Tundra

by Tim Stevens

  Rokva regarded him over the rim of his cup. He finished his tea, replenished his cup from the pot.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yarkosky Station has a significance beyond the scientific research it produces. A significance known to perhaps fifty people. I, and the other directors, am among them. And I believe I’m justified in telling you now, so that you’re included in our number.’

  He began.

  Lenilko listened. Rokva’s cadences were as lulling as the sea, and as his words took shape, and the full import of what he was saying began to emerge, Lenilko felt himself buoyed as if on the back of some gargantuan, terrible beast rearing from the depths.

  When Rokva had finished, Lenilko watched him in silence. He felt stunned. Appalled. Exhilarated.

  ‘Perhaps you begin to grasp my dilemma.’ Rokva spooned sugar into his cup. ‘Thirty years ago, twenty five, this would have been a clear-cut matter for us to deal with. A case of espionage, to be met with counterintelligence. Now, it appears to be more the province of Counter-Terrorism. Eshman and his crew.’

  Yuri Eshman was the Director of the FSB’s Counter-Terrorism Department. The rivalry between it and Rokva’s and Lenilko’s own Directorate of Special Activities was intense and ongoing. Counter-Terrorism saw the Special Activities people as sad, irrelevant relics, a nostalgia club dedicated to fighting old Cold War battles that were long since over. The Kremlin seemed to agree. Annual funding for Counter-Terrorism had soared in the last decade, in contrast to a steady drop in investment for the Counterintelligence Service as a whole and the Special Activities Directorate in particular.

  ‘However: I resisted taking the case out of your hands and handing it to Eshman,’ Rokva went on. ‘Until now, it has been perfectly justifiable for our service to conduct a deep-penetration investigation into what is happening at the station. But in light of what I’ve just told you, you must see that it’s looking as though we’ll have to concede this one to Eshman.’

  No. Under the table Lenilko’s fists clenched.

  ‘I have the agent in place,’ he said, in tones as measured as he could manage. ‘I have exclusive access. I want to hang on to this one, Director Rokva. I want to see it through. Bring it home.’

  ‘And I can understand that.’ Rokva nibbled at a tiny biscuit which had accompanied the tea. ‘As I say, I have so far resisted what my head has told me, namely that this entire project should be handed over to Counter-Terrorism. I’m old guard, Semyon Vladimirovich. I cut my KGB teeth on the great, stealthy battles between us and the Americans and British. Chasing a rag-tag mob of terrorists and martyrs was not what I signed up for when I joined as a young man.’ He sighed, raised both palms heavenward. ‘But these are different times. The madmen, the bombers, the kidnappers, they have the upper hand. Our old enemies, our old friends, the sane, clever ones, the ones who were so much like us... they aren’t the threat they used to be. And we’ll have to come to terms with that.’

  For the first time since he’d sat down, Lenilko applied himself to his own tea. It was bland and cool and insipid.

  ‘What are my instructions?’ he said, finally.

  ‘You are to contact Eshman’s office and inform him of the Yarkovsky Station project. You are to include every last detail of what you have learned. You are to tell him that the Directorate of Special Activities recognises this is a case for Counter-Terrorism, and that you will be on hand to provide advice but will otherwise leave CT to handle it from now on.’

  Rokva’s tone was matter of fact, but something in his eyes betrayed regret. Bitterness, even.

  Lenilko said, ‘This is wrong, sir.’

  ‘Quite probably, yes. Morally speaking.’

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘You have to.’

  ‘It’s ours.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Director.’

  It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to his superior. Lenilko flinched, appalled.

  But Rokva didn’t react.

  Lenilko held up his hands in apology. ‘That was uncalled for, sir. But...’

  He placed his palms neatly on the table, leaned forward.

  ‘Six hours.’

  Rokva raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Six hours,’ said Lenilko. ‘Give me six hours to prove this is a matter primarily for Special Activities and not for Eshman. If I fail to make my case, I’ll willingly concede defeat. No. I’ll go further. If I’m wrong, I’ll resign.’

  Rokva rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’ He placed his hands on the table in a mirroring of Lenilko that was either wholly unconscious or a crude parody. ‘Six hours. No longer. Beyond that, I’ll contact Eshman myself.’

  Without warning Rokva rose, signalled somebody behind Lenilko’s shoulder. For an instant Lenilko felt the thrill of primal Russian fear, the abject terror of the hand on the upper arm, the three a.m. knock at the door. But Rokva was probably only giving notice that his car should be brought round.

  ‘Thank you, Director Rokva,’ Purkiss murmured. ‘Six hours. I won’t let you down.’

  Seventeen

  Either the quality of the transmitter was lower than Purkiss had expected, or he’d positioned it less than ideally. Because although Wyatt’s voice was unmistakeable, his words were unintelligible.

  Purkiss hunched forward over the receiver on the writing table, as if by getting physically closer to it he could somehow boost its power. He pressed the tiny earpiece further into the external auditory canals of both his ears.

  Wyatt spoke in a natural baritone, with a slight emphasis on the sibilants, and those two aspects of his speech came across clearly enough. There was even a moment when Purkiss fancied he caught a word – Purkiss – but he dismissed it.

  Purkiss had gone straight from Medievsky’s office to his room, where he’d locked the door and taken out his briefcase and removed the surveillance kit from the false bottom.

  It was a gamble. He’d advised Medievsky to send Wyatt to the generators to stand guard, and it was possible Wyatt would head straight there. But Purkiss knew Wyatt hadn’t been back to his room since the discovery of Keys’s body at seven that morning. Wyatt had been herded into the mess with the rest of them at first, and then had gone straight out with Haglund and Medievsky on the expedition to inspect the satellite dish. On his return, he’d once again gone directly to the mess with his colleagues.

  So, if he was communicating with someone on the outside from his sleeping quarters, he’d want to take this opportunity to send a message before he was posted to a potentially protracted stint of guard duty.

  It took five minutes, less than Purkiss had expected, and the sudden breaking of a human murmur into the silence startled him.

  He listened for three minutes, at most. Then the voice fell silent.

  Purkiss continued listening, heard the multitude of random noises produced by somebody moving about a room.

  Silence followed. Purkiss knew Wyatt had left his room.

  He put the receiver and the ear buds away in the briefcase’s compartment and stowed it in the wardrobe.

  He hadn’t heard a word, hadn’t heard even what language Wyatt had been speaking in. But he’d confirmed that Wyatt had a line of communication with the world outside. The rhythm of his speech, the flow and the pauses, had been those of a man talking on a phone, alternately talking and listening.

  Purkiss left his room and walked the corridors until he was outside Wyatt’s. He wondered what the man had made of the note he must have found when he’d entered, the one Purkiss had pushed under the door, asking for a meeting to discuss a technical point. Possibly Wyatt would have dismissed it as a lame attempt by Purkiss to lure him into a private conference.

  This time Purkiss disregarded the risk of traps. He overcame the lock in under fifteen seconds, pushed the door open.

  The room was as generic as Purkiss’s own. He searched it methodically and quickly, all need for stealth long past. It came as no surprise that th
ere was nothing obvious to find, no phone or laptop or tablet computer, no documents, no passport.

  He found the satellite phone handset, after seven minutes, in that oldest and most classic of Cold War hiding places: inside a waterproof bag, taped under the lid of the toilet cistern.

  Purkiss pulled the handset from the bag and gripped it like an athlete brandishing a trophy.

  It was, at last, something concrete.

  *

  Purkiss had seen the outbuilding that housed the generators a few times since his arrival. It was a concrete block, low and broad, some fifty or sixty yards from the west wing of the main building of the complex.

  He reached the front corridor quickly, moving stealthily, ducking back once or twice when he heard somebody moving round the corner ahead. There was a risk that Medievsky or one of the others would come to his room for some reason and become suspicious when their knock failed to elicit a response. It was a risk Purkiss was willing to take.

  His outdoor gear was hanging on the same hook he’d left it after returning from the trip to Outpost 56-J. Purkiss stepped into the snowsuit, zipped up, hauled on the heavy boots, pulled down the goggles. The suit was bright orange in colour, its purposeful visibility a potential handicap now. There was no way round it.

  Purkiss opened the door and felt the cold leap on him, howling, as if it had been waiting.

  He stooped and ran in the direction of the generator building and understood why it was said you had to acclimatise yourself to the tundra on a twice-daily basis if you were to function. He’d last been outside the complex twenty hours ago. Now, it was as if he’d been parachuted in after living for six months in the tropics. The cold was a flurry of needles stinging his face and his hands and his torso, despite their thick coverings, and spreading numbness through his skin and down, deeper, penetrating the layers of muscle and fat and breaching the hardness of bone to suffuse the marrow within the cavities.

  He was gripped with a violent impulse to veer away, to forget everything, forget the mission, forget Wyatt, to hurl himself back towards the main door and slam it behind him and give himself over to the embrace of the heat of the building he’d just left. The building housing the generators was a theoretical construct, a compressed cube looming ahead that was as removed from Purkiss’s reality as a Picasso viewed in a gallery.

  Purkiss narrowed his consciousness so that it focused on the building and nothing else. He pulled the building towards him.

  It slammed against the side of his face and he gripped its sheer slick wall, amazed at its solidity, its actuality.

  The door was ten paces to his right, a window in between giving off a faint light.

  Purkiss crept along the wall, ducked when he reached the window so that he moved beneath it. He didn’t risk a glimpse inside.

  At the door, he touched the wooden handle with his gloved hand. Turned it, infinitesimally, aware that his perception of time and distance was distorted by the cold.

  Pushed it a millimetre or two.

  There was the slightest give, not enough to open it even a fraction, but sufficient to tell Purkiss that it wasn’t locked.

  He twisted the handle fully and charged through the door.

  With hindsight, he understood that the terrible, overwhelming imperative to escape the cold had made him reckless, had overridden the precautions he would normally take when entering a room in order to surprise an opponent.

  Purkiss felt the heat envelope him, deliriously, as he kicked the door shut, and the relief that flooded his veins delayed him because as he looked right and then left he registered during the second move that he’d seen something on his right but by the time he’d whipped round and dropped into a crouch with his hands raised and ready to deliver a blow that would incapacitate, it was too late.

  Wyatt sat against the far wall on the right, on the floor, twenty paces away.

  Behind Purkiss, the generators hummed.

  Wyatt’s knees were drawn up, his extended arms braced across them. His right hand gripped a pistol, the left supporting it from below.

  He said: ‘Purkiss. It’s about bloody time.’

  Eighteen

  It wasn’t the gun, or even the fact that Wyatt had got the drop on him so effortlessly, that disturbed Purkiss.

  It was the fact that Wyatt knew his name.

  Entire tapestries threatened to unravel. Had Wyatt been expecting his arrival, which meant his cover had been blown before he’d even left London? Was Purkiss by now so recognisable in the international intelligence community that Wyatt had identified him on first contact?

  And, from the bleakest reaches of his mind, the nasty sewer into which Purkiss had first tapped last summer, en route to a possible ambush in Riyadh: has Vale set me up?

  Beside Wyatt, propped against the wall, was a rifle. Purkiss assumed it was one of the ten Medievsky had mentioned, the small arsenal for use as protection from bears. It looked to Purkiss like a Ruger Hawkeye.

  The gun in Wyatt’s hands was probably his own. A Walther PPK.

  Wyatt said, ‘Lock the door.’

  The key was in the lock on the inside. Purkiss complied.

  Wyatt gestured him closer. ‘We haven’t much time. Sooner or later, someone’s going to notice your absence and raise the alarm.’

  Purkiss pulled off his goggles, felt numbing heat melt his exposed skin.

  He took a casual step forward.

  ‘Right there is close enough,’ Wyatt said mildly, not bothering to wave the gun or anything dramatic like that.

  ‘What did Keys have on you?’

  Wyatt smiled mirthlessly. ‘Straight to the point. If you’d been like that from the outset, Keys might still be alive and we might not be in the predicament we’re in now.’

  Purkiss didn’t let his confusion show. ‘Had he discovered what you were doing here? Is that it?’

  ‘You know what, Purkiss? It was only a short while ago, when Medievsky returned to tell me I was going to be standing sentry duty here, that I worked out who you really are. Not John Purkiss, I knew that already. But what your agenda is. You’re the Ratcatcher. The mythical figure sent to track down us renegade agents. The equivalent of the monsters parents tell misbehaving children will come and get them if they don’t toe the line.’

  ‘You believe that. Really.’ Purkiss had learned not to protest too much in situations like this. ‘No, in fact I’m straightforward SIS. But yes, I am here to find out what you’re planning, and put a stop to it.’

  ‘You admit, then, that you don’t know why I’m here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wyatt shifted to find a more comfortable position against the wall, the gun never wavering in his hands. ‘And yet, you assume automatically that I need to be stopped.’

  ‘You’re a traitor. You joined an enemy intelligence agency while employed by ours. That means you have to be brought to book. It’s open and shut, Wyatt. No nuances, no moral dilemmas involved.’

  ‘Even if what I’m trying to do is in Britain’s interests?’

  Purkiss sighed. He’d managed to inch forwards, subtly, so that he was two or three feet closer to Wyatt. It wasn’t enough. He could traverse the ten paces between them in two seconds. A bullet would cover the distance in a fraction of that. ‘The Soviet Union used to argue that Britain’s interests would be served by its becoming part of the Warsaw Pact. Spare me the propaganda, Wyatt.’

  Wyatt said, carefully, his eyes fixed on Purkiss’s: ‘I didn’t kill Keys.’

  He was inviting Purkiss to read his gaze.

  ‘And I didn’t sabotage the satellite dish, either.’

  To detect a lie in the eyes, no matter what the words said.

  Purkiss believed him.

  And, if he was honest with himself, he’d had his doubts already.

  He said: ‘Then who did?’

  Wyatt raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s why I’m here. To find out who, and why, and what.’

  ‘On behalf of the Russian government.’


  ‘Yes, of course.’ Wyatt’s tone was matter of fact. ‘Your version of the facts is probably more or less accurate. I was recruited in Warsaw in 1985. During the nineties there wasn’t much of a role for me, though I remained an asset of the KGB as it went through its various permutations. Things have got busier in the last decade and a half.’ He kept his two-handed grip on the Walther, but raised the index finger of his left hand. ‘And before you ask what motivated me... please. It’s not relevant.’

  Purkiss said, ‘Put the gun down, Wyatt.’

  Wyatt frowned, but in an almost affable way, as if to say: come on.

  Six inches closer. Purkiss didn’t chance any more.

  ‘You’ve effectively told me that we’re on the same side in this,’ he said. ‘I’m hardly going to jump you. I’ve admitted I don’t know what your mission here is. You appear willing to tell me. I’m all ears. But that gun makes me nervous.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Wyatt.

  Damn. That made it more difficult. But Purkiss could hardly refuse. He lowered himself to the concrete floor, perturbed by how numb his legs still felt from the cold.

  Wyatt dropped his hands to his sides, the gun pointing away.

  ‘The FSB picked up SIGINT data mentioning Yarkovsky Station towards the end of last year. Not just once, but several times. Nothing specific, but enough to suggest something was happening here, or about to happen. I was placed here to check it out. So far, I’ve found almost nothing. They all seem to be kosher, the staff here, even if they are an odd bunch.’

  ‘Do you suspect anything? Industrial espionage, the stealing of research material?’

  Wyatt tipped his head. ‘It wouldn’t make sense. This is an international station, owned jointly by four countries. It isn’t some top-secret Russian facility.’

  ‘Then what?’

  For the first time, Wyatt looked grave. ‘I don’t know, Purkiss.’

  Purkiss said, ‘How did you identify me?’

  ‘Your name? My handler in Moscow worked that one out. I’ve maintained communications with him.’

  ‘I know,’ said Purkiss. ‘I found your satellite phone.’