Nemesis (2 page)

Vodovos felt the wetness on his shoulder and craned his head round. He saw the horrible, grinning face inches from his, the mouth distorted in a toothy leer where the lip and cheek had been shot away.

It was one of the soldiers. One of
his
soldiers.

He’d been hearing the screams around him for a few seconds at least, he realised, but only now was he registering them. By swivelling his head he could make out another body a few feet away, and a man stumbling aimlessly nearby, his injuries impossible to judge in the near darkness.

It’s just one helicopter
, Vodovos’s mind shouted.
Why don’t they shoot it down?

He saw movement from the corner of his eye.

A black shape moved swiftly from the left. Another appeared a few yards away.

More of them, thought Vodovos. More men, at ground level.

Pain arrowed up his leg without warning, cold and clean and burning.

The flash of the guns lit up the clearing brilliantly in a succession of strobe images, each offering a snapshot from hell. Bodies twisted and spun, and the cries offered a high counterpoint to the roaring of the weapons.

Vodovos’s primitive brain, the part deep below the more modern cerebral cortex, the area that was vestigial to an era before the mammals had separated from their reptilian counterparts, took control.

He flopped onto his back, rolling the dead man off him.

He allowed his eyes to remain open, staring at the night sky.

He brought his breathing under control, so that his respiratory intake and output produced only the minutest movement of his chest. It was difficult, because the pain he’d felt in his leg had returned, and was clamouring for his attention, and he wanted to gasp.

He’d learned the technique during his training. It was seldom used, and it seldom worked anyway.

But, sometimes, playing dead was one’s only hope of staying alive.

The gunfire had stopped. The high-pitched ringing in Vodovos’s ears was all that remained.

Beyond that, faintly, he heard the low
whup-whup
of the helicopter’s rotor.

A single shot made him almost flinch, but he lay dead still.

Two figures loomed on the periphery of his vision, the forced perspective making them seem huge, with grotesquely enlarged boots.

He continued to stare at the sky, resisting the urge to look at the men. His eyes prickled and itched, the urge to blink almost intolerable.

He felt the tackiness on his face and in his hair, realised the blood from the man who’d died on top of him was providing camouflage of a sort.

One of the looming men bent down. Even on the edge of Vodovos’s vision, the man’s face appeared blurred. He was wearing a balaclava.

Vodovos stopped breathing entirely. He could hold his breath long enough, he decided, that the man would lose interest in him.

He
had
to.

As the seconds ticked by, the burning in Vodovos’s chest swelled to an inferno.

He was wrong, he realised. He wasn’t going to be able to hold out.

A burst of air escaped from his nose just as the man straightened.

The man moved almost beyond Vodovos’s vision. The second man had disappeared entirely.

Vodovos heard grunting noises, the sounds of men hefting a mass.

He risked an infinitesimal twitch of the muscles that controlled his eye movements.

The two men had hauled the old man, the prisoner, to his feet. Expertly, with their arms under his to support him, they were moving him away.

He saw the old man reach the other, the one Vodovos had been tasked to bring home.

Something happened, then. Something Vodovos couldn’t process immediately.

It didn’t make sense.

Vodovos lay still.

The voices - there’d been several of them, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying, or even the language they were speaking in - receded.

At last, the hammering of the helicopter began to rise. It faded into the distance.

Vodovos expelled the air in his lungs in a screeching gasp.

He gulped fresh mouthfuls, again and again. Tasted the copper aroma of blood. It seemed to have infused the very air.

Even now, he didn’t dare turn his head.

Because he didn’t know how he was going to face what he’d see around him.

The death. The carnage.

The evidence of his desolate, horrifying
failure
.

––––––––

E
ven before Purkiss had descended the steps from the plane’s door, he saw Vale standing on the tarmac.

It was unusual. Normally Vale contacted him by phone to arrange a rendezvous. Unexpected meetings like this weren’t his style.

Vale was a tall black man, skeletally thin, and tending towards a stoop as if sixty-plus years of life were finally getting the upper hand. He watched Purkiss as he disembarked, but didn’t raise his hand in greeting. The late March air was chilly, winter seguing sluggishly into spring, but Vale wore a heavy overcoat. Purkiss supposed a man as bony as he was felt the cold more than most.

Purkiss stepped onto the runway.

‘Quentin,’ he said.

‘John.’

There was no handshake. No
hello
. It wasn’t the way they did things.

The rest of the passengers began filing towards the airport terminal. Vale turned and motioned for Purkiss to fall in step.

‘Passport control’s been taken care of,’ he said. ‘Your luggage will be collected and delivered to you later.’

They headed for a gate in the wall along one side of the runway. A security guard held it open for them.

Vale said, ‘Are you fit?’

It wasn’t small talk, wasn’t an idle query about Purkiss’s wellbeing. Purkiss had spent the last week in the Belgian countryside, not on holiday but being put through his paces with six other people by a former officer of the French Foreign Legion. The man offered a private - and expensive - service for intelligence operatives, security personnel, mercenaries, and anyone else who had requirements which went beyond those available through the normal channels.

The training had been brutal. Comprising all-weather endurance courses, hand-to-hand combat sessions, and simulated interrogation exercises, it had stretched Purkiss to the extremes of what he had considered himself capable of. Once - just once - he’d thought he’d reached his limit, and couldn’t make the cut. But he’d overcome the final barrier his psyche had thrown up. Two of the other people on the course had dropped out, one of them with a broken femur, the other in a state of abject, gibbering panic from which Purkiss doubted the man would ever fully recover.

Purkiss was approaching the end of his fortieth year. He was still young enough to function with a high level of proficiency in his field, but he was at an age where the first slowing of the reaction times began to manifest, where the connections between mental and physical action weren’t made with the same lightning-quick immediacy.

He’d taken a full twenty-four hours at the end of the course to rest, in a tiny cottage near Ghent. He’d slept, he’d stretched and soothed his punished muscles, he’d spent long periods with his mind emptied of all thought.

He ached still, and the horrors to which he’d been subjected danced and cackled on the periphery of his memory, part of his consciousness for ever.

But he felt good. Refreshed. Recharged.

‘Yes,’ he said to Vale. ‘Top condition.’

Vale needed to know that Purkiss was ready, which meant he had work for him.

Vale’s car was parked in a restricted area. A Volvo saloon, it was neither flashy nor decrepit. He got behind the wheel, Purkiss dropping in beside him. The interior smelt strongly of stale cigarette smoke.

As Vale started the engine, he said, ‘We’ve got a problem.’

Purkiss listened, hard.

In the course of the last six years, Vale had sent him to avert an attack on the Russian president. He’d despatched him to the nightmare of the Siberian tundra. He’d even placed Purkiss in the way of an assassin, in order to draw out the ringleader.

But he’d never once described anything as
a problem
.

When Vale didn’t venture anything more, Purkiss said: ‘By
we
, I take it you mean the Service.’

Both Vale and Purkiss had previously worked for the Secret Intelligence Service, known more popularly as MI6. Purkiss had left six years earlier. He still wasn’t entirely sure whether Vale was independent of the Service, or employed by them in some capacity. But, as the man responsible for rooting out rogue and criminal elements within SIS, Vale’s troubles often overlapped with those of the organisation.

Vale headed for the exit. Stansted Airport was small, and easy to escape, unlike the tangled nightmare that was Heathrow to the west. Purkiss’s own car was parked here, but he assumed it would find its way back to him in due course.

‘The Service, yes,’ Vale said. ‘But you and I, personally, John. We have a problem.’

So this was it, Purkiss thought. The money had run out. The economic situation dictated that Britain could no longer afford to fund an outfit whose sole responsibility it was to keep the intelligence service clean.

But that didn’t fit, because Vale wouldn’t have taken the unusual step of meeting Purkiss at the airport.

Purkiss sensed that, however much Vale had thought about how he was going to brief Purkiss, he was struggling to choose the best approach.

‘Where are we going?’ Purkiss said.

‘Vauxhall Cross.’

SIS headquarters. Purkiss hadn’t set foot inside the building in more than half a decade.

It was in Central London on the Thames. An hour’s drive away, at least.

Purkiss said, ‘Give me the bare bones. Otherwise we’ll sit like this in silence until I won’t be able to take it any more.’

Without taking his eyes off the motorway ahead, Vale said: ‘Fair enough.’

He paused.

‘Rossiter’s escaped.’

––––––––

S
ir Peter Waring-Jones had been in post for three years. He’d worked his way up the ranks, and served as Deputy Director of the Secret Intelligence Service for a full decade before at last assuming the top job. It served as a neat illustration of his legendary patience.

Purkiss had never met him before. He looked older than he appeared in the few photographs Purkiss had seen of him, and must be past seventy by now. His suit was smart but he wasn’t fussily dapper, and to Purkiss’s relief he wasn’t wearing a bow tie.

Waring-Jones had been a contemporary of Vale’s in SIS, both of them active agents in the nineteen-seventies and -eighties. Nonetheless, Vale never expressed any opinions to Purkiss about the man. Purkiss had always liked that. It suggested discretion on Vale’s part.

Loyalty.

Waring-Jones was already standing when Purkiss and Vale entered. His office was large, and tastefully but not extravagantly appointed. An enormous picture window gave out onto a magnificent late-morning view of the Thames. The double-glazing was deceptively normal looking, but Purkiss assumed it could withstand any onslaught short of a rocket attack.

Another, younger, man rose as they came in. He was Asian, third generation if Purkiss’s memory served him. Rupesh Gar. Thin, intense and bespectacled, as Deputy Director he was the yin to Waring-Jones’s yang, a contrast in age and ethnic background and personality.

‘Quentin,’ said Waring-Jones. His voice was friendly without the overt jocularity Purkiss had been expecting. ‘And Mr Purkiss. Thank you for coming.’

He extended his hand. Both men shook.

Gar stepped forward and they repeated the ritual with him. His intensity was unusual, Purkiss decided. It came from his bearing, his aura. His eyes themselves were so neutral they were almost blank.

Waring-Jones indicated for them all to sit. His desk was vast, and occupied most of one end of the room. But there was a coffee table nearer the door, with easy chairs arranged around it, and it was to these that he directed Vale and Purkiss.

There must have been five hundred books on the shelves lining the walls. Purkiss appraised them quickly. He noted a preponderance of volumes about China. Waring-Jones was a Sinophile, Purkiss knew, and one of the reasons for his rapid rise to the Deputy Directorship had been his extensive knowledge of the country, at a time when it was ascending to world prominence itself.

Tea and coffee were already arranged on the table. Waring-Jones helped himself, gestured to Purkiss and Vale to do the same.

Without preamble, Waring-Jones said: ‘Quentin will have briefed you on the situation. But to save time, I’m going to assume you know nothing.’

He glanced at Gar, nodded.

Gar fixed his gaze on Purkiss. He said, ‘Last night, at a location up in the Highlands, on the Moray Forth approximately thirty miles from Inverness, an incident occurred which has triggered the highest level of alert this country has seen since the London bombings on July seventh, 2005.’

Gar’s accent was cut-glass. He’d been educated at Harrow and then taken a Master’s degree in politics at Oxford, Purkiss knew. But he’d come from unprepossessing beginnings, the grandson of an immigrant shopkeeper from Delhi. His voice was more aristocratic even than Waring-Jones’s.

Which meant it had to be an affectation.

‘During a prisoner exchange, one involving our Service and operatives of the Russian FSB, an attack was launched by an unknown party. Both prisoners involved in the exchange disappeared. All of the personnel facilitating the exchange, on both sides, intelligence operatives and military alike, were killed. All but one. An FSB agent named Stepan Vodovos. He’s at present in our custody.’

As if they’d rehearsed this, Gar glanced at Waring-Jones, who continued: ‘The prisoner exchange was a clandestine one. They always are, of course - they’re not the sort of thing you read about in the paper - but in this case, it was given the green light by the Prime Minister himself, without the approval of the Cabinet.’

Purkiss processed this quickly. For the Prime Minister to sanction an operation of this kind and not seek Cabinet approval first, or at least not inform them, was highly unusual. It hinted at something of a significance Purkiss couldn’t guess at.