Ratcatcher

came out quiet, heartfelt.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Fallon was lashed to the chair just as Purkiss was to his, if anything more securely so, his legs bound one to each chair leg. He wore an open-necked shirt filthy with old dried blood. The whites of his eyes were webbed red and a cut beneath one eye gaped stickily. His nose appeared intact, but his lower lip was a swollen wedge of meat.

Purkiss understood, then, what Fallon’s stare had meant in the long minutes after they were left alone. The man had been utterly astonished to see him.

It was like a bizarre type of motionless, silent sparring. Purkiss did not know what to say, where to begin. Fallon clearly had lots he wanted to say, urgently, but his words were kept at bay by the huge, the all- encompassing fact that both separated and joined them. Spliced, thought Purkiss absently: that was a good double-edged word to describe the dynamic.

An hour passed, or possibly ten minutes. Neither man dropped his gaze.

Fallon ended the silence again, his mouth moving with the sticky sound of somebody deficient in saliva.

‘We have two things to talk about. One is more urgent. Why don’t we address that first.’

Purkiss said nothing.

‘Why are you here?’

Purkiss watched the face but the question seemed genuine.

‘I came here to find you.’

‘How did you know — ’

‘Somebody sent me a photo of you in Tallinn.’

Fallon blinked slowly, as if considering this.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Purkiss.

‘Trying to stop an attack on the summit.’ He coughed, broke off wincing. ‘Today, is it? It’s the morning of the thirteenth?’

‘Yes. There’s about three hours to go.’ Purkiss would have leaned forward if he could, the urgency beginning to take hold. ‘Keep talking.’

‘I’m on a Service operation. It’s why they got me out of Belmarsh. A rogue Service agent here in Tallinn is helping Kuznetsov, the man who’s holding us here.’

‘Do you know which one? Which of the three agents?’

Fallon stared. ‘You know them?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, I never discovered which one.’

‘Teague.’

‘You stopped him?’ said Fallon.

‘No.’

‘He’s still at large?’

‘Yes.’

Fallon closed his eyes, nodded, then looked at Purkiss again. ‘Briefly, I got close to one of Kuznetsov’s crew. A woman.’

‘Lyuba Ilkun.’

‘You know that, too. I was hoping to get on board the operation. I’d convinced her, I think. Kuznetsov on the other hand was suspicious. They grabbed me several days ago, might have been a week — you lose track.’

‘You’ve been down here all the time?’

‘No. They were keeping me in some kind of cellar until a few hours ago. Hooded me, brought me here.’

A cellar. It would have been the farmhouse.

Purkiss said: ‘You’ve been roughed up. What did they ask you?’

‘The usual. Who I was working for, who I was working with. It was pretty bad in the beginning — they’re amateurs at this but what they lack in finesse they make up for in brute force — but they eased up after a while. As though Kuznetsov realised he wasn’t going to get me to talk, and wanted to keep me intact until he could find out who I was by other means. They’ve left me entirely alone for the last day or so, apart from feeding me. And moving me here.’

Purkiss was thinking rapidly, sifting through conversations in his memory. ‘They don’t know that you’re Service?’

‘They might suspect it. I certainly didn’t tell them.’

It fell into place with what Purkiss thought must be an audible click. ‘They do now.’

‘How so?’

‘Teague doesn’t know Kuznetsov has you. Or at least he didn’t when I first met him. As soon as I told him and the other two agents I was looking for you, he would have got on to Kuznetsov and asked him if he’d heard of you, without telling him who you were.’

Fallon’s frown deepened.

Purkiss went on: ‘Kuznetsov didn’t tell Teague he had you, but I think Teague suspected that he did. It’s why Teague let me carry on, why he didn’t just hand me over to Kuznetsov from the word go. Teague wanted me to find you because he wanted to find you himself. He knew you were here to stop the operation, so he needed to be assured that you’d been neutralised. Later, I met Kuznetsov’s second in command, Dobrynin — ’

‘The one with the mutilated hand. He was one of my interrogators.’

‘Right. I told him I was looking for you and that you were a former SIS agent. I did it to gauge his reaction. He looked delighted.’

‘So why would Kuznetsov hang on to me after he’d learned who I was, and why has he kept it a secret from Teague?’

‘Maybe — ’ Purkiss stopped. There was no maybe. He didn’t know.

They fell silent, Purkiss listening for footsteps, Kuznetsov’s men returning to tell them to stop talking. None came.

‘Do you know what’s planned for the summit?’ said Fallon.

‘The assassination of the Russian president.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

Again Fallon shook his head. ‘The closest I got to finding anything out was when Lyuba used to talk about the “event”. All very abstract.’

Purkiss felt the unspoken thing rising between them again. It wasn’t time, yet, and he said: ‘All right. A full debrief.’

‘Agreed.’

‘You first.’

On the screen a reporter, one of the network’s heavyweights and looking unfeasibly bright and awake given the hour, yammered away against the backdrop of the Memorial. Police bearing very visible light arms hove into view from time to time, not accidentally. At the bottom of the screen a ticker tape relayed information about little else. Every now and again the picture cut away to the hotel where the president was staying overnight, an aerial shot making the early morning helicopters look like circling moths.

Venedikt drank tea, replenishing his glass as quickly as he emptied it. On the screen a related human-interest piece showed a group of young people in Moscow raising a raucous toast to their new friends in Estonia. This was followed by the now-familiar footage of the president arriving at the reception banquet the night before. As the camera closed on his face, Venedikt raised his own glass.

The supreme sacrifice, tovarisch. Just as his grandfather had made.

And a brilliant plan, meticulously conceived, was now going to be made perfect. All along, Kuznetsov had striven not to leave any fingerprints. In a few hours from now, when the world was picking over the pieces,