by Tim Stevens
Fatigue was starting to tug at his eyes and limbs, brought on by the shortage of sleep he’d had the previous night on the way back from Rijeka, as well as the emotional grind of learning about Fallon’s escape. The lingering effects of the chase earlier and the sedative his body had absorbed weren’t helping either. He took a long draught of the soft drink, waited for the caffeine to kick in.
There was no pattern that he could discern. Fallon taking a flat with Seppo, who’d then reported his presence to Vale after several months. Fallon working in a dive of a club and taking up with an apparent street fighter of a woman, stringing her along and then ditching her without warning – and owing her money into the bargain. But in Purkiss’s experience the attempt to fit facts to patterns was one of the great errors of which human beings were capable. Of more use was the notion of probability based on past experience. His experience of Fallon was that the man didn’t get infatuated easily and didn’t run short of cash. His relationship with the woman had to be cover of some sort.
The relentless assault of the music was getting to him, proving hypnotic in both the mesmerising and the soporific senses. He thought about waiting outside but decided that he might miss Lyuba at the end of her shift. Instead he headed for the restroom. As usual the queue for the ladies’ was long, the one for the gents’ non-existent. He shouldered through the swinging door and into the reek of urine and bleach. He edged past the row of men at the communal urinal, found a vacant sink and ran the cold tap, ladling water against his face before pooling it in his hands and gulping it down. It was surprisingly palatable for city water. In the brown flyblown glass his face was pale, full of dark scoops: under the eyes, below the cheekbones and nose.
Beside Purkiss a skinny man with a ravaged face held open a jacket lined inside with slender pill bottles and knuckly twists of hashish. Purkiss shook his head. He was turning to leave when he felt a vibration against his leg. He pulled out his phone. A missed call from five minutes earlier. Vale.
He stood outside the cubicles until one of the doors opened. A man lurched out fumbling up his trousers. Purkiss went in, grimaced at the stink and the swamp of urine and toilet paper on the floor, kept away from the edge of the toilet bowl. He lifted the phone to his ear to hear the voice message while he reached behind him to slide the latch across.
The door slammed open against his thumb and the man cannoned into him shoving him forward so that his shins connected with the toilet bowl. He heard the door bang shut as he fought to keep his balance. With awful speed the man’s hands came down on either side of Purkiss’s neck and he felt the bite of the garrotte.
Ten
It was the phone that saved him from immediate death. It was in his left hand because he’d been reaching back to latch the door with his right and hadn’t had time to lower it completely. The garrotte caught across his watch but cut into his neck on the other side. He felt the wire tighten and crush the heel of his hand against the side of his jaw and he felt the closeness of the man behind him and the hot sourness of his breath against his right ear.
Purkiss shifted his head a fraction, all he could, to the right. At the far extreme of his vision was the shape of the other man’s head and part of one fist where it bunched with its fellow at the back of Purkiss’s neck, increasing the torque on the ends of the garrotte. Pain slashed through his neck and he felt the flesh bulging around the crevasse gouged by the wire. There was no blood yet, he was fairly sure of it. His right arm hung free.
Purkiss fought against the roil of nausea and tried for a backwards head butt with his occiput into his assailant’s face, but the twist of the garrotte around his neck might as well have been a vice holding his head in place because there was almost no range of movement. The wave of nausea was turning into one of panic as his watch slipped partially free from the garrotte and the wire began tightening across his forearm.
He pivoted back from the hips. This shifted the man back slightly and Purkiss was able to get his right foot up and onto the edge of the toilet bowl. He shoved himself backwards, pistoning his leg, slamming the man back against the door. Purkiss pushed again and a third time, each time pounding the man into the door and shaking the entire cubicle. From outside a drunken voice laughed what the fuck’s going on in there in Russian – another Russian speaker, this was quite a Russian club, that might be significant flitted through Purkiss’s thoughts – and the man behind him gasped back, ‘Leave us alone,’ which was met with cheers and wolf whistles. Purkiss got his right arm up and grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair and bent his head sideways. The angle was all wrong because his arm was flexed behind him and he was trying to exert force outwards, but the stretch on the man’s neck was enough to make him hiss through clenched teeth and momentarily shift his grip on the ends of the garrotte to secure it more tightly. In that instant Purkiss let go of the hair and gripped his left fist in his right hand and pressed his left forearm against the wire, the separate pains in his arm and in the right side of his neck blinding but the manoeuvre succeeding in creating a little slack. He was able to turn his head a fraction to the right and whip it sideways and he felt his frontal bone just above and to the side of his right eye connect hard with the man’s cheekbone and with a soft cry the man loosed his hold on one end of the garrotte. Purkiss spun to face him and the movement tore the garrotte free from the man’s left hand. Purkiss closed in, striking with a half-fist at the side of the man’s neck.
The blow to his cheekbone had been hard but the man recovered quickly and brought his arm up and deflected Purkiss’s attack. The man countered with a two-fingered eye jab but the space was too confined, ridiculously so, and he didn’t have the distance available to build up any momentum. Purkiss caught his hand and wrenched it around and down. With the edge of his other hand he struck at the man’s exposed neck. The man did his best to avoid it but with his arm held twisted as it was there wasn’t much he could do, and he sagged against Purkiss.
Purkiss let go of his wrist and caught him under the arms and supported the dead weight for a second, catching his breath, blinking until the ceiling stopped rocking, struggling not to topple over the toilet bowl pressed against the backs of his legs. There was a flicker at the man’s eyelids and he’d been bluffing and Purkiss let go of him and brought his knee up just as the man brought both fists stabbing in at Purkiss’s kidneys, an incapacitating blow if done right. Purkiss’s knee into the man’s abdomen as he dropped took some of the force out. Now the man had an arm around Purkiss’s neck and with his other hand he was gouging at Purkiss’s face. Purkiss seized the wrist in his hand and held it quivering. He stared into the man’s face, so close to his, red and sweating, the eyes narrowed to slits and the breath wheezing hot against his face.
For a fraction of a second they held the position, taking stock. The man had his left arm around Purkiss’s neck and his right in a claw near Purkiss’s face. Purkiss gripped the man’s right wrist in his left fist. His right hand was free and between them.
Purkiss brought his left hand up with the heel of the palm foremost and slammed it into the underside of the man’s jaw with as much force as he could muster, which was less than it would have been a minute earlier because the pain and disorientation were taking their toll. Still the man managed to avoid the worst of the blow by turning his head and taking the brunt on the corner of his jaw. He loosened his arm further from Purkiss’s neck and jabbed his stiffened fingers at the side of Purkiss’s throat and Purkiss staggered, vision blurring. The thrash of the music was suddenly overwhelming and as if detached from his body he saw himself stumble over the toilet and the man shift position for the killing blow. From somewhere inside him Purkiss felt something building, a great dark shadow which couldn’t be contained and which erupted from his chest and along his arm as he rammed the heel of his palm out again. This time he caught the man directly beneath the nose and snapped his head back. He dropped, finally, the nasal bones driven into the soft tissues of his brain, his knees sinking into the
foetid mulch on the cubicle floor.
Purkiss reeled, gripping the cistern and heaving over the bowl, though nothing came out apart from a sour spew of half-digested soda. His foot slipped in the mess on the floor and the wall tilted towards him. He shoved down the lid of the toilet and slumped onto it and leaned forward, head in his hands.
When he opened his eyes, panic scrabbled at him because he thought he’d been out for hours; but by his watch, which was still functioning, barely five minutes had passed since he’d entered the cubicle. At his feet, pressing against his legs with genuine dead weight this time, the man half sat, half slumped, empty eyes turned turned to the ceiling. When he was confident he’d keep his balance Purkiss stood and let the man slide sideways so that his head fell alongside the root of the toilet bowl.
In the man’s hip pocket he found a wallet with a driver’s licence. He read the name – Abram Zhilin, Russian again – and address. The man had no phone on him. Purkiss bent to peer under the door of the cubicle. There were two pairs of feet at the urinal trough. Swiftly he opened the door and exited and pulled it shut and walked past the two men who didn’t turn. He went to the basins. In the mirror his face was bone-sallow, the eyes grey bruises and not fully focused. There were angry red lines along his left forearm and the right side of his neck, seeping blood. He washed his arms and neck, cupped water over his face and between his lips, spitting and repeating.
There wasn’t time to reflect on what had happened, because he had to see if the woman was still out there. It was ten to one and he hoped she hadn’t left yet. He stepped out into the dizzying throb and sidled along the wall towards the bar. She looked up, Lyuba. In her face there was shock. Her glance darted across the floor and he followed it and saw, picked out intermittently in the strobes, the face of the man with the bull neck who’d been following him earlier, separated from him by a mass of clubbers.
He though about moving sideways towards the entrance, but saw her looking in that direction as well, and he understood there were others, probably guarding the fire exits too. He’d been set up, and he was now well and truly cornered.
*
Afterwards the Jacobin went for another walk, this time along Pikk, the Long Street, past the old guild houses towards St Olaf’s Church. Not one but two more scars on the soul. The old woman had to die after she’d seen what happened to her husband, there was no question about it; but she was blameless, as indeed was the old man. They might even have been left to live if the Jacobin could have been sure Purkiss hadn’t given the man his phone number and asked him to get in contact should anyone come asking.
The three-quarter moon perched on top of St Olaf’s spire, at one time the tallest of its kind in the world. The Jacobin gazed up at it, breath pluming in the cold night air, and thought about human hubris. A year’s meticulous planning, and Purkiss was trying to put a stop to it at this late hour.
On the worst nights – perhaps one in every ten – the Jacobin’s dreams were painted in vast, terrible vistas of devastation: charnel pits engorged with the stick bodies of concentration camp inmates, strontium-blighted cityscapes of black ruin, fields of mud and blood and bone. The Jacobin would wake, sweat-slick, fist crammed into mouth, driving back a scream. The terror would ebb after a few minutes, but the shaking in the hands would persist. The Jacobin didn’t mind; welcomed the dreams, in fact. When one had committed oneself to a refusal to give an inch, the dreams stiffened one’s resolve.
The figures were burned in the Jacobin’s mind. Two and a half thousand operational strategic warheads, two thousand operational tactical warheads, seven thousand stockpiled warheads of both varieties. It was the best estimate of the Russian nuclear arsenal, not at the height of the Cold War but today, more than two decades after the fall of the Soviet empire. There was no chance, none at all, that the growing economic and geopolitical resurgence of the old enemy would not be accompanied eventually by the flexing of its military muscles, whether directly or through terrorist proxies. And no chance that the nuclear stockpile would remain unused. Meanwhile the governments of the EU and the US were embracing détente, rapprochement, a host of French terms that failed to disguise the English one they were meant to replace: appeasement.
As the evidence of the country’s growing aggression and arrogance had accumulated – the Litvinenko murder, the crushing of Georgia – there had been those within the Service who had pressed for a more assertive approach to the Russian Bear: greater numbers deployed in Moscow and Petersburg to bolster the existing networks there, targeted assassinations, pressure on the politicians to adopt a more publicly pugnacious stance. These courageous voices had been shouted down by others, less courageous. Russia is an ally in the War on Terror. We rely on Gazprom’s oil. And, more honestly if hardly more excusably: Look at the state of the economy. There’s no money left. The mealy-mouthed justifications nauseated the Jacobin.
After the morning of Saturday the fourteenth everything would be different. Within a week, within days, the Kremlin would have made its move, and the weasels in Whitehall and Washington would no longer be able to cower in their burrows. And leading the fightback would be the Service, reenergised, with a reacquired sense of purpose.
The old man, the landlord, had opened the door in a fury. His anger quickly dissolved into terror. By the end he was grovelling. He’d been useful, not for revealing where he’d sent Purkiss – this was already known to the Jacobin – but for what he’d said about the questions Purkiss had asked. The picture was becoming extremely complicated.
The call came from Kuznetsov. ‘My men are in place. He’s trapped.’
That was quick. The Jacobin was impressed, but didn’t betray it. ‘They underestimated him last time. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.’
‘You have my word.’ Was there snideness in the tone? Kuznetsov’s true attitude towards the Jacobin had become increasingly apparent in the last week.
‘Non-lethal force only.’
Kuznetsov said nothing.
‘I mean it, Kuznetsov.’
‘It causes delay, and ties up my people who are needed elsewhere. A quick despatch is far more efficient.’
The Jacobin gripped the phone, fighting down the frustration. ‘I told you, I need to extract information from him. Crucial information that could scupper the whole enterprise if we let it.’
‘If he is as dangerous as you say, then we’re better off with him dead.’ The call was disconnected.
The Jacobin paced, channelling the anger, trying to divert it like lightning into the earth. The pig-headed idiot had ideas above his station, was going to let his ego wreck everything.
From across the nearby bay a horn sounded, low and prolonged like a moan.
Eleven
He’d identified four of them so far but suspected there were more. The bull-necked man was barrelling his way through the throng, hanging back when Purkiss changed direction so that he could track him. On either side of the entrance there were two of them, their stares like spotlights trained on a lone sprinter across a prison yard. And behind the bar the woman, Lyuba, was ignoring the shouts of drinkers trying to get her attention and stood with folded arms, her gaze naked as the others’.
He fished the card out of his breast pocket and read the number by the light of his phone.
It was going to be impossible to make himself heard over the cacophony. On the other hand, he couldn’t risk heading back into the restrooms where it was marginally quieter, because he’d be trapping himself down a cul de sac. He thumbed in the text message and hit the send key.
The bull-necked man was trying to drive him towards the two at the entrance and he headed deep into the heaving mass of clubbers but it was hazardous because he didn’t know how many of them would be waiting further back in the depths of the dance floor and if one of them had a syringe like earlier they could slip it in before he’d realised what was going on and he’d be down and then they’d have him. He felt himself borne along by the press of bodies. This
, as well as the strobing lights and the endless grind of the music, triggered panic in his stomach. He thought about screaming. Nobody would notice, and it might offer him some release.
The phone in his pocket vibrated. He looked at the screen, saw the words: On our way. Fifteen minutes.
Our? There was no point dwelling on what this meant, because he had to concentrate on staying conscious and keeping his wits about him for a quarter of an hour. It was no time at all and yet an eternity.
There was another possibility to consider, a wild card he had no control over. The body might be found in the cubicle in the next fifteen minutes and the place locked down. It would reduce the immediate danger, but would generate problems of its own. His best bet was to make his way to one of the walls and keep against it, limit the directions from which the enemy could approach without restricting his potential escape routes. Purkiss squirmed his way over to the far wall. Once there he turned and took stock.
The bull-necked man was approaching, his progress remorseless through the sea of bodies. From over to the left, one of the men who’d been guarding the entrance was advancing, too, sidling along the wall. Purkiss eased to his left instinctively but ten feet or so in that direction was a corner and that was the last place he wanted to end up.
Purkiss breathed deeply, sucking reserve oxygen into his lungs and his bloodstream. He flexed his limbs, bounced on his toes, preparing himself. Two of them at close quarters, in his weakened state, were going to be a problem, to say the least. If they had syringes they wouldn’t even necessarily be filled with a sedative, as before. The man in the toilet cubicle had been trying not to subdue him but to kill him.
It murmured through the crowd like a ripple or a Mexican wave, a word he didn’t recognise at first until he realised another word was filtering through in counterpoint, this one in Russian: police. The collective mood of the crowd shifted, most people continuing their frenetic leaping but considerable numbers moving fast towards the restrooms, the back of the dance floor, the fire exits. Near him a boy swallowed painfully, forcing down whatever had to be hidden. Another hopped on one foot, trying to stuff the illicit goods into his other shoe. The bull-necked man and his colleague halted their advance, looking about and then craning back towards the entrance.
