Cronos Rising

by Tim Stevens

  ‘You sent someone else to killed in your stead,’ said Purkiss. The anger was coming to the fore now.

  Vale shook his head once. He looked unoffended. ‘No. I didn’t know the plane was going to be brought down. Myles was retired CIA, an old friend of mine. I was aware I was being hunted, so I asked him for a favour. He was to travel to Istanbul under my guise. I was waiting there, and intended to identify whomever was following him. I had no idea they would try to kill me in that manner, by bringing down the plane.’

  Purkiss tried to process it. He looked at Rebecca.

  She said, ‘Everything I’ve told you is true, apart from this part. Quentin summoned me to Rome to protect you. He said he was in hiding, that he was presumed dead on the plane, and that I was to be his proxy, helping you in the search for Saul Gideon.’

  ‘You understand why I did it, John,’ said Vale, before Purkiss could speak. ‘I couldn’t make contact with you directly for two reasons. First, my enemies thought me dead. That was an advantage I held, and I couldn’t risk losing it. I knew they’d be after you, and as long as you were unaware I was still alive, I’d still be protected even if they caught you. The second reason was for your protection, John. If somehow the opposition did know I was still alive, any contact between the two of us would put you in danger.’

  The data was flooding in too quickly for Purkiss to make complete sense of it all. He said, ‘You knew Gideon was holed up on the island.’

  ‘Yes. I told you that myself, on the video I made you.’

  ‘Didn’t you think to warn him that he was in danger?’

  ‘He knew it already,’ said Vale. ‘As soon as he heard the plane had gone down, supposedly with me on board.’

  ‘But you didn’t warn him beforehand,’ said Purkiss. ‘You knew there was a threat to you at least a week earlier, or so you said on the clip.’

  Vale applied himself to his cigarette. Through the smoke, he said, ‘I couldn’t be certain, right up until now, that Gideon wasn’t the instigator of all this. That it wasn’t him resurrecting Cronos’s plans.’

  ‘So that’s true, what Gideon said? About Cronos, and the four gods, as he called you?’

  Vale nodded. ‘Rebecca sent me a message not long ago, informing me that Gideon told you all of that. Yes, it’s true. And with Gideon now above suspicion, and me as well, it means he was right. Clay is the man pulling the strings.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The answer startled Purkiss.

  Vale exhaled smoke, turning it into a sigh. ‘And that’s the problem. We need to bring him down, as a matter of urgency. But he’s in Moscow.’

  Purkiss waited for more.

  ‘He goes by the name of Kyrill Grabasov. You’ve heard of him?’

  Purkiss searched his memory. ‘No.’

  ‘You perhaps don’t read the financial papers. Grabasov is the CEO of Rosvolgabank. One of the six largest financial institutions in Russia.’

  ‘So he’s got money,’ said Purkiss. ‘Resources. It makes him harder to get at. It doesn’t make him invulnerable.’

  ‘It’s infinitely more complicated than that,’ Vale said heavily. ‘Think about it, John. Why might a former SIS asset reappear in the guise of a Russian citizen, in a senior position in the Moscow elite, with access to the highest levels of government?’

  The answer came to Purkiss like a shot of some stimulant drug.

  ‘Because he isn’t a former asset,’ he said.

  ‘Precisely.’ Vale sat down again for the first time, as if pressed down by an invisible hand. ‘Kyrill Grabasov – Oliver Clay – is the highest-placed mole the British Secret Service has ever run within Russia.’

  *

  ‘His legend was built up with painstaking care over almost a decade. It was an operation originally planned during the Cold War, but it never came to fruition because of the difficulties of access to the Soviet Union. Then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the grip began to tighten once more, SIS decided to revisit the idea.’

  Vale had begun to wander the room, smoking as he walked. The rest of them, Purkiss and Rebecca and Kendrick, remained standing. Purkiss noticed that Kendrick had his eyes closed, like an unused computer which had entered sleep mode.

  ‘I didn’t learn all of this until a year or two ago,’ said vale. ‘Until then, I had no idea of Clay’s whereabouts. Now I understand why I had such difficulty tracking him down, and why Gideon did, too.’

  He turned back from the window.

  ‘The intelligence Clay provides is apparently first class. From it, SIS has been able to put together a picture of the Russian economic infrastructure, its strength and its weaknesses, which is richer than anyone else’s, even the CIA’s. The advantages to Britain are immeasurable. In addition, as I mentioned, Clay has the ear of senior Kremlin apparatchiks, up to and including, it’s rumoured, the President himself. He’s been able to supply details about power relations within the government, the various factions and camps which always develop in such bodies, of the kind we’d only ever get from senior defectors back in the Cold War days.’

  Vale massaged the knuckles of his cigarette hand with the other. The arthritis in his fingers was becoming pronounced, Purkiss noticed.

  ‘So you see our difficulty, John. The man we need to bring down in order to save our own lives, and in order to prevent SIS from becoming the kind of renegade outfit that sets itself up almost as a private government, is a man who’s regarded as untouchable by SIS itself.’

  The silence that followed was broken by Kendrick, who shuffled his feet impatiently. He went to the bedside table and drank water directly from the bottle, noisily and sloppily.

  Purkiss said, ‘Are there others involved, Quentin? Other targets, apart from you and me? And presumably Rebecca, by association?’

  ‘No.’

  Had there been the slightest flicker in Vale’s eyes, the merest hint of hesitation, before he’d answered?

  ‘So what’s the story with Delatour?’ said Purkiss. ‘You didn’t suspect him?’

  For the first time, annoyance showed on Vale’s furrowed face. ‘No. And it rankles. But it just shows how devious Clay can be. He had one of his own people working for me for years. I became suspicious, of course, when Rebecca informed me that he’d approached you offering to help. But I told her to watch him, and report back any concerns to me.’

  ‘He played us well,’ said Purkiss. ‘Something I don’t understand, though. How did you come to realise in the first place that you were being targeted?’

  ‘Tell tale signs,’ said Vale. ‘Nothing obvious, nothing concrete. But it was the gradual accumulation of small details. A wrong number called to my phone. Evidence of surveillance in the street. An attempt by a hacker to breach the security safeguards on my computer. Little things. You develop a sixth sense, John. You know that.’

  ‘Did you ever suspect me?’ Purkiss said evenly.

  ‘No.’ Vale’s answer was neither hesitant, nor too quick.

  He took another turn round the room. ‘The reason I decided on this rendezvous, John, is that things have moved on. Saul Gideon is dead. Clay knows we’re on to him. We’re past the stage of deceit, of clandestine activity. Of pretending. Our cold war has heated up. And we need to find a solution together.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Purkiss.

  Vale turned his head. ‘Say again?’

  ‘About our being past the stage where deceit might be useful. We still have a trump card.’ Purkiss paused. ‘Clay still believes you’re dead. We have the advantage of surprise.’

  He told Vale what he had in mind.

  Twenty-four

  Grabasov seldom got home before ten p.m.. Often it was after midnight. On some nights, he didn’t go home at all, but slept in a small apartment annexed to his office.

  Tonight, he made it back at eleven.

  His wife, Dominika, was usually still awake, but on this occasion he found her in their bed in
the darkness, dead to the world. Grabasov was relieved. When his day had been taken up with business matters, he enjoyed talking with her over a glass of wine, finding it cathartic. But when the major events of the day involved his other life, his secret one, he needed to be alone.

  On such nights, he was tempted to sleep over in the annexe. But he was careful not to overdo his stays there. Dominika probably already suspected him of infidelity: it came with the territory of being a wealthy, powerful businessman. But too many nights away from home would suggest that he’d found himself a soulmate, rather than simply a mistress. Dominika might decide she’d had enough, and demand a divorce.

  And she was an essential part of his cover.

  In his previous life, as Oliver Clay, Grabasov had been moderately promiscuous. It had always amused him that his unprepossessing appearance, his excess weight and his boorishness and his puerile humour, had been no barriers to female interest in him, and he’d indulged his opportunities as and when the fancy took him. But ever since he’d begun his new existence - he couldn’t call it by the trivialising name of a mission - he’d been a model of restraint. There’d been no affairs, relatively little boozing by Russian standards, and strictly no corruption in the form of monetary malfeasance.

  His position was simply too precious, too precarious, to risk.

  He cleaned his teeth in the marbled bathroom. The sumptuousness of the fittings, of the entire house, left him indifferent. These trappings were for show, and for Dominika. Grabasov was no sybarite.

  Before coming up to bed, he’d gone into the private study downstairs and booted up his computer. He accessed the dark web, the secret Internet with its hidden corridors beloved of terrorists and child molesters and paranoiacs, and brought up his email account through a complex series of codes and passwords.

  There were no messages.

  Grabasov still enjoyed the minutiae of the spying game. He’d been in it a long time, since the early 1970s, and so much had changed. Now, instead of trying to thwart the KGB’s countersurveillance measures through a sequence of dead-drop placements of microfilm, he was dodging the successor FSB’s attempts to infiltrate and police the underbelly of the online world. Grabasov had always believed the Soviet Union to have the most sophisticated and effective intelligence and counter-intelligence apparatus in the world, and he was now convinced that the new Russia beat the Americans and the British and the Chinese hands down in the field of electronic surveillance. And yet, he had managed to stay ahead of them.

  Grabasov had no official handler in SIS. He was a unique asset, and the normal channels of line management therefore didn’t apply to him. Rather, he communicated with his employing organisation through a series of cut outs, men and women who relayed messages to him, and communicated his own messages back to London, without being fully aware of who he was or what his significance was in the scheme of things.

  Daily he checked for new directives or pieces of intelligence from London. On most days, there were none. Today was typical.

  Grabasov eased into bed beside Dominika. She was a heavy sleeper, and her slumber was usually enhanced by the wine or vodka she consumed in the evenings. Sometimes he wondered if they ought to have had children. There was still time, he knew. They’d been married just five years, and while he could only ever be a grandfatherly parent, Dominika was still young, only thirty four. Kids would further cement his image as a settled Russian citizen.

  He lay on his back, hoping that sleep would come within the hour but knowing it wouldn’t, when the doorbell chimed downstairs.

  Grabasov felt the freeze of panic he’d last experienced in his twenties, as a neophyte agent on an operation in Minsk.

  Behind the Iron Curtain, a midnight knock at the door had meant only one thing. The KGB had come calling.

  So this is it, he thought. After eleven years. A good eleven years. Productive, and worthwhile. They’ve caught up with me.

  Grabasov turned his head to look at Dominika’s sleep-blurred face on the pillow beside his. She hadn’t stirred at the sound of the door. He knew when she was faking sleep, and this wasn’t one of the occasions.

  He swung his legs out of bed quickly, wanting to get downstairs before the doorbell sounded a second time. He didn’t waste time putting on a dressing gown.

  As he went down the staircase - he’d managed to steer Dominika away from the neo-Classical design she’d originally yearned for - Grabasov ran through the likely sequence of events. He’d done so before, countless times over the last decade; but previously it had all been so theoretical. For the first time, he was faced with the enormity of his fate, terrible in its imminence.

  There would be the interrogation. It would be extensive, lasting weeks, perhaps months. It would begin in the Lubyanka, the notorious former KGB headquarters, and it would primarily involve elements of psychological coercion. Depending on how long he held out, and his captors would expect him to be of the highest resilience, given the dimensions of the fraud he had perpetrated on them, he might be subject to more fleshly methods of torture.

  Grabasov knew he wouldn’t be subjected to a public trial. The propaganda value of his exposure to the world’s media would be considerable. But the Kremlin would also be acutely aware of the embarrassment potential. Here was a man who’d been appointed to a senior position in one of the country’s premier banks, and who now was revealed to be a British spy. Russia would look like a fool in the world’s eyes. A cuckold, even, which was even more humiliating.

  The most likely outcome was that they would attempt to turn Grabasov. To run him as a double agent, remaining in his post as head of the bank and continuing to maintain contact with his employers in London. But he’d feed them disinformation, very subtly, in the exquisite way the FSB were so expert at. Incrementally, Britain’s picture of the Russian economic and political machines would be distorted, until it became utterly false.

  An alternative scenario came to mind. They would know Grabasov to be a high-quality asset who would always be at risk of remaining loyal to his masters. There was the strong possibility that he’d become a triple agent, apparently doing Moscow’s bidding while continuing to work for SIS. And that might prove too great a risk for the Kremlin to take.

  In which case, Grabasov was looking at a bullet through the back of the head, or, more likely, a final year or two of life in the frozen hell of a Siberian prison camp. The latter was the more probable option. It carried a strong element of humiliation, of pitiless revenge.

  Like an alcoholic entering the AA programme, Grabasov knew the only way he would be able to endure the life ahead of him was by surviving in that most primal of manners: one day at a time.

  He opened the front door.

  The first surprise was that only one person stood there. The FSB always conducted its visits in pairs, at least. Always.

  The second was the youth, and deference, of the man on the porch. And the fact that he was wearing the neon-highlighted uniform of a commercial courier.

  He was solemn without being austere. Confident without arrogance. He maintained a respectful physical distance, several feet back.

  ‘Mr Grabasov? I apologise for the lateness of the hour, but I have an urgent delivery for you.’

  He stepped forward and held out a small packet, the kind that was meant for sending objects other than letters by post and was bubble-wrapped inside.

  Grabasov took it. There was nothing written on it, front or back.

  The young man was already walking down the driveway towards the street.

  Grabasov closed the door.

  He went upstairs to the middle floor and into his study. As a precaution, though Dominika was unlikely to wake up, he locked the door.

  Inside the package he found a flash disk. There was nothing else.

  He took a reserve laptop from a cupboard. The laptop was for the testing of memory sticks and CDs and email attachments which might contain lethal, hard-drive-destroying viruses.

  The flash dr
ive contained a single file. A video.

  Grabasov ran it.

  A featureless room appeared on the screen. Grabasov’s eyes searched it for clues to its location, but there were none. Even the vague light filtering in through a probable window off-screen on the right might have come from the sun anywhere in the world.

  A man moved into view, seating himself before the camera so that only his head was visible. He was clean shaven, about forty years old, with dark hair of moderate length and strong but placid features.

  Grabasov had studied the face in photographs, but had never seen it in such circumstances as now.

  John Purkiss.

  His voice was new to Grabasov. He spoke in a soft, clear baritone, his accent upper middle class rather than aristocratic.

  ‘Oliver Clay. I hope you’re watching this. If somebody else is, then I’m afraid you’ve been compromised somewhere along the line.’

  Purkiss paused, as if to allow his words to sink in. Especially his use of Grabasov’s real name.

  ‘You’ve succeeded in killing Saul Gideon, and you see me as your last remaining obstacle. I’m afraid you’re in for a surprise.’

  He looked off camera.

  A few seconds later, a second man seated himself beside Purkiss.

  Grabasov became very still, so that he was more aware of the blood pulsing in his head than of his breathing.

  It was Quentin Vale. There was no doubt about it. No possibility that this was a decoy, or some clever trick of cinematography.

  ‘Oliver,’ Vale intoned. Clay had heard the voice on telephone recordings over the last few weeks. He’d seen pictures of the man, aged compared with when they had last met, fifteen years earlier. But it was as if the years had fallen away, and the relatively youthful and vigorous man Clay had known and worked with for more than two decades was sitting there in the room with him.

  Grabasov watched Vale, expecting him to take over. But it was Purkiss who did the talking.

  ‘You realise, of course, that you’re finished,’ said Purkiss. ‘The fact that we know who and where you are means that your future is entirely in our hands. We know that you’re reviving the Cronos operation, and why you’re doing so. It stops, right now. No more killings. No more empire building. We’re the gods. The titans have been supplanted by their sons. There’s no going back.’