Cronos Rising (6 page)

The young man behind the desk considered for a moment, then glanced at his colleague. She seemed to be his senior, in experience if not otherwise, and nodded.

He picked up the phone and dialled.

After thirty seconds, and a second attempt, the man replaced the receiver.

Mr Purkiss was not answering. He might not be in.

Rebecca didn’t ask if she might be allowed to go up and knock on his door. It would have aroused immediate suspicion. Instead, she thanked the two concierges for their help, and gave them a cell phone number she made up on the spot, as well as an invented name, asking them to call her as soon as John Purkiss appeared. She also asked for a piece of hotel paper and an envelope, and scribbled a nonsensical message which she sealed and handed to the woman, who placed it in a rack of trays on the wall.

The number below the particular tray was 331.

Rebecca exited the hotel through the front doors, and lingered across the street under an awning, aware that she was obtrusive, a single young woman out in the rain on an October night. But nobody accosted her. She watched the hotel entrance until, half an hour later, a pair of taxis pulled up in front and a group of five or six revellers spilled out, laughing raucously.

Quickly, she made her way back across the road and joined the partygoers as they stumbled up the steps to the doors. There were three men and three women, all in their thirties or early forties, all inebriated. One of the men grinned at her, his gaze unfocused, and said something in Italian. She smiled and shook her head.

She timed it right, holding back until the first of the group made it though the doors and lurched over to the reception desk to engage the staff there in cheery conversation. With the two concierges’ attention focused politely on him, Rebecca detached herself from the group and strode across the lobby and round the corner into a corridor, where she saw a bank of lifts.

She took the fire stairs to the third floor, found a silent corridor beyond. Cautiously she crept along it until she reached room 331. Unlike most of the doors, it had no
do not disturb
sign hanging on the handle.

She placed her ear to the door and listened.

No sound from within.

The lock was operated with a key card. Rebecca had no way of opening it, short of going downstairs and asking for one, which was out of the question.

She knocked softly on the door, then stepped aside, out of range of the fisheye lens.

Her ears strained. There was no sound from within. No footfall on the floor.

Rebecca walked back down the corridor to where she’d seen the fire alarm, behind a panel of glass at eye level. She glanced about, before hefting the bag containing her laptop and ramming the corner against the glass.

The shriek of the alarm was immediate, a harsh repetitive whoop that echoed around and down the corridor. Quickly she sprinted towards the stairs and down a flight, emerging on the floor below just as the first sleep-befuddled faces were beginning to peer through the doors.

The throng began to grow in the corridor, the jabber of panic rising, and Rebecca merged with the milling crowd.

She manoeuvred her way back to the fire stairs and ascended them, a look of bewilderment on her face, as if she’d forgotten the need to go down rather than up. Reaching the third floor again, she looked down the corridor towards the door of room 331.

It remained shut, though all the rest of the doors on either side of it were open and people were pouring out.

Rebecca waited as long as she dared, until the last of the guests were piling past her, yelling at her and tugging at her sleeves, trying to get her to snap out of her reverie and accompany them to the lobby.

Still the door remained closed.

Rebecca followed the others, making her way through the lobby where the night staff were trying to corral the crowd, to maintain a semblance of order. She pushed her way to the entrance doors and through into the night.

On the rain-slick pavement she ran along the front of the hotel and round the corner, to the side where room 331 looked out. She paused, located the third floor, scanned the windows.

She couldn’t be sure which ones belonged to room 331, but they all remained shut, and intact.

A fire engine’s bleat sounded in the distance.

Rebecca returned to the front of the hotel and watched the doors from across the road once more. Among the people flooding out, she couldn’t see anyone resembling John Purkiss.

By the time the fire engines had arrived, she was convinced. Purkiss wasn’t in the room. Had probably been gone for some time.

Which left her stuck.

She took out her phone and thumbed in a text message.

Target absent from hotel.

She hit the
send
key, and began walking away.

*

T
he response came within five minutes, as Rebecca was nearing the station once again.

It consisted of a text message with a new name and address.
He may have a lead
, read the message.

Rebecca looked up the address on the map application of her phone. It was a long distance to walk from where she was, and she sensed that time was not to be wasted.

She raised an arm to hail a taxi.

––––––––

T
he trouble with looking for surveillance in an airport concourse was the sheer number of people populating the area, the myriad opportunities for concealment.

Frankfurt Airport’s Terminal 1 was still open, but was operating a reduced service following the events of the previous day. It meant that the crowds were smaller than they might usually have been, both because many of the flights had been cancelled, and because a lot of passengers had baulked at the thought of taking off from or arriving at a place which had so recently been the departure point for the ill-fated Turkish Airlines flight, and had scrapped or revised their own travel plans.

The concourse crawled with police and military. People were being stopped and questioned, their bags sifted through. People of all ages and racial backgrounds, not just young men of Middle Eastern appearance. The German chancellor had appeared repeatedly on the news broadcasts Purkiss had caught, her face tight with defiance:
Life goes on. We will not permit ourselves to be cowed by terrorist murderers
. And she’d exhorted the people of Germany to cooperate with the security forces, to accept that in the short term at least, there would be inconveniences to be endured.

It all posed a problem for Purkiss. The police would be on the lookout for any signs of stealthiness in anybody within the airport terminal. A man without luggage would attract suspicion.

And the visible security presence was one thing. There’d be scores, perhaps hundreds, of plainclothes personnel strewn throughout the terminal as well. Purkiss had identified four of them, three men and a woman, within just five minutes of entering the terminal through the arrival gate.

He’d bought a fresh set of clothes at Fiumicino Airport, choosing chinos and smart trainers and an overcoat and ditching the duffel jacket in one of the bins. The United Airlines flight had been only half full, and he’d had no trouble securing a seat at short notice.

At eight fifty on Wednesday morning, less than two hours after he’d boarded in Rome, Purkiss reached Frankfurt. He did an initial sweep of the terminal with several purposeful strides from one end to the other, giving the impression he was a man on his way to an appointment of some kind. That was when he’d spotted the four undercover security personnel, though they didn’t seem to have taken an interest in him. Afterwards, he settled himself at the counter of a coffee shop, from which he could survey a fair stretch of the concourse, and ordered breakfast.

While he ate, and watched, he caught up with the news through four papers he’d bought from a kiosk, two of them German and two British. There was little difference between them in the known facts they relayed. Flight TA15 was thought to have been brought down by a relatively low-yield explosion within the cabin, which had torn open the fuselage and done enough damage to cause the pilot and co-pilot to lose control. Of the 148 passengers, seventeen had been nationals of Muslim countries. Suspicion was already being cast on one man in particular, Umair Jat, a citizen of Pakistan who had previously been investigated by the authorities in Islamabad for possible links to radical jihadist groups, though nothing had been proven.

Much was made in the news reports of two other facts. One was the telephoned admission by a supposed spokesman for the Islamic Caliphate in Asia that the ICA was responsible for the killings. The German Security Service and the US State Department had separately issued confirmations that the admission was likely to be genuine. The other noteworthy detail was the arrest of a man at the departure gate of a Swissair flight, a few minutes before TA15 took off. The man was a Jordanian, Adnan Hanahneh, who’d been observed to be acting suspiciously as he approached the gate.

Two hours after being taken into custody, the Jordanian had died. The details were sketchy, but officials said he had probably taken his own life by means of a cyanide capsule he’d managed to keep hidden from his captors.

Hanahneh was, the newspapers speculated, probably part of a double act with whomever had carried the bomb aboard the Turkish Airlines flight; the intention had been to destroy two passenger aircraft simultaneously.

Purkiss believed otherwise. There was no mention of any explosive material having been found in Hanahneh’s possession. He thought the Jordanian was probably a decoy, and his so-called suspicious behaviour a ruse intended to divert security attention away from the Turkish Airlines flight.

In any event, he didn’t believe the purpose of the attack had been to further worldwide jihad. It was too much of a coincidence that Quentin Vale had been on board that flight.

Purkiss thought the downing of TA15 had been an act of assassination.

Yet again, he ran his mind over the possibilities. Vale had wanted Purkiss out of the way, which was why he’d organised the fake liaison between Billson and the Chinese national, Xing, in Rome. It suggested Vale thought Purkiss needed to be kept out of harm’s way. Did that mean Vale suspected or knew that he, too, was in danger?

It opened up all sorts of further questions. Where had Vale been heading when he’d boarded the flight? TA15 had been going to Istanbul, so it was reasonable to assume that whatever business Vale was involved in, it was taking place in Turkey. Had he been fleeing someone, or something?

Purkiss raised his head and gazed across the terminal. It was filling, gradually, as the mid-morning passengers began to make their nervous appearance.

His jaw clenched in frustration. Vale’s insistence on keeping almost every detail about himself and his background secret from Purkiss for “security reasons”, as he put it, was now a liability. Purkiss knew nothing about him. Nothing about the enemies he had, the political complexities of his life.

It was easy to understand how a man like Vale could make enemies. He’d dedicated his professional life to hunting down the bad apples within the British intelligence establishment. And he had, so far as Purkiss knew, a one hundred per cent success rate. There’d be plenty of grudges festering away within the jails of Britain and elsewhere in Europe, and plenty of potential future targets who might decide to pre-empt Vale before he turned his attention to them.

Purkiss was aware that all this applied to him, too.

His options were limited. He’d come to Frankfurt Airport not with any clear goal in mind, but rather to visit the scene of the crime, to absorb its atmosphere and allow the intuitive part of his mind to bask in the environment, in case it threw up any clues.

Before he’d boarded the flight from Rome to Frankfurt that morning, Purkiss had called Hannah again in London. He’d asked for another favour: that she obtain for him the names of all the known MI6 personnel in Istanbul, whether based in the embassy or outside. It was a long shot, but it might provide some idea as to why Vale had been heading there. Purkiss had bought a mobile phone at the airport and he gave her the number.

She hadn’t called back yet, but Purkiss knew it was a task that would take some time.

He felt himself drawn towards the Turkish Airlines check-in desk, which was just visible to his left from where he sat at the counter of the coffee shop. There was barely anybody queuing at the desk. The airline was tainted, cursed, and would remain so for a long while. He knew there was nothing he could ask the staff at the desk that would be of the remotest use, but he felt the urge to walk in Vale’s steps, to trace his exact path, as if that might give him some insight into what had happened.

It was stupid, superstitious, and Purkiss berated himself inwardly.

The waiter appeared to ask if he wanted anything else. Purkiss asked for more coffee, and, deciding he needed to load up on carbohydrate and protein, requested bratwurst and sauteed potatoes.

While he waited, Purkiss scanned the newspaper reports again. If the destruction of the plane
had
been for the sole purpose of killing Vale, it would have taken considerable planning. That suggested Vale had booked the flight some time in advance. Perhaps Purkiss could find a way to determine exactly when and how the flight had been booked. It wouldn’t tell him much, but it would add incrementally to the supply of information he was building up.

He needed a skilled hacker. But the greatest IT expert he’d ever known, Abby Holt, had been killed two years earlier, in Tallinn, because Purkiss had let her down.

He compressed the thought, and the emotions which clung to it like an aura, and crammed them into a box within his head. He let the box drop, deep into the blackness of his mind, until it disappeared.

The waiter arrived once more and laid a steaming plate in front of Purkiss. He discovered he was ravenous, despite his tiredness. He pushed the pile of newspapers to one side and applied himself to the bratwurst.