A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  Merc kissed her. On the forehead and on the cheek. On the lips, full, cold.

  He felt her swallow hard as if she had stifled the next accusation, or question. He doubted if Brad or Rob, experts in the world of survival, would have dealt better with it. Quite a gentle kiss, for comfort. She squeezed his hand. It was bad that the boys had gone. Like he had told her, not a matter of offering a judgement, but a loss in his armoury of options. Merc would never have countenanced denouncing a man for the ‘crime’ of fear. He pulled back from her, felt the wet on his face, and sensed her soften, but still she clung on to his hand. He could see the corner of the roof. Watched it. She might have understood, and he might have. He assumed the clock ticked in the device. Nikki would come fast along the pavement, beyond the hoarding on the bend and would be running for the car. She’d be flicking the ignition and he would be leaning back to open the door behind him. The clock would be going. He wondered about the Wolf’s Lair.

  She was quiet. He wiped his tongue across his lips, erased the taste of her.

  The call came from the bathroom. ‘Everything good . . . Did you see Olga? She is doing the supper for them . . . We’ll catch something out.’

  The Major’s wife was at the basin, undressed, washing. He said everything was good: it was, nearly. In the kitchen he found Olga and their son. Something simple; eggs and potato and sauce. Olga was a trainee chemist from a floor below, a simple and reliable girl, excellent for sitting with their child when he and Julia went out. Not often because most evenings he was too tired and most evenings she was buried deep in textbooks. Absently, he kissed his son on the forehead and was rewarded with a smear of mashed potato on his face, and a laugh from his son and a giggle from the girl.

  He went to change. An evening in the cinema meant jeans and a T-shirt and a floppy fleece and a leather jacket. Rare for them to be out and therefore more appreciated. One good moment in the day: he had been thanked.

  A colonel had expressed personal appreciation for his actions. The one who had ‘requested’ that the girl, Yekaterina, be freed because she was the sister of a criminal hacker for whom the state had work. She had been released, but might as well have had a manacle around her ankle. A long time since he had last been thanked by a superior officer. The colonel had hurried away and caught up with another of the same rank, and a brigadier, and they had strode, in masterful fashion, down a corridor and into the main lobby and a car had waited for them on the kerb, with a driver. The gratitude had been fulsome, and he believed it reflected their feeling that he could neither be bought nor bribed, was his own man . . . Praise indeed.

  He did not know where she was. And did not know who she had met. Did not know whether a rendezvous was for her interest, or for her brother. The film was How I Ended this Summer, chosen by Julia. Set in the Arctic, it would be dark and dense, moody and atmospheric. The critics had loved it, and she would probably let her hand rest lightly on his lower thigh and he would, think of why the girl had gone to a supermarket car-park to meet another group, unidentified, and why – afterwards and driving towards the city’s centre – they had performed a relatively sophisticated procedure in the traffic. Second nature to the Major, to throw off surveillance, and to criminals, but not to the level of people that she associated with.

  They left for the cinema, and she held his hand closely as if fearful that he might break free, go back to work. And, their thoughts merging, they laughed.

  Daff left everything in place.

  A fair assumption that Boot was able to get up on a kitchen chair, pull the window wide open, get his leg in and on to the draining board and lever himself inside. The chair had been left, and the window was slightly ajar, and lights were on and curtains drawn and music played. Across from the building on Igor Gramov, the far side of the park, the surveillance vehicle was in place, its engine idling, cigarettes lit. It was not that he had no right to be there, or that secrecy was paramount, more that his presence was none of their damn business. She was on the platform when the train came in. Independence and sovereignty had given the Estonian town a new platform, but Narva’s station building was decrepit, the product of a hasty rebuild after the battle, months of it, for the the town in 1944. A drab, grim and poorly lit place, empty of welcome.

  He looked so harmless. An elderly man with a slight stoop, carrying a canvas overnight bag, his overcoat unbuttoned and a scarf – might have been last year’s Christmas present – loose at his throat. A three-piece suit that had a bit of fleck in the herringbone and well polished shoes as if that were important, and a trilby firmly on his head. Looking so unperturbed, might have filled in most of a crossword on the three-hour train journey from Tallinn . . . And might have sent men to their deaths, and might be facing a volcanic inquest into decisions taken, and might have politicians cringing or the hierarchy of the Service consigned to ‘gardening leave’ – and might be presiding over a coup of legendary proportions, One way or the other, nothing neutral about the single man coming slowly down the length of the platform. She assumed that the time of detonation would be close. She had worked hard on the apartment, what her mother always did if relatives were visiting – and she went forward and took his bag, which seemed acceptable. He’d go to the stake if it failed, and others with him. Daff? Might just slip out the back door, avoid the poison and the back-stabbing, get a job down in the Gulf, arm’s length, head down.

  ‘A good ride, Boot?’

  ‘Very fair, thank you. Thought where I would have been if not on this caper – at Quatre Bras, my dear. A very significant crossroads.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Just like here, I suppose, significant, yes.’

  That Thursday evening, standing with the farmer who gave him a roof to sleep under most weekends, Boot would have been at the crossroads where the traffic streamed between Charleroi and Nivelles and Brussels and Namur. The farmer never tried to make conversation when Boot stood half a pace in front of him, and gazed, and imagined. He knew Quatre Bras well. A place where ‘quarter was neither asked nor given’, a contemporary chronicler had written. The Duke was here, had met his German ally, and the plan had been approved. The Emperor, only a mile away, might have noticed a small gathering of horsemen, might have identified them, might have spat at the ground . . . Today, the roads were busy and sloping countryside sat astride the main route from the south, straight and Roman and well paved. A car-park, weeded, littered with broken glass, dog excrement, abandoned plastic bags, had a low earth wall. Boot usually stood on it, unless the rain was particularly heavy. Squares of infantry had held their shape and blocked the French advance, little hedgehog formations that bristled with the bayonets of the Brown Bess muskets, and for some moments Wellington and his staff had taken refuge inside a square, maybe ten yards by fifteen, sharing the limited space with the wounded. Where the French cavalry had charged there were now fields grazed by horses and donkeys . . . It was painful for Boot to be here, coming off the station platform, and not where – almost – he believed he belonged. The purchase of time was the significance of the battle at the crossroads . . . Time had indeed been bought . . . He would have gone back to the farmhouse, would have sat with the family and eaten, drunk local beer, then retired early.

  ‘No news at this end.’

  ‘How can one expect there to be? It was the time then, at Quatre Bras, for lesser men to stand up, be counted, and win or lose the day. The same now as then. Always that posture in combat . . . We depend, Daff, on the small people. You are entitled to consider me deluded, but in the car-park at the crossroads, where the squares formed, I can sense – and you would also – the heat and noise and drama of battle, and men then do superior deeds and win or are inferior and lose. Straight choice.’

  She drove him towards the town centre. He did not speak again. It rained hard, had done that same evening at the battle site. He seemed to blink, shut his eyes, banished it . . . ditched the past and turned to the present, the future. Not that there was much, if anything, he could do, but it was right to b
e here, showed loyalty to the boys on the ground. He assumed the monitoring services would have the first news of an explosion, and there would be newsflash interruptions on the agency wires. He would hear soon enough, but his phone stayed silent, and he must be patient. Boot reckoned, at that moment, in the darkened streets of Narva, that his life as an intelligence officer teetered on the edge, might progress and might collapse.

  Her trick of the evening, clever girl, was to take him inside an apartment via a kitchen chair and an open window, and near to a headlong fall, and then a glass and a pizza, and then a long silence, and he would watch the phone that was placed on the table.

  ‘There will be road-blocks, everything stopped.’

  ‘Police everywhere, and militia. It will be a net.’

  ‘Nothing will get through.’

  Martin said, ‘We will go to gaol for the rest of our lives.’

  Toomas said, ‘One of those fucking gulag camps, like for Kristjan’s grandfather.’

  Kristjan said, ‘Until we die.’

  They were sitting in the car, parked beside the hoses and the air for tyres, and vehicles came in a stream to use the pumps.

  ‘It was rubbish, the money they were paying us,’ Martin said.

  ‘For what was asked of us, an insult,’ Toomas said.

  ‘Shouldn’t have taken it. Should have told them to shove it up their arses,’ Kristjan said.

  ‘So, we are agreed – yes?’ Martin’s question.

  ‘Agreed.’ Toomas’s answer.

  ‘No alternative, because of who we are – what happened.’ Kristjan slapped the shoulders of the two in front of him. They left the fuel station, went up a slip road, took the main highway, were lost in the traffic, and went fast.

  Nikki watched the faces.

  The last time he had looked at his watch it had been thirty-seven minutes since he had depressed the button. He thought he had been told that the timer was set for forty minutes. He seemed to remember that the time was forty, but his recall was fogged. He could not sit there at the table and gaze at his watch and examine the scurrying movement of the second hand, and the slower minute hand. So, he looked at the faces, and bent his shoulder and his fingers scrabbled for the rucksack’s strap.

  They had been divided into hubs. Inside the hubs, each had a target area. The one allocated to Nikki was the banking system for benefit payments in the northern English city of Manchester. He thought it bizarre. There was no similar system in St Petersburg. Men and women either lived off their families or begged on the streets, were given no wage for not working. His was a city of survivors . . . It might be three minutes, or might be fractionally less, could be a little more – if the device worked and did not malfunction. He looked around him. He could measure the boredom. All individualists and all shunning any degree of discipline, and hostile to organisation. He gripped the handle of the rucksack and lifted it between his knees.

  He had no love for the avtoritet, the GangMaster who employed him, who paid him poorly, who had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of euros and dollars from his work. He was sitting at the end of the table and fidgeted and wanted to be gone, back to the annex where the officials waited, and then they would speed away and do a restaurant that evening, and the start of the hacked entries through the vulnerable points would begin, be coordinated, for the morning. He saw the nostrils of the avtoritet twitch as if he smelled them, his cologne not proof against them. He might be hurt, might be killed. Nikki did not know the power of the explosives inside the laptop, nor how much shrapnel would be spat out. He set the rucksack on the table in front of him.

  The twins were the youngest at the table. He had no argument with them. Their faces were alive with acne sores and they wore identical spectacles with thick lenses. They wanted out, played listlessly with their keys.

  In the Wolf’s Lair, as Nikki had read, the officer had brought into the conference room, for the Fuhrer’s daily briefing, an attaché case with the device primed and had put it on the floor. A midsummer day, and the conference had been held in a wooden hut, not the confines of a bomb-proof bunker where the blast would have been contained, maximised.

  The tall kid had twice met Nikki’s glance, had seemed lonely, isolated, had wanted contact, but each time Nikki had failed to respond. He wanted no sympathies to build, nothing that would destroy his commitment. What was it for? At one level, because he was compromised, but that was peripheral. At another level, it was because he had been promised that his sister would be taken out, offered a new existence. At the highest level it was about his hatred of HookNose and the Roofer and Gorilla. He had never before felt such power. The rucksack was on the table and the laptop was inside it. More power and less regret than when he had wriggled inside the bank accounts and taken out the clients’ money, transferred it, gone to Stockholm and been treated as a treasured customer.

  The officer, integral in a conspiracy, had left the briefing room, abandoned his attaché case on the floor, had not known that another man would see it, ease it away with his boot, push it against a heavy table leg. All part of the legend of the Wolf’s Lair.

  The smart, slickly dressed guy, with the girl and the fast car outside, or the one whose father had brought him, did not seem hostile, just indifferent. They were together, farther down the table towards the annex, and would catch much of the shrapnel that the device would throw out, if it fired. The officer had left, exited the inner compound, had been boarding a military light aircraft and was ready to taxi as the explosion ripped through the briefing room. He had taken off, been flown in a bubble of radio silence to Berlin.

  He hated HookNose, who drew doodles on a notepad.

  Had reached Berlin, had claimed to fellow conspirators that his target had been killed at the Wolf’s Lair, that the moment of revolution was right, and did not know that a solid table leg had taken the immediate force of the blast.

  And hated the Roofer who used the long sinewy fingers that could take his weight up a sheer stone wall with minimal crevices for his fingertips, and who now picked mucus from his nose.

  Had left too early, and the reward was to hear the target’s voice, alive but shaken, on a radio wavelength.

  And hated Gorilla who chewed on gum relentlessly and took it from his mouth, every few minutes, and fastened it under the table top and extracted a new piece, grinding it between his teeth.

  Had failed, but was fortunate to have been frogmarched into the central courtyard of the Berlin building, and propped against a wall and executed by firing squad. Fortunate because many who had followed the officer’s lead would die from strangulation, hanged with piano wire.

  Nikki glanced again at his watch and cursed himself for his impatience, and took the laptop out of the rucksack and laid it in front of him, then dropped the empty rucksack to the floor, and did not know how long, and saw the movement . . . The Avtoritet headed, as if relieved to be shed of them, towards the main door, and the two officials followed him, and chairs started to scrape, and panic began to grip Nikki. It took hold, and he seemed to see the room emptied and just himself and the laptop left inside the Wolf’s Lair.

  He raised his hand.

  A strong, firm voice, the quaver controlled. ‘There are matters that I do not find clear, and it is important that we all know exactly how far it is intended that we travel. An example, how important is secrecy, the enemy left in ignorance . . . One question, but I have others.’

  He saw annoyance, felt contempt directed at him from HookNose, irritation from the Roofer, and heard an audible curse from Gorilla. He did not know how much time he had bought, but the Avtoritet, GangMaster of the Kupchino district, and the official who was his ‘roof’ and took his money, and the second official who had delivered the shopping list of targets, were in conversation, and they came back to the table and questions he might have to ask to win more time careered in his head, and the twins watched him closely as if puzzled by him, and suspicion might have grown. The laptop, benign, was in fron
t of him, and he saw his sister and heard her rare laughter, and with her was the man who had given a promise . . .

  Merc blinked.

  Light shone in his face, then the angle altered and caught, full on, Kat’s, and she turned away. The headlights swung towards a parking bay near to the exit point on to the slipway, flicked on-off, twice, and then were killed.

  It was a moment before Merc regained his sight, could focus again on the corner of the building, and wonder why the lights had flashed and . . . More light, brilliant. The same illumination as there was when a flash-and-bang grenade was thrown but so much bigger, brighter. He twisted, saw her face and the wide-eyed stare. A fraction of time and the first signs of debris hurtling up from the roof area, then the light failed, died, and the noise came as thunder brought on the back of wind.

  If he was coming he would have come. Merc couldn’t tell her but she’d have known.

  What to say? Nothing that was appropriate, that matched the moment. Merc knew how it was when men or women fell in the line, sometimes within sight and sometimes round a corner where the trench was in sharp-angled bends . . . the sounds of falling masonry and glass shattering as it landed on the ground. Then silence. Until the first scream. A woman ran towards the service counter of the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise and her head thrown back and her skirt stretched with her stride and she howled in terror. Then the first cars revving their engines; many would have been queuing for food but abandoned it . . . She had removed her hand. Her lips, where he had kissed her to silence her, were thin, drawn. She would have known. A sharp look at him, and he nodded. Then the first siren . . . far away but coming fast.