Jokerman (8 page)

Sixteen

The figure that collided with him was a woman’s. Lighter than him by at least three stone, she nonetheless knocked him off his feet, landing hard on him, the hot tarmac of the road’s surface slamming up at him from below.

A second, less than a second, later, the Range Rover exploded.

The flash of the blast bloomed into an orange and black fireball just as the blast wave howled across Purkiss and the woman who was covering him, the awful ear-punching noise of the detonation following, like the roar of a gigantic jungle predator that strikes its prey motionless with terror.

  Black shrapnel spun and whipped in a fan pattern like boiling hail, and Purkiss felt it sting his legs and skitter past his head across the tarmac.

The screaming, the terrible screaming, from all around was joined in discordant harmony by the cacophony of car alarms that started up out of synch along the length of the street.

Purkiss, feeling smothered, rolled aside, trying to get out from under the weight on top of him. Then he felt the intense heat, saw the flicker of flame.

He shoved the woman to one side and rose to a crouch. Another woman stumbled past, shrieking, clutching her head, her face a bloodied caul.

The woman on the ground, the one who’d knocked Purkiss down, was on fire.

She too had risen to her hands and knees, and down her back the flame seared and leaped like a grotesque mohawk hairdo. Purkiss wondered why she didn’t roll on her back to crush out the flame, until he saw the triangle of twisted metal protruding from the back of one thigh.

He pulled off his suit jacket, tearing the cheap material along one seam, and flung it across the woman’s back, tamping it down, feeling the heat lick at the palms of his hands through the fabric.

Lifting the jacket away, he saw nothing but blackened shreds of clothing. He pulled the woman’s shirt out of the waistband of her trousers and looked the smooth curve of her back, crossed by the strap of her brassiere. The skin was seared pink, but that was all. A sunburn, nothing more.

She began to get to her feet, gave a cry and dropped to one knee again. Purkiss crouched to look at the piece of shrapnel jutting from her leg.

Wrapping his jacket around one hand, he grasped the shard, wincing at the hot steel, and tugged hard, once.

She bit back most of the scream so that it sobbed out through her clenched teeth. Flinging away the fragment of metal, Purkiss examined the wound. No gushing of blood. He put an arm across the woman’s back and helped her to her feet.

They hobbled towards the pavement, Purkiss wincing at the tiny slivers of debris he now realised had penetrated his own legs. Around them people ran aimlessly, like ants from a broken mound. The stench of diesel and scorched cloth stung Purkiss nostrils, and the yells and wails were muffled through the high-pitched whine in his ears that was the aftermath of the detonation.

The woman slumped across the bonnet of the nearest car. Purkiss turned to look at the remains of the Range Rover. It was a black metal skeleton, acrid greasy smoke billowing from it to fill the street. Vague, slumped humanoid shapes were visible within it.

Down the street a man’s and a woman’s bodies lay, prone and unmoving, in the middle of the road. The boys who’d been kicking the ball around cowered on the pavement in their respective parents’ arms, their exuberance extinguished.

Purkiss found his mobile phone undamaged in the pocket of his ruined jacket. He punched in 999, gave the address and a brief account – a car bomb, at least two fatalities, probably more – and heard the sirens even before he’d finished speaking. Somebody else must have phoned it in already.

Leaving the woman against the bonnet of the car, he loped over to the bodies in the road. Their eyes were open and dulled in death, and the man had almost been decapitated by a sheet of shrapnel. He scouted around, doing a loose three hundred and sixty degree survey, past faces slack with shock and bewilderment, but saw nobody in critical need of help.

The woman was making an effort to stand upright as he returned to her. For the first time he got a proper look at her. Black, straight hair, shoulder length, a pale face discoloured by smuts from the diesel smoke, high cheekbones. The faintest Eastern cast to her dark eyes, he thought. Age perhaps late twenties, early thirties at most. She was tallish, around five nine, and wore a lightweight trouser suit and shirt, the scorched jacket long discarded.

‘You all right?’ he said, just as she started to ask the same thing. Her voice was muffled through the singing in his ears, which showed no sign of easing yet.

She angled her gaze past him, back down the street. Purkiss looked over his shoulder.

‘See something?’

‘It was probably wired to the ignition rather than remote-controlled,’ she murmured. ‘But it’s possible whoever planted it is nearby, watching the result.’

‘Yes,’ he said, thinking:
she’s a professional. Interesting.
‘I was considering that, too. But they’ll be gone now.’

They both looked at the smouldering wreck of the Range Rover.

‘We should get out of here,’ said Purkiss, though he had no idea if she’d agree.

Without a word, she turned with him as he strode off.

Seventeen

Purkiss noticed she was limping slightly.

‘You need that seen to.’

‘I’ll manage.’

They headed directionlessly but with apparent purpose back towards the high street. The rippling crowds ignored their smoky figures, desperate to find out what had caused the bang several blocks away.

Purkiss said, ‘How did you know?’

‘About the bomb? I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I knocked you down because one of those men had a gun. And you were a sitting duck there in the road.’

‘A gun.’ He hadn’t seen it.

‘The one who had the door open and was looking right at you. I could see the gun from the angle I was at. You probably couldn’t.’

She was giving him an excuse, a way to save face. He said: ‘Thanks. For saving my life.’

‘And thanks for stopping me burning.’ It sounded almost farcical, but this time, unlike back in the hospital ITU, Purkiss didn’t give vent to hysterical laughter.

‘John Purkiss,’ he said. He glanced at her, expecting her to nod in recognition, but she didn’t.

‘Hannah Holley,’ she said.

She stumbled a little and he caught her elbow. Spotting a cafe, he steered her in and sat her down at a corner table. She didn’t resist.

Purkiss ordered coffee, black, for them both. Opposite him the woman gazed about distractedly, seldom meeting his eye. What she needed, he thought, was a few minutes alone to vent. To scream, weep, rage. But she couldn’t, here, and certainly not in his presence.

When the coffee came he emptied three sachets of sugar into hers without asking, and pushed it under her nose. She sipped, grimaced, sipped again. The couple at the next table were looking across and Purkiss stared back; their gaze twitched away. Purkiss peered under the table to see if the woman was bleeding on the floor from her leg wound. She wasn’t.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You’d better start.’

Hannah Holley tossed the hair out of her eyes, drained her coffee, looking at him over the cup. He waved the waitress over for a refill.

Holley said, ‘I followed you there. To Al-Bayati’s flat. I saw you approach him and his entourage, and I got in closer to try to hear what was said. That’s when I saw the man in the back drawing the gun.’

‘Where did you follow me from?’ asked Purkiss.

‘The
Iraqi Thunder Fist
office,’ she said. ‘I’ve had it under surveillance since yesterday. Al-Bayati’s the man I wanted to talk to, but he hasn’t shown up there. Then you arrive. You don’t fit the demographic. I was intrigued. You left with a purpose in your walk. That’s when I thought you’d be worth following.’

Purkiss studied her, knowing the obvious question he had to ask her was the same one she had for him. It was a calculated dance: giving away too much would be risky, but if he didn’t reveal anything, she probably wouldn’t either.

He decided on an oblique approach: ‘You said you had the
ITF
office under surveillance since yesterday.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why yesterday, particularly?’

She hesitated, then released a long breath. ‘I’m going to take a leap into the unknown here, and suggest that we both know the name Charles Morrow.’

As she said it, she watched his face intently. Again he was struck by her professionalism. She was interested not so much in his reply as in what his face revealed.

Purkiss said, ‘Yes.’

Holley said, ‘You’re not Security Service. Not Five.’

‘No.’

After another pause, she said, ‘I am.’

‘Then you should be able to find out relatively quickly who I am.’
Though not what I’m doing involved in this mission
, he thought.

She shook her head. ‘If you mean, you’re on the Service’s database… no. I can’t access it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m working off the books,’ she said. ‘Freelance. Not even that, because it suggests I’ve been hired. I’m doing this on my own.’

‘Doing what, exactly?’

‘Looking for Charlie Morrow’s killer,’ she said. ‘He was a friend of mine. A decent man.’

‘Your Service must be tearing the country apart looking for the killer,’ Purkiss said. ‘Why not become part of that investigation?’

Instead of answering, she picked up a spoon and stirred her coffee absently, even though she’d already done so. ‘You’re not in the Service,’ she repeated.

‘No.’

‘Are you working for it, though?’

‘No.’ It wasn’t entirely a lie. He was working for Kasabian unofficially, not for the Security Service. The distinction would be a little fine for most people, Purkiss knew. But truth and lies had different meanings in his world.

‘So… what’s your role in this?’

‘I’m looking for Morrow’s killer, just like you.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

For the first time he saw a flash of anger in her dark eyes. It faded rapidly. Purkiss suspected she was by nature a fiery person, who had to struggle more than most other spooks to maintain the iron grip of emotional control that was required by the job.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I owe you. If it wasn’t for you I’d be dead. And to use a cliché, we’re on the same side here. I think we can help one another. But I can’t reveal why I’m involved. Not yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘It would be breaking confidence.’

It sounded so old-fashioned, so out of place in a discussion between two espions, even to Purkiss, that he thought he saw the twitch of a smile at her mouth.

She studied him levelly, appraising. Then she nodded.

‘That I can understand.’

‘I
will
tell you that my background is with the other side. SIS.’

‘Yes, I suspected that. But you’re not with them any more?’

‘No.’ Through the window over her shoulder, Purkiss saw a fleet of police vans barging its way down the high street. People in the café were turning to look, the buzz in the air rising as word spread.
Bomb… terrorist attack…

He spread his hands. ‘Answer this or not, as you see fit… but to go back to what I asked, why are you going it alone? Why not join the official investigation?’

‘Because I suspect someone within the Service is involved in the killing. Possibly more than one person.’

Eighteen

She sat back, leaving the statement between them. If she was expecting surprise from Purkiss, she must have been disappointed. Or intrigued.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘Charlie Morrow and I are – were – friends. We worked together a couple of years ago on some data mining stuff involving new blood in the Egyptian Embassy, and hit it off. Nothing intimate, if you see what I mean. None of that. But we each liked the way the other worked. We had similar values.’ She raised her eyebrows a fraction. ‘It sounds ridiculously naïve, doesn’t it.’

‘Not at all.’

‘We stayed in touch after our work together finished. Met up rarely, exchanged the odd email or text. And it became clear to me that Charlie was unhappy. Not with his day-to-day work itself, not even particularly with his personal life, though he was divorced and lived alone. Rather, he had a problem with the way the Service was run. With its ethos.

‘He wasn’t so green as to imagine that any counterintelligence service was entirely pure, that there weren’t underhand and even morally questionable things that had to be done from time to time in the interests of the greater good. But he felt the Service had become not just the protector of the good, but the determiner of what was good in the first place. It was the old story of how the legislative and executive branches of government need to be kept separate in order for a system to be just. Charlie felt the Service had outstripped its authority. Divorced itself from the need to answer to Parliament. And he didn’t like it.’

She shifted in her seat, and winced. She’d need that wound seen to soon, Purkiss thought. But he didn’t want to interrupt her flow.

‘I’m assuming you know Charlie was deeply interested in Iraq,’ she went on. ‘His wife being Kurdish. She was a refugee from Saddam’s persecution, and was apparently a passionate advocate of his overthrow, for obvious reasons. Like her, Charlie backed the Coalition invasion in 2003. He began to have his doubts in the aftermath, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, when the extent of the failure of the post-invasion planning became glaringly evident. When the bombings and mass slaughter got underway.

‘Charlie had no problem morally with investigating and surveilling dissident Iraqi groups here in London, groups like
Iraqi Thunder Fist
. He wasn’t one of those who believed that the planting of a bomb in a crowded Baghdad market place was somehow a noble act of resistance. But he was becoming increasingly concerned about the uses to which the intelligence he was gathering was being put. He’d speculate that it was being passed on to the CIA, to some of the Middle Eastern regimes surrounding Iraq, and that it was being used to justify all kinds of things – indiscriminate assassinations, blackmail, kidnapping.’

Purkiss thought about this. In the SIS he’d sometimes seen people start to lose contact with reality. Steeped in a culture of lies, deception, betrayal and ambiguity, eventually they saw treachery and untruth in everybody around them, in every single human interaction.

She sighed. ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking. And yes, Charlie was paranoid. Particularly after his wife left him and he spent a lot more time on his own. But he was also shrewd. His speculations weren’t altogether implausible. Anyway. Three days ago, he tried to contact me. Left a message on my phone. I was abroad, on a few days’ leave in the South of France. There was no phone reception, something I’d chosen deliberately. I came back the next day, two days ago, and got the message. Shortly afterwards I discovered he was dead.’

‘What was the message?’

‘He said, “Touching down”. Just those two words. It was a kind of code he’d made up. He’d said once that if I ever got that message, it meant he’d gone away, or was about to go away, to a far-off place, and that I was to search his flat immediately.’ She glanced off to one side. ‘I thought he was joking when he said that.’

‘And did you? Search his flat?’

‘Yes. It wasn’t easy. I went straight to his flat in Marble Arch. On the way I learned via the grapevine that he’d been killed that morning. I didn’t get any details, just that he was dead. So I assumed his flat was either about to be searched, or had already been searched and I was walking into a trap. I did as much countersurveillance on it as I could without delaying things for too long, and I went in.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘A notebook.’ She gave half a laugh. ‘I don’t mean a notebook computer, I mean an actual, old-fashioned paper notebook. Taped in a recess above the toilet pipe as it went into the wall. I’ve got it in a safe place, but so far it hasn’t been much help. Most of it’s written in some kind of personal shorthand. Nothing even a codebreaker could crack, because it’s not designed to be read by a single other human being.’

‘Then why did he want you to find it?’

‘
Most
of it’s in code. But a few names come up, written in normal language.
Iraqi Thunder Fist
is one. Mohammed Al-Bayati is another.’

‘So you staked out the
ITF
office.’

She shrugged. ‘What could I do? From that moment on, I caught Charlie’s paranoia. He’d obviously known he was at risk of being killed, which is why he rang me.
Me
, not his line of command. It suggested he at least suspected someone within the Service of being an enemy. That meant I had to regard everyone, the whole of the Security Service, as a potential threat. It meant I couldn’t access any of the databases any more, couldn’t search for Mohammed Al-Bayati’s home address, in case it triggered alarm bells. So I had to do it the hard way. Watch the office and see if he turned up.’

Purkiss sifted through the information she’d given him, calculating how much she probably knew, and how much she didn’t.

‘Ms Holley –’

‘Hannah.’

‘Hannah, what do you know of the circumstances of Morrow’s death?’

‘That he was shot on an estate somewhere in the Home Counties, with a long gun.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘That’s it. Through the grapevine.’

There was no point holding back, Purkiss thought. He said, ‘He was meeting the Home Secretary. He was going to blow the whistle on something within the Service.’

Hannah’s eyes flared. She sat back in her chair, letting out a long breath through pursed lips, managing to sound vindicated and wondering at the same time.

‘Don’t ask me how I know,’ he continued. ‘But it’s one hundred per cent reliable information. And I’m here as an outsider, to find out both who killed Morrow and what he was about to expose.’

When Hannah leaned forwards again there was something gone from her eyes. It was the professional reserve, the forced coolness. Uncovered, the blackness of her dilated pupils threatened to suck Purkiss in.

‘I’ll help you,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

‘You said “a few” names came up in Morrow’s notebook,’ said Purkiss.

‘Yes.’

‘There are others?’

‘There’s one more.’