He broke away, went back on board. Fee and Alice walked towards the town.
Alice said, “I hate this goddamn place.”
Fee said, “It fucking stinks.”
“Just a little nothing town, barely on a map.”
“And under the perpetual shadow of that bloody monster across the border. We’re screwed up, at the end of the road.”
“Best then is to get pissed, make a proper job of it.”
Both kept walking and neither wept and both wished they could.
“We do things differently, Dominic, today and in the future. The sooner that lesson is learned the more comfortable we shall all be.”
Dominic, considered a rising star, had been called to the office now occupied by the acting D-G to report on his communications with the far extremity of northern Norway, where it was adjacent to the frontier with the Russian Federation. He had been able to relay the message that Knacker – called him by that name which raised a serious frown and a shaken head – expected to be out within twenty-four hours, and would be bringing his team with him. ‘All of the team?’ Which was more than Dominic could answer.
“The Service is held back by the presence of a group of decrepit veteran warriors, playing games as if they were still at their preparatory schools. Playing God with people’s welfare, even their lives – which I understand to be this Knacker’s speciality. Has some poor wretch over there, has he? Something quite repellent about men and women who sit in safety while they consign others to risk, often to death. I won’t have it.”
Dominic sailed close to impertinence. He asked if the old adage of ‘rough men’ who might ‘visit violence’, at night, on the folks likely to harm us was now inappropriate.
“That is an attitude, no doubt hawked round by the ‘old guard’. But on my watch it will not be tolerated. Might have been acceptable a century ago, not today. State-sponsored assassination no longer has houseroom, and those who object can go and find themselves alternative employment. Root and branch these ‘rough men’ will be removed from the Service payroll. I won’t have it. It’s a new age that I will preside over… and this Knacker, he has a man on the far side of the Russian frontier, no doubt with a hue and cry up his backside… It will be a new dawn and it starts tomorrow. So, get him home, and his team, before more pain is inflicted. I read a résumé on the justification of this mission. It is preposterous, some woolly idea about a centre of intelligence in some ravaged village in Syria. Should be bottom of any list of priorities, and a Russian citizen to be murdered in cold blood. Might have been acceptable in the past, no longer. They’re going out to grass, all of them. I’ll not permit hankering after the Dark Ages. They are redundant. Understood?”
“Very clearly,” Dominic answered. “I’ll get back on to them. Tell them to find a decent verdant pasture. Have them on the first plane out, those that have a chance.”
“Let’s go do it,” Natacha said.
She was bored, uncomfortable, and tired, and the mosquitoes had taken a liking to her. She reached back and took Timofey’s arm and heaved him up.
They went together, in step, but neither carried a stone. Her idea, not his. Timofey would have turned away from the two men and headed off back the way they had come. He thought, ruefully, that too often he listened to her and did as she said. Had reason to: she had been the one arrested and he had been the one to break free, and she had been the one who had kept her mouth shut during interrogation and he had been at liberty. He sensed a sort of madness about her and wondered what show she would enact. There was always a show with Natacha which made her fun to be alongside, worthwhile when they worked. Was a pain in his gut when she plagued him with the Kursk business – not prepared to move on and ‘get a life’ as he urged. He knew each detail of the Kursk’s sinking and how long the survivors of the initial explosion had been alive at the stern end, and the telling made him shiver each time she parroted it, and what the navy had done and what fucking Putin hadn’t done. Knew it – and loved her in a rough, unsentimental way.
So, they went to ‘go do it’, and she was in front and skipped gracefully off rocks and on to hard grass tufts and stayed out of the bog, and Timofey laboured behind her. He did not know how she would do it, but supported her aim. She wanted money… He thought it a bad day for them, which had got worse because they had failed to retrieve the pistol, shoot the fucking officer, then get back home. Their only consolation was that they might stay free. Money would help. Money, in his opinion, usually helped.
Her show, and he would stay back. He was confident for her. If she could take a cop’s gun off him then he thought her a certainty. She reached them. The officer watched her, hands still tied behind his back, and something beyond contempt on his face, and Gaz never took his eye off her and removed the pistol from his belt. She was covered by the officer’s eyes and by the pistol.
The silence could have been what Timofey hated most about this bare, desolate space. It seemed to close in on him, then begin to throttle him. So he started to clap, rhythmically, as if they were not by a lake in daylight in the tundra but under the strobe lights of a strip club. It was the part she played. Her dance, and Timofey kept up his clapping but sank on to the ground. They would need money if they were to disappear, shrink off the stage and move on, perhaps reach as far as Archangel and start again there. She was a few feet in front of the Englishman and the officer, and her thin little anorak came off first. A girl by the railway station had been desperate for a spliff last summer and had paid for it with this anorak and Natacha was rarely without it. She threw it down by the officer’s feet. Her dance was sinewy, what they might have done in an oriental dive, not that either of them would have known.
After the anorak came the blouse. After the blouse came a flimsy vest. More pirouettes and more fast-foot shuffles, and then the speed of his clapping grew and her hands were at her waist and her belt was hanging loose.
She kicked off her trainers, then her jeans and came to her underwear. She did not look at the two men, did not know whether they watched her, were entranced, or were embarrassed, irritated. She went into the water, until it covered her ankles, and her dance splashed them. Flesh as white as if it had come from under a stone, went further and the water cascaded off her thighs, and her hair dripped and she went in deeper. Took one step more than she had intended and the bottom of the lake must have sloped sharply… and she was pitched forward. The clapping stopped, and she shrieked, went under. None of the men came forward to drag her out.
She surfaced, spluttering. The bones in her body seemed to jut out, sharp enough to break the skin at her elbows, her shoulders and her pelvis. Her hair was lank and tangled.
She chose Gaz. “You liked that?”
Hands on hips in front of him. “You thought I danced well?”
Made no effort to dry herself, had struck a pose, no modesty, and the smile cracked her cheeks. Her cabaret act was complete and attention was riveted on her, as she required.
“Did I do well enough?”
She stretched out her hand and the water dripped from her, and it would never have warmed during the brief Arctic summer, but she did not shiver.