Cronos Rising Read online

  CRONOS RISING

  Tim Stevens

  Copyright 2014, Tim Stevens

  ***~~~***

  Licence Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share it with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Cronos Rising (John Purkiss, #5)

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY TIM STEVENS | John Purkiss series

  Martin Calvary series

  Joe Venn series

  Shorter stories and novellas

  Cover by Jane Dixon-Smith at JD Smith Design

  One

  Half an hour before what would come to be referred to by the European and American intelligence services as the incident, the man known in certain quarters as the Ferryman sat in a glass-walled cafe overlooking Terminal 1 of Frankfurt Airport and thought about the afterlife.

  The Ferryman was an atheist, but if any of the various visions of the afterlife held the remotest appeal for him, it was the Muslim variety. The carnality of it all, with its harem of waiting virgins, grounded it in psychological realism, far more than the anodyne Christian nightmare of string-accompanied bliss, which suggested to the Ferryman, who was also a teetotaller, a state of Huxleyite druggedness.

  At least those who immolated themselves in anticipation of an eternity of sensual debauchery could be said to be normal, in a certain sense.

  Adnan Hanahneh and Umair Jat were two of the most devout Muslims the Ferryman had ever met. Hanahneh, the Jordanian, was demonstrative in his faith, speaking of his devotion with an excitability that bordered on the unstable. Jat, from Pakistan, was more of a closed book, a quiet man slow to anger, courteous and measured in his speech and his actions. But his commitment to his cause was beyond doubt. The Ferryman had been assured of this, and while he was loath to believe anybody else’s assessment of a man, his own impression of Jat, and of Hanahneh, was that they were as dependable as could be hoped for.

  Hanahneh had been selected for the Swissair flight. As such, he was the foil, the straight man, the stooge. The fall guy. And though he knew this, he didn’t know what his downfall was set up to achieve. He’d deliberately been kept ignorant, and he understood why. He and Umair Jat had never met.

  The Ferryman knew Hanahneh had played his part. Ten minutes ago, as the Ferryman sipped his espresso, he’d noticed the change in the flow of the crowds on the concourse below the glass-walled mezzanine on which he sat. The masses were shifting towards one end of the floorspace, as if being corralled. Quarantined. The subtle security presence hadn’t swelled noticeably, but the Ferryman had watched the behaviour of the infrequent uniformed men, and he hadn’t missed the tension in their postures, their increased tendency to raise their communications devices to their ears.

  Something was going on at the Swissair departure gate, far away down the corridors.

  The Ferryman signalled a passing waiter and requested another espresso. Unlike many other frequent travellers, the Ferryman didn’t despise air travel. In fact he positively enjoyed the experience. He supposed this stemmed from his childhood in the 1970s, when his parents had taken him on occasional holidays overseas, and he’d loved the thrill of an airport, with its bustle and its chiming announcements, and the hulking planes on the runways outside the windows, pregnant with the promise of escape and adventure. Nowadays, the Ferryman liked airports best in the quieter hours, late at night or, as now, shortly after daybreak. He always arrived early, to allow a smooth check-in and plenty of time to bask in the warmth and humming sounds of the departure area, to savour a coffee and a newspaper before boarding.

  Today, he had the coffee, and the pastry breakfast, and the newspaper - this morning’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - for show. But he wasn’t boarding any flight. In just under an hour’s time, he would make his exit towards the public car park outside the terminal building and locate his second car, not the BMW he had arrived in but the Audi which had been waiting for him since the day before yesterday. And he would disappear into the city of Frankfurt, before catching a high-speed train to Hamburg and a Lufthansa flight out of the country, in a south-easterly direction.

  The crowd on the concourse below was changing in its collective body language, and in its emotional tone. There was an unsettled aspect to it, bordering on suppressed panic. Still, the security presence hadn’t been stepped up. The Ferryman supposed they were being discreet, and were congregating around the Swissair gate via some other entry point.

  He finished his third espresso, took a bite of his croissant, and ran his eyes over the front page of his Allgemeine Zeitung. The headlines were similar to those of every other paper on the newsstands, preoccupied with the Ebola crisis. Tomorrow, they’d once again be in lockstep, but screaming a very different message.

  Although an enormous digital clock dominated the wall of the terminal directly across from the Ferryman, he checked his watch out of habit. Six forty-seven. If the Jordanian, Hanahneh, had played his role to the full, he would by now have been in custody for approximately twenty minutes.

  On the runway outside, far away from the departure gate serving the Swissair flight, Turkish Airlines Flight TA15 would have completed its turn and would be rolling into the beginning of its takeoff run.

  The Ferryman had learned, over many years, that fear was not something to be repressed, but rather to be channelled. He was now in a position of extreme danger. But he observed the quickening of his respiratory rate, the sudden flood of adrenaline into his circulatory system, and allowed the sensations to play themselves out, without feeling the urge to move his body in response to them. As a result, his senses were heightened: his vision more acute, his taste and his smell sharpened, his hearing amplifying every ting of a spoon against a cup, every murmured voice from the tables around him, until he basked in the simple wonder of the everyday perceptual flow most human beings learn unconsciously to tune out of awareness.

  He was in danger because it was possible, at this crucial stage, that Hanahneh would lose his nerve. That, faced with the sudden terror of interrogation, and threats, and the gibbering fantasies of rendition and torture with which his cornered mind would plague him, he’d scream a description of the Ferryman at his captors.

  But the Ferryman didn’t think the Jordanian would buckle just yet. Intoxicated by the thrill of the moment, he was more likely to be worn down gradually, over the coming days, when more subtle, psychological methods of coercion would begin to be deployed. Perhaps his captors would introduce a Muslim interrogator, a pious, sympathetic man, who’d persuade Hanahneh that he understood what he’d done, and that he was his sole confidante in the new nightmare world in which he found himself. By then, the Ferryman would be far away; but Hanahneh had a good memory, and he’d be able to supply a description which would give the authorities a close to perfect physical picture of the Ferryman.

  Which was why the Ferryman had built in a
n element of insurance.

  The poison was a colourless, tasteless one, designed in Morocco by a master. The Ferryman had slipped it into the Jordanian’s coffee with ease, at their final meeting the night before in the apartment in Frankfurt. The poison consisted of both a neurotoxin and an agent which neutralised the clotting factors in the blood. Both elements would manifest themselves after ten to twelve hours of ingestion, but the poison would be entirely asymptomatic prior to this narrow window.

  Hanahneh had drunk the coffee at a little after ten o’clock last night.

  He’d be in a police interrogation room, or shackled in the back of a speeding car, or perhaps even aboard a flight heading towards one of the US military bases in Germany, when the convulsions would start. His captors would hold him down and prise his jaws apart, dislocating the mandible if necessary, searching desperately for the cyanide capsule they’d missed. Hanahneh would go into cardiorespiratory arrest even as he turned into a sack of blood, the anticoagulant causing him to haemorrhage from every orifice, every pore.

  And perhaps, cavorting with his scores of virgins in paradise, he’d look down on the Ferryman and offer thanks for this opportunity to achieve martyrdom.

  The Ferryman took out his tablet computer and called up the Turkish Airlines site. Flight TA15 was confirmed as airborne.

  Six fifty-two.

  And the Ferryman had seen the man not only checking in at the desk, but boarding the plane out on the runway, a little over thirty minutes ago. Had watched him from the great glass windows of the concourse, a stooped figure, shuffling in the queue across the rain-streaked runway and up the steps leading into the cabin of the Boeing.

  The Ferryman mopped up the last flakes of his pastry, put away his newspaper and his tablet in his attaché case, and tossed a couple of ten-euro notes on the table.

  He headed for the escalators that would lead him towards the terminal’s exit, an unremarkable middle-aged man in a grey suit, with fair hair and a purposeful but not hasty walk. Just another cosmopolitan Northern European businessman going about his daily schedule.

  *

  Turkish Airlines Flight TA15 blew apart at one minute past seven on Tuesday the twenty-eighth of October, in the slate-coloured sky twenty thousand feet over the countryside of the German region of Hesse.

  The plane didn’t explode, in the strict sense. Rather, the blast caused by the detonation of the plastic explosive buried in the large intestine of the Pakistani national named Umair Jat, and triggered by the signal from his mobile phone which he activated while sitting on the toilet seat and muttering a heartfelt prayer, tore a hole in the fuselage of the port side of the aircraft which led to a chain reaction, the metal rending further and the sudden change in pressure sucking passengers and baggage and the general bric a brac in the cabin out into the freezing air, and causing the Boeing 737-800 to veer sideways before the pilot and co-pilot grasped what was happening.

  There were no clear witness accounts of what happened next, given that the incident occurred over an area of sparsely populated farmland. Aviation experts were later able to confirm that the structure of the plane had been relatively intact when it hit the ground, with the fuselage ripped to ribbons but neither wing having detached itself.

  The passenger manifest revealed that one hundred and eighty-four people had boarded. Though it was impossible to identify all the bodies, or even match all the various parts to each other, it was clear there were no survivors.

  Two

  According to the local police database, the typical mugger in the district of Borgo in Rome was locally born, and aged between seventeen and twenty-four.

  As an Englishman pushing forty, John Purkiss didn’t fit the demographic.

  He didn’t, therefore, pull a ski mask over his face, or otherwise disguise himself as he strode rapidly towards his victim. It was eight o’clock in the evening, and the streetlights were sparse along this stretch of the Tiber. The lights of central Rome across the river, and those of the Vatican behind, plunged the narrow street into contrasting shadow.

  The target leaned on the railing thirty yards ahead of Purkiss, in a pose of relaxation as he gazed over the river. He was a short man, compactly built, in a light woollen suit and no overcoat. The autumn was slow to come to southern Italy, even though October was two thirds gone.

  Purkiss himself wore a sweater and cargo pants and a duffel jacket, the last for its pockets rather than to provide warmth. His rubber-soled running shoes made the faintest whisper on the pavement as he closed in.

  In the pocket of his jacket, his hand gripped cold steel.

  The man at the railings ahead was called David Billson. Officially a mid-ranking Foreign Office liaison consultant at the British Embassy on the Via XX Settembre, he was in fact an employee of SIS, colloquially known as MI6, the British intelligence service. There was nothing surprising about that. Every embassy and consulate of every nationality harboured a quota of its parent country’s spies. The United States had CIA operatives in its Grosvenor Square embassy in London. Britain, in turn, planted its own secret agents in Washington and New York. Even notionally friendly countries conducted clandestine intelligence operations on each others’ soil.

  That was what embassies were for, to a large extent. They provided an inviolable base on foreign territories from which the Great Game could be played out.

  David Billson, though, was more than a British spy in Rome. He was a British spy in Rome who was providing intelligence to the Chinese government.

  Whether he was a true double agent, working for the Beijing regime, or whether he was a mercenary selling information to the highest bidder, wasn’t clear. Nor was it particularly relevant, as far as Purkiss was concerned. Purkiss’s remit was to obtain evidence that Billson was providing information to a man named Xing Ho Lee, a teacher at one of the local Chinese schools here in Rome. Lee was known to the British and US authorities to have an affiliation with the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence service of the People’s Republic of China.

  And, forty minutes earlier, Purkiss had witnessed Lee handing over a briefcase to David Billson, in the hushed confines of the Galleria Spada.

  The handover had been professionally done, neither man interacting with the other, but both ending up side by side and gazing at the gallery’s Brueghel collection. Lee was instantly recognisable to Purkiss, who’d studied pictures of his appearance just as he had those of Billson prior to arriving in Rome. Lee had lowered the briefcase to the floor neatly, bending his knees the way you were always taught to do rather than curving his back. After a couple of minutes studying the Brueghel pictures, he’d walked away. Billson himself had waited a similar time before picking up the briefcase without looking down at it. Purkiss watched him clip the chain attached to the handle of the briefcase smoothly around his wrist.

  Purkiss had followed Billson through the brightly lit streets and across the Tiber into Borgo, where Billson paused on the river bank. Purkiss wondered about this. Was the man meeting somebody else there? If so, snatching the briefcase might mean walking into a trap. So Purkiss had scouted around the point where Billson was standing and looking out over the river, and had carried out every counter-surveillance manoeuvre he knew. When he was as satisfied as he could be that Billson wasn’t being watched, Purkiss closed in.

  The bolt cutters in his pocket were a standard piece of kit he employed when following a target. You never knew when a mark might be observed to padlock something in a locker, or pass through a gate which he then secured behind him. In this case, the briefcase was chained to Billson’s wrist, and the bolt cutters would allow Purkiss to remove the case without having to go through the tedious process of finding out where the man kept the key to the lock.

  Purkiss lengthened his stride as he came into the final few yards of his run. Billson would hear him, or sense him, at the last minute, he knew, and so it was essential he built up enough momentum that he’d retain the advantage of surprise long enough to prevent
a defensive move by his target.

  And, sure enough, Purkiss saw Billson’s head start to turn when he was five paces away.

  Purkiss’s right fist connected with the back of Billson’s neck with perhaps seventy per cent of the maximum force it could deliver. At the same time, Purkiss gripped the man’s left arm, the one holding the briefcase, with his own left hand and jerked it upwards. Billson slammed forward against the stone wall overlooking the river as Purkiss dipped his right hand into his pocket and pulled out the bolt cutters and used their jaws to snap efficiently through the lightweight chain securing the briefcase to Billson’s left wrist. As he did so, he applied torque to the arm, twisting it ever upwards and anticlockwise until the fingers of Billson’s left hand opened involuntarily and he released the handle of the case.

  Purkiss released the arm and caught the briefcase deftly by the handle with his left hand. He dropped the bolt cutters back in his pocket to free up his right hand and raised it, prepared for a counterattack by Billson. But his blow to the man’s neck had been effective, not quite knocking the man unconscious but stunning him. Billson slumped against the stone wall, his hands gripping the top to keep himself from sliding down. He didn’t look round, but rather shook his head as if in dazed wonder.

  Purkiss ran.

  He headed back the way he’d come, in a straight line away from Billson and directly behind him, so that the man would have to turn round fully to see him. The side street from which Purkiss had emerged, and into which he now plunged once more, led to a short maze of unlit alleys. Purkiss dodged and weaved, taking a different route from the one he’d followed while checking for surveillance earlier, before he came out on a broader thoroughfare. There he slowed, controlling his breathing, dropping to a purposeful stride. An informally dressed man sprinting though the streets with a briefcase in his hand would arouse suspicion at the very least, and might even trigger pursuit.

  When once again Purkiss was confident he wasn’t being followed, he entered a small piazza, one he didn’t recognise but which probably, like most places in Rome, had some historical story attached to it. The square held a scattering of evening strollers, mainly tourists by the look of them. No police.