Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Timofey had a key on a chain to his belt and locked the door behind them. Gaz had the pistol in his hand. Armed it, checked the safety, heard the clatter of metal parts scraping together… would like to have fired it first, been somewhere he could gauge the accuracy of the sights and the strength of the kickback, and the squeeze required on the trigger.

They went down the stairs. Timofey led and Gaz followed, the girl staying close as if he was now special, beyond the reaches of her experience. Little nuggets of information had filtered to him, and were absorbed. She was joined at the hip to the Kursk disaster; he was the distant product of a sailor’s tumble in the stress of wartime with a local girl, and the boys on the fishing boat were running down on the time they could linger here. All were bound by loyalties to men long dead. He supposed that old faiths were the currency by which Knacker could prosper.

Timofey said he would drive, and Natacha climbed into the back seat. They would be told when they needed to know. He took a pair of pizza boxes off the floor in front of the seat allocated him, and a fag packet and chocolate wrappers and took them to a full rubbish bin and dumped them. If they had asked him why he did housekeeping for the Fiat, he would not have answered.

Gaz sank down on to the front passenger seat.

He reached across, and took Timofey’s hand, and held it tight, then released it. Then turned and took her hand and held it for a short moment. That was his gesture. They were his army, his team, his unit. They were what he had. The engine coughed into life… Not for a man of Gaz’s rank – corporal and discharged for medical complications – to consider whether the mission stank of old offal, could be justified, would make a difference, was even possible. Most would have said success was unachievable, but they were not the guys who lived in Forward Operating Bases – not the guys who lay on their stomachs with the piss trapped in increasing discomfort in their bladders; not the guys who spent half a day and more watching an atrocity staged in front of them as though they were fortunate to have views from the house’s best seats… he reckoned himself one of life’s small people. They came and fixed things that their ‘betters’ cared not to spend time on. Small people and the world seemed to need them – as Knacker needed Gaz. Would it make a difference? Decent if it did. Grimaced to himself because the small people were not that smart and not that privileged… smart people and privileged people wouldn’t lie in a ditch beside a tinfoil package of their own excreta for three days, or more.

As they headed away from their block, he said that he would like a short stop, and for one of them to get him half a dozen plastic shopping bags. Just that, and he wanted them empty.

On the first floor of a public house on a main street on the south side of the Thames, the early team were at work on the room that the Round Table used for their monthly lunches. The management rather enjoyed the secrecy that the ‘spooks’ visited on them. Word had reached them that today would be a wake replacing the induction of a new member. The deceased was one of the ‘old guard’, a founder member of the Round Table. Benny Kowalski had had access to the best document forgers in Europe, from Vienna to Helsinki. He had crossed the Iron Curtain, had passed through electronic fences and digitalised airport checks as though they were merely inconveniences. His assets in the east had ranged from army officers, intelligence men of GRU and what had been KGB, and locked in his head, inside an elephantine memory, were archives of names and contact points. At any moment of crisis, it would have been Benny Kowalski who would sidle up to a sub-committee, speak out of the side of his mouth, say if the matter was ‘real’ or just pretence, speaking fluent English but with a gravelly Polish accent. He had not attended the last several meetings and it was said that cancer had finally caught up with him. There would be much nostalgia at his passing, and Tennyson’s verses would be spoken with collegiate fervour. Respect would flow, and a yearning for the ‘old days, good old days’. The days before the bloody kids, the analysts, moved in. The supply of alcohol required for such a wake would be a delight to the public house management. Long might they last.

Dawn came, brought a silver shine to the river, and early sunlight slipped into the suite of offices occupied by the Director-General. He’d be gone by midday. His wife had accompanied him in the car that had brought him here. She would wait in an outer office while he dealt with ‘essential business’, then they would leave together by a back entrance, not making a drama from a crisis… She had said, when he had for the third time used the word ‘essential’ as justification for coming back in that dawn, ‘For Christ’s sake, you silly old thing, the morning after you’re gone the seventy-three bus will still run down the Essex Road, and next month the Test at Lords will still kick off on time. Face facts.’

Miserably, he did.

The Deputy Director-General, in an hour earlier than was his habit, was ushered to the office and they were provided with coffee and a few of the previous day’s croissants fetched from the canteen below.

“Not sure when I’ll be back.”

“Not personal, but I’ll work on the assumption that you’re not, not coming back.”

“You’ll want briefings. I believe most of your effort is in finance, staff matters, and…”

“I’ll organise them, thank you. There will be changes. Inevitable.”

“Not a case of baby and bathwater. Much of our work here has been exciting, risk-taking, innovative, and effective.”

“It has been – much of our work – free of justifiable scrutiny, piratical. Seems to me and others, to have been out of control. There will be changes.”

“I hope not to be around to see them.”

“First, right at the very top, will be the immediate closing down of the la-la-land world of these Round Table geriatrics. They’ll go in the bin, with all their childish rituals. No place for them. Rather nurtured it, haven’t you? I trust demolition will be easy.”

“Easy to destroy, difficult to build, I used to be told.”

“You’ll be out of the building when I circulate the instruction. No further resources will be committed to that Round Table. They’ll be reined in. If they don’t like it then they can go away quietly or noisily and whine or rant, but they are finished. I expect to run a tight ship, one with ethics and accountability. I wish you well. Yes, all of us do, but time for change and the extirpation of self-congratulatory people who are not team players. Good day.”

Gone, none of the croissants as much as nibbled, and the coffee pot still full. Impossible to have even begun to explain the addictive quality of plans such as those brought to him in the name of Knacker; the risks were intoxicating and the triumphs blessed and the failures heartbreaking… All madness, yet he could never refuse Knacker.

The Director-General, still holding that position by a thread, asked his PA to get Arthur Jennings on the phone.

The old woman saw them, or at least recognised the shapes of their heads.

Early on that day of the week she went to the market, always early and always the same day. The black saloon car, German, was parked close to the front entrance of the block: she always recognised a German car and sometimes – making certain she was not seen – spat against a tyre. Her father had been on the forward defence lines of Leningrad during the siege and she had been brought up to loathe all things German… But she did not spit that morning because the two minders were in the car.