A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  She peeled an apple, then divided it. ‘Did you bend?’

  ‘A little.’ He ate half the apple and she took the rest.

  ‘But she is freed?’

  ‘She is going home.’

  ‘So, the criminals rule, they can shelter under the roof – yes?’

  ‘They would think so.’

  He thought his wife pretty, serene. But her face showed the weariness of work and worry: she would have benefited from that week on the Black Sea, on a lounger in the sunshine, and he worshipped her loyalty: she would never have demanded the holiday and the compromise.

  ‘They would be wrong?’

  ‘Two times wrong. First, the sister has been in a cell where the sewage rises in the pan, where the floor and the bedding are filthy, and the effect is to diminish her commitment to revolution, and I have recruited her. She will be the little bird that sings for me. Second, the brother is dependent on her for love, for affection, and for the conduct of his life and he will talk to her, will confide. As I drove home tonight I gave myself a solemn commitment. I will hit the Kupchino clan, will embarrass its roof, my colonel . . . Maybe a traffic violation, maybe Class A narcotics possession, an illegal firearm. Why? Because soon we return to Minsk – and maybe then move on. Who knows? I will hammer them, dear Julia, and I will not break my promise. Hammer them.’

  He thanked her for his supper. Her fingers ruffled the hair on his neck. He kissed them and pushed back his chair. Both faced another busy day, but not a difficult one. He went to their son’s room and the child slept well.

  He was yawning and she was starting to slip off her clothes as they went towards their bedroom. A promise mattered to this man who his wife called ‘obstinate, awkward, stubborn, principled and lovable’. Would not be broken and would not be ignored. He was pleased with the outcome of the day, and would soon have his song bird in place, humming cantatas, and providing the evidence for the hammering he would dish out. After he had undressed he laid his service pistol, loaded and with the safety applied, on the table beside the bed: another old habit finding it hard to die.

  Most of the lights off, sitting among shadows, Nikki stayed up.

  And listened. He heard the press of vehicles on the road below, the shouts of the drunks returning from bars or sessions in the parks, the sound of televisions and arguments and laughter and singing, but did not hear her footsteps on the last flight of the stairs. He knew what sounds she would make as she climbed, and he had trained himself to register the noise as her key-ring rattled, and the scrape if she missed the lock, and the squeal of the door opening. Listened, and did not hear what he wished to. And agonised. Knew what he would do. Seemed to see the flash that blinded his eyes, and the thunder that would kill his ears, and the hurricane wind that would flatten him – and did not hear her. He was manipulated, a toy in the hands of the man who had taken him off the street outside the bank, who had threatened him, who controlled him.

  And agonised because it was still possible for him to approach the villa where the GangMaster lived, a top-of-the-range Italian car in the driveway for his wife and an armoured Range Rover for himself. Ring the bell at the electrically controlled gate, and tell a guard who he was and that his message was of great urgency. Could do that. Go inside, stand in a hallway. Say that a foreign intelligence team, enemies of the state, planned a provocation at the meeting the following afternoon, had sent people who he would meet in the parking area of the supermarket off the junction where the highway came in from Estonia. The message would be passed, and FSB would escort him to a holding centre, and what would he have achieved? Sweet fuck of nothing . . . A promise had been given. He had believed it. A call through to the Big House and bank statements from Stockholm arriving. His fraud exposed, his sister dumped. Nothing to be done, and the Englishman would have smiled at the depths of his dilemma.

  He could not work. Usually, when she was out late with her ‘friends’, and he stayed up for her and felt the loneliness, he would have tapped at his laptop keys, played the games of simulated ‘honey bombs’ and prepared mock attacks of malware. Tumbling into his lap would come the details of debit cards exfiltrated with spearphishing. And he did ‘zero days’ assaults: went through the stages of intrusive and on towards disruptive and followed with destructive which could take down a country’s utilities, darken it and blow out its capacity to function – and hide all of it because the policy was based on deception, maskirovka, and the need of it was taught them each time they fulfilled a state contract . . . Not that night.

  They would have evaluated him, the GangMaster and the colonel. Should he be humoured? As if he had crawled on the floor to them, grovelled. He strained to hear. First the sound of her footsteps, and the stamp on the concrete, and then her voice and the hum of the chords of 1812, Tchaikovsky’s woodwinds and percussion and brass and strings replaced by a small defiant sound. He flopped into the lumpy filling of the sofa seat. She missed with the key and ditched the Overture and cursed, and the door creaked as it opened.

  The light was snapped on. If she was grateful that he had sat up for her then she hid it well. She went to the fridge and pulled out a milk carton, looked at the expiry date and cursed again, swigged then turned and faced him. She stood, weight on her toes, her hands on her hips, and her hair a tangled mess, then he saw the light of her anger.

  ‘Don’t ask me if I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Want to know how I am? They might as well rape you, hands all over you, any dignity taken, fingers in you. Yes, I’m all right, yes.’

  ‘I have to tell you.’

  ‘And me tell you.’

  On the sofa, close, big slugs of vodka to embolden them, darkness around them broken only by the street lights below. Arms around each other, like lovers, the brother and sister clung to each other.

  Kat’s mouth close to his ear. ‘They don’t own us.’

  Nikki’s voice, a murmur against her cheek: ‘Everything I do, have done, is for us.’

  ‘They think we belong to them, are slaves to them, and they play with us.’

  ‘For you, what I have done and will do.’

  The last news bulletin of the night had started on the TV and came through the thin wall from the adjacent apartment of the woman with the cigarette kiosk: martial music and the heroic commentary which meant that tanks would be advancing or aircraft offloading their bombs – somewhere. There were times when they beat at the wall in frustration at the noise, or exchanged angry words in the lobby, but that night, the start of a new day, they barely heard her. She could not remember when she had last allowed him to hold her, close and warm: she had thought him a criminal, artistically dead, with the principles of the rats that scavenged in the waste bins behind their block. Together, each feeding warmth to the other, and the alcohol coursing in them, giving courage.

  ‘My first thought, how to get out . . . no passport, impossible.’

  ‘Hear me.’

  ‘Go, turn my back on this place, society, its control . . .’

  ‘Listen to me.’

  ‘. . . because it suffocates and stifles, and it watches and listens, and imprisons and persecutes, and cannot be beaten, and I should go – leave you, whatever. Say that “I am defeated”, say “I cannot change anything”, and try to walk out, maybe go north and through the snow and the fence and into Finland – but that too is impossible. My first thought.’

  ‘Do you want to hear, listen, or finish?’

  ‘Second . . . do we all leave? Give Russia, my country as much as their country, to intelligence men and the persecutors, fascists, and to the serfs who think still it is the czar’s time. Say that we are too small, irrelevant, can do them no harm, and give them the freedom of the field? Accept defeat? Or stay and fight them . . . the other option.’

  ‘Are you ready to listen?’

  ‘They offered me a pass out of the gaol. The cell is disgusting. They do not have to beat you, the cell humiliates. In the cell you live in shit . . . They let me out and pushed me cl
ear and I am on the pavement and the wind is in my face, and some of the rain, and it might snow next week and they think that is a sort of freedom. I walk on their pavement, cross their street, use their bridge, all by courtesy of them. The price? Always a price is charged by them . . . I was to be a stukach. That is what it costs, to go that low, be that level of scum, an informer. They were very satisfied with me because they believe they have a new “tout” who will give them gossip from meetings, stay near to the people who actually do something – even if only to strip off and make a pantomime, or draw a penis on a bridge, but something. I let them think that I agreed because I was frightened to be sent back to the cell. I am ashamed I agreed but what else could I do? Remember that story, of the child, aged thirteen, betraying his own father to the police for anti-Stalin remarks in his own home? His father was shot in the Terror, but others in the family took the child, and cut off his head with a forest saw, and then they were subject to the “highest measure of social defence” and put in front of a firing squad. They wanted me to be like that kid, Pavlik Morozov, an informer . . . Fuck, what am I to do?’

  ‘Be with me tomorrow – that is what else.’

  ‘I think it is better to stay, stay and fight. Not accept defeat. Whatever the cost, fight them. I have to be braver. With courage I can survive the cell block. One day, think of one day, imagine it when the mass of people are no longer serfs, have the same courage as us, will fight . . . It is what I thought as I came home. Stay and fight, go to prison, fight there . . . How else can we struggle against them? No other way but protest with pamphlets and paintings on walls, and meetings. We have to.’

  ‘Hear me.’

  And he passed the bottle to her and she swigged it, and he drank and felt the glow of it, and felt brave. Thought also that she did not listen to him because she had never reckoned anything he said worth waiting to hear. She spluttered, and the power of the alcohol silenced her, and the TV in the next apartment was off and it was quiet. The defining moment. He paid for her life, her music, her food and her crap existence alongside the ‘dissidents’, and did not have her respect. Yearned for it.

  He talked, matter of fact. The word he would have used was priznaniye – confession, a purging of secrets, and gratifying.

  Her eyes widened. He talked of what he would do in the day, and who he would meet. A gasp of astonishment. Spoke of the bank on the Kornhamnstorg and what was lodged there, and coming away and a car door opening in front of him, and being pushed down into the back of a car, and an offer made and a threat given. Her arms on him, gazing into his face. He described a meeting, and who would be there – the Roofer and HookNose and Gorilla, and a colonel of FSB and the GangMaster who led them. And he felt her shiver. Told it calmly and in a sequence, and seemed to know the outcome.

  ‘Is it for real?’

  ‘It is what will happen . . . why should I doubt it? They are professional people. I think that they are, have to hope it.’

  He came to the barn. A storm lantern hung outside it, swaying in the wind. The house, wood and clapper boards and tin-roofed but with a brick chimney at the end, was beyond the barn. The smell from the burning wood on the fire was fainter and it would be dying and the smoke from the stack was occasional. He blessed the fire which had been a better guiding star for him than the compass.

  Merc answered his own questions. Where the building was, and how far it was within the forest, and how long the track would be, and what time it would take him to cover that distance, and then how much farther on was the lay-by. He thought he had three hours . . . His clothing dripped, and was filthy from the bog and his boots were sloppy with mud, and the rain pelted him and the wind sang in the trees.

  The main building was single-storey and dark except for a glimmer from the window at the far end, below the chimney. The lamp outside the barn was guttering, would not last. On the barn’s door was a new padlock. . . . What was Merc good at? Good at getting across a river not quite in spate, good at coming through a forest without a torch and without a path, good at sniffing out the value of a fire in a hearth, good at killing, good at deflecting thoughts of ‘sometime’ when he might be ready to leave the life of a Gun For Hire, and good at dealing with simple locks. He had a spike on his penknife. He extended the spike, thought he might find hay bales, but could be a heap of old sacking. A deep cold bit into his body and the wind lashed his sodden clothing. The lamp gave him sufficient light, and he lined up the probe on his knife.

  Merc thought of the bank manager. ‘You know, Gideon, if you don’t mind me calling you that, because after this length of time that you’ve been coming in here – well, Mister Hawkins is so distant – I think we know each other tolerably well. You are a puzzle to me . . . not in the armed forces or your salary would say it, not anything illegal because you wouldn’t want to come in here and discuss investments if it were ill-gotten gains. I think that what you do is dangerous, far beyond anything I’d be capable of, and I also think that what you do helps in some way to protect myself and my family. For the risks you take, I believe you are moderately well recompensed. I don’t suppose it often, if ever, happens, Gideon, that people thank you for your work: anyway, whether it’s a first or not, please accept my gratitude . . . Goes without saying that the account is ticking, not dramatic but these are not easy times. You have a decent nest egg accumulating – and I hope you intend to use it, get the benefit from it, have enough time to enjoy what you have earned from your work. What am I saying? Something like, “If it’s possible, get out while the going is good”, something like that . . . But I don’t know what the pressures are on you, Gideon, and doubt you’ll share them with me . . . Enough said. As always, a pleasure to see you . . . Stay safe, Gideon – wherever you are.’ He’d be asleep, and would not have heard of Narva, nor its river, and what use he would find for the spike attached to his penknife. It went into the aperture. He worked the handle of the knife round, used slight force to twist the padlock’s innards, then heard the metallic snap, as if a clamp were released. The bar flopped open, and he eased it off. He worked one of the twin doors, had to struggle to lift it an inch clear of the mud, and felt a little wave of heat escape through the gap and linger on him for a moment. He took a step forward.

  Noise clattered above him and a feather wing lashed his face and a chicken screamed.

  A pig yelled and fled from him. He reached back and dragged the door shut, was surrounded by darkness and by the sound of animals and the fowls, and their warmth seemed to settle on him. He used the torch from his pocket . . . a good beam. Merc thought he might have ended up with Noah, on the Ark’s lower deck. Eyes peered back at him. There the noise of cattle, and sheep, and pigs, and chickens flew fitfully around his head.

  Merc switched off the torch.

  After setting the alarm, a low pulse beat, on his watch, after checking that the Makarov issued to him had not shipped water, after running his hands over the outer surface of the laptop – still dry inside the plastic packaging – he began to undress. The temperature outside might have been a degree or two above freezing. Everything off. Coats, fleece, shirt and vest, trousers and underpants, boots and socks. He squeezed the moisture out of the wettest, and he laid the clothing on the straw by his feet. Then, Merc put straw over them and bent and rolled them hard and tight and hoped the bedding would suck up more of the moisture. The livestock pressed around him, had no fear of him . . . He could not easily calculate how many hours he had been in the front line trench on Hill 425 and had tried to kill men before they could kill him, but the animals sensed no danger from this intruder. He made soft noises and the darkness cloaked him. He lay on straw and covered himself with two sacks that might once have carried grain for the pigs or cake for the cattle.

  A few minutes of restlessness, and grumbling from the beasts at the interruption of their night, and some defecations and cascades of urine, and foul smells – all familiar to him from life in the Forward Operating Base, and some came to sniff at him, then the qu
iet gathered. He did not think about the mission, the boys up the road waiting in a lay-by, nor about the laptop that was inside the soaked outer fabric of the rucksack and the device built into it – nor about those who would die, be mutilated and live, nor the bereaved, nor about the flowers beside a bed. Thought about nothing – and slept.

  The Maid had stayed calm, usually did. The camp bed was hard but serviceable. There were rooms down in the basement for staff needing to overnight – with long lists of regulations to prevent assignations, same sex or differing genders, and a hawk-eyed attendant who, it was said, ‘never slept, not a wink, could have been bloody Stasi’ – but she preferred to be on her own territory, with her own phones and secure computers. She had heard nothing, always good.

  A deserted corridor was beyond her locked door. Later the cleaning staff would come and noisily polish the corridor floor, and others would refill the sandwiches and hot drinks machines. Sometimes a cat came, seeking out vermin dinners and with the run of a back staircase and a route out of the fortress, known to it and very few others, and a way down to the gardens or the Thames mud at low tide. The cat was known as AalZ to a select group: Ayman al-Zawahiri. The heavily hunted figurehead leading Al-Qaeda was known to many but hardly ever seen. If the cat sensed she was behind the door then it would howl and scratch for entry, and she might let it in. But to most in the building the cat was only a rumour. Her friend, down the pecking order from the parrot, would not expect a call from her and only visited by appointment. He was a representative and sold tins of fancy biscuits, for special occasions . . . The phone did not alert her, and she had no ringtone from her computer. All satisfactory. Bad news, on a race-track, always outpaced good tidings.

  And extraordinary how good news and bad percolated at speed through a building dedicated to secrecy . . . Ollie Compton had been in old Century House when news had broken, on discreet links, that Oleg Penkovsky, ‘our man’, had been executed in the Lubyanka and had said that many were in tears, and others broke out the whisky . . . She, herself, should not have known anything of the successful exfiltration of a KGB colonel, but the tale that he was safe across the Finnish border had raised cheers through the building . . . But bad news had the edge, in speed, on the good. She had heard nothing.