Cronos Rising

by Tim Stevens

  The shriek of the alarm was immediate, a harsh repetitive whoop that echoed around and down the corridor. Quickly she sprinted towards the stairs and down a flight, emerging on the floor below just as the first sleep-befuddled faces were beginning to peer through the doors.

  The throng began to grow in the corridor, the jabber of panic rising, and Rebecca merged with the milling crowd.

  She manoeuvred her way back to the fire stairs and ascended them, a look of bewilderment on her face, as if she’d forgotten the need to go down rather than up. Reaching the third floor again, she looked down the corridor towards the door of room 331.

  It remained shut, though all the rest of the doors on either side of it were open and people were pouring out.

  Rebecca waited as long as she dared, until the last of the guests were piling past her, yelling at her and tugging at her sleeves, trying to get her to snap out of her reverie and accompany them to the lobby.

  Still the door remained closed.

  Rebecca followed the others, making her way through the lobby where the night staff were trying to corral the crowd, to maintain a semblance of order. She pushed her way to the entrance doors and through into the night.

  On the rain-slick pavement she ran along the front of the hotel and round the corner, to the side where room 331 looked out. She paused, located the third floor, scanned the windows.

  She couldn’t be sure which ones belonged to room 331, but they all remained shut, and intact.

  A fire engine’s bleat sounded in the distance.

  Rebecca returned to the front of the hotel and watched the doors from across the road once more. Among the people flooding out, she couldn’t see anyone resembling John Purkiss.

  By the time the fire engines had arrived, she was convinced. Purkiss wasn’t in the room. Had probably been gone for some time.

  Which left her stuck.

  She took out her phone and thumbed in a text message.

  Target absent from hotel.

  She hit the send key, and began walking away.

  *

  The response came within five minutes, as Rebecca was nearing the station once again.

  It consisted of a text message with a new name and address. He may have a lead, read the message.

  Rebecca looked up the address on the map application of her phone. It was a long distance to walk from where she was, and she sensed that time was not to be wasted.

  She raised an arm to hail a taxi.

  Eight

  The trouble with looking for surveillance in an airport concourse was the sheer number of people populating the area, the myriad opportunities for concealment.

  Frankfurt Airport’s Terminal 1 was still open, but was operating a reduced service following the events of the previous day. It meant that the crowds were smaller than they might usually have been, both because many of the flights had been cancelled, and because a lot of passengers had baulked at the thought of taking off from or arriving at a place which had so recently been the departure point for the ill-fated Turkish Airlines flight, and had scrapped or revised their own travel plans.

  The concourse crawled with police and military. People were being stopped and questioned, their bags sifted through. People of all ages and racial backgrounds, not just young men of Middle Eastern appearance. The German chancellor had appeared repeatedly on the news broadcasts Purkiss had caught, her face tight with defiance: Life goes on. We will not permit ourselves to be cowed by terrorist murderers. And she’d exhorted the people of Germany to cooperate with the security forces, to accept that in the short term at least, there would be inconveniences to be endured.

  It all posed a problem for Purkiss. The police would be on the lookout for any signs of stealthiness in anybody within the airport terminal. A man without luggage would attract suspicion.

  And the visible security presence was one thing. There’d be scores, perhaps hundreds, of plainclothes personnel strewn throughout the terminal as well. Purkiss had identified four of them, three men and a woman, within just five minutes of entering the terminal through the arrival gate.

  He’d bought a fresh set of clothes at Fiumicino Airport, choosing chinos and smart trainers and an overcoat and ditching the duffel jacket in one of the bins. The United Airlines flight had been only half full, and he’d had no trouble securing a seat at short notice.

  At eight fifty on Wednesday morning, less than two hours after he’d boarded in Rome, Purkiss reached Frankfurt. He did an initial sweep of the terminal with several purposeful strides from one end to the other, giving the impression he was a man on his way to an appointment of some kind. That was when he’d spotted the four undercover security personnel, though they didn’t seem to have taken an interest in him. Afterwards, he settled himself at the counter of a coffee shop, from which he could survey a fair stretch of the concourse, and ordered breakfast.

  While he ate, and watched, he caught up with the news through four papers he’d bought from a kiosk, two of them German and two British. There was little difference between them in the known facts they relayed. Flight TA15 was thought to have been brought down by a relatively low-yield explosion within the cabin, which had torn open the fuselage and done enough damage to cause the pilot and co-pilot to lose control. Of the 148 passengers, seventeen had been nationals of Muslim countries. Suspicion was already being cast on one man in particular, Umair Jat, a citizen of Pakistan who had previously been investigated by the authorities in Islamabad for possible links to radical jihadist groups, though nothing had been proven.

  Much was made in the news reports of two other facts. One was the telephoned admission by a supposed spokesman for the Islamic Caliphate in Asia that the ICA was responsible for the killings. The German Security Service and the US State Department had separately issued confirmations that the admission was likely to be genuine. The other noteworthy detail was the arrest of a man at the departure gate of a Swissair flight, a few minutes before TA15 took off. The man was a Jordanian, Adnan Hanahneh, who’d been observed to be acting suspiciously as he approached the gate.

  Two hours after being taken into custody, the Jordanian had died. The details were sketchy, but officials said he had probably taken his own life by means of a cyanide capsule he’d managed to keep hidden from his captors.

  Hanahneh was, the newspapers speculated, probably part of a double act with whomever had carried the bomb aboard the Turkish Airlines flight; the intention had been to destroy two passenger aircraft simultaneously.

  Purkiss believed otherwise. There was no mention of any explosive material having been found in Hanahneh’s possession. He thought the Jordanian was probably a decoy, and his so-called suspicious behaviour a ruse intended to divert security attention away from the Turkish Airlines flight.

  In any event, he didn’t believe the purpose of the attack had been to further worldwide jihad. It was too much of a coincidence that Quentin Vale had been on board that flight.

  Purkiss thought the downing of TA15 had been an act of assassination.

  Yet again, he ran his mind over the possibilities. Vale had wanted Purkiss out of the way, which was why he’d organised the fake liaison between Billson and the Chinese national, Xing, in Rome. It suggested Vale thought Purkiss needed to be kept out of harm’s way. Did that mean Vale suspected or knew that he, too, was in danger?

  It opened up all sorts of further questions. Where had Vale been heading when he’d boarded the flight? TA15 had been going to Istanbul, so it was reasonable to assume that whatever business Vale was involved in, it was taking place in Turkey. Had he been fleeing someone, or something?

  Purkiss raised his head and gazed across the terminal. It was filling, gradually, as the mid-morning passengers began to make their nervous appearance.

  His jaw clenched in frustration. Vale’s insistence on keeping almost every detail about himself and his background secret from Purkiss for “security reasons”, as he put it, was now a liability. Purkiss knew nothing about him. Noth
ing about the enemies he had, the political complexities of his life.

  It was easy to understand how a man like Vale could make enemies. He’d dedicated his professional life to hunting down the bad apples within the British intelligence establishment. And he had, so far as Purkiss knew, a one hundred per cent success rate. There’d be plenty of grudges festering away within the jails of Britain and elsewhere in Europe, and plenty of potential future targets who might decide to pre-empt Vale before he turned his attention to them.

  Purkiss was aware that all this applied to him, too.

  His options were limited. He’d come to Frankfurt Airport not with any clear goal in mind, but rather to visit the scene of the crime, to absorb its atmosphere and allow the intuitive part of his mind to bask in the environment, in case it threw up any clues.

  Before he’d boarded the flight from Rome to Frankfurt that morning, Purkiss had called Hannah again in London. He’d asked for another favour: that she obtain for him the names of all the known MI6 personnel in Istanbul, whether based in the embassy or outside. It was a long shot, but it might provide some idea as to why Vale had been heading there. Purkiss had bought a mobile phone at the airport and he gave her the number.

  She hadn’t called back yet, but Purkiss knew it was a task that would take some time.

  He felt himself drawn towards the Turkish Airlines check-in desk, which was just visible to his left from where he sat at the counter of the coffee shop. There was barely anybody queuing at the desk. The airline was tainted, cursed, and would remain so for a long while. He knew there was nothing he could ask the staff at the desk that would be of the remotest use, but he felt the urge to walk in Vale’s steps, to trace his exact path, as if that might give him some insight into what had happened.

  It was stupid, superstitious, and Purkiss berated himself inwardly.

  The waiter appeared to ask if he wanted anything else. Purkiss asked for more coffee, and, deciding he needed to load up on carbohydrate and protein, requested bratwurst and sauteed potatoes.

  While he waited, Purkiss scanned the newspaper reports again. If the destruction of the plane had been for the sole purpose of killing Vale, it would have taken considerable planning. That suggested Vale had booked the flight some time in advance. Perhaps Purkiss could find a way to determine exactly when and how the flight had been booked. It wouldn’t tell him much, but it would add incrementally to the supply of information he was building up.

  He needed a skilled hacker. But the greatest IT expert he’d ever known, Abby Holt, had been killed two years earlier, in Tallinn, because Purkiss had let her down.

  He compressed the thought, and the emotions which clung to it like an aura, and crammed them into a box within his head. He let the box drop, deep into the blackness of his mind, until it disappeared.

  The waiter arrived once more and laid a steaming plate in front of Purkiss. He discovered he was ravenous, despite his tiredness. He pushed the pile of newspapers to one side and applied himself to the bratwurst.

  The man seated at the counter a few feet to Purkiss’s right said, in German: ‘Would you mind if I had a look at the paper?’

  Purkiss nodded. ‘Feel free.’

  He reached to his left and handed the stack across to the man, who opened and folded the Allgemeine Zeitung and studied the front headlines.

  Purkiss lifted his fork to his mouth and chewed, his eyes on the hubbub of the terminal, his thoughts on Vale, and the wild goose chase the man had sent him on in Rome.

  Distraction. One of the essential tools in the espion’s kit. Vale had used it expertly.

  Distraction...

  Purkiss dropped his fork with a clatter.

  He’d reached for the papers to his left...

  The pain scored vertically down behind his breastbone, as if a clawed beast was trying to achieve purchase within his chest.

  Before him, the terminal blurred, doubled.

  His hands flailed, knocking his coffee cup over, the hot liquid burning his thighs. Down the counter, nearby, somebody shouted.

  Purkiss dropped off the stool he was perched on, his feet hitting the floor one at a time and clumsily. The floor tilted and lurched upward towards him.

  His throat felt as if it were puffing closed. Panic gripped his chest in a tight band.

  The food he poisoned the food he poisoned

  Through his swimming, telescoping vision, a woman recoiled. On the small round table before her stood a solitary bottle of water. Purkiss snatched at it, missed, stumbled into the table, tipping it. He grabbed the bottle through sheer luck and raised it and dumped the contents over his mouth, soaking his face and his head but getting some of it into his narrowing throat. He swallowed convulsively.

  Dilute. And purge.

  He coughed, violently, finding himself without warning on his hands and knees. Around him, gasps and yells were distorted as if by some electronic mechanism.

  Purkiss rammed the fingers of his hand deep into his mouth, the tips probing for the pharynx. The gag reflex was triggered immediately and he felt the gorge rush up from deep within his belly and spew hotly over his hand and sleeve to rain across the floor.

  It wasn’t cyanide. There was no bitter almond tang in his mouth.

  He felt obscurely, pathetically grateful.

  Purkiss crawled between the tables, seeing legs step aside for him as the hum of wonder and fear around him began to spread. His limbs functioned, after a fashion, arms and legs. He was making progress forwards. The absence of paralysis suggested there wasn’t a neurotoxin involved.

  A stabbing, wrenching pain in his belly made him stop, hunch over, dry-heave with his face almost touching the floor.

  Arsenic, perhaps. Or some seemingly innocuous plant toxin. Oleander?

  He grabbed somebody’s arm, though it wasn’t an arm because it didn’t pull away, and its rigidity suggested it was a table leg. He hauled himself up so that he was on one knee.

  Focus. Prioritise.

  Purkiss turned, the movement sending a new ripple of nausea through his gut. His eyes somehow coordinated with one another and he stared at the counter he’d vacated.

  The man who’d asked to borrow his newspapers was gone.

  Hands, no longer fearful, were grasping at his arms and his shoulders now. In his ears, on both side, voices shouted: ‘Are you all right?’ and ‘What’s wrong?’

  Purkiss rose fully to his feet, finding his balance. He shook his head, murmured something about a fear of flying.

  Somehow he managed to extricate himself from the knot of people around him. He made his way unsteadily towards the entrance of the coffee shop, wiping his mouth, tasting the bile.

  There’d be more of them. He needed to establish just how many, because that would help him estimate his odds of survival.

  Taking care not to walk too gingerly that he’d attract attention, but not so nonchalantly that he risked keeling over, Purkiss headed down the terminal in the direction of the check-in desks. These were the areas that would be under the scrutiny of the security detail, and as such he’d be relatively protected there.

  His face was set, but his eyes roved, scanning the bobbing heads that passed on either side of him. His vision was rapidly returning to something approaching normal, but the excoriation in his gullet and his gut remained. If the mucosal lining of his gastrointestinal tract had been damaged, he might start vomiting blood at any moment. Perhaps haemorrhaging uncontrollably. There might be an anticoagulant in the toxin, a warfarin-like agent that would turn him into a leaking vessel of blood –

  Focus.

  Purkiss passed a woman, and for a moment glanced at her face. Their eyes met for the briefest of instants before she disappeared behind him.

  He fought the impulse to turn and stare after her.

  There’d been something there, in that split-second of contact. It was more than the neutral acknowledgement one human being might display of another. Neither had it been a spark of sexual interest.

>   The woman had recognised Purkiss.

  Without breaking stride, he angled himself a little to the right so as to begin an imperceptible loop back in the direction he’d come. He concentrated on the brief impression he’d had of the woman, burning the details onto his memory. She’d been young, perhaps late twenties or early thirties. Dark blonde hair, possibly bobbed, beneath a hat. Casual clothes: a fleece, jeans. And a shoulder bag which looked as if it might hold a laptop computer.

  He was almost certain he’d never seen her before.

  So: she recognised his face, which meant she’d been primed to spot him. He had to consider her one of the opposition. That increased their numbers to two, at least, including the man in the coffee shop who’d poisoned his meal.

  Purkiss reached the queues for the check-in desks. Despite the restricted numbers of flights, the major airlines seemed to be doing good business, with the lines of waiting passengers snaking back almost to the opposite side of the terminal. Purkiss chose a queue for a budget airline and joined the end. He fished out the new phone he’d bought and gazed at it, his thumb moving, just as everybody did these days while standing in line and waiting.

  Using the periphery of his vision, and occasional lifts of his head to check the progress of the queue, he studied his environment.

  The woman was nowhere to be seen. He assumed she’d passed close to him as part of a surveillance sequence of some kind, which involved the opposition keeping close to him at all times to reduce the risk he might escape. Sooner or later, they’d make a move. But would they dare to do so here, in full view of the watching security people?

  The nausea roiled though his belly and chest once again, without warning, and Purkiss thought for a moment he was going to throw up again. He clenched his jaws, breathed deeply through his nose, fought the squirming in his gut back down.

  He felt himself shoved from behind and half-turned, tensing, the adrenaline surging in his blood. But it was a couple with three children and a huge pile of suitcases. The man, his sweating face red with harassment, muttered an apology.