Ratcatcher

by Tim Stevens

  For you, dedushka, he thought.

  Five

  Purkiss was at the taxi rank in the back of a cab when he changed his mind, got out and walked on to the bus stop. The taxi would have been quicker but, glancing in the wing mirror as he settled himself in the seat, he’d seen the man striding past, rangy and crop-headed, his nonchalance too studied. The man had been part of the small crowd in the arrivals hall just after the final customs check. Although Purkiss had lost him for a few minutes, he’d spotted him again near the exit, peering into a shop window.

  If he took a cab the man would lose him. Purkiss didn’t want that.

  He approached a middle-aged couple in the queue at the bus stop and said, ‘Do you speak English?’

  The man rocked a palm from side to side.

  ‘Do you know how much the shuttle costs? Into Tallinn?’

  The man told him. Purkiss turned to raise eyebrows at the driver of the cab. He hoped his change of transport choice would appear to be about money. In any case the crop-headed man had walked on past the bus stop and turned on to a pedestrian crossing. Purkiss boarded the bus, watched the man disappear into a multi-storey car park, not looking behind him.

  Purkiss held on to a support pole as the bus tried to sway him loose. He focused on the feeling that was tightening his chest, trying to give it a name and thereby reduce its grip. Apprehension? He’d failed to reach the contact, Seppo, even before entering the field of operations. From the moment he’d set foot in the field, he’d been identified. Somehow Fallon had been expecting him.

  Not apprehension, no. Fear.

  On the plane, with nothing to read or otherwise occupy his thoughts for three hours, Purkiss had given himself up to memory, promising himself it would be the last time for a while.

  In his mind’s eye was Fallon as he’d been four years earlier. Forty years old, average height, slim build, shortish brown hair. Nothing conventionally distinguished about his looks, but he had a smile that could charm the paint off a wall. He was erudite without being affected, a supremely self-confident Harrow and Oxford boy without a trace of arrogance. To the amusement of those who worked with him he always carried round a particular book as a kind of totem, a paperback copy of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Apparently he’d been reading it during the mission in which he’d most narrowly escaped death.

  And, as it turned out, he was corrupt. Corrupt and corrupting, his taint seeping into the lives of other people, spoiling them irreversibly. Purkiss had left the Service after Claire’s murder, and while his colleagues accepted tacitly that he’d done so because to remain would have been to be reminded daily of what and whom he’d lost, in his more honest moments Purkiss admitted to himself that it was Fallon’s rottenness that had driven him out rather than the offer that Vale had subsequently made him. It was like refusing to live any longer in a house in which a body had been found walled up and decomposing into the stonework.

  Vale had appeared out of nowhere during the trial, turning up every day and sitting in the same spot behind Purkiss. He was obviously Service or retired – the trial wasn’t being conducted in public and the spectators were being vetted carefully – but it wasn’t until Vale fell into step beside him after a long day in the courtroom and suggested they go for a bite to eat that Purkiss had any conversation with him. Purkiss’s instinct was to decline the offer. His social life had dwindled to a minimum since he’d lost Claire, and he wasn’t anxious to change that. But he was curious despite himself about this quiet, gloomy man, his Afro-Caribbean ethnicity unusual in a Service employee of his generation.

  In the Italian restaurant, Vale told him he’d taken early retirement from the Service twelve years before, his story a familiar one of a former field agent unable to adjust to life in mothballs. In the seventies, he’d infiltrated Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow under the guise of a Tanzanian postgraduate exchange student, had his cover blown by a KGB agent provocateur and got out hidden in a freight train with a bullet in one lung. After that his deep-cover days were over. He spent the rest of the seventies and the eighties working the diplomatic circuit in southern Africa, in the thick of the proxy Cold War battles between the superpowers. The nineties brought him back to London and, essentially, desk work.

  They traded war stories for a while, both aware that this was preamble. Over coffee Vale made his pitch.

  ‘One searches for a less hackneyed expression than the tip of the iceberg, but that, really, is what Fallon is.’ He shovelled sugar into his cup. Purkiss wondered how he stayed so gaunt, though he’d learn later about the sixty-a-day cigarette habit.

  Purkiss stared down at his fists, flashing back to the man in the dock. ‘He hasn’t got a hope.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll convict him, all right. He’ll get life. But that’s because he got caught in the act. It was a stupid mistake he made, and his punishment isn’t going to deter anybody else, because all it will teach others is that they have to be more careful than he was.’ He steepled gnarled fingers. ‘When an agent goes rogue, the Service would prefer to dispose of the problem quietly. In a case like this, the murder of an agent by a fellow agent witnessed by yet another agent, there’s no question of any cover up. Justice has to be swift and merciless. But if Fallon had stopped short, been caught with nothing more than his fingers in the till… The top brass would have sacked him, yes, but might have bought his silence rather than prosecute him. The Service is still punch drunk after the Iraq inquiries and the catastrophic intelligence failures which were brought to light as a result. It can’t afford any more scandal, least of all the public outing of criminals in its midst. What I’m saying, John – may I? – John, yes, is that if you’re a member of the Service, whereas you might not quite be able to get away with murder, you can get away with pretty much anything short of that.’

  ‘And you have examples of this happening?’

  ‘Plenty. I’ve made it my business to seek them out. In effect, I’ve been doing what your fiancee was doing on a smaller scale in her investigation of one man.’

  Purkiss studied Vale, trying to prise his way behind the gaze. ‘So why don’t you go public? Blow the lid off the whole thing? They’d threaten you with the Official Secrets Act, but you could find ways around it. Plant rumours, be ambiguous.’

  Vale watched him in silence, his eyes and mouth serious. He reached across for the salt and pepper cellars and placed them a few inches apart.

  ‘You were what, fourteen years old when the Wall came down? Sixteen when the Soviet Union folded. Too young to have had any strong views one way or the other on the nuclear disarmament debate. I was against unilateral disarmament myself. Still am. I believed in like for like, matching the enemy’s destructive power with one’s own. But while many of us, most of us, perhaps, in the multilateralist camp were putting our trust fervently in the idea of deterrence, believing that if deterrence failed then it really didn’t matter who had more weapons, there were others who saw the annihilation of the human race in nuclear fire as not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the other side didn’t win.’ He tapped one of the cellars. ‘Better dead than Red, better rubble than roubles. I’ve no doubt such people existed on the Soviet side as well. Ideologues who believed ideas could exist without a population of actual people alive to hold these ideas in their heads.’

  Some of the salt had spilled. Purkiss swept it into his hand and disposed of it on his empty plate. Vale said: ‘What I’m getting at, John, is that to blow the lid off, as you put it, corruption and crime within the Service is to take the fanatic’s approach. Let the whole structure burn as long as it keeps its purity. I don’t take this view. I believe in the Service. I want to save it from itself. But I don’t want to destroy it in the process.’

  Purkiss learned a great deal that night, which stretched on into the early hours. Vale had had his eye on Purkiss, and Claire too, for many months before the murder. The man knew almost more about Purkiss than he remembered himself, not only details of
his degree at Cambridge and his prior upbringing as the son of a Suffolk farmer and landowner, but names of people from Purkiss’s childhood whom he hadn’t thought of for decades.

  Purkiss learned about drug rings, national and intercontinental, in which Service personnel were suspected of having a hand. He learned of deals between Western oligarchs and foetid tinpot dictatorships brokered by British agents. He heard about terrorist atrocities the commission of which had been assisted by undercover operatives, who had walked away scot free because the outrages had taken place in impoverished third world areas which lacked the blessing of a large population of lawyers.

  What Vale was proposing was that Purkiss leave the Service and work for him instead. Purkiss’s role would be to track down and shut down the renegades, avoiding the ponderousness and potential for scandal which would attend the normal official investigative process.

  ‘You’ll be hated,’ Vale said. ‘Hated, and despised as a turncoat. But if we do this right, in time you’ll become a legend. And we know the power legends exert, the atavistic awe they inspire. Awe enough, perhaps, on occasion to deter.’

  Purkiss asked Vale for a week to think about it.

  Five days later Fallon was convicted of murder. The next morning Purkiss resigned from the Service. By the river in sight of Legoland, the name by which insiders referred to the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, Purkiss shook Vale’s bony hand. It was all the contract they’d ever have.

  *

  The Jacobin watched the monitor as the zoom on the camera was adjusted and the image sharpened. Kuznetsov’s man had chosen well, a position in a coffee shop with a head-on unobstructed view of the arrivals corridor. The other two men were among the crowd lining the railing, one of them visible on the periphery of the camera’s field.

  Six minutes earlier the man had relayed back that the baggage was now at the carousels according to the information board, and now the first of the passengers from Stansted began trickling down the passage, led by an exhausted young backpacker with a wan smile for her waiting parents. As the video streamed through, the Jacobin’s computer was recording it for playback later.

  The voice of the man with the camera murmured through the phone link as though to himself: ‘Fifteen.’

  He was keeping a tally of the passengers. Good. They were arriving in clumps now. The passenger list had numbered one hundred and seventy-four, none of the names familiar. The Jacobin examined every face, discarding each one in turn.

  Then it flared, the shock of recognition, and the Jacobin watched the figure stride down the corridor and emerge into the crowd and disappear from view. The Jacobin brought up the window with the recording of the footage, rewound it and played it again at half speed, then paused it when the face was turned straight towards the camera.

  A tall man, lean. Hair dark and on the long side. Clean shaven. Blue shirt, khaki chinos, duffel coat, a shoulder bag.

  ‘I’ve seen him,’ said the Jacobin, and gave the description. The two men in the crowd were on the audio connection and acknowledged. The Jacobin kept watching the streaming feed in case a second familiar face appeared, but the crowd dispersed and the flow stopped. The Jacobin shut down the video feed but kept the audio connection with the two men.

  ‘He’s been to a cash machine. Heading for the taxi rank now.’

  ‘He’s a professional,’ said the Jacobin. ‘Use especial discretion.’

  The instruction wasn’t acknowledged. Probably there was a sneer on the man’s lips. The Jacobin leaned back in the swivel chair and stared at the ceiling.

  John Purkiss. Here in Tallinn, at this point in the game.

  He was going to be a problem.

  Six

  He identified the second tag within two minutes of boarding the bus. The initial process was one of elimination: as a rule, discount people in groups, children or obvious teenagers, very old people, and the physically disabled. The bus was crowded, but he soon filtered out everyone except the middle-aged couple he’d approached in the queue, a young woman in a short skirt engrossed in text messaging, and a short man of about forty in a fedora which he kept on his head even in the humid press of the bus. The man had squeezed on at the last minute and shuffled his rump into a tiny space on one of the seats, provoking mutters of annoyance.

  Purkiss let his gaze drift over the other passengers. Through the windows the last glimmers of coral had been sucked down past the horizon and darkness had settled, and with it the cold.

  The girl in the skirt pushed the bell and got off. The female half of the couple sat down in her place. Purkiss didn’t think they were the ones.

  The man in the fedora murmured into a mobile phone, his voice inaudible. Purkiss let his stare settle on the man. He didn’t look up.

  That was unnatural. Purkiss knew he was the tag.

  After five minutes the bus stopped again and the man got off. Purkiss peered through the window after him but he strode off without looking back.

  The bus pulled into what was obviously the terminus and came to a stop. Purkiss stood aside, letting others pass until he was the last person on the bus, then stepped off himself. The road bustled with shops and early evening crowds. He took a moment to locate the man he was looking for, then spotted him walking away into the town: heavy set, bull necked. Purkiss half turned. There he was, the rangy man with the cropped hair from the airport, ten paces behind, his lips moving.

  Purkiss understood how they’d done it. As soon as it was clear he was taking the bus, the crop-headed man had gone to get his car and had driven here to the town gate to wait for him. In the mean time the man with the fedora had got on the bus to make sure they didn’t lose him. When he realised Purkiss had made him, he’d rung ahead and got off at a designated stop, and been replaced immediately by the bull-necked man Purkiss had seen lumber aboard and who was now disappearing ahead.

  So, they knew he’d spotted the one in the fedora. Did they realise he’d identified his current tags? It was a classic box formation, one ahead and one behind, except that for it to work the person being followed shouldn’t be aware of either component.

  Two followers were going to be difficult. If he could isolate one, lose him and then turn the tables and track him, it could lead him to valuable information. Throwing off two tags was possible, but usually involved breaking cover and running, which tended to make it harder to pick up the trail again afterwards. The answer was probably going to be to get behind the rear tag without appearing to be evading pursuit.

  Disorientated by the complete unfamiliarity of his surroundings, Purkiss dropped back a pace, letting the bull-necked man round a corner ahead. He glanced across at a mirrored shop window and saw that his plan was going to need radical revision because the crop-headed man had changed tactics and was closing on him fast.

  *

  ‘He’s made us. Both of us.’

  The Jacobin stood and paced, the handset perched on the desk and switched to speakerphone. I told you, damn it. ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Trying to subvert the situation.’

  They’d never get back on to Purkiss if he turned the tables. ‘Listen to me. If you lose him now we may never find him again. I want you to move in and apprehend him. Non-lethal force only.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘How public are you?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘No police.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The Jacobin stood still, breathing slowly, frustrated at the lack of visual contact.

  Purkiss, gone from the Service for four years. What the hell was he doing here now?

  *

  He looked back and there was no pretence now, a direct hard stare as the crop-haired man bore down. The street was crowded but not enough that an attack would go unnoticed in a press of bodies.

  Unless the man had something in his – He reacted even before the thought was fully formed as the man lunged, a fluid sweep of his arm which Purkiss sidestepped feeling like he was def
ending himself against a fencing sword, except that protruding from the man’s fist was no blade but a needle so tiny that it barely produced a glint. For an instant the man was off balance. Purkiss tried to swat at his back to tip him past his centre of gravity, but he sprang forward and righted himself and stepped aside. He glared at Purkiss across the pavement.

  Nobody else seemed to have noticed. It was some sort of tranquilliser, Purkiss assumed, designed for quick action so that he’d go down and the man would support him, full of concern, explaining to the passersby that he was a friend. Then he would hustle him away to whatever fate was planned for him.

  The man up ahead, the bull-necked one, would be either on his way back or staying put waiting for his friend to drive Purkiss towards him and so to try to keep the odds as they currently stood. Purkiss backed under the awning of a shop and elbowed open the door and stepped inside, letting the door swing shut. It was a bookshop, deeper than it was wide, not crowded but with a few customers browsing unhurriedly enough that it didn’t seem about to close. Purkiss sidled down the centre aisle, keeping his eye on the door. It opened and the crop-headed man came through. He held back, standing near the door, watching Purkiss, waiting. Again his lips were moving. Purkiss knew he was summoning his colleague. There wasn’t much time.

  The fire door was down a passage on the other side of the service counter. Two women sat at the tills, one young, the other possibly her mother. Neither had looked up when the man came in. Purkiss walked to the counter. ‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

  The younger woman said, ‘Little.’

  ‘Sorry to have to tell you, but I just saw that man near the door put a book in his pocket.’

  The girl’s eyes widened and she glanced past him. The other woman muttered a question and she answered and the older woman came out from behind the counter and called down the length of the shop at the man, her tone pleasant but assertive.