Two young people at the entrance. The girl was a decoy. The man had belted him, struck him hard. Would not have happened if the idiots supposed to watch over him had not been asleep in the car. Done with swiftness and a degree of expertise… His initial fight back had been a failure. The pain was still in his privates and his shins were agony where the man’s weight pressed on them. He could not shift the plastic bags that gagged and blindfolded him, and bile had dribbled from the sides of his mouth, but he had not vomited. His wrists were tightly bound and his ankles, and he had heard the whisper of talk in the front as the driver threw the little car from one side of the road to the other. They went fast and several times there were choruses of horns as other vehicles were cut up or swerved aside.
Who had taken him? He did not know. At the Academy they taught a reasonable level of English to a favoured stream of recruits. He needed English if he went after foreign diplomat missions, and when he hunted out the western businessmen who came to Moscow and St Petersburg, and thought that Russia was a milch-cow to exploit. I am going to take him out. End of story. Not mafia. Not local environmentalists from Murmansk. Not opponents of the President’s rule who had, anyway, a negative foothold this far from the principal cities. And not mistaken identity because he wore uniform and a car waited outside for him… He had had, and scratched in his memory for evidence against the conclusion, no contact with Great Britain, with anyone British: well, other than two businessmen whom he had hustled before going to Syria, and an economist who had written hostile investment reports relating to business life in modern Russia and whose apartment he had ordered to be broken into. But… neither businessmen nor economists would have involved themselves, or had the resources to, in a violent attack on an officer such as himself. And the whispering in the front of the car, in Russian, was of death, of him being shot dead, and the opportunity had been there and not taken.
Lavrenti could not speak. Could not demand to be freed. Could not demand an explanation: ‘Do you fucking know, you peasant shit, who I am?’ Could not tell them that his father was a brigadier general and his contact list spread as high as the President. Could do nothing. Was not able to make sense of what he had heard, a flat voice, and calm. I am going to take him out. End of story.
Going at speed and quartering the roads and no more talk, and he listened for sirens as evidence of pursuit, and was not rewarded.
Off the E105 highway from Murmansk to the frontier and then the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, and on the east side, the Russian side, of the border checks at Titovka, was a slight track. It might once have led to a natural forest of trees which had long before been felled, and it might once have reached a fortified position for artillery or machine-guns in the defence of the city from the Nazi invaders. It was now used only by Jasha, the recluse. It led to his cabin. He had no power or water, no comforts, nothing of the modern world except for the metal box under his bed where many thousands of roubles were stored. He had wealth, but nothing on which to spend it except for the basic foods that he and his dog needed, and the oil for his lamp, and tobacco for his pipe – essential in summer when the mosquitoes swarmed, and ammunition for his rifle which shot the wild creatures that he sold on those rare visits to the city. His friend was his dog. He loved his dog and its encroaching age upset him. More important now was his belief that he possessed a new neighbour. He had not been out of the hut for twenty-four hours. His neighbour had been inside the hut and had searched its contents but had taken nothing, had destroyed nothing. He could not judge what relationship, other than respect, was possible with the neighbour – with the bear that he had called Zhukov.
All through the night he had heard it. A soft and gentle moaning. A light wind in the leaves of the summer birches. A cry for help. Not a scream or a shriek of agony, not a bellowing roar of anger, but the noise of pain and almost, he thought a call for his sympathy. It was somewhere in front of his cabin but he could not see it from the window. But it was a bear, wild… It had moaned for him for many hours now, and the sound of it wounded Jasha. He considered what to do, if anything were possible other than to take the rifle with the heavy bullets from the shelf high on the wall.
Knacker had slipped into the ‘waiting time’. Those were the hours that seemed to linger, once his immediate business was concluded. It was now a question of hanging about, tidying up any mess, getting ready for the departure which would be – as usual – at a scamper.
He had been to the airport and Fee had driven. Had watched from a distance. Alice had returned to their safe house, but had been up earlier and had spilled the bad news to their facilitator. Best to get it done early in the morning while the hitters were still half–asleep, half-cut, half-stoned from the previous night; they had been pitched from their pits, barely given time to dress, and were now up and away on the first leg of their flight home, and by the time that resentment kicked in and fury that the job they were recruited for had slid away, they’d be on the next stage of the journey, en-route for Amman: looking for a fast return to the rigours of a refugee camp… Not for Knacker to ladle out sympathy, but he had allowed himself one mutter of ‘Poor bastards, rather them than me’. They were gone, a headache culled.
By now, safe to assume, the trawler would have sailed. By now, also reasonable to imagine, a killing would have been completed. The waiting time was the collection of hours and minutes, seldom days, between something planned with care and the confirmation of its execution. He felt comfortable. He thought that a decent lunch, him hosting the girls and the Norwegian border ‘guide’, would be appropriate that day if a recommended place existed in Kirkenes… and his mind drifted. Up in the wild north of his own country, Maude would now be away from the temporary quarters that the diggers occupied and would be lugging her backpack along a platform at Newcastle for her train south. She would be turning her back on a Roman collector of wheat and his adversary who topped up the woad count on his skin perhaps twice a week. Would be back in New Malden that evening and saving tales of mutual derring-do on that frontier, either side of that Wall. Knacker would offer remnants of his own mission to her, tell of a fence, a barrier, a mission and a man far from help and reliant on his own skills for survival. Bugger all had changed over the centuries. She never asked but would have assumed that it had gone to plan, as he’d expect it to, and if she asked him directly ‘Win or lose, or score draw?’, he would fake annoyance and his eyes would flicker and he’d murmur across the pillow something like, ‘What would you expect,’ and they’d laugh, briefly. Funny old life and a funny old marriage, and a strong one as long as Maude realised that she took second place to his waiting times on the Russian frontiers. An acceptable one as long as he understood he would never compete with the glories of scratching in the dirt with an old toothbrush… He’d slip into VBX when he was back, first stop, and would have a sharp ten minutes with one of the Director’s team, would brief, then slip away; would hope to see Arthur Jennings and offer up good news, then would go home to New Malden. His dirty washing would make a moderate pile beside the machine – never could work the bloody thing – then back to his Yard and new plans and new thoughts and consideration of how to hurt them, the opposition, in their offices on Lubyanka Square. He had not been there, never would be. By now, the phones would be ringing, and computerised screens flashing news-bites, and senior men demanding answers from juniors, and the air rich with obscenities – and likely they’d not even know the name of James Lionel Wickes – the Knacker man. And laughed out loud, and Fee gazed at him perplexed.