A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  What had he expected? Pretty much that . . . what he assumed a crime gang would wish for. Anyone cruising more than once past the main entrance would be noticed, and efforts made at identification. They had gone by just the once. Two bays in the parking area, one of which she had chosen, had a view of a corner of the building, not much of one, but something, and of the stained concrete facing of the walls. An ordinary enough place, and Merc reckoned it was about to become a ‘significant other’ in his life. She didn’t have to be told. Haughtily and with a swing of her hips, like they were not worth acknowledging, she led the boys into the pick-up area for fast food. Nikki turned, reached out, and with his thin bony hands clutched at Merc’s coat.

  ‘You’ll do it, take her out?’

  Merc understood. ‘I will.’

  ‘Keep her safe?’

  ‘She will be with me. The same chance that I have.’

  ‘And them?’

  ‘Go separately. She is with me.’

  He seemed to slump. The questions would have been wracking him. Merc understood. He lifted the rucksack off the floor, opened the drawstring, took out the laptop. He was asked the size of the explosive charge, and gave the answer.

  ‘What will that do?’

  ‘Big damage. Hurt people who are in that area, on that floor.’

  Merc did not gild it, nor attempt to counter the resolve . . . They talked about the firing mechanism and how the laptop should be armed, and the countdown. Quiet voices, no melodrama, and no curses about an enemy or about the big gesture, nor of changing a world, and he wondered how great was the anger burning inside. The young man twisted away and the moment passed. Merc watched the exodus from the service counter and could see that Martin was close to the girl, might have been chatting her up and they had paper bags full of food.

  A good meal, hot, and he did not know when he would next feed – or would want to.

  Boot liked to walk.

  Slapping stout shoes on the ground always gave him a sense of belonging. He had made a little programme for himself; no more conversations but simply a swallowing of atmosphere and place. He stood by the statue. A classic figure, Victorian in style but dating from the inter-war years in Tallinn, sited on a fortification hump below the main castle; it had become a symbol in resistance to the Soviet occupation. In fact, the story was from mythology: the widow was Linda, her dead husband was the giant Kalev, founder of the first settlement. During the Occupation, when the KGB had been here in force in Pikk Street, it had been an offence, punished by imprisonment, to lay flowers at Linda’s feet and so keep alive the memory of those citizens uprooted and sent east to the labour camps and factories of Siberia. Boot would have said that he came from a society that was flaccid, one with little comprehension of real suffering. He enjoyed the company of monuments. He went down the hill and past a museum and the theme outside the entrance was of suitcases. Concrete ones. Shapes of suitcases with neat handles were laid haphazardly around main door. So many from here had packed their possessions inside a case of leather, or cardboard, had queued submissively, had been put on to trains, squashed into cattle trucks, had either gone to Auschwitz in the west or to the frozen regions of the inner wilderness of the Soviet Union. An image that helped him gain perspective if he were to play the part, moderately successfully, of a Cold War warrior – which once had thawed and had now regained its chill.

  The rain had eased.

  He was near to the KaPo offices, austere and without flags or fences or armed guards, but he did not call in. Negotiations were better left in Daff’s hands – so capable, lost without her, so reliable – and at a low level. Boot was disciplined, could avoid glancing at his wrist, telling himself how long it might be until the meeting in the block inside the Kupchino district convened, and how long until the device, built by the old deafened explosives expert in a forgettable corner of west London, detonated. Time to kill. Had to be there, at the end, went with the responsibility. But the waiting was painful, and Ollie Compton had taught him that tourism was a fair antidote.

  If he had not been there, that ?Thursday afternoon, if the weekend had already beckoned him, he would have been clear of the cemetery in Brussels, off the bus, checked in at the farm where they kept a room for him. The family rejoiced in what they thought of as his excessive eccentricity. He’d have been on his bicycle, kept in a shed at the back of the kitchen, and pedalling on the flat and straight Namur road, cursing the the long-haul lorries, might have been singing or humming, and would have thought himself blessed. Did not matter if it rained or was hot, or if there were ice on the road. He would reach a junction on the route from Charleroi to Liège, where the first action had been – at Ligny – close-quarters fighting. Not for long, but it was his routine; he would stand in a track and gaze out over the fields – ploughed or sown, flourishing or harvested. It was where the Germans had been surprised by Napoleon’s army, and 10,000 of them had deserted and run for their lives, and the Duke had been dependent on those who had not fled to stand firm and buy him time. He would have seen the tower where the Emperor had watched developments through his spyglass. Would have heard the explosions of grape and canister . . . Said to have been the ‘last honourable war’ because a prisoner could be released on giving his word that he would not subsequently rejoin the battle. Fought in midsummer, hot; an almost dried-out stream running through the village of small stone homes, with a church tower good for artillery spotting. Not much water. The bullets of the day required saltpetre and needed their ends bitten off before loading. A residue stayed in the mouth, foul-tasting and parching. Fighting infantry, in summer, needed ten pints of water per day. Very unlikely that he would have met any other visitors, would have been a lone figure, at peace with himself, imagining the speed with which liaison officers charged back towards the Duke’s headquarters down the Brussels road to report how the Germans fared . . . He would not hear yet from Daff.

  A taxi took him out of the city and on to the bypass linking with the Narva road. Boot asked his driver to wait.

  He went through the cemetery gates. Two girls in baggy overalls and beanies operated petrol-driven blowers to force rotting leaves away from the stones. At the far end, facing him, was a massive bronze sculpture. Not about occupation, but liberation . . . Always two sides to an argument, a version of life accepted by Boot. It showed a Red Army trooper, head bowed, his rifle slung over his back. Lodged in a bag on his hip were a red rose and a red carnation, both vivid and alive, and at his feet, beside his combat boots, were vases of new chrysanthemums; he marked the reverence of his people at the sacrifices made in the repelling of the German military. The statue had been placed in a noted square in the city, but the newly independent Estonians, enjoying the tease, had uprooted it and shifted it to this small burial ground, out of the way and out of sight. The reaction had been punitive. The Kremlin had not enjoyed such a gesture. A highly coordinated attack had been launched from Russian territory. Estonia had pretty much closed down for three days. Tanks? No. Air strikes? No. Ground invasion? No . . . A cyber strike. The government in Tallinn had seen its computer systems collapse. Banks had failed to operate. Businesses were left in digital darkness. Boot thought there was a nobility about the statue. Always good to appreciate significances from the past. A year later, Boot knew it well, another Russian cyber blitz had brought the former satellite state of Georgia to a shuddering halt: the tactic worked, was proven. The statue he stared at had a simple grace, understated dignity, and told a cyber truth – a country’s functioning gone dark.

  He returned to his taxi and asked to be driven to the train station. It would be good to see Daff. Did not look at his watch, but time was slipping and he carried the responsibility for the strike. Like the Duke, Boot believed the faint-hearted deserved little respect. He would need to chalk up a victory. He had thought his time valuably spent.

  Sitting by the river, the rain pattering on her shoulders, Daff was silent, chain-smoked. And waited.

  Close to her,
in thin undergrowth, was a burned-out rocket, the other fireworks used in the diversion had been collected up and taken away. The one that had been missed would be the only reminder of the business she was about. Not much to bloody show for it: the carcass of a firework, a few boot indentations in the mud and, she supposed, if she looked hard, some used matches. Further downstream and nearer to the tank memorial would be more scarred places, his footsteps . . . Ridiculous; she was supposed to be as hard as an old and rusted masonry nail, and she was wrapped in her thoughts, and he dominated them.

  She wondered how the time went for him. The water flowed steadily. A patrol boat had gone past and then veered away round the bend, would now be close to the bridge at Narva. Two older men drifted by, their outboards moter switched off, careful to stay on the Estonian side of the river; they had rods out but she’d seen nothing caught.

  Her knees were drawn up to her chest and her arms were folded on them, taking the weight of her head, and she remembered conversations in Baghdad and Kabul and Erbil, and it might have been her peculiar ability to draw him out, and others, take them into regions of confidentiality over little cups of Turkish coffee or good Earl Grey tea bags, and sometimes even a glass of beer or a whisky shot. Had fancied him, not ashamed of it. What people did who shared those sort of lives . . . And recalled her questions, his answers.

  What happens afterwards? ‘Not a job you grow old in. Pack it in someday, switch the phone off. A place in the back end of nowhere where people can’t find you. Light a fire, stoke it up, just sit and let it all drain away. Hope someone’s there who understands it.’

  Doing what? ‘Might do van deliveries in the winter, then take folks out hiking in the mountains, up north of Brecon, in the spring and summer. Nothing carrying responsibility.’

  Who’ll share that, understand it? ‘God knows – someone with a skin thicker than most. You do this, are a Gun for Hire, and you get on the treadmill, but it’s always going faster, never slower and making it easier to jump clear. Don’t know how to find somebody who can think that way.’

  But you have to want to pack the life in – sure you do? ‘All I know is this sort of soldiering – doing the mercenary, telling myself it’s not about being a crusader but it’s for the money. Can’t be escaped from. Mix with guys now – and you, Daff – like Brad and Rob, and they’re good to talk with, and other guys on the convoys. Go back to UK and nobody knows what it’s about. Why I’d have to lock myself away.’

  What’s the dream, when the ‘sometime’ comes? ‘Have a bit of money stashed. Get a home that isn’t just a barracks room, get down to the dealer, select the Mercedes. A C-Class Coupé or an E-Class Cabriole. Ride the lanes, hear its throb. Not to make the world a better place, but to drive a big car, have that power.’

  I can hide, when I do anything that’s over the edge, Merc, behind the symbol of the Crown and the State and the ‘duty stuff’, and you kill and with the greatest efficiency, and you take the cash, pocket it – how does that feel? ‘I have to take you on trust, have to believe what I’m told. It’s not the old defence of obeying orders because nobody gives me commands. End of the day, Daff, that’s what I am – empty, hollow, and want to be something different and don’t know how to start out on that. Who’d want me, Daff? God, I have the feeling I’m talking and no one has stayed behind to listen, the drunk in the closed bar and the cleaner working round his feet. It’s hard, Daff. Bad and hard. You still awake? Who’d want me?’

  He’d get that far, a deep breath, then gulp the last of the beer, and the mood would change.

  ‘Good talk, Daff, hope I didn’t bore the arse off you. Time I went to bed. Goodnight and all that, and thanks for listening. Another day tomorrow . . .’

  She did not really know in the half dozen times, could have been more, that it had been acted out, what else she could have done other than . . . A hotel bar, a café in a new shopping mall, in a secure compound, and could have stood with him and damn near taken the shirt off his back and gone down his chest and let her fingernails rake his skin and tease the old scar tissue from where they’d plucked out shrapnel, and march him to the elevator. Get the bloody key off him and open the door, and maybe use an unarmed restraint to stop him wriggling clear. If he did free himself, there would be that soft slow smile and a duck of the head and the door would have closed in her face. If he didn’t break away, and she was able to get him into his room – which would be a tip and heaps of gear scattered about, and probably ordnance among it, and likely she’d damn near stub a toe on a grenade – and get him on the bed, and get his trousers off and all the rest, and what she wore, then – nothing much. Like it had been, her belief, in the room of the apartment on Igor Gramov, and her hugging his back. Tight as a pulled string knot he would have been . . . Not for want of bloody trying for Daff – not for lack of hoping. Nobody who did not live the life, theirs, would understand. She supposed herself to be fixated, did not care. Supposed herself, also, to be unprofessional.

  She doubted she’d change, and doubted he would. The rest of the usual big river flotsam and the fishermen with their drifting boat were long gone and the rain might have slackened but the cloud was heavy and low and the darkness would soon be shrouding them. She hadn’t meant to stay at the river so long, she should get back to the apartment and make it more habitable for when Boot arrived. But she did not get to her feet, go back to the hire car that would have the surveillance guys parked in behind it.

  It seemed colder, and there was sleet in the air. She stayed where she was, heard the river and watched it, and could see the failing outline of trees on the far side and a watch-tower stark against the cloud line . . . and might say a prayer. And time drifted.

  They came in an unpredictable stream to the compound in the Kupchino district.

  Twins, fifteen-year-old boys, were brought by their mother in a polished Audi wagon from the far side of the city and were already entered in an FSB-sponsored centre of education excellence. Both had growing reputations for original thought and aptitude.

  A boy, tall and gangling as a high jump athlete, but with bent shoulders and a concave chest, was dropped by taxi, looked around him and seemed to grimace at the building, spat into a puddle, and hurried through the gate,

  Another, just a week past his twentieth birthday, had come on a bus from the railway station, and wore jeans slashed at the knees – not decoratively, but through age and wear – and was said to be the ‘best on the block’, and to have three GangMasters courting him.

  A short, squat boy who had a straggling beard and was not old enough to have thickened it, arrived in a Porsche sports model, and lifted out two laptop bags. He’d driven himself and when he stopped and climbed out, a girl manoeuvred herself from the passenger seat to the driver’s and the guards at the gate gawped at what they saw at the top of her legs, and she was a trophy – as much as the car. She slammed the car door after giving them the finger.

  Another, in his early twenties, was brought by his father, dressed flashily in a shiny suit, and might have managed this prodigy in the skills of vulnerabilities, zero days, traps and Trojans, and negotiated rates for him, percentages. He had the nervous look of a man in a higher league than was comfortable.

  And the Roofer came, and Gorilla with him, and HookNose followed them inside.

  A further half dozen went past the barrier and into Reception and were ogled by the girls; these boys, even the twins, would have been fancied more by the blondes, as meal tickets – forgetting the smells and the ‘peculiarities’ and the obsessions – than even the footballers on the books of Zenit St Petersburg. They were the best and the brightest, the cream of their trade, and some had quality education provided by the state, and others were self-taught, and some were minutely supervised from the ‘academy’ of 8th Main Directorate of FSB, and two of them worked only for the highest bidder, and some were the script-kids of the principal gangs and had no formal education but came alive only when their fingers danced on a keyboard. None yet
approached the status of Evgeniy Bogachev, on a Most Wanted list issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in faraway America for whom – if information leading to his arrest was lodged – a $3 million reward would be paid, or lesser figures for whom the recompense would be a tidily wrapped $1 million. All were protected . . . Last came two sleek black German saloons which carried the men who would task the group.

  Inside Reception, the girls ticked them off . . . Only one name remained unaccounted for. But there was still time, and the coffee break continued and he was not yet abusing the schedule.

  ‘So, what do we do?’ asked Kristjan.

  A shrug from Martin. ‘Just sit, just wait.’

  From Toomas, ‘What else?’

  ‘You have any imagination? You want to know who these people are?’

  Toomas blinked at him, but could barely see the face behind him in the darkening car. ‘You talk shit, Kristjan – always did.’

  Martin, more reflective, asked him, ‘What are you saying to us?’