by Tim Stevens
Inside, the cathedral was cool and echoing. More tourists strolled about, their voices low. High above, the vault showed scenes from a life; St Paul’s, Purkiss assumed. He made his way up the central aisle towards the altar.
He didn’t know if the men were local Maltese; but he’d heard the saying that the only way to cross a road in Rome without the slightest chance of being run over was to be accompanied by a nun. Perhaps the men were similarly God fearing and would avoid entering a holy place for underhand purposes.
No such luck. At the front pew he turned and looked back. The men had entered and were standing one on either side of the doors, watching him. Feet apart, hands crossed in front of them. Gangster poses. They both wore suits, and looked so alike they might have been brothers, or cousins at least.
He faced them fully. They stared back across the length of the cathedral. Clearly they were willing to wait. At some point, in an hour or two, the cathedral would close to the public and Purkiss would be forced to leave. The men would then take possession of him again.
He needed to force their hand.
Purkiss pulled out his phone and muttered nonsensical words into it, holding the men’s gaze. They didn’t quite glance at one another, but there was a subtle shift in their demeanour. Reinforcements might make life difficult for them.
They began to advance, one coming up the centre aisle and one up the side where the tourists were fewest. The logical step would be for Purkiss to head down the other side, but the man in the centre would then easily be able to slip sideways between the pews and intercept him.
Instead Purkiss waited.
The man coming up the middle – the man who’d had the gun earlier, though Purkiss assumed they were both armed – reached him first. Purkiss extended his hand.
‘Let’s talk.’
The man stopped, looking momentarily bewildered by Purkiss’s approach. Purkiss smiled and at the same time kicked the man in the shin, a hard pistoning drive of the instep of his loafer against the unpadded strip of bone. It was hardly an incapacitating injury but it produced a sudden shock of pain, always. The man winced and leaped back and Purkiss moved in quickly, ramming the stiffened extended fingers of his hand underneath the man’s breastbone. He grabbed him under the arms as he sagged and lowered him to the pew.
The second man was almost on him but Purkiss yelled, ‘Somebody help, please. I think he’s having a heart attack,’ and immediately the crowd began closing in and the second man was jostled aside. Sprawled on the pew, the first man was half-conscious, his eyelids fluttering, his face mushroom-grey and waxy.
Purkiss kept up a stream of patter – I don’t know him, he just collapsed, can anyone do CPR – while he manoeuvred himself towards the periphery of the crowd gathering at the front of the cathedral, putting distance between himself and the second man. The man moved back and started heading down the side again. At the doors of the cathedral Purkiss looked back and saw the man running after him, gaining ground, barging people.
Purkiss stepped through the doors and waited against the wall on one side of them, blinking in the sudden brightness. A young family stepped back in surprise as the man shoved through the doors. Purkiss hooked the man’s ankle with his foot and the man launched forwards, landing heavily in the dust. Pushing himself away from the wall, Purkiss kicked the man in the head, not a killing blow but an incapacitating one. Without breaking stride he set off rapidly across the piazza.
*
He moved at random through the streets, letting the adrenaline burn itself out, checking methodically for tags and then rechecking. In the shelter of a doorway he stopped and took out the phone he’d lifted from inside the jacket of the man he’d dropped in the cathedral.
The contact folder was full of Italian names. Purkiss opened the ‘recent calls’ list. The last call had been made at 4.05 p.m. Half an hour ago. There was no name attached to the number.
Purkiss dialled it, waited.
On the second ring it was answered.
‘Si?’
Purkiss said nothing.
‘Quello che sta succedendo?’
What’s going on? Except that wasn’t quite right. Purkiss was fluent in Italian, but the words the man at the other end was using were a little different.
Purkiss rang off. He recognised the dialect. It was Sicilian.
*
Dusk brought a drop in the heat, but the air was still balmy. In the marina below, the sea shifted and glittered. Across from Purkiss the crenellated walls of Valletta towered against the evening sky. The streets on this side of the peninsula overlooking the bay were crowded and raucous, the seafood restaurants and pubs packed to spilling.
Purkiss stood in the shadows ten yards from the door of the British High Commission and waited.
A phone call half an hour ago had established that Paula Cass was still in the building. He had hung up before he could be put through. There’d been little point going back to the restaurant in Mdina and waiting for either Motruk or Silverman to emerge. It was a small town, and the Sicilians would have backup, possibly on their way already. Purkiss had headed immediately back to the car park outside the entrance to the town and made his way back to Valletta.
He’d been watching the High Commission for three hours.
At a little after eight p.m. she came through the doors, in a lightweight summer jacket and carrying a briefcase. She looked tired, harassed. She was alone.
Purkiss pressed back into his doorway to let her pass, then stepped out after her. As she drew level with an alley between a restaurant and a block of flats he closed in and brought the edge of his hand against her neck, aiming for the carotids.
It was a blow designed for use from the side or the front and instinct made her turn slightly and bring her shoulder up so that his knife-hand caught the trapezius muscle between her neck and shoulder. She pivoted, jabbing an elbow into his abdomen, but he tightened in time, simultaneously getting an arm across her throat and bringing his other fist in a hammerblow against her forehead. She sagged, and he supported her.
A group of passersby turned to stare and Purkiss said, ‘Whoops. One too many,’ and hoisted her across his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Down the alley and behind the block of flats was his rental car in a pool of darkness. He opened the boot and lowered her into it. Her pulse was there, weak but steady, and she was breathing normally. With a roll of duct tape he bound her wrists and ankles. He left her mouth unsealed. She was a professional; she’d know that calling out wouldn’t work.
*
Purkiss drove southwest, heading vaguely in the direction of the megaliths he’d visited a couple of days earlier, where the roads were rough and potholed and rocky scrubland predominated. When it felt isolated enough he pulled the car in and opened the boot. Cass glared up at him, dishevelled, her face streaked with sweat.
He hauled her out and tore free the tape around her ankles, then pushed her stumbling down a slope to a stone wall on the edge of a field. At the wall he turned her to face him. The implications of the remote setting were clear.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. Her voice was surprisingly steady.
‘Silverman’s working with Motruk,’ Purkiss said. ‘I saw them in a restaurant in Mdina this afternoon. Right before I was ambushed by two armed Sicilians.’
‘What did you –’ It came out quickly. She had diplomatic responsibilities, Purkiss supposed. He shook his head.
‘They’ll live. But Motruk’s clearly involved with them. He met a group of them at the Freeport Terminal before he went to Mdina.’ He began to roll his sleeves up. ‘Neither you nor Silverman seemed interested when I mentioned Motruk was in Malta. You didn’t seem all that surprised, either. I thought perhaps that was because you’d already spotted him. But you’ve got no surveillance on him. And then I catch Silverman breaking bread with the man.’
She stared at his eyes. There was calculation going on there. Was she planning a move of some kind? With her hands taped togeth
er behind her? Purkiss thought perhaps she was considering what to tell him.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But not in the way you think. Silverman did go to meet Motruk, and I knew about it. I’ve met Motruk. And he is dealing with the Sicilians.’
‘But?’
‘But he’s one of ours. Motruk is an SIS agent.’
THREE
‘Have you heard of the kaw kaw?’
Cass was rubbing the circulation back into her chafed wrists, flexing her fingers. On the road above them a car slowed for a moment, then drove on.
Purkiss shook his head.
‘Local legend. The kaw kaw,’ she said, ‘takes different forms according to different versions of the story. Some say it’s a grey, slug-like creature, others a giant that strides across Malta and the other islands in the archipelago. Either way, it has the ability to detect the presence of guilt wherever it goes, and to force its way into the houses of the guilty.’
‘Your point being?’
‘That’s the role you’re stuck in. You don’t work for the Service any more, and I don’t know what you do these days – my research hasn’t been able to find that out – but you’re trapped in the Service mindset. You smell guilt where it doesn’t exist, and you can’t leave it alone.’
Purkiss didn’t need this. He wanted to know about the Sicilians.
Cass went on: ‘You did what any responsible former agent should have. You informed us after you’d spotted Motruk. But that’s where your involvement should have ended. There was no call for you to go surveilling him, to blunder into a meeting between him and his SIS handler and jump to the wrong conclusions. Now you’ve ballsed things up for us. The Sicilians saw you taking an interest in Motruk and will now assume there’s something fishy about him.’
Purkiss leaned against the stone wall, folded his arms. He was missing something.
As if noticing, Cass said: ‘I’ll explain, not that you have any right to further information. The Service recruited Motruk three years ago, as a useful Mediterranean asset given his knowledge of the region and its denizens. For the last eight months he’s been here in Malta under my and Leon Silverman’s authority, forging links with Sicilians from the Andreotti family. Heard of it? Yes. The Sicilians use many different routes to launder their money these days. Most of it’s done electronically, but they like to hang on to more traditional ways. One such channel is through Malta. Motruk’s posing as the broker. He takes charge of large cash shipments from Sicily and swaps them for clean money, supplied by our government as well as Italy’s.’
‘So why haven’t you grabbed the Sicilians yet?’
‘We’re waiting for the big one. I said Motruk exchanges large cash sums. They’re actually relatively small in comparison to the haul that he reports is coming in next month. If we can catch Andreotti’s men with their fingerprints on that one, it’ll make any prosecution worthwhile.’
Something didn’t add up. Purkiss said, ‘But the Sicilians who jumped me didn’t follow us from Marsaxlokk. I wasn’t tagged. I’m certain of it. Which means they were in Mdina already, and watching the restaurant where Motruk met Silverman. So they already suspect him of being involved with the Service.’
‘They know he is. It’s his cover story: he’s a Service agent who’s two-timing his employers. It makes him more useful to the Sicilians because he’s their man inside the enemy camp.’ She shrugged, wincing slightly. ‘Of course they’re naturally suspicious, so they ask him when he’s meeting his handler and put people in place to make sure he’s where he says he is. They’ve probably bugged the restaurant where he and Silverman met, which is why the two of them will have discussed nothing we don’t want the Sicilians to hear.’
‘Have you told Motruk about me?’
She held his gaze. ‘We had to. He needed to know about the Sicilians attacking you, so we told him everything. How you spotted him and informed us, then tagged him. He was impressed, said he’d no idea he was being surveilled.’ She exhaled, slowly, through pursed lips. ‘As I said, this has buggered things a bit. The Sicilians will want to know from Motruk who might be stalking him. He’ll have to profess ignorance, but it’s unlikely they’ll be entirely convinced. They’ll treat him with suspicion from now on.’
‘They’re not stupid. They’ll know he’s made enemies over the years. I could be anybody from his past, out to settle a score. If anything it bolsters his credentials with you.’
‘Nice try, Purkiss.’ She straightened. ‘Take me home. And for Christ’s sake back off. Don’t go anywhere near Motruk, or me, or Silverman. In fact, best of all, go back to London. Malta’s a small island and the Sicilians are everywhere. You’re marked.’
At the car Purkiss opened the door for her. He saw it coming an instant too late to avoid it entirely, the blow glancing off the side of his jaw and knocking him sideways, stumbling. He put his hand to his mouth, saw blood on his fingers.
She dropped into the seat and looked up at him. ‘Don’t you ever do anything like this to me again. Don’t you dare.’
*
Purkiss dropped Cass off outside the High Commission – she said she’d prefer he didn’t see where she lived, which he thought was fair enough – and took a winding drive northwards through Sliema and the resorts of St Julian, sifting his thoughts.
Cass was right. He’d overstepped the mark, had arrogantly blundered his way into a situation that was none of his concern, and had potentially jeopardised a Service operation in the process. And here he was, on his first holiday of sorts in years, trying to decide if he had a future in the career he’d chosen. If this wasn’t an answer, what was?
But as he waited for a raucous straggle of partygoers to cross the street in front of him, he thought about Mortuk’s past, and what he knew about him, and realised that something didn’t fit.
If Purkiss’s involvement had already raised the Sicilians’ suspicions about Mortuk, as Cass said she believed, then his continuing involvement was hardly going to aggravate matters. The damage was done. And as for Purkiss’s own safety as a marked man… well, that was his own problem.
Turning the car, he headed south once more.
*
The door of the Three Ships guesthouse triggered an old-fashioned brass bell as he opened it. A tiny lobby, clean but stuffed untidily with magazines and tourist brochures on every surface, was guarded by an ancient woman with a head like a hairy apple sitting behind a reception desk. She grinned toothlessly at Purkiss.
‘Do you have a room?’
‘Yes, sir. Last one.’
He noticed with silent thanks that she used an old-fashioned registration book rather than a computer, and on the wall behind her was mounted a board with old-fashioned room keys on hooks. There were six hooks in total, and two keys.
Purkiss produced his passport – it gave his real name, but that wouldn’t matter – and as the old woman filled in the register with laborious arthritic fingers, he read the entries upside down. Two rooms were out to couples, so he discounted those. Of the remaining three, one guest had an English name. Motruk was unlikely to be posing as an Englishman.
He pointed to the listing of one of the other two rooms in the book. ‘Can I have that one?’
Her grin was regretful. ‘I am sorry, sir. That is occupied.’
‘When will it be vacant?’
‘Not until…’ She frowned. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘And this one?’ He pointed at the other.
‘Ah, no. This gentleman is booked for long time.’
That would be Motruk. Room three. Purkiss glanced up at the key board. Number three was hanging there, suggesting Motruk was out.
Purkiss’s room – six – was on the top floor, but he stopped on the storey below. The dimly lit corridor was deserted apart from a listless pot plant. He stepped across to the door of room three, grimacing as a floorboard creaked. No light was visible beneath the door, and after two minutes Purkiss could hear no sound from within either.
The
lock was a simple mortice. Purkiss had it open in a minute and gently pushed at the door. It swung open, the darkness beyond broken only by a sheaf of sodium light from a street lamp outside. He advanced inside, taking in the wardrobe, the bed, the dressing table. An object caught his eye there.
He stepped forward to peer at it. It was a key, a large one. The key to the door.
He had time to register that the one on the hook downstairs was a decoy, slipped there when the old woman wasn’t looking, before the movement behind him made him spin and drop at the same time. The dark shape that had risen from the armchair behind the door was standing square-on with its arms extended and Purkiss saw the glint of the gunmetal in the narrow light as his foot lashed out and caught the figure in the belly, knocking it back against the chair. Purkiss followed up, diving forward with his head tucked down, the crown of his head barrelling into the man’s chest and his fists coming in from the sides to hammer at the kidneys, but the man brought his gun arm down and cracked Purkiss on the head with the butt and Purkiss reeled aside, stumbling against the chair.
He felt a shove and dropped face down into the chair, the room tilting. Turning on the seat he peered up, arms crossed in front of him, and saw the figure take several steps back and snap on the light and aim the gun once more.
*
‘You’re Purkiss, yes?’
Motruk’s accent was strong but intelligible.
Purkiss hauled himself upright in the chair. Motruk shifted his stance, feet apart, gun in both hands but lowered slightly.
‘I knew you would come.’
Purkiss said nothing.
‘You thought to search my room. Find some clue that I am not who your Amanda Cass or Leon Silverman say I am. Correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are right. At least, I am not quite who Cass and Silverman think I am.’ He stepped forward and sat on the bed, the gun still grasped in a two-handed grip but now pointing at the ground between his feet. ‘They will have told you I am an SIS agent helping them to trap the Andreotti family by pretending to launder money. And this much is true. But this is not my real purpose.’
