noise of the explosions died and the smoke cleared and they were free to finish the lives of the wounded mujahedeen , most of them had already gone to their God. The Russians were all alive, considered that their officer had saved them. Mikki and Boris were not loyal to Lavrenti but to his father. They lounged beside the big car and smoked and must have reflected that they lived a pretty good and prosperous life.

They had done jobs for his father, and chauffeured his mother, and provided protection during the wild years when the old regime collapsed. His father had done well, and the muscle he had brought to a killing ground had been supplied by Mikki and Boris. It was natural that as his father climbed he would need reliable men to watch his back against revenge and jealousy. The boy going to Syria, and his mother in tears, and his father, gruffly anxious, had sent them to stand alongside his only child to protect him. They had been with him that day, had seen it, watched it, but had not taken part in it…

He drank with his friends, fortified himself.

Whenever life was so bad that his future seemed eaten up, and he had no booze money, he would lurch up the hill, and know he was free of his son – the rat Timofey – and of his son’s girl, the whore. Always there were friends at the Alyosha monument, and always they were generous with what they had. It was a steep climb for him. After their own drink was finished, they would wait till it was quiet and the front plinth of the monument was deserted, and then the youngest and the fittest would dart forward. At the front of the monument, where gaudy wreaths were laid, were usually fresh fruit and newly cooked scones, and bottles of vodka. Those who came to stock up the offerings, in memory of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War who had died in the defence of the city, replenished the vodka bottles. The young drinkers, the fastest on their feet, would ignore the fruit and the scones. A bottle of real stuff, Stolichnaya 100 proof, ABV 50%, would be brought back, replaced by one filled with tap water, and they would drink happily until it was drained.

Today he wanted proper vodka, not the shit they were used to drinking. He needed to fortify himself, not that any of his fellow drinkers, riddled with alcoholism, would have understood his problem. They had been told often enough of the wrongs done him by the vermin who had taken his home, his son and his son’s whore, but they would find it hard to comprehend what he intended – when the drink supplied the necessary courage. To stand outside the big building on the Prospekt and tell the first officer he could grab hold of what his son intended. A sleeper, woken, and a foreign power intervening, and espionage. He would tell it because the alternative was a penal colony where there was nothing to drink, and where he would die.

Now he said where he was going, and why. Some shrugged and some looked away, and some thought he was obviously ready for an asylum, and some murmured that it was dangerous to denounce his own son. It would take a quantity of vodka to gain the boldness for that level of betrayal. He would do it. Fuck them all… He would.

“It is a secure line at your end?”

“Secure, confirmed.”

“Thank you. Good to speak, Paulo. You are going to bring me up to speed?”

“My intention, all you should know. I begin at the start… I considered that I had the wrong people and the wrong address, but I knew the name and the address were correct because they had the code. I tell you my friend, Knacker, they were a considerable surprise to me.”

Knacker assumed that Paulo, third-tier Italian diplomat and first-tier UK asset, spoke from the security room in his country’s Moscow embassy.

“Please explain.”

“Only my opinion but I should not hide it from you. They did not seem to be suitable , I think that an appropriate description.”

Over the years, Knacker had built himself a network of colleagues. They came from ethnically rich and diverse backgrounds, were cultivated with the care that Maude, when not scratching among ruins, gave to her glasshouse tomatoes. He believed them loyal to him, willing to walk an extra mile or two, and above all they were tasked to tell him the truth. His name was not widely known in the European intelligence community, but those who knew it swore by his effectiveness as a confounder of what was called the ‘Russian conspiracy’, to dislocate their best endeavours – almost a crusade.

“Tell me.”

“I am not a cold water man. I do not pour it with the aim of dampening enthusiasm. The man originally recruited, then let go to his sleep, is long dead. His son – now in his late fifties, early sixties – lives at the address I was given. He is a pitiful alcoholic, barely able to communicate and with severe physical limitations on his mobility. It would be unwise to place any reliability on him. Then there is the grandson… he has taken over the family primacy and was the one ‘woken’. He is Timofey. Cannot be specific but I am assuming him to be a pusher of narcotics, the cannabis/marijuana field, not the Class A of heroin/cocaine, but perhaps also in amphetamines. He would have no ideological distaste for the regime of authority in Murmansk city except that it is ‘authority’. He would be without discipline. Your expression, Knacker, is I believe ‘the loose cannon’. With him is a girl. On a table in the apartment, one bedroom and where they live with the father, was a gaol release form. The girl is just back from a detention sentence. I detect she has less self-control than him, more mercurial and harder to predict her actions. They possess a small car – Italian, of course, and therefore utterly reliable in its quality engineering. Knacker, allow me one suppressed smile. They are quite unsuitable for any important work put in their way. You want my conclusion?”

“Why not, Paulo? Are you cancelling Christmas?”

There was no possibility of Knacker misunderstanding the tenor of the Italian’s report. He liked the old quip of ‘If it were easy, everyone would do it’, could hide behind that, but not appropriate to inflict it on his colleague, and knew his honesty.

“It gives me no pleasure… it is a difficult town. The FSB there expect the infiltration of hostile agents. They have the Fleet and there are concerns for the security of the naval yards. Also they have the proximity of a NATO border. People live on a diet of suspicion. There is a sizeable apparatus of counter-intelligence. That is the reality.”

“The conclusion, Paulo?”

“It is difficult to say to you, Knacker, because I know what is invested.”

“Cut to the point, friend.”

There was a pause on the line. Expected. Knacker was in the garden of the safe house, and he spoke quietly. Fee watched him from the kitchen, behind the double glazing, and filed her nails. The Norwegian had sent a cryptic text indicating the Russian patrol vehicle had checked out the border fence and had dutifully photographed what appeared to be bear prints on the smoothed ground their side of the wire and had collected the coarse hair deposited on the barbs. From his vantage-point in the bushes he had heard their radio exchanges, and a shout that it was ‘another of those fucking bears, big bastard by the print size’, and they had set about repairing damage. All satisfactory.