Tim Stevens - Ratcatcher

‘Remember, John. No outside involvement.’

‘Listen — ’

‘I’ll be in touch.’

Purkiss dropped the phone. He clenched his fists and raised his face to the canopy of trees and the night sky beyond. The choking feeling left him.

It was completely unprofessional because the danger of being hunted down was still present, but through clamped teeth he roared, a long deep primal sound that bounced off the depths of the forest and sent small things skittering in fear.

It was a setback, nothing more. All thoughts of trying to get some sleep gone, Venedikt stood motionless, watching his men at work. The doors were hauled open and the preparations began for the transfer.

Rather than fury he felt a quiet pride in his foresight. There had always been a possibility that the farm would be discovered, and to fail in the mission at this late hour because of having failed to anticipate this possibility would have been a shame too enormous for him to bear. An hour’s swift work, and it would be as if nothing had happened.

He could, Venedikt supposed as he stepped aside to give more room to two of his people who were running at a stoop and laying the charges, have committed more men to the pursuit of Purkiss and his colleague. To his mind that would have been irresponsible, would have left the rest of the farm dangerously underprotected. In any case, a larger group wouldn’t necessarily have managed to hunt Purkiss down.

Venedikt’s phone rang.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve warned Purkiss off. You don’t need to relocate.’

‘Warned him.’

‘I have his friend. The contact he had here in the city. I’ve told him she’ll die if he alerts the authorities.’

Venedikt watched a truck reverse into position and wheeze to a standstill. Two men came running to drag the rear doors wide. ‘It’s not enough.’

‘He cares for this woman. He won’t do anything to jeopardize her safety. I know him.’

‘But we’re still exposed here. He might come back.’

‘If he comes back you’ll be ready for him. And the woman dies.’

‘It’s my decision to make.’

‘I know it is. And if you choose the upheaval of relocation, it’s more of a problem for you than for me. But it is my problem too, because it increases the risk of something going wrong with the operation, of your being discovered along the way.’

Venedikt sucked hard on his teeth. He hated to change his mind once he’d made it up, especially at the urging of another whom he did not respect. Especially when that person was an English. But the possibility that they were still secure, could proceed as planned without the disruption of changing bases… it was attractive.

He said, ‘I’ll stay put for the time being.’

‘Good.’

‘Any change in circumstances, any hint you get that Purkiss is alerting anybody else, you let me know immediately.’

There was no reply. Venedikt thought that showed contempt.

He stepped forward, raised his hand, and gave the orders. One or two of the men glanced at him but they were all finely trained, obeyed without question. He went to look for Dobrynin who was supervising the wiring of the farmhouse. The charges, the detonators, would remain in place, just in case circumstances changed.

After an age they were surprised by another road. Again they crossed it, its surface slick with the drizzle that was beginning now that the cloud cover had ceased its drifting. The compass on Purkiss’s phone told him they were heading east-south-east, but they were still far from anywhere that looked familiar. Soon they would have to leave the cover of the forest and chance the road.

Beside him Kendrick kept pace, hobbling slightly, his leg bound with strips torn from his shirtsleeves. His mouth moved, bitten-off mutters barely audible over the tramp of their feet.

There had been no telephone signal now for half an hour. Purkiss checked the display periodically. The time was just after eleven p.m. Nine hours until the summit, and he didn’t care.

He had let Abby down.

Guilt was a phenomenon — not a feeling, that was too slight, too ephemeral a word — with which he was familiar. In the weeks and the months after Claire’s death it had lived with him constantly, on the good days a weight pressing down on his head and driving him into the ground, on the bad an internal parasite clawing and sucking the innards of his chest and his abdomen into a compact ball. Now it was a slash from a scalpel blade, so pure and shocking that it was cold rather than painful.

When he’d told Kendrick, the first thing Kendrick said was, ‘Shit. Jesus,’ and the second was, ‘How?’

Purkiss knew the answer. The memory stick in Seppo’s flat, the one he’d conveniently been allowed to find, the one with the password that even Abby couldn’t crack — there it was, you idiot , the giveaway — hadn’t been a memory stick at all, but a tracking device. Fallon had been on to Abby and her whereabouts from the moment Purkiss had given her the stick.

They got moving at once after that, Kendrick binding his own wounds with concentrated grimness, Purkiss pacing about helplessly, understanding how caged animals felt. Kendrick didn’t say it’s not your fault or anything like it. It wasn’t his style. When they were ready to set off he hefted the rifle — he’d insisted on taking it back from Purkiss — and said, very low and very precisely: ‘I tell you what, Purkiss. If you see this Fallon, you better kill him quickly. Because if I get my hands on him first, he’s mine.’

They used their goggles in the deeper parts of the forest now that there was no moonlight, and saw a startlingly wide variety of cowering and scampering shapes. As they walked Purkiss cast his mind back to his movements after he’d found the memory stick. Had he inadvertently revealed the location of anyone or anywhere else significant? He didn’t think so. Fallon would have tracked him to the nightclub, and perhaps that explained why Lyuba Ilkun had been able to summon her colleagues so quickly after he’d talked to her. They had already known he was there.

It still didn’t hang together. The surprise the man at Rodina Security, Dobrynin, had shown at the mention of Fallon’s background in the Service, as well as his involvement in the events planned for the following day, suggested Fallon wasn’t working with Kuznetsov’s group. But presumably Fallon had alerted the group to Purkiss and Kendrick’s presence on the farm after he’d grabbed Abby, and had either forced her to tell him where they were — he doubted it, it wasn’t the sort of thing Abby would do unless under extreme duress, something he didn’t want to think about — or, more likely, had seen the farm displayed on Google Earth on her computer and had put two and two together. Which suggested that he was in some way helping Kuznetsov. And where did the traitor among the three British agents come in? Was he — or, conceiveably, she — working with Fallon, as well as with Kuznetsov?

Damn it, they needed to get back to the city, and they were making maddeningly slow progress. Purkiss began heading up a slope towards the road again. Kendrick said, ‘We hitchhiking?’

‘If need be.’

‘Going to be difficult.’

Purkiss half turned and looked at Kendrick, at his bloodied legs and lank hair and stubble. Most of all at the rifle.

‘You reckon?’

Hitchhiking wasn’t in fact an option — with the gun it would be more like hijacking — but Purkiss wanted to get to the exposed higher ground of the road because he was more likely to get a phone signal there. After a few seconds he was rewarded with one bar’s worth. He checked the map facility, got the name of the road they were on and that of another one branching off half a kilometre ahead.