An informer was detested and an informer was feared. Gaz, in Northern Ireland, had monitored the Republicans still keeping the embers of the Troubles alive, and he had served two tours in Afghanistan and had been camouflaged in ditches and on the fringe of maize crops and had watched compounds. There because the naked eye saw more than a drone or a satellite lens, there because of the word slipped to his bosses, or the intelligence people, by informers. Informers gave access where not even Special Reconnaissance Regiment eyes could go, and the fate of such a man or woman was non-negotiable. Likely to be pain first, but gratuitous and inflicted long after contacts and codes had been extracted along with fingernails and toenails, and cigarette burns, and then they would be killed for maximum humiliation. In front of Gaz, the girl had started to shiver and he heard little gasps of breath from her and the dogs at her ankles took her cue and growled low and the goats were restless and Gaz had a tight hold of his weapon… Knew he could not outrun a horde of men if they came chasing for him; he did not have an arrival schedule for the gun club on wheels; and the weather would still prevent close fire support from the air… Bad times, and worsening.
The first of the boys was singled out. He was pulled clear of the group sitting in the driving rain while the wind buffeted their hair and tugged their clothing, and a red mark was painted on the boy’s forehead. He was dragged nearer to the football pitch and stood there with a guard. Not alone for long as the informer moved towards another who wore only boxer shorts and would have come late from his bed.
It had an inevitability and the girl stayed close to him beyond the scrim netting, and suffered.
Arthur Jennings said, “The village was razed, you might consider it a ‘war crime’, Dickie. But people, in my opinion, are amazingly resilient, rather like the weeds in the cracks in my front path, they come back, those that are left. The village will one day be re-populated and life of a sort will resume. And, as we well know, war gutters out – not that we have much to be proud of in that area – and the Russians are still there, and the Iranians, and the Hezbollah still strut in that territory, and the Assad regime is unchallenged, Moscow’s marionette… We know all that. What remains, is the value in strategic terms of that community alongside the highway. What is available from there is raw and uncontaminated intelligence: who uses that road, how often, for what purpose? A north-south link and we should have access to what the road traffic can tell us. Am I talking about putting a team of recce boys on the ground as a long-running commitment? I am not. But we need to insert a team and give the locals the equipment we would want utilised. Dickie, you and I are of the generation that recognises the importance of Human Intelligence. We have a rare chance to acquire some very fair results because of the Russian who was prominent on that day. He became a focus of hatred for the survivors. He is an FSB officer, a gilded youth. Lavrenti Volkov. His father was a brigadier general in KGB, then figured in the early days of FSB before nominal retirement and is on the periphery of a group close to the President. He is currently a major and has a future as part of a dynasty of influence, control. We aim to take him down, I correct myself, have him taken down, but first we put a man close enough to our target to make a positive identification.”
Lavrenti bridled, “I don’t have time.”
“Then you make time, find time.”
He faced his father, was a little taller than the older man. “A Jew, a little businessman, a nobody. Why should I meet him?”
“Because of what he has.”
“Maybe, maybe when I have finished in Murmansk.”
He saw colour spread in his father’s cheeks and realised that a rising temper was only narrowly controlled, but he did not back off, and the veins protruded on his father’s forehead. They had a scant relationship, he had never been hugged and held by his father, seldom been congratulated for any academic effort at school, and his ambitions in hockey had been ridiculed, and he had known that his entry to the élite training college for FSB fast-track recruits had been smoothed. His father’s voice rose.
“Not ‘maybe’, not later. Tomorrow before you go back north.”
“There is not time.”
“You see him if it means you shit, shower, dress before dawn.” A gnarled finger, scarred and narrow to the shape of the bone from grenade shrapnel, poked persistently at Lavrenti’s chest. His wife would have told him that he had stayed in his room, when her friends brought their daughters to the apartment.
“And why? Why is it necessary for me to chase after this Jew? Why?”
“I did not think you so fucking stupid. He has holdings north of the Arctic Circle. You know what is there? Are you too much of an idiot to know? There are minerals waiting and begging to be dug from the ground – copper, coal, gold, uranium, tungsten, diamonds. His holding is around an area of the Yenisei River. He is a small man and he bought well. What does he want now?” Spittle spluttered from his father’s mouth, some finding a place on Lavrenti’s cheeks and nose.
“You know, you tell me.” Facetious, sarcastic, almost as if he dared his father to hit him. Never had. Had mostly ignored him. He thought his father would have known about him from quizzing the two minders, Boris and Mikki… and once he had finished in Murmansk he would shed them.
“Protection. Wants a roof. Wants people close to him who will watch his back, have influence, keep away the jackals and wolves. Needs a roof under which he can sit. Clear? You give him a roof.”
“What is it to me?”
“Fucking idiot… What age am I? Past seventy. I wheeze, hack and cough, can no longer run. Death beckons. Dead, I cannot offer the roof. You can. You are the coming man because of my efforts, and fuck-all thanks – and your mother who still has to wipe your arse and also fuck-all thanks. Your future rests with people who make money and who come looking for men prepared to offer a roof. You… I tell you…”
He thought his father indestructible. Could not imagine life without him. His father made a ‘victim’ of Lavrenti, and the old intelligence officer was a man happy only in the company of cronies. Over drinks, they would have discussed the bad times in the Afghan war, and the awful times of the Yeltsin presidency, and now talked of financial opportunities and pledged loyalty to the regime that supplied them. Would not have known how to make conversation with his son.
“As you always do.”
“First I tell you this… you changed, you came back from Syria and were a different boy. We came back from Afghanistan, and had lost, and were the same men but harder, stronger. You are just cold. One day, if you have time, remind me to ask you why you changed. We fought a skilled enemy, you fought peasants… What I tell you, it does not last for ever. The regime will not. When it collapses, and it will be fast because of no prepared and acceptable succession, but a vulture feast on the corpse, the clever man will have his money well secreted outside Russia. Outside, or lose everything. Make what you can while the opportunity is there, get it to London, be ready. Do you hear me?”
Never spoken of before. Brusque exchanges when he returned on the big transporter from the Latakia base, and a grudging acknowledgement of the award of a gallantry medal, along with promotion, but never a table covered with bottles and a detailed critique of how the war in Syria progressed… nor ever a mention of a future beyond the life expectancy of the President, almost as if treason were being discussed. As if a cold breeze fluttered on the hairs at the back of his neck, like the past came and charged at him. He submitted.