Ratcatcher

by Tim Stevens

  He pulled the arm of the mirror so that it was maximally extended, and reached across with it as far as he could over the other balcony, tilting it until he had the view he wanted. The curtains were separated a crack at chest height. As he watched the mirror, a man’s torso appeared fleetingly inside the room. Purkiss adjusted the angle some more and saw the side of a man’s face, his mouth moving as he addressed somebody to the side of and below him.

  At least two, then.

  Back in the room he squatted down at the minibar. He found a bottle of wine and eight miniature bottles of spirits. Among the coffee things on the dresser were six sachets of sugar. He took everything to the bathroom and poured the wine down the sink, then poured the contents of the miniatures into the wine bottle, half filling it. Using his teeth he ripped the edge of a hand towel and tore it lengthways. He rolled it and pushed it deep into the neck of the bottle, dousing in the mixture, before removing it and emptying the sugar over the soaked cloth. He reinserted one end into the bottle’s neck so that it dipped below the surface of the alcohol. It wasn’t much, certainly nowhere near as effective as a petrol bomb would have been, but he wasn’t looking for something deadly.

  He took out his phone. When Elle answered, he said very quietly, ‘There are at least two of them in her room. I’m in the one next door. I want you to phone the hotel switchboard and ask to be put through to room one one nine. Speak in Russian. Tell whomever answers that his orders are to withdraw. I’ll take your call as my cue.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Purkiss used a chair to prop open the door of his room. He stepped along the corridor to the door of room 119 and placed the end of the keycard Abby had given him into the slot, taking care not to push it far enough to unlock the door. He left his door ajar. On his way back to the balcony he picked up the makeshift Molotov cocktail and the complimentary book of matches on the coffee table.

  He waited on the balcony, the rain batting gently at his face, the enclosed layout of the courtyard protecting him from the wind. He had counted to twenty-two when the phone began to ring in room 119.

  Purkiss lit half the matches at the same time, twisting and tilting the protruding length of towel, smearing the flame over its length. He watched it catch and begin its slow crawl towards the neck of the bottle. Faintly, through the closed glass doors of the room next door, he heard the man’s voice. Purkiss drew a breath. As he released it, he hurled the bottle backhanded against the glass doors of the adjacent room.

  It smashed in a burst of flame and glass, but he was already running back down the length of his room and out to the corridor. He rammed the keycard home, waited the half second for the click, and pushed the door open. It was as he’d hoped, the phone was on the side of the bed nearer the door as he’d remembered it and the man was still there having just dropped the receiver. The other man had also backed off towards the door, recoiling from the shock of the noise and flame against the balcony doors. Purkiss charged the man at the phone first because he was nearer and caught him with a flying kick square in the chest. It slammed him hard against the wall, and as the man started to slide down Purkiss dropped and grabbed the gun half-grasped in the man’s limp hand and spun, keeping low by the side of the bed.

  The other man was fast, already taking aim. The noise from the suppressed shot was like a heavy table being tipped over, and the duvet inches from Purkiss’s face erupted in a furrow of feathers. At the same time Purkiss fired, his gun fitted with a suppressor too. His shot caught the man in the throat, his head snapped round and back, and he twisted and crashed back against the television set in the corner.

  Purkiss hauled the slumped man to a sitting position. He’d hit his head in the impact with the wall and was semiconscious, his eyes fluttering. Purkiss slapped his cheeks, drove a knuckle into his breastbone. Apart from a moan, the man didn’t react.

  Purkiss pulled out his phone. ‘I have one of them. I need to interrogate him but he’ll make too much noise, and somebody might have heard something already anyway. I’m coming down.’

  She said, ‘Got it.’

  He strode over to the balcony doors and flung them open. The fire from the homemade bomb had already burned itself out. Purkiss craned to look up and down the iron steps of the fire escape that ran alongside the balcony. At the bottom was the courtyard, where he would be hemmed in. It would be more straightforward to go out the front door, though he’d have to get the man at least partly mobile first.

  He glanced at the man in the corner, the one he’d shot and whose throat had sprayed gore across the television screen. The man was quite dead, but a few inches from his hand was a phone, its display still lit up as if it had been used in the last minute or so. Purkiss had been paying attention to the man’s gun, naturally enough, but hadn’t noticed what else he had in his hands. Had he had time to make a call before Purkiss had come through the door?

  Purkiss’s own phone vibrated.

  ‘John.’ Elle’s voice, low and urgent. ‘They’re approaching the entrance. Four of them.’

  Twenty-Six

  Purkiss said, ‘Understood,’ and rang off.

  There would be a back way through the kitchens, but they’d have that covered. Apart from that he knew nothing about the layout of the hotel.

  He grabbed the man under the arms and dragged him to a standing position. The man staggered but he kept himself upright. He blinked vacantly. Purkiss hissed in his ear, ‘English?’

  The man stared at him.

  ‘Russian?’

  The man didn’t nod his head but Purkiss could see he’d understood. He said, ‘Come on,’ and, an arm across the man’s shoulders, he led him to the door, stowing the gun in the waistband of his trousers and covering it with his jacket.

  The corridor was empty. There was no approaching commotion to suggest anyone had been alarmed by the banging. Purkiss hurried the man, not allowing him to stumble, towards the stairs. Instead of descending he urged the man up to the second floor.

  At the top of the steps he pushed him along the corridor and round a corner. To their left the lift was coming, the numbers above the door counting the floors as it rose. It wouldn’t be the four others; they were unlikely to take the lift. With his free hand Purkiss gripped the man’s throat on either side of the tracheal cartilage and massaged the carotid arteries with thumb and fingertips. It stimulated the vagal nerves which in turn slowed the heartbeat, a trick Purkiss had learned from a doctor in Morocco. The man’s eyes rolled up and he sank. Purkiss held him under the arms and lowered his dead weight to the carpet in front of the lift. Then he slipped back round the corner.

  The lift door opened to the murmur of voices, which changed to sharp cries. Purkiss stepped round the corner and saw a middle-aged couple crowding round the body on the floor. They looked like tourists. He strode forward.

  ‘Move aside, please. I’m a doctor,’ he said in English, with a Russian accent.

  They looked up in bewilderment. He put a little impatience into the voice.

  ‘Move out of the way.’

  The man on the floor looked awful, his face like the sweating underbelly of a fish. His breathing came in laboured rasps. Purkiss crouched beside him and lifted his eyelids with his thumbs to reveal a rind of white on each side. He felt his pulse – thirty-eight beats per minute but at least full – and peered in his mouth at his tongue.

  He looked up at the couple. ‘You speak English?’

  ‘Yes.’ The man was American.

  ‘You know this man?’

  ‘Never seen him before. We came out of the elevator and he was just there.’

  ‘He needs urgent attention. I need to get him on a bed, quickly. Where’s your room?’

  The woman said, ‘Well, I don’t know if –’

  ‘Where’s your room.’

  The man said, ‘Opposite. Two oh three.’

  He walked quickly to the door a few paces down the corridor and unlocked it. He came back and took the supine man’s feet while Pu
rkiss got a grip beneath his arms. They hauled him into the room and laid him on the double bed. Purkiss bent over him, busying himself, loosening the man’s collar, turning him on his side so that he wouldn’t aspirate if he vomited. He addressed the couple without looking at them.

  ‘Sir, I need you to go down to the front desk and tell them to call an ambulance. Don’t try calling from the room because they may not understand you. Their English is not so good here. Ma’am, I want you please to go upstairs to room 507 – that’s the fifth floor – and get my medical bag. It’s beside the bed.’

  He groped in his pocket and took out the keycard to room 121. She seemed about to protest again, but her husband took her arm and they left. It was a tissue-thin story and it wouldn’t be long before they saw through it, but at the moment Purkiss was on a floor and in a room where his opponents were not expecting him to be. That gave him an edge, however slight.

  The Americans had left their room keycards on the bedside table. Purkiss opened the mini-bar and took out a cold bottle of soda water and pushed it down the back of the man’s collar. He moaned and flailed his arms. Purkiss felt his neck. The pulse was up to fifty.

  He was recovering, but not quickly enough. Purkiss put the bottle in his pocket and went into the bathroom. The tiny window opened on to the side of the building. Through it, he could see the black iron railing of the fire escape.

  Back in the bedroom the man was stirring again. Purkiss got him in a fireman’s lift and carried him into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

  Below the window that opened was another immovable one, an opaque sheet of glass. Purkiss took off his jacket and wrapped it around his fist and broke the glass with a sharp jab. Behind him he could hear the rattle of somebody trying the door to the bedroom, then a woman’s voice calling out, the American’s. She would have gone up to room 507, found that the key Purkiss had given them didn’t work, and come straight back down. Her husband would probably still be on the ground floor, alerting the staff.

  Like many continental hotel bathrooms this one had a bidet, positioned under the window. Purkiss stood on it and leaned out the gap left by the breaking of the window. The cast-iron fire escape plunged three floors to an alley along the side of the hotel, and stretched up beyond the fourth, fifth and sixth floors to the roof. He put his head back inside and propped the man upright on the bidet, jamming him so that he didn’t slide sideways. It wasn’t going to do much good for the blood flow to his brain, but Purkiss had more pressing concerns. He squeezed through the window space and hauled himself on to the steps, teetering for a horrible instant in the grip of that inbuilt insanity that whispers to human beings to jump when they’re on the lip of a long drop. Then he sat and braced his feet against the banister and the window frame. Gripping the man beneath his arms, he leaned backwards.

  The man was about Purkiss’s size but he was dead weight. Purkiss strained, the muscles of his arms and shoulders burning. Distantly he could hear pounding on the door, shouting. With luck, whoever came upstairs with the husband would not have keys to the room on them and would have to go back downstairs again. The man flopped over the rim of the window. Purkiss heaved him the rest of the way by grabbing his arms. For a second he felt him start slipping down the slick metal of the steps and Purkiss fought to regain control. Then he stooped awkwardly and lifted him fireman-style again. Gasping under the effort, he began to climb. The night air was cold, and flickers of rain whipped about as if a deluge was toying with the idea of making an appearance. The alley below didn’t go anywhere. Chances were fair that there would be nobody down there to look up and see them. Far greater was the likelihood that somebody would get into the room and stick his head out the window. If Purkiss could make it to the roof before this happened, he might have a few minutes to spare, because the natural assumption would be that he had climbed down rather than up.

  He reached the top where there was an unlocked metal door, pushed the man through, and shut it behind them as softly as he could. Voices suddenly broke into the empty air below. The door was in a low wall that ran around the edge of the roof. In the centre of the open rectangle were two blocks with doors in their walls that he assumed led to the inner staircases. He didn’t have a great deal of time because the hotel would be crawling with police in a few minutes, and they would certainly check the roof.

  Purkiss sat the man against one of the walls. He tore off the gag, pulled the bottle of soda from his pocket. The shaken carbonated water sizzled over his hands. Purkiss shook it over the man’s waxy face. The man sighed and mumbled, opening his eyes a crack and squinting against the glare of a spotlight from a nearby building. Purkiss took out the pistol – a SIG Sauer P226, he noticed – and laid it on the ground.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  His lips moved silently. Purkiss slapped him.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Braginsky.’ His eyes were open and focused on Purkiss’s. He was on the right side of the twilight that separated consciousness from its counterpart.

  ‘Okay.’ Purkiss squatted back on his haunches. ‘You know how this sort of thing usually works, Braginsky. You give me the runaround a bit, I cut up rough, you start feeding me scraps, I go easy, you clam up again, I escalate the violence, et cetera, et cetera. Except I haven’t got much time. And when I’m pushed for time, I skip the niceties.’

  One of the mistakes that Purkiss had come to learn was frequently made about interrogation science was that the more immediately the urge to be free from the distressing stimulus, the more likely the person being interrogated was to say anything, even if it were untrue. So, a man in extreme pain will reflexively tell his tormentor what he believes he wants to hear. A man facing the less immediate threat of impending death or disfigurement, and who has time to contemplate the consequences of his non-cooperation, may still lie, but is less likely to do so, as the demons generated by his own imagination do their work.

  Purkiss picked up the Sig-Sauer, pushed the tip of the silencer against the man’s forehead, and motioned for him to stand. He did so, shakily. Purkiss grabbed his collar and turned him and shoved him towards the adjacent wall which was lower, hip height. He kept pushing so that the man was bent over the wall at the waist. Laying the gun down on the wall, Purkiss squatted and gripped the man’s ankles. He pushed up so that he tipped past his centre of gravity with a cry.

  Braginsky hung suspended over the drop, his arms flailing.

  ‘Where’s my friend? The woman.’

  The man yelled some more. Purkiss let go and immediately gripped the ankles again.

  ‘Whoops.’ He peered over at Braginsky’s face, which arched back at him, eyes rolling in terror. ‘You’ll notice it’s not a clean drop. You’ll hit a balcony or two on the way down. It’ll be messy.’

  ‘I don’t know –’

  ‘You’re getting awfully heavy, Braginsky.’ He let the ankles slip a few inches more.

  ‘For the love of God, I swear I don’t know. The Englishman took her.’

  ‘Fallon.’

  ‘I don’t know his name. It was never told to us by the boss.’

  ‘The boss. You mean Kuznetsov.’

  ‘Yes.’ He shouted it unhesitatingly. It made Purkiss think he was telling the truth about the rest.

  ‘Where’s Fallon?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Back at the farm?’

  ‘No. It’s –’ He broke off, and Purkiss gave him an encouraging jolt. ‘Ah, God, don’t – The farm’s being closed down.’

  From far away, somewhere below in the streets, came the noise of sirens.

  ‘What’s planned for tomorrow?’ He combined the question with a shake of the man’s legs. He could feel his grip genuinely starting to slacken.

  ‘An attack on the President.’

  That was interesting. He hadn’t said on the summit.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Russian.’

  Purkiss took this in, the implications not imme
diately clear. But it became a secondary concern. Behind him a door crashed open in one of the stairwell blocks and men began to stream out, too early to be the police, and looking too murderous.

  Twenty-Seven

  They were four, just as Elle had said, hard and ugly men who fanned out across the rooftop. Each was armed with a pistol, apart from one who gripped one-handed a single-barrelled shotgun, the end sawn short.

  Purkiss dragged Braginsky back over the edge and let him fall gasping near his feet. He grabbed the Sig-Sauer. The block the men emerged from was the farther of the two from Purkiss. The men were perhaps fifty feet away, advancing. Purkiss hauled Braginsky to his feet, pressed the gun against his head. One of the men took aim at Braginsky himself. No good: they’d riddle their own man if they had to. Purkiss placed the gun on the ground and raised his hands. Braginsky’s legs buckled and he slid to the ground, his face a gargoyle mask of fear.

  Purkiss scanned the environment. There was nothing he could do, nothing. The door to the fire escape was too far away to be of any use, and the men were between him and the doors to the inner stairs. If they didn’t take his phone away from him immediately he might be able to get a message to Elle and Kendrick. The likelihood of that was almost non-existent.

  One of the men coughed, and frowned at the rope of blood his mouth flung out on to the concrete. An instant later the crash of a shot rang off the walls around the roof. The man hit the ground face-down as the other three spun and crouched, one of them knocked off his feet immediately by a second shot. The man with the shotgun pulled the triggers of his weapon. The boom of the firing mechanism was followed by the stinging spatter of lead shot against the wall of one of the blocks. His body jerked twice and he twisted towards Purkiss as he fell. The fourth man got to his feet, swung his gun arm over to point it at Purkiss. Purkiss dived and rolled on his shoulder and the shots sang off the wall. Braginsky screamed and spun face-down, hit by a ricochet, Purkiss assumed. The man was taking aim again when the rifle hammered. He was hit three times before he could fire. He sprawled awkwardly, the gun spinning and skittering away from him across the surface of the roof.