Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

A sneer played on Timofey’s mouth as he turned off the road. “That was Kirov, Sergei Kirov. An ally of Stalin, the boss of Leningrad, but in this country, then and today, the top man does not like to see a deputy with ambition. He was assassinated. It is the same in politics as it is in mafia . A big man cannot be challenged by a rival, must be destroyed. We survive, Natacha and I, because we have no ambitions. We go our own way, free spirits. If we can sell, can find enough arseholes prepared to buy, make some money, walk away, then we are content. That is why we help you, not because we love you, friend, or believe in your right to bring a war into our country, but because we get money for it. You know what we argue about, Natacha and me? We argue what we shall do with the money. Who knows… except in this city there is nothing to spend money on. That man was killed because he climbed too high, was a threat. Who is the man you will kill, friend?”

He evaded. “Not the right time.”

“An FSB officer, yes? You will kill an FSB officer?”

“I need to see him, look at him, identify him, follow him home, know where he lives.”

“Then you will kill him? Why this officer?”

“At a different time, we talk then.”

She said, perky and pleased to interrupt, “I would like to kill an FSB officer – well, kill him a bit and then stamp on his throat, and then hurt him some more, then make him cry that I should finish the work, hurt him that much. I was in the gaol because of FSB… maybe you should let me help you.”

Gaz deflected, but realised that a gamble of epic proportions had been taken by Knacker Incorporated in packing him off to sea, then into mainland Russia, but he had been only vaguely briefed as to the value of the end product. A big operation and an expensive one, one that oozed risk. He was the mushroom man, kept in the dark and fed on shit. At the finish of the day his role would have been small but pivotal, but Gaz was barely flattered.

She said, “You want to know why my father hanged himself? Why it happened? Why he took a rope to a tree, to end his life?”

“If you want to tell me.”

He could have told her that he did not give a damn why her father had killed himself, and did not want to talk, needed to concentrate his thoughts… and needed, maybe, to reconcile himself to the fact the plan was rubbish, the method of infiltration poorly prepared, that he was little more than a cloth hung out on the drying frame that spun in his garden at the back of the house on Westray. Too much was asked of him, and he should have refused. He supposed that this evening, or at dawn the following morning, the trawler would tie up in the docks and he would be there and would meet the second man on the crew outside the gate and they would go together back the secure area, and then cast off – would get the hell out, leave this couple alone with their dreams. Could get out then. Would be free, be clear, would have failed.

But he would not: he was trapped, was Knacker’s man.

The building blocks were being set, discreetly, in place.

Alice had come to Tromso in northern Norway, and had been lifted from there in a charter, had come down at Kirkenes. Before the plane had lined up to approach the runway, she had been able to see out of the porthole, courtesy of the pilot’s manoeuvre, the thick pine forest on the Norwegian side of the frontier, then the scrape in the ground where the trees and foliage had been bulldozed clear – the border zone – and then had been able to look farther inland, out on to the Kola peninsula and had seen more forest. Her view had disintegrated because of low cloud and gentle rain, but she had seen a bleak landscape. She wondered if the tundra wilderness were populated, saw no homes, and no small farms. The only sign of development, other than the border strip, had been the monstrous, nickel smelter with high chimneys spouting fumes, a handful of kilometres into the Russian side. Alice could pick up and discard campaigns, had once been vegan but no longer, had once been a teetotal non-smoker but now did both, had once followed the mantra of abolishing pollution and industrial contamination, and that one had lingered. She thought the smelter a disgrace and its belched smoke a national humiliation for those across the border and the big cats down in Moscow… and out there was their boy.

She had no coat, no hat and no umbrella. She walked across the tarmac. Had given the pilot a mischievous ‘come on’ grin when she’d thanked him for the ride, and he had grinned back. She had chucked off any tiredness from the long flight back from the Middle-East. Fee was waiting for her at the terminal building. From his cockpit, the pilot might have watched her. Not so demure, little Alice, with her freckles and pale face and fair hair tending towards red. They hugged, showing the pain of being apart. They broke and walked towards the transport.

“Get him across? Work well?”

“Yes, he went. Seemed in reasonable spirits.”

“Only ‘reasonable’?”

“That’s good enough. Be more worried if he was dancing a jig. It’s a pretty fuck awful place where he’s gone. Should be there by now and staking out.”

“What’s he like?”

“Pretty ordinary. What you’d expect. I mean, he was broken by what happened, what he saw. Wasn’t our finest hour, dragging him out of his cave, his refuge, but needs must…” She shrugged.

Her own boys, the recruits, and the Facilitator, were due to land in seventy-five minutes. Contact, after a fashion, was broken. She passed no comment on them, was more interested, concerned, about the man that Knacker had brought on board: he’d a skill at that, unrivalled, getting men and women to go farther up the road than was ever warranted by a simple call of duty. Those were the ones Knacker selected, the ‘pretty ordinary’ ones. Alice did not travel anywhere in the orbit of harm’s way on her own, was always accompanied by a close protection team of Royal Military Police or hemmed into the back seat of a vehicle with a gang of sweaty Hereford boys… had sometimes wondered how she would be on her own, looking after her own back. Perhaps Fee read her.

“Actually, it’s not too bad what’s asked of him. The plan holds water.”

Drunk, rolling on his feet, clutching at other pedestrians on the crossing the father of Timofey had his eyes fixed on the grand new building on Lenin Prospekt.

Had the traffic been heavy there was every chances he would have been run down. He weaved, lurched, and carried on. He was uncertain of the entrance, where he would find someone to whom he would denounce his son, and the girl who was his son’s whore.

It was a heady cocktail that drove him across the wide road. Alcohol, the indignity and shame of the way he was treated in his own home, the insults he faced daily: supreme was the certainty of arrest and imprisonment in a penal colony on a charge of treason, espionage, betrayal of the state. Again and again, he rehearsed, among the vehicles and gripping the arms of fellow pedestrians who tried to shake him off, what he would tell the clerk at the desk, and the gratitude he’d get for his revelation. Better he had never been woken, better he had stayed asleep. He made it across.

His eyes might have deceived him, but he thought three doorways led into the building. Not four and not two, and he was desperate to piss, but first he had a flight of steps to negotiate. He did not know which door he should attempt to open. He saw a car parked at the side of the steps, two men lounging beside it, smoking. Rough-looking men, but he swerved them, and must have wet himself, and started shouting at them that he had important information to offer and… he was told to ‘Go piss yourself somewhere else’. He stumbled and fell and lay on the steps and his hip hurt, and the wet ran down his leg.