Tim Stevens - Ratcatcher

‘No.’

‘He’s still at large?’

‘Yes.’

Fallon closed his eyes, nodded, then looked at Purkiss again. ‘Briefly, I got close to one of Kuznetsov’s crew. A woman.’

‘Lyuba Ilkun.’

‘You know that, too. I was hoping to get on board the operation. I’d convinced her, I think. Kuznetsov on the other hand was suspicious. They grabbed me several days ago, might have been a week — you lose track.’

‘You’ve been down here all the time?’

‘No. They were keeping me in some kind of cellar until a few hours ago. Hooded me, brought me here.’

A cellar. It would have been the farmhouse.

Purkiss said: ‘You’ve been roughed up. What did they ask you?’

‘The usual. Who I was working for, who I was working with. It was pretty bad in the beginning — they’re amateurs at this but what they lack in finesse they make up for in brute force — but they eased up after a while. As though Kuznetsov realised he wasn’t going to get me to talk, and wanted to keep me intact until he could find out who I was by other means. They’ve left me entirely alone for the last day or so, apart from feeding me. And moving me here.’

Purkiss was thinking rapidly, sifting through conversations in his memory. ‘They don’t know that you’re Service?’

‘They might suspect it. I certainly didn’t tell them.’

It fell into place with what Purkiss thought must be an audible click. ‘They do now.’

‘How so?’

‘Teague doesn’t know Kuznetsov has you. Or at least he didn’t when I first met him. As soon as I told him and the other two agents I was looking for you, he would have got on to Kuznetsov and asked him if he’d heard of you, without telling him who you were.’

Fallon’s frown deepened.

Purkiss went on: ‘Kuznetsov didn’t tell Teague he had you, but I think Teague suspected that he did. It’s why Teague let me carry on, why he didn’t just hand me over to Kuznetsov from the word go. Teague wanted me to find you because he wanted to find you himself. He knew you were here to stop the operation, so he needed to be assured that you’d been neutralised. Later, I met Kuznetsov’s second in command, Dobrynin — ’

‘The one with the mutilated hand. He was one of my interrogators.’

‘Right. I told him I was looking for you and that you were a former SIS agent. I did it to gauge his reaction. He looked delighted.’

‘So why would Kuznetsov hang on to me after he’d learned who I was, and why has he kept it a secret from Teague?’

‘Maybe — ’ Purkiss stopped. There was no maybe . He didn’t know.

They fell silent, Purkiss listening for footsteps, Kuznetsov’s men returning to tell them to stop talking. None came.

‘Do you know what’s planned for the summit?’ said Fallon.

‘The assassination of the Russian president.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

Again Fallon shook his head. ‘The closest I got to finding anything out was when Lyuba used to talk about the “event”. All very abstract.’

Purkiss felt the unspoken thing rising between them again. It wasn’t time, yet, and he said: ‘All right. A full debrief.’

‘Agreed.’

‘You first.’

On the screen a reporter, one of the network’s heavyweights and looking unfeasibly bright and awake given the hour, yammered away against the backdrop of the Memorial. Police bearing very visible light arms hove into view from time to time, not accidentally. At the bottom of the screen a ticker tape relayed information about little else. Every now and again the picture cut away to the hotel where the president was staying overnight, an aerial shot making the early morning helicopters look like circling moths.

Venedikt drank tea, replenishing his glass as quickly as he emptied it. On the screen a related human-interest piece showed a group of young people in Moscow raising a raucous toast to their new friends in Estonia. This was followed by the now-familiar footage of the president arriving at the reception banquet the night before. As the camera closed on his face, Venedikt raised his own glass.

The supreme sacrifice, tovarisch . Just as his grandfather had made.

And a brilliant plan, meticulously conceived, was now going to be made perfect. All along, Kuznetsov had striven not to leave any fingerprints. In a few hours from now, when the world was picking over the pieces, fingerprints would indeed be found.

The fingerprints of the British Secret Service.

Ventilation in the basement was poor, and the sweat was moulding Purkiss’s clothes to his body, adding to the sense of restriction imposed by the bonds. He blinked, tried to flick the stinging droplets from the corners of his eyes.

‘So, you see,’ he said, ‘things don’t add up.’

Fallon’s story had been a masterclass in the art of the debriefing: rapid, clipped, not a word wasted. Released early from Belmarsh with an unconditional pardon, sent to Tallinn because of preliminary intelligence suggesting activity potentially detrimental to the forthcoming summit visit, he’d picked up the Kuznetsov link through old-fashioned legwork, haunting bars and clubs frequented by ex-military types. At the same time he had learned of the unofficial cell of SIS agents, the trio working without Embassy cover. Pillow talk from Lyuba had confirmed that Kuznetsov’s operation, whatever it was, was being assisted by a British intelligence agent, and that this person wasn’t connected with the Embassy. Fallon didn’t think Lyuba knew herself who the agent was.

And he’d been sharing a flat with an SIS agent-in-place called Jaak Seppo. It was the part that didn’t make sense.

Purkiss listened without comment, then relayed his own story, less succinctly, leaving out any mention of Vale, saying only that “a contact” in London had passed on to him the picture of Fallon that Seppo had sent him.

Now he said, ‘Why would Seppo shop you to my contact, knowing he’d get in touch with me?’

‘I don’t know.’

Had there been the slightest hesitation there?

‘You’re not telling me everything, Fallon.’

This time the pause was definite.

‘No, I’m not.’

Purkiss waited. When Fallon stayed silent he said, ‘A full debrief. We agreed.’

‘There’s something I can’t tell you now.’

‘Damn it, Fallon.’

‘I can’t explain why. It doesn’t affect the position we’re in.’

‘For the love of God — ’

‘I will explain. I promise. Once we’re out of here, once we’ve stopped Kuznetsov.’

And so it had come to be, without being made explicit by either of them before. They were allies, working together towards a common goal. Old buddies again.

Purkiss hadn’t breathed in but he felt his chest swelling, the agony in his ribs so intense it became almost pleasurable. He stared at this man, battered, bloodied, teeth smashed. Pitiable.

‘You killed Claire.’

Fallon’s head had been hanging forward, his gaze downcast. Now he lifted his eyes.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Understanding came fully formed, not in stealthy increments. The Jacobin sat down under the enormity of it.

He was in the kitchen, forcing himself to take food despite having no appetite. Beyond the window the city napped through the darkest hours, as reluctant to rest as he was.

Kuznetsov had had Fallon, all along. Had taken him captive while he was courting the Ilkun woman, and had found out somehow that he was SIS. Now he had Purkiss, another former SIS operative. Two British agents.

He was going to use them to implicate the Service in the attack.

Fury at oneself was never productive, never ever, and the Jacobin struggled to suppress it. If you’d worked it out earlier, you’d have taken care of Purkiss yourself rather than deliver him to the Russian . Kuznetsov might still have used Fallon, but a single agent could have been attributed to coincidence. With two, the hand of SIS would be unmistakeable.