Ratcatcher

by Tim Stevens

  The man’s stare flicked from Purkiss to the advancing woman, calculating. Then Purkiss was vaulting over the counter and as the young woman screamed he was down the passage and pushing the fire door open. He found himself in an alley, dark and murky.

  The other man was there. He must have doubled back earlier and been lurking nearby. He saw Purkiss and ran the short distance towards him, quick for such a thick-set man. Purkiss was off running in the opposite direction but his foot slid on a slick of wet cardboard. He stayed upright but lost a second. The man bore down.

  Purkiss turned and the man’s forearm drove off his shoulder. In the man’s fist he saw the flash of a needle – he’s got one too – and he pivoted on one foot and brought an extended-knuckle strike against the man’s neck. There wasn’t much of a neck to aim at and he got the side of the man’s jaw. He bellowed and punched Purkiss in the chest, slamming him back against the wall of the alley, winding him. There was no time to make a fuss about not being able to draw breath properly because the fist with the syringe was stabbing at his thigh. Purkiss twisted his hips, felt a sting in his upper thigh. He pistoned his leg side-on into the man’s abdomen, the syringe spinning high with a liquid streak spilling from the needle’s tip. The man staggered back and Purkiss swept at his shins with a foot, bringing him down hard.

  Ten feet away the fire door barged open and the crop-headed man came through. Purkiss felt it then, the leadenness in his limbs and his eyes as though the earth’s gravitational pull had suddenly been doubled. He thought that while most of the contents of the syringe hadn’t gone in, a fair amount had. Even his thoughts were heavy.

  There was no chance of taking the other man down now. There was no option but to run, run…

  *

  ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘Stefan’s down, out of action. He got him with the needle first. He’s running, but he’s slowed down.’ The man sounded out of breath.

  ‘Stop him.’

  The Jacobin kept the line open and picked up another phone and dialled.

  Kuznetsov answered at once.

  ‘I need more men. Near the bus station.’ The Jacobin gave a quick summary.

  ‘There’s no-one else in the area at the moment. By the time I can get anybody down there it will probably be too late.’

  ‘Send them anyway. Your man might already have him by then.’

  ‘Who is this person?’ said Kuznetsov.

  ‘I’ll explain later. Someone I know. Someone very dangerous.’

  *

  The wall toppled towards him and he recoiled and the opposite one slammed into his shoulder. One foot in front of the other, like a marathon runner on his last legs, like a baby taking its first steps. Where was the other man? He didn’t dare look round in case the rotational movement dropped him.

  A sense of proximity warned him at the last second and he summoned all his reserves and jerked his elbow back, connecting with something soft, a face. The cry receded behind him which meant the man had dropped back, even if for only an instant. Purkiss clasped the wall and swung round a corner. There ahead was a main street again, its lights harsh but welcome as the sun. He loped along the side of the building until he reached the main road. He turned, allowing himself a glance back.

  The man was coming after him, closer than he’d hoped, darkness at his nose and streaked on his cheek, his eyes shadowed under the neon glare. Purkiss set off into the pedestrian traffic on the pavement, was immediately buffeted. He stumbled to his knees, hauling himself up amid angry mutters which he couldn’t understand but took to mean look at him, bloody drunk. It wasn’t a clever move being in a crowd because it would be so much easier now for the man to close in and slip in the needle, and this time depress the plunger all the way. What he needed was adrenaline to counter the sluggishness. If you couldn’t get an adrenaline fix from running for your life where could you get it?

  Then he knew.

  Purkiss lurched towards the kerb, bouncing off a lamppost, and stepped into the road. For an instant he felt as if he were actually viewing his surroundings upside down, so dislocating was the chaos of sensation on all sides, the rushing of headlights and the fury of horns and the tiny faces on the pavement and behind windscreens. The razor squeal of tyres seemed to slash at his legs as a wing mirror clipped his hip and sent him to his knees again, another set of wheels missing his fingertips by an inch.

  His pulse drilled in his chest. He lifted his head and saw the front grille of a car halted a foot from his face. He tried to stand but his limbs were nailed to the road surface. Then there were hands on his upper arm hauling him up and a face looking into his in sympathy and helping him back on to the pavement. A familiar face.

  No, something wrong there. The face had blood on it and it wasn’t expressing sympathy. It was the man with the cropped head.

  Others clustered round. Purkiss saw the man’s other hand come out of his pocket. As it moved between them Purkiss grabbed the wrist and twisted it and jammed the needle in up to the hilt and forced the weight of his thigh against the plunger, driving it into the man’s groin. Purkiss smelt the bloodied breath through the man’s nose as his eyes turned up. Purkiss let him fall, watched his head bounce off the pavement.

  There was no time to go through his pockets because the growing crowd had shrunk back in a communal gasp. Shouting, there came the older woman from the bookshop. Was that where he was? He’d come full circle.

  All he could do was push his way loose and, again, run.

  Seven

  After the call to Kuznetsov to tell him – your other man’s down, the target’s free – the Jacobin went for a walk in the Old Town. The conical turrets were blacker against the backdrop of the newly darkened sky. By the clock on the tower of the Holy Spirit Church it was half past eight. In thirty-six hours’ time it would be over.

  Purkiss. He was troubling in himself, but so were the implications of his presence in the city. The Jacobin hadn’t yet explained to Kuznetsov who Purkiss was, but would have to soon, even though Kuznetsov would reasonably blame the presence of a former SIS officer on poor security on the Jacobin’s part.

  There was no point in conducting an intensive manhunt. Tallinn was a small city but not that small, and the manpower available to Kuznetsov wasn’t unlimited. The Jacobin assumed Purkiss was still operational, so there would be little gained in checking the hospitals. He would have to be ignored for now, until he showed his hand again.

  The Jacobin watched a British stag party posing crudely for photographs on the Town Hall Square, and was put in mind of the small man, Seppo, and his camera that morning. Like Purkiss, he was another loose end unsatisfactorily tied off. Too much was unexplained at this late stage.

  Unless –

  Seppo and Purkiss.

  Of course. The connection was not only possible but seemed likely.

  With a renewed lift of spirits the Jacobin left the square.

  *

  Purkiss passed between the twin mediaeval towers of the Viru Gate into the Old Town at eight fifty-five by his watch. He’d assumed it was hours later, his sense of time having slowed along with his reactions. After lurching round corner after corner he’d finally stopped, hands braced on thighs, fighting the urge to vomit. For the first time he noticed that he’d dropped his shoulder bag at some point and had no spare clothes. The weight in his limbs was beginning to lift, but his eyelids still felt sodden.

  A street newspaper vendor sold him a guidebook and map. From another vendor he bought a pay-as-you-go phone. He tried Seppo again, got no response, binned the phone and bought another from a different shop. He called Vale, surprised to find that his tongue and jaws worked well enough that he could make himself understood.

  ‘I’m compromised.’

  He told him about the surveillance from the airport, the chase.

  ‘Fallon must have got on to Seppo.’ Purkiss could hear cellophane being stripped off a fresh pack of cigarettes. ‘Obtained your name and arrival time. I’m so
rry.’

  ‘Not your fault. Everyone breaks if the pressure’s extreme enough. And Fallon’s a professional, he’d have known if Seppo was trying to feed him disinformation.’

  Down the line Vale drew deeply, exhaled through his nose. ‘Do you want to come back?’

  Purkiss ignored that. ‘I’m going to Seppo’s flat.’

  ‘That’s highly dangerous.’

  ‘It’s the only way.’

  He rang off and dialled again. Abby answered after two rings.

  ‘Abby, it’s me. Sorry to wake you.’

  ‘You didn’t. It’s a quarter to seven.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Sorry, yes. Bit disorientated.’

  ‘How’s Tallinn?’

  ‘Friendly people. Can you get a GPS fix on this phone?’

  ‘I can do anything, Mr Purkiss.’

  ‘If I don’t ring you back in two hours, locate me and phone this number.’ He gave her Vale’s number. The two of them had never met; Vale provided the funding and some very basic logistical support but was otherwise content to leave Purkiss to hire his own help on a freelance basis. If she had to contact Vale it would mean Purkiss was fatally compromised.

  With the help of the map he found himself on the outskirts of the Old Town, picture-postcard red roofs clustered on the far side of a busy main road. He crossed unsteadily, the blare of traffic making him flash back to the recent past. For a moment he wondered if there’d been some kind of hallucinogen in the syringe, but concluded that the stress of the last hour was still gnawing at him.

  He walked cobbled streets, modern shopping facades kept discreet amongst the splendour of the mediaeval buildings. The aroma of roasting meat assailed him from restaurant doorways. He realised he hadn’t eaten since grabbing a bite on the way to see Vale that morning. There was no time to stop. On the other hand he was weak, needed protein and carbohydrates. He stepped into a square, the cobbled pavement of which sloped alarmingly, bought a steak sandwich and a litre bottle of water from a vending wagon, and sat on a stone bollard to eat. He felt his blood glucose levels rise immediately. As if in tandem a memory surfaced for the first time.

  After he’d dropped the bull-headed man and was staggering away with the tranquilliser starting to spread through him, the other man had been close enough behind him that he’d heard him muttering into his phone in Russian. The content wasn’t particularly revealing – he’s hit, I’m going after him, or similar – but the throaty vowels were unmistakeable. Although there wasn’t anything odd about the man’s being a Russian speaker, ethnic Russians making up over a third of the city’s population according to the guidebook he’d bought, it might be significant that Fallon was working with Russians.

  Seppo’s flat was in a residential area of Toompea Hill in the upper Old Town. Using the looming silhouette of the city’s castle as a landmark, Purkiss strode up the hill, pausing once to look back at the view over the city below. The autumn chill had deepened, cooling the sweat he’d accumulated.

  He reached the end of the street he wanted and looked up it. Rows of parked cars lined one side. At a crouch he crawled up the street beside the cars, keeping his head up enough that he could peer into each one. None looked occupied. Straining his eyes, he stared across the street and identified Seppo’s block. From where he was, Purkiss couldn’t tell which of the two first floor flats was Seppo’s. Lights were showing from behind the drawn curtains in the windows of only one of them.

  He watched the entrance to the block for ten minutes to see if anyone would emerge. There wasn’t much point. The place would have been searched already, the trap set and waiting for him to spring it. They’d be either in the flat itself or in the lobby, most likely the first. In that case breaking in wasn’t an option, even if he could make it up to the window somehow once he’d established which of the two flats it was, because he’d be heard. Short of waiting until whoever was in the flat finished his shift and was relieved – and who knew how long that would take – the only course was the direct one.

  He crossed the road beneath the flood of the streetlights, feeling his back contract as it anticipated a bullet between the shoulder blades. He made it to the door. Seppo’s number was unadorned by any name. He pressed the buzzer and waited. Nothing.

  He tried again, twice. The response was the same. There were twenty-four call buttons. He pressed them in rapid succession. Within seconds the voices started coming through, short and rising into questions at the end. In Russian he muttered, ‘Hi, it’s me.’

  Another Babel of monosyllables, then a sharp buzz and he pushed the door open. The lobby was dim and smelled of antiseptic. He mounted the stairs, saw that Seppo’s flat was on the right, which meant it was the one without visible lights on from the street. At the door he paused. A booby trap? Breath held, he tried the handle. Locked. He got out a credit card and set to work.

  He’d been half expecting a complicated system, given Seppo’s past as an agent, but the lock yielded at once. He pushed gently and let the door swing open. No light greeted him. For an instant he felt the primal terror of stepping into the dark. He reached for a switch. The passage filled with light. With a vase he found on a table just inside the door, he propped the door ajar and, hugging the wall, he moved down the passage. He reached an open doorway into the living room and dived in, rolling on his shoulder and coming up at a crouch. There was nobody in the room.

  He turned on the lights and did a quick survey. It was simply and tastefully decorated, like someone’s home rather than a safe house. A sword, some kind of antique, hung on the wall. Otherwise there was little to give any impression of the occupier’s personality. The surfaces were dust-free and clean, apart from the shadow of a scrubbed stain on the carpet by the fireplace.

  Purkiss put his head into the kitchen. It too seemed in order. He had crossed the living room to explore the rest of the flat when the echo of footsteps rang up the stairs. He ducked back into the living room, but the front door was already swinging open.

  Eight

  ‘He didn’t mention anything about a visitor.’

  She was early thirties, Purkiss guessed. Light brown hair tied back, thin fawn pullover and suede jacket, jeans.

  ‘He wouldn’t have. He doesn’t know I’m coming, it’s a surprise.’ He gestured about the room. ‘To be honest I wasn’t even sure he still lived here. Still wouldn’t be if you hadn’t confirmed it. It’s a few years since I last heard from him.’

  She glanced around. ‘I’ve never been here either. We’re friends at work, but not that close.’

  ‘And he hasn’t been in for – how long?’

  ‘Three days. He isn’t answering his phone either. Our boss is livid. I’m more worried than anything else.’

  It seemed presumptuous for either of them to sit so they remained where they were.

  He said, ‘What work does he do?’

  ‘We’re a small English-language newspaper for expats. Living Tallinn.’ She didn’t look at him as though she expected him to have heard of it, or cared if he had or not. ‘He’s a photographer. The photographer, really.’

  She was lying through her teeth, as he was, and they each knew the other was lying.

  He scratched the back of his neck. ‘It’s a bit difficult for me. I don’t know much about him, about his life here. Do you know where he might have got to?’

  ‘No idea, I’m afraid.’

  He’d spun the first threads in the web of lies: I’m a friend of Jaak’s, well, not a friend exactly. I met him when he was an exchange student at Cambridge with me fifteen years ago. I came up here and the door was open. He didn’t say how he’d got into the block of flats in the first place and she didn’t ask. She countered with her concerned work colleague fable.

  They stood with nothing more to say, two strangers with a tenuous link meeting in odd circumstances. He broke the moment.

  ‘Well, as I say, I was in town anyway. I’ll be off.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘Look, if you do hear from him in
the next couple of days could you ask him to give me a ring?’ He scribbled his name – Martin Hughes, the one on the passport – and a random seven-digit mobile phone number on a piece of notepaper from a pad on the table beside the landline phone near the door. She took the paper and glanced at it.

  ‘Likewise, if he gets in touch with you, call me, okay?’ She handed him a business card. She’d slipped up: why not just ask him to tell Seppo to call the office? The name on the card was Elle Klavan, the logo that of Living Tallinn, and there were mobile and fax numbers and an email address.

  At the door he said, ‘You staying here?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll wait a bit, see if he comes back.’ Her eyes were level.

  Another mistake she’d made: she hadn’t been sceptical enough about his explanation for his presence there.

  Outside the building Purkiss turned left and walked down the hill. He crossed the road and sidled up again behind the row of cars and took up position between two closely parked saloons, where he squatted, watching the windows and the entrance.

  There was occasional movement behind the curtains. The brightness increased a fraction, as though a light had been turned on elsewhere in the flat. After several minutes the lights snapped off without warning. Shortly afterwards she emerged from the building and headed down the hill.

  Within a block the streets started to become more crowded, something for which Purkiss was thankful as it provided cover. He was able to stay well back, yet keep pace with her. She wasn’t trying any counter-surveillance moves, which meant either that she wasn’t aware that she was being tagged or that she wanted to be followed. She headed back down into the centre of the Old Town. Purkiss tracked her through the square where he’d sat earlier, then off in a direction he hadn’t been before. She had the unhurried stride of somebody with things to do but no particularly pressing deadline to meet.

  She’d spoken startled Estonian on seeing him, but he’d answered in English and she’d immediately replied in kind, her accent unambiguously Home Counties. Klavan. Was the name Estonian?