by Tim Stevens
The monitor he was looking at now was one of those covering the arrivals area at London City Airport.
The footage came streaming in, a continuous feed, and local FSB software analysed it while running a cross-match with its databases of ‘people of interest’. In this manner, the movements of significant people into and out of Britain could be noted. The system wasn’t foolproof. It couldn’t be, and wasn’t expected to be. But on occasion, a match was made.
The image frozen on the screen was of a tall man with dark hair. He wasn’t looking directly at the hidden camera, and his face was turned slightly to one side. But his features were clear.
In a frame to one side of the monitor, the facial recognition software displayed its match. The same man’s face stared out, the image far crisper than the one on the airport camera.
The young kindergartener didn’t recognise the man. Didn’t recognise the name that came up.
But he saw the code in vivid letters alongside the matched image.
The priority code.
Escalate to senior officer with urgency.
The kindergartener picked up his phone. He’d send an electronic account of the match, but escalate with urgency meant there had to be immediate telephonic contact as well.
When the curt voice at the other end said, ‘Yes?’, he told his superior that a John Purkiss had just been identified arriving at London City Airport.
*
The message passed up the chain of command with smooth efficiency.
Within seven minutes of the match having been made by the facial recognition software, the Director of the FSB was informed.
Karl Borisovich Krupyev was in his office at the time, alone for once, taking a few minutes of respite between meetings. After he put the phone down, he sat for thirty seconds, allowing himself to savour the sensation of urgent, visceral excitement.
Then he picked up the phone once more.
Usually, when he made this call, he hesitated for an instant. He believed too-frequent calls to the number might make him seem weak, or too eager to please.
This time, he had no doubt the call would be welcomed.
As he waited for the connection to be made, he opened the attachment to the message which had just arrived on his computer monitor.
He looked at the face. And felt another thrill of triumph.
John Purkiss, the British agent, had aborted the attack on the President two autumns ago in Estonia. An attack that had been instigated by Richard Rossiter.
Now Rossiter was a fugitive. He’d slipped through their grasp, in circumstances nobody had yet begun to understand.
And Purkiss had surfaced.
It might mean nothing. It might be coincidence.
What might be, didn’t matter.
The ring tone ended in a click so abrupt that the Director caught his breath.
‘Yes?’ Even the single syllable was enough to capture the man’s voice. The voice which everybody was familiar with, which was heard nightly on the television news, and across the world as well.
It was a voice that could charm, and chill.
‘Mr President,’ the Director said, as neutrally as he was able. ‘We have a development. John Purkiss has been identified in London.’
He relayed the details into the silence at the other end.
When he’d finished, after the briefest of pauses, the voice came quietly, ‘You’ve taken further action?’
‘Yes, sir. Of course.’ Further action meant putting immediate surveillance in place. Every airport in Britain had FSB personnel on constant, round-the-clock standby. The greatest numbers were at Heathrow and Gatwick, the two biggest sites. But the Director had four of his staff at London City.
On his monitor, the update had already arrived. Target identified entering vehicle. Licence plate captured.
The Director thought to himself: Excellent work. The noting of a car licence plate opened up all sorts of possibilities. The FSB had access to Britain’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency databases.
He said, ‘Your instructions, sir.’
Usually, the request for further orders tended to trigger annoyance. The President expected his most senior intelligence officer to come up with ideas, not pleas for guidance.
But this was different.
The voice on the other end of the line said, as quietly as before, ‘The closest surveillance. But he is not to be lost. You understand? If there’s the remotest chance that he is about to evade us, we close in. And apprehend.’
‘Understood, sir.’
The Director waited. You never hung up first in a circumstance like this.
‘Karl Borisovich.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The President seldom used the Director’s patronymic.
‘Make this work.’
It was said gently. But it wasn’t a request.
‘Sir.’
The click was followed by a hum.
Krupyev allowed himself a second interval of inactivity.
He relished the excitement. The adrenaline crest of the incipient chase.
And, he acknowledged, there was the thrill of fear in his blood, too.
He picked up the phone once more.
Ten
Rossiter had always been intrigued by Friesland.
Of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands, it was the one with the most distinctive character. Its people were legendarily tall. It had its own language, West Frisian, which was closer to English than almost any other in the world.
And - the feature that suited Rossiter’s purposes most immediately - it included a chain of fourteen islands in the North Sea, none of which featured to any significant degree on any Western intelligence radar.
The Eurocopter had landed into a moderate headwind an hour earlier. Lars Dokkuma met Rossiter on the runway, his shoulders stooped against the currents thrown up by the beating of the rotor blades. At four in the morning, the wind scouring the fields from the sea was raw and punishing, and Rossiter felt the sharp bite of the cold against his neck once again as he stepped out of the cabin.
Dokkuma reinforced the Frisian stereotype. At six feet six, and lanky with it, he towered over Rossiter despite his hunch. His thin lips and nose were thrown into prominence between the bulky layers of his wool hat and scarf.
‘Lars,’ Rossiter said, raising his voice over the helicopter’s clatter while managing not to shout.
‘Jacobin.’ The Frisian shook hands. Once, back in Tallinn, two and a half years ago, Rossiter had been labelled the Jacobin by somebody who’d been hunting him. It amused him to keep the moniker, and that was the only name he’d given Dokkuma.
Beyond Dokkuma, a large, ugly lorry squatted like a prehistoric creature. Rossiter raised his hand without looking behind him. He heard his men climbing off the chopper.
Rossiter didn’t make small talk, as a rule, but even he was struck by the taciturnity of the tall man as they made their way towards the truck. He appreciated it. There were no queries about how things had gone so far, whether there’d been any setbacks, or anything of that kind. The helicopter had arrived at the appointed time, and that meant the plan was following its course.
Dokkuma’s car was parked a short distance away from the lorry. He took the wheel himself rather than using a driver. In the wing mirror, Rossiter saw the truck lumbering after them. Four of his men had climbed on board, the suitcase they’d picked up in Åland handcuffed to the wrists of two of them.
Rossiter didn’t think Dokkuma would pull a trick, but it never hurt to be cautious.
Dokkuma didn’t say anything until they’d travelled perhaps a mile. The island was shrouded in blackness, with no streetlights to be seen, and no sign of human habitation either. The building loomed ahead of them with a startling suddenness. It was flat and broad, and resembled nothing so much as a wartime artillery shelter.
‘The Lab,’ Dokkuma said. He pronounced the th as d. There was something slightly humorous, Britishly ironic, in the way he seemed to capita
lise the word lab. Altogether rather Dutch, Rossiter thought.
Rossiter and Dokkuma stood aside while the men brought the suitcase off the truck and headed into the building. The Frisian gestured for Rossiter to precede him and he went in.
It was, indeed, a laboratory, despite its forbidding, functional outside appearance. The interior was given over to a floorspace covered with benches, work surfaces and electronic equipment. Harsh overhead panel lights provided blue-white illumination.
‘A coffee,’ said Dokkuma.
Rossiter accepted. He watched as his men uncuffed themselves from the case and four of Dokkuma’s people, mild-looking men and women who didn’t wear white coats as might be expected, took possession of it.
‘Half an hour,’ said Dokkuma.
He and Rossiter sat on stools along one side of the laboratory, sipping their coffee in a silence that was almost companionable. Rossiter watched the technicians working on the suitcase while his men stood to either side.
After ten minutes, a mobile phone rang.
Dokkuma raised it to his ear. Listened. Put it away.
Rossiter watched his profile.
A small smile played about the Frisian’s mouth.
Rossiter said, ‘Care to tell me?’
Dokkuma glanced at him, still smiling. He poured more coffee into Rossiter’s mug.
He said, ‘My people have established that your helicopter carries no missiles. Nothing that might be used to blast this lab into dust the moment you leave here.’ He raised his own mug. ‘Let’s toast.’
Rossiter didn’t follow suit. He shook his head.
‘It’s a sensible security measure,’ he said, ‘and I’d probably have done the same. But really, Lars. A man of your skills is valuable to me. I might need your services in the future. You know the expression, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?’
Dokkuma raised his head, gazed over towards the laboratory personnel working on the contents of the suitcase. He was no longer smiling.
‘Your analogy is crap, Jacobin. I’m a one-off, for your purposes. If my staff establish what you wish them to establish, you’ll have no more use for me.’
Rossiter sighed. ‘Your cynicism is troubling. But I suppose it has survival value.’
The grin was back on the man’s face, though he said nothing.
*
It took twenty-three minutes, according to Rossiter’s wristwatch.
One of the lab techs stood upright, at last, and turned towards Rossiter and Dokkuma at the far end of the room.
He raised his gloved hand. Made a circle with his thumb and forefinger in the gesture universally recognised as the sign that everything was as it should be. Except, Rossiter had heard, in Brazil, where it meant arsehole.
Rossiter put down his empty mug. Extended a hand to Dokkuma.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
The man’s grip was firm without being crushing. ‘You’ll forgive me if I get a little vulgar. But I need a guarantee that the balance of the funds have been paid.’
‘And you’ll have it.’ Rossiter took out his phone, a pay-as-you-go he’d been handed in the helicopter. He keyed in a number, then attached a text message with a nine-digit code. Reception wasn’t the best here, on an island in the North Sea with the winds gusting down from Siberia, but he saw that the message had been transmitted successfully.
‘It’s all yours,’ he said.
Dokkuma picked up his own phone. Dialled a number by pressing a single key. Rossiter knew the call was to somebody monitoring the bank account Dokkuma had specified.
The Frisian listened, watching Rossiter as he did so.
He put the phone away.
His smile this time was broad.
‘A pleasure doing business with you, Jacobin.’
‘Likewise.’
*
The Eurocopter lifted into the buffeting night, embarking on its third trip with Rossiter as a passenger.
He couldn’t make out Dokkuma, or any of his people, or even the lorry, on the ground below. The lights had already been killed and this end of the island was a smudge of blackness in the surrounding sea.
A face appeared beside Rossiter, leaning into the cockpit. It was McCammon, the leader of the team which had freed Rossiter, and the man Rossiter came closest to trusting with his life.
Rossiter said, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the chopper: ‘Yes.’
McCammon disappeared once more.
Although he couldn’t see him, Rossiter imagined the man holding the small box in his palm. He visualised McCammon’s thumb sliding over the two buttons on the upper surface, pressing down on one, and then the other.
The depressing of the buttons sent independent signals to two devices.
The first was the one inside the canvas sack one of Rossiter’s men had dropped beneath a bench in the laboratory while they were waiting for Dokkuma’s staff to complete their work on the suitcase. The device was composed of plastic explosive with an incendiary overlay.
The second object resembled a mobile phone. Rossiter had dropped it into Dokkuma’s jacket pocket as they’d turned towards the door of the laboratory to exit. It, too, contained plastic explosive.
He heard nothing over the howling of the rotor blades and the thud of the engines. But, hundreds of feet below, he saw the flash of light, the eruption of black chunks of masonry against an orange bed of flame.
It was possible that some personnel might escape unscathed. But that didn’t matter.
The main targets - the laboratory, and Lars Dokkuma himself - had been eliminated.
Rossiter thought about what he’d said to Dokkuma.
Yes, cynicism had survival value.
But sometimes it wasn’t enough.
The Eurocopter angled north-west, out to sea, putting distance between itself and any local radar systems. It was sufficiently fuelled to keep it airborne for a few hours more. But it would need to land again at some point.
The destination had been a point of contention between Rossiter and McCammon. McCammon believed strongly that Rossiter should place himself as far from Britain as was feasible.
‘No,’ Rossiter had said. It was the first and only time they’d spoken together during Rossiter’s incarceration in the prison in Berkshire known as The Box. By then, the strategy had been established, and fine-tuned down to the minutest detail. ‘Britain is the last place they’ll be looking for me.’
Rossiter leaned back in his seat. He allowed himself a brief closing of the eyes, a temporary indulgence of satisfaction.
The product had been obtained, and verified as authentic. He’d promised the Locksmith that he would contact him with instructions for deactivating the explosive device implanted on the person of Mossberg. He would contact the Locksmith, in due course - there was no rush, and there was no harm in making the man sweat - but he would issue no instructions, because there was no such explosive device. The bluff had worked, because the Locksmith was from a country in which fear and paranoia made even the most outrageous threat plausible.
Rossiter had the product in the suitcase. It was time to move into the next phase.
Eleven
Asher had driven them to London City Airport from SIS headquarters in a nondescript Toyota Camry, and it was to the same car, sitting alone in a gloomy corner of the multi-storey car park, that they returned.
Asher reached the Toyota first. He gave it a swift once-over, checking under the chassis with an extendable mirror he’d produced from his coat pocket, peering at the door handles and the tops of the windows for signs of tampering. Purkiss stood back, appreciating the man’s tradecraft.
They’d pulled out into the evening traffic when Vale called.
‘I have an address for the facility where the surveillance device was implanted in Rossiter,’ he said. ‘R557 Medical is its technical SIS label. Colloquially, it’s known as The Plant.’
‘Very droll,’ said Purkiss. ‘Personnel?’
‘Ye
s, I have a list of names. The surgeons involved in the procedure, as well as the technicians who supplied the tracking device. It all gets a bit complicated, though, I’m afraid. The particular device used to track Rossiter is produced by an independent firm, HorizonTech, which is under exclusive contract to the Service. They’re bound by all the usual restrictions, the Official Secrets Act and so forth, and of course the Service has exercised due diligence in vetting them. But it’s possible someone within the firm has access to the codes required to track the particular device implanted in Rossiter, and has leaked them.’
‘It’s somebody there,’ Purkiss said. ‘We can forget about the medical staff. They were just there to install the bug.’ Through the windscreen he saw the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf glitter into view. ‘Can you get me a breakdown of this company? HorizonTech? In particular, the personnel involved in the production and distribution of the device in question?’
‘I’ve done it already.’ Vale said it without a hint of self-satisfaction. ‘Again, we’re casting a wide net. If you include the factory-floor employees, the technicians involved in the physical creation of the bug, we’re looking at close to sixty people. Sixty individuals who could conceivably have had access to the signal Rossiter’s bug gave out.’
Purkiss thought for a moment. ‘We need to fast-track this. Could you run a check on all those sixty-odd people for SIS backgrounds?’
There was a pause before Vale replied. ‘Ah, yes. I see where you’re going with this. I’ll ring back.’
A few years ago, Purkiss would have relied on Abby Holt to do his research. Abby was a precocious IT genius, a slip of a girl in her twenties from Lancashire who had a remarkable facility for accessing the most secure databases in Britain, and internationally. But Abby was gone, shot dead in Tallinn, on that terrible October night which had been followed by the final confrontation in the Gulf of Finland, with the terrorist and would-be assassin Kuznetsov.
And with his sponsor, Richard Rossiter.
Asher was taking the Toyota westwards, broadly in the direction of SIS HQ once again. Purkiss hadn’t told him to go there, but he was homing in like a pigeon. The crowded and frenetic night-time streets of East London began to give way to the sleeker environs of the powerhouse that was the city’s financial heart. Beyond the towers of Canary Wharf to the left, the Thames brooded, visible intermittently between the buildings.
