Tim Stevens - Ratcatcher

‘More likely, but again I doubt it. There’s no real vantage point. And the crowds are going to be kept right back, there’ll be no plunging in for a grip and grin session at the end, so a handgun wouldn’t get close enough.’

‘So…’ Kendrick frowned out the window. ‘A full-frontal attack by this Kuznakov’s — ’

‘Kuznetsov’s.’

‘Kuznetsov’s private army? Some kind of suicide attack?’

‘It’d be suicidal, all right, but it wouldn’t achieve much else. Say he’s got twenty people. With the numbers of police and probably military there are going to be on the streets tomorrow, they’d be cut down before they got within half a mile.’

The needle and the mass of activity beneath it dwindled in the mirror.

Kendrick said, ‘This Fallon geezer.’

‘Yes.’

‘You think he’s acting on his own.’

After a pause Purkiss said, ‘I don’t know. I think he’s connected to the Kuznetsov crew but not in a way they’re fully aware of. I believe he’s hijacking their operation in some way, letting them do all the hard work and then planning to, I don’t know, take the credit for it, add a twist of his own. Something.’ He rubbed his eyes in frustration. ‘Ten minutes with him. All I need.’

‘You’ll need longer than that if he’s as hard a nut as you say.’

‘Ten minutes.’

Kendrick grinned sourly. ‘The bedwetting bleeding-heart liberal I know. Gone in forty-eight hours.’

Purkiss said nothing, fists tightening on the wheel.

Kendrick said: ‘So how long are we going to leave it to find Fallon before we hand everything over to the coppers?’

‘As soon as we get him, SIS and the police get everything else. The location of the farm, Kuznetsov’s involvement, all of it. That’s their business, not mine, beyond how it helps me to find Fallon.’

‘That wasn’t my question.’

‘It’ll take as long as it takes.’ He glanced over at Kendrick. ‘Getting hanged hasn’t softened you up, has it?’

Kendrick chuckled. ‘No, mate. Just wondered if you were planning on chickening out early.’

The roads were less familiar in the darkness and after a time Purkiss punched in the address of the farmhouse so as not to get lost. At one point he saw the strobing of emergency service lights through the trees ahead. As they rounded a curve, the place where he and the other man had gone over the edge earlier that afternoon came into view. A makeshift barrier had been constructed and clusters of police remained, waving traffic past.

After that there were no lights for miles. They seemed to be tunnelling into the forest, its massive presence almost mountainous around them. A few miles on, the foliage began to thin out, the odd field to appear. The satnav indicated their destination was five kilometres ahead.

Two kilometres short he pulled in at a layby. He killed the engine and the lights. Purkiss thumbed Abby’s number into the phone, heard it ring and then cut out. He looked at the display.

‘Damn it.’

‘What?’

‘No signal.’

‘Told you. The trees. I hate the countryside.’ Kendrick checked his phone. ‘Mine’s no good either.’

‘Let’s walk.’

They moved down the road, keeping on the left hand side where the forest was, ready to duck between the trunks at the sound of an approaching vehicle. After a while Purkiss stopped and tried the phone again. This time he got Abby.

‘Signal’s not brilliant out here.’

Kendrick got out his phone and they linked up in conference call mode, both men putting their earpieces in. Presently they came to a wall, hand-built from stone. It wasn’t the one, yet. They moved along it. More forest, and then another wall, this one reinforced with concrete and curving away from the road, a recess and gates visible along its length.

‘This is it.’

Dull light rose from behind the wall, but the trees blotted out what illumination came from the moon, which was obscured anyway for the most part by clouds. They fitted on the night vision goggles. They were fairly basic first generation pieces of equipment, providing amplification of ambient light up to about two hundred times, too crude for precision work such as sniper activity but enough to show up the presence of an enemy in the vicinity, and portable as well.

They flattened themselves against the wall and moved along it towards the gate, Purkiss in front. As he crept nearer he heard a cough, saw the glow of a cigarette tip beyond the gate just as the smoke reached his nostrils.

‘Other way,’ he whispered.

They retraced their path along the wall until they came to the corner at which they had started, then followed the wall to the right. The forest had been cut back from the wall far enough that no branches were within leaping distance from the top. Purkiss chose a particularly stout looking fir tree and began to climb up the trunk, Kendrick following suit on the other side. They reached eye level with the top of the wall and hauled themselves a couple of metres higher and peered across.

As the Google Earth images had shown, the farmhouse lay at the end of the drive sweeping down from the gate. The windows of the farmhouse were lit up and the brightness shifted with movement inside. Smaller lights burned here and there in the yard.

‘What the hell’s that?’ said Kendrick.

Some distance behind the farmhouse was a huge wooden building, a great sprawling barn of some kind, floodlights rigged to illuminate its front and men, four or five, moving back and forth through its doors. Their voices were too low and distant to be made out in any detail.

‘It wasn’t in the pictures.’

‘No.’ Purkiss muttered down the line to Abby, describing what they were looking at.

In a moment she said, ‘Checked again. It’s definitely not on Google Earth. Must be new, or newish. As I said, the pictures can be up to three years out of date.’

They clambered down and set off along the wall once more. Further down they shimmied up another tree. They had come a longer distance than Purkiss had estimated and the buildings were behind them now, the view directly across the wall one of fields and copses.

Kendrick was tapping his arm and when he looked he noticed it. Just visible within the perimeter, thirty metres away, a man’s shape was making its way on foot along the wall. Before he disappeared from view Purkiss saw he was carrying something in both hands, pointing downwards: a rifle.

Unless the man had some kind of night-vision viewing capability himself he wouldn’t have seen them. They climbed down anyway. Faintly, from the other side of the wall, they heard the rasp of static from a walkie-talkie, a low murmur in reply fading as the man moved on.

So there were guards patrolling the perimeter, perhaps more of them at the rear where the tree cover was dense inside and outside the wall and intruders would be likeliest to attempt entry. As silently as they could Purkiss and Kendrick continued along the wall, eventually reaching the next corner and turning in so that they were following the rear wall.

Again they crept up a tree and looked over. On the other side was a copse, the gleam of the farmhouse and the barn barely visible in the distance through the layers of fir. Purkiss scanned from left to right and back with the goggles. No signs of life. He indicated with two fingers and Kendrick nodded. To Abby he murmured, ‘We’re going over the wall.’

There was no reply and he glanced at the screen again. The signal was gone.

The wall was of varying height, the ground uneven along its length. At its lowest it was perhaps three metres high. Kendrick squatted and interlocked his fingers. Purkiss used it as a step and pistoned himself up so that his hands grappled with the top of the wall. His toes found a purchase and he hauled himself to the top and looked down. No movement on the other side. He braced himself and reached down for Kendrick’s hand and helped pull him up. They dropped on to the carpet of fir needles at the foot of the wall.