A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  Only aimed shots, and the line of them coming would seem to stagger and they would close the gaps – ever nearer.

  ‘Need your back stiffening, Boot?’

  ‘Just a little. Yes, I suppose I do.’

  Boot had come to the one man to whom he gave considerable respect, whose judgement he trusted, whose sense of an almost reckless imagination he admired – and would try to match. He was in the process, through Daff’s recruiting, of setting in motion a matter that could not lightly be reversed. He had come across London to see Ollie Compton. The coffee mugs on a low table in front of them might not have been thoroughly washed and the milk in the coffee might have been several days past its shelf life. They were in a first-floor bed-sit, on a street behind Ealing Broadway where a man – once a legend in the Service – eked out his last days.

  ‘Your shout, is it? Praise if it goes well, brick-bats on your head and a rope round your neck if it fails? Is there big collateral?’

  ‘Big, and not predictable. Would I be starting the Third World War, nuclear level, responsibility with me? Unlikely. Would I be shaking the tree, making a hell of a mess underneath it, stoking up some confused anger – sackloads of it? Sincerely, I’d hope so.’

  ‘And it’s a one-time opportunity?’

  ‘I think so. Stripped to the barest bones it is this: Our problem is always “attribution”, who the little bastards are and where to swat them. That I’ve cracked. Know who they are and where they are, and know there will be a conclave of their best and their brightest in St Petersburg. I cannot imagine there will be a similar opportunity again, that level of players and in a location only a hundred miles from a friendly border. The opportunity to swipe them is better than I’ve ever dreamed of in the years since I was given this bloody chalice of poison. Haven’t been able to dent them, not raise a squeak, not till now . . . I fancy I can make them howl, or whimper, but anyway experience suitable pain. But a strike back, what involves serious violence over and above tinkering with cyber channels, comes with high-stake money – frighteningly high. But the chance won’t come again, not in my opinion. Believe me, Ollie, the danger we face from these people would keep you awake at night, cannot just be ignored, nothing done because any response escalates the conflict . . . God help me, I’m setting it in motion.’

  His host was in his ninetieth year. An automated e-mail message congratulating him on his anniversary would be sent from VBX to acknowledge the Big Nine. Otherwise there would be only one card on the mantelpiece, and that would be Boot’s. The Service was supposed to have moved on and ‘buccaneers’ or ‘pirates’ were no longer held in esteem. The eccentric was seen with suspicion – except that the Big Boss, in a lofty office suite above where Boot worked with Daff and the Maid, had a streak in his make-up that Boot had discovered and could cultivate. That streak was for the bold and for the inventive, and for the recall of past days. Ollie Compton had left behind him a plague of diplomatic protests, fist shaking and finger jabbing, had executed assets and stings that had dripped angst and blood, and had been the prime mentor for the young Boot. It was like coming to a shrine.

  ‘Can you push it through, get the sanction?’

  ‘Would have to be economic with detail, and ramp up the “deniability factor”. I’d win the day, stress the golden opportunity for the end of this week. The “eclipse business”, won’t be another one coming round and soon. I’m confident that I can.’

  ‘So, why come here, looking for a comfort zone from a clapped-out buffoon?’

  Not a pretty sight confronted Boot. The man wore shapeless trousers, pyjama bottoms protruding below the turn-ups, no socks, elderly slippers. A string vest, a shirt that had not been buttoned and might have been worn for a week, a dressing-gown, and a monocle over the right eye. Unshaven, with a sprouting of white hair garlanding most of his scalp that was camouflaged with old scars and laced with wide veins. No spare flesh on the body, and wrinkles patterning his skin. But a straight and proud back and bright and curious eyes, and a good speaking voice, and a mind that Boot would have called razor-sharp, and thoughts always worth assimilating.

  ‘You said it, to get the spine stiffened.’

  ‘Because you might lose people?’

  ‘Might, yes.’

  ‘You can live with that. Never bothered you in the past. Would not have shown a damn of interest in you if it had. Men and women taken behind the lines, beyond rescue, outside any orbit of safety. Tapes of their torture, the screams, sent for you to listen to? Have to come up with something better than that, Boot. All of your seniors disowning the enterprise, and you alone carrying a heavy old can of nasty-smelling stuff. Up for it?’

  ‘I think so, probably.’

  ‘I never gave a toss, Boot, for the debris I left behind. The old line used to be about omelettes and broken eggs. Never was mawkish. How it has to be. World without end, know what I mean, amen.’

  ‘Suppose it’s what I came to be told.’

  ‘And it is worth doing, worth the sacrifices of men’s lives, perhaps women’s, while you stay safe and warm? In their lives, fucking them about, giving them a cheerio and nice wave. Is the job worth the possible cost?’

  And Boot, in the quiet of the room, with the smell of old clothing around him, the window open in spite of the weather and carrying the scents of the cooking of various ethnic recipes, told it in greater detail. A tip from the Swedes, the interception of a young, scruff-arsed hacker with a St Petersburg address, a pause and a short résumé on the power of the Russian hack industry whether from Organised Crime or from state sponsorship and the growing fear that theft and espionage bred, and a sense of the helpless . . . An impatient gesture from Ollie Compton’s skeletal hand. Not much furniture in the room other than the bed, the chairs on which they sat, the table where the mugs cooled, and a wardrobe and a sink and a small electric cooker, and a plastic-walled corner concealing a shower. But there were piles of newspapers knee-high in a corner and a laptop on the floor. The gesture told Boot that what he said did not need explanation – as it would for the Big Boss. He repeated those grand and increasingly familiar words of ‘attribution’ and ‘strike back’, and the old head nodded, impatient because that was repetition, and the hair waved as if in a small breeze and he sensed the growing interest of the veteran, probably envy. The difficulty of target identification. The near impossibility of locating a den from which a hacker operated, the lack of an opportunity to hit where it hurt . . . a new warfare where one side had the freedom to roam and the other was stuck in a shelter and did not know how to frighten . . .

  ‘Frighten, hurt, have them by the short ones, the curly ones, and grab what’s there, and squeeze and twist and do some damage. You didn’t just come here, Boot, to moan at your weakness and inability to dream. Get on with it.’

  ‘I know when there will be this gathering of them – rats in a nest if I fancy that licence – I have the address and the time, and the quorum will be of many of the most sophisticated hack people from the St Petersburg district, and beyond. They’ll get a briefing from the FSB liaison who deals with their Organised Crime principal, their GangMaster. All in the same room, together, and that is privileged information from a source, and Cheltenham can’t put that together, and our ground people don’t have it, and the best of the defence companies, good old private enterprise, are still faffing about in ignorance of this scale of session. We have an opportunity for a strike back, brutal and physical and not electronic, that will shake their complacency to the core, diminish the authority of their warlords. We put up with their shit, thieving from our accounts, stealing from our Research and Development, planning their capabilities to attack us, paralyse our life blood, and—’

  ‘Steady, Boot. No need to make it personal. That, my friend is intended irony. When they poisoned that young defector in London, with that radioactive stuff, they thought he’d be dead and gone before the calumny was identified, they were using our pavements to defecate over, our kerbs to urinate in. Hurt th
em how much? A squib or a bang? Which?’

  Boot sucked in air, and it whistled over his lips. He was observed closely and the monocle was in place and Ollie Compton’s eyes were lit and his jaw hung in expectation.

  ‘I think a bang,’ he said. ‘Quite a decent bang.’

  A thin hand caught Boot’s shoulder in a claw grip and he realised he had the approval of the old Cold War fighter. They talked on. Where the insertion should be made, how many personnel would be needed, the composition of the elements of the bomb so that if – God forbid – it failed, then the deniability stayed strong, and a situation where two crime groups would be in open conflict and believing that rivalries had overflowed, and what sort of man should lead the charge, and what his pedigree should be.

  ‘Very calm, few words unless they’re necessary. Able to fight his way out and, most important, able to lead. That’s not a weapons freak, just a good man, and solid as granite, who can handle acute stress situations. Do we, Boot, still make them like that? Do we?’

  ‘Daff and the Maid are working on it. Seem to think we can manage it.’

  They stood. Boot wondered if he should take the older man’s arm, steady him from the ravages of arthritis, but was waved away. They went to the door. Boot asked if there was anything he could do for Ollie Compton . . . and remembered that it was a good forty years since a wife had walked out with a reported final flurry of ‘You love that bloody job a sight more than you love me’, likely to have been a fair reflection of the marriage. And there had been some poor investments and there was the continuing inclination to back the slower horses going round Wincanton or Redcar or Chepstow. No wife, no money, and no one at the Service thinking if that depth of intuition could be tapped into. Boot, as a raw youngster, had hung on every word, and they’d chewed the fat at various checkpoints and border crossings while waiting for an agent to cross, and they’d gone heavy together to whip into line any compromised attaché from a Warsaw Pact embassy. It had been the saddest day of Boot’s career when, on a Friday night twenty-four years before, the mentor’s card had been shredded. It was he who had then handed Boot the Maid, and had given her the name – Marian, so natural – and he’d walked away from the little drinks event and gone into a spring evening for a pleasant walk along the Embankment . . . and had done more for Boot because there had been a Brussels stopover, on a journey back from Vienna, and the senior man had waved down a taxi and they had gone together to the battlefield at Waterloo, spent half a day there, and the taxi was almost off the clock when they were back at the airport, but Compton’s expense claims were never queried.

  ‘Thank you, grateful for your time. Keep well.’

  ‘Bollocks, Boot, what else have I to do? Remember this – up there, where you’ll be sending your man and the miscreants with him, it will be cold, wet, and the country is forested and rough, roads are few. Still a high security zone back from the frontier. When they’re coming, after the bang which is not a squib, the chances are that – “best laid plans o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-glay” et cetera – not everything works as hoped for and then the dogs of hell, each last one of them, will be unleashed. Your man all right with that?’

  Briefly, a touch of embarrassment, Boot hugged him, then opened the door. ‘Have to be, won’t he? If we can get hold of him.’

  Daff had done further circles with her pen around the initials G F H. The letters were fiercely underlined with messy doodles surrounding them. But she had moved on, and the Maid had taken over the hard yards of tracking the man they wanted. The two of them worked well. Both would have said, with a noncommittal shrug, that Boot’s office would have ceased to function without their efforts. Each would have supposed he realised their value but neither would have taken the conclusion for granted. The Maid ran the office, kept Boot to his schedules, filtered the material that bounced on to his screen, restricted his visitor numbers, always permitted him the opportunity to think, ponder, consider. Middle fifties, a son just out of university, and travelling, destination uncertain, father unknown but rumours abounded, and a reported permanent guest in a small central London apartment, a parrot. She was one of those rare people who were content with what life threw at them, happy with her lot. All those years ago, when he had first started out on obsessed journeys in pursuit of the truths of Waterloo, the Maid had found the framed print: the Duke’s face rising from the big black boot and capped with jauntily feathered headgear. The only decoration she allowed in his work space. And, for most weekends, the Maid booked the train tickets and alerted the accommodation. And, this – now – was important business because the rendezvous with the history and dreams, of the sodden fields where the battle had been fought, had been broken. She sat on the edge of the table, tweed skirt and high-buttoned blouse, bobbed greying hair and cultured pearl earrings, and had a brisk voice as she demanded of bureaucrats – the Ministry, Hereford, a company employing private military contractors – for a contact point that would get her close to the location of the man with the initials G F H, and was not demure when obstructed. Quite a violent volley, abuse, then she had her hand over the phone speaker, the secure line, and an aside to Daff.

  ‘Getting there, not quick, but getting there.’

  ‘And me . . .’

  An unlikely pairing. Daphne, Daff since coming as a nervous young woman into VBX, took time over her make-up and seemed to party late and not only at weekends, and dressed well, and showed herself to the world, tight jeans and a low-cut jersey – but wore no rings and barely holidayed. Blonde pony-tail that swished in the wind, tanned skin and shoulders that seemed powerful, tall, exuding health. Might have deceived, played a part, might have been beset with loneliness. Early in and late out. There were days when Boot barely seemed to notice her presence but her loyalty to him was complete. She had certificates in unarmed combat and for pistol shooting and had done weekend courses with Special Forces, could strip a standard assault rifle while blindfolded, and reassemble it. Could do much, but had not snaffled a man, and might have felt that a failure, but might not. She went home each evening to a quiet, empty flat and ate junk food and watched junk TV, and never voiced regrets. She had recruited the young man who had done the escort run for her down Route Irish, had propositioned him at the embassy’s pool café in the Green Zone, and would have expected to sleep with him if a friendly corner of Baghdad had been found. She hadn’t – would not have objected, but had not. Sometimes, she’d lie awake and reflect that she had recruited him, pretty much encouraged and facilitated him into harm’s way, but the needs of the job came first, as they should, the fucking job came always first. The deal was easy, and seemed acceptable to him, and she’d reckoned him as isolated as herself. They should have been kindred, except that he seemed more taken by the gut-churning excitement – and fear – of close-quarters combat. Monthly payments went through a discreet account, and in return he had access to the fighting at any location that was useful to Daff’s team, being shipped to wherever was currently ‘interesting’ – which was Erbil inside the Kurdish enclave, and leading a fight against the lunatics occupying Raqqah and territory south of Mosul. Raw intelligence came from him, not the sanitised material that the ‘professionals’ produced. It had a value, was cheap at the price. He had been there a little more than a year, had not been home, and she had not travelled to see him, and his material came – when convenient – written in pencil on lined paper, and they learned how well the enemy fought, who were the better locally based commanders, what munitions and ordnance were most needed. Truth to tell, with the little nudge he had from SIS, and Daff’s team, he could do his fighting as long as he cared – no shortage of opportunities – and his killing. Now, the Maid was trying to track him and Daff was busy lining up the back-up.

  ‘. . . two in place, now. Don’t sound a whole tin of beans, but it’s what we have.’

  The phone rang. Not at a good moment for Toomas. He wore a fake mediaeval helmet with narrow eye slits, a short-sleeved tunic of close-woven chain-
mail, and his legs were encased in scarred leather. He carried a five-foot-long battle sword, which only a man of strength who claimed to be a serious fighter could have used in combat. It was the dress of the Livonian Order of Teutonic knights who had been sold the strategic castle of Toompea by the bankrupt King Valdemar III of Denmark around the mid-forteenth century. The castle dominated the city of Tallinn and was where Toomas scratched a living.

  On any November afternoon, as winter approached, tourists who had climbed the hill through the Old City to reach the fortifications were harder to attract, and Toomas had just corralled a couple – Germans. He would pose for them and then he’d take off his chain-mail and let the young man wear it, then the helmet, and finally he’d hand him the big sword to brandish and the young woman would oblige with the camera. And they would tip . . . The phone rang persistently, and his covert glance at it revealed he was receiving an international call. He had the young man kitted for battle, and the flash from the camera lit him, and he spoke briefly into his phone and asked the caller to leave him for three minutes, then try again. He hurried the couple through the ritual.

  An inevitable diminished reward. Usually he expected ten euros. They gave him five. He had rushed them and the chain-mail had caught the young man’s ear and nicked the lobe as he dragged it over his head, leaving flecks of blood. He put the mail and helmet away, locked them in his cupboard off the museum’s hall, with the sword, and waited.