Tundra

by Tim Stevens

  Purkiss glanced at Vale. The older man had a knack for dry irony, but Purkiss had never known him to make actual jokes.

  ‘Quentin.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is going to require deep cover.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I won’t be able to organise that in two days.’

  ‘It’s all been arranged. You’ll have credentials that will hold up under all but the most exhaustive scrutiny.’

  This was something new. In the past, Vale had left Purkiss to set up his own cover identities, something that had been increasingly difficult in the last year and a half since Purkiss had lost his friend Abby, who’d been a master at procuring forged documentation. For the first time, Vale himself had done the work, or someone associated with him.

  Purkiss found it disquieting. It tied him to Vale, and to SIS, in a way he didn’t like.

  Vale turned his melancholy eyes on Purkiss, and it was clear he understood.

  ‘You wouldn’t have been able to do this on your own, John,’ he said. ‘Not gain entry to a facility like Yarkovsky Station without connections at a higher level than, with respect, you have access to. But I know it takes control away from you to a certain extent. And I know how that feels.’

  Vale reached inside his greatcoat and produced a clear plastic folder. Inside was a manila packet, sealed and fat.

  Purkiss took it.

  Vale tipped his head. ‘We’ve some details to go over. Let’s walk.’

  *

  Now, thousands of miles away in the crushing silence of his quarters, Purkiss reflected on the cover Vale had supplied him with. It really was very good indeed.

  John Farmer’s history had been elaborated in enough detail to encompass an authentic-sounding lifetime, but it left room for Purkiss to improvise and personalise it. Farmer’s date of birth was close to Purkiss’s own. Their upbringings were similar, as were their respective educational trajectories. Only in their subsequent career paths did they diverge. John Farmer had been a staff reporter on first local, then national British newspapers, before he’d gone freelance. He’d been a regular stringer with Reuters for five years, and had solid references from the agency. Purkiss knew the references had to be authentic, and wondered what kind of influence Vale, or somebody on his behalf, had exerted to acquire them.

  The credentials had been convincing enough to persuade the Russian authorities to allow John Farmer entry to Yarkovsky Station for a period of up to two months. The station was, as Vale had said, an international one, and the facilities were technically the joint property of Russia, the United States, Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands. Each of the five nations apart from Holland employed its own citizens currently as staff members on the site. But the station was on Russian soil, and final access was at the discretion of Moscow.

  Permission for John Farmer to conduct his interviews, to research his forthcoming article on the work being done at Yarkovsky Station, had been granted nine days before Purkiss had met Vale in Hyde Park.

  Purkiss stood up and went to the window. It was blacked out almost entirely by a heavy roller blind, a fine rim of external light marking the edges on either side. It’s essential during the summer months, Medievsky had said. Nobody would sleep otherwise, in the night-time sunlight. With a finger Purkiss drew back the blind and peered out.

  The pocked snowscape stretched into darkness.

  He needed sleep. Not just because his body was crying for it like a drowning man clawing for air, but because he had to let his brain rest, process, assimilate all it had learned in the previous two hours since his arrival at the station. But Purkiss knew the visual stimulus beyond his window, the starkness of the alien environment he found himself in, was necessary. It would be a backdrop against which his impressions of the faces, the actions of the ten people he’d met tonight might imprint themselves on his consciousness, so that his sleeping mind could do its work.

  Purkiss’s primary conclusion was that two of the staff at Yarkovsky Station overtly disliked him. Ryan Montrose, who had met him together with Medievsky on his arrival. And the doctor, Douglas Keys, who’d barely exchanged a word but had lapsed into sullen silence almost immediately after they’d shaken hands.

  His secondary conclusion was that two of them genuinely liked him. Medievsky himself, with his professionally detached manner, yet faint grin and quick look. And Efraim Avner, the joker in the pack, the loudmouth. His interest in Purkiss had come across as completely unfeigned.

  The rest of them were an unknown quantity, for the time being at least.

  Except Wyatt himself. He’d been the last to arrive, like a great actor sweeping onto the stage after the lesser players had been introduced. His grip on Purkiss’s proffered hand had been neither aggressive nor limply defensive. His manner had been entirely what one would expect from a research scientist greeting a journalist who’d come to popularise his work.

  But there’d been a directness in Wyatt’s gaze, something he’d allowed to linger for a fraction of a second too long. And in the final instant, there’d been a recognition there, too, and a kind of acceptance.

  Wyatt’s eyes had said: I know why you’re really here.

  In one glance, Purkiss’s cover was blown.

  But it didn’t matter. The cover was meant to provide access, and it had done its job. Now that he was in, all bets were off.

  Purkiss lay back down on the bed and allowed fatigue, fumbling and ravening, to claim him.

  Four

  Semyon Lenilko’s father, Vladimir, had pointed out the Lubyanka to his son for the first time when Semyon was nine.

  It was a spring morning in 1981, and father and son had been crossing Lubyanskaya Square on the way to their quarterly visit to Detsky Mir, Moscow’s premier toy store. Semyon had seen the enormous, boxy yellow building on previous trips, but it hadn’t captured his interest in the slightest.

  His father halted him with a hand on his shoulder and turned him gently.

  ‘There,’ Vladimir Borisovich Lenilko said, standing behind his son and pointing. ‘Remember it. And never, ever find yourself surrounded by its walls.’

  Even at the age of nine, Semyon detected something in his father’s voice, a subtle trace of bitterness. It was the closest he remembered the old man ever coming to making a statement of defiance. Of subversion, even.

  Semyon had liked his father. Had loved him, even. But he’d never really respected him. Lenilko senior had been born during the Great Patriotic War and was therefore too young to have remembered it, or to have any interesting stories to tell about it. He’d come of age in the grey 1960s years of Brezhnev’s early premiership, and had shuffled stoically through life as a lower-middle-ranking accountant in the Department of Agriculture. As a Party member he was entitled to certain perks, but he failed to take proper advantage of them, in Semyon’s estimation, and the family had spent the seventies and most of the eighties in the same crappy apartment overlooking the Kiyevsky Rail Terminal. Like so many of his generation – like so many Russian men, period – Vladimir Borisovich Lenilko had died young, at fifty-nine, destroyed by disappointment and Gold Symphony vodka.

  But his words on that spring day in 1981 had stayed with Semyon. Never, ever, find yourself surrounded by its walls.

  As a teenager, Lenilko had made frequent pilgrimages to the square just to stare at the building. The awe and dread he felt every time he set eyes on it increased with each visit rather than diminishing. He steeped himself in the Lubyanka’s history: its Neo-Baroque design, its starting days as the headquarters of an insurance company until the Cheka took it over in 1918, its overcrowding during Stalin’s purges. The blank, silent windows had exerted a pull on him which all but compelled him to run headlong towards its doors, like a moth to a torch beam.

  Lenilko hadn’t been a rebellious teenager. There’d been no parental authority to rebel against. As he advanced towards the façade of the great building, though, he felt as always the thrill of defiance.
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  I didn’t take your advice, father. I’m inside its walls every day.

  The sentries inside the doors saluted smartly. Lenilko waved back, kicking the snow from his boots and shaking it off his cap. Unlike most other people of his seniority, he didn’t come to work by chauffeured car. His apartment was a twenty-minute walk away, and unless he was called to the office in the middle of the night on urgent business, he made the journey on foot every time, even in heavy snow like today’s.

  A female clerical worker scurried out of his way deferentially, even anxiously, as Lenilko approached the inner doors, his electronic swipe card in his hand. He smiled. Natalya told him he was the least tyrannical FSB officer she’d ever met, and Lenilko assumed others saw him that way too. Yet his presence always inspired abject fear in those who didn’t know him.

  Some things never changed, even after decades. The terror of the authority figure, and how he or she could wreck one’s life, had been imprinted on the Russian DNA since long before Stalin, or even Lenin.

  The building was alive but not yet bustling. It was seven in the morning, the time Lenilko usually started his working day, unless he’d pulled an all-nighter and had slept in the office, when he’d begin work even earlier. He rode the elevator alone to the fourth floor, stepped out into the office suite, its carpet plush and freshly cleaned, its glass and metal surfaces sporting a uniform pin-sharp gleam.

  The Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, FSB, was even more Byzantine in its structure than had been its predecessor organisations, the KGB and the FSK. It comprised seven distinct services. Within the Counterintelligence Service, there were in turn seven further directorates or departments. Lenilko worked for the Directorate of Special Activities, in a post he’d held for the last five years. He wasn’t top dog, yet, but he was going to get there. And he would do so before he was fifty years old, perhaps even forty-five. He was now forty-two. Three years didn’t leave him much time, but the pulling off of a major operation could swing it.

  Anna and Konstantin were there already, hunched over their desktop computers. Lenilko pushed open the glass doors and swung his overcoat onto the hook.

  ‘Arse-crawling bastards,’ he said cheerfully. The two looked round, Anna young and fresh-faced and plump, Konstantin narrow and gloomy as an undertaker. They were known in the office as Laurel and Hardy. Both feigned indifference to his greeting, though Lenilko knew Anna was pleased.

  The office was open plan in design, with eight workstations. Lenilko had his own personal office beyond a door at the far end, but he didn’t head for it. Instead, he strolled over to the pair and stood behind them, a hand on each of their shoulders.

  ‘Anything yet?’

  He knew the answer. If there was any news, they’d have called him at home. Natalya would have rolled away in bed, groaning, and he’d have been awake and alert and rising, heading for the bathroom even as they spoke.

  ‘Negative,’ said Anna. ‘He hasn’t called in.’

  Lenilko raised his head to peer at the row of clocks on the wall opposite. The one for Yakutsk showed one-ten pm.

  ‘He can’t have had the opportunity,’ said Lenilko. ‘Or, the journalist hasn’t arrived yet.’

  ‘He’s arrived,’ said Konstantin. He was in his early thirties, a decade older than Anna and the same span younger than Lenilko, but his melancholy demeanour and utter absence of humour made him seem far older. ‘Yakutsk confirms the pilot returned in the early hours of this morning. He delivered his passenger.’

  ‘Okay.’ Lenilko studied their computer monitors over their shoulders, caught Konstantin’s glance of irritation and backed off. He paced the carpet towards his office door and back again, breathing the familiar smell of his workplace, his eyrie, feeling the rush of purpose flood his veins.

  A Reuters journalist, doing a piece on Yarkovsky Station. There was nothing overtly unusual about that. Except that the journalist, John Farmer, happened to turn up seven weeks after Feliks Nisselovich had disappeared from the facility.

  Lenilko believed in coincidences. He’d studied statistics at university, and he knew the incidence of seemingly fantastical events occurring in quick succession was high, and related to nothing more than chance. But as an FSB officer, one of his tasks was to be suspicious of coincidences. To regard them as nonexistent until it could be proved otherwise.

  He’d had Anna and Konstantin run John Farmer’s credentials through the wringer. They’d held up. The one photo Reuters had released of the man had been generic, slightly unfocused, and hadn’t matched anything on the Directorate’s database. Nor had the picture in Farmer’s passport. It meant nothing.

  In his role as a senior officer in the Directorate of Special Activities, Lenilko was given a certain amount of freedom to conduct his own investigations, independent of the operational orders he and his colleagues received from on high. In less than an hour, the majority of the men and women under his command would arrive at the office, and the business of the day would begin. He’d receive updates on the various official operations the team was running: the infiltration of dissident groups in the Caucasus and Chechnya, the data collection from the surveillance apparatus planted in the embassies here in Moscow, the recruitment of potential assets within the foreign intelligence services known to be active across Russia.

  But the Yarkovsky Station project was separate. It was his baby, and of his staff only Anna and Konstantin knew about it. The data he’d received so far from the station had trickled in, sometimes stopping for days, and there was nothing yet to get his teeth into. But something within Lenilko, deep in the marrow of his bones, told him that this case could make him, if handled skilfully.

  And the arrival of the so-called journalist, Farmer, was a vindication of sorts. It suggested to Lenilko that he hadn’t been wrong. That his instinct that there was something of great significance going on in that bleak outpost in North-Eastern Siberia, had been correct.

  He went into his office, set the coffee machine going, and resumed his attack on the never-dwindling stack of paperwork on his desk.

  Five

  Purkiss entered the living area to find four of them at the dining table, picking at the remains of breakfast: Efraim Avner, Keys, the British doctor, Ryan Montrose, and the woman he’d met in the corridor shortly after his arrival, Patricia Clement. Keys and Clement peered at Purkiss with interest. Montrose’s eyes darted at him and slipped away again. Only Avner greeted him, raising his mug with an exaggerated cheer.

  ‘Hey. It’s risen from the dead.’

  Purkiss had woken half an hour earlier and had sat up, disorientated, the inside of his head like sludge. He’d gone across to the blackout blind and pulled it aside. The sky was grey and dull, the snow silent. He tried to remember when the sun was supposed to rise in this part of the world. Nine o’clock? Nine thirty? His watch told him it was twenty past ten. He’d slept for more than eleven hours.

  He wandered the corridors, hearing the station thrumming and clanging distantly around him, and felt like an intruder in someone else’s home. After a couple of wrong turns he found the room from the night before, where he’d been introduced to the others.

  Purkiss grinned ruefully. ‘Jetlag,’ he said. ‘But I’m fighting fit now.’

  ‘Grab a plate,’ muttered Keys. He looked even older than he had the night before, grey stubble rasping on his cheek as he rubbed it. Avner pushed bowls of scrambled eggs and bacon towards Purkiss.

  Purkiss helped himself. ‘Who does the cooking here?’

  ‘We take turns,’ said Avner. ‘Well, some of us do. These three here, plus Budian. The rest of us are exempt, because our cooking’s so godawful we’d cause a dysentery outbreak within days.’ He plucked a gnarled rasher of bacon from the bowl. ‘How about you, John? Cordon bleu?’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Purkiss. ‘But I’d be happy to do my bit.’

  Patricia Clement extended her hand across the table. ‘We weren’t properly introduced last night, Mr Farmer.’

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bsp; Her eyes were so pale the irises were almost indistinguishable from the surrounding corneas, lending an unnerving quality to her gaze. Her skin was almost translucent. Purkiss wondered how long she’d been at the station, away from any prolonged sunlight.

  Purkiss pretended to search his memory. ‘Dr Clement. The psychologist.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Texas?’

  Her smile was faint but genuine. ‘Alabama. Full marks for trying, though.’

  It was an opening into a conversation that would eliminate the need for any awkward silences, and Purkiss took it. ‘What’s your accent, Efraim? You’re Russian, I think you said?’

  ‘Does it not show, tovarischch?’ Avner said, thickly and gutturally. He laughed. ‘Yeah, man. Born in Petersburg. But I came to America when I was ten, after the USSR went down the pan. Spent most of my life in Des Moines, Iowa. I still have Russki citizenship, though, and I did part of my postgrad work at Moscow University.’

  Purkiss glanced at Montrose, who shrugged as if the unasked question bored him. ‘Portland, Oregon.’

  Keys was eyeing Purkiss. ‘You got any medical conditions I should know about?’

  ‘No.’

  The doctor put down his fork and wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘I only ask because I’ve been given no advance notification about your medical history. Which I should be, whenever a new person arrives here.’

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s a miserable bastard with everybody,’ said Avner. Keys ignored him and heaved to his feet, carried his plate over to the kitchenette.

  ‘Have you been given the grand tour?’ asked Clement.

  ‘Dr Medievsky showed me the basic layout of the building last night.’ The tour had taken close to an hour. Purkiss had listened carefully to Medievsky’s commentary as they explored the corridors. The station seemed smaller on the inside than it had from without, the ceilings low and claustrophobic and only intermittently illuminated by panel lights. The complex was, broadly, divided into two wings: the east, which contained living quarters and supply stores, and the west, comprising the laboratory and administrative facilities. Through windows on the west side, Purkiss glimpsed hulking outbuildings, blurred by the snowfall: the vehicle hangar, and the shed containing the twin diesel generators that provided the station with its power.