Cronos Rising (16 page)

Purkiss spread his hands wide, thinking:
if this is it, it’s the most ironic way to die the gods could have imagined for me
.

‘We need him alive, Tony,’ he said, unsure if he shouted it or spoke in a whisper.

Rebecca appeared in the doorway behind Kendrick, Delatour close behind. Kendrick half turned.

Purkiss stepped up to him and placed a hand on his forearm, pushing the gun down gently but firmly.

They stood, spaced apart, and stared down at the white-haired man. He’d drawn his legs in but remained sitting against the wall. His eyes had regained their focus.

Keeping his gaze on Purkiss alone, he spat out a wad of tooth and blood.

Purkiss said: ‘Get up.’

The man didn’t ask for assistance, nor was any offered to him. He didn’t make a big show of it, but rose slowly, a quick, tight grimace his only sign of discomfort.

He stood, feet braced apart, arms folded, head tilted back. As if he was the captor, the interrogator, rather than at the mercy of four opponents.

‘You’re Purkiss,’ he said. His voice was a guttural rasp, made thicker by the broken teeth, the no-doubt bitten tongue.

Purkiss said: ‘Saul Gideon.’

The man didn’t reply, didn’t nod. But his eyes confirmed to Purkiss that he was right.

––––––––

K
endrick said: ‘I say we waste the bastard.’

It was a clichéd line, and Gideon’s mouth twitched in contempt. His eyes remained trained on Purkiss’s.

‘Geezer tried to kill us,’ said Kendrick, his tone unnervingly reasonable, as if he was politely pointing out to somebody that they were jumping a queue. The Walther hung by his side, but his index finger was still inside the trigger guard, Purkiss noticed.

‘I tried to kill you,’ said Gideon, still looking at Purkiss, ‘because I assumed you’d come to kill me. Nothing you’ve done so far has persuaded me to abandon that assumption.’ His accent was English public school, clipped and precise.

Kendrick shook his head, chortled. ‘Look at that. He won’t even face me. Keeps talking to you, as if that’ll impress me.’

Gideon said, ‘Why would I talk to the monkey when I’ve got the organ grinder in front of me?’

Kendrick bit his lip. He took a step forward, aimed the pistol two-handed at Gideon’s groin.

‘Just for that,’ he snarled, ‘I’m starting with the bollocks.’

Purkiss said, ‘Tony.’ He nodded at Gideon. ‘All right. Talk.’

‘Not here.’ Gideon gestured beyond Purkiss at the door. ‘There’s quite a lot to say, on your part as well as mine. We’ll be better served down below.’

‘Here’s fine,’ said Purkiss.

The older man sighed. ‘You bloody idiot. I have closed-circuit cameras around this island. The screens are in a room downstairs. If you’re not the threat I’ve been waiting for, then it’s still coming. I need to keep an eye out.’ He winced, moving his jaw awkwardly. ‘If you’re afraid of a trap, afraid I’ve got backup waiting downstairs, then go and take a look yourselves. There’s plenty of hardware here.’ He indicated the guns. ‘One of you can stand guard over me while we wait.’

Purkiss considered for a moment. Then he stood aside.

‘Lead the way.’

Gideon walked fluidly, with the prowling confidence of a much younger man, an athlete. He strode to the door and began climbing down the ladder. Purkiss waited at the top, covering him with the gun, before descending himself.

For the first time Purkiss had an opportunity to study the rest of the ruins behind the façade and the tower. Most of them were just that – ruins – with barely a wall left intact. He didn’t have enough knowledge of Ancient Greek architecture to be able to pinpoint the era.

Behind the remains of an interior wall, Gideon stopped and squatted. He grasped an iron ring in the stone floor and heaved, his muscles bunching beneath his shirtsleeves. A trapdoor peeled away and he let it crash to the ground.

Purkiss peered down. Iron rungs in the wall of a brick-lined, cylindrical shaft led down into an artificially lit room.

‘I’ll go first,’ he said.

Gideon stood aside. Purkiss descended ten feet and found himself in an office-cum-living space, square and perhaps thirty feet to a side, hewn out of rock and buttressed by heavy stone supports. Nearby, a bank of video monitors showed a jerkily changing array of images from around the islet. At the far end of the room stood a rudimentary cot bed and a small table with a single chair.

He signalled for the others to follow him. Gideon came first, and moved swiftly to the desk with the monitors. He examined them systematically, changing the images one by one.

A water cooler stood against one wall. Gideon filled a plastic cup, drank deeply. ‘Help yourselves,’ he said indifferently.

Purkiss looked around the room. It was a single person’s abode, there was no question about it.

‘How long have you lived here?’ he said.

‘On and off, six years.’ Gideon eyed Purkiss’s foot. ‘You need a dressing?’

‘No. But a pair of shoes would be useful.’

Purkiss had meant it as an offhand remark, but Gideon made his way to a cupboard door built into the wall. He tossed out a pair of boots.

‘Those should fit.’

Kendrick twitched impatiently, shifting from foot to foot. He’d put the gun away, at least.

Gideon didn’t offer them a seat. He perched on the edge of the desk. For the first time he seemed to take the other three in.

‘So what’s the story?’ said Purkiss.

Gideon said: ‘Vale sent you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Before he died.’

‘He left me a posthumous message,’ Purkiss said. ‘He warned me that you might be dangerous. Though he said you were one of us.’

‘I recognised you when you got off the boat.’ Gideon tipped his head at the bank of monitors. ‘My first thought was that you were leading an assassination squad.’

‘Why?’

‘I assumed you’d turned against Vale. That you were working for them.’

‘Who’s
them
?’ Purkiss asked.

Gideon gazed off to one side, as if marshalling his thoughts. Then: ‘Cronos.’

He watched Purkiss closely, as if trying to read a lie in his eyes.

In a moment, he said, ‘I see. You don’t know.’

*

‘Y
ou’ve heard of the Greek myth. The Cronos myth.’

Purkiss and the others had pulled up what chairs they could find, Kendrick perching himself on the edge of the desk at the other end from Gideon.

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘The titan son of Gaia and Uranus. Father of the gods.’

‘It’s usually spelled Cronus, or nowadays Kronos,’ said Gideon. ‘But this version has a C and two Os. The father of Zeus, whom he tried to eat, as he’d done with all his other children. Zeus turned against him, defeated him. Castrated him, in fact, though modern tellings tend to expurgate that detail.’

Gideon paused; not, Purkiss thought, for dramatic effect, but rather because he was about to reveal something he’d never told anyone before.

‘You’re Vale’s man,’ said Gideon. ‘You neutralise renegade elements within the Service.’

It wasn’t posed as a question, so Purkiss didn’t answer.

‘You’ll have wondered where this all started,’ Gideon continued. ‘Where Vale comes from. Whether you follow a long line of people with similar remits to yours.’

‘Naturally,’ said Purkiss.

Gideon got up, took a few slow paces away, turned and came back.

‘In the late nineteen seventies – ’77, to be exact – a high-ranking officer in SIS decided, unilaterally and without official sanction, that the Service needed to be cleansed. We were losing the espionage war against the enemy. There’d been the Philby scandal the previous decade, and the rest of the Cambridge spies before that. Anthony Blunt was yet to be exposed publicly, but he was known about. The apple was rotten, and the worms needed cutting out. Our high-level asset decided that the best place to start was by targeting the criminals. Not necessarily the traitors or the moles, but the agents behaving in reprehensible ways, for personal gain. It was the concept of zero-tolerance policing, two decades before it became fashionable.’

Gideon drew off another cupful of water from the cooler and drained it.

‘And so Cronos was born. Nobody knows if he called himself that, or if it was a moniker bestowed on him as his legend grew. But he was the father of the gods. The gods being the people who sought out the wrongdoers within the Service, and punished them for their sins.

‘There were four of us. Quentin Vale. Oliver Clay. Helen Marchand. And myself. You’re known vulgarly, Purkiss, as the Ratcatcher. We had no such description. Because nobody knew about us. Our activities, our countermeasures against the rogue and criminal elements within the ranks of the Service, were truly clandestine. Our job wasn’t to deter. It was to eliminate.’

The older man’s eyes had changed, the black irises expanding so that they crowded out the whites. Purkiss could imagine that stare, thirty or forty years ago, provoking the same effect in a transgressor as any interrogator from the formal enemy, the KGB, could achieve.

‘We were in many ways like the gods of the ancient Greeks. And I say that without any hint of pretentiousness. Our characters, our personas, were contrasting and complimentary. There was Vale, the thoughtful, serious one. Clay the joker, the buffoon. Myself, Gideon, the irascible, restless man of action. And Helen Marchand, the mother figure, the peacemaker who held us all together, and sometimes kept us apart when it was necessary.’

He broke eye contact for a moment.

‘Each of us had his or her own motivation for doing what we did. In my case, it was loyalty. That most sneered-at of virtues, in today’s degenerate world. But I owed the Service, Purkiss. And not merely for giving me employment.

‘I was born in 1943, in Poland. As an infant I was spirited out along with my mother and a few members of my extended family. I grew up in England, and never knew the horrors of that era first hand. But my father was left behind, in Chelmno extermination camp. I spent the first twelve years of my adult life trying to find the people responsible for the administration of the particular section of the camp in which my father was held, and in which he was murdered. The Service – SIS – helped me to find them.

‘It became
my
Service. My family. I swore a blood oath to it. And I was proud to serve it as Cronos directed, by keeping it clean. Keeping it honourable.’

Gideon seemed to pull himself back to the present. His gaze snapped to Purkiss once more.

‘At some point, Cronos changed. We were in part to blame for that, the four of us. We were so successful, so effective at what we did, that Cronos became convinced we were being underused. He began to envisage us, under his leadership, as needing to broaden our scope. To start formulating and implementing policy within SIS. Even when such policy didn’t have official sanction.’

‘He wanted to create a fifth column,’ said Purkiss.

‘Yes.’ The anger was back in Gideon’s voice, but it had a different quality to that which he’d displayed when talking about his father. ‘A
black-ops cell
, in current parlance, although that doesn’t quite capture it. We weren’t simply to carry out unofficial operations. We were to become a guiding force within the Service, one which would steer it in the direction Cronos believed it should be heading. Freed from accountability to Parliament and the Prime Minister, invisible to scrutiny.’

Gideon sat down again on the edge of the desk. He glanced at the monitors for a few seconds.

More quietly, he said: ‘It was arrogance in the extreme. Hubris. And we couldn’t permit it. Couldn’t allow the Service we’d purified and nurtured with such passion to become corrupted in such a flagrant manner, turned into one man’s megalomaniacal tool. So we raised arms against Cronos, our creator. The gods turned upon their father. We castrated him.’

Kendrick let out a guffaw, the sound startling in the enclosed space.

Without looking at him, Gideon said, ‘Your friend takes me literally. Of course that’s not exactly what happened. But we curbed Cronos’s ambitions, and with them his power, so yes, castration is an apt metaphor.’

He exhaled deeply.

‘The programme, or whatever it was that the four of us constituted, fell apart. We went our separate ways. I left the Service, as did Helen. Vale and Clay remained. And Vale took up the mantle, in his dogged way. He became the new Cronos, if you like, though a gentler, more low-key version. He began to recruit his own agents.’

A frown creased Gideon’s forehead.

‘All of this, the great disruption, the neutralisation of Cronos, happened in 1999. More than two decades after it all began. You would have been a boy then, Purkiss. Twenty-three or twenty-four. Vale couldn’t have recruited you at that time.’

‘No,’ said Purkiss. ‘I first met him in 2008.’

Gideon nodded. ‘So he had others before you. Interesting.’

Purkiss let that pass. He said: ‘What happened to the rest of you? Clay, Helen Marchand? You?’

‘Helen died five or six years ago of cancer. I hadn’t kept in touch with her, but I made it my business to update myself about her situation.’ Gideon paused for a moment, before he clapped his hands together softly, as if closing a book. ‘I myself started a small business, providing security to the shipping lanes along the Mediterranean seaways. The business turned out more successful than I’d expected, and I was able to retire in 2006. I met Vale only once after the great schism, but I’ve monitored his whereabouts and his movements all the way through. Right up until a few months ago.’

‘And the other one?’ said Purkiss. ‘Clay?’

Gideon folded his hands beneath his chin and leaned on them. His dark predator’s eyes focused on a distant point, in time as well as in space.

He held the position for a long time.

‘Oliver Clay has disappeared,’ he said. ‘My reach is extensive. But Clay has evaded my grasp. I know he remained with SIS up until at least 2002. Since then, however, he’s vanished from my radar. And that has always perturbed me. Because in order to make yourself invisible to me, you have to take special, deliberate measures.’