Jokerman (John Purkiss 3)

by Tim Stevens

  One of the things that impressed, and sometimes astounded, Purkiss about Vale was the speed at which he worked.

  On the way out to the car, Vale had rung Kasabian, then handed the phone to Purkiss. Purkiss gave a brief summary of what Rossiter had told him.

  ‘Riyadh,’ Kasabian said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hell of a long shot.’

  ‘Better than no shot.’

  In the car, while Purkiss used his phone to locate the address of Scipio Rand Security, Vale spoke on his own phone via its hands-free function, cutting from one connection to another, issuing instructions, considering and rejecting suggestions. He fell silent eventually, waiting for a call back.

  Purkiss found a stark website for Scipio Rand Security, minimalist in its design yet expertly done. They called themselves one of the leading providers of personal and corporate security in the Middle East, and a link provided examples of their clients: mostly British and American businesses, but there were a few Saudi-sounding names there as well. There were none of the gushing testimonials normally to be found. It made the firm sound somehow more professional.

  A telephone number and fax and email addresses were listed. Purkiss memorised them, but didn’t think they’d be of use. Contacting the firm beforehand would be like the police telephoning a suspect in advance to notify him of an impending arrest.

  The problem was, despite pictures of a grand-looking complex of office buildings on the website’s home page, which suggested the firm had an actual physical existence, there was no address for the headquarters.

  Vale’s phone rang. He hit Receive and a voice filled the car, speaking so rapidly Purkiss couldn’t understand what it was saying.

  When it had finished, Vale said: ‘We’re in luck.’ He looked at his watch. ‘There’s a chartered flight to Riyadh leaving from Heathrow at three fifteen. That’s fifty minutes from now. You’ve a seat booked on it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Purkiss.

  Heathrow was this side of London, on the route back. And he had his passport with him.

  Vale reached into the pocket in his door, brought something crackling out. It was a pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out with his lips, dropped the pack back into the door pocket, and pressed in the car’s cigarette lighter.

  ‘I thought you’d quit,’ said Purkiss.

  ‘I did. Angina, as I told you.’

  ‘Quentin, it’s not for me to lecture, but…ah.’ Purkiss shrugged.

  ‘It helps me think better.’

  Purkiss thought he detected the tiniest of tremors in the hand that pressed the lighter cylinder to the end of the cigarette.

  Vale lowered the window on his side as the acrid fumes began to fill the car. Purkiss gazed through the windscreen.

  A tremor?

  He’d never seen Vale overtly crave a smoke, not even in these last few days when he’d been off them. So why the jitteriness now?

  Purkiss glanced at Vale’s profile. It was gloomily impassive, his default expression.

  They drove in silence, something tense and undefinable in the air between them.

  At the drop-off area outside Heathrow’s Terminal Five, Vale scribbled down the flight details and handed the slip of paper to Purkiss.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  Purkiss held his gaze for a fraction of a second. There was nothing to read there.

  He walked into the cool of the terminal building.

  Finding a relatively private spot in a corner, he dialled Hannah’s number. There was a lightness in her tone when she answered, a change since the events of the night before.

  Purkiss told her about the conversation with Rossiter. ‘I’m about to board to Riyadh.’

  ‘I want to be there too.’

  He’d already considered it. ‘Okay. You’ll have to catch a separate flight, which would be advisable anyway. Let me know, and I’ll meet you at the airport.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘One thing. I don’t actually have a physical address for the place, and I won’t be able to hunt for it online while I’m in the air. Could you perhaps see what you can find, while you’re waiting to get a flight?’

  ‘No problem.’

  Purkiss headed for the check-in desk, passport at the ready.

  He could have asked Vale to look for the address, but something had stopped him.

  Vale’s tension, his sudden resumption of smoking.

  Like a child, held helpless before an advancing ogre and trying desperately to twist away from it, Purkiss recoiled from the suspicion that was crawling over him, and from the realisations that were lining up one after the other.

  The security leak, which had resulted in the sniper’s attacking Purkiss in his home even before he’d taken on the Jokerman operation.

  The apparent coincidence of the gunman having been poised outside Arkwright’s house at the very same time Purkiss and Hannah had been questioning him.

  Vale?

  The horror grew within Purkiss as the rumbling of the plane’s engines rose to a roar, then a shriek as it launched into the vast and unknown sky.

  Thirty-nine

  Purkiss had travelled through King Khalid International many times en route to Iraq during his time there, and then as now he never failed to be struck by the enormous, city-like sprawl of the airport in the desert below the plane, or by the colossal mosque which dominated the passenger terminal as he emerged from the arrivals area.

  It was a little after midnight, local time. Still, the terminal bustled as if night hadn’t fallen outside. The building was efficiently airconditioned but Purkiss had received a dose of the night-time heat as he’d stepped off the plane. Riyadh in August: not the best time for a visitor from a temperate clime.

  Purkiss switched on his phone, waited for the international roaming function to kick in. He had one text message waiting. It was from Hannah: Call me.

  She answered immediately. ‘I have Scipio Rand’s address,’ she said. ‘I managed to stay out of the Service databases, but I had to call in a couple of favours with contacts in the Foreign Office.’ She gave a street address in the Diplomatic Quarter.

  ‘Good work,’ said Purkiss.

  ‘Also, I’ve booked a Saudia flight for ten-oh-five – that’s half an hour from now. I’m at Heathrow. Landing time’s seven twenty in the morning at your end.’ She told him the flight details.

  Seven hours to go. Purkiss had managed to catch a couple of hours’ sleep on the flight, and didn’t feel tired now. He wandered the length and breadth of the terminal, trying to look purposeful so as not to attract attention as a loiterer. When the shop windows had exhausted his meagre interest, he found an all-night coffee shop that served meals, and fuelled up with caffeine, carbohydrate and protein.

  He thought about Hannah as he ate, and the night before. Had it been an outlet for the tension they’d both built up after such a chaotic, threatening day? Probably. But Purkiss found himself genuinely looking forward to seeing her again. He checked his phone for messages, but there were none. Why there would be any, he didn’t quite know. He supposed part of him was anticipating news from the hospital, news about Kendrick. And it wouldn’t be good.

  Purkiss’s thoughts tacked back to Vale, no matter how he tried to rein them away. He’d thought it through, and there was no more thinking to be done on the matter. Not now, not until he got back.

  Vale had deceived him once, over a complicated matter. He’d led Purkiss to believe that Claire, Purkiss’s fiancée, was the innocent victim of a murder by another agent. That agent had turned out to be one of Vale’s men, and on the side of good, whatever good was in this particular world; whereas Claire was corrupt. Purkiss thought he had forgiven Vale for his deception because Vale had had Purkiss’s best interests in mind, even if Purkiss didn’t agree with his approach.

  But this… this was different. If Vale was mixed up in all this, working for Strang, then he was putting himself on the other side of an unbridgeable divide from Purkiss
. Had Vale’s shakiness, his nerves, been the outward manifestations of a guilty conscience as he sent Purkiss, a man he’d worked with closely for half a decade, into a trap and to his death? Or was the older man simply human, prone to the drawbacks of ageing – tremulousness, faltering courage – like anybody else? Was Purkiss reading too much into it all?

  There were the niggling details, though. The coincidences, the leaks. And treachery on Vale’s part could explain most, perhaps all of them.

  A group of women walked past the shop, dressed in full-length abayat. Purkiss wondered whether Hannah would remember she was obliged to cover up or risk falling foul of the mutaween, the religious police. He also wondered how she’d react to being forbidden to drive.

  Then he realised how different his attitude was towards her compared with other agents he’d worked with. Normally he took it for granted that colleagues had done their homework. Now, he was fussing over Hannah Holley as if she were a neophyte.

  Purkiss shook his head. She’s really got to you.

  The buzzing of his phone shook him out of his thoughts. He picked it up.

  It was Hannah.

  ‘John, I’m sorry about this. I missed the flight. Delays at check in, and at the scanner.’

  ‘Do you think you’ve been compromised?’

  ‘No, it’s unlikely. Nobody took much time over me. Just large numbers of passengers to process, and too few desks to cope.’

  Purkiss looked at his watch. One o’clock.

  ‘There’s another flight at six in the morning,’ Hannah said. ‘Seven hours from now. I’ve booked a seat on that. But it means I’ll be there with you only around two in the afternoon.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Can’t be helped.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘No point just sitting here at the airport,’ he said. ‘I’ll head into the city. Scout around.’

  ‘Don’t approach the Scipio Rand offices, will you? Not without me.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he said.

  They rang off.

  Purkiss sat sipping his coffee, thinking.

  Don’t approach Scipio Rand, she’d said, and he’d agreed. But they both knew the temptation would be too great for him to resist. He wasn’t given to loitering about for any length of time, not when there was a target to be investigated.

  It was of course entirely possible that Hannah had missed the flight. Heathrow was a notoriously busy airport, and it wasn’t as if Hannah could use her Security Service credentials to buy herself special treatment, working off the books as she was.

  But it was also possible she’d deliberately not taken the flight.

  The vast, echoing terminal around Purkiss seemed suddenly frighteningly smaller, as though the walls and ceiling were closing in, squeezed by the crushing emptiness of the surrounding desert outside.

  If Hannah had missed the flight on purpose, it suggested that she knew Purkiss was going to investigate Scipio Rand on his own, regardless of what he told her. And that meant she knew he’d be walking into a set up. A trap.

  His mind rewound and replayed the events in order.

  Hannah, appearing out of nowhere just before the bomb in Mohammed Al-Bayati’s Range Rover had gone off.

  Hannah, just happening to have found a notebook of Morrow’s with leads pointing to Dennis Arkwright.

  Hannah, present at the interview with Arkwright at the very moment he had come under attack.

  It didn’t make sense. It didn’t tie together neatly, or even at all. But, as with Vale, it was a series of seemingly unconnected little coincidences and oddities which, in the light of Hannah’s failure to board the plane, unsettled Purkiss.

  Without turning his head too obviously he scanned the terminal, or at least as much of it as he could see from where he was sitting. People stood around or ambled or hurried, singly and in pairs and small groups. There was no evident surveillance in place. But then, if it had been obtrusive, it wouldn’t have been surveillance at all.

  Purkiss felt the gnawings of unease which would, if indulged, progress to panicky helplessness. A rat in a corner, with no apparent means of escape, will lapse into acceptance of its situation. Purkiss was in a different position, because he didn’t know where the danger was, or which direction it would come from.

  Except he did, in a sense. Part of the danger was internal. The corrosive effects of mistrust, of suspicion of those once thought loyal, could be every bit as hazardous as an external threat.

  Purkiss closed his eyes to slits, just enough not to exclude all visual data. He drew a deep breath through his nose, centring himself.

  Into an impossible cube-shaped container, with no visible seams, he placed mental images of Vale and Hannah. He could still see them hazily through the opaque walls of the box, so he thickened the sides like the cataracts in an elderly eye, until the faces within had disappeared.

  Then he allowed the box to plunge, impossibly deeply, into the most inaccessible reaches of his being.

  He released the breath. Opened his eyes fully. Found himself not in the tortured past, or the speculation-riddled future, but in the now.

  Purkiss left the coffee shop, strode the length of the terminal towards an all-night car rental kiosk he’d seen earlier. He was aware of the soft peeling noise of his soles on the polished floor with every step he took, of the coffee-and-spices aromas breezing around him, of the murmur and susurration of a cleaning machine that hummed robotically past, its driver seemingly less alive than it was.

  At the kiosk he considered the options offered to him. Technical requirements – speed, reliability, protection in the event of a collision – always had to be weighed up against the need for discretion and lack of obtrusiveness when choosing a vehicle in a hostile field. After a few minutes’ thought, Purkiss selected a two-year-old silver Audi saloon.

  Even in the two hours since he’d stepped off the plane, the heat had built up outside. Purkiss glanced at a digital display on the terminal wall as he walked to collect his car. Twenty-eight degrees Celsius already, at half-past one in the morning. By dawn it would have reached thirty, at least. By noon, forty or more.

  He hadn’t been in the Middle East for six years, and was therefore not acclimatised. It meant that any confrontation with the enemy would best take place in the next few hours, before Purkiss was at a distinct disadvantage.

  The Audi’s engine felt smooth and beautifully tuned, the air conditioning kicking in immediately. Purkiss took it for a few turns around the car park, getting a feel for the way it handled. Then he headed for the petrol station near the exit. He filled up the tank, marvelling as he had done when he’d first visited the Gulf at the astonishingly cheap price of fuel, before taking the sign for King Fahd Road towards Riyadh, a little over twenty miles to the south.

  Despite the bright lights of the highway, the surprisingly active traffic, the sky overhead was clear and luminous with stars, light pollution from the distant city having little effect here. Clear skies were dangerous, in Purkiss’s experience. They reminded him of happier times – Marseille, chiefly – and tended to have a mesmerising, lulling effect. He forced himself to focus on the immediate environment.

  Night-time countersurveillance was tricky, because you could never be as certain as you could in daylight that the set of headlights behind you were the ones that had been tailing you since the start of your journey. But the highway was vividly lit in sodium, and by the time the traffic began to build up and slow on the outskirts of the city, Purkiss had identified the tag.

  Forty

  Riyadh’s broad highways and boulevards, elaborate mosques and palm trees all gave Purkiss the impression of a showcase city, a little tatty around the edges and without quite matching the garish kitsch of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

  He used the Audi’s satellite navigation system to identify the Diplomatic Quarter, then took a deliberate wrong turn, braking late as though in frustration at having missed the road he wanted. As planned, he found himself in
a one-way system and therefore couldn’t double back.

  In his rearview mirror, the black Lexus hung back, keeping pace with him.

  Purkiss had identified it through a simple manoeuvre back on the highway leading from the airport. He’d accelerated to overtake two marginally slower cars in front of him and had dropped in ahead of the first one. The Lexus, not wanting to lose him, had muscled in one car behind. His move had been unremarkable, unlikely to attract suspicion. That of the Lexus confirmed what he’d thought: it had been tagging him since he’d left the airport.

  One car, then. Not so much a welcoming committee as a scout party, there to make sure he did indeed head to the Scipio Rand headquarters rather than going off and doing his own thing.

  It left Purkiss with a dilemma. He was now in no doubt that if he ventured near the Scipio Rand building he’d be walking into a trap, one from which he was unlikely to escape given all the advantages the enemy had, knowledge of the terrain being one of them. On the other hand, if he very obviously avoided heading there, the person or people in the Lexus would become suspicious, and might surmise that he was on to them. They might call for backup, which would further tip the odds against Purkiss.

  He needed to isolate the Lexus, somehow. Draw it away and create a scenario in which he could interrogate its occupants.

  The commercial centre of the city was beckoning brightly ahead, most of the lighting from the windows and awnings of shops that wouldn’t open for many hours yet. Light traffic continued to pass Purkiss, a scattering of pedestrians, exclusively male, here and there on the pavements: workmen, mostly, maintaining the city’s infrastructure. Once, a police patrol car eased past him in the opposite direction, two faces turning to watch him as they passed.

  On the corner of a quiet-looking junction, beside some kind of walled park, Purkiss indicated and pulled on to the kerb.

  He climbed out of the Audi, not looking directly back but noticing the Lexus draw to a halt fifty yards down the street. Purkiss popped the bonnet, propped it open using the thin stick hinged to the body, and peered underneath.

  Beyond the bonnet, he saw a man approaching. He shifted position and noted a second man advancing from the other side.