Nemesis

by Tim Stevens

  Lights emerged from the tunnel, and the train eased to a standstill with a prolonged screech and a hiss.

  The manic ritual of disembarkment and boarding began. Passengers squeezed free from the sliding doors and dropped onto the platform like released livestock. At the same time, those on the platform pressed forward, determined to secure their place before the carriages became too packed to accommodate even one more body.

  Purkiss’s eyes searched the platform, and the carriages nearest to him through the windows. He couldn’t see her. There were just too many people.

  He pushed his way along, his eyes scanning constantly. He’d chosen to go left, towards the rear of the train. It was a random decision, and there was just as much chance that she’d gone the opposite way.

  The last successful boarders were cramming themselves past the doors, their necks twisted awkwardly. Others were stepping back, resigned to wait for the next train.

  A man’s voice, distorted by static, barked across the tannoy: ‘Doors closing. Stand clear. Mind the closing doors.’

  As one, the sets of twin doors on all the carriages began to slide shut.

  They opened again, as they inevitably did when the trains were overcrowded. The driver repeated his request for passengers to stand clear.

  The doors began to close again.

  Purkiss saw her.

  Her back was to him where she stood in the narrow space between seated passengers’ rows of knees, and he would have missed her if she hadn’t turned her head, only slightly, and afforded him a one-quarter view of her face.

  Purkiss grabbed a rolled-up umbrella from the hand of the woman at his side and lunged forward and thrust it between the nearest set of doors just before they met one another.

  He felt the doors close on the umbrella, almost pulling it from his grip.

  The doors slid open once more.

  He dropped the umbrella and shouldered his way onto the carriage. A man snarled, ‘There’s no more room, mate.’ Purkiss felt toes under his heels, heard the sharp cry.

  Saburova glanced up, and caught his eye.

  She moved immediately, barging against the row of passengers standing with her in the central walkway, heading away from Purkiss. He grabbed the shoulders in front of him and shoved sideways, clearing a path for himself. Someone landed a punch in his back but he ignored it.

  She was almost at the next set of doors, and Purkiss noticed something different about her.

  She was carrying a hold-all.

  She’s moving it. She knows it’ll be found if she doesn’t.

  The doors began to close and then opened yet again, no doubt because someone was leaning against them. The driver’s voice came over the speaker, exasperated, admonishing them collectively.

  Saburova lunged for the doors and got through.

  Purkiss shoved his way back through the doors he’d come through and caught sight of her, sprinting along the platform, knocking people aside as she went. She was heading towards the rear end, where another exit gave into a passage leading towards one of the other lines.

  Purkiss was probably ten years older than her, but he had longer legs, and he was able to charge through the obstructing passengers more forcefully. He reached the passage and saw her at the far end, about to emerge onto the northbound platform.

  He heard the rumbling of an arriving train.

  He reached the tunnel and saw the lights of the front carriage as they broke from the tunnel. Saburova was heading down the platform, close to the edge, clearly intending to board as soon as the doors opened.

  He put all he had into the sprint, charging up the platform and seeing her turn her head and raise the hold-all defensively.

  He dived, launching himself at her, his arms outstretched for a tackle.

  She stepped back quickly.

  Too quickly.

  Her boot heel caught on a ridge in the concrete of the platform and she lost her balance and toppled backwards into the oncoming lights.

  The train was slowing, but the impact of the edge of its front against her back flung her forwards onto the platform again like a marionette. A collective gasp rose from the assembled passengers, who’d moved aside when first one person and then another had come running onto the platform.

  Then the screaming started, a Babel of horror that echoed off the arched ceiling and down the tunnel.

  Purkiss, who’d landed in a stoop, threw himself prone and grabbed the hold-all where it had dropped on the platform and clutched it to him.

  He crawled over to Saburova.

  She lay face down, one knee bent beneath her, her arms sprawled to either side. Her head was turned and he saw her face, one eye open and staring at him. Blood gouted from her nose, and a thinner rivulet crawled from her ear toward the corner of her eye.

  Her back was grotesquely deformed, indented as if a groove had been scored in a lump of clay.

  Purkiss crouched, put his face close to hers. He felt her shuddering, intermittent breath against his skin. Saw the crimson bubble forming on her lips.

  ‘Yulia,’ he said, his mouth at her ear. ‘It’s over. All that can happen now is that Rossiter gets away. You’ve failed to achieve your goal, a goal you believed to be the right one, however warped your reasoning. But you can still die having done some good.’

  The screaming was threaded through with other shouts, angry, authoritative ones.

  ‘Tell me where Rossiter is. Tell me so that I can find him, and stop him. Let that be your legacy. Let your people, in the FSB and in Russia itself, remember your name as, at the last, a heroic one.’

  He angled his eyes and saw the boots, lots of them, advancing down the platform. He was aware that the shouting was being directed at him. Without taking his face from Saburova’s, he extended his arms as far as he could to the sides, his hand splayed to show they were empty.

  The hold-all was beneath him, pressed against his chest.

  She jerked, a sound emerging from her broken mouth that was part cough, part choke.

  ‘Do it, Yulia,’ Purkiss murmured. ‘Tell me.’

  Her lips moved.

  He listened.

  ‘Again.’

  She repeated it. Her voice was a harsh rasp, barely more than a whisper. But the words she said were clear.

  Hands gripped his arms and his collar and he was hauled upright. An officer in a flak jacket squatted and picked up the hold-all.

  ‘Careful with that,’ Purkiss said.

  Another officer crouched beside Saburova, spoke into a mouthpiece, demanding medical assistance.

  But Purkiss knew she was beyond that.

  Twenty-six

  Just as the dawn was delayed this far north, so the dusk arrived earlier. The day had been overcast, and the failing light merely deepened the existing gloom.

  Rossiter climbed to the top of the broch again, as he’d done in the early hours of the morning. This time, the ground below was silent, not teeming with activity. The sea all around was restless, discontented. Even the circling gulls sounded troubled.

  It was a serious setback. Rossiter was nothing if not honest with himself. And it would make next time that much more difficult.

  But setbacks were just that. Obstacles to be overcome, or circumvented.

  He’d watched a few of the news reports down below, in the modified caverns. A suspected terrorist incident had been thwarted at King’s Cross Station. Depending on how much information was allowed to leak out, over the next few days the incident would be upgraded to major catastrophe.

  Saburova had called him at three ten in the afternoon to report that she’d collected the item, at the rendezvous point in Barnet, North London.

  Half an hour later, she’d rung to confirm: the package was in place at King’s Cross.

  And she was meeting Purkiss, together with the Russian who had apparently survived the attack last night.

  At just after five, the intuition Rossiter had honed over the decades, the one every operative of his exp
erience learned to cultivate, began to tell him something was amiss.

  He called Saburova’s number.

  And got a dead tone.

  Less than five minutes later, his phone rang.

  ‘She’s been terminated. The item has been found and is in the process of being deactivated.’

  And so it ended.

  Rossiter said, without emotion: ‘What happened?’

  ‘Purkiss. I don’t know how, exactly, yet. But he took her down.’

  ‘Are we compromised?’

  ‘No. He had no opportunity to interrogate her. She was struck by a train. Dead before the medics arrived.’

  Rossiter thought for a moment.

  ‘I’ll close up here,’ he said. ‘No point in taking chances.’

  ‘We’ll need a period of cooling off.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’m hardly going to tell you that.’ Rossiter ended the call.

  *

  By seven o’clock, preparations for the exodus were almost finalised. Rossiter considered striking out immediately. But he knew it would be better to wait until darkness had fallen completely.

  He’d worked down below, co-ordinating his men – all six of them – and allowing himself a brief glance at the clock at six p.m. That was when the timer had been set to go off. The remainder of the caesium he’d obtained from the Iranian, the Locksmith, would have been seeded throughout the Underground system.

  And London would have become a dead zone. If not physically, necessarily, then certainly psychologically and symbolically.

  And the old enemy, Russia, would have been to blame.

  Disappointment was an emotion Rossiter no longer experienced. He’d cauterised those particular nerve endings a long time ago. It was the only way to survive life.

  From the broch, he watched the Eurocopter crew make their way to where the chopper squatted on a flat stretch of land, a hundred yards from the caverns. He would leave with the crew. The rest of the men would take the boat moored to the small jetty.

  It was a pity, Rossiter reflected, that McCammon was no longer with him. He’d been useful, and shrewd. But he’d been cut down on the Merseyside docks along with the others, part of a ruse which had, it appeared, failed to work.

  Still. One learned from one’s mistakes.

  High above, the thin drone of an aircraft, presumably on its way to Scandinavia or across the Arctic, cut through the vast silence.

  Saburova was a loss, too. She was on the opposite side, and yet on the same side as Rossiter. She, too, resented the way the great adversaries of the Cold War had become bit players on the world stage. And she, like Rossiter, wanted to see her organisation assume its rightful prominence in her country’s life once again.

  They still had Mossberg, Rossiter thought. He would be useful. He was now in Teheran, being pumped for his nuclear expertise. In reality, what he would be giving the Iranians was disinformation, designed to impede their progress towards developing weaponry rather than speeding it up. Perhaps there was a way of working him into future plans.

  Rossiter closed his eyes, inhaled deeply of the wild sea air.

  It was time to get moving.

  He climbed down the side of the broch, taking care in the gloom.

  At the base, he glanced across to the southern edge of the islet.

  And saw the figures closing in, silent and black.

  Twenty-seven

  The four men with Purkiss hadn’t given their names, nor had he offered his. They’d said nothing to him during the flight.

  They were paratroopers, but he didn’t know from what division. They wore no insignia, no identifying marks. He recognised their weapons, though. L85A1 assault rifles.

  Vale had come through.

  When Purkiss had emerged into the hubbub of the station, the delays down below significant as the armed officers had tried to detain him, he’d headed for the exit, his phone already in his hand.

  ‘The bomb’s secured and Saburova is dead.’

  A slight pause was all the relief Vale offered. ‘First class, John.’

  ‘I know where Rossiter is. I need you to procure military transport for me with full urgency. Plus some personnel. And Quentin.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You need to do it yourself. Don’t involve the Service.’

  Purkiss waited for an objection, or at least a question. But Vale said, ‘That should be within the bounds of possibility.’

  *

  By six o’clock, little more than an hour later, Purkiss was boarding the transport plane at an airfield in Hertfordshire, north of the city. The four men aboard gave him the once over before ignoring him.

  He strapped the pack onto his back. He’d made night-time jumps as part of his Service training, but that was more than a decade ago and he hadn’t used the skill since. He hoped it was like riding a bicycle. Once learned, never forgotten.

  A spare assault rifle had been provided for him. He declined it. In a shoulder holster he carried the SIG P226 and a spare magazine.

  He waited until they were airborne before issuing the scant instructions that were necessary.

  ‘Creag Innis is an islet on the western edge of the Shetlands, without a civilian population. Approximately one kilometre by two in area. Mainly rock, but with some woodland.’

  He’d gleaned the information on the way to the airfield.

  ‘The number of hostiles is unknown,’ he continued. ‘As is the nature of their training. We have to assume it’s military. The primary target is this man, Richard Rossiter.’

  He held up his phone. The four men studied the image in turn.

  ‘Capture where possible, but it’s not essential. That goes for everyone there.’

  And that was the extent of their interaction.

  *

  They dropped into the darkness, the suddenness of finding himself suspended thousands of feet above the ground profoundly disorientating to Purkiss.

  At first, the cluster of islets below was bewildering, and Purkiss was concerned that they’d miss their target and be stranded on some obscure rock. But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw the tiny lights below.

  The helicopter took shape, far beneath them. Purkiss used it as an anchor point.

  His landing was rough, the jolt as he made contact with the earth shaking though his hips and his spine. He wrestled with the ’chute and collapsed it before the wind could start to tug it away. He stowed it and dropped the pack on the ground.

  The four other men were already on the move.

  They’d landed on a slope of scrubland, near the edge of the water. As they reached the ridge at the top of the slope, they flattened themselves.

  Over to the right, a hundred yards distant, the helicopter’s rotor blades had started to sweep in a slow arc. Ahead, and slightly to the left, a hillock rose to some kind of ancient structure at the summit. In the base of the hillock there appeared to be some kind of door, a light shining dimly above it.

  Beyond the hillock, the spikes of pine woodland formed a ragged skyline.

  Purkiss had to assume Rossiter was on board the chopper.

  He signalled silently to the other men. The one nearest nodded.

  Rising from their bellies, the five of them began to advance on the helicopter at a crouch.

  Purkiss saw the glint of movement at the same time as the others and flattened himself once more as the explosion of light along the helicopter’s side was followed by the staccato crash of automatic fire and the air around them teemed with the whine of projectiles. The rock and soil chipped and spattered and Purkiss curled into a ball, minimising his exposed surface area.

  From their prone position, the four men began to return fire, the hammering of their weapons as relentless and methodical as a drill. The helicopter’s machine gun started up again, its roar louder than the assault rifles.

  One of the men gasped and rolled and jerked.

  Purkiss crawled so tha
t he could keep the hillock in his line of vision. The door remained closed.

  He saw two of the men scramble for cover behind a cluster of boulders. They pressed themselves on either side of it and loosed off bursts at the helicopter.

  The remaining man raised a hand, looking at Purkiss, and gestured towards the hillock.

  Purkiss nodded.

  At a stoop, they ran towards the door in its base.

  The other man was ahead. He was almost at the door when it was flung open.

  He didn’t hesitate, opening fire in a short burst. Purkiss saw a figure lurch backwards.

  He reached the door.

  And heard a sound, off to the left. Distant but unmistakable.

  The noise of an outboard motor starting up.

  Twenty-eight

  Purkiss ran, stooping again, the SIG held low and in both hands.

  Behind him, the chatter of submachine gun fire echoed inside whatever chambers or tunnels were in the base of the hillock. Further back, the helicopter’s gun had fallen silent.

  He followed the rasp of the motor, its sound like a chainsaw. Heard it growing louder as he approached the tip of the islet.

  He reached the lip of a shallow cliff and looked down.

  A narrow cove with a patch of rocky beach lay below, a twenty-foot drop. A single boat was just beginning its turn away from the shore.

  The figure at the tiller was indistinct. But Purkiss knew.

  He looked down. He could scramble to the beach without difficulty, but it would cost him time.

  Bracing his gun arm by gripping his wrist in his left fist, Purkiss took aim with the SIG P226.

  He fired. Twice. Three times.

  Four.

  The boat continued on its path out to sea.

  Purkiss slid down the rock face on his backside, the SIG as level as he could hold it. As he hit the ground at the bottom, he fired again.

  Three more shots. Four.

  He ran down the short length of beach, slowed, took aim.

  Fired the last two rounds.

  For a moment he thought he’d made a hit, because the boat listed a little to one side. But it corrected itself, and went on its way.

  Purkiss slammed the spare magazine in and began advancing into the water, feeling its freeze rising up his legs.