by Tim Stevens
He’d wanted to rattle Wyatt, and just for an instant he knew he’d succeeded: there was the slightest shifting of the man’s eyes, a movement at his mouth. Wyatt raised his free hand in an imaginary toast.
‘Just now?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so. You didn’t search my room before.’
‘No.’
Purkiss glanced away naturally, took in the immediate environment. He wasn’t going to reach Wyatt in time, not from a seated position, so the only other option was to use the surroundings in some way. To his right was the wall. To his left, a row of wall cupboards, seven or eight feet away.
In a pocket inside his jumpsuit, he felt the weight of the satellite phone.
He said, ‘Okay. Neither of us knows what’s going down here. There’s no obvious way of finding out. But something’s imminent, hence the cutting of the communication system. So we focus on who the culprit is.’
‘Yes. I’d agree with that.’
‘And?’
‘Who do I think it is?’ Wyatt looked away, considering. ‘Medievsky, possibly. He’s in charge, he’s well placed to hide evidence of what he’s up to. Montrose is another possibility. A dark horse. And Haglund. He’s the engineer, he could have rigged the explosion in the fuel tank of your snowmobile. Which was something else I didn’t do, by the way. And he was the first to discover that the comms were down.’ He nodded at Purkiss. ‘How about you?’
‘Haglund, yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘A definite possibility, and for the reasons you mention. Montrose... I don’t know. He’s too resentful, too uncontrolled. He doesn’t feel right. I think you’re completely wrong about Medievsky.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he told me during our recent conference that when he was appointed as leader of the team, some FSB apparatchiks ordered him to report any unusual activity at the station. It was some matter of national security, some item of interest in the region that might attract the attention of undesirable elements. All very vague and very KGB.’
He watched Wyatt carefully as he said it, and the man’s interest was definitely piqued.
Purkiss went on: ‘The thing is, Medievsky was completely sincere when he relayed all this. And genuinely uncomfortable about betraying a secret. He wasn’t covering anything up.’
‘You can’t be sure of that.’
‘No. I can’t. But you know when your instincts tell you something. Medievsky’s not the one.’
Wyatt appeared to think about it. ‘Any of the others grab you?’
‘Avner’s whole volatile, office-joker performance might be just that, a performance. But he doesn’t feel right. Budian’s in the running, though Keys’s death really seems to have shaken her. Clement, though... She’s cold. Unreadable. I know very little about what she actually does here, apart from watch people and make gnomic remarks from time to time. She’s one to watch.’
Wyatt shifted again, adjusting his back against the wall behind him. For the first time his tone was laced with frustration. ‘And while we sit here, contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s all progressing relentlessly. Whatever it is. We don’t bloody know, haven’t an inkling.’
It was the perfect opening. Purkiss reached inside his jumpsuit, brought out his hand, saw Wyatt’s head snap back to face him and the right hand with the gun start moving.
‘Hell, Wyatt.’ Purkiss raised the phone handset. ‘I was just going to say, you need to call your handler in Moscow. Tell him, or her, that they have to provide you with more intel, and urgently. What’s the big thing Medievsky has been sworn to protect? No more bureaucratic secrecy. Time’s running out.’
The phone handset weighed perhaps one pound. The speed it could achieve once flung from a human hand, even that of an Olympic discus thrower, wouldn’t turn it into anything approaching a lethal or even an incapacitating projectile. But Purkiss wasn’t looking to disable Wyatt with it. Rather, he was aiming to shock and confuse, long enough to buy him the crucial seconds necessary to leap up and cross the floor and neutralise the man before he could bring the Walther across and fire with any degree of accuracy.
Because although Purkiss believed Wyatt, accepted that he wasn’t the one who’d tried to kill him or had actually killed Keys or sabotaged the satellite dish, he suspected the man was holding something back, something that Purkiss would have to extract from him using forced persuasion, the current euphemism in use by SIS.
Professional baseball players in the United States had been timed to pitch the ball at speeds of close to one hundred miles per hour. Purkiss estimated he could achieve a velocity of sixty per cent of that. Which meant he could hit Wyatt in the face with the handset in less than one hundredth of a second.
That was assuming his preparatory actions leading up to the throw didn’t provoke Wyatt into aiming the Walther and firing first.
He’d achieve greater momentum if he drew his hand back before hurling the phone. On the other hand, he’d lose precious fragments of time to Wyatt.
Purkiss released the handset in a kind of push, like an awkward shotputting move. It meant he had to arc it slightly upward to compensate for the reduced velocity.
As if the throw had triggered it in some way, the phone began to ring, the shrill hum as jarring as a banshee’s shriek.
*
The noise delayed Purkiss for a crucial second. By the time he was up and launching himself across the floor at Wyatt, the handset had ricocheted off the man’s partly averted head and Wyatt had the gun up and its muzzle loomed huge.
Purkiss got the wrist of the gun arm in his grip and levered the arm away from his face, at the same time jabbing with a half-fist at Wyatt’s abdomen, seeking the solar plexus but meeting his ribcage instead, a winding blow but not an incapacitating one. Wyatt grunted and tried to bring his knees up and succeeded, his bent legs forming a barrier between him and Purkiss. The blow to his chest had weakened him sufficiently that Purkiss was able with a twist of his wrist to send the Walther spinning from Wyatt’s fingers.
He released Wyatt’s arm and threw himself away from him and towards the gun and caught it before it skittered across the floor. Rolling, Purkiss extended both arms, the gun trained on Wyatt, who crouched against the wall, his face grey.
Between them, the phone handset lay on the floor, still ringing.
Wyatt watched Purkiss’s face, his gaze never dropping to the phone.
‘I need to answer it,’ he whispered.
Purkiss rose to his knees, keeping a bead on Wyatt.
‘You have to let me answer it, Purkiss.’ His voice was a fraction stronger. ‘Moscow may have critical information to impart.’
Purkiss gave it a second. The phone rang again, a steady one-tone pulse.
‘No hints of any kind,’ said Purkiss. ‘You’re guarding the generators, and have nothing new to report. Listen, don’t talk. No stress codes. I’ll recognise them. And put it on speakerphone.’
Wyatt nodded quickly and reached for the handset, grimacing. He hit the receive key, glanced away from Purkiss. Purkiss respected that; it was professional. When you were staring at somebody else in the room, it was hard for some of that intensity not to be conveyed to the person on the other end of the line.
‘Da?’
The reply came tinnily after a second or two. ‘Can you talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘The objective is now clear. In the vicinity of Yarkovsky Station there is the wreckage of a Tupolev plane. Somebody is –’
Wyatt rocked back on his haunches, his head snapping to one side, so that for an instant Purkiss imagined the phone had exploded in his face. Almost immediately after, Purkiss heard the smash of glass behind and to his right, felt the sudden rush of cold from outside as the window was breached.
He dived, rolled, coming up on his back and aiming the Walther at the window even as the next flash of light came, and the next in quick succession, and against the wall Wyatt jerked again and cried out once and slumped
like a marionette with its strings cut. Purkiss opened fire, clean central shots at the square of darkness through which the snow was already beginning to swirl. He edged over to Wyatt, loosing another shot at the window to keep it clear. Without looking at Wyatt he grabbed him under one arm, his eyes on the window, and began to duckwalk over to the adjacent wall, out of the line of sight of the window, hauling Wyatt with him. He felt the dead weight, the utter lack of responsiveness.
Back where Wyatt had been crouching, the phone handset lay on the floor, the scratchy distant Russian voice erupting from it: ‘Talk to me, talk to me...’
Purkiss hesitated for a second, pulled three ways. His instinct was to fling open the door and confront whoever was out there. But he’d make an easy target, not least because the disorientating effect of the cold would slow him down.
He scuttled across the floor, keeping the gun trained on the window again, and grabbed the handset. He killed the call, cutting the Russian off in mid-sentence, and shoved the phone in his inside pocket.
Wyatt was clearly dead. All three shots had hit home, two in the chest and one shearing away the side of his neck. For the first time Purkiss noticed how much blood there was, a pool of it beneath the man and forming a smear across the floor where Purkiss had dragged him. The blood was already congealing in the cold coming in through the smashed window.
The hammering began on the door, so hard that Purkiss wondered if a battering ram was being used. He heard Medievsky’s yell: ‘Frank?’
The door yielded to a battery of boot heels, splintering free from the mooring of its lock. Medievsky came through first, Haglund behind. Both carried Ruger rifles.
‘My God,’ muttered Medievsky.
Purkiss laid the Walther down, kicked it away. He rose, his hands held away from him. He was conscious of the glue of Wyatt’s blood matting the front of his snowsuit.
Haglund raised his rifle, sighted down it, the barrel steady on Purkiss. He motioned him over to the wall. Medievsky stepped over to Wyatt, gazed down at the body. He’d pulled off his goggles and his mask, and his mouth was a hook of fury and horror.
He turned to Purkiss.
‘Bastard.’
Nineteen
Lenilko had quit smoking seven years earlier after a twenty-a-day habit since his teens, determined to stay ahead of the statistical mortality curve for Russian males. He’d experienced cravings every so often in the intervening years, but usually when he was around other smokers.
Alone in his office, he was glad he’d got rid of the pack he used to keep in his desk drawer in order to test his resolve. Because he knew there was no chance he’d be able to resist now.
As he did with all calls on the satellite phone, he’d recorded this one. He played it back.
Can you talk?
Yes.
The objective is now clear. In the vicinity of Yarkovsky Station there is the wreckage of a Tupolev plane. Somebody is –
Then the cry of pain, the sound of glass shattering and the clatter as the handset was dropped. Followed by two sharp reports, distant but unmistakeable: small arms fire.
Lenilko listened to his own voice. What’s happening... are you shot... talk to me.
A volley of new shots, closer this time, from a different handgun. Sounds of scuffling and rasping static.
Then a click as the call was ended.
Lenilko stood at his desk, picked up the phone. His thumb hung poised over the call button.
Wyatt wouldn’t answer. He was certain of it.
Lenilko wondered, his thoughts detached, if Wyatt too had been recording the calls. If so, whoever now had the handset would also have the message about the Tupolev aircraft, the one Lenilko had been in the middle of conveying when the shots had come.
He took his thumb away from the key but continued to hold the handset, as if it might somehow tell him what had gone on at the other end.
The realisation crept through his veins, his marrow, where he couldn’t ignore it.
The mission was compromised. No. The mission was blown. His contact with Yarkovsky Station was terminated. So was his asset on the ground.
Lenilko had to assume the opposition had discovered the whereabouts of the crashed Tupolev, which was why they were upping the ante, severing communication links. They were buying time while they took what they were after from the aircraft. Action on their part was imminent. Delay on Moscow’s part would be fatal.
Which meant Lenilko had to do what Rokva had originally ordered him to. He had to hand over the case to Counter-Terrorism as a matter of urgency. Had to recognise that he was out of his depth, had failed, and that more reliable hands than his were required to take control of the situation.
Shame burned in him, clawed at his innards.
For a full twenty minutes he stood before the window, watching the Sunday families picking their way across the snow-carpeted square below on the way to the toy store, no longer scurrying in dread before the Lubyanka’s presence as they would have done thirty years before.
Twenty minutes, every one of them a further delay, every one of them a nail driven into the coffin of the guilt within which he felt encased.
He had no alternatives. There was no point in debating himself, and debasing himself. His humiliation was complete. No point in adding criminal negligence to his failings.
Lenilko returned to his desk and, still standing, picked up the office phone.
‘Anna,’ he said. ‘Get me Director Eshman, please. Yes, Counter-Terrorism.’
His heart leapt, the sudden shock preventing him from breathing for a few seconds. It was only then that he fully registered what was happening.
In his other hand, the satellite phone had begun to ring.
*
At the front door Medievsky barged ahead of Purkiss and flung it open and stood aside with the rifle readied. Haglund jabbed Purkiss in the back, herding him through. The warmth flooded Purkiss, affording blessed relief despite the circumstances.
Medievsky faced him, unwilling to turn his back on Purkiss, and walked backwards down the corridor.
‘Oleg,’ said Purkiss.
Behind him, Haglund muttered: ‘Shut up.’
Purkiss hadn’t had a chance to say anything in the generator room. The two men had hustled him outside without delay, and during the short trot back to the main building, the keening of the wind had been such that Purkiss wouldn’t be able to make himself heard if he’d tried.
‘It wasn’t me who shot Wyatt. You have to find out where each of the others has been in the last few minutes. One of them opened fire through the window. They’ll be out there still, or they’ll have just got in and be taking off their snowsuit. There’s no time to waste.’
Haglund rammed the barrel of the Ruger between Purkiss’s shoulder blades, propelling him forward so that Medievsky had to back away more quickly. Purkiss stumbled, regained his footing.
‘Oleg, you’re feeling like a fool right now, because you think I played you for one. You’re looking for revenge. I can understand that. But your primary responsibility is to the staff at this station. If you don’t get the person who did this right now, more of you will be killed. Probably all of you.’
Medievsky banged on a door set into the wall of the corridor. ‘This one.’ He pulled a huge ring of keys from his pocket, selected one and fitted it and shoved the door open, stood aside again and jerked the barrel towards the opening. ‘Get in.’
Purkiss stepped inside. It was a storeroom, a spare by the look of it. An old-fashioned lightbulb hung from a cobwebbed comma of flex in the ceiling. The dusty shelves were bare apart from a few ancient, yellowed cardboard boxes.
Purkiss turned. Medievsky stood in the doorway, the rifle aimed at Purkiss at belly height.
‘You didn’t kill Frank?’
‘No.’
‘Then where did you get the gun you were holding?’
‘It was Wyatt’s.’
Medievsky looked as if he was going to spit.
He lifted the gun, the barrel now centred on Purkiss’s chest.
So this is it, thought Purkiss. This room isn’t a prison cell. It’s an execution chamber.
The one chance they had was the phone. If Medievsky used it to call Wyatt’s FSB handler in Moscow, they could have assistance here from Yakutsk within ninety minutes. It might not be soon enough, but it was worth a try. But help might already be on its way. The FSB man would have heard the gunfire, would assume Wyatt was dead, and may already have scrambled support.
Purkiss needed to tell Medievsky about the phone before the man opened fire. His shots might destroy the handset in Purkiss’s pocket.
‘Oleg,’ he said. ‘You need to let me –’
‘We’ll be back once I’ve decided what to do with you,’ Medievsky snapped. He slammed the door. Purkiss heard the key grind in the lock.
He stood in the centre of the storeroom floor, aware for the first time of the hammering of his heart, the surge of adrenaline like amphetamines through his vasculature.
When the rushing of the pulse in his ears had quietened, Purkiss moved quickly to the door and put his eye to the keyhole. As expected, Medievsky had taken the key with him. The field of vision was minimal, only the wall of the corridor immediately opposite presenting itself. Purkiss held his breath and waited. Nobody paced past.
He turned his head and pressed his ear to the cold metal door. The building echoed and clanged, the sounds transmitted though the walls from all over. He shifted and put his ear against the keyhole.
There was no sound, no other cue to suggest that somebody was standing on the other side. That didn’t mean there was nobody there; Haglund, maybe, his rifle trained on the door, ready to fire the moment he had an excuse. But it did mean that if someone was standing guard, they were being stealthy about it.
Purkis backed away to the far end of the storeroom. They weren’t professionals, Medievsky and Haglund, that was clear. Professionals in their own fields, certainly, but not in Purkiss’s line of work. For one, they’d made the mistake of not searching him, of being lulled by the fact that they’d seen him lay his gun down into believing he was unarmed. A skilled operative would have searched him for a backup weapon.
