A launch flying a Russian flag came and went. Two on board, and they’d have been bawled out if their officer had seen them because they trailed a lure from a short rod and would have been after pike or catfish and stayed close to their own bank, showed no alertness, but had weapons hooked on their backs.
Hours passed, and a stiffness was gathering in his hips. Well into the afternoon, and the light starting to fade. Within five metres of Merc, a ferocious tusked beast. A wild boar that would have been a hunter’s pride and joy if shot. Would not have reached that size by an accident of nature, would have relied on cunning, suspicion and the taking of few chances. It came to the water. It would have crossed the road behind, having listened for the approach of a vehicle. It drank. Merc thought it would not have wanted stale rain-water from a puddle, but the freshness of the river. It would not have exposed itself had there been movement on either side.
Time was sliding. His gut was knotted, and he was cold, rain pattering around him. He could sense the darkness and density of the forest behind the watch-tower and tried to imagine how it would be under the canopy, how much bog. The map showed old drain ditches that would now be flooded. He had the clearing that he would make for, and then a track to follow.
A small deer tiptoed through the song birds and eased close to the heron but did not disturb it. Merc wondered if another would join it, or if this was a lone creature. The heron would have sight and awareness, and the deer would be blessed with the best hearing . . . and the day drifted, and hours slipped by, and the light dropped. Anglers went by in a small boat and were watched closely by the heron and the deer, but the boar was long gone.
He watched the water. The flow was hard and fast; he saw flotsam being carried down and so could gauge its speed. He calculated how far down the bank he would have to be, upstream of the little gap in the reeds that was the heron’s place, and the deer’s, and where the song birds were. He had help from a small navigation buoy that had broken loose from its mooring, drifted towards, then past him. It was the best place for him and he had learned much. But Merc was still not certain how his board would cope on the water with the weight he must carry. The forest wall beyond the reeds had given up no secrets, and would be difficult.
He was happy to be alone, always had been and always would be – perhaps. A slow smile on his face and he imagined, briefly, a vase of flowers. Then ducks flew low over the water and called to each other, and the dusk came. The rain had come on harder.
Boot was the tourist. The light was failing and the attendants imitated sheepdogs and rounded up the last visitors of the day, and sent them out. Boot declined polite suggestions that closure was imminent, would stay to the bitter end.
He gazed at the bulk of the beast, a monument – he reflected – to over reaching hubris. He had done the palace and the changing of the guard, but did not know if he had watched his colleague’s son on the parade ground. Had taken the ferry and was at the museum for the warship, the grandest in the world as it existed on that August day 390 years earlier, and only 1400 metres into a maiden voyage, well within sight of the slipway. Such pride in her, yet such ignorance of the tenets of ship building, and the arrogance of leaders who believed they knew best and would not leave complications to those best equipped to engage them. It towered above him in a dull light, and the timbers still seemed pristine and the gun ports were clean cut and the heraldry on the prow was typical of the grandiose conceit of a Swedish monarch, a tinkerer with blueprints of warship design, so the thing had capsized and the king and his acolytes were humiliated . . . Boot detested interference. Kings and political leaders and the Big Boss should stick well to the rear. He liked the lesson of the Vasa, and the story it told of the frailty of ambition.
Daff did not need him in Narva. Better out of it. He would only have fussed, been in the way.
He gazed up at the timbers, and marvelled at the workmanship, flawed but magnificent. The Duke, on the schedule that Boot had set, would have been – as the light fell over Brussels – preparing for the Duchess of Richmond’s ball. It was said that the future of Europe would be decided in the next forty-eight hours by force of arms, but the Duke would be seen, admired, calming faint hearts by being there, taking to the floor, talking with the richly gowned young women of Britain’s greatest families, banishing panic. So impressive. The orchestra would have been tuning violins and fiddles, and the girls – shipped in from the aristocratic homes of London – would have been fussed over by their maids ensuring their beauty was clear to all, and the young sprigs of the army – cavalry and infantry – would be thinking of a blush, a kiss, and not of the surgeons busy sharpening their implements. Always good to have distractions and to keep stress at bay.
He had seen enough. The centre of the Swedish warship’s gravity had been too high, the draught too shallow: silly mistakes.
Boot felt calm . . . believed Daff would cope, and well. Hoped the mercenary would and needed him to. Was at peace with himself, but accepted he was vulnerable to ‘events’, things that might happen that were not anticipated, always the enemy. Nor could he predict, subject to those events, which individuals – unheard of and not factored into any prior assessment – would stand in the way: a traffic policeman, a car-park attendant determined to issue a ticket, a suspicious babushka peering from an upper window and ranting suspicion . . . anything. Which made the game unpredictable, inexact – perhaps worthwhile.
‘You’ll be fine, boys . . .’
They had loaded the car. A decent shiny saloon with Martin behind the wheel and Toomas beside him, and Kristjan sprawled across the back seat. She had supervised the checklist, down to their tickets for the hockey match at the Ice Palace. The spare plates were wrapped in a blanket and stored with the spare wheel, Russian-issued and easy to find in Narva. The loss would have been reported to the police at this end but would not have filtered across the river and into the near-obsolete computers available to the police or militia on the road to St Petersburg. Daff did confidence well, her glass was always half full, and she fancied they needed the encouragement. It was Wednesday, late afternoon, and a clock ticked, hands jerking forward.
‘It’ll be good. Pick him up, do the run. It will work well,’ she said.
They were in the big square opposite the tourist office and with a rear view of the castle, with low walls for the cannon emplacements facing them, and ahead was the Estonian customs and border control. They would not have wanted to talk. They were nervous and it showed . . . would have been all right for her, except that it was not expected for Daff, at her grade, to go into harm’s way. Had she done so, as a UK passport holder, Daff could have claimed diplomatic status, and might only have been mildly roughed. Soon enough, she’d be frog-marched to one of those out-of-sight crossing places and swapped. The experience would make a fine story for her to tell if she trekked off to Ollie Compton’s pad, put a take-away curry in the microwave and told him her tale. Not the same for the boys. They would go into harsh régime cell blocks, then to the camps up in the regions of perma-frost, where they would have become skeleton-thin from hunger. They would have done better than their grandfathers, but after a few years beyond the Arctic Circle, behind the wire, they’d have thought it a relief – a blessed one – to be dead. But they were paid, and almost generously, and were lucky, in her opinion, to have been given the work . . . They weren’t her friends, did not need to be her friends.
And should not have been her friends. Daff’s home, as a teenager, had been an estate, remote and land-locked, in a harsh corner of Scotland. A grey stone house built to withstand the worst that winter weather could throw at it, and for half the year smoke blew horizontally from the stacks, and the pastimes there were stalking red deer – which she did well and was a fine shot – and fishing the Conon waters and Loch Meig. She knew the sons and daughters of keepers and the people who farmed tough cattle and hardy sheep and was fond of them in a limited way, but they were not friends. Ollie Compton went up there, had a week o
n the river in March, and she’d sit beside him while he smoked or ate a sandwich and broke from casting, and he’d said, ‘You pay them and you use them, and they are never your friends and – God forbid, my girl – they are never in bed with you. They are the “hired help”. Forgotten when their usefulness is exhausted.’ Ollie Compton had been her entry marker into the Service, and her parents had thought it the right move for her, a curb to her bolshie teenager moods. Daff fancied that Merc would be kinder to them, and would win their loyalty in a way that she did not. They were paid, and would have believed a company in São Paolo would be more than grateful on their return.
The window in Martin’s door was closed. Their cigarettes were lit. The car started. None of them looked through the rear window to give her a wave. They moved towards the Estonian check.
Daff hurried. She climbed up on to a bastion, built in the seventeenth century by Charles XII, a Swedish king. She went along the wall, slithering on the mud, and came to a street that would lead to the viewing platform. She was short of breath when she reached the wall high above the river and overlooking the bridge. Daff thought herself a veteran, but was not. She had never done what was asked of Merc, what was expected of the boys; she had not been over the line into the territory of a supposed enemy, been beyond reach. She had been a decorative addition to the Green Zone café by the pool, had flitted in and out of Kabul and been ferried to the city by armoured helicopter and had worked in compounds, was a regular in Erbil and Beirut and Amman, but with a security detail minding her.
The car edged forward, slowly, lit by floodlights. It passed the last of the day’s small entrepreneurs who went backwards and forwards to bring cigarettes and vodka into Narva for sale on street corners and in the housing estates. She thought they went too slowly, and sensed the nerves in the car. It reached the barrier. A red and white pole blocked them. A figure in a greatcoat, a shadow and a shape and anonymous, bent over the driver’s window and would have been handed their papers, and would have started to scan them. They might, inside the car, try to make a joke with him, because of the fear . . . Daff did not cross into hostile territory; those she had met who did had always told her that the checkpoint was the place where the smile froze, and sweat chilled. The papers would be returned, the barrier raised, and then the anxiety would increase as the vehicle limped forward and all inside tensed for the shout to ‘Stop’. A change of mind. Daff felt the fear. She watched the car moving off and out of the light from the arc lamps and it seemed to be close to the casino, and she lost it there, could no longer register the tail lights. It might be back the next evening, Thursday, or the morning after. It was now beyond reach, had gone across.
She went to her car, drove fast, went north and downriver.
She was brought to the interview room.
‘Please, sit down, Yekaterina.’
She stood.
‘I have invited you, Yekaterina, to sit down.’
She stayed standing.
‘I have had a long day, Yekaterina, and am looking forward to being at home with my family. But they are used to eating alone and used to me being late. It is not important to me, and I am in no hurry. Sit or stand.’
She spat.
‘Unnecessary and vulgar. I would have thought better of you, Yekaterina. Not even straight at me, but missing and only messing my carpet.’
She was flushed. Poor aim, and a feeble gesture. The guard by the door, Kat’s escort from the cell corridor a floor below, took a pace forwards, her hand on the truncheon attached to her belt. He waved her back to the door, then with another gesture, slight and without fuss, closed the door behind her.
‘I want to go home. Perhaps you want to go home. Why have you had to wait before I was ready to see you, Yekaterina? Because I have been talking with other members of your group, and with the one that you call the Leader. I talked to them about you . . . Some I find conceited and some are committed and some are confident, but they all have one difficulty. Let me tell you about it. You are certain you do not wish to sit?’
Still stood, and he thought she shivered but the radiator was turned high and the motion would have been from uncertainty, not cold.
‘You have already, Yekaterina, been useful to me. We had difficulty, I confess it, in locating the one you identified as lider. We owe you thanks. That group have good tradecraft when they move and practise anti-surveillance techniques. Let me explain. It is difficult to follow without being observed if certain obvious tactics are used, and we would need perhaps ten or fifteen operatives. Expensive in overtime payments. But I had you, and you do not have the techniques. You might as well have blown a whistle. You led us there and I am grateful. We have been looking for him for eight months, since his participation in a demonstration in Moscow. Because of your help we have found him, and we have the full caucus of the steering committee – and you were there. Why were you there? I think they tried to please him. If I go out with my wife to friends for dinner, to their home, we take flowers, also some chocolate as a gift. They brought you. You were the gift. Someone he had not seen before, not fucked before, something fresh and clean, a diversion for him. Please, Yekaterina, you did not assume you were taken as a reward for the quality of your intellect? You did not? Taken, as in some primitive societies it might be a chicken or a goat, perhaps for sacrifice. You were a diversion. Are you quite happy to stand rather than sit? And if you feel the need to spit, please do.’
He kept his voice deliberately, soft. She would have had to strain to hear what he said, and his tone and his manner would already have perplexed her, and she would have forgotten the nuances of his questioning when she had first been brought before him, and treated as an errant child. The Major had long been puzzled that the interrogators of FSB, as in the old days of KGB, wanted to be feared, to hurt their prisoners and have them huddling in the corner of a room, wetting themselves, sometimes with split lips, fractured ribs, bruised eye sockets. She did not smell of the overflowing toilet and the bucket beside it – that specific cell with its plumbing problems had been allocated her as soon as he had been told the identities of the catch – because he had ordered she be taken to the wash-house, given a short but warm shower and a nearly clean towel to dry herself, and they had found a tracksuit for her. Most of the fight had gone from her. The defiance had ebbed . . . Had she been punched or kicked then she would still curse him and struggle, but his apparent gentleness – he thought – perplexed her, and the chance to wash and put on clean clothing over her own underwear.
‘You have no passport, have nowhere to go. You have no piano teacher because you have lost your place at the Conservatory and have burned boats with your private tutor. A small matter but she spoke freely to me today . . . Your brother who is a criminal works under the direction of an organised crime chief. The chief has liaisons that do this country no honour. I am requested to free you. You should know, little Yekaterina, that I do not take bribes, am not corrupt. So if I return you to your home, then I do it because it is of advantage to me. I am not at the beck of a colonel in this building, nor a brigadier who has become rich from such liaisons. Do you want to return to your apartment, have the possibility of renewing your studies at the Conservatory, have your passport given back to you?’
She stood at her full height, thrust out her chin and drew back her shoulders, tried to recall the light in her eyes – did not succeed. Almost pitiful . . . He questioned her again, but bleakly.
‘Or do you wish to be taken back to the cell block, have that clothing withdrawn from you, go to a communal holding area for women prisoners, and after a court appearance be remanded to a correctional facility? Is it a difficult choice?’
The Major had many agents within the ranks of the supposed dissidents, all subject to his careful, calm approach. He thought himself a fair man, without malice, and that the forces of protest in St Petersburg were limited, ineffective. A photographic portrait of the President adorned the wall behind his desk; he had no loyalty to that man,
only to the laws of the country. She ignored the chair but sank to the floor, sat cross-legged and her head drooped. He told her that he would go and have a coffee in the canteen, then would return to hear her answer. He stood, put on his jacket, called for the guard to watch her. Smiled.
‘You are at a crossroads, can go to the right or to the left. Think on it – but it comes at a price, little Yekaterina, going home tonight . . . not going to the cell block.’
Dusk fell over Narva.
Men and women hurried home, clutching plastic bags weighed down with the day’s purchases. Kids were back from school and it was too cold for football, too bleak to pop pills. Buses thundered towards destinations . . . The brightest places, were those fronting on to Ivangorod and the Russian city across the river. The castle was a world-famous historic building, restored from the Second World War’s devastation, a beacon. At the base of the castle wall was a pathway, paid for by the European Union. No one walked on it but it could be seen from the Russian side and seemed to boast success. The new money heaped on Narva was cosmetic. The town was rooted in the past. It had cemeteries and monuments to great and long-dead rulers and was a place where hope was rationed, coupons scarce.
The last lorries of the day crossed the bridge. The last pedestrians were checked and passed through briskly, towards and then past the white line, barely visible halfway across. The wind grew in strength and rain spattered. A harsh night was promised.
A dreadful night to be sending up fireworks, lighting the touch-papers and having them spear towards the low carpet of darkened cloud from which the rain tipped. An unlikely night for a celebration, for an engagement to be welcomed or a birthday marked. Local men did it, from the KaPo unit supposed to be watching over Daff’s movements. They had trouble getting a cigarette lighter’s flame on to the short fuses for rockets, for ear-piercing explosions, and for the cascades that climbed high enough to pierce the bottom layer of cloud, then disappear from sight, then come back, sinking down, and seeming to reignite. It was a good show, more than a token. The launch site for the diversion was upstream from the tank memorial and on the edge of the conurbation of Narva, in a far corner of the Wehrmacht graveyard, away from the squat dark crosses in stone. When some of the lights fell, the bright plastic flowers laid against the stones became visible. The two men charged with the work did as Daff had asked, and it would have been pretty enough and noisy enough to distract anyone on the far side of the river.
A Damned Serious Business Page 19