“Are you all right, Major?”
He said he was well, and yet could not meet the penetrating gaze of the Jew.
“You were far away; were you listening to me?”
He had listened.
“You are, Major, as I am told it, a decorated and experienced officer. Served in Syria, a fine record there. Perhaps finance and mineral extraction are alien to you – perhaps.”
He could deny that. He needed to show himself to be well on the ladder and advancing towards the highest rungs. He knew the question that would follow and never answered it whether it came from a stranger, the Jew, or from his family, even his father, the former brigadier general.
“How was it there? As bad as we assume, or worse?”
He said, seemingly offhand and bland, that it was a necessary act of policy and the commitment had suited the state at that time, that it was finished and not to be pecked over.
“I hope it was for some purpose… You found it hard, saw bad things? Was your role dangerous, did…?”
Lavrenti slammed his fist on the table. “I don’t fucking talk about it. Don’t.”
And he stood, and faced the Jew. The man showed no astonishment at the sudden, unprompted explosion. If he then had doubts as to the wisdom of putting his protection in this officer’s hands, relying on protection under this officer’s roof, he made no sign of it… What was not said was sufficient to deflate Lavrenti.
“Well, Major, you have much to think of, and no doubt would be pleased to have time to consider a response. What a privilege to have met you. No hurry, nothing immediate is required, maybe in a few months…”
The cigarettes were pocketed and the Marlboro lighter. It was as if the Jew had come to a car showroom and had browsed and looked at brochures, then decided that he did not like what he saw, would go elsewhere, but without wishing to cause offence. Lavrenti pushed a button on the leg of the table, at knee height. An escort would come and lead the Jew out of Lefortovo. He had never before reacted in such a way to mention of his war service in Syria, had not acknowledged the stress caused by what he had seen on one day, and what he had done on that same day. Within an hour his father would have been told and within an hour and five minutes the brigadier general, retired, would be on the phone, blaring questions and criticism at him, and he would deflect. Nothing of that day had left him, and more often his nights were spent tossing and sleepless. He went out into the corridor, locking the door behind him. He walked briskly. Uniformed men in the corridors stopped, stood sharply at attention, saluted him, and from behind open doors officers saw who passed them and called out greetings as if he were the man everybody wished to count as a friend because he owned a future. A guard at the main gate offered good wishes and asked when he would be back, but he did not answer.
In a restricted parking area, a privileged space, the car’s engine was idling, Mikki at the wheel and Boris standing by an opened rear door. They talked and laughed, and saw him. It would be a fast drive to the military airport, then all three would be on a flight, duration 150 minutes, going north to Murmansk.
He had not lost his temper in that way before, had not shown such weakness… The images clung at his throat.
They went at speed and a cloud of dust billowed behind them. Alice, petite and pretty and with her hair trailing under the rim of a combat helmet, half of her face covered against the dust and sand by a khaki scarf, and the skin below her throat masked with the shape of an armour-plated jerkin, and with trousers in olive green flapping on her legs, was with the Special Forces. She was taken into Syria, across a border marked only by a single strand of barbed wire, now long buried in dirt and sand. A few such routes, listed only on the covert maps. existed for mutual convenience.
She was driven – three vehicles and one passenger, her, with machine-guns festooned on them all – towards a sanitised but unwelcoming refugee camp where they would collect a guide for further incursion. The escort had given her headphones and a face microphone so she could communicate, but remarks were kept to a minimum because her business was not for sharing, and procedures in this hostile environment were best kept private. It was ‘wild west country’ and the warlords of Syrian militia and the Americans and the Russians ruled the ground along with the Hereford people. There had been times when the British would have met up with Russians from their Spetsnaz teams, cans of strong beer broken open, and fags exchanged, but relations now were guarded, though the understanding of free passage along selected routes still held.
Only Knacker would have granted such opportunities to a low-ranking official. Alice spoke well, had a decent accent and a reasonable Oxford degree in Modern History, but working to Knacker and answerable only to him, she was entrusted with work far beyond her pay grade. Her family had wealth, a certain influence, a home on the hills above the Regency city of Bath… and her lover, sometimes passionate, sometimes noisy and sometimes raising eyebrows, was the formidable Fee. They were a solid item. Four months after teaming up domestically and living in Fee’s housing association apartment in south-east London, Alice had been driven by Fee to the west country. She had been dropped down the street and out of view of her parents’ home – and Fee would have gone to the shops – and she had walked the last 200 yards, and had believed that her mother and her father were too hidebound in their attitudes to accept the relationship, bless it. It had been a hideous wet day, biblical torrents rushing down the street, and Fee had driven to the house, and had been waved in along with their daughter. A few frosty minutes and news of a problem with an electric kettle had surfaced. Fee, huge and muscular and with a gap between her teeth and cropped hair and a bulging backside, had produced a screwdriver, had re-wired the kettle, had programmed their televisions, had fixed Alice’s mother’s mobile phone. Since then, Fee had been up on the roof to check for loose lead, had cleaned out gutters, had re-plumbed a shower unit. She was now adored and was greeted on each visit with a fresh work list… .
They had clearance of a sort, but had been fashionably economical with detail, to drive away from the camp and into the harsh hinterland of the country where grief and brutality and mourning and cruelty were the popular pastimes. Had she used a firearm? Once or twice, a laconic answer. She had an assault rifle across her lap loaded with twin magazines, and a leather pouch filled with grenades, and a medical pack strapped to her hip.
The camp was beyond a hillside, a collection of tented streets, and hanging above it was a pall of smoke from small cooking stoves. A Red Cross flag hung limp by the gate. The Amman based station that looked after Jordan had done the leg work. The guy in front of her, normally crouched behind his weapon and scanning every summit, every ridge and every bend in the track, gestured to her. A lone man sat beside the track, 100 yards from the camp entrance, his head down so that his features could not be recognised, and would have heard their engines rumbling along the track. The man pushed himself up and came loping towards them. He was watched by the guns, fingers on triggers and weapons cocked. It was bad country and only a fool would not have been suspicious of a supposed contact, his motives and loyalties. He was frisked, searched roughly – would be their guide.
Alice shook his hand firmly. The man pointed away to the east and the wheels spun and they headed out across open country… Sort of everyday work, Alice was giggling to herself, to go off-road and fetch herself three killers, not squeamish men, from a village. Down to her to select them. Not work for a recce man with demons in his head who might falter when a trigger needed pulling, but for guys in whom a desire for revenge burned brightly – a mark of the responsibility that Knacker dumped in her sweet little lap where the automatic rifle lay.