She pointed across the bar, showed him where they had been sitting and talked of the Norwegian customers and their iPad and what she had seen, and described a photograph.
Lavrenti, the major, walked through the empty rooms of the apartment. At his side was his mother. It was well placed in the Arbat district, where prices were steep even by Moscow’s current standards. Irrelevant to him. Bought outright and valued at $8000 a square metre it had a wide living area with room for dining, a kitchen, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, and a small balcony which would be good in summer and not collect too much of the winter snow. It would be taken by his mother; she would order the curtains and rugs, would furnish the apartment down to the cutlery, the crockery, the bed linen and towels: most likely she would choose the shower heads and instruct on degree of hot water.
In the Lefortovo interview rooms, he could call in a man or woman who needed reminding of their status in the new society. He could sit at his desk after the individual had been kept waiting for a half-hour or more in the entrance hall, after he had been marched along corridors with no decoration, no markers as to where he was in the building, after he was brought to the room and was seated on a hard, straight-backed chair and ignored. No acknowledgement, no courtesy. Could keep a person fidgeting, uncertain and with morale slackening, and would have a closed file in front of him and seemed to busy himself at a computer screen which was, of course, out of the subject’s eyeline. Then, eventually would start with a cold, monosyllabic voice and would play the bored official and deal with questions of identity, addresses of domestic and work life. Any interview carried out in the recesses of the old Lefortovo gaol added to the sense of intimidation, insecurity: as intended. The building was part of the legend of the state’s control over Muscovites… there he was free from any oversight. A suspect might denounce him, with threats of legal action in the courts, and the complaints would be dismissed. His job was to protect the regime from foreign espionage, to keep the regime safe from dissidents, scum, internal agitation, to continue the supremacy of the high-fliers of the ruling group, and to work on a career path that would take him, Lavrenti Volkov, into their ranks. Very simple. In the interview rooms of Lefortovo gaol he worked assiduously towards those aims. He had been to the shit heap of Syria and commendations said he had displayed courage, leadership and ingenuity. He had been to the city of Murmansk and his record there showed diligence, single-minded devotion to the aims of FSB… There was a threat, there must be a threat, it was essential that the threat existed, was alive, and was massed across the frontiers of the state: across the Norwegian border, up the E105 highway. If there was no threat then the work of FSB, Federal’nya sluzhba bezopasnosti, was unnecessary. The organisation could be wound up and its high-ranking officers sent to work in industry, or drive taxis, and anarchy again could rule as it had in the days before the rise of the President. It would not happen on the watch of Lavrenti Volkov, and in the meantime he worked with assiduous devotion, and his career prospered – as had the career of his father, the brigadier general.
His mother chattered about orders for Scandinavian furniture, not much of it because the new cult was for minimalism, and the imported TV, and the German kitchen units, and.… He never criticised his mother, could still recall the scent she had worn, from Paris, the day he had returned from Latakia, the Syrian port city now taken over by the Russian air force, and she had hugged him as if he were a precious toy, and the perfume had stuck in his nostrils, but he had not choked on it, had told her how wonderful it was to be home after a half-year of duty. Nor did he ever contradict his father, high ranking, the best of connections, but who had fought in the failed Afghan intervention. His father had guided his path of advancement: to whom he should duck his head in respect, who was a drunk and a fool and to be ignored, who was a drunk and an idiot but should be listened to, and who was a coming man and who was vulnerable and slipping back. And he never complained about the close attention of his two minders, Boris and Mikki, sergeants in a unit once commanded by his father and now middle-aged and clinging to the last scaffolding of importance, drivers and fixers and the street rubbish that he would soon seek to discard. His father had organised their recall to uniform for his duty in Syria and they were supposed to have ‘watched his back’ and made sure he came home in an aircraft seat and not in a bag; never complained about them because they harboured the secret of a long day in a faraway village, were witnesses. No complaints were made of their work, slovenly, untidy, the least that was acceptable.
His mother said that the apartment was a fitting home for an FSB officer with the best prospects of promotion, a future… He would be monitoring foreign diplomats, those from the west European nations who were most hostile, and would be directing the programmes designed to make them uncertain, paranoid: threats to family pets, burglary of homes and the parasite fear that came from burglary, and the opening of windows in the depths of winter and changing alarms and inserting porn clips on a family’s desktop, and the harassment of locally employed workers. He told his mother that he was grateful for her attention to his new home.
Outside, Mikki was slouched at the wheel of the Mercedes saloon, and Boris ducked his head when he opened its door for Lavrenti’s mother but not for him, respect denied him. They had been there, were witnesses. They went to lunch, a new Italian restaurant.
He should have felt strong, in control of his destiny, but did not.
A printer spewed out the picture.
Leaning forward, peering at the uniformed shoulders and the broad cap and its FSB insignia, Fee said, “Cheerful looking cove, I’d say.”
Alice pointed. “And that’s the line on his face, what we’re told to look for, but you could miss it if you weren’t close up.”
“Have to know him, have absorbed the sight of him.”
“Not just a glimpse. Would need a decent eyeball on him.”
Going south on Kennington Lane, away from the monster building of mud-yellow and lawn-green that was forever Ceauscescu Towers and home of the Service, was the office known to those who needed such information as Knacker’s Yard, or more simply as the Yard. Its door was sandwiched between the entrances to a taxi company and a fish bar and was opposite a tailor specialising in serious alterations. Varied punters seemed to come and go and it would have been difficult to single out that particular door, no number and no name-plate, but a bell and a spyhole, as in any way out of the ordinary. It was. Inside, with a television monitor to aid him and a lens trained on the street, was the same Coldstreamer who fronted up security at Round Table meetings. If he had a firearm it was not admitted to, but certainly he possessed within easy reach cans of gas and pepper spray and flash-and-bang grenades. On the first floor was the Yard and the windows had blinds permanently down but behind them and out of sight were steel plates. One open-plan area and a plain desk that was Knacker’s, and two work surfaces that were the territory of his only aides – Fee and Alice. Other Round Table specialists had a room farther back on that floor and two more had the upper storeys where sleeping quarters were available. Knacker used to say that contamination from the employees in the main building was better avoided if these ‘knights in armour’ (or hooligans) were separated from the herd.
“It’s not just the girl – where Knacker is.”
“Too right, there was the recce boy.”
“What are we looking for from him? What can he do for us?” Alice asked, rolling her eyes. Knew the answer but would be amused to hear it spoken out loud.