by Tim Stevens
*
The leaves on the maple trees were flat hands grabbing for her, the unbroken dome of the sky a lid keeping her prisoner.
Of course it was possible the man had turned to look at her because they’d made eye contact and he was wondering if he knew her. Of course his might have been the normal reaction of a man noticing a young and reasonably attractive woman passing by. But Nina knew the difference between the feel of a man’s interested gaze and that of a Watcher.
This was definitely the latter.
She ran, and the cool lunchtime air sucked at her, trying to slow her, turning viscous. Ahead the perimeter of the campus beckoned and threatened, the anonymity of the city beyond. It was a small city, Charlottesville, and she wouldn’t be able to lose itself among its forty thousand souls the way she would in New York or Chicago.
She didn’t look back, even when she felt the footsteps pounding at her heels, even as the hand descended on her arm to slow her. Except it didn’t; that was imagination intruding again, bleeding into the real word, its thick strokes smudging the boundaries.
Time for meds, a crazy voice inside her piped up. Time at long last to start taking the pills, girl. And the hell with your violin playing.
Nina erupted on to the street, where suddenly young people didn’t predominate and elderly ladies with shopping baskets shuffled past harassed mothers with bunches of bawling kids sprouting from their hands. She weaved and jostled, the sidewalk like a combined minefield and obstacle course. Downtown reached for her in the near distance. There was her apartment, her haven. And while part of her laughed at the idea that she’d feel any safer there - the Watchers, after all, wouldn’t be deterred by the simple locks she’d had installed on the door and windows - another part shielded itself behind the atavistic power of the notion of home.
Three streets on, after a hair’s-breadth dodging of a car bumper and a forest of raised middle fingers, Nina slowed, her chest finally tightening in protest and her legs cramping.
She turned, swept the street left to right and back, ready to run again.
There was nobody. No tall tanned man striding in pursuit, no slowly cruising car with tinted windows and bald man in mirror shades presenting his granite face through the window.
No voices.
Nina sank to her knees, the crack of the sidewalk against bone sending unnoticed jabs of pain up her legs. She clasped her face in her hands.
It hadn’t been as intense as this for a long time. Six months, maybe.
When she felt ready to stand she did so, rising with a straight back, not trusting her balance to cope with the heft of the violin on her back and avoid toppling her over. She took her hands from her eyes, blinked at the garish glare of the noonday light around her.
A woman pushed an infant-laden stroller by her, smiling happily into Nina’s face.
Two businessmen in pinstripes, one fat and one thin like Laurel and Hardy, bustled past, arguing mildly.
A skateboarding kid sailed precariously close, too cool for school in his skinny gear and mantle of nonchalance.
Downtown Charlottesville was before her, familiar and unchanged.
Nina took a step, and another. Her legs worked. She was real again, calm and solid, not ephemeral as she’d started to be only minutes earlier. She wasn’t going to evaporate, was an entity that existed in its own right.
She smiled. Touching her violin through its case, she set off towards downtown.
And the men broke apart to let her between them: two of them, each in a suit, one black and one white. Each had a tiny dot in his ear, one in his right and the other in his left. She saw these as she glanced from one to the other when they passed.
Dreamily, she looked back.
They didn’t. Their backs receded.
But she knew, finally, that she hadn’t been wrong. This time it was real.
This time, the Watchers were moving in.
Five
Outside Amsterdam
Sunday 19 May, 11.30 am
‘Tickets, alsjeblieft.’
She was past forty with a weighed-down air and a nice, tired smile. Pope stirred out of his put-on doze and returned her grin.
‘Dank uw.’ She punched his ticket, caught his eye again. Her glance and her smile lingered.
Pope thought: Careful, now. The last thing he needed was to be remembered.
When she’d moved down the carriage he folded his Spiegel and over the edge of the paper watched the man opposite him. Middle fifties, Teutonic, and engrossed in a laptop which the reflection in his Himmler glasses revealed to be displaying a spreadsheet on its monitor.
The man probably wasn’t Service, or CIA, or German or Dutch intelligence. Pope couldn’t be certain. But then, it was always about probabilities.
The probability of John Purkiss’s arriving at Jablonsky’s house while Darius Pope was despatching Jablonsky was... low. Vanishingly so. Which meant, it was probable that Purkiss had been alerted to Pope’s presence in the city, and to his connection with Jablonsky. Which meant one of two things. Either, Jablonsky or Taylor had been tapped, and had revealed some connection with Pope. Or, Pope had been under suspicion for some time. The second was the more alarming possibility. It was also the less likely, Pope thought. He’d done nothing to arouse suspicion among the mandarins at the top ranks of the Service. He’d taken care to carve a career of solid, unspectacular achievement over the years. He’d done none of his research on Service time or using Service equipment. His tradecraft was exceptional; he found it hard to believe he’d allowed surveillance to gain much of a hold on him or his movements.
So one or both of the Americans had revealed something. it could have happened in one of a number of ways. Routine Service surveillance of the Company men might have picked something up - the most likely scenario. Or the pair had approached the Service themselves, for whatever reason.
In any case, Pope was now officially identified as the killer of two Company operatives. The Service knew this; perhaps the CIA did as well. The Service would be taking care not to let its transatlantic rival know of this, but it would struggle to keep it a secret for long. Which meant the Service was going to do its utmost to track down Pope, and neutralise him, before the Company found out about him. And they’d be using John Purkiss to do so.
Pope allowed his eyes to close and settled back in the seat, feeling the gentle rolling of the train beneath him. John Purkiss. He was an open secret within the Service, his actual identity suspected by some and known by fewer, his role accepted as a reality by all but the most naive. The Ratcatcher had emerged some five years ago, a vigilante of sorts. Pope had been a junior employee at the time, but he’d known his share of grafters, corner-cutters, agents on the make. Zero tolerance had been the mantra passed around, unwritten: the new way, the salve for the Service’s public wounds caused by scandal after scandal. It was no longer safe to take a little sweetener for the minor intelligence you passed on to your Iraqi police contact or your Shanghai stool pigeon. You’d be looking over your shoulder after doing the deed, and more likely than not would feel a hand descending on it.
Once Pope had tracked down the identity of the Ratcatcher, he’d gathered as much intelligence on Purkiss as he could find. An active agent since his recruitment after Cambridge in the late nineteen-nineties, Purkiss had excelled in the Mediterranean arena as a vetter of Islamist notaries in southern France and the Dalmatian coast. His fiancee, a fellow agent, Claire Stirling, had been murdered in 2008 by Donal Fallon, a senior operative who’d subsequently been arrested and convicted of murder, and had turned out to have been part of a black ops group within the Service, carrying out hits on people deemed a threat to British national security. Purkiss had left the Service soon after Fallon’s imprisonment.
And it was then the crackdown had begun in earnest, on the crooks and the chancers within the Service. Possibly it was a coincidence that Purkiss had disappeared at the same time. But Pope had run checks, analysed patterns of movement.
Purkiss had been sighted at too many locations close to areas from which agents had quietly been removed, for mere chance to have been involved. No, Purkiss was the Ratcatcher. The probabilities were in its favour.
Purkiss had come close to besting Pope, and that rankled. Back at Jablonsky’s house, if he’d focused on taking Pope down instead of hesitating to ascertain if Jablonsky could be saved, Purkiss would have taken Pope down; Pope was certain of it. Later, after Pope had placed some distance between them and had allowed his natural advantage of stamina to come to the fore – he was more than half a decade younger than the other man, and the difference counted for more than people realised – Pope had been surer of his chances of winning. But even so, Purkiss had made him drop his blade, and had been deadly accurate with the chunk of metal he’d thrown at Pope’s head.
He’d been a formidable opponent, Purkiss; and he was behind, somewhere, and in pursuit. Which was why Pope had laid the trail he had.
He allowed his eyes to crack open a few millimetres. The Germanic businessman was still wrapped up in his perusal of his laptop spreadsheets. There were no likely candidates in the rest of the environment, nobody who could remotely pose a threat to Pope. Pope knew that was the first impression of the imminently dead.
Keeping his eyes minutely open, he allowed the feelings aroused by the killings to flood to the surface. Taylor’s death was the first, but Pope was surprised to find the sensory memories to be less intense in this case. Probably it was because he’d done it more quickly, putting the first bullet through Taylor’s face even as he turned; there’d been barely time to ensure the man recognised him, and even then Pope couldn’t be sure, as the lifelight dulled in the ruined eyes, that Taylor had fully appreciated who he was.
Jablonky’s killing had been different. The first shot, in the abdomen, had dropped him. Even if he’d been carrying a gun in his own kitchen – and given that Pope now knew Jablonsky might have been expecting him, that wasn’t so far fetched – he’d have had no opportunity to reach for it. That wouldn’t have been the case if Pope had hit him in the legs or the shoulder. On the kitchen floor, his hands cramped over the roiling surge from his belly, Jablonsky’s look had been that of a man who knew exactly what was happening to him, who was doing it to him, and why.
Pope had killed before, but never in such a planned way, and never with that same thrill of feeling he’d got from these two despatches. It was too soon after the killings for him to have any perspective on the emotions he was feeling, or what they signified about his personality. He’d tried them on for their fit; now he put them away again, as neatly as clothes into a wardrobe.
Once more he closed his eyes. This time, his thoughts turned towards not John Purkiss, not Taylor or Jablonsky, but somebody else.
*
23 June
Taylor brought in two more today. Prisoners, this time, local Hondurans by the look and sound of them. They’d been roughed up, which meant they probably resisted transfer.
Grosvenor and Z supervised the administration of the agent to each man in turn. I observed through the one-way mirrored glass. As before, the agent was intravenous, given by slow injection through an infusion set with saline running at the same time. Dehydration had been a problem with the last batch of subjects.
The first of the two men was the older and weaker-looking. Z stood by, making an occasional contribution – the glass wasn’t soundproofed but it did limit what I could hear – while Grosvenor conducted the interrogation. She paced, she alternately cajoled and raged and soothed; but she didn’t lay a finger on the man. The prisoner/subject didn’t hold out at all, started jabbering from the start. But he clearly wasn’t telling Grosvenor what she wanted to hear. As Grosvenor’s rantings grew more relentless the prisoner started gibbering and weeping. He was fastened to his chair and couldn’t move his torso or limbs, but his head rolled and slumped on his neck, back and forth.
After twenty-seven minutes – I kept time by the clock high on the wall at the back of the cell – the man died. His back went rigid, his neck arched, and all hell broke loose in the room. The medics ran in and Grosvenor and Z moved to free the man and lower him to the floor. I didn’t see the rest, but I found out later that he’d gone into cardiac arrest and all efforts to resuscitate him had failed.
The second of the two prisoners was more interesting, if that’s the word to use in a situation like this. He glared at his interrogators, scowled and spat at their questions, seemed intent on provoking and riling Grosvenor to make him lose control. Grosvenor’s performance was masterful – bearing in mind that I couldn’t hear much of what she was saying - in that she appeared at times close to snapping, to beating the prisoner into unconsciousness, but then switched to a demeanour of such sweet calmness that it must have been part of her stock-in-trade, and was unnerving in its obvious calculatedness. Grosvenor used physical force, to be sure: slapping, twisting the man’s ears, on one occasion grabbing his hair and forcing the head back past the point where it must have hurt; but there was never any sense that she was at the brink and ready to kill the prisoner for the sake of a moment’s gratification.
Thirty-nine minutes in, the prisoner began to show signs of fatiguing. His eyelids fluttered, his words – unheard by me – seemed to stumble from his mouth. Grosvenor pressed home her advantage, moving in ever closer to the man, wheedling and threatening and imploring, never stopping.
And then the experiment seemed to start bearing results. Frustrated at my inability to hear what was being said, I watched not Grosvenor or the prisoner but Z. He was standing back, presenting a one-quarter view to me through the one-way glass, but his back stiffened, his face tensing. Whatever the prisoner was saying, it was having an effect.
Grosvenor had gone very quiet - I could make out nothing she was saying, not even individual sounds - and her torso was between me and the prisoner, obscuring the man’s face. But when she stepped away, glancing across at Z, there was a flicker of triumph in her features.
The prisoner slumped in his seat, his torso held upright by his bonds but his head lolling forwards. For a moment I thought he’d succumbed, like the first man; but I caught sight of his eyes blinking faintly below his lowered brows. In a moment Z and Grosvenor conferred quickly and Z called something across. The medics came in, untied the prisoner and carted him away, having to support him under his arms if not quite carry him.
It was the first evidence I’d seen of the potential effectiveness of Caliban; and God help me, but I felt a stab of excitement at what they seemed to have achieved.
*
Pope had the words down pat in his memory. He was an eidetiker, one of those rare human beings with the ability to memorise text at a first reading; and he’d read the material more than once. He’d chosen this section to revisit, because the woman he was thinking about got a mention in the scenario. Had a starring role, in fact.
The woman was Grosvenor, and she was Pope’s next target.
Six
Hamburg
Sunday 19 May, 3.17 pm
Purkiss spotted the first tag two rows ahead of him on the plane. The second one he identified on the walk from the runway to the terminal building.
They were good, there was no question about that. The plane was a quarter empty so Purkiss had a range of seats to choose from, which meant the tags had the same; but instead of positioning themselves behind or beside him, at least one of them had sat in front. Not an obvious position for surveillance. But although the man never once glanced overtly across at Purkiss, never did anything to arouse the slightest suspicion, Purkiss sensed his otherness. He didn’t belong among the rest of the passengers. Again, there was nothing obvious about his appearance to suggest this: in his middle thirties, dressed in a navy suit and perusing the International Herald Tribune, he looked like just another cosmopolitan businessman on a mid-afternoon trans-European trip. But his aura of toughness, of centred wariness, gave him away to somebody with Purkiss’s sensitivity to such things.
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The second man must have been sitting behind Purkiss. Walking across the tarmac in the light, cold rain that had greeted the Lufthansa flight, Purkiss stopped and turned as if to peer up at the plane he’d just left. Several people behind him glanced at him as they passed, but the tag – this one younger, shorter, his dark narrow looks more intense than those of the first man – avoided his gaze in a way that was deliberate.
Purkiss strode past the man towards the terminal, wanting to maintain the pretence that he was unaware of the surveillance. He felt the familiar cold burn between his shoulder blades, a primal reaction to the experience of exposing one’s back to an enemy. Ahead, on the escalator rising into the terminal building, he saw the first man.
He wasn’t sure, but they felt like Americans. CIA men.
*
Purkiss was travelling under his own name – there hadn’t been time to organise a cover passport before catching the flight out of Schiphol, and in any case there didn’t appear to be any need for a covert identity at this point – and experienced a flicker of tension when the woman at passport control glanced at his picture and then at his face. It was an old Service mantra: the longer you worked in the field, the more databases your details were likely to appear on. He hadn’t done much work in Germany before but the country’s intelligence service would have picked him up on their radar at some point, he was certain of it.
Nonetheless he was nodded through. He made his way past the baggage hall and through the EU arrivals channel. The first tag was lost from sight in the crowds milling in the arrivals hall. Purkiss slowed once he’d run the gauntlet of card-wielding greeters and pretended to rummage in the briefcase he was carrying. The second tag didn’t pass him, and was therefore hanging back, probably as the rear half of a box formation.
If they were Company, it suggested Jablonsky and Taylor had made their colleagues aware of Pope, and somehow the link had been made to Purkiss. Perhaps they’d had Pope’s flat under surveillance and had followed Purkiss from there to Jablonsky’s house. Purkiss didn’t think so; he was almost always aware when he was being tagged, as now.
