Nemesis (6 page)

Purkiss and Asher were escorted wordlessly into the building, where a man in civilian clothes handed Asher a clipboard. He signed and returned it. As before, the exchange was conducted in silence.

The airfield was just outside Inverness, and was one used mainly by the military and the intelligence services. A Mercedes saloon sat in front. Asher had said the site of the ill-fated prisoner exchange was some thirty miles away to the north-east.

The two men hadn’t spoken on the flight up from London. There wasn’t hostility in their silence; the presence of the pilot had prevented them from saying much to one another.

Asher opened the driver’s door and got in, Purkiss joining him in the passenger seat. A chilly late-afternoon wind scoured the slopes of the surrounding hills, rocky and purple with heather.

As if there’d been no break in their conversation back in Waring-Jones’s office, Asher said: ‘I’m not here to keep an eye on you. If that’s what you think.’

He pulled away through the gates of the airfield and turned onto a desolate grey road.

Purkiss said, ‘Of course you are. Which is rather ironic.’

He saw Asher tip his head in acknowledgement. Purkiss’s job was to bring rogue elements of SIS to heel. This was a turnaround.

‘Nonetheless,’ Asher said. ‘I’m aware – and Waring-Jones is aware – that if I tread on your toes too much, I’ll lose whatever cooperation you’re willing to give me. That isn’t in our interests. So I’ll try to be helpful.’

On the flight up, Purkiss had used his phone to read the dossier Vale had emailed him. He’d requested it when he and Vale were alone in the room after the others had left.

‘He seems above board, John,’ Vale had said, referring to Asher. ‘But I’ll send you what I can find about him.’

The dossier gave a potted biography of Paul Asher. Aged thirty-seven, unmarried, he’d been with SIS twelve years. Cryptography was an especial strength of his. And, as Waring-Jones had said, Asher had an excellent track record in the Russian arena. He’d done some good work last year during the Crimean invasion, sending back detailed intelligence about the various factions within Ukraine and their relationships with each other and with Moscow.

Purkiss read the dossier twice. By the end, he still didn’t grasp why Asher had been chosen to accompany him. He understood that Waring-Jones would want one of his own people to be involved. But why Asher, in particular?

A ground fog blurred the road ahead into opaque greyness, causing the automatic headlights of the Mercedes to flick on. The tarmac was cracked and potholed, testing the car’s suspension.

Purkiss watched Asher’s impassive profile.

He said, ‘So what’s your story, Asher?’

The corner of the man’s mouth twitched in something approximating a smile. ‘I suspect you’ve already brought yourself up to speed.’

‘I mean, what do you get out of this? Your work for the Service.’

Everybody who stayed with SIS for more than a few years was driven, in some manner. Plenty of people signed up each year, seduced by the James Bond notion of a life of intrigue and glamour. But those who stayed the course usually did so because they were working off some neurosis or other. They were either chasing some distant goal, or running away from a demon of some kind.

Asher seemed taken aback by the question. ‘I’m good at what I do. I discovered that along the way. That’s what’s kept me going.’

Purkiss understood that. He thought it probably applied to a lot of people, in various fields of endeavour. You drifted into a random career, and it ended up teaching you things about yourself you’d never considered before.

‘What was your entry point?’ Purkiss asked. He meant:
how were you recruited?

‘I saw an ad.’ There was a shrug in Asher’s tone. ‘It was late 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. MI6 was actively touting for staff. I guess you could say I wandered in off the sidewalk.’

The car’s engine was well-tuned, almost silent. The wheels hissed on the road surface.

Purkiss listened, hard. Because there’d been two things of note there.

No;
three
.

He replayed the man’s words in his head, before time could distort the memory.

Watching Asher, he said, ‘Have you ever thought about jumping ship? To Big Sister?’

Big Sister was slang for MI5, or the Security Service. It was better funded and employed more personnel than SIS, the foreign intelligence service, hence the nickname.

‘No.’

There’d been a pause there.

A hesitation which had been driven not by consideration, but by incomprehension.

Purkiss said, ‘You live in the States at all? Work there?’

‘You’ve read my dossier.’ Asher sounded exasperated. ‘You know I haven’t.’

The road ahead curved gently to the left, around a rocky crag. No oncoming headlights broke the gloom. No lamps revealed themselves in Purkiss’s wing mirror.

He shouted: ‘There.
There
,’ and jabbed a finger diagonally, aiming through the windscreen at a point slightly to Asher’s right.

Asher turned his head instinctively, away from Purkiss.

Purkiss lunged, jabbing the stiffened fingers of his right hand at the man’s throat, just below the jawline, targeting the carotid artery. At the same time he twisted his torso and brought his left arm across his body and gripped the steering wheel, steadying it.

Asher reacted, quickly, but not quickly enough, bringing up his left shoulder too late to offset the force of Purkiss’s strike. His head jerked sideways and Purkiss felt the steering wheel nearly torn from his grasp.

The car veered rightwards, the wheels scrabbling on the gravel which bordered the grassy verge alongside the road. The verge ended after a few feet in a low stone wall. Purkiss hauled the wheel anti-clockwise just in time to pull the front bumper away from the wall, the gravel spraying against the solidly piled stones.

The Mercedes stalled with a jolt, the momentum snapping Purkiss’s chest hard against the safety belt. He’d already extended his legs into the footwell to steady himself.

He wrenched the handbrake up and released Asher’s seatbelt and then his own and leaned into the man, ready to deal with a bluff. But Asher slumped against the door, his face pallid, his eyes half closed.

Purkiss leant across him and opened the door and heaved him out onto the verge.

*

B
eyond the wall, the ground dropped at a sixty-degree angle into the mist.

The slope was scrubby and pocked with rock outcroppings. It wasn’t quite a ravine, Purkiss reckoned, but when he tossed a pebble into the murk he heard the clicks of its progress becoming ever more faint.

He lowered Asher backwards over the wall so that his waist was balanced on the top. The centre of gravity was just far enough beyond the wall that if the man struggled, or tried a manoeuvre with his legs, he’d tip himself all the way over.

Before dragging him the few feet to the wall, Purkiss had searched him. There’d been a tiny .22 pistol, flat as a saucer, strapped to Asher’s right ankle beneath his sock. Purkiss pocketed it.

He leaned across Asher’s waist, pinning him to the top of the wall, and reached down and knuckled his breastbone hard.

The arms flailed, vaguely at first, then in a more focused effort to push away whatever was causing the pain in the front of his chest. Purkiss saw the head lift, the reddened, vein-engorged face try to bend towards him.

‘A fifty-foot drop,’ Purkiss said. ‘At least. Plenty of rocks on the way down. If you don’t break your neck, you’ll almost certainly break one or more limbs. And you’ll be stuck down there, until I make my way down and find you.’

The eyes peered wildly up at him, the features grotesquely distorted by gravity. The man’s tie flopped over his mouth and he spat it away.

‘You’re not SIS,’ Purkiss continued. ‘Nobody in the Service for twelve years refers to it as MI6. You had no idea what I meant by
Big Sister
. And you’re not even British. Your accent’s first-rate, but your idiom is off. You said
sidewalk
. And
I guess
. You’re American.’

He felt the torso writhe beneath him. He eased off, allowing the squirming movements to tip the body a few millimetres further over the edge.

‘Not a good idea,’ Purkiss said. ‘You need to be clear on this, Asher. If you try to bluff, or stonewall me, I
will
let you fall. I want Rossiter. Want to find him more than anything else I’ve wanted in a long time. I need to find him quickly. I haven’t time to mess about.’

Gravity had pulled Asher’s upper lip back in a snarl. His eyes rolled, seeking the sky, the wall, Purkiss’s own face.

‘I’ll fabricate a car crash,’ said Purkiss. ‘You were killed. I was injured. It’s foggy up here. Nobody will ever be able to prove anything different. You’ve read about me. You know far more about me than I’ll ever know bout you. You know what lengths I’m reputed to go to. So - and I’ll ask this just once - who are you?’

The exposed teeth clamped together, and Purkiss thought the man was going to swear at him, or plead with him, or both.

Asher hissed: ‘I’m CIA.’

––––––––

A
sher stared straight though the windscreen. His jaw worked intermittently, as though he was tasting something. Purkiss had noticed the thin smear of blood at one corner of his mouth, and thought the man had bitten his tongue at some point.

He hadn’t soiled himself. That was to his credit.

Purkiss sat back against the passenger door, facing Asher. He didn’t think the man would risk a sudden move.

A solitary lorry had rumbled past, a couple of minutes earlier. It had slowed for the briefest instant before its driver seemed to decide that the Mercedes didn’t look like it had crashed, or broken down.

Other than that, they were alone.

‘The Company is involved because of the missing physicist,’ Asher said. ‘Mossberg.’

He hadn’t abandoned the accent entirely, but it had slipped a little, so that the American rhotic Rs were evident, the vowels a little longer than before. His tone was matter-of-fact, without a trace of humiliation.

That was another point in his favour.

Purkiss waited.

‘The exchange, Rossiter for Mossberg, was brokered by Washington,’ said Asher. ‘Your Prime Minister made the final decision, of course. But he did so after consultation with the President. And the President persuaded him that Mossberg was of high enough value to both of us, the US and Great Britain, that it was worth losing Rossiter in return.’

When he said no more, Purkiss asked, ‘What’s so important about Mossberg?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Asher.

Purkiss sighed inwardly.

Asher turned his head to look at Purkiss.

‘No. I mean, I genuinely can’t. Because I don’t know.’

Purkiss watched his eyes. Looked for tell-tale signs in the rest of the face, a twitch or a tightening. Saw no minor movements of the hands indicating a suppressed attempt to cover up the mouth after a lie.

He thought Asher was telling the truth.

‘The Company persuaded MI6 to let them in on this investigation,’ Asher continued. ‘Hence my presence here. Waring-Jones assumed you’d be suspicious if you knew I was CIA, so a legend was quickly created for me that established me as an MI6 operative. I guess it wasn’t convincing enough.’

‘The legend was fine,’ said Purkiss. ‘As I said, it was your use of idiom that tipped me off.’

For the first time he saw a reaction, a minute narrowing of the eyes. He recognised the clench of shame in Asher’s face.

‘So what now?’ said Asher.

Purkiss nodded through the windscreen. ‘Get going.’

Asher looked at him.

‘To the site of the exchange,’ said Purkiss. ‘We’re here now. We may as well finish what we came here to do.’

*

T
he road, the rocky slopes and scatters of woodland, became ever more desolate as they progressed.

After a full five minutes of silence, Purkiss said, ‘What’s your take on Mossberg? Why’s he so valuable?’

‘I told you. I don’t know.’

‘I didn’t ask if you
knew
. I want your opinion.’

Asher drew deeply though his nose, seeming to relax a little. ‘The obvious answer is that he’s a professor of physics. He’ll have knowledge of Moscow’s nuclear facilities and programmes.’

‘Doesn’t make sense,’ Purkiss said. ‘The Russians wouldn’t hand him over if he had any really useful information for us.’

‘Right.’ Asher paused. ‘You know anything about Mossberg’s background?’

‘No. Waring-Jones didn’t see fit to tell me.’

‘Mossberg was serving a fifteen-year prison sentence in Moscow for falsifying scientific data. He fiddled the results of a research study he was conducting into reactor safety standards. His conclusions were that many Russian nuclear reactors were at an unacceptably high risk of melting down. It turned out his research had proven no such thing. He was being overly cautious.’

‘Scientific fraud isn’t a criminal offence,’ Purkiss said. ‘Even in Russia.’

‘But his findings caused Moscow to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on upgrading their reactors,’ said Asher. ‘When they discovered the money had been wasted, the Russians prosecuted Mossberg for defrauding the public purse. Something like that.’

Purkiss took a few moments to absorb it.

‘And you know all this how?’ he said.

Asher had regained some of his confidence. ‘The Kremlin assumed at first that Mossberg was a CIA plant. He’d travelled to the US many times, and he had contacts in the scientific community over there. How exactly he’d pose a threat to Russian security by
improving
their nuclear safety standards is hard to work out. But if they hadn’t picked up his fraud before completing the upgrades of the reactors, the cost would have run to billions of dollars. So I guess Moscow viewed Mossberg as a possible economic saboteur. Anyhow. The Kremlin accused Washington of being behind Mossberg’s fraud. Washington denied it, of course. There was no evidence to link Mossberg to either the CIA or MI6, and in the end the Russians had to just drop it. But they jailed Mossberg for fifteen years. He was three years into his sentence when the exchange was proposed.’