Cronos Rising (21 page)

He reached awkwardly with his left hand and found the handle of the briefcase and pulled it out from where it was wedged at his side and laid it across his lap. The weight wasn’t excessive.

Two hasps closed it. Purkiss tried sliding the release buttons with his thumb. The case was locked.

It was a cheap piece of luggage, and the hasps could be prised open with relative ease. But to do so might be to trigger whatever was inside.

With his left hand Purkiss reached inside a pocket of the jacket draped over the armrest and extracted his Swiss Army knife, just as he had done on the piazza in Rome with the earlier briefcase, the one he’d taken from Billson. It seemed an aeon ago.

Keeping the knife concealed between his body and the briefcase, Purkiss opened it and eased the blade behind one of the hasps.

He glanced at the side of Delatour’s face once more.

Still no gleam of perspiration at the temple.

The man was lying.

Purkiss slipped the knife under his right arm and touched the tip against the crook of Delatour’s elbow, pressing hard enough to make its pressure felt.

‘There’s no bomb in this case,’ Purkiss murmured. ‘Either you admit it, or I’ll open up your brachial artery. It won’t be a quick death, but you’ll bleed out before you can leave the train. It’ll be a mess, but I’ll get out of these cuffs and disappear before anyone can stop me.’

The man was lying, but he had some plan in motion. Purkiss was certain of it.

Delatour’s face remained impassive. There was no sweat, still, no tiny tic at the corner of the eye or the mouth.

Purkiss leaned forward, peering across Delatour, seeking out his right hand. It was hidden by his side.

With a sharp sideways snap of his neck, Purkiss rammed his head into Delatour’s face.

The man’s head rocked back, his nose giving way beneath the force of Purkiss’s skull. Across from them the woman gave a stunned gasp. Purkiss lunged across Delatour with his right hand, the one holding the knife, and jammed the blade into Delatour’s own right forearm.

He saw the fingers open involuntarily as the knife went in, saw the tiny round flat object in Delatour’s palm, with its central red button.

Purkiss gouged the blade into the arm, twisting and ripping, needing to hurt rather than to kill. The blade had been slowed by the sleeve overlying the arm but the material was reddening rapidly.

The woman across began to scream, and her husband let out a yell.

Purkiss jerked the knife upward and outward, dragging the arm with it, and saw the object drop from Delatour’s palm and skitter away down the aisle of the carriage.

Purkiss pulled the knife free from Delatour’s arm and jammed it into his throat, beside the windpipe where the carotid pulse was now a pounding, visible thing.

The screams from the passengers opposite drowned out the gurgling hiss from Delatour’s own throat. The blood, bright and fresh and arterial, spurted onto Purkiss, catching the side of the face before he could avert his head entirely.

He left the knife where it was, protruding from Delatour’s thrashing neck, and dropped his hand into his trouser pocket and found the tiny key and fitted it into the plastic cuff and freed himself.

Delatour’s flailing hands were at his throat, grabbing at the knife and jerking it out, but Purkiss didn’t wait to observe.

He shoved out into the aisle, taking the briefcase with him, his face and neck and chest daubed with blood. The screams reached a raging pitch, and someone pulled the emergency cord because the brakes set up their own screech.

Purkiss found the object Delatour had dropped halfway down the aisle beneath a seat. He slipped it in his pocket. The train had been pulling into a station and he saw passengers on the platform through the windows, oblivious to what was going on inside the carriage.

The doors hissed open and Purkiss stepped out and strode towards the exit, leaving a growing trail of stares and mutters in his wake.

The witnesses were many, and his fingerprints were on the knife, but none of that mattered for the moment.

He made it up the escalator and through into the afternoon air, brushing aside expressions of concern from people who assumed he was horribly injured. When he found an alleyway he pulled out his phone.

‘Quentin. Delatour’s down. He had what I think is a decoy bomb in a briefcase. I have it with me now. He was carrying a detonator. I suspect there’s an explosive somewhere on the Metro, either in a carriage or in the tunnels. You need to get the Metro evacuated and the police down there.’

Purkiss sagged against the wall, giving in to the shakes, and waited.

––––––––

T
hey collected him twenty minutes later, Rebecca driving, Vale beside her, and Kendrick in the back seat.

Kendrick stared at him. ‘Bloody hell.’ And he laughed.

Purkiss kept his head down as they moved through the streets. Vale briefed him: he’d made an anonymous call to the emergency services, informing them of the danger and providing the detail that there was a dead man on the carriage of the Green Line. That information would have already been communicated to the authorities, and it would add credibility to Vale’s warning.

Already, they heard sirens coalescing in the distance.

Rebecca had organised a safe house, a rented apartment, on the northern outskirts of Athens. They arrived there and deposited the car and hustled Purkiss inside, where he stripped off and showered and emerged after ten minutes.

When the others were out of earshot, Purkiss said to Vale: ‘I need to talk to you. Urgently, and alone.’

Vale watched him. In his eyes there was resignation, as if he’d been expecting this.

He said, ‘Very well.’

––––––––

G
rabasov sat alone in his office, high above the city.

This time he didn’t gaze out over the skyscrapers, but instead contemplated the framed photograph of a smiling Dominika on his desk.

Dominika, whom he hardly knew, and cared less about.

The news of the incident on the Athens Metro had reached him forty minutes earlier.

Ten minutes after that, he’d called the Ferryman’s number for the last time.

His phone lay on the desk. There’d been no return call.

So it was over. The gods had won, after all.

Grabasov had three courses of action open to him.

The first was to do nothing. To continue as before. He’d receive a message before long, he knew, from Vale or Purkiss or both. It wouldn’t be gloating, but it would remind him that he’d violated their stipulations once, and would not be given another chance if he transgressed. They wouldn’t blow his cover to Moscow, he was almost certain of it. But the threat would always be there.

Option two was for him to be proactive. To inform SIS of what he knew. Vale and Purkiss would be apprehended - there was no way they could evade the collective might and cunning of British Intelligence for ever - and Grabasov himself would be recalled, to face whatever fate was deemed necessary. Apart from petty revenge on Vale and Purkiss, this scenario would achieve nothing.

The third option was the most immediate.

Grabasov reached for the bottom drawer in his desk, the one he kept locked most of the time.

He drew out the pistol.

Standard practice was to drink oneself into a semi-stupor first, but Grabasov - Clay - regarded himself as a professional to the last. The irony of failing to carry out this final task would be supreme.

He rose and carried the gun to the window, where the city lay resplendent before him.

He had a preprepared suicide note on his computer, one he’d composed soon after taking up his position and which he’d regularly updated over the years. The current version cited pressures of work, and fears about the financial performance of the bank. It was standard operational procedure for an agent in his position. You always protected the Service, to the end.

In the end
, he thought,
I did some good. There’s no gainsaying that.

He raised the pistol, his reflection ghostlike in the glass.

––––––––

T
he old man licked away the last of the pureed food from the spoon. His eyes swam past Rebecca’s, half-recognising her, she thought.

She’d been away just over a week, but in his world it was a long time.

Her boss, Docherty, had welcomed her back with relief, after the customary questions about whether she felt ready to return to work yet. Her brother had regained consciousness after his head injury and was making good progress. So she’d resumed work at the nursing home this morning, and she was surprised how quickly she settled back into its quotidian rhythms, despite all that had happened in her life since she’d taken her emergency leave.

‘Ready for dessert?’

The old man’s gaze didn’t drift back to Rebecca. Instead, it stayed fixed on a point past her shoulder.

She turned, laying down the spoon.

Purkiss stood in the doorway.

The juxtaposition of his presence and the mundane setting of the nursing home jarred her so that she felt momentarily as if she was dreaming.

‘Rebecca,’ he said.

*

P
urkiss’ first question to Vale had been: ‘The fourth one of you. Helen Marchand. Was she ever stationed anywhere Kendrick might have encountered her?’

‘Quite possibly.’ Vale shrugged. ‘She trapped a number of Service personnel who were involved in military liaison. She was an attractive woman. Men would have remembered her, especially someone like Kendrick.’

It explained why Kendrick had been so sure he’d met Rebecca before.

‘She was Rebecca’s mother,’ Purkiss said.

‘Yes.’

The next question Purkiss decided to keep for later. He said instead, ‘What was your real reason for taking down Cronos fifteen years ago, or whenever it was?’

Vale nodded. ‘It wasn’t that he was trying to turn us into a fifth column, as Gideon told you. Cronos was Henry Ashington. That’s how he was known to the Service, anyway. His real name was  Viktor Fyodorov.’

Purkiss listened in absolute stillness.

‘We - the four of us, together: Gideon, Helen, Clay and I - discovered this about him in the mid-1990s. Fyodorov had been a KGB agent, a mole who’d penetrated SIS in the sixties and had been in place ever since. Cronos, the creator of the gods, was an enemy asset. Which meant that the four of us had been working for a member of the KGB for twenty years.’

‘Why?’ said Purkiss. ‘What was his intention, when he set up the project with the four of you?’

‘Deep cover, I believe,’ Vale said. ‘By setting up a group of agents within SIS, whose job it was to police the Service and cleanse it of rogue elements, he was cementing his position as a loyal British Intelligence officer. He was above suspicion. But we learned, piece by piece, of his connection with the KGB. And we couldn’t turn a blind eye, John. We had to stop him, even if it meant the end of the work we were doing with him. The noble, honourable work.’

Vale fell silent for a few moments, his eyes far away. Then he blinked and looked at Purkiss.

‘What made you suspect that Gideon and I weren’t telling you the truth?’

‘It just seemed implausible,’ said Purkiss. ‘A man in Clay’s position, deeply buried as a mole within the Moscow establishment... why would he risk it all with a project to take over SIS? But I think I understand, now, in the light of what you’ve just explained. Clay was trying to get rid of you, and Gideon, and me, because he needed to eradicate all trace of his past. If it ever emerged that he’d once worked for the KGB, however unwittingly, SIS would pull him from his post immediately and his reputation, and career, would be destroyed. He was acting out of self-preservation.’

Vale spread his hands. ‘And that’s the long and the short of it.’ He paused. ‘John, you have to understand that I couldn’t tell you any of this before. It might have affected your judgement. If you’d known that I, the man you’ve worked with for over five years, was a former KGB asset - again, I emphasise an unwitting one - you might have walked away. And Clay would have found me, and killed me, and eventually you as well.’

He lit a cigarette, his first since Purkiss had got him alone.

‘I don’t know what you intend now, John. I hope you’ll continue to work with me. But I’ll fully understand if you choose not to.’

Instead of responding directly, Purkiss said, ‘Another question.’

Vale waited.

‘What happened to Cronos?’

*

P
urkiss pulled the armchair to the side of the bed and sat down. He felt Rebecca’s presence at his side.

The old man’s rheumy eyes roamed over Purkiss’s. There was no human connection there. No comprehension.

‘Dementia?’ Purkiss murmured, without looking at Rebecca.

‘Yes. Alzheimer’s.’

This time Purkiss turned his head. Rebecca looked as Vale had: resigned, calm, as if this moment had been inevitable.

‘You grandfather?’ It was a guess on Purkiss’s part, but an educated one. There was a tenuous resemblance in the old man’s creased, slack features, a thread carried down the generations.

Rebecca said, ‘Yes.’

It explained her day job, Purkiss thought. A nursing home assistant was an odd cover for an SIS agent, even a sleeper. But he understood that part of her responsibility was as the old man’s guard.

Vale had told him, in answer to his last question back in the Athens hotel: ‘We kept Cronos under house arrest. Just the four of us, without involving any official SIS channels. Helen Marchand was his daughter. She organised most of it, ensuring that he was provided with all the comforts he required. He was an old man by then, pushing eighty, and his absent-mindedness progressed until the signs of something more serious became apparent. Eight years ago he was transferred to a nursing home.’

‘Where?’

Vale shook his head. ‘I’m not going to tell you that, John. I don’t need to.’

Vale’s last sentence had a double meaning, Purkiss reflected.

Purkiss said, ‘So you kept him alive out of compassion for Helen?’