Jokerman (John Purkiss 3)

by Tim Stevens

  He decided on an oblique approach: ‘You said you had the ITF office under surveillance since yesterday.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why yesterday, particularly?’

  She hesitated, then released a long breath. ‘I’m going to take a leap into the unknown here, and suggest that we both know the name Charles Morrow.’

  As she said it, she watched his face intently. Again he was struck by her professionalism. She was interested not so much in his reply as in what his face revealed.

  Purkiss said, ‘Yes.’

  Holley said, ‘You’re not Security Service. Not Five.’

  ‘No.’

  After another pause, she said, ‘I am.’

  ‘Then you should be able to find out relatively quickly who I am.’ Though not what I’m doing involved in this mission, he thought.

  She shook her head. ‘If you mean, you’re on the Service’s database… no. I can’t access it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m working off the books,’ she said. ‘Freelance. Not even that, because it suggests I’ve been hired. I’m doing this on my own.’

  ‘Doing what, exactly?’

  ‘Looking for Charlie Morrow’s killer,’ she said. ‘He was a friend of mine. A decent man.’

  ‘Your Service must be tearing the country apart looking for the killer,’ Purkiss said. ‘Why not become part of that investigation?’

  Instead of answering, she picked up a spoon and stirred her coffee absently, even though she’d already done so. ‘You’re not in the Service,’ she repeated.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you working for it, though?’

  ‘No.’ It wasn’t entirely a lie. He was working for Kasabian unofficially, not for the Security Service. The distinction would be a little fine for most people, Purkiss knew. But truth and lies had different meanings in his world.

  ‘So… what’s your role in this?’

  ‘I’m looking for Morrow’s killer, just like you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  For the first time he saw a flash of anger in her dark eyes. It faded rapidly. Purkiss suspected she was by nature a fiery person, who had to struggle more than most other spooks to maintain the iron grip of emotional control that was required by the job.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I owe you. If it wasn’t for you I’d be dead. And to use a cliché, we’re on the same side here. I think we can help one another. But I can’t reveal why I’m involved. Not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It would be breaking confidence.’

  It sounded so old-fashioned, so out of place in a discussion between two espions, even to Purkiss, that he thought he saw the twitch of a smile at her mouth.

  She studied him levelly, appraising. Then she nodded.

  ‘That I can understand.’

  ‘I will tell you that my background is with the other side. SIS.’

  ‘Yes, I suspected that. But you’re not with them any more?’

  ‘No.’ Through the window over her shoulder, Purkiss saw a fleet of police vans barging its way down the high street. People in the café were turning to look, the buzz in the air rising as word spread. Bomb… terrorist attack…

  He spread his hands. ‘Answer this or not, as you see fit… but to go back to what I asked, why are you going it alone? Why not join the official investigation?’

  ‘Because I suspect someone within the Service is involved in the killing. Possibly more than one person.’

  Eighteen

  She sat back, leaving the statement between them. If she was expecting surprise from Purkiss, she must have been disappointed. Or intrigued.

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘Charlie Morrow and I are – were – friends. We worked together a couple of years ago on some data mining stuff involving new blood in the Egyptian Embassy, and hit it off. Nothing intimate, if you see what I mean. None of that. But we each liked the way the other worked. We had similar values.’ She raised her eyebrows a fraction. ‘It sounds ridiculously naïve, doesn’t it.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘We stayed in touch after our work together finished. Met up rarely, exchanged the odd email or text. And it became clear to me that Charlie was unhappy. Not with his day-to-day work itself, not even particularly with his personal life, though he was divorced and lived alone. Rather, he had a problem with the way the Service was run. With its ethos.

  ‘He wasn’t so green as to imagine that any counterintelligence service was entirely pure, that there weren’t underhand and even morally questionable things that had to be done from time to time in the interests of the greater good. But he felt the Service had become not just the protector of the good, but the determiner of what was good in the first place. It was the old story of how the legislative and executive branches of government need to be kept separate in order for a system to be just. Charlie felt the Service had outstripped its authority. Divorced itself from the need to answer to Parliament. And he didn’t like it.’

  She shifted in her seat, and winced. She’d need that wound seen to soon, Purkiss thought. But he didn’t want to interrupt her flow.

  ‘I’m assuming you know Charlie was deeply interested in Iraq,’ she went on. ‘His wife being Kurdish. She was a refugee from Saddam’s persecution, and was apparently a passionate advocate of his overthrow, for obvious reasons. Like her, Charlie backed the Coalition invasion in 2003. He began to have his doubts in the aftermath, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, when the extent of the failure of the post-invasion planning became glaringly evident. When the bombings and mass slaughter got underway.

  ‘Charlie had no problem morally with investigating and surveilling dissident Iraqi groups here in London, groups like Iraqi Thunder Fist. He wasn’t one of those who believed that the planting of a bomb in a crowded Baghdad market place was somehow a noble act of resistance. But he was becoming increasingly concerned about the uses to which the intelligence he was gathering was being put. He’d speculate that it was being passed on to the CIA, to some of the Middle Eastern regimes surrounding Iraq, and that it was being used to justify all kinds of things – indiscriminate assassinations, blackmail, kidnapping.’

  Purkiss thought about this. In the SIS he’d sometimes seen people start to lose contact with reality. Steeped in a culture of lies, deception, betrayal and ambiguity, eventually they saw treachery and untruth in everybody around them, in every single human interaction.

  She sighed. ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking. And yes, Charlie was paranoid. Particularly after his wife left him and he spent a lot more time on his own. But he was also shrewd. His speculations weren’t altogether implausible. Anyway. Three days ago, he tried to contact me. Left a message on my phone. I was abroad, on a few days’ leave in the South of France. There was no phone reception, something I’d chosen deliberately. I came back the next day, two days ago, and got the message. Shortly afterwards I discovered he was dead.’

  ‘What was the message?’

  ‘He said, “Touching down”. Just those two words. It was a kind of code he’d made up. He’d said once that if I ever got that message, it meant he’d gone away, or was about to go away, to a far-off place, and that I was to search his flat immediately.’ She glanced off to one side. ‘I thought he was joking when he said that.’

  ‘And did you? Search his flat?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t easy. I went straight to his flat in Marble Arch. On the way I learned via the grapevine that he’d been killed that morning. I didn’t get any details, just that he was dead. So I assumed his flat was either about to be searched, or had already been searched and I was walking into a trap. I did as much countersurveillance on it as I could without delaying things for too long, and I went in.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘A notebook.’ She gave half a laugh. ‘I don’t mean a notebook computer, I mean an actual, old-fashioned paper notebook. Taped in
a recess above the toilet pipe as it went into the wall. I’ve got it in a safe place, but so far it hasn’t been much help. Most of it’s written in some kind of personal shorthand. Nothing even a codebreaker could crack, because it’s not designed to be read by a single other human being.’

  ‘Then why did he want you to find it?’

  ‘Most of it’s in code. But a few names come up, written in normal language. Iraqi Thunder Fist is one. Mohammed Al-Bayati is another.’

  ‘So you staked out the ITF office.’

  She shrugged. ‘What could I do? From that moment on, I caught Charlie’s paranoia. He’d obviously known he was at risk of being killed, which is why he rang me. Me, not his line of command. It suggested he at least suspected someone within the Service of being an enemy. That meant I had to regard everyone, the whole of the Security Service, as a potential threat. It meant I couldn’t access any of the databases any more, couldn’t search for Mohammed Al-Bayati’s home address, in case it triggered alarm bells. So I had to do it the hard way. Watch the office and see if he turned up.’

  Purkiss sifted through the information she’d given him, calculating how much she probably knew, and how much she didn’t.

  ‘Ms Holley –’

  ‘Hannah.’

  ‘Hannah, what do you know of the circumstances of Morrow’s death?’

  ‘That he was shot on an estate somewhere in the Home Counties, with a long gun.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘That’s it. Through the grapevine.’

  There was no point holding back, Purkiss thought. He said, ‘He was meeting the Home Secretary. He was going to blow the whistle on something within the Service.’

  Hannah’s eyes flared. She sat back in her chair, letting out a long breath through pursed lips, managing to sound vindicated and wondering at the same time.

  ‘Don’t ask me how I know,’ he continued. ‘But it’s one hundred per cent reliable information. And I’m here as an outsider, to find out both who killed Morrow and what he was about to expose.’

  When Hannah leaned forwards again there was something gone from her eyes. It was the professional reserve, the forced coolness. Uncovered, the blackness of her dilated pupils threatened to suck Purkiss in.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘You said “a few” names came up in Morrow’s notebook,’ said Purkiss.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are others?’

  ‘There’s one more.’

  Nineteen

  Within twenty seconds of the blast, Tullivant was gone, driving at an unhurried pace north towards Greenwich.

  He’d been parked for six hours at the end of the street, in the road with which Al-Bayati’s street formed a T, so that he had a clear view of both the Range Rover and of the entrance to the man’s house.

  Ten minutes before climbing into his parked car to wait, he’d approached the Range Rover, a leather bag over one shoulder. The street was all but deserted at five thirty in the morning, not even an early jogger or dog walker to be seen. Nonetheless, there were bound to be people up at this hour, some of them even looking out of their windows as they sipped their first mugs of tea, so he had to make everything look as natural as possible.

  Tullivant disabled the Range Rover’s alarm and the locking mechanism with a piece of electronic equipment not widely available commercially. He popped the hood, lugged a bottle of windscreen washer fluid round together with a small package which he’d taken from the leather bag concealed against it, and reached under the raised bonnet as though filling up with the fluid. He withdrew the dipstick, muttered as though finding the oil level low, and lowered himself to peer under the chassis, looking for a leak. Quickly, carefully, he fitted the package of C-24 explosive under the chassis.

  Back in the car, he prised away the panel around the ignition and wired up the detonator. It wasn’t his favourite type of car bomb. Motion-sensitive ones, triggered by a human bulk lowering itself onto the seat, were more elegant; but in a busy residential street like this one they were too risky. A child climbing onto the bonnet might set it off. And Tullivant had discounted a remote-controlled device, because the signals jammed too frequently.

  At that point, Tullivant could easily have driven away. He could have been on the other side of the country by the time the bomb exploded, reducing considerably his chances of being caught. But he needed to see for himself that the hit was successful. So he waited.

  Once, during the six hours, the front door of the house had opened, and Tullivant had stiffened in his car seat. But it had only been one of the bodyguards, going out for the newspaper and a bottle of milk. Tullivant was relieved the man went on foot. It would have been embarrassing if he’d blown up the street in the process of popping out for a few essentials.

  Around noon, it had all kicked off, and very nearly unravelled.

  Al-Bayati and his entourage emerged in a seeming hurry, heading straight for the Range Rover. As they were climbing in, the tall man whom Tullivant had been aware of on the periphery of his vision suddenly stepped onto the road, his hand extended, holding some sort of identification card.

  John Purkiss.

  The shock of recognition made Tullivant feel disorientated, as if he’d slipped into someone else’s dream.

  Reality intruded again. Tullivant had the Timberwolf in the car. If he moved quickly, he could take out Purkiss, and hope that Al-Bayati and his guards took fright and chose to start the car.

  A woman was running up the road towards Purkiss, from behind him so that he couldn’t see her. Dark hair, slim build.

  She collided with Purkiss and, as if he was the trigger, the car went up.

  Tullivant ducked beneath the window, felt the heat sear his head. The roar made his car judder.

  He raised his head once more. Dense smoke choked his throat and stung his eyes.

  Through the haze he saw the rolling, screaming bodies, the tumbling fireballs of debris.

  The frame of the Range Rover loomed into view, haloed in flame.

  Satisfied, Tullivant started the engine of his own car and pulled away. Nobody would notice his departure in the chaos.

  Negotiating the streets one-handed, he hit the speed-dial key on his phone.

  ‘Target’s neutralised,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘One thing,’ said Tullivant. ‘John Purkiss was at the scene.’

  He relayed what he’d seen: Purkiss approaching Al-Bayati with some sort of card in his hand, as though posing as a police officer or other figure of authority.

  The news was received in silence. Tullivant didn’t ask, do you want me to take Purkiss out? He’d wait for his instructions, without speculation, without pre-emption.

  ‘Another target.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tullivant.

  ‘This is a little more complicated.’

  Tullivant listened, angling towards Rotherhithe and the tunnel that would take him across the Thames. There was a lot of detail to be absorbed. Tullivant had a visual memory, so that he retained facts by converting them into a flowing series of images. He used the system to memorise the target’s name, address, and the specifics of exactly when he was expected to move in and do the hit.

  Yes, this was going to be more complicated than the ones so far. But in many ways more interesting, for that very reason.

  Twenty

  Alone in the house for a final precious few minutes, Emma made herself a cup of green tea and sat at the kitchen counter, looking out over the Common.

  The kids had stayed over with their friends, the Finches’ twins, and when Emma had rung that morning to ask about picking them up, Melanie Finch had said, ‘God, no, don’t rush. They’re having a great time. A well-behaved pair you’ve got there, Em.’

  Melanie said she’d drop Jack and Niamh back at Emma’s around lunchtime. It was now half past twelve. The live-in nanny, Ulyana, would only be back the next morning.

  Emma had arri
ved home the night before at two-thirty, tiptoeing through the silent rooms, carrying her guilt like a burden she might drop at any moment and wake Brian. She’d slipped in beside him, hoping he wouldn’t wake up, but he’d half-rolled sleepily towards her.

  ‘Busy night, love?’

  For an instant she was convinced he’d smell James in the bed with them, even though she’d showered back at the hotel before changing back into her day clothes. But he turned on his back and put out an arm for her to lie across, and she did so, snuggling into the crook the way she’d done for years, in the beginning.

  She felt the slow rumble of his breathing in his chest beside her ear. It was at the same time deeply comforting, and almost unendurable in the way it stoked her guilt and shame.

  He hadn’t driven her into James’s arms. Hadn’t done anything except bore her. And he didn’t even do that, really. He was witty, clever, interesting, and interested in her. If his job as a Physical Education teacher at the local private boys’ school didn’t present as obvious a topic of conversation at parties as hers as a GP did… well, so what?

  No. Emma was honest enough with herself that she could recognise what a walking cliché she was. It was the danger in James she was attracted to. There was something of the bad boy about him. And like a teenage ingénue, she felt herself drawn in.

  When she woke, the slanting sun indicated it was after nine o’clock. Emma glanced across but saw Brian’s side of the bed empty, the pillow neatly plumped.

  The relief made her slump back on the sheets, the guilt close behind. Of course. He was coaching cricket today. It meant no awkwardness this morning, no struggling to ignore the lingering sensation of being in James’s arms. By the time Brian got home, she’d have got through a normal day, and would be more herself again.

  Sitting at the counter, waiting for the children to arrive, Emma had a sudden, insane urge to phone James.

  She suspected he used a special, pay-as-you-go phone to communicate with her, rather than his work one or even his main personal one. It was the sort of thing an agent in his position would do, secrecy coming instinctively. But she knew she couldn’t risk calling him.