Tundra (17 page)

Purkiss pulled the handset from the bag and gripped it like an athlete brandishing a trophy.

It was, at last, something concrete.

*

P
urkiss had seen the outbuilding that housed the generators a few times since his arrival. It was a concrete block, low and broad, some fifty or sixty yards from the west wing of the main building of the complex.

He reached the front corridor quickly, moving stealthily, ducking back once or twice when he heard somebody moving round the corner ahead. There was a risk that Medievsky or one of the others would come to his room for some reason and become suspicious when their knock failed to elicit a response. It was a risk Purkiss was willing to take.

His outdoor gear was hanging on the same hook he’d left it after returning from the trip to Outpost 56-J. Purkiss stepped into the snowsuit, zipped up, hauled on the heavy boots, pulled down the goggles. The suit was bright orange in colour, its purposeful visibility a potential handicap now. There was no way round it.

Purkiss opened the door and felt the cold leap on him, howling, as if it had been waiting.

He stooped and ran in the direction of the generator building and understood why it was said you had to acclimatise yourself to the tundra on a twice-daily basis if you were to function. He’d last been outside the complex twenty hours ago. Now, it was as if he’d been parachuted in after living for six months in the tropics. The cold was a flurry of needles stinging his face and his hands and his torso, despite their thick coverings, and spreading numbness through his skin and down, deeper, penetrating the layers of muscle and fat and breaching the hardness of bone to suffuse the marrow within the cavities.

He was gripped with a violent impulse to veer away, to forget everything, forget the mission, forget Wyatt, to hurl himself back towards the main door and slam it behind him and give himself over to the embrace of the heat of the building he’d just left. The building housing the generators was a theoretical construct, a compressed cube looming ahead that was as removed from Purkiss’s reality as a Picasso viewed in a gallery.

Purkiss narrowed his consciousness so that it focused on the building and nothing else. He pulled the building towards him.

It slammed against the side of his face and he gripped its sheer slick wall, amazed at its solidity, its actuality.

The door was ten paces to his right, a window in between giving off a faint light.

Purkiss crept along the wall, ducked when he reached the window so that he moved beneath it. He didn’t risk a glimpse inside.

At the door, he touched the wooden handle with his gloved hand. Turned it, infinitesimally,  aware that his perception of time and distance was distorted by the cold.

Pushed it a millimetre or two.

There was the slightest give, not enough to open it even a fraction, but sufficient to tell Purkiss that it wasn’t locked.

He twisted the handle fully and charged through the door.

With hindsight, he understood that the terrible, overwhelming imperative to escape the cold had made him reckless, had overridden the precautions he would normally take when entering a room in order to surprise an opponent.

Purkiss felt the heat envelope him, deliriously, as he kicked the door shut, and the relief that flooded his veins delayed him because as he looked right and then left he registered during the second move that he’d seen something on his right but by the time he’d whipped round and dropped into a crouch with his hands raised and ready to deliver a blow that would incapacitate, it was too late.

Wyatt sat against the far wall on the right, on the floor, twenty paces away.

Behind Purkiss, the generators hummed.

Wyatt’s knees were drawn up, his extended arms braced across them. His right hand gripped a pistol, the left supporting it from below.

He said: ‘Purkiss. It’s about bloody time.’

I
t wasn’t the gun, or even the fact that Wyatt had got the drop on him so effortlessly, that disturbed Purkiss.

It was the fact that Wyatt knew his name.

Entire tapestries threatened to unravel. Had Wyatt been expecting his arrival, which meant his cover had been blown before he’d even left London? Was Purkiss by now so recognisable in the international intelligence community that Wyatt had identified him on first contact?

And, from the bleakest reaches of his mind, the nasty sewer into which Purkiss had first tapped last summer,
en route
to a possible ambush in Riyadh:
has Vale set me up?

Beside Wyatt, propped against the wall, was a rifle. Purkiss assumed it was one of the ten Medievsky had mentioned, the small arsenal for use as protection from bears. It looked to Purkiss like a Ruger Hawkeye.

The gun in Wyatt’s hands was probably his own. A Walther PPK.

Wyatt said, ‘Lock the door.’

The key was in the lock on the inside. Purkiss complied.

Wyatt gestured him closer. ‘We haven’t much time. Sooner or later, someone’s going to notice your absence and raise the alarm.’

Purkiss pulled off his goggles, felt numbing heat melt his exposed skin.

He took a casual step forward.

‘Right there is close enough,’ Wyatt said mildly, not bothering to wave the gun or anything dramatic like that.

‘What did Keys have on you?’

Wyatt smiled mirthlessly. ‘Straight to the point. If you’d been like that from the outset, Keys might still be alive and we might not be in the predicament we’re in now.’

Purkiss didn’t let his confusion show. ‘Had he discovered what you were doing here? Is that it?’

‘You know what, Purkiss? It was only a short while ago, when Medievsky returned to tell me I was going to be standing sentry duty here, that I worked out who you really are. Not John Purkiss, I knew that already. But what your agenda is. You’re the Ratcatcher. The mythical figure sent to track down us renegade agents. The equivalent of the monsters parents tell misbehaving children will come and get them if they don’t toe the line.’

‘You believe that. Really.’ Purkiss had learned not to protest too much in situations like this. ‘No, in fact I’m straightforward SIS. But yes, I
am
here to find out what you’re planning, and put a stop to it.’

‘You admit, then, that you don’t know why I’m here.’

‘Yes.’

Wyatt shifted to find a more comfortable position against the wall, the gun never wavering in his hands. ‘And yet, you assume automatically that I need to be stopped.’

‘You’re a traitor. You joined an enemy intelligence agency while employed by ours. That means you have to be brought to book. It’s open and shut, Wyatt. No nuances, no moral dilemmas involved.’

‘Even if what I’m trying to do is in Britain’s interests?’

Purkiss sighed. He’d managed to inch forwards, subtly, so that he was two or three feet closer to Wyatt. It wasn’t enough. He could traverse the ten paces between them in two seconds. A bullet would cover the distance in a fraction of that. ‘The Soviet Union used to argue that Britain’s interests would be served by its becoming part of the Warsaw Pact. Spare me the propaganda, Wyatt.’

Wyatt said, carefully, his eyes fixed on Purkiss’s: ‘I didn’t kill Keys.’

He was inviting Purkiss to read his gaze.

‘And I didn’t sabotage the satellite dish, either.’

To detect a lie in the eyes, no matter what the words said.

Purkiss believed him.

And, if he was honest with himself, he’d had his doubts already.

He said: ‘Then who did?’

Wyatt raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s why I’m here. To find out who, and why, and what.’

‘On behalf of the Russian government.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Wyatt’s tone was matter of fact. ‘Your version of the facts is probably more or less accurate. I was recruited in Warsaw in 1985. During the nineties there wasn’t much of a role for me, though I remained an asset of the KGB as it went through its various permutations. Things have got busier in the last decade and a half.’ He kept his two-handed grip on the Walther, but raised the index finger of his left hand. ‘And before you ask what motivated me... please. It’s not relevant.’

Purkiss said, ‘Put the gun down, Wyatt.’

Wyatt frowned, but in an almost affable way, as if to say:
come on
.

Six inches closer.
Purkiss didn’t chance any more.

‘You’ve effectively told me that we’re on the same side in this,’ he said. ‘I’m hardly going to jump you. I’ve admitted I don’t know what your mission here is. You appear willing to tell me. I’m all ears. But that gun makes me nervous.’

‘Sit down,’ said Wyatt.

Damn.
That made it more difficult. But Purkiss could hardly refuse. He lowered himself to the  concrete floor, perturbed by how numb his legs still felt from the cold.

Wyatt dropped his hands to his sides, the gun pointing away.

‘The FSB picked up SIGINT data mentioning Yarkovsky Station towards the end of last year. Not just once, but several times. Nothing specific, but enough to suggest something was happening here, or about to happen. I was placed here to check it out. So far, I’ve found almost nothing. They all seem to be kosher, the staff here, even if they are an odd bunch.’

‘Do you suspect anything? Industrial espionage, the stealing of research material?’

Wyatt tipped his head. ‘It wouldn’t make sense. This is an international station, owned jointly by four countries. It isn’t some top-secret Russian facility.’

‘Then what?’

For the first time, Wyatt looked grave. ‘I don’t know, Purkiss.’

Purkiss said, ‘How did you identify me?’

‘Your name? My handler in Moscow worked that one out. I’ve maintained communications with him.’

‘I know,’ said Purkiss. ‘I found your satellite phone.’

He’d wanted to rattle Wyatt, and just for an instant he knew he’d succeeded: there was the slightest shifting of the man’s eyes, a movement at his mouth. Wyatt raised his free hand in an imaginary toast.

‘Just now?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so. You didn’t search my room before.’

‘No.’

Purkiss glanced away naturally, took in the immediate environment. He wasn’t going to reach Wyatt in time, not from a seated position, so the only other option was to use the surroundings in some way. To his right was the wall. To his left, a row of wall cupboards, seven or eight feet away.

In a pocket inside his jumpsuit, he felt the weight of the satellite phone.

He said, ‘Okay. Neither of us knows what’s going down here. There’s no obvious way of finding out. But something’s imminent, hence the cutting of the communication system. So we focus on who the culprit is.’

‘Yes. I’d agree with that.’

‘And?’

‘Who do I think it is?’ Wyatt looked away, considering. ‘Medievsky, possibly. He’s in charge, he’s well placed to hide evidence of what he’s up to. Montrose is another possibility. A dark horse. And Haglund. He’s the engineer, he could have rigged the explosion in the fuel tank of your snowmobile. Which was something else I didn’t do, by the way. And he was the first to discover that the comms were down.’ He nodded at Purkiss. ‘How about you?’

‘Haglund, yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘A definite possibility, and for the reasons you mention. Montrose... I don’t know. He’s too resentful, too uncontrolled. He doesn’t feel right. I think you’re completely wrong about Medievsky.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he told me during our recent conference that when he was appointed as leader of the team, some FSB apparatchiks ordered him to report any unusual activity at the station. It was some matter of national security, some item of interest in the region that might attract the attention of undesirable elements. All very vague and very KGB.’

He watched Wyatt carefully as he said it, and the man’s interest was definitely piqued.

Purkiss went on: ‘The thing is, Medievsky was completely sincere when he relayed all this. And genuinely uncomfortable about betraying a secret. He wasn’t covering anything up.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

‘No. I can’t. But you know when your instincts tell you something. Medievsky’s not the one.’

Wyatt appeared to think about it. ‘Any of the others grab you?’

‘Avner’s whole volatile, office-joker performance might be just that, a performance. But he doesn’t feel right. Budian’s in the running, though Keys’s death really seems to have shaken her. Clement, though... She’s cold. Unreadable. I know very little about what she actually does here, apart from watch people and make gnomic remarks from time to time. She’s one to watch.’

Wyatt shifted again, adjusting his back against the wall behind him. For the first time his tone was laced with frustration. ‘And while we sit here, contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s all progressing relentlessly. Whatever
it
is. We don’t bloody know, haven’t an inkling.’

It was the perfect opening. Purkiss reached inside his jumpsuit, brought out his hand, saw Wyatt’s head snap back to face him and the right hand with the gun start moving.

‘Hell, Wyatt.’ Purkiss raised the phone handset. ‘I was just going to say, you need to call your handler in Moscow. Tell him, or her, that they have to provide you with more intel, and urgently. What’s the big thing Medievsky has been sworn to protect? No more bureaucratic secrecy. Time’s running out.’

The phone handset weighed perhaps one pound. The speed it could achieve once flung from a human hand, even that of an Olympic discus thrower, wouldn’t turn it into anything approaching a lethal or even an incapacitating projectile. But Purkiss wasn’t looking to disable Wyatt with it. Rather, he was aiming to shock and confuse, long enough to buy him the crucial seconds necessary to leap up and cross the floor and neutralise the man before he could bring the Walther across and fire with any degree of accuracy.

Because although Purkiss believed Wyatt, accepted that he wasn’t the one who’d tried to kill him or had actually killed Keys or sabotaged the satellite dish, he suspected the man was holding something back, something that Purkiss would have to extract from him using
forced persuasion
, the current euphemism in use by SIS.