Nemesis (8 page)

‘The Lab,’ Dokkuma said. He pronounced the
th
as
d.
There was something slightly humorous, Britishly ironic, in the way he seemed to capitalise the word
lab
. Altogether rather Dutch, Rossiter thought.

Rossiter and Dokkuma stood aside while the men brought the suitcase off the truck and headed into the building. The Frisian gestured for Rossiter to precede him and he went in.

It was, indeed, a laboratory, despite its forbidding, functional outside appearance. The interior was given over to a floorspace covered with benches, work surfaces and electronic equipment. Harsh overhead panel lights provided blue-white illumination.

‘A coffee,’ said Dokkuma.

Rossiter accepted. He watched as his men uncuffed themselves from the case and four of Dokkuma’s people, mild-looking men and women who didn’t wear white coats as might be expected, took possession of it.

‘Half an hour,’ said Dokkuma.

He and Rossiter sat on stools along one side of the laboratory, sipping their coffee in a silence that was almost companionable. Rossiter watched the technicians working on the suitcase while his men stood to either side.

After ten minutes, a mobile phone rang.

Dokkuma raised it to his ear. Listened. Put it away.

Rossiter watched his profile.

A small smile played about the Frisian’s mouth.

Rossiter said, ‘Care to tell me?’

Dokkuma glanced at him, still smiling. He poured more coffee into Rossiter’s mug.

He said, ‘My people have established that your helicopter carries no missiles. Nothing that might be used to blast this lab into dust the moment you leave here.’ He raised his own mug. ‘Let’s toast.’

Rossiter didn’t follow suit. He shook his head.

‘It’s a sensible security measure,’ he said, ‘and I’d probably have done the same. But really, Lars. A man of your skills is valuable to me. I might need your services in the future. You know the expression, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?’

Dokkuma raised his head, gazed over towards the laboratory personnel working on the contents of the suitcase. He was no longer smiling.

‘Your analogy is crap, Jacobin. I’m a one-off, for your purposes. If my staff establish what you wish them to establish, you’ll have no more use for me.’

Rossiter sighed. ‘Your cynicism is troubling. But I suppose it has survival value.’

The grin was back on the man’s face, though he said nothing.

*

I
t took twenty-three minutes, according to Rossiter’s wristwatch.

One of the lab techs stood upright, at last, and turned towards Rossiter and Dokkuma at the far end of the room.

He raised his gloved hand. Made a circle with his thumb and forefinger in the gesture universally recognised as the sign that everything was as it should be. Except, Rossiter had heard, in Brazil, where it meant
arsehole
.

Rossiter put down his empty mug. Extended a hand to Dokkuma.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

The man’s grip was firm without being crushing. ‘You’ll forgive me if I get a little vulgar. But I need a guarantee that the balance of the funds have been paid.’

‘And you’ll have it.’ Rossiter took out his phone, a pay-as-you-go he’d been handed in the helicopter. He keyed in a number, then attached a text message with a nine-digit code. Reception wasn’t the best here, on an island in the North Sea with the winds gusting down from Siberia, but he saw that the message had been transmitted successfully.

‘It’s all yours,’ he said.

Dokkuma picked up his own phone. Dialled a number by pressing a single key. Rossiter knew the call was to somebody monitoring the bank account Dokkuma had specified.

The Frisian listened, watching Rossiter as he did so.

He put the phone away.

His smile this time was broad.

‘A pleasure doing business with you, Jacobin.’

‘Likewise.’

*

T
he Eurocopter lifted into the buffeting night, embarking on its third trip with Rossiter as a passenger.

He couldn’t make out Dokkuma, or any of his people, or even the lorry, on the ground below. The lights had already been killed and this end of the island was a smudge of blackness in the surrounding sea.

A face appeared beside Rossiter, leaning into the cockpit. It was McCammon, the leader of the team which had freed Rossiter, and the man Rossiter came closest to trusting with his life.

Rossiter said, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the chopper: ‘Yes.’

McCammon disappeared once more.

Although he couldn’t see him, Rossiter imagined the man holding the small box in his palm. He visualised McCammon’s thumb sliding over the two buttons on the upper surface, pressing down on one, and then the other.

The depressing of the buttons sent independent signals to two devices.

The first was the one inside the canvas sack one of Rossiter’s men had dropped beneath a bench in the laboratory while they were waiting for Dokkuma’s staff to complete their work on the suitcase. The device was composed of plastic explosive with an incendiary overlay.

The second object resembled a mobile phone. Rossiter had dropped it into Dokkuma’s jacket pocket as they’d turned towards the door of the laboratory to exit. It, too, contained plastic explosive.

He heard nothing over the howling of the rotor blades and the thud of the engines. But, hundreds of feet below, he saw the flash of light, the eruption of black chunks of masonry against an orange bed of flame.

It was possible that some personnel might escape unscathed. But that didn’t matter.

The main targets - the laboratory, and Lars Dokkuma himself - had been eliminated.

Rossiter thought about what he’d said to Dokkuma.

Yes, cynicism had survival value.

But sometimes it wasn’t enough.

The Eurocopter angled north-west, out to sea, putting distance between itself and any local radar systems. It was sufficiently fuelled to keep it airborne for a few hours more. But it would need to land again at some point.

The destination had been a point of contention between Rossiter and McCammon. McCammon believed strongly that Rossiter should place himself as far from Britain as was feasible.

‘No,’ Rossiter had said. It was the first and only time they’d spoken together during Rossiter’s incarceration in the prison in Berkshire known as The Box. By then, the strategy had been established, and fine-tuned down to the minutest detail. ‘Britain is the last place they’ll be looking for me.’

Rossiter leaned back in his seat. He allowed himself a brief closing of the eyes, a temporary indulgence of satisfaction.

The product had been obtained, and verified as authentic. He’d promised the Locksmith that he would contact him with instructions for deactivating the explosive device implanted on the person of Mossberg. He would contact the Locksmith, in due course - there was no rush, and there was no harm in making the man sweat - but he would issue no instructions, because there was no such explosive device. The bluff had worked, because the Locksmith was from a country in which fear and paranoia made even the most outrageous threat plausible.

Rossiter had the product in the suitcase. It was time to move into the next phase.

––––––––

A
sher had driven them to London City Airport from SIS headquarters in a nondescript Toyota Camry, and it was to the same car, sitting alone in a gloomy corner of the multi-storey car park, that  they returned.

Asher reached the Toyota first. He gave it a swift once-over, checking under the chassis with an extendable mirror he’d produced from his coat pocket, peering at the door handles and the tops of the windows for signs of tampering. Purkiss stood back, appreciating the man’s tradecraft.

They’d pulled out into the evening traffic when Vale called.

‘I have an address for the facility where the surveillance device was implanted in Rossiter,’ he said. ‘
R557 Medical
is its technical SIS label. Colloquially, it’s known as The Plant.’

‘Very droll,’ said Purkiss. ‘Personnel?’

‘Yes, I have a list of names. The surgeons involved in the procedure, as well as the technicians  who supplied the tracking device. It all gets a bit complicated, though, I’m afraid. The particular device used to track Rossiter is produced by an independent firm, HorizonTech, which is under exclusive contract to the Service. They’re bound by all the usual restrictions, the Official Secrets Act and so forth, and of course the Service has exercised due diligence in vetting them. But it’s possible someone within the firm has access to the codes required to track the particular device implanted in Rossiter, and has leaked them.’

‘It’s somebody there,’ Purkiss said. ‘We can forget about the medical staff. They were just there to install the bug.’ Through the windscreen he saw the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf glitter into view. ‘Can you get me a breakdown of this company? HorizonTech? In particular, the personnel involved in the production and distribution of the device in question?’

‘I’ve done it already.’ Vale said it without a hint of self-satisfaction. ‘Again, we’re casting a wide net. If you include the factory-floor employees, the technicians involved in the physical creation of the bug, we’re looking at close to sixty people. Sixty individuals who could conceivably have had access to the signal Rossiter’s bug gave out.’

Purkiss thought for a moment. ‘We need to fast-track this. Could you run a check on all those sixty-odd people for SIS backgrounds?’

There was a pause before Vale replied. ‘Ah, yes. I see where you’re going with this. I’ll ring back.’

A few years ago, Purkiss would have relied on Abby Holt to do his research. Abby was a precocious IT genius, a slip of a girl in her twenties from Lancashire who had a remarkable facility for accessing the most secure databases in Britain, and internationally. But Abby was gone, shot dead in Tallinn, on that terrible October night which had been followed by the final confrontation in the Gulf of Finland, with the terrorist and would-be assassin Kuznetsov.

And with his sponsor, Richard Rossiter.

Asher was taking the Toyota westwards, broadly in the direction of SIS HQ once again. Purkiss hadn’t told him to go there, but he was homing in like a pigeon. The crowded and frenetic night-time streets of East London began to give way to the sleeker environs of the powerhouse that was the city’s financial heart. Beyond the towers of Canary Wharf to the left, the Thames brooded, visible intermittently between the buildings.

Beside Purkiss, Asher murmured: ‘You see it?’

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss.

The lights had caught his attention even before his conscious mind had registered them. They were a single pair, hovering in his wing mirror, disappearing as the traffic interposed itself before emerging again at exactly the same distance behind.

He’d noticed that Asher had tried a slight diversion, turning up a side street unnecessarily and rejoining the original route. The car behind had hung on to them.

Purkiss said, ‘Any others?’

‘Just the one.’ Asher’s face in profile was hawkish, his eyes scanning the road through the windscreen. ‘They may have another car ahead. Hard to tell.’

It would be a classic box tag: at least one vehicle behind, and another ahead. The car in front was the vulnerable one, of course, because a sudden change in direction would throw it off course. Which was why there were usually a minimum of two tags ahead, in this kind of tactic, to allow for greater flexibility.

So Purkiss had to assume there were at least three opposition vehicles in the field.

Asher said: ‘You want me to lose them?’

Purkiss had been in this type of situation before, as a junior SIS officer in the early years of the last decade. It had been Basra, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, and while on a reconnaissance operation in the centre of the city he’d found himself boxed in by a total of four enemy cars. The nature of his mission was such that the people tagging him had one goal in mind, and one only. Namely, to isolate Purkiss and kill him.

On that occasion, his objective had been to get away. To break out of the box, and lose the tags. He’d done so, successfully.

Now, in London, with a target whose whereabouts were a mystery, and with almost nothing to go on, the presence of surveillance offered an opportunity rather than a threat.

‘No,’ Purkiss said. ‘Draw them in.’

‘I thought so.’

Purkiss had said
draw them in
rather than
draw them out
for a specific reason. Drawing out entailed the luring of the tag to a more isolated environment. Drawing in forced the follower to show his hand in a more public place.

The green signs ahead indicated a left turn into the Rotherhithe Tunnel, which would take them beneath the river and southwards. Purkiss heard the ticking of the indicator as Asher flicked it on, saw the winking of the light on his own wing mirror.

The car behind closed in a little.

Asher began to take the Toyota into the turn that would put them on course for the tunnel. He swung the wheel rightwards in a second, pointing them straight ahead, extinguishing the indicator.

Then he jerked the wheel left again.

The lights behind them tilted in their direction.

And Asher spun the wheel, the tyres squealing, and aimed ahead once more, leaving the tunnel approach behind and to their left.

Horns blared furiously around them.

It was a triple feint, twice creating the impression of a left turn, and its purpose was to sow confusion in the tag. Asher pulled it off expertly. The car behind arced after them, thrown by the sudden alteration of direction.

The car exposed itself. Left no doubt that it was following them.

Sometimes, the manoeuvre was used to flush out a suspected tag you weren’t quite sure about.

In this case, the purpose of the move was psychological. Its intention was to embarrass the followers. To make it clear to them that you were aware of their presence, and to force them to drop all pretence of secrecy.