Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

Two businessmen in pinstripes, one fat and one thin like Laurel and Hardy, bustled past, arguing mildly.

A skateboarding kid sailed precariously close, too cool for school in his skinny gear and mantle of nonchalance.

Downtown Charlottesville was before her, familiar and unchanged.

Nina took a step, and another. Her legs worked. She was real again, calm and solid, not ephemeral as she’d started to be only minutes earlier. She wasn’t going to evaporate, was an entity that existed in its own right.

She smiled. Touching her violin through its case, she set off towards downtown.

And the men broke apart to let her between them: two of them, each in a suit, one black and one white. Each had a tiny dot in his ear, one in his right and the other in his left. She saw these as she glanced from one to the other when they passed.

Dreamily, she looked back.

They didn’t. Their backs receded.

But she knew, finally, that she hadn’t been wrong. This time it was real.

This time, the Watchers were moving in.

Outside Amsterdam

Sunday 19 May, 11.30 am

‘Tickets, alsjeblieft.’

She was past forty with a weighed-down air and a nice, tired smile. Pope stirred out of his put-on doze and returned her grin.

‘Dank uw.’ She punched his ticket, caught his eye again. Her glance and her smile lingered.

Pope thought: Careful, now. The last thing he needed was to be remembered.

When she’d moved down the carriage he folded his Spiegel and over the edge of the paper watched the man opposite him. Middle fifties, Teutonic, and engrossed in a laptop which the reflection in his Himmler glasses revealed to be displaying a spreadsheet on its monitor.

The man probably wasn’t Service, or CIA, or German or Dutch intelligence. Pope couldn’t be certain. But then, it was always about probabilities.

The probability of John Purkiss’s arriving at Jablonsky’s house while Darius Pope was despatching Jablonsky was… low. Vanishingly so. Which meant, it was probable that Purkiss had been alerted to Pope’s presence in the city, and to his connection with Jablonsky. Which meant one of two things. Either, Jablonsky or Taylor had been tapped, and had revealed some connection with Pope. Or, Pope had been under suspicion for some time. The second was the more alarming possibility. It was also the less likely, Pope thought. He’d done nothing to arouse suspicion among the mandarins at the top ranks of the Service. He’d taken care to carve a career of solid, unspectacular achievement over the years. He’d done none of his research on Service time or using Service equipment. His tradecraft was exceptional; he found it hard to believe he’d allowed surveillance to gain much of a hold on him or his movements.

So one or both of the Americans had revealed something. it could have happened in one of a number of ways. Routine Service surveillance of the Company men might have picked something up — the most likely scenario. Or the pair had approached the Service themselves, for whatever reason.

In any case, Pope was now officially identified as the killer of two Company operatives. The Service knew this; perhaps the CIA did as well. The Service would be taking care not to let its transatlantic rival know of this, but it would struggle to keep it a secret for long. Which meant the Service was going to do its utmost to track down Pope, and neutralise him, before the Company found out about him. And they’d be using John Purkiss to do so.

Pope allowed his eyes to close and settled back in the seat, feeling the gentle rolling of the train beneath him. John Purkiss. He was an open secret within the Service, his actual identity suspected by some and known by fewer, his role accepted as a reality by all but the most naive. The Ratcatcher had emerged some five years ago, a vigilante of sorts. Pope had been a junior employee at the time, but he’d known his share of grafters, corner-cutters, agents on the make. Zero tolerance had been the mantra passed around, unwritten: the new way, the salve for the Service’s public wounds caused by scandal after scandal. It was no longer safe to take a little sweetener for the minor intelligence you passed on to your Iraqi police contact or your Shanghai stool pigeon. You’d be looking over your shoulder after doing the deed, and more likely than not would feel a hand descending on it.

Once Pope had tracked down the identity of the Ratcatcher, he’d gathered as much intelligence on Purkiss as he could find. An active agent since his recruitment after Cambridge in the late nineteen-nineties, Purkiss had excelled in the Mediterranean arena as a vetter of Islamist notaries in southern France and the Dalmatian coast. His fiancee, a fellow agent, Claire Stirling, had been murdered in 2008 by Donal Fallon, a senior operative who’d subsequently been arrested and convicted of murder, and had turned out to have been part of a black ops group within the Service, carrying out hits on people deemed a threat to British national security. Purkiss had left the Service soon after Fallon’s imprisonment.

And it was then the crackdown had begun in earnest, on the crooks and the chancers within the Service. Possibly it was a coincidence that Purkiss had disappeared at the same time. But Pope had run checks, analysed patterns of movement. Purkiss had been sighted at too many locations close to areas from which agents had quietly been removed, for mere chance to have been involved. No, Purkiss was the Ratcatcher. The probabilities were in its favour.

Purkiss had come close to besting Pope, and that rankled. Back at Jablonsky’s house, if he’d focused on taking Pope down instead of hesitating to ascertain if Jablonsky could be saved, Purkiss would have taken Pope down; Pope was certain of it. Later, after Pope had placed some distance between them and had allowed his natural advantage of stamina to come to the fore — he was more than half a decade younger than the other man, and the difference counted for more than people realised — Pope had been surer of his chances of winning. But even so, Purkiss had made him drop his blade, and had been deadly accurate with the chunk of metal he’d thrown at Pope’s head.

He’d been a formidable opponent, Purkiss; and he was behind, somewhere, and in pursuit. Which was why Pope had laid the trail he had.

He allowed his eyes to crack open a few millimetres. The Germanic businessman was still wrapped up in his perusal of his laptop spreadsheets. There were no likely candidates in the rest of the environment, nobody who could remotely pose a threat to Pope. Pope knew that was the first impression of the imminently dead.

Keeping his eyes minutely open, he allowed the feelings aroused by the killings to flood to the surface. Taylor’s death was the first, but Pope was surprised to find the sensory memories to be less intense in this case. Probably it was because he’d done it more quickly, putting the first bullet through Taylor’s face even as he turned; there’d been barely time to ensure the man recognised him, and even then Pope couldn’t be sure, as the lifelight dulled in the ruined eyes, that Taylor had fully appreciated who he was.

Jablonky’s killing had been different. The first shot, in the abdomen, had dropped him. Even if he’d been carrying a gun in his own kitchen — and given that Pope now knew Jablonsky might have been expecting him, that wasn’t so far fetched — he’d have had no opportunity to reach for it. That wouldn’t have been the case if Pope had hit him in the legs or the shoulder. On the kitchen floor, his hands cramped over the roiling surge from his belly, Jablonsky’s look had been that of a man who knew exactly what was happening to him, who was doing it to him, and why.