Cronos Rising Read online

  Purkiss sat on a stone bench and examined the briefcase. It was a plain leather one, neither brand-new nor battered, with two combination locks. He took a Swiss Army knife from another of his pockets and jemmied the hasps open, ruining the locks in the process.

  Vale had instructed Purkiss to procure evidence that Billson was being paid for information by the Chinese. He hadn’t told him to examine that evidence himself, but Purkiss knew he was justified in opening the briefcase, and that Vale would see it the same way.

  The case was full of paper, but not in the form of banknotes.

  Instead, there were reams of A4 and A5. Some had Chinese characters printed on them, in the format of text or letterheads or sometimes both. Some of them were completely blank.

  Purkiss didn’t read or speak Mandarin, or Cantonese, or any other Chinese language. He’d therefore need to keep the paper for scrutiny by somebody able to interpret the writings.

  But he was fairly certain the writing was junk. That the paper in the briefcase was just that. Paper. Filler.

  Purkiss placed the contents carefully on the bench beside him. He set to work inspecting the briefcase itself. The inner lining, the leather exterior. The handle.

  There were no hidden compartments. No flash drives stitched into the seams. No microdots secreted behind the metal rivets.

  Purkiss replaced the stack of paper in the case, closed it, and, holding it shut beneath one arm, made his way out of the piazza.

  *

  He didn’t go back to his hotel room. He’d done a comprehensive sweep for bugs, which had come up clear, but this latest development changed everything.

  He had to assume his hotel was under surveillance.

  Instead, Purkiss took a metro train to the Trevi Rione. It was a quiet area, but not so desolate that anybody could make a move on him without being seen. He found a cafe and sat at a window table with a clear view of the street. The noise level in the place was just enough that it would interfere with any long-range audio device which might be used to try to eavesdrop on his conversation.

  Any known audio device. The Chinese regime might have, and probably did have, access to technology far in advance of anything the Western or even the Russian intelligence services were aware of.

  Purkiss called the only number on his phone. Vale’s number.

  During the silence that followed his thumbing of the key, Purkiss again ran through the scenario which had played out, and the possibilities it threw up.

  David Billson, the suspected MI6 traitor, had received a briefcase in a clandestine manner from a man known to have links with the Beijing government. That briefcase had turned out to be filled not with money but with decoy material.

  It meant either that Billson had been duped, or that the whole thing was a charade. One designed to trick an observer into believing that Billson was being paid by Chinese Intelligence.

  The first possibility was so unlikely as to be almost instantly dismissable. If the Chinese were offering to buy information from Billson but reneging on the deal, why go to the lengths of handing over a briefcase full of supposed cash? All Billson would do would be to open the briefcase hours, or minutes, or even seconds after the handover, and discover he’d been ripped off. It would be far less complicated for his Chinese contact simply not to turn up. Presumably, Billson would have no redress. He couldn’t exactly approach his own people, or walk into the Chinese embassy in the city, and complain that he’d been tricked.

  So Purkiss assumed the handover of the briefcase was for his, Purkiss’s, benefit. Which meant the Chinese, and very likely Billson himself, knew Purkiss was in Rome and had Billson under surveillance.

  That in turn meant one of two things. Either Purkiss had slipped up somewhere, and his surveillance of Billson over the last three days since he’d arrived in Rome had been noted. Or - and this was of greater concern - there had been a security breach at some other, higher, level.

  Purkiss had no idea what that “higher level” might mean. He was a freelancer, an independent operator who had once worked for MI6 but was now paid directly by Quentin Vale, a man who was himself once a British Intelligence agent. Vale’s current relationship with MI6 and the British government in general was unclear to Purkiss. Though Vale had access to funding and logistics which seemed impossible for a private citizen, he’d always given the impression to Purkiss that he was no longer in the employ of the official intelligence services. Purkiss believed Vale was answerable to some other governmental body, perhaps the Foreign Office or even the Cabinet Office itself.

  It wasn’t Purkiss’s concern. His job, for the last six years, had been to track down and neutralise the rogue elements within British Intelligence. The ideological turncoats, the mercenaries, the petty criminals.

  Purkiss listened through the silence, waiting for the ringing to start at the other end. Either Vale would pick up within a ring or two, or the call would go to voicemail. In which latter case, Purkiss would pause for two seconds before ending the call. He never left a message. Vale would call him back as soon as he got a chance.

  The rising three-note squeak jarred in Purkiss’s ear. A robotic woman’s voice, English-accented, said: ‘Sorry. This number is not available.’

  Purkiss listened to the sequence repeat itself.

  He thumbed the end call icon on the screen of his phone.

  For a moment he stared at the window of the cafe, at his face half reflected in the glass.

  He popped open the back of his phone and removed the battery and went to the toilet at the back of the cafe and dropped the battery into the bowl. Piling a wad of toilet paper on top of it, he flushed. Waited for the cistern to fill up. Flushed again.

  He strode out of the cafe, feeling the chill hit his exposed skin - it was as if the temperature had dropped from southern-European October balminess to something altogether colder - and broke the body of the phone apart between his fingers, scattering the pieces.

  Vale’s number wasn’t available.

  That had never happened before. Not in six years.

  Vale had been compromised.

  Which meant Purkiss himself was cut off.

  Exposed.

  A church loomed ahead of Purkiss. Tiny by Roman standards, it was nevertheless spectacularly striking, in that typical Italian way. In the north of the continent, where the iconography was darker, more primeval, such a church would have sported gargoyles leering from its walls.

  Above the doors, an ornate Christ in bas-relief grimaced, the terrible torment of its expression enhanced by the sculpted gore that leaked from its widespread, transfixed hands.

  Three

  Purkiss spent the next three hours crossing the city following the most chaotic of routes, chaotic in the sense of random, unpredictable. When he noticed he’d been following an approximate figure-of-eight path, he changed it drastically to a diagonal zig-zag. When he found himself once again at one or other bank of the Tiber, he headed for the outer suburbs.

  Absolute certainty was an impossibility in Purkiss’s line of work. But by eleven o’clock, with the crowds thinning on the piazzas and the residential streets darkening, he was as positive as he could be that he wasn’t under surveillance.

  He felt the urge to dispose of his clothes, to scrub himself in a shower somewhere, in case some kind of monitoring device had been secreted about his clothing or even implanted in his skin. He felt the urge, and he resisted it, because that was where normal healthy paranoia segued into madness. He’d known agents who had succumbed to that degree of fear, a corroding force which eventually became paralysing.

  In the last hour before midnight, Purkiss found a tiny hotel on an authentically cobbled street in the Ludovisi district. In the reception area, barely as big as a kitchenette in a studio flat, he asked the sleepy woman behind the desk for a room for the night.

  He ascended the vertiginous stairs and inserted the old-fashioned key into the lock, stepped inside, and braced himself for the brilliant flash of lig
ht and noise which never came.

  Get a grip, he told himself.

  The room held a single bed with a sagging, too-soft mattress, a single chair, and a dresser with a telephone and portable television set. Purkiss drew the thin curtains across the window, finding them inadequate to the task of blotting out the light from the street lamp directly outside. He sat on the edge of the bed and took stock.

  His single suitcase was back at his original hotel. All it held were a couple of changes of clothes and his toiletries. His passport, and his wallet, were in the pocket of the duffel jacket he was wearing. He had the briefcase with its prised-open locks and the most likely worthless scrap paper inside.

  He needed to get back to Britain, but he didn’t know how vulnerable he’d be at the airports. He could take a train out of Italy, but the stations might be under surveillance.

  His best bet was to hire a car.

  He’d make his way back to London, and then... what? He had no contact details for Vale, apart from the phone number which now appeared defunct. Vale didn’t use an office, at least not one Purkiss was aware of. All their meetings had taken place outdoors, or in other public places.

  He couldn’t very well walk into the MI6 building and ask after Vale, because Vale wasn’t officially Service any more.

  No. He’d have to wait to be contacted, either by Vale himself or by somebody who knew him. And that cast Purkiss in a passive role, which he didn’t like.

  Purkiss had spent the day tailing David Billson, and realised that as such he hadn’t kept up with the news. He looked for a remote control, couldn’t find one, and turned the small television set on manually, flicking through the channels until he found a 24-hour news channel in English.

  He watched the grainy footage. The black smoke billowing towards the slate sky, the frantic activity as people scurried about in bright neon outfits. The aerial shots, taken from helicopters, of the shattered plane, half-submerged in the field in a crater of its own making.

  Flight TA15. Turkish Airlines.

  Purkiss cast his mind back to his last conversation with Vale, four days earlier. They’d been walking through St James’s Park – London’s parks were a favoured choice of Vale’s for their rendezvoux – and Vale had said: I’ll be out of the country for the next few days, but I’ll be contactable by phone, so feel free.

  Purkiss watched the screen for a minute more. The German security service had received a telephone message six hours after flight TA15 had gone down, from a man identifying himself as a spokesman for the Islamic Caliphate in Asia. The ICA claimed responsibility for the destruction of the plane in the name of international jihad. More blows would be struck against the ICA’s enemies in the West. Et cetera.

  Purkiss turned off the television. He looked at the phone beside it on the dresser.

  Then he headed back downstairs, the damaged briefcase under his arm once more, and he asked the woman at the desk for change for a twenty-euro note.

  Three blocks from the hotel, Purkiss found a public phone booth. It was one of a dying breed that still took coins rather than merely credit cards.

  He punched in the international code for the United Kingdom, then the number he’d committed to memory.

  She answered on the fifth distant ring, just as Purkiss was about to hang up. ‘Holley.’

  ‘Hannah,’ he said. ‘It’s John.’

  There was only the briefest pause. ‘John? Hold on a moment.’ The faint noise he’d heard in the background faded, as she closed a door. ‘What’s up?’

  Hannah Holley was an operative with the British Security Service, MI5. She and Purkiss had met in the summer of the previous year, when he’d been hunting a gunman known as the Jokerman. Purkiss and Hannah had become close during the investigation, and had developed a relationship of sorts. But it hadn’t survived, any more than the Jokerman had, and four months ago they’d parted company.

  They’d done so by mutual assent. Hannah had, over a meal in a Soho restaurant, first proposed it, in the awkward way that even normally straightforward, confident people couldn’t avoid. Her career was vital to her, and she didn’t feel she had room for a man in her life at this stage in her progression.

  Purkiss had experienced a disquieting sense of relief. He agreed, saying he understood fully, and that his own job made it difficult for him to pay a relationship the attention that was required to sustain it.

  In reality, he didn’t understand why they were splitting up.

  Purkiss hadn’t spoken to Hannah since then, though their separation hadn’t been acrimonious. It had been tacitly understood that they’d probably remain in contact from time to time.

  ‘I need a favour,’ he said.

  *

  Hannah called him back half an hour later, as a thin drizzle was starting to soak the pavement around him. Several people had passed him by while he waited, though thankfully nobody had tried to use the public phone.

  ‘Got it,’ she said. ‘His name isn’t there.’

  Her tone sounded relieved, for Purkiss as well as for herself.

  ‘Read them out,’ Purkiss said.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  She’d obtained the passenger manifest for flight TA15. How, he didn’t know. But she was an up-and-coming MI5 asset, who’d earned a great deal of respect for the part she’d played in concluding the Jokerman operation, and she’d have plenty of favours to call in discreetly.

  Hannah began to recite the names quickly. There were one hundred and forty-eight of them, Purkiss knew from the news report.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Say that one again.’

  ‘Terence McCall?’

  ‘No. The one before.’

  ‘Robert Edgar.’

  ‘That’s him,’ said Purkiss.

  He felt a tightening in his face. In his gut.

  Hannah said: ‘What? John –’

  ‘He’s used it as an alias before,’ said Purkiss. ‘Usually when flying somewhere. He has a passport in that name.’

  Hannah was silent for a second. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ Purkiss took a deep breath of the cooling air, felt the taste of new rain at the back of his throat. ‘Hannah, thanks.’

  ‘John, what’s this about? Did he have something to do with this –’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Purkiss. ‘I need to think. You’ve been a great help.’

  ‘Where are you?’ she said.

  But she’d be able to work it out, from the number of the public phone he’d given her. It was obviously Rome.

  ‘John, are you all right?’

  ‘Physically, yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go, Hannah. I might call you again.’

  He hung up and began striding back towards the tiny hotel, ignoring the rain as it soaked his head and neck.

  Quentin Vale, AKA Robert Edgar, had been on board Turkish Airlines Flight TA15.

  And there were no survivors.

  Random scenes flashed through Purkiss’s mind. His first meeting with Vale, in the restaurant after the sentencing of Donal Fallon, the man who’d killed Purkiss’s fiancee, Claire. Vale’s jitteriness in the car, last year, as he’d dropped Purkiss off at Heathrow Airport knowing Purkiss was likely to be ambushed in Saudi Arabia where he was heading. Vale’s dark, furrowed face, etched with concern, as he’d met Purkiss at the airfield in Finland eight months ago, when Purkiss had been carried by stretcher off the chartered flight from Siberia, delirious and riven with frostbite from the terrible trek he’d endured across the tundra.

  And Purkiss thought of the briefcase under his arm, full of worthless paper, of garbage intelligence.

  An idea, fanciful but plausible, was gestating in his mind.

  He needed to find David Billson again. Find him, and ask what the hell was going on.

  Four

  ‘Excellent. You’ve done really well.’

  Rebecca winced at the words, even though she’d tried hard to keep any hint of a patronising tone
out of her voice. Sometimes the words themselves were at fault, however you delivered them.

  The old man blinked at her. The tip of his tongue snaked out to collect the last smear of pureed vegetables from his lips. Behind the watery film covering his eyes, she could read nothing. No recognition, no emotion.

  But she told herself he appreciated her praise. It was one of the ways she got through the working day.

  Rebecca collected up the dinner things - the half-empty plate, the plastic beaker of milk with its nipple-like spout - and put them on the tray. She wiped the old man’s mouth gently, again trying not to belittle him, not to give the impression that she was wiping a baby’s bottom. She removed the corner of the napkin from the collar of his cardigan where it was tucked, and deposited it too on the tray.

  ‘Be back in a moment with a cuppa. Okay?’

  Damn. The perky cheeriness was there in her voice, as if she was humouring him. A lot of the nurses and nursing assistants did it. Even the doctors who visited the home assumed the same light-hearted approach. They meant well, as Rebecca did. But, in truth, it was difficult to know how to talk to somebody with dementia. Somebody who might not understand a word you were saying to them. But who might, deep down, respond adversely to your carefree tone, and be unable to say so.

  She gave the old man’s hand a squeeze, maintaining eye contact, her expression friendly but genuine. And, for an instant, she felt a connection. Nothing tangible, nothing she could put into words. But there was a moment of contact there, between two human beings, rather than between a ninety-four-year-old man afflicted with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and his thirty-two-year-old carer.

  Rebecca straightened. Through the window, the afternoon sun bathed the South Downs in mellow light. The view was spectacular, and very English, the Sussex countryside rolling away towards the distant sea in a patchwork of fields dappled with sheep and clusters of burnt-orange oak leaves which still decked the trees.