Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

He remembered graffiti in a nationalist corner of Londonderry. Daubed after it was public knowledge that Raymond Gilmore, small-time, low-life Provo, had gone supergrass which had meant the lifting of the city’s IRA brigade principals. It said I knew Raymie Gilmore – thank feck he didn’t know me . It had been regarded, by military and bad boys alike, as quality.

He had watched these two on a foul weather day, wind and powerful rain, while an atrocity was played out in front of them. They had seemed detached from the main action and had trailed around the village and across the football pitch and gone down between the buildings, had stayed close to their officer but had neither cautioned nor encouraged him. Gilmore had died a maudlin drunk, his handlers gone… The guard on the gate in front of the building’s main door was on his radio, complaining – easy enough to read it – about the drunk.

Their presence was the best sign. The bus-stop across the street had a weatherproof roof and sides of reinforced clear plastic. It served several routes… which was good because that meant it aroused no attention if a bus came and was ignored.

“Friend, you want me to stay?” A whisper in his ear.

It was what he had come for. He was not there to have his hand held, to be dependent on these kids. Before the black dog days he had been able to operate as well in solitary as in company, but before… “I want you back at the car, able to come quick, just around that corner. Nearer than where you parked, and watching me.”

“You take that chance?”

Everything he did was taking a chance. He nodded. He thought the girl did not want to leave him, perhaps feared she’d miss out on the big scene, but Timofey tugged her arm roughly. He was alone… Women milled around him with shopping bags, and kids who had come from school and larked and swung their satchels, and a druggie who might have been one of Timofey’s customers… He reckoned now that the pair of them, Timofey and Natacha, were better than he’d bargained for and neither would crumple. Hard to credit. He was in Murmansk, a security-dominated city, one where counter-espionage forces were supreme, and he watched the two foot soldiers and waited for their officer.

What to talk about that had not already been exhausted? Not the dour days in Afghanistan, and not the long weeks in Syria. Instead the two minders ignored the drunk who was on the steps and arguing with the guard, belting on about a plot, an infiltration, an espionage event and too pissed to finish a sentence. They talked of their future.

For Mikki and Boris, the truth was that the brigadier general – respected and almost loved – was a different man from the one they had followed through the Afghan intervention. They minded his kid – whom they called the ‘little shit’ or the ‘little bastard’ – because the old man asked it of them. The future was soon, pressing. It would be a hotel… they had enough connections to get the necessary permits and the building resources, and would easily attract a decent ‘roof’ to shelter under. Where? Boris was from Irkutsk and Mikki had been brought up in the far Far East and Kamchatka. Both had made the decision to quit home, abandon friends and family, and join the military security wing of what was then KGB. Both had been on the personal protection detail of the brigadier general when he was a junior colonel and both owed their lives to the time he had called down the air strike right above where they held out, ammunition stocks near exhausted. Their idea now was to site themselves along the M11 highway, perhaps inside the city limits of Veliky Novgorod, and purchase a property in decline that was close to the Volkhov river and near to the lakes and forests. It would be a good stop-over point in the 800-kilometre drive from the capital to St Petersburg. That it was still a dream and not reality was because of their loyalty for the old man who had taken both of them off the streets when they were raw recruits, had kept them close and privileged. Always they had need of a roof, always they had been protected with one.

They talked quietly. There had been a time in Boris’ home city, Irkutsk, when there were gunfights on the streets as mafia groups battled for supremacy, and in Mikki’s home town there had been numbing unemployment when the regime had collapsed and the factories had locked their gates. They had been fortunate, had been on the winning side when the dust of chaos cleared, would not have been without the shelter given them by their officer… Everything they had they owed to the father of the ‘little shit’, and nothing was owed to the ‘little bastard’. They waited for him.

The rain fell. Neither understood why the drunk was still there, had not had his arse kicked. They might have a central building and they might also have chalets amongst trees. It would be a good place, and clean, and used by families. And what pleased them equally was that they would never return to this God-forsaken wreck of a city where it was always day or always night. What helped in the project for the hotel was that each was blessed with a hard-working woman who would turn her back on the city and come with them. Would be better than good and they would be shot of Lavrenti Volkov.

At his desk, his door closed, Lavrenti trawled his screen. No matter that the new major and the impertinent captain had had the chance to get to know each other better in the canteen or in a meeting room, or – for all he cared – in a quiet part of the cell block. He would stay in his office, regardless of what name was on the door, until the end of the working day. Phone calls came to him and most involved investigations that he had been a part of, but three were for the new man. His crisp rejoinder was ‘Wrong extension, nobody of that name is on this number.’

He found clips of the President speaking in the Kremlin, and more clips of the President at armed forces exercises, and watched him on vacation and fishing or hunting or diving in the Black Sea, bare-chested. He thought the man was his saviour. As long as he lived, and power remained in those hands, small and delicate, Lavrenti was protected. As were many others. Many hundreds of men lived well because the President stayed in rude health. Those who had worked on secret missions abroad, and those who had been in the vanguard on the special units in the Caucasus, and those who administered the regime’s justice in the interrogation rooms at Lefortovo, and those who collected the money for providing roofs. It would have been simple to have tapped the keys, to have resurrected the involvement in Syria, plastered the screen with images of Russia’s bombs and Russia’s armour and Russia’s infantry, and with those units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran to which Russian officers were assigned as liaison. From the next day, he would be in Moscow, alone, and would offer a curt farewell but no thanks, to the two minders allocated him so many years before because that would denigrate his authority. They knew, they had been there. Had seen it all and had never given a sign. They had been there, a handful of paces behind him, and it ate at him. Voices in the corridor, and hisses of irritation, and they would be waiting for him, would wait until he was ready to leave.

Timofey came to the bus shelter, glanced around it and had blinked, and the cold had touched his neck, and he could not see the man. Had come to look for him, to see if all went well, if anything had happened, how much longer they might wait – and that hour was almost on them when the bureaucrats vacated their premises. Could not see his man, did a raking sweep with his eyes – caught sight of a man in the back of the shelter and realised the skill displayed. How to sit in a bus shelter and have his body at that angle and his head turned away and behind a large woman, and his eyes swept on and relief soared, and admiration and… Timofey saw the figure on the step outside the ironwork fence of the headquarters building. He recognised his father.