Ratcatcher

the bottle, dousing in the mixture, before removing it and emptying the sugar over the soaked cloth. He reinserted one end into the bottle’s neck so that it dipped below the surface of the alcohol. It wasn’t much, certainly nowhere near as effective as a petrol bomb would have been, but he wasn’t looking for something deadly.

He took out his phone. When Elle answered, he said very quietly, ‘There are at least two of them in her room. I’m in the one next door. I want you to phone the hotel switchboard and ask to be put through to room one one nine. Speak in Russian. Tell whomever answers that his orders are to withdraw. I’ll take your call as my cue.’

‘Understood.’

Purkiss used a chair to prop open the door of his room. He stepped along the corridor to the door of room 119 and placed the end of the keycard Abby had given him into the slot, taking care not to push it far enough to unlock the door. He left his door ajar. On his way back to the balcony he picked up the makeshift Molotov cocktail and the complimentary book of matches on the coffee table.

He waited on the balcony, the rain batting gently at his face, the enclosed layout of the courtyard protecting him from the wind. He had counted to twenty-two when the phone began to ring in room 119.

Purkiss lit half the matches at the same time, twisting and tilting the protruding length of towel, smearing the flame over its length. He watched it catch and begin its slow crawl towards the neck of the bottle. Faintly, through the closed glass doors of the room next door, he heard the man’s voice. Purkiss drew a breath. As he released it, he hurled the bottle backhanded against the glass doors of the adjacent room.

It smashed in a burst of flame and glass, but he was already running back down the length of his room and out to the corridor. He rammed the keycard home, waited the half second for the click, and pushed the door open. It was as he’d hoped, the phone was on the side of the bed nearer the door as he’d remembered it and the man was still there having just dropped the receiver. The other man had also backed off towards the door, recoiling from the shock of the noise and flame against the balcony doors. Purkiss charged the man at the phone first because he was nearer and caught him with a flying kick square in the chest. It slammed him hard against the wall, and as the man started to slide down Purkiss dropped and grabbed the gun half-grasped in the man’s limp hand and spun, keeping low by the side of the bed.

The other man was fast, already taking aim. The noise from the suppressed shot was like a heavy table being tipped over, and the duvet inches from Purkiss’s face erupted in a furrow of feathers. At the same time Purkiss fired, his gun fitted with a suppressor too. His shot caught the man in the throat, his head snapped round and back, and he twisted and crashed back against the television set in the corner.

Purkiss hauled the slumped man to a sitting position. He’d hit his head in the impact with the wall and was semiconscious, his eyes fluttering. Purkiss slapped his cheeks, drove a knuckle into his breastbone. Apart from a moan, the man didn’t react.

Purkiss pulled out his phone. ‘I have one of them. I need to interrogate him but he’ll make too much noise, and somebody might have heard something already anyway. I’m coming down.’

She said, ‘Got it.’

He strode over to the balcony doors and flung them open. The fire from the homemade bomb had already burned itself out. Purkiss craned to look up and down the iron steps of the fire escape that ran alongside the balcony. At the bottom was the courtyard, where he would be hemmed in. It would be more straightforward to go out the front door, though he’d have to get the man at least partly mobile first.

He glanced at the man in the corner, the one he’d shot and whose throat had sprayed gore across the television screen. The man was quite dead, but a few inches from his hand was a phone, its display still lit up as if it had been used in the last minute or so. Purkiss had been paying attention to the man’s gun, naturally enough, but hadn’t noticed what else he had in his hands. Had he had time to make a call before Purkiss had come through the door?

Purkiss’s own phone vibrated.

‘John.’ Elle’s voice, low and urgent. ‘They’re approaching the entrance. Four of them.’

Twenty-Six

Purkiss said, ‘Understood,’ and rang off.

There would be a back way through the kitchens, but they’d have that covered. Apart from that he knew nothing about the layout of the hotel.

He grabbed the man under the arms and dragged him to a standing position. The man staggered but he kept himself upright. He blinked vacantly. Purkiss hissed in his ear, ‘English?’

The man stared at him.

‘Russian?’

The man didn’t nod his head but Purkiss could see he’d understood. He said, ‘Come on,’ and, an arm across the man’s shoulders, he led him to the door, stowing the gun in the waistband of his trousers and covering it with his jacket.

The corridor was empty. There was no approaching commotion to suggest anyone had been alarmed by the banging. Purkiss hurried the man, not allowing him to stumble, towards the stairs. Instead of descending he urged the man up to the second floor.

At the top of the steps he pushed him along the corridor and round a corner. To their left the lift was coming, the numbers above the door counting the floors as it rose. It wouldn’t be the four others; they were unlikely to take the lift. With his free hand Purkiss gripped the man’s throat on either side of the tracheal cartilage and massaged the carotid arteries with thumb and fingertips. It stimulated the vagal nerves which in turn slowed the heartbeat, a trick Purkiss had learned from a doctor in Morocco. The man’s eyes rolled up and he sank. Purkiss held him under the arms and lowered his dead weight to the carpet in front of the lift. Then he slipped back round the corner.

The lift door opened to the murmur of voices, which changed to sharp cries. Purkiss stepped round the corner and saw a middle-aged couple crowding round the body on the floor. They looked like tourists. He strode forward.

‘Move aside, please. I’m a doctor,’ he said in English, with a Russian accent.

They looked up in bewilderment. He put a little impatience into the voice.

‘Move out of the way.’

The man on the floor looked awful, his face like the sweating underbelly of a fish. His breathing came in laboured rasps. Purkiss crouched beside him and lifted his eyelids with his thumbs to reveal a rind of white on each side. He felt his pulse — thirty-eight beats per minute but at least full — and peered in his mouth at his tongue.

He looked up at the couple. ‘You speak English?’

‘Yes.’ The man was American.

‘You know this man?’

‘Never seen him before. We came out of the elevator and he was just there.’

‘He needs urgent attention. I need to get him on a bed, quickly. Where’s your room?’

The woman said, ‘Well, I don’t know if — ’

‘Where’s your room.’

The man said, ‘Opposite. Two oh three.’

He walked quickly to the door a few paces down the corridor and unlocked it. He came back and took the supine man’s feet while Purkiss got a grip beneath his arms. They hauled him into the room and laid him on the double bed. Purkiss bent over him, busying himself, loosening the man’s collar, turning him on his side so that he wouldn’t aspirate if he vomited. He addressed the couple without looking at them.

‘Sir, I need you to go down to the front desk and tell them to call an ambulance. Don’t try calling from the room because they may not understand you. Their English is not so good here. Ma’am, I want you please to go upstairs to room 507 — that’s the fifth floor — and get my medical bag. It’s beside the bed.’

He groped in his pocket and took out the keycard to room 121. She seemed about to protest again, but her husband took her arm and they left. It was a tissue-thin story and it wouldn’t be long before they saw through it, but at the moment Purkiss was on a floor and in a room where his opponents were not expecting him to be. That gave him an edge, however slight.