Tundra

by Tim Stevens

  ‘That would be great. Thanks.’

  Montrose tipped his head toward one of the armchairs. Purkiss didn’t sit until it was clear at least some of the others were going to do the same. But a couple of them, the engineer Haglund and Keys, the doctor, stood gazing down at Purkiss as though he was some strange exhibit.

  A few seconds before the silence became awkward, Purkiss said: ‘Dr Medievsky will have told you who I am, but I’ll sum up. I’m a stringer for Reuters, and I’m here to do a series of pieces on Yarkovsky Station and the work you’re conducting here. If it’s acceptable to you, I’d like to interview each one of you at some point about your specific field. I understand that I may also be allowed to accompany you on field trips, to gain first-hand experience of your work. I’m here for four weeks, so there’s no pressure – I’m sure we’ll be able to fit in a mutually convenient time.’ He glanced at Medievsky. ‘And as I’ve said to your leader, I’ll be as unobtrusive as I possibly can. If I’m getting in your way, please say so and I’ll back off.’

  Purkiss had used the term leader deliberately. He noticed the reactions, slight but definite, from certain people in the room.

  He filed his observations away for later consideration. Because he’d already learned a good deal about the men and women who made up the staff of Yarkovsky Station, far more than he’d gleaned from his reading of the potted biographies Vale had supplied him with.

  ‘Call you John?’ said Avner.

  ‘Of course.’

  Beneath the peak of the baseball cap, Avner’s eyes strained with suppressed mirth. ‘One big question, John.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Why in the hell did you pick February to visit?’

  ‘Fair point.’ Purkiss spread his hands. ‘It wasn’t entirely my choice, to be honest, but I can see the sense of it. Readers interested in finding out more about a research station in Siberia are going to want to hear about what work is like in conditions of extreme cold. It’ll be a better story this way. Plus, it’ll be interesting to hear from you how the nature of the work you do varies according to the season.’

  ‘Have you been to Siberia before?’ This was from Oleksandra Budian, the small owlish woman. Her eyes were magnified behind her glasses like an interrogator’s, but her tone was friendly enough.

  ‘No. Coldest place I’ve ever visited is Calgary, in Canada.’

  There was a shift in the atmosphere in the room, almost a relaxing as a silent communication passed between the men and women. He doesn’t know what he’s in for. Purkiss was the intruder whose arrival had threatened to disrupt the unity of the group; now he’d revealed himself as an outsider, and they were whole once more. A family of sorts.

  Purkiss sipped the coffee Montrose had brought him. It was black and heavily sugared, almost aggressively so. Purkiss normally took his coffee white and unsweetened. He decided not to make an issue of it.

  ‘So,’ he said, as he put the mug aside. ‘I’m a novice, someone you’ll find hopelessly naive about the ways to dress and to behave in a climate like this. I’m hoping to learn from you. But I’m not here to be a pain in the backside, and if ever I’m starting to become one, I trust you’ll tell me so.’

  Again he sensed an adjustment in the room: in the postures, the demeanours.

  Efraim Avner clapped his hands, once. ‘Vodka.’ To Purkiss: ‘You a drinking man?’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ said Purkiss.

  ‘Hell, yeah.’ For the first time the young man stood up. He clicked his fingers manically. ‘Come on, people. We’ve got a guest.’

  The engineer, Haglund, ambled over to a panel of wall cupboards and turned with two rows of shot glasses clasped on his fingertips like talons. Avner himself produced a litre bottle of vodka with a flourish, setting it down on the table between the sofas and cracking the cap with relish. He poured in a continuous stream like a clumsy bartender, the clear fluid slopping between the arrayed glasses.

  It was Medievsky who raised the toast. ‘Welcome to Yarkovsky Station.’

  They knocked back the shots quickly, Medievsky and Montrose and Budian and Avner and Haglund. Purkiss noticed that Keys, the British doctor, hadn’t been poured a glass.

  Purkiss himself swigged the vodka, coughed behind his hand, allowed most of it to spray beneath his collar. He’d mastered the art of pretended heavy drinking over an evening while staying completely sober, but this kind of in-the-spotlight downing of shots was more difficult. Nonetheless, the liquor was raw and rough, and it was entirely plausible that as a Western European he might gag upon encountering it for the first time.

  ‘Whoah,’ he said. ‘The learning curve begins here.’

  That earned him a laugh, a genuine and unforced guffaw from most of the people present. Only Montrose, the bespectacled American, looked away, unsmiling, touching the rim of his empty glass to his upper lip.

  Purkiss looked at each of them in turn, raised his eyebrows. ‘No na zdorovye?’

  A collective wince went up. Avner actually cringed, and glanced across in mock fearfulness at Medievsky. ‘No. Jesus. First of all, that’s not a drinking toast at all. That’s grade-school Russian, man.’

  Purkiss knew that. He wanted to convey the impression that his Russian was good but not quite at the standard of a native speaker.

  He said, ‘Why else? You said, first of all.’

  Medievsky answered. ‘We do not speak Russian here at Yarkovsky Station, Mr Farmer. Not everybody here is fluent, so English is the lingua franca. It’s an iron rule, which I would be most grateful if you’d be sure to respect.’

  ‘No problem.’ Purkiss pretended to sip at the remainder of the liquid in his shot glass. ‘Makes life a lot easier for me.’

  ‘And it makes life a lot more interesting for me,’ said Avner. He reached over and began to refill the glasses. Purkiss put his hand over his own. ‘Studying fellow Russkies who aren’t allowed to speak their own language, even when engaging in technical scientific discourse with a compatriot. It’s enormous fun.’ He peered at Purkiss, his eyes mischievous and unclouded by the vodka. ‘I’m the anthropologist here. But you probably knew that already, John.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Purkiss.

  ‘Skol, then.’ Avner emptied his glass, still watching Purkiss.

  Medievsky stood up. ‘John, let me show you a little of our facility. And then, of course, your room.’ He bent and muttered something to Budian, who nodded without looking at him. A meeting, or some kind of instruction, Purkiss thought.

  Purkiss rose and followed Medievsky, conscious of the eyes at his back. He was aware also of a sense of anticipation, of imminence.

  Because he hadn’t yet met the person he’d come to the station for. The target.

  The door of the mess quarters swung open and as if on cue, as if the whole process had been cheesily choreographed, a man came in and stopped and stared straight at Purkiss, and Purkiss felt the electric tingle of recognition, of first contact.

  Medievsky turned slightly.

  ‘Ah. John Farmer, the remaining member of our team. Dr Frank Wyatt.’

  The man who’d come through the door was in his middle fifties. He had the lean, ascetic build of an athlete, the set mouth of a man committed to an ideal. Purkiss had studied a host of pictures of the man in innumerable files, and he knew Wyatt’s thick shock of hair had turned its current slate-grey twenty years earlier and stayed there.

  The man paused for the briefest instant before stepping forward and extending his hand.

  ‘Farmer. You’re the journalist.’

  ‘Dr Wyatt.’

  Even before the handshake, the symbolic clasp that offered nothing more than a meeting of skins, two realisations branded themselves on Purkiss’s mind.

  Vale had been right about Wyatt.

  And Wyatt knew why Purkiss was there.

  Three

  Some of Purkiss’s most productive thinking over the years had been done on beds just like this one, in anonymous rooms, with his hands
behind his head and an impersonal ceiling above him and silence all around.

  But the environment, this time, was different. The quiet was almost absolute, the low hum of a distant generator so faint as to be quickly ignorable by the brain’s auditory cortex. And yet Purkiss was aware of a sense of immenseness, of a huge encroaching landscape stretching in all directions for thousands of miles. He’d read about the region extensively; had studied Solzhenitsyn’s excoriation of the Soviet Archipelago, and the numerous travelogues by users of the Trans-Siberian train. But though he’d gained from these accounts a sense of the sweaty, claustrophobic immediacy of the Siberian experience, he was unprepared for the crushing vastness of the terrain, the dead and cold implacability of the millions of square miles of harsh Earth in the centre of which he was nestled.

  It was the closest Purkiss imagined he would ever come to experiencing the surface of another planet.

  One of the first surprises he’d encountered after entering the room was the en-suite bathroom. It was little more than a shower cubicle which one could reach only by stepping over a squat toilet, but it was more than Purkiss had been expecting. He wondered whether all the rooms were equipped in the same way, or whether he was being accorded special treatment as a guest upon whom Medievsky was keen to make a favourable impression.

  Purkiss had unpacked his clothes, two weeks’ worth of heavy-duty woollens which would have to be recycled at least once, before testing the shower. The water had come as a shock, so immediately scalding that he’d had to step out. By working the control knob he’d found a happy medium, and he’d stood under the jets for fifteen minutes, scrubbing away fourteen hours of staleness and grime.

  Fatigue would arrive suddenly, and drag him under. But for now, lying on his back on the single bed, Purkiss was wide awake, and able to reflect on the events of the previous seventy-two hours, and in particular those of the last two.

  He hadn’t heard from Vale for nearly eight weeks, since just before Christmas and the Hong Kong affair. Vale wasn’t one for New Year’s greetings, or casual contact of any kind. When he’d engaged Purkiss in an operation, he was as close and as affable as a lifelong friend. But in between, he might as well not have existed as far as John was concerned.

  The call had come as Purkiss was emerging from Tottenham Court Road Station, into the rain that had shrouded the country almost continuously ever since November. Purkiss pulled his phone from his overcoat pocket and glanced at the caller display. Name withheld.

  It could be only one person.

  ‘John. Quentin.’

  And so it had begun, the familiar rise in tension within Purkiss’s gut as he’d listened to Vale’s precise yet understated pitch. There was no small talk, no exchange of how have you beens. Not even a coy preamble by Vale along the lines of I’ve a job you might be interested in or are you available at short notice?

  Instead, after the two-name introduction, Vale said: ‘I’d like you to go to Siberia.’

  ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  It was by now the standard first question Purkiss asked. Vale called him when a member of the British Secret Service, SIS, needed investigating. Purkiss was former SIS, and might therefore be expected to know at least some of the men and women he was sent after.

  ‘All right,’ said Purkiss. ‘Rendezvous?’

  Vale told him.

  Purkiss felt a prickle of anticipation. An outdoor meeting in the rain. It practically guaranteed that they wouldn’t be subject to any meaningful surveillance. Which meant secrecy was of the highest importance.

  So he’d met Vale in Hyde Park, at the Marble Arch entrance, the vast lawns traversed only by people scurrying towards their destinations and the odd die-hard jogger. Vale was as skeletal as the umbrella he angled over Purkiss’s head, a man in his sixties of Caribbean parentage who oozed the commingled odours of fresh and stale cigarette smoke.

  The brusqueness that typified Vale’s initial phone calls was never in evidence when they first met afterwards. The two men walked companionably, like friends catching up after a few months’ separation. Vale asked with genuine interest about Purkiss’s life, about his thoughts in regard to the last two missions he’d been despatched to undertake – in Pakistan and Hong Kong, respectively – and about Kendrick, Purkiss’s friend who’d caught a ricochet bullet in the head last summer. Purkiss answered straightforwardly. He didn’t ask Vale about himself in return. He’d learned years ago that it was a fruitless task.

  They reached the Serpentine. A lone mother attempted to coax her sodden child away from the water’s edge where he was trying to lure the ducks nearer by hurling sticks at them.

  Purkiss said, ‘So. Siberia.’

  Vale handed the umbrella to Purkiss. He lit up, took a deep drag, breathed a profile of grey smoke into the rain.

  ‘Francis Wyatt. Does the name mean anything to you?’

  Purkiss used a peg system to hold names in his memory, involving concrete images linked to specific letters of the alphabet. He ran through it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wyatt is former SIS. A veteran field agent, earmarked for control jobs. Senior ones, possibly. But he retired early, at the age of forty-eight. Six years ago.’

  ‘Which fields?’

  Vale played with the cigarette between his thumb and first two fingers. ‘He was active in the mid-nineteen eighties as a postgraduate student in climatology at the University of Warsaw. The Department of Geography and Regional Studies. The product he supplied was superb. First class. He identified the locations of some of the main Soviet tank deployments in eastern Poland, among other data.’

  The harassed mother’s exhortations to her toddler were becoming more strident. Vale nodded down the snaking bank, and they began to walk.

  ‘After 1990, Wyatt was pulled out of Europe. He did some teaching and training here in London, for a while, but he was still a young man, barely thirty, and his talents as a field operative were too useful to waste. He ended up, in the late nineties, stationed in the Levant. Lebanon and Tel Aviv, mostly. He did stints in Turkey. Trips to Teheran. His focus was on the Palestinian groups, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. Once again, excellent, textbook work. With flair. He could have run the Middle East desk within the Service before he was fifty. But, as I say, he chose to leave. And the reason he gave, at the exit interview, was that he preferred to spend the remaining years of his working life following academic pursuits. He had a genuine degree in climatology, and that was what he said was his life’s passion.’

  In his pocket, Purkiss felt his phone vibrating. It would be Hannah. He didn’t answer for the moment.

  Vale continued: ‘They fought to keep him, of course. Tried to bribe him with every enticement in the book. He could follow his vocation, earn a chair at any university in the world, but he would still be valuable to SIS. The Service would work around him. Yet Wyatt was adamant. He harboured no resentment against the Service, was grateful for their employment and proud of the work he’d done for them. But it was time for him to move on.’

  They walked in silence for a minute. Purkiss sifted through the information so far. It was a kind of game they played. Vale relayed facts, and Purkiss absorbed them and searched his memory of Vale’s tone for essentials, for emphasis.

  ‘Warsaw,’ he said finally.

  ‘Yes.’ Vale took a satisfied draw on his cigarette. ‘Wyatt was turned by the KGB at some point while he was a student. Probably in 1985 or thereabouts, when he was in his middle twenties. A vulnerable age in this business. Too young to have become entirely cynical yet, but old enough for doubts to have started to creep in.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘There’s no question. For years there were suspicions. Nothing SIS could plausibly act upon, and the intelligence Wyatt was providing turned out to be wholly accurate, but he was kept under watch all the same. Then, in 1999, one of SIS’s Turkish informants obtained photographic evidence of Wyatt meeting a Russian FSB operati
ve in Ankara. The operative had been a KGB officer in Warsaw in the eighties, his time there overlapping with Wyatt’s.’

  Purkiss mulled it over. ‘Did the Service pull him in?’

  Vale shook his head. ‘You know how it works, John. There wasn’t considered a need to remove Wyatt from active service. He was a first-rate asset, and if he was still dallying with the Russians... well, they were our friends by then, in the Yeltsin days. Things have changed, of course, and it wouldn’t be tolerated now.’

  ‘But why did Moscow allow Wyatt to relay the kind of information you said he provided? Soviet tank movements and the like? Especially if it wasn’t disinformation, and was genuine, as you mentioned.’

  Vale had a way of drawing on his cigarette that made it seem like he was shrugging. ‘Perhaps it cemented his cover. The Kremlin was willing to sacrifice a certain amount of secrecy in order to keep an asset like Wyatt in their fold.’

  Again, the two men strolled in silence. Ahead of them the Serpentine’s edge merged with the grey gloom and disappeared.

  Purkiss said: ‘So he’s a KGB double. He retires, with honour. Now what?’

  Vale took a slow turn, his gaze surveying the environment without appearing to do so. When he spoke, his voice was lower, forcing Purkiss to move closer to hear.

  ‘Wyatt’s resurfaced. For the last two months, he’s been part of an international research team at Yarkovsky Station in North-Eastern Siberia. But he’s kept up his contacts with Russian Intelligence. SIS has been watching him ever since his so-called retirement. Sometimes he’s disappeared off the radar for a while, but there have been sightings of him in Morocco, in Kiev, even once in St Petersburg. And each time, there have been particular FSB operatives present as well. SIS believes he’s still working for the Russians, but his appearances so far have been too short-lived, too fleeting for anyone to get a handle on. Now, though, he’s stayed put for two months.’

  ‘And you want me to find out what he’s up to.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow, if possible.’