by Tim Stevens
Throughout, Vale gazed at the camera, almost motionless. He wasn’t even smoking.
Purkiss continued: ‘When I said you’re finished, I was referring to your private operation. The Cronos business. As regards your work for the Service... we’ve decided you’re too useful an asset to be cast aside. So you continue as before.’
He leaned forward a fraction. His eyes, normally mild, took on an intensity that captivated the attention like a master actor’s.
‘But understand this, Clay. If there’s the remotest hint that you’re continuing with your current course of action - that you’re coming after me, or Quentin, or anybody else, or that you’re recruiting others to your cause - then we’ll blow you sky high. We’ll tip off the FSB with unambiguous evidence. They’ll have you inside the Lubyanka before you know it. And I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. We’ll do this without official sanction, by the way. The wishes of SIS be damned. And you’ll be no use to Moscow as a double agent, because they’ll know we’ve fed you to them. You’ll be wrung out like a sodden rag, and thrown on the rubbish tip.’
Again Purkiss left a pregnant pause. Vale’s expression never changed.
As if recalling something he’d genuinely overlooked, Purkiss said, ‘Oh. There’s a quid pro quo, by the way. You get to keep your freedom, such as it is, and your exalted positions both as a captain of Russian finance and as British Intelligence’s premier agent. In return, you give us Delatour.’
Purkiss had said most of it with his usual amiability, his reasonableness. As he mentioned Delatour, his expression darkened.
‘You need to be kept in place, for obvious reasons. Delatour has no such protection. He’s a traitor, and he deserves a traitor’s fate. You have no more use for him, Clay. So arrange for him to board the rearmost carriage of the Green Line on the Athens Metro at Attiki, in the direction of Kifisia, at one-fifty p.m. on Saturday the first of November. That’s the day after tomorrow. Wherever in the world he is at the moment, it gives him time to get there, if you act quickly. I’ll allow half an hour’s leeway. If he’s not on the train, the Director of the FSB in Moscow will receive an email at two-thirty p.m., Athens time, containing evidence that Kyrill Grabasov, the CEO of the Rosvolgabank, is a British asset named Oliver Clay.’
For the first time, the shadow of a smile played at the corners of Purkiss’s mouth. It didn’t reach his eyes.
‘And if that makes you consider cutting and running right now, I’d advise against it. The moment we detect that you’ve disappeared, we’ll notify Moscow in a similar fashion.’ Purkiss blinked, the old affability returning. ‘Just do it, Clay. Give us Delatour. You once hunted down people just like him. You understand what motivates us. Put him on that train, and we’ll silence him.’
Purkiss gazed at the camera, as did Vale. Grabasov waited for more.
After a full twenty seconds, the picture snapped off.
Grabasov turned off the computer and sat back in his chair.
He thought: Quentin. You clever, devious bastard.
But you’re not clever enough.
He smiled into the darkness.
Twenty-five
The Ferryman took up a position next to a group of young women laden with bags from what looked like designer clothes shops. They were locals, the women, and they chattered with the spirited abandon of close friends enjoying a Saturday post-payday spree.
He was dressed in an unthreatening suit with a collar and no tie. A middle manager, perhaps, who’d finished a weekend morning shift and was heading home, cheap briefcase hanging from his hand.
The digital display above the platform gave the time as 13:48, and the arrival time of the next train as three minutes from now.
The train pulled in on time, hissing to a halt. Delatour allowed the women to step in ahead of him, before entering and choosing a seat next to the aisle. It left a seat free beside him, adjacent to the window. He placed the briefcase on this second seat.
Across from him were a middle-aged couple, the man gazing out the window at the wall of the tunnel, the woman engrossed in a paperback book.
Inside Delatour’s briefcase was a folder containing sales reports. Behind the lining was a network of wires, attached to a slim cylindrical object at the tip of which a soft red light pulsed at the rate of once every second.
The doors of the carriage closed, and the train wheezed into motion.
He’d presented his idea to the Oracle, Grabasov, when he’d called him after leaving the islet on Thursday, after it had become apparent that Purkiss and his associates had got the better of Artemis’s men and would be heading back to confront Delatour. Grabasov had approved the idea, Delatour knew, even though the man’s tone had been as inexpressive as ever.
Delatour’s hypothesis was simple: Purkiss was a hypocrite. He moved and worked in a world in which the concept of moral absolutism was nonsensical, and he accepted this axiom. Yet he balked at actions which entailed collateral damage, the deaths of civilians, regardless of the context.
This hypocrisy could be exploited.
Delatour proposed the organising of a significant attack, one which he could arrange within a few days using his contacts in the Islamic Caliphate group. An event in London or Washington or New York would be the most potent, but any European or American city would serve. Delatour would set it up, and a message would be sent to Purkiss to inform him about it. The message would be conveyed through the MI5 woman, Hannah Holley, with whom Purkiss was known to have had a relationship. She wouldn’t be informed about the content of the message, but would simply be contacted anonymously and told that her former lover was to phone a specified number. Delatour had no doubt she would pass on the message, and that Purkiss would respond.
Purkiss would be instructed to present himself at a specific location at a designated hour, in order to avert the planned mass attack. He’d do so, and he’d attempt a trick of some kind; but the Ferryman would kill him then and there, the moment he was in sight.
And that would be the end of it.
Everything had changed since the revelation that Vale had survived. Now, Purkiss had apparently turned the tables. It was he who was dictating locations and times. He who seemed poised to take down the Ferryman, rather than the other way round.
But Grabasov had identified a way to implement the Ferryman’s original idea. And Delatour, upon hearing it, had immediately concurred.
Delatour had arrived early at the station. Nine hours early, in fact.
He’d been in Athens, still, basing himself in a hotel room in the city centre, and it had taken him a matter of three hours to assemble the necessary equipment. He had an Islamic Caliphate contact in the city, who procured him the chemical components in short order. The rest of the material had been purchased from a department store.
He’d walked the Metro line from station to station, above ground, nine hours ago. And he’d had everything in place by the time the first trains started running at five thirty that morning.
Delatour looked at the window as the train plunged into the tunnel. In its reflection, he could see the seat backing on to his. A teenaged boy, earbuds plugged in and head hunched over his mobile device, sat beside an elderly woman who appeared asleep.
A man barged past Delatour’s knees and shoved himself into the seat next to him, pushing the briefcase to the far side against the wall of the carriage.
As Delatour turned his head, he felt the ratcheting of something around his left wrist. He glanced down and saw a plastic handcuff encircling the soft gap between the bones of his forearm and the base of his hand. The cuff was so tight that the skin bulged around it.
On Purkiss’s lap, his own right wrist was clamped by the matching handcuff.
*
‘He’ll bring backup, of course,’ Vale had said.
‘No he won’t.’
And Purkiss had explained.
Rebecca had found the plastic cuffs at an Army surplus store.
Purkiss had been sit
ting in the last-but-one carriage, and had seen Delatour on the platform as the train had pulled in. He was on time, then. If he hadn’t been there, Purkiss would have got off at the next station and watched the end carriages of the next two trains.
The middle-aged couple on the seat opposite hadn’t noticed a thing. Purkiss murmured in Delatour’s ear: ‘We get off at the next station. If you resist, I’ll kill you here, unlock the cuffs, and disappear.’
Delatour said, barely moving his lips, and so quietly Purkiss had to strain to hear him, ‘There’s a bomb in the briefcase.’
Purkiss didn’t look at it, but he became intensely aware of the press of the case against his side.
‘It’s on a timer,’ said Delatour. ‘I won’t tell you when it’s set for. But it’s an incendiary device. The blast will blow out the windows, both the external ones and the connecting ones between the carriages. The flame will be funnelled down the tunnel and engulf both the carriages down the line and the upcoming platform. The casualty count will be high. Scores of people, at least. Probably hundreds.’
Purkiss thought rapidly.
Back in the hotel room, when they’d been considering strategies, Vale had said: ‘It’s a matter of pride with Clay. He’ll pull a trick at the end. He won’t be thinking about the repercussions. It’ll rankle that we’ve outsmarted him. He’ll do whatever he needs to defeat us.’
A matter of pride...
The phrase had stayed with Purkiss. And it had given him the solution.
He said, matching Delatour’s almost inaudible murmur: ‘Then we’ll all go out together. But you’re going out, Delatour. That’s all I care about.’
He watched the side of Delatour’s face, the smooth expanse at the temple where the hairline had receded.
The skin was pale and matte, with no sheen of sweat.
The briefcase pressed heavily against Purkiss’s side. He fancied he could feel it move with an imagined ticking within it, which was absurd.
The train pulled into the next station with a squeal of brakes and juddered to a stop. Purkiss heard the doors slide open, but didn’t look at the mix of people pouring off and stepping on the replace them.
With his eyes still forward, Delatour said: ‘Purkiss. I know this is brinkmanship. But the bomb will go off. You have the option of disembarking, or not. Your choice.’
‘No. You’re the one with options, Delatour.’ Purkiss watched the couple opposite. Still, neither of them seemed to have taken an interest. Purkiss had cast his jacket over the armrest between his seat and Delatour’s, covering their forearms where the cuffs joined them. ‘You tell me how to disable the device, or you die with me.’
He reached awkwardly with his left hand and found the handle of the briefcase and pulled it out from where it was wedged at his side and laid it across his lap. The weight wasn’t excessive.
Two hasps closed it. Purkiss tried sliding the release buttons with his thumb. The case was locked.
It was a cheap piece of luggage, and the hasps could be prised open with relative ease. But to do so might be to trigger whatever was inside.
With his left hand Purkiss reached inside a pocket of the jacket draped over the armrest and extracted his Swiss Army knife, just as he had done on the piazza in Rome with the earlier briefcase, the one he’d taken from Billson. It seemed an aeon ago.
Keeping the knife concealed between his body and the briefcase, Purkiss opened it and eased the blade behind one of the hasps.
He glanced at the side of Delatour’s face once more.
Still no gleam of perspiration at the temple.
The man was lying.
Purkiss slipped the knife under his right arm and touched the tip against the crook of Delatour’s elbow, pressing hard enough to make its pressure felt.
‘There’s no bomb in this case,’ Purkiss murmured. ‘Either you admit it, or I’ll open up your brachial artery. It won’t be a quick death, but you’ll bleed out before you can leave the train. It’ll be a mess, but I’ll get out of these cuffs and disappear before anyone can stop me.’
The man was lying, but he had some plan in motion. Purkiss was certain of it.
Delatour’s face remained impassive. There was no sweat, still, no tiny tic at the corner of the eye or the mouth.
Purkiss leaned forward, peering across Delatour, seeking out his right hand. It was hidden by his side.
With a sharp sideways snap of his neck, Purkiss rammed his head into Delatour’s face.
The man’s head rocked back, his nose giving way beneath the force of Purkiss’s skull. Across from them the woman gave a stunned gasp. Purkiss lunged across Delatour with his right hand, the one holding the knife, and jammed the blade into Delatour’s own right forearm.
He saw the fingers open involuntarily as the knife went in, saw the tiny round flat object in Delatour’s palm, with its central red button.
Purkiss gouged the blade into the arm, twisting and ripping, needing to hurt rather than to kill. The blade had been slowed by the sleeve overlying the arm but the material was reddening rapidly.
The woman across began to scream, and her husband let out a yell.
Purkiss jerked the knife upward and outward, dragging the arm with it, and saw the object drop from Delatour’s palm and skitter away down the aisle of the carriage.
Purkiss pulled the knife free from Delatour’s arm and jammed it into his throat, beside the windpipe where the carotid pulse was now a pounding, visible thing.
The screams from the passengers opposite drowned out the gurgling hiss from Delatour’s own throat. The blood, bright and fresh and arterial, spurted onto Purkiss, catching the side of the face before he could avert his head entirely.
He left the knife where it was, protruding from Delatour’s thrashing neck, and dropped his hand into his trouser pocket and found the tiny key and fitted it into the plastic cuff and freed himself.
Delatour’s flailing hands were at his throat, grabbing at the knife and jerking it out, but Purkiss didn’t wait to observe.
He shoved out into the aisle, taking the briefcase with him, his face and neck and chest daubed with blood. The screams reached a raging pitch, and someone pulled the emergency cord because the brakes set up their own screech.
Purkiss found the object Delatour had dropped halfway down the aisle beneath a seat. He slipped it in his pocket. The train had been pulling into a station and he saw passengers on the platform through the windows, oblivious to what was going on inside the carriage.
The doors hissed open and Purkiss stepped out and strode towards the exit, leaving a growing trail of stares and mutters in his wake.
The witnesses were many, and his fingerprints were on the knife, but none of that mattered for the moment.
He made it up the escalator and through into the afternoon air, brushing aside expressions of concern from people who assumed he was horribly injured. When he found an alleyway he pulled out his phone.
‘Quentin. Delatour’s down. He had what I think is a decoy bomb in a briefcase. I have it with me now. He was carrying a detonator. I suspect there’s an explosive somewhere on the Metro, either in a carriage or in the tunnels. You need to get the Metro evacuated and the police down there.’
Purkiss sagged against the wall, giving in to the shakes, and waited.
Twenty-six
They collected him twenty minutes later, Rebecca driving, Vale beside her, and Kendrick in the back seat.
Kendrick stared at him. ‘Bloody hell.’ And he laughed.
Purkiss kept his head down as they moved through the streets. Vale briefed him: he’d made an anonymous call to the emergency services, informing them of the danger and providing the detail that there was a dead man on the carriage of the Green Line. That information would have already been communicated to the authorities, and it would add credibility to Vale’s warning.
Already, they heard sirens coalescing in the distance.
Rebecca had organised a safe house, a rented apartment, on
the northern outskirts of Athens. They arrived there and deposited the car and hustled Purkiss inside, where he stripped off and showered and emerged after ten minutes.
When the others were out of earshot, Purkiss said to Vale: ‘I need to talk to you. Urgently, and alone.’
Vale watched him. In his eyes there was resignation, as if he’d been expecting this.
He said, ‘Very well.’
Twenty-seven
Grabasov sat alone in his office, high above the city.
This time he didn’t gaze out over the skyscrapers, but instead contemplated the framed photograph of a smiling Dominika on his desk.
Dominika, whom he hardly knew, and cared less about.
The news of the incident on the Athens Metro had reached him forty minutes earlier.
Ten minutes after that, he’d called the Ferryman’s number for the last time.
His phone lay on the desk. There’d been no return call.
So it was over. The gods had won, after all.
Grabasov had three courses of action open to him.
The first was to do nothing. To continue as before. He’d receive a message before long, he knew, from Vale or Purkiss or both. It wouldn’t be gloating, but it would remind him that he’d violated their stipulations once, and would not be given another chance if he transgressed. They wouldn’t blow his cover to Moscow, he was almost certain of it. But the threat would always be there.
Option two was for him to be proactive. To inform SIS of what he knew. Vale and Purkiss would be apprehended - there was no way they could evade the collective might and cunning of British Intelligence for ever - and Grabasov himself would be recalled, to face whatever fate was deemed necessary. Apart from petty revenge on Vale and Purkiss, this scenario would achieve nothing.