Jokerman (18 page)

Thirty-nine

Purkiss had travelled through King Khalid International many times en route to Iraq during his time there, and then as now he never failed to be struck by the enormous, city-like sprawl of the airport in the desert below the plane, or by the colossal mosque which dominated the passenger terminal as he emerged from the arrivals area.

It was a little after midnight, local time. Still, the terminal bustled as if night hadn’t fallen outside. The building was efficiently airconditioned but Purkiss had received a dose of the night-time heat as he’d stepped off the plane. Riyadh in August: not the best time for a visitor from a temperate clime.

Purkiss switched on his phone, waited for the international roaming function to kick in. He had one text message waiting. It was from Hannah:
Call me
.

She answered immediately. ‘I have Scipio Rand’s address,’ she said. ‘I managed to stay out of the Service databases, but I had to call in a couple of favours with contacts in the Foreign Office.’ She gave a street address in the Diplomatic Quarter.

‘Good work,’ said Purkiss.

‘Also, I’ve booked a Saudia flight for ten-oh-five – that’s half an hour from now. I’m at Heathrow. Landing time’s seven twenty in the morning at your end.’ She told him the flight details.

Seven hours to go. Purkiss had managed to catch a couple of hours’ sleep on the flight, and didn’t feel tired now. He wandered the length and breadth of the terminal, trying to look purposeful so as not to attract attention as a loiterer. When the shop windows had exhausted his meagre interest, he found an all-night coffee shop that served meals, and fuelled up with caffeine, carbohydrate and protein.

He thought about Hannah as he ate, and the night before. Had it been an outlet for the tension they’d both built up after such a chaotic, threatening day? Probably. But Purkiss found himself genuinely looking forward to seeing her again. He checked his phone for messages, but there were none. Why there would be any, he didn’t quite know. He supposed part of him was anticipating news from the hospital, news about Kendrick. And it wouldn’t be good.

Purkiss’s thoughts tacked back to Vale, no matter how he tried to rein them away. He’d thought it through, and there was no more thinking to be done on the matter. Not now, not until he got back.

Vale had deceived him once, over a complicated matter. He’d led Purkiss to believe that Claire, Purkiss’s fiancée, was the innocent victim of a murder by another agent. That agent had turned out to be one of Vale’s men, and on the side of good, whatever good was in this particular world; whereas Claire was corrupt. Purkiss thought he had forgiven Vale for his deception because Vale had had Purkiss’s best interests in mind, even if Purkiss didn’t agree with his approach.

But this… this was different. If Vale was mixed up in all this, working for Strang, then he was putting himself on the other side of an unbridgeable divide from Purkiss. Had Vale’s shakiness, his nerves, been the outward manifestations of a guilty conscience as he sent Purkiss, a man he’d worked with closely for half a decade, into a trap and to his death? Or was the older man simply human, prone to the drawbacks of ageing – tremulousness, faltering courage – like anybody else? Was Purkiss reading too much into it all?

There were the niggling details, though. The coincidences, the leaks. And treachery on Vale’s part could explain most, perhaps all of them.

A group of women walked past the shop, dressed in full-length
abayat
. Purkiss wondered whether Hannah would remember she was obliged to cover up or risk falling foul of the
mutaween
, the religious police. He also wondered how she’d react to being forbidden to drive.

Then he realised how different his attitude was towards her compared with other agents he’d worked with. Normally he took it for granted that colleagues had done their homework. Now, he was fussing over Hannah Holley as if she were a neophyte.

Purkiss shook his head.
She’s really got to you.

The buzzing of his phone shook him out of his thoughts. He picked it up.

It was Hannah.

‘John, I’m sorry about this. I missed the flight. Delays at check in, and at the scanner.’

‘Do you think you’ve been compromised?’

‘No, it’s unlikely. Nobody took much time over me. Just large numbers of passengers to process, and too few desks to cope.’

Purkiss looked at his watch. One o’clock.

‘There’s another flight at six in the morning,’ Hannah said. ‘Seven hours from now. I’ve booked a seat on that. But it means I’ll be there with you only around two in the afternoon.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Can’t be helped.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘No point just sitting here at the airport,’ he said. ‘I’ll head into the city. Scout around.’

‘Don’t approach the Scipio Rand offices, will you? Not without me.’

‘I won’t,’ he said.

They rang off.

Purkiss sat sipping his coffee, thinking.

Don’t approach Scipio Rand
, she’d said, and he’d agreed. But they both knew the temptation would be too great for him to resist. He wasn’t given to loitering about for any length of time, not when there was a target to be investigated.

It was of course entirely possible that Hannah had missed the flight. Heathrow was a notoriously busy airport, and it wasn’t as if Hannah could use her Security Service credentials to buy herself special treatment, working off the books as she was.

But it was also possible she’d deliberately not taken the flight.

The vast, echoing terminal around Purkiss seemed suddenly frighteningly smaller, as though the walls and ceiling were closing in, squeezed by the crushing emptiness of the surrounding desert outside.

If Hannah had missed the flight on purpose, it suggested that she knew Purkiss was going to investigate Scipio Rand on his own, regardless of what he told her. And that meant she knew he’d be walking into a set up. A trap.

His mind rewound and replayed the events in order.

Hannah, appearing out of nowhere just before the bomb in Mohammed Al-Bayati’s Range Rover had gone off.

Hannah, just happening to have found a notebook of Morrow’s with leads pointing to Dennis Arkwright.

Hannah, present at the interview with Arkwright at the very moment he had come under attack.

It didn’t make sense. It didn’t tie together neatly, or even at all. But, as with Vale, it was a series of seemingly unconnected little coincidences and oddities which, in the light of Hannah’s failure to board the plane, unsettled Purkiss.

Without turning his head too obviously he scanned the terminal, or at least as much of it as he could see from where he was sitting. People stood around or ambled or hurried, singly and in pairs and small groups. There was no evident surveillance in place. But then, if it had been obtrusive, it wouldn’t have been surveillance at all.

Purkiss felt the gnawings of unease which would, if indulged, progress to panicky helplessness. A rat in a corner, with no apparent means of escape, will lapse into acceptance of its situation. Purkiss was in a different position, because he didn’t know where the danger was, or which direction it would come from.

Except he did, in a sense. Part of the danger was internal. The corrosive effects of mistrust, of suspicion of those once thought loyal, could be every bit as hazardous as an external threat.

Purkiss closed his eyes to slits, just enough not to exclude all visual data. He drew a deep breath through his nose, centring himself.

Into an impossible cube-shaped container, with no visible seams, he placed mental images of Vale and Hannah. He could still see them hazily through the opaque walls of the box, so he thickened the sides like the cataracts in an elderly eye, until the faces within had disappeared.

Then he allowed the box to plunge, impossibly deeply, into the most inaccessible reaches of his being.

He released the breath. Opened his eyes fully. Found himself not in the tortured past, or the speculation-riddled future, but in the
now
.

Purkiss left the coffee shop, strode the length of the terminal towards an all-night car rental kiosk he’d seen earlier. He was aware of the soft peeling noise of his soles on the polished floor with every step he took, of the coffee-and-spices aromas breezing around him, of the murmur and susurration of a cleaning machine that hummed robotically past, its driver seemingly less alive than it was.

At the kiosk he considered the options offered to him. Technical requirements – speed, reliability, protection in the event of a collision – always had to be weighed up against the need for discretion and lack of obtrusiveness when choosing a vehicle in a hostile field. After a few minutes’ thought, Purkiss selected a two-year-old silver Audi saloon.

Even in the two hours since he’d stepped off the plane, the heat had built up outside. Purkiss glanced at a digital display on the terminal wall as he walked to collect his car. Twenty-eight degrees Celsius already, at half-past one in the morning. By dawn it would have reached thirty, at least. By noon, forty or more.

He hadn’t been in the Middle East for six years, and was therefore not acclimatised. It meant that any confrontation with the enemy would best take place in the next few hours, before Purkiss was at a distinct disadvantage.

The Audi’s engine felt smooth and beautifully tuned, the air conditioning kicking in immediately. Purkiss took it for a few turns around the car park, getting a feel for the way it handled. Then he headed for the petrol station near the exit. He filled up the tank, marvelling as he had done when he’d first visited the Gulf at the astonishingly cheap price of fuel, before taking the sign for King Fahd Road towards Riyadh, a little over twenty miles to the south.

Despite the bright lights of the highway, the surprisingly active traffic, the sky overhead was clear and luminous with stars, light pollution from the distant city having little effect here. Clear skies were dangerous, in Purkiss’s experience. They reminded him of happier times – Marseille, chiefly – and tended to have a mesmerising, lulling effect. He forced himself to focus on the immediate environment.

Night-time countersurveillance was tricky, because you could never be as certain as you could in daylight that the set of headlights behind you were the ones that had been tailing you since the start of your journey. But the highway was vividly lit in sodium, and by the time the traffic began to build up and slow on the outskirts of the city, Purkiss had identified the tag.

Forty

Riyadh’s broad highways and boulevards, elaborate mosques and palm trees all gave Purkiss the impression of a showcase city, a little tatty around the edges and without quite matching the garish kitsch of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

He used the Audi’s satellite navigation system to identify the Diplomatic Quarter, then took a deliberate wrong turn, braking late as though in frustration at having missed the road he wanted. As planned, he found himself in a one-way system and therefore couldn’t double back.

In his rearview mirror, the black Lexus hung back, keeping pace with him.

Purkiss had identified it through a simple manoeuvre back on the highway leading from the airport. He’d accelerated to overtake two marginally slower cars in front of him and had dropped in ahead of the first one. The Lexus, not wanting to lose him, had muscled in one car behind. His move had been unremarkable, unlikely to attract suspicion. That of the Lexus confirmed what he’d thought: it had been tagging him since he’d left the airport.

One car, then. Not so much a welcoming committee as a scout party, there to make sure he did indeed head to the Scipio Rand headquarters rather than going off and doing his own thing.

It left Purkiss with a dilemma. He was now in no doubt that if he ventured near the Scipio Rand building he’d be walking into a trap, one from which he was unlikely to escape given all the advantages the enemy had, knowledge of the terrain being one of them. On the other hand, if he very obviously avoided heading there, the person or people in the Lexus would become suspicious, and might surmise that he was on to them. They might call for backup, which would further tip the odds against Purkiss.

He needed to isolate the Lexus, somehow. Draw it away and create a scenario in which he could interrogate its occupants.

The commercial centre of the city was beckoning brightly ahead, most of the lighting from the windows and awnings of shops that wouldn’t open for many hours yet. Light traffic continued to pass Purkiss, a scattering of pedestrians, exclusively male, here and there on the pavements: workmen, mostly, maintaining the city’s infrastructure. Once, a police patrol car eased past him in the opposite direction, two faces turning to watch him as they passed.

On the corner of a quiet-looking junction, beside some kind of walled park, Purkiss indicated and pulled on to the kerb.

He climbed out of the Audi, not looking directly back but noticing the Lexus draw to a halt fifty yards down the street. Purkiss popped the bonnet, propped it open using the thin stick hinged to the body, and peered underneath.

Beyond the bonnet, he saw a man approaching. He shifted position and noted a second man advancing from the other side.

Purkiss drew out the dipstick, examined the end. He touched the radiator cap, winced.

‘Got a problem?’ said a man’s voice, in English.

Purkiss glanced up. The man who’d approached from the left side of the car was Arabic, in his late twenties, sleekly dressed in a business suit. He was the one who’d spoken, in slightly accented American English. On the other side, the second man was similarly attired. He was European, British-looking. Older, in his late thirties, maybe, shaven-headed and brutal featured.

‘Something’s not right here,’ Purkiss muttered, as though exasperated.

As he spoke, he saw the Arabic man’s hand move inside his jacket.

Purkiss grabbed the bar that was propping the bonnet up and twisted it upwards and sideways, yanking it free from the notch in which it was resting and at the same time wrenching it off the hinge at the other end. It was no thicker than his thumb, but rigid. As he swung it lefthanded in a backhand slash the bonnet crashed shut, the sudden noise disorientating.

The steel bar whipped across the Arabic man’s face and he yelled, spinning away and backwards, his hand emerging from his jacket, a handgun dropping onto the pavement. Purkiss swivelled and brought the bar whipping in a forehand motion across his body. The second man, whose gun was already in his hand, caught the blow across his wrist but managed to hold on to his gun. Purkiss moved in with an elbow strike at the man’s neck, connecting before he could step aside, the tip of his elbow driving into the mastoid process below the man’s ear. He wheezed and sagged, bouncing off the front bumper.

The first man was already up again and coming back at Purkiss, palms open before him in a fighter’s pose. Purkiss aimed a kick at the man’s torso, which he sidestepped in the direction Purkiss had been expecting. Purkiss smashed a hammer fist down onto the back of the man’s neck and he crashed against the bonnet, managing somehow to keep his feet. Purkiss drove a foot into the backs of the man’s knees. This time he went down, banging his head again against the metalwork at the front of the Audi.

Purkiss stooped and grabbed the older man, the European-looking one, under the arms, and hauled him to the side of the car. He opened the rear door and dumped the man’s dead weight onto the back seat.

On the pavement behind the Audi, the Lexus’s tyres squealed, its lights leaping forwards.

Purkiss thought:
Damn. They left the driver in the car.

He dived into the back seat on top of the man he’d slung there, in case the driver of the Lexus opened fire, and slammed the door shut behind him. Kneeling and crawling across the unconscious body, he clambered through the divide into the driver’s seat. Keeping his head low, he hit the ignition switch.

In the wing mirror the headlights flamed like twin owl eyes, bearing down.

Purkiss rammed the gear shift into reverse and trod down hard on the accelerator. Reversing was a counter-intuitive move by which Purkiss intended to wrong-foot the Lexus driver, and it seemed to work. The Audi rocketed backwards along the pavement just as the Lexus drew level. Purkiss saw the pale oval of the driver’s face turned towards him through the window an instant before it disappeared behind a curtain of shattering glass and plastic as the wing mirrors of the two cars collided and exploded. A screech of grinding metal accompanied the scraping of the Lexus’s bumper against the side panel of the Audi before Purkiss was clear and angling the Audi out onto the road, the Lexus’s brake lights flaring redly through his windscreen.

On the back seat, the man moaned quietly.

Purkiss jolted the wheel sideways and spun out into the middle lane, a limousine blaring furiously past him. He passed the Lexus even as he saw it vault off the pavement where it had partly mounted. Its lights dropped in behind him, alarmingly close, as it gave chase.

On the dashboard, the satnav peeped and bleated, confused by the erratic moves he was making. He ignored it; it was no use to him now. He was aware he was driving blind, in an utterly unfamiliar city enclosed by desert. And he was aware that any moves in the direction of the Scipio Rand headquarters would draw him closer to the centre of the spider’s web, something he needed to avoid.

The boulevard ahead furrowed into two parallel prongs with a tree-lined barrier between them. Purkiss chose the left-hand one, for no especial reason. The Lexus hung close behind, cutting across a mini-convoy of sports cars, and as if spurred on by the cavalcade of angry horns closed in on Purkiss.

He needed to get away. There was no longer any need for deception, for maintaining the fiction that he hadn’t noticed the tag on his tail. Purkiss had one of their men captive - he’d chosen the European because he was older, and therefore more likely to be senior, and in a position to divulge more information - so his goal was to lose the Lexus, avoid whatever reinforcements might be on their way, and escape the bounds of the city.

But the driver of the Lexus was tenacious.

Purkiss considered a sudden braking manoeuvre, to force the Lexus to stop and thereby stall its engine, or even to ram into the rear of the Audi; but his instinct told him the driver was a seasoned professional and would be expecting that, and would simply slow down, thereby gaining precious distance. Instead, Purkiss glanced to his right, at the divide between the two sides of the road, lined as it was by manicured palm trees.

He chose a gap between the trees that looked wider than most, and with a spin of the wheel rammed the Audi through it.

The car howled up the kerb and across the grassy divide, its sides striking the trunks of adjacent trees with a twin
thock
sound and a crump of bending metal. But it made it through, and crashed across onto the road on the opposite side, traffic there screaming sideways to avoid collision. Momentarily disorientated, Purkiss looked around, and spotted the Lexus running parallel on the other side of the divide. The trees appeared closer together here, and Purkiss didn’t think the driver would have a chance to aim between them.

Ahead, a set of traffic lights turned amber, then red. A heavy stream of vehicles began to cross perpendicularly.

Purkiss weighed the odds. If he continued as he was, straight through the lights, and at his current speed - ninety-five kilometres per hour - he’d almost certainly hit at least one of the cars in the cross-traffic. On the other hand, if he stopped for the lights, the Lexus would in all likelihood reach the lights on its side of the road, which were currently green, hook round, and end up facing Purkiss, ready to ram him where he sat.

He could have snatched up one of the dropped guns back there where he’d taken down the two men, he reflected. But a running gun battle through the night streets of Riyadh wasn’t his idea of a clean solution to the problem at hand.

Somewhere, from off to the right and behind, Purkiss heard a police car’s call. The European-style twin note, not the rise and fall of the British or American siren.

Purkiss hit the accelerator hard, grinding it so that his heel was pressing it down. The speedometer jerked upwards as the Audi gathered momentum, the red-lit junction ahead looming large. Over to the left, the Lexus was temporarily left behind.

At the last moment before he reached the junction, Purkiss spun the wheel, executing a lurching J-turn that took the Audi in a finely judged arc past the impossibly large and gaping Os of a couple’s mouths through the windscreen of a four-wheel drive in the next lane and right across to the side of the road bound in the opposite direction. Once facing away from the junction, Purkiss rode the accelerator and clutch carefully, holding back from stalling the car, and once he was sure it was steady, headed back the way he’d come, at a measured pace, neither fast nor suspiciously slow.

The police cars, two of them, squealed past him towards the junction.

Through the trees lining the central barrier on Purkiss’s right, he could see lights swaying chaotically, and he understood that the driver of the Lexus was making a U-turn himself. As the road was one-way only on that side of the barrier, it meant the driver was intending to head back the wrong way, in the face of oncoming traffic.

Purkiss picked up speed. In his mirror, behind and to his right, he watched the Lexus veer crazily between panic-stricken cars as it wove back down the road. Directly behind Purkiss the police cars had screeched round the junction and were beginning to turn down the road on the other side of the barrier, in pursuit of the Lexus.

The Lexus leaped the barrier, just as Purkiss had done with the Audi and at the same spot, its bumper gouging out a chunk of one of the palm trees’ boles. With a scrape of loosened metal the Lexus made it on to the road and straightened out so that it was behind Purkiss once more.

On the other side of the barrier the police cars slowed, thrown by this sudden manoeuvre.

The first gunshot erupted, the rear window of the Audi bursting inwards in a glittering cascade.

Purkiss floored the accelerator, crouching low over the steering wheel, swinging it fractionally to present an unsteady target. He was fairly sure he’d seen just one man in the Lexus, which meant the driver himself was doing the shooting and was therefore hampered by his need to control the car. But the second shot came then, the blast alarmingly close behind, and this time the bullet struck the upholstery just above Purkiss’s head.

Another junction was coming up rapidly, the lights turning amber. Purkiss saw a large refuse truck beginning to ease over the line to the left, in preparation for the green signal.

He touched the brake to slow himself just enough to get the timing right, gritted his teeth as the Lexus kept on coming behind him, its headlights growing enormous and on full beam. Ahead of him the light was red, and he saw the truck lumber forwards.

Purkiss ground the accelerator down, surging forward into the path of the truck, its bulk towering down in a blare of horn that sounded like a train’s warning. The Audi cleared the front of the truck by such a narrow margin Purkiss thought he could feel the car’s rear rocked by the slipstream. Then he was through and across on the other side.