Cronos Rising Read online

  ‘Gone to find us transport to the island in the Cyclades.’

  ‘Am I still coming along?’

  Purkiss said, ‘If you want to.’ He steadied Delatour as the man rocked a little on his feet. ‘You want to lie down here for a bit?’

  ‘No.’ Delatour shrugged Purkiss hand off his arm. There was a trace of annoyance there, the resentment of a man bested in combat. ‘I assume I’m confined to the hotel? That you’ve posted your attack dog, that Kendrick, to make sure I don’t leave?’

  Delatour was smart; Purkiss had to give him that. He thought like Purkiss. ‘Let’s just say your trustworthiness would be enhanced in my eyes if you didn’t slip out for a rendezvous with anybody.’

  At the door, Delatour said: ‘I wonder what you think my motive would be in betraying you.’

  ‘You must have worked it out,’ Purkiss said. ‘You might be working with the group that killed Vale. You could be planning to tip off this Saul Gideon before our arrival. For all I know, you’ve already done so.’

  Delatour seemed to hesitate, the door ajar in his hand. He closed it again and faced Purkiss.

  ‘Shall I tell you why I really tracked you down?’ he said.

  Purkiss felt his interest stir.

  ‘It wasn’t just because I thought you would be the obvious person to help me find Vale’s killer,’ Delatour went on. ‘It’s because I thought you might have killed him.’

  *

  They sat, Delatour on the edge of the bed once again, Purkiss in the room’s single chair.

  ‘Vale contacted me by phone a week ago,’ said Delatour. His nose was swollen and already bruised, and his voice came out a little distorted. ‘I was still in New York at the time. He told me he thought he might be in danger. Serious danger, as in terminal. I asked if there was anything I could do to help. He told me that if anything happened to him, I was to try and find you. He warned me to take extreme care, because there was a possibility that you were the one who might harm him.’

  Purkiss watched Delatour’s face, processing the words. It made no sense.

  ‘He didn’t say why,’ Delatour went on. ‘I asked him, of course. But he was as cryptic as ever. He said simply that there were enemies showing their hand, and he couldn’t be sure that you weren’t one of them.’

  No sense at all.

  ‘And now?’ said Purkiss. ‘Do you believe I had anything to do with Vale’s death?’

  Delatour studied him for a moment before answering. ‘I think probably not,’ he murmured. ‘But I can’t be sure.’ He frowned, glancing down. ‘You told me earlier that Vale left a posthumous message for you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  Purkiss told him about the video clip Rebecca had shown him, giving Delatour the gist rather than the exact account. Delatour listened impassively.

  ‘So he tells me in confidence that you might be a threat to him,’ Delatour said, ‘yet sends you a message which suggests he regards you as an ally.’

  ‘It’s contradictory,’ Purkiss agreed.

  His phone hummed in his pocket. He looked at the screen.

  Kendrick.

  ‘Men coming into the hotel,’ Kendrick rasped, as if he was trying to keep his voice low. ‘Four of them. Look like hard buggers. Pros.’

  Sixteen

  Purkiss put the phone away. Stared unblinkingly at Delatour.

  ‘Hostiles are on their way up,’ he said.

  He’d told Kendrick to stay put near the entrance.

  Delatour looked alert. ‘How many?’

  ‘Four.’

  Delatour rose to his feet, steady by now. He caught Purkiss’s eye and said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake. No, I didn’t know they were coming.’

  Still uncertain, Purkiss said: ‘Get in the bathroom. They come in there, put them down. Use lethal force if you have to, but we need at least one of them alive.’

  Delatour moved quickly, disappearing into the bathroom, as Purkiss opened the French windows leading to the small ledge of a balcony. It overlooked the hotel’s tired garden, which consisted of concrete walkways interspersed with scraps of neglected lawn. There was nobody in the garden apart from a workman weeding a flower bed and dumping the takings into a wheelbarrow.

  Purkiss pulled the French windows closed behind him and pressed himself against the wall. Light drapes hung on either side of the windows inside the room, and he watched the one closest to him for any sign of movement.

  It came perhaps thirty seconds later: a soft rapping on the door to the room, followed by a voice, muffled through the door and the closed windows. Purkiss couldn’t make it out, but it was a man’s, and it had the sing-song quality of a domestic worker asking permission to enter.

  He’d left the do not disturb sign hanging on the handle. Hotels differed throughout the world, but if there was one thing that united them, it was that the cleaning staff respected a guest’s request for privacy. Especially this early in the morning.

  He strained his ears. The noise of the city, complete with the grinding of construction machinery, made it difficult to hear clearly any sounds coming from within the room. But Purkiss thought he heard the soft creak of the unoiled door handle being turned.

  He thumbed a text message to Kendrick: they’re here at my room.

  The next sounds were unmistakable: heavy footfalls as men entered the room, all pretence at stealth dropped. He listened to the crash of the chair being knocked aside, presumably as someone looked under the bed.

  A moment later, the French windows swung open.

  Purkiss kicked the window nearest him, pistoning his foot so that he drove his full force into the frame. The window smashed against the man coming through, a pane breaking as it connected with his head. Purkiss had delayed his kick until the man was far enough through that his arm extended beyond the edge of the frame. As Purkiss had been expecting, the hand held a gun.

  Purkiss grabbed the gun hand with both of his, the fist itself rather than the wrist, and pulled the man all the way through onto the balcony. He noted fleetingly that the man was bleeding from his head where the glass pane had shattered against it, red droplets spraying finely in the morning light. Purkiss twisted the gun hand up and outward, raised his foot again, and kicked the man hard in the abdomen, causing him to double over with a groan.

  A second man crouched inside the room just inside the doors, his gun extended in a two-handed grip. Purkiss swung the first man round so that his body was between Purkiss and the second man and aimed the gun arm as best as he could and drew back the man’s finger against the trigger.

  The unsuppressed blast echoed through the room and out across the garden, sending a yell up from the gardener like a startled bird. Inside the bedroom the second man took three or four stumbling steps backwards, his chest soaked in crimson, before he crashed against the dressing table and dropped to the carpet.

  The man Purkiss was using as a shield began to recover and struggled against Purkiss’s grasp. Purkiss held on, his arms reaching around the man from behind, his own hands clamped over the hands gripping the gun. The trouble with that was that Purkiss didn’t have much room for manoeuvre. As long as his hands were occupied controlling the gun, they couldn’t be used for anything else.

  He rammed his knee up between the man’s legs from behind. The blow would normally have been incapacitating, but the man squeezed his thighs together, mitigating the effect of the strike. With a grunt of fury the man brought the heel of his shoe down on Purkiss’s foot. The sharp pain caused Purkiss to relax his grip a fraction, and the man wrenched his hands free and twisted.

  Purkiss was dimly aware of movement within the room, shouting and struggle, but his attention was focused on the opponent out here on the balcony. The man tried to pivot so that he was facing Purkiss but Purkiss hung on, his arms now gripping the man in a bear hug. The man was barrel-chested, and Purkiss didn’t have the advantage of superior size to make the hug effective.

  Instead, he released his grip,
allowing the man to turn further, before jabbing a half-fist up into his opponent’s solar plexus. The man jolted back but continued to bring the gun round. Purkiss grabbed the gun arm by the wrist in both hands and ran the winded man to the waist-high balcony railing and flung his arms out and over, the momentum propelling the man over the rail with a yell.

  Purkiss took a second to peer down. The gardener had already sprinted for cover. The gunman lay sprawled on the concrete path, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle, a growing pool of blood spreading around his head.

  Through the French windows Purkiss saw a third man come charging headlong towards him. Before Purkiss had time to react, the man’s feet were kicked out from under him and hit the carpet just inside the windows. Kendrick was on him, kneeling on his back, wrenching his arms behind him, snarling like a wild beast.

  Beyond them, Delatour appeared. He was grimacing, clutching his upper arm.

  Purkiss said: ‘Tony. Don’t –’ but even as he spoke, Kendrick looped a crooked arm under the man’s neck and tightened it, at the same time twisting the man’s head sharply to one side. The crack was audible.

  Purkiss stepped through the windows. Delatour was dishevelled, his shirt bloodied and untucked, his face sheened with sweat. Through the open bathroom door behind him, Purkiss saw a body sprawled on the floor. There was blood, and a lot of it.

  He met Delatour’s eyes. Delatour shook his head.

  ‘He had a knife. I turned it on him.’

  Purkiss went over to the bathroom door and peered through, on the off-chance. But the handle of a sheath knife protruded from beneath the supine figure’s breastbone.

  Damn. All four, dead.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ Purkiss said.

  *

  They moved through the warren of streets near the wharf, losing themselves, intent more on throwing any possible pursuers off track than on reaching a particular destination.

  Delatour’s upper arm had been nicked by his attacker’s blade, not deeply enough to cause serious damage but enough to bloody his shirt. He’d slung Purkiss’s coat over himself to disguise the stains – there hadn’t been time to return to his own room. Kendrick loped on Purkiss’s other side, muttering to himself.

  Purkiss hadn’t said anything to him about killing the man in the hotel room. It didn’t seem apposite at the moment. But of all four men, Kendrick’s had been the one most obvious to keep for interrogation.

  The commotion had started elsewhere in the hotel, voices raised in alarm at the gunshot and the sounds of combat. Purkiss had gone back out onto the balcony and gauged the drop and swung himself over the railing and hung to his full length, before letting go.

  He’d angled himself outward so that he’d landed on the grass rather than the concrete pathway. Nonetheless, it was a fair drop, the three-floor distance offset somewhat by the fact that the lawn was raised halfway up the level of the ground floor. Purkiss rolled with the impact, ignoring the stab in his ankle, and rose upright.

  He looked up, where Kendrick was already hanging, ready to drop. Purkiss stood below him and caught him awkwardly as he fell, not breaking his fall but slowing it. Delatour looked less confident, and his injured arm slipped at the last moment so that he swung dangerously close to the concrete. But Kendrick got below him in time, and eased his landing.

  They ran across the lawn towards the wall of the garden, disregarding the shouts from the overlooking windows. They’d be seen, and by many people; Purkiss couldn’t help that. The important thing was to get away before the police arrived.

  The sirens were already flaring nearby as they made it on to the road running along the back wall of the hotel garden. Purkiss took a moment to orientate himself, then set off towards the wharf, in a zig-zag pattern through the narrow streets.

  When they’d put a few blocks between themselves and the hotel, Purkiss pulled out his phone and called Rebecca. She answered immediately.

  He told her what had happened.

  ‘Delatour?’

  ‘He took one of them down,’ said Purkiss. ‘He’s clean.’

  ‘I’ve organised a boat to take us to Iora at ten o’clock,’ she said. ‘Just under an hour from now.’

  ‘Good.’ Purkiss slowed to a fast walk, the other two doing the same on either side of him. ‘It’ll give us a chance to catch our breath.’

  ‘How did they know you were at the hotel?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘They must have followed us from the airport,’ Purkiss said. ‘Or someone tipped them off. I don’t know who.’

  But he was thinking again of what Delatour had said.

  Vale told me you might be a threat to him.

  Purkiss felt the chill on his skin, more than just cooling sweat.

  Was this Vale’s posthumous way of avenging himself on the man he thought might kill him? By luring him to Athens, on a pretext of sending him to a remote island, just so that he could be ambushed once here?

  It just didn’t fit. Vale hadn’t been afraid to take calculated risks, but he’d never go this far. Have Purkiss killed without absolute proof that they were enemies.

  On the other hand... Purkiss reminded himself that he had never really known Vale. Hadn’t known much about his background, apart from rumours, legends.

  Hadn’t known if perhaps Vale was accountable to some higher authority, one with goals quite different from the ones Purkiss had pursued in Vale’s service.

  Purkiss realised he was still on the phone when Rebecca said, ‘John? Anything else?’

  ‘No. Wait around the wharf. We’ll meet you there nearer the time.’

  He put the phone away and said to Delatour: ‘You need to get a change of clothes.’

  He’d already asked him if his arm needed medical attention. Delatour dismissed the injury with a wave.

  They reached a market street which, even at just after nine in the morning, was alive with bustle and clamour. While Delatour hung back, Purkiss went to one of the stalls and found a cheap shirt and jacket and trousers that looked the right size.

  He gave them to Delatour. While the man slipped the new clothes on behind the stalls, Purkiss and Kendrick shielding him, Purkiss said to Kendrick: ‘You cut up a little rough back there.’

  Kendrick looked please. ‘Dropped the bastard, didn’t I?’

  ‘Look, Tony,’ Purkiss murmured. ‘You did well. But you need to pull your punches unless it’s life or death. We could have interrogated that man.’

  Kendrick went very still, and stared at Purkiss. ‘You what?’

  ‘He could have provided us with intelligence.’ Purkiss kept a distance between them, but folded his arms. It conveyed authority without being threatening.

  The moment lingered for two seconds. Three.

  Then Kendrick broke eye contact and laughed. ‘Nah. We had to get out of there, remember? He would have slowed us down.’

  He was right. Purkiss had to acknowledge it, even though he didn’t say anything.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kendrick, reaching into the waistband of his chinos under his leather jacket. ‘And I got this.’

  Part of a gun emerged from Kendrick’s waistband. A Walther, by the look of it.

  ‘Took it off the bugger,’ he said cheerily.

  Purkiss considered. If they were stopped by the police for any reason, they’d be immediately arrested when a concealed weapon was found. On the other hand, a new attack could come out of nowhere, and they might not be so lucky this time.

  Purkiss nodded at the gun. ‘Put it inside your jacket,’ he said. ‘And keep it there until you have to use it. No admiring it in public.’

  They wandered further along the harbour, where the fishing boats were bringing in their latest catches. Beyond the bobbing masts, the Aegean glittered under the morning sunlight. An idyllic, bucolic scene, and one which felt to Purkiss laden with threat.

  Seventeen

  Kyrill Grabasov gazed through the plate-glass window that filled almost the entire east-facing wall of his office.
Beyond were the skyscrapers of the International Business Centre, symbols of the new, resurgent Motherland.

  Failure was a word that left a bitter taste in his mouth. His own failure, and that of those working for him. It could not be otherwise. If failure had been easy to accept, he wouldn’t have reached his current position as the Chief Executive Officer of Rosvolgabank, far less held it for the last four years.

  The bank was a hybrid, partly state-owned but mostly in the hands of private shareholders, many of whom themselves held high office in the Moscow bureaucracy. Some of them were in the Kremlin itself. The bank had helped fund one of the biggest weapons-development programmes of the Russian military, the Orkotsk Project, to the tune of seventy billion US dollars. In return, the Russian Duma, the parliament, had smoothed the way for the Rosvolgabank to corner the market in Russia’ newest territorial acquisition, the Crimea, since its annexation last spring.

  It was fair to say that the Rosvolgabank, and Kyrill Grabasov, had an amicable relationship with the political leadership in Moscow.

  Today’s failure – the one Grabasov had learned about just half an hour earlier – wouldn’t directly affect that relationship. But small failures tended to presage larger ones, much as to tolerate a small nick or dent on the bodywork of your new car often meant you became less concerned about the next one, and the next, until before you knew it you found yourself driving a battered old wreck.

  He’d taken the call on his cell phone, alone in his office. It was Artemis. The man didn’t sound afraid – his voice never betrayed any emotion – but Grabasov imagined his unease.

  ‘My men have been neutralised,’ he said without preamble.

  Grabasov took it in. ‘Their status?’

  ‘I’m awaiting confirmation, but I believe they’re all dead.’

  Artemis would have sent the men in with at least one of them wired and transmitting a live audio feed back to wherever he was.

  Four men, he’d said he was sending in. All of them dead.

  ‘It was Purkiss,’ said Artemis. ‘My link man confirmed it shortly before he was cut off by a gunshot. He said there were others, number and identities unknown.’