Ratcatcher (5 page)

The twelve-kilogram round from the rocket launcher slammed into the side of the front vehicle, rocking it on its wheels so that it tipped, though it stayed upright. The vehicle was customised with galvanised steel armour designed to withstand high-velocity rifle ammunition but stood no chance against a projectile that could penetrate almost forty inches of hardened metal. The vehicle rocked again as the round exploded, shuddering and lifting this time off its back wheels like a bucking horse. Venedikt and his men swarmed towards the ragged oval rip in the side of the vehicle. One of the fallen guards, legs mangled, performed a half situp and tried to level his shotgun, face contorted, but a burst from one of the Rk.62s threw his head back. At the second armoured van the guards were down, most dead but two kneeling with their hands behind their heads. Venedikt gave his order and two of his men put single shots in the backs of the kneeling guards’ heads. The man with the RPG-28 had moved across and reloaded. He yelled a warning and Venedikt’s men stood clear as the second round punched the side open.

The noise would have been muffled by the dense surrounding forest, and along the road on either side bogus
Road Closed
signs had been set up to deter the sporadic traffic; but the guards would have notified the police as soon as the attack began, and speed was of the essence. Venedikt paced and gave orders as his men unloaded the contents from the wrecked transporters and filled the two vans. Here and there came a moan followed by a shot as one of his people walked round administering
coups de grace
. Dobrynin, his second in command, raised a hand.

‘Yefimov.’

Venedikt walked across the wet tarmac to Dobrynin who stood and looked down at Yefimov: the driver of the first armoured van, Venedikt’s man on the inside, the one who had supplied the intelligence about quantities and timing and guard numbers and vehicle specifications which had enabled the robbery to be planned with such precision. Yefimov, who had deliberately stalled the van to allow the trap to be sprung rather than taking the evasive action expected of the driver of a cash transporter. He’d been hit by a blast from one of the guards’ shotguns, his lower abdomen a swamp beneath his clutching hands.

Venedikt squatted beside him, gripped his elbow.

‘Pyotr Mikhailovich, you have served your country with great honour.’

The man’s grimace widened. His eyes looked into Venedikt’s.

Venedikt stood, drew his pistol from his belt holster. He thumbed off the safety and shot Yesimov in the forehead.

The vans’ engines were running, exhaust fumes clouding the brittle September air, and the last of the steel boxes was loaded, like the others undamaged by the rounds from the rocket launcher. The front van swung so that its passenger door presented itself to Venedikt. He sprang in and they were away. There was no cheering in the van. Triumphalism might have made them careless, and there were still the police to be avoided, the money to be counted to confirm that they had not been duped. But although Venedikt sat in grim silence, exultation gripped his chest and throat so fiercely he felt faint.

For you
, dedushka, he thought.

FIVE

Purkiss was at the taxi rank in the back of a cab when he changed his mind, got out and walked on to the bus stop. The taxi would have been quicker but, glancing in the wing mirror as he settled himself in the seat, he’d seen the man striding past, rangy and crop-headed, his nonchalance too studied. The man had been part of the small crowd in the arrivals hall just after the final customs check. Although Purkiss had lost him for a few minutes, he’d spotted him again near the exit, peering into a shop window.

If he took a cab the man would lose him. Purkiss didn’t want that.

He approached a middle-aged couple in the queue at the bus stop and said, ‘Do you speak English?’

The man rocked a palm from side to side.

‘Do you know how much the shuttle costs? Into Tallinn?’

The man told him. Purkiss turned to raise eyebrows at the driver of the cab. He hoped his change of transport choice would appear to be about money. In any case the crop-headed man had walked on past the bus stop and turned on to a pedestrian crossing. Purkiss boarded the bus, watched the man disappear into a multi-storey car park, not looking behind him.

Purkiss held on to a support pole as the bus tried to sway him loose. He focused on the feeling that was tightening his chest, trying to give it a name and thereby reduce its grip. Apprehension? He’d failed to reach the contact, Seppo, even before entering the field of operations. From the moment he’d set foot in the field, he’d been identified. Somehow Fallon had been expecting him.

Not apprehension, no.
Fear
.

*

On the plane, with nothing to read or otherwise occupy his thoughts for three hours, Purkiss had given himself up to memory, promising himself it would be the last time for a while.

In his mind’s eye was Fallon as he’d been four years earlier. Forty years old, average height, slim build, shortish brown hair. Nothing conventionally distinguished about his looks, but he had a smile that could charm the paint off a wall. He was erudite without being affected, a supremely self-confident Harrow and Oxford boy without a trace of arrogance. To the amusement of those who worked with him he always carried round a particular book as a kind of totem, a paperback copy of Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
. Apparently he’d been reading it during the mission in which he’d most narrowly escaped death.

And, as it turned out, he was corrupt. Corrupt and corrupting, his taint seeping into the lives of other people, spoiling them irreversibly. Purkiss had left the Service after Claire’s murder, and while his colleagues accepted tacitly that he’d done so because to remain would have been to be reminded daily of what and whom he’d lost, in his more honest moments Purkiss admitted to himself that it was Fallon’s rottenness that had driven him out rather than the offer that Vale had subsequently made him. It was like refusing to live any longer in a house in which a body had been found walled up and decomposing into the stonework.

Vale had appeared out of nowhere during the trial, turning up every day and sitting in the same spot behind Purkiss. He was obviously Service or retired – the trial wasn’t being conducted in public and the spectators were being vetted carefully – but it wasn’t until Vale fell into step beside him after a long day in the courtroom and suggested they go for a bite to eat that Purkiss had any conversation with him. Purkiss’s instinct was to decline the offer. His social life had dwindled to a minimum since he’d lost Claire, and he wasn’t anxious to change that. But he was curious despite himself about this quiet, gloomy man, his Afro-Caribbean ethnicity unusual in a Service employee of his generation.

In the Italian restaurant, Vale told him he’d taken early retirement from the Service twelve years before, his story a familiar one of a former field agent unable to adjust to life in mothballs. In the seventies, he’d infiltrated Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow under the guise of a Tanzanian postgraduate exchange student, had his cover blown by a KGB
agent provocateur
and got out hidden in a freight train with a bullet in one lung. After that his deep-cover days were over. He spent the rest of the seventies and the eighties working the diplomatic circuit in southern Africa, in the thick of the proxy Cold War battles between the superpowers. The nineties brought him back to London and, essentially, desk work.

They traded war stories for a while, both aware that this was preamble. Over coffee Vale made his pitch.

‘One searches for a less hackneyed expression than
the tip of the iceberg
, but that, really, is what Fallon is.’ He shovelled sugar into his cup. Purkiss wondered how he stayed so gaunt, though he’d learn later about the sixty-a-day cigarette habit.

Purkiss stared down at his fists, flashing back to the man in the dock. ‘He hasn’t got a hope.’

‘Oh, they’ll convict him, all right. He’ll get life. But that’s because he got caught in the act. It was a stupid mistake he made, and his punishment isn’t going to deter anybody else, because all it will teach others is that they have to be more careful than he was.’ He steepled gnarled fingers. ‘When an agent goes rogue, the Service would prefer to dispose of the problem quietly. In a case like this, the murder of an agent by a fellow agent witnessed by yet another agent, there’s no question of any cover up. Justice has to be swift and merciless. But if Fallon had stopped short, been caught with nothing more than his fingers in the till… The top brass would have sacked him, yes, but might have bought his silence rather than prosecute him. The Service is still punch drunk after the Iraq inquiries and the catastrophic intelligence failures which were brought to light as a result. It can’t afford any more scandal, least of all the public outing of criminals in its midst. What I’m saying, John – may I? – John, yes, is that if you’re a member of the Service, whereas you might not quite be able to get away with murder, you can get away with pretty much anything short of that.’

‘And you have examples of this happening?’

‘Plenty. I’ve made it my business to seek them out. In effect, I’ve been doing what your fiancee was doing on a smaller scale in her investigation of one man.’

Purkiss studied Vale, trying to prise his way behind the gaze. ‘So why don’t you go public? Blow the lid off the whole thing? They’d threaten you with the Official Secrets Act, but you could find ways around it. Plant rumours, be ambiguous.’

Vale watched him in silence, his eyes and mouth serious. He reached across for the salt and pepper cellars and placed them a few inches apart.

‘You were what, fourteen years old when the Wall came down? Sixteen when the Soviet Union folded. Too young to have had any strong views one way or the other on the nuclear disarmament debate. I was against unilateral disarmament myself. Still am. I believed in like for like, matching the enemy’s destructive power with one’s own. But while many of us, most of us, perhaps, in the multilateralist camp were putting our trust fervently in the idea of deterrence, believing that if deterrence failed then it really didn’t matter who had more weapons, there were others who saw the annihilation of the human race in nuclear fire as not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the other side didn’t win.’ He tapped one of the cellars. ‘Better dead than Red, better rubble than roubles. I’ve no doubt such people existed on the Soviet side as well. Ideologues who believed ideas could exist without a population of actual people alive to hold these ideas in their heads.’

Some of the salt had spilled. Purkiss swept it into his hand and disposed of it on his empty plate. Vale said: ‘What I’m getting at, John, is that to
blow the lid off
, as you put it, corruption and crime within the Service is to take the fanatic’s approach. Let the whole structure burn as long as it keeps its purity. I don’t take this view. I believe in the Service. I want to save it from itself. But I don’t want to destroy it in the process.’

Purkiss learned a great deal that night, which stretched on into the early hours. Vale had had his eye on Purkiss, and Claire too, for many months before the murder. The man knew almost more about Purkiss than he remembered himself, not only details of his degree at Cambridge and his prior upbringing as the son of a Suffolk farmer and landowner, but names of people from Purkiss’s childhood whom he hadn’t thought of for decades.

Purkiss learned about drug rings, national and intercontinental, in which Service personnel were suspected of having a hand. He learned of deals between Western oligarchs and foetid tinpot dictatorships brokered by British agents. He heard about terrorist atrocities the commission of which had been assisted by undercover operatives, who had walked away scot free because the outrages had taken place in impoverished third world areas which lacked the blessing of a large population of lawyers.

What Vale was proposing was that Purkiss leave the Service and work for him instead. Purkiss’s role would be to track down and shut down the renegades, avoiding the ponderousness and potential for scandal which would attend the normal official investigative process.

‘You’ll be hated,’ Vale said. ‘Hated, and despised as a turncoat. But if we do this right, in time you’ll become a legend. And we know the power legends exert, the atavistic awe they inspire. Awe enough, perhaps, on occasion to deter.’

Purkiss asked Vale for a week to think about it.

Five days later Fallon was convicted of murder.  The next morning Purkiss resigned from the Service. By the river in sight of Legoland, the name by which insiders referred to the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, Purkiss shook Vale’s bony hand. It was all the contract they’d ever have.

*

The Jacobin watched the monitor as the zoom on the camera was adjusted and the image sharpened. Kuznetsov’s man had chosen well, a position in a coffee shop with a head-on unobstructed view of the arrivals corridor. The other two men were among the crowd lining the railing, one of them visible on the periphery of the camera’s field.

Six minutes earlier the man had relayed back that the baggage was now at the carousels according to the information board, and now the first of the passengers from Stansted began trickling down the passage, led by an exhausted young backpacker with a wan smile for her waiting parents. As the video streamed through, the Jacobin’s computer was recording it for playback later.