Tim Stevens - Jokerman

A telephone number and fax and email addresses were listed. Purkiss memorised them, but didn’t think they’d be of use. Contacting the firm beforehand would be like the police telephoning a suspect in advance to notify him of an impending arrest.

The problem was, despite pictures of a grand-looking complex of office buildings on the website’s home page, which suggested the firm had an actual physical existence, there was no address for the headquarters.

Vale’s phone rang. He hit Receive and a voice filled the car, speaking so rapidly Purkiss couldn’t understand what it was saying.

When it had finished, Vale said: ‘We’re in luck.’ He looked at his watch. ‘There’s a chartered flight to Riyadh leaving from Heathrow at three fifteen. That’s fifty minutes from now. You’ve a seat booked on it.’

‘Good,’ said Purkiss.

Heathrow was this side of London, on the route back. And he had his passport with him.

Vale reached into the pocket in his door, brought something crackling out. It was a pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out with his lips, dropped the pack back into the door pocket, and pressed in the car’s cigarette lighter.

‘I thought you’d quit,’ said Purkiss.

‘I did. Angina, as I told you.’

‘Quentin, it’s not for me to lecture, but…ah.’ Purkiss shrugged.

‘It helps me think better.’

Purkiss thought he detected the tiniest of tremors in the hand that pressed the lighter cylinder to the end of the cigarette.

Vale lowered the window on his side as the acrid fumes began to fill the car. Purkiss gazed through the windscreen.

A tremor?

He’d never seen Vale overtly crave a smoke, not even in these last few days when he’d been off them. So why the jitteriness now?

Purkiss glanced at Vale’s profile. It was gloomily impassive, his default expression.

They drove in silence, something tense and undefinable in the air between them.

At the drop-off area outside Heathrow’s Terminal Five, Vale scribbled down the flight details and handed the slip of paper to Purkiss.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

Purkiss held his gaze for a fraction of a second. There was nothing to read there.

He walked into the cool of the terminal building.

Finding a relatively private spot in a corner, he dialled Hannah’s number. There was a lightness in her tone when she answered, a change since the events of the night before.

Purkiss told her about the conversation with Rossiter. ‘I’m about to board to Riyadh.’

‘I want to be there too.’

He’d already considered it. ‘Okay. You’ll have to catch a separate flight, which would be advisable anyway. Let me know, and I’ll meet you at the airport.’

‘Got it.’

‘One thing. I don’t actually have a physical address for the place, and I won’t be able to hunt for it online while I’m in the air. Could you perhaps see what you can find, while you’re waiting to get a flight?’

‘No problem.’

Purkiss headed for the check-in desk, passport at the ready.

He could have asked Vale to look for the address, but something had stopped him.

Vale’s tension, his sudden resumption of smoking.

Like a child, held helpless before an advancing ogre and trying desperately to twist away from it, Purkiss recoiled from the suspicion that was crawling over him, and from the realisations that were lining up one after the other.

The security leak, which had resulted in the sniper’s attacking Purkiss in his home even before he’d taken on the Jokerman operation.

The apparent coincidence of the gunman having been poised outside Arkwright’s house at the very same time Purkiss and Hannah had been questioning him.

Vale?

The horror grew within Purkiss as the rumbling of the plane’s engines rose to a roar, then a shriek as it launched into the vast and unknown sky.

Purkiss had travelled through King Khalid International many times en route to Iraq during his time there, and then as now he never failed to be struck by the enormous, city-like sprawl of the airport in the desert below the plane, or by the colossal mosque which dominated the passenger terminal as he emerged from the arrivals area.

It was a little after midnight, local time. Still, the terminal bustled as if night hadn’t fallen outside. The building was efficiently airconditioned but Purkiss had received a dose of the night-time heat as he’d stepped off the plane. Riyadh in August: not the best time for a visitor from a temperate clime.

Purkiss switched on his phone, waited for the international roaming function to kick in. He had one text message waiting. It was from Hannah: Call me .

She answered immediately. ‘I have Scipio Rand’s address,’ she said. ‘I managed to stay out of the Service databases, but I had to call in a couple of favours with contacts in the Foreign Office.’ She gave a street address in the Diplomatic Quarter.

‘Good work,’ said Purkiss.

‘Also, I’ve booked a Saudia flight for ten-oh-five — that’s half an hour from now. I’m at Heathrow. Landing time’s seven twenty in the morning at your end.’ She told him the flight details.

Seven hours to go. Purkiss had managed to catch a couple of hours’ sleep on the flight, and didn’t feel tired now. He wandered the length and breadth of the terminal, trying to look purposeful so as not to attract attention as a loiterer. When the shop windows had exhausted his meagre interest, he found an all-night coffee shop that served meals, and fuelled up with caffeine, carbohydrate and protein.

He thought about Hannah as he ate, and the night before. Had it been an outlet for the tension they’d both built up after such a chaotic, threatening day? Probably. But Purkiss found himself genuinely looking forward to seeing her again. He checked his phone for messages, but there were none. Why there would be any, he didn’t quite know. He supposed part of him was anticipating news from the hospital, news about Kendrick. And it wouldn’t be good.

Purkiss’s thoughts tacked back to Vale, no matter how he tried to rein them away. He’d thought it through, and there was no more thinking to be done on the matter. Not now, not until he got back.

Vale had deceived him once, over a complicated matter. He’d led Purkiss to believe that Claire, Purkiss’s fiancée, was the innocent victim of a murder by another agent. That agent had turned out to be one of Vale’s men, and on the side of good, whatever good was in this particular world; whereas Claire was corrupt. Purkiss thought he had forgiven Vale for his deception because Vale had had Purkiss’s best interests in mind, even if Purkiss didn’t agree with his approach.

But this… this was different. If Vale was mixed up in all this, working for Strang, then he was putting himself on the other side of an unbridgeable divide from Purkiss. Had Vale’s shakiness, his nerves, been the outward manifestations of a guilty conscience as he sent Purkiss, a man he’d worked with closely for half a decade, into a trap and to his death? Or was the older man simply human, prone to the drawbacks of ageing — tremulousness, faltering courage — like anybody else? Was Purkiss reading too much into it all?

There were the niggling details, though. The coincidences, the leaks. And treachery on Vale’s part could explain most, perhaps all of them.

A group of women walked past the shop, dressed in full-length abayat . Purkiss wondered whether Hannah would remember she was obliged to cover up or risk falling foul of the mutaween , the religious police. He also wondered how she’d react to being forbidden to drive.

Then he realised how different his attitude was towards her compared with other agents he’d worked with. Normally he took it for granted that colleagues had done their homework. Now, he was fussing over Hannah Holley as if she were a neophyte.