Jasha closed and barricaded the cabin door behind him, using the table and the chair. Rain dripped rhythmically from the roof and misted the window panes. He sat in his chair and faced the door, his rifle on his lap. The dog, an old and treasured friend, came off the sacking and sat close to his knee. He heard nothing and saw nothing. His fear seemed to shame him.
She was told to stand on the steps of the hotel. The evening was closing down and the clouds nibbled against the sea horizon behind her, and the wind blew at the soft rain. In spite of it being high summer some of the passing cars used their headlights and the tarmacadam glistened. The man she had met in Hamburg had greeted her at the airport, had told her again that she should call him ‘Knacker’, had shared a taxi with her, had booked her for a single night into the hotel by the shore and along from the harbour. He stood close to the girl but behind her, would have been in shadow. In the middle of the day the woman from the consulate had come to the bar on Rostocker Strasse, and had paid the owner for her time and had taken her to catch a flight through Copenhagen and on to this edge of the European mainland. She could have refused, had not. He, Knacker, had told her that this journey for which, in a quiet voice, he thanked her, was the last time she would be involved in a matter of retribution…
She would never forget. She had heard people discuss death, talk of bereavement, when they were waiting for food or drinks to be brought to them in the bar. Usually, they spoke of ‘moving on’ and ‘putting all that behind us’. They had not been where she had been. To have refused to come would, in Faizah’s mind, have been a betrayal of the village she had once been a part of. She saw him. Felt for the first time, the only time, a weakness in her legs and seemed to shiver on a warm evening. He walked well and she thought him a stranger in the place, and he looked once behind him and a woman – stout hips and tight trousers and with a street-light showing up a tattoo on her arm – waved him forward. Seemed as manipulated as she was. Dressed casually, he came forward warily and reached the far side of the street. No traffic to hold him up but he looked both ways as if that were routine, necessary or not, always careful, and crossed – would have been told to, and then looked up and was in front of the steps leading to the hotel’s entrance. Recognised her… where they had been and what they had shared. Of course he recognised her. He rocked on his feet, hesitated, and climbed the step towards her. She had been told that she would see him and had asked why she was brought the long distance from Hamburg. Knacker had said, “It’s to encourage him, my dear, simply that. Encourage him.”
To hug her, to kiss her, to shake her hand, to stand awkwardly in front of her. Options that faced Gaz. Remembered how it had been on the last day, all through the hours that he had been with her – and remembered also how it was when he had been in the hide and she had come close with her dogs and her goats, and never a word spoken between them. He had been in the room in the safe house, he had lain on the bed and stared at the ceiling and had not slept and had tried again and again to memorise all he had been shown… He had not thought of Aggie. Nor had he thought of the gardens and homes where he was booked for work. Nor had he considered the rumour mill that would have been grinding the length and breadth of Westray, and thought his life there already fractured. The puppeteer was Knacker… Gaz saw him standing in the darkness at the side of the hotel entrance and beyond the throw of the interior lights. He saw the scar on her chin, where the skin had folded back, where her finger now went, nervously. He stood in front of her. He thought her aged and her skin had lost most of its lustre and her eyes were dull. He reached out his hand. One finger of his joined with one of hers. Each finger hooked so that they did not drift away.
She said, “You are going to Murmansk, where he is.”
“Yes.”
“Where the Russian officer is.”
“Yes.”
“He could have stopped everything.”
“Could have, probably… chose not to.”
“I have been brought here to ‘encourage’ you.”
“It’s what they do – they believe if I am encouraged then I will do better.”
“What do you do in Murmansk?”
“I am supposed to watch the FSB office in Murmansk. To see him. To follow him. To learn his home and his work schedule. Then I come out.”
“Finished? See him, walk close to him? Then, come out?”
“That is what I am told to do.”
“You identify him, where he believes he is safe. You can get beside him. You can shoot him, strangle him, stab him, beat with a bar on his skull until it breaks. Not kill him?”
“No.”
“You remember it?”
“Yes. Very well. It is not my business to kill.”
“You are a soldier…”
“Was a soldier. Not now.”
“You will help to kill?”
“I do not know what is intended. Perhaps others will be used to kill. From my information, perhaps.”
“You will not kill him? Only help to kill him? Should I go with you? I could kill him. With my hands, with a gun… You saw him, saw what he did.”
“I just do my job,” he said flatly.
“I hope I encourage you to ‘do your job’.”
She turned away. The colour was back in her face and the light in her eyes, and he thought her glance ravaged him and was intended to. Gaz bit at his lip. She went into the hotel’s foyer, and Knacker came from the shadows and gazed impassively at him. He thought his words had been pathetic. The woman, Fee, called from behind him. He went back down the steps and crossed the road and might have been run down because he looked neither way, and a horn blasted him, and she was stern faced and made no comment and they went up the hill together towards the safe house. He supposed he was ‘encouraged’, and the next day he would go across the border, and remember, all the time, what he had seen that day.
Chapter 6
They were parked up in a four-wheel drive. Gaz was in the back.
The clothes he wore had been given him that morning. Cross-country gear and his own boots, and breakfast had been cooked by Fee, and a single cup of tea… He was shown again, on a laptop’s screen, the border and its hinterland, taken by a drone camera.
They were deep in a pine forest. A Norwegian was at the wheel and his name wasn’t given and Gaz assumed he was from their border control unit, roped in for the ride, and to offer advice. Fee sat beside the driver. Knacker was alongside Gaz. Gaz assumed the girl, Faizah, was now surplus baggage. They’d likely have pushed some bank notes into her purse for a taxi to the airport and she’d have already caught a flight south, then a Hamburg connection. Her job had been to hustle Gaz: she’d done that successfully. He had slept poorly, but could not remember the last time he had slept well – might have been the last night before deploying towards the village, Deir al-Siyarqi, more than two years ago.
Had slept well then, hadn’t known what would hit him in the next hours, out of ‘the clear blue sky’, unexpected and where all the bad times sprang from. Had been looking forward to seeing the girl – no name and no talk and a herd of goats and two dogs – and her playing the silent game with the raised eyebrow, the sharp light in her eye, and sharing his secret. A different girl on the step of the hotel, brought to Kirkenes with the express task of stiffening him. Army people called it ‘moral fibre’ – it needed to be strong, dependable, and they’d reckoned she could toughen him. Nothing about him sitting with her and asking how she did, what her life was, would she ever go back? Only her lecturing him on the constraints applying to any trooper, corporal, sergeant or officer in a unit specialising in reconnaissance. Left a bad taste, sour, and should have been better because of where they had been and what they had seen.