A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  An Englishman drawled at him, showed him the punishment and fluttered the promise of a reward. He was the victim of the Roofer and HookNose and Gorilla, and would damn them for it.

  A sudden stop, shrill brakes behind them, and some skinhead bastard with bare arms in spite of the cold and the thickening rain, yelling at Kat to ‘get the fuck out’. He was aware that there was a collision behind them, two vehicles or three, and the argument was fiercer there than around Nikki and Kat, who were responsible. She had almost missed the turn to the supermarket, the entry slipway camouflaged by advertising boards – for local beers and a new brand of coffee, and durable nappies. They turned in.

  He had been told where to go.

  The spaces all around them were empty and the busy trade in the supermarket had not yet begun, and he wondered about the length of the fuse and, how many minutes, and the force . . . Nikki leaned back in his seat and lit a cigarette, first of the day, and they were well early. The man had said, I am a man of my word, Nikki, and it will happen, what you ask for. Nikki had told him who would be there, and the agenda for the meeting and had seen the flicker of interest . . . When they talked of strike back most of the security companies advocated retaliatory hacking into the computers used by their opponents. A joke. If his was hacked, disabled – or the Roofer’s or HookNose’s or Gorilla’s – then a replacement was available from Computer World or the Key Computer Centre. Pick it up in half an hour, be up and running within two hours, back at work and wriggling the worm by the end of the shift. Nikki said she was going for a yoghurt. He told her not to be long.

  He had been promised they would come.

  The woman, his target – the bitch – had missed her turning, then had braked her VW Polo.

  A pick-up behind her had stopped sharply and had swerved to the side and hit the kerb. Behind the pick-up was a BMW 7 series, glistening black bodywork, and a chauffeur driving. The FSB sergeant – new to surveillance – worried about a lorry steaming past him, had hit the BMW’s fender, and had taken out a brake light. Normally, for a minor road traffic accident, the sergeant would have flashed his card and that would have been enough for any other driver to back off, except that the chauffeur drove a senior official from the Regional Governor’s office. To admit the shunt was his own fault? Never. Nor would the chauffeur back down. They argued for a full ten minutes, and wrote dockets for each other. The sergeant was uncertain whether the target vehicle had gone down the slipway that led to a supermarket, or had gone on down the highway . . . He had lost it.

  Difficult, so early, to get on his radio, explain to the Major a situation in which he – of course – was blameless, and had lost sight of the woman in her old VW Polo. He drove past the slipway, and the BMW disappeared ahead of him, wove among the lanes, and the accident had cost him a full ten minutes, and he sweated.

  Toomas watched the ‘foreigner’ change the tyre.

  Only fifteen kilometres beyond Kingisepp, and late – time slipping – and both Kristjan and Martin had claimed to be able to fix it, and had not been able to get the jack to expand or the nuts to loosen. Tempers had flared between them – and he had stepped in. Not aggressive, and without criticism. ‘Think I may have handled this model before: always was piss awful.’ The jack had gone up and raised the vehicle and the nuts had been rolled into the inverted hub-cap, and the tyre was taken out of the boot . . . all done well and feelings left marginally intact. Toomas noted it, admired what he saw. And had learned.

  Why was the ‘foreigner’ called Merc? There had been a poor answer, something about ‘always been keen, you know, on Mercedes cars. Can’t afford one, but it’s the dream . . .’ What he had learned had more importance than a name. There had been the girl, calling his mobile when he did his show for the last tourists of the autumn, and the same girl – recognised her voice – coming to the café. He had drunk plenty, but remembered. Told shit, the work was for a company in São Paolo. A lie. This man was no casual freelance . . . His gait was a giveaway – strong, loping. His speech was another – economic, familiar with leadership. The wheel was the game changer – not interfering too early, allowing their frustration to build, then taking over and doing it without pushing Martin’s nose, or Kristjan’s, in the dirt . . . Toomas thought him a ‘special services’ operative, not casual labour pulled in by a Brazilian company, which meant if they screwed up, if they were held – then the cover was manageable. He thought the man was British.

  Toomas’s grandfather was killed by British action. Not beaten to death in the cell below the pavement on Pikk Street by British clubs and rubber truncheons, not electrocuted by British terminals clamped to his testicles, not losing his fingernails because they were dragged out by British pliers. The British had put him there . . . it was documented. The British had recruited his grandfather, then the dates of the landing were leaked by a British traitor to a Soviet intelligence officer. After the death of his grandfather, or Martin’s, or Kristjan’s, Toomas would never have taken money from a British intelligence officer. The wheel was back on.

  What else? Could be the matter of the coat.

  His grandfather’s memory was worshipped by Toomas and kept alive by the aunt who had hidden, taped to the underside of a drawer, a photograph of a face with light stubble on the cheeks and tousled hair, and an openness and naivete about the eyes and the mouth – then just short of his twentieth birthday . . . Toomas liked to go to Tallinn to the tower block hotel where KGB officers had positioned a listening and observation post and monitored visitors. Their uniforms were kept on clothes shop dummies and the place boasted their power. He also liked to go to the Occupation Museum where they had collected the lightweight weapons used by the Forest Brothers, some with stick magazines and some with a drum holding the bullets. Toomas had tried to get work at both the hotel and in the museum but had been turned down for having insufficient academic qualifications. Often he had imagined the pain meted out to his grandfather, and the terror he would have felt, and wondered how much he could have withstood. Now there was the matter of the coat.

  Merc had stepped out of the car and watched their first feeble efforts, then intervened. Had taken off his coat, dropped it on to the back seat, where he had been sitting and where the upholstery was still wet from his clothes. The tyre had been replaced, and he had been cleaning his hands in a puddle. Kristjan had lifted the coat, had passed it to Merc, and Toomas had seen the pistol bulging from the pocket. Just a glimpse but enough time to note that the magazine was snugly fitted . . . Toomas had no firearm, and Kristjan did not, nor Martin. They drove again, picking up speed, and headed towards St Petersburg.

  In an old metal sink, with water from a blackened kettle hanging above the kitchen fire, Marika had washed the clothing they had found. Now, she hung it on a wooden frame, made many years before by Igor, and stood it in front of the hearth.

  He would not have noticed the scrapes on the bottom of the padlock that fastened the door to the barn. She might not have done if the key, hanging from a string around her neck, had fitted easily into the slot and turned immediately. That morning she had had to wriggle the key and had examined the padlock’s base. His eyesight had deteriorated, hers had stayed sharp. She had seen the scratches . . . had pulled open the door and gone inside. Marika, in her eighty-fourth year, had never shown fear. She had witnessed the killing by the Red Army of her father, accused of harbouring and hiding deserters. And the shooting of Igor’s parents by the same detachment, condemned for collaboration with the German forces. She a teenager and he still a child had seen it from where they hid, and in the night had dug the necessary graves: still respected. She had watched her mother die eight years later from depression and total exhaustion, had seen Igor beaten for opposing the cult of collectivisation, an arm broken and an eyeball detached, had taken refuge in the forest’s depths when more deportations were ordered in 1960. All that frightened her was the prospect of her dying before him and Igor being unable to care for himself . . . they had been to
gether for sixty-five years. She had entered the barn; the dogs with her, and had noticed that the animals were restless. The dogs had rooted in the straw, had found the clothing. If she had been afraid, she would have gone as fast as old, arthritic limbs permitted, back to the house, demanded that Igor bring his shotgun. She was not afraid.

  She had collected a pair of all-weather trousers, socks, underwear, a fleece, and she had found wrapping that smelled of peppermints. The clothing had gone into the bucket, rinsed thoroughly and layers of mud scraped from the material.

  Would she tell Pyotr what the dogs had found? Doubtful. A lesson long learned was that trust should never be total. He was due to come that afternoon if his duties in the forest allowed it – hunting the smugglers who floated vodka crates across the river in the inner tubes of tyres. When the clothes had dried she would fold them and lay them carefully inside the barn, out of reach of the inquisitive beasts, and where the chickens would not mess on them.

  The rain fell hard on the roof of the farmhouse, rattled and beat on it, and the window-panes ran with water. She thought the stranger would come back, would find his clothing had been cared for.

  They reached the outer suburbs of the city.

  Merc thought Martin drove well; he was cautious and used his mirror and had kept calm when a police vehicle came up fast on their outside with lights and sirens, but passed them. The road carved through modern industrial estates and behind them were tower blocks, and the monuments to the defence of Leningrad, and bright flowers. Occasionally, painted artillery pieces marked an old front line. Toomas sat beside him using the map on his phone.

  He talked. Not flamboyantly but positively. It was a given that the local boy would be there, nervous, and they should calm him. When they arrived at the supermarket, Merc said what they should do.

  Martin sat in the car, the engine idling. Toomas and Kristjan were out of the car and 100 metres away, one right and one left, and scanning around them to counter surveillance . . . As he would have done at a Forward Operating Base, or down Route Irish, or planning a supply convoy going beyond Kabul and into the Bagram base. Never loud, but using his finger to jab into the palm of his hand for emphasis. What his signal would be if he decided on a ‘fail’, an immediate reaction to bug out fast, and how Martin would respond. And the alternative way out of the city avoiding the E-20. He used crisp sentences, and let his words sink in and looked each of them in the face to check their understanding, and they did not question him.

  There was always a calm. After the calm came the movement. Pulling out of the lorry park in the armoured Land Rover and starting out on a road monitored by mujahideen, leaving the international airport’s fortified gate, jumping down from the trucks that carried the detachment as far as the end point of the communications trench that led up to the Hill. He was good at calm, and looked to spread it. Make each of them feel wanted, and give them their tasks. Merc shivered and the cold clamped on his damp body. He had zipped his coat and felt the weight of the pistol hard on his hip. Toomas murmured into Martin’s ear, there was a stab on the brakes and they lurched into the slipway.

  ‘It’ll be good, guys,’ Merc said. Didn’t know whether he meant it, or felt it appropriate. Nothing seemed to threaten. Other cars took the same route. Stocking up for the rest of the week, ordinary people and ordinary cars. The supermarket was sheltered behind gaudy hoardings and the parking area was off to the right near to the fuel station.

  Merc had seen it, but Kristjan called it.

  A VW Polo, correct colour, a small guy inside leaning on the front passenger door and smoking, glancing down at his wrist, and chucking his fag out the window, impatient. A girl was wiping the windscreen. Flags flew horizontally from their poles near the building and it would have been bad to be out. Hanging around, waiting, impatient, not knowing if the rendezvous had gone wrong. Merc factored it all in.

  He had his own timetable and would stay with it. Between Merc’s feet was the rucksack. Inside it – plastic-wrapped, knotted tight with a supposed waterproof seal – was a laptop, inside the laptop was . . .

  Never hurry, one of Merc’s sacred rules.

  About as stupid a thing as they could have done would have been to drive straight up from the slipway, cross the parking area and pull in neatly alongside the VW Polo. As Merc had planned it, they went to a different corner, close to a store for waste bins, where the trees were shredded of leaves and weeds grew tall. They looked for a tail, for watchers.

  Merc would not move until he was ready.

  They liked to play the martyr. The Major thought this one – and many like him – preferred to be threatened, then roughed up, left in a corner of a cell with a split lip and a few teeth loosened, and the slop bucket not emptied and abuse from warders, interrogators: martyrs were heroes. Guards were outside the door and a button was underneath the Major’s desk. A light would flash; they could intervene within seconds.

  The Major despised this man. Already he had created confusion in the mind of the self-styled Leader. No violence, no psychotropic drugs administered by hypodermic, no screamed abuse. The man did not yet appreciate the gravity of his situation, and would have thought himself able to debate – an intellectual superior confronted by a low-level bureaucrat – and assumed his opinion had importance.

  They had talked of the President. Of the siloviki who surrounded him, of privilege and corruption and misuse of power. The Leader, lulled by conversation, had begun to talk in growing confidence of the ‘uprising’ that would come, the ‘clean broom’ that would follow, the hounding out of the ‘current clutch of criminals’. Any such statement violated the laws of the land, what the Major had taken an oath to defend . . . ‘What happens after the President?’ Fallen under a tram, a heart attack while enjoying his privileges, a plane crash, assassination by a rival: plenty of scope for a job vacancy. The Leader was not on a hard-backed steel-framed chair, but had been sitting on a deep leather-covered sofa and had sunk back, a heater warming his ankles; the Major was opposite him, in his office chair, his shoes resting on his desk. The man flushed out his ideas of counter-revolution, the lynching of those chucked from power, the confiscation of assets, and the use of the military – after authority had been wrested from their officers – to maintain order on the streets. The Major thought the man disappointing with the truisms of his programme, empty of ideas and of little value other than as a sacrificial example of state authority.

  He moved on. The girl . . . Yekaterina. A snort.

  How did her rate her? As a screw? Was she good or bad or indifferent? Did she know what to do? How was she to be valued in the world of protest? How much influence did she carry with others in the group? Again the snort. She was a hanger-on, a groupie, a lost soul, without importance. She had been brought to the meeting for him to take to bed, no other reason, like she was a gift of flowers, or a jar of caviar, or champagne from the south. A pleasant gesture . . . one night and she’d have been out on her arse, but he’d have paid her taxi fare . . . It was important for the Major to have that assessment, but he hid his disappointment.

  His phone rang . . . surveillance . . . a target had been lost, his feelings were masked . . . but a target had been found, in a supermarket car-park, and the girl and her brother were there, but nothing had happened. He cut the call. Enough. The Leader condemned himself, would go to a Special Facility for many years, would have ample time to consider how he had been fooled in a small office in the Big House by an hour of politeness and courtesy. He pressed his bell. The man was taken away. The Major regretted that Yekaterina had failed to impress. He wondered why the young woman sat with her brother in a car-park, and who they were meeting: more likely to be a contact of his, from the hacker world. A quiet day had started, he predicted, but that evening he and Julia planned a trip to the cinema, and he had promised to be home early.

  After decisions had been taken and boxes ticked, it was easy to lose sight – in a welter of detail – of the original ‘mission statement
’. Boot tried to lodge in his mind the image of Hatpin heaved off the street in Stockholm, dumped in a hotel room chair, and spilling information – like a conveyor belt – of attacks on utilities and government projects and military planning, and the great archives stored by the principal banks. All of it accounted for Boot being up on the ramparts of Toompea Castle and entertaining an American, an air force officer and colonel, who dealt in the murk of cyber defence, perhaps also of cyber attack. Boot paced alongside and listened.

  ‘You have to understand, my friend, that Organised Crime up the road from here, beyond the frontier, is joined at the hip with the state. When the state does not need them the kids are free to filch credit cards, do the frauds. But when the state calls, they come running. They are beholden to the state. It provides protection on a level which offers total immunity from prosecution . . . We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. We’re also talking about criminal conglomerates that employ hundreds of men and women . . . The hackers are the equivalent of the Special Forces units, they’re glamorous. Behind them is all the back-up they need. They have people who do their documents, provide passports, researchers looking for vulnerabilities. They put people inside the State Department, your Foreign Office, a principal defence contractor, and they search out weaknesses and email addresses and make friendships. They employ psychiatrists so that the bosses can evaluate the trustworthiness of the people they employ. It makes the Italian mafia groups look small beer. It is a hell of a problem, understatement.’

  Old associates had met at a Brussels conference, had stayed in touch. And Boot would not be asked why he had travelled, what he planned, when it would happen.

  ‘How hard to go after them, my friend, is a dilemma. Simple when the tank fires up its engine and starts rolling, bomb the shit out of it: a politician understands that. What about now? The men and women who do the authorisation of counter measures do not possess a cyber mind. They’re not blessed with a lexicon including “firewalls” and “airgaps”, and they’ll want to know the likelihood of “blowback”. I meet a political master and I try and read his mind, judge him, then I talk with him in kindergarten language – still I doubt he understands. What I do say is that an unclaimed strike back will lead – as night follows day – to real antagonisms among those paid to supply the “roof”. Which would be pleasing.’