Ratcatcher

numbers to the current rump of a dozen. It was natural that vengeance should be sought.

Vengeance would be theirs, he’d assured them. All they could do themselves was kill the man, but far worse was the fate that history would inflict upon Purkiss: the death of his very name under the curses of a thousand million spitting tongues, day after day, for ever.

Purkiss waited until the man at his legs paused to adjust his grip, then flexed his knees and his hips, the sudden movement pulling his shins free from the man’s arms. He pistoned his legs so that both his feet caught the man full in the abdomen just below the ribcage, the force of the kick driving the man backwards and upwards. His head cracked against the frame at the top of the low doorway hard enough that flakes of plaster broke adrift. The impact against the man’s torso had pushed Purkiss back against the man holding him under the arms. The man stumbled back against the steps. Purkiss landed on him and jerked his head backwards, trying to connect his skull with the man’s face, but missed. The man recovered quickly, writhing out from underneath. Purkiss twisted his head round and got his teeth into the man’s right ankle above his low-topped boot. He clamped his jaws tight around a mouthful of choking sock and yielding flesh.

The man yelled and jerked his leg loose, the movement making him lose his balance. Still on his back, Purkiss braced his feet on one of the steps and heaved back and up, launching his head into the man’s exposed groin. With a shriek the man fell on his backside. Purkiss turned and found his feet. The man was already trying to stand but Purkiss brought a knee up under his chin and heard teeth gnash and shatter. The man sprawled and slid down a step before coming to rest.

Wrists still fastened behind his back, Purkiss squatted beside the man. With the fingers of his right hand he grabbed the grip of the pistol protruding from the man’s belt and prised the gun out. As the man he’d kicked down the steps rose in the doorway below, weaving, his own pistol out and aimed, Purkiss turned side-on and fired twice.

The first shot went wide and the ricochet whined off the door jamb, making him half-duck. The second took the man in the chest, sending him back once more through the doorway. From below, he heard Fallon hiss, but there was no time to go back, they’d agreed on that. Purkiss crouched again and searched the pockets of the man sprawled on the steps, duckwalking awkwardly around him until his trussed hands found what they were looking for inside his jacket. A mobile phone.

Purkiss straightened and pushed the phone in his back pocket. He took the remaining stairs at a run, horribly aware that he had no sense of spatial orientation and had no idea what he would find at the top or which way he should head once there. Another door stood closed at the top in the left-hand wall. He pushed it open with his knee, didn’t pause because there’d be no point, but charged through. He found himself in a narrow corridor, impersonally painted and uncarpeted — he was in some kind of office building — with no lighting of its own, but faint illumination coming from each end, a doorway limned in light to his left. To his right, a window looked out onto the exterior, swatches of rain flicking against the glass.

He ran at the window. Behind him came noise as the door opened and the shouting began. The window looked double glazed and wouldn’t therefore yield in time. He glanced back over his shoulder where two figures were crowding into the corridor. He aimed backwards and fired a salvo, one of the men howling and twisting away. The other crouched and wastaking aim and Purkiss fired again, dropping and rolling as the shots sang by and chipped into the wall. One of them hit the window and it starred and shattered. From the ground, Purkiss fired back, a low and sweeping volley. The man at the other end danced to keep his legs out of the way, ducked back inside the door. Purkiss was up and tucking his head as tightly as he could into his chest.

With as fast a run-up as he could achieve in such a short distance he launched himself at the jagged remains of the window and into the wet dark.

The shock of cold air and rain clutched at his breath. He landed hard on his shoulder and rolled, keeping the momentum going, tumbling over and over down a soggy slope of dirt and gravel, resisting the screaming urge to stop and look back. Somewhere far off he heard shouting again and the firing started. Dimly he registered that the bullets were relatively low-velocity because he heard the crump of the shots before the stinging whine as they sang past him.

When the ground stopped sloping and ran level he rolled once more and peered around at a crouch, taking a moment to aim, and releasing three shots at the window he had come through. It was almost hidden behind the hump of the ground he’d rolled down but he saw a figure twitch away. He kept low, below the hump, and ran along the edge of it, away from the building, which he saw was a broad two-storey office block of some kind.

The squall was surging again, sheets of rain lashing and cracking at the mercy of a puckish wind. Ahead of him was a concrete wall that enclosed the property. On the other side of it was a field. He reached the wall and tried to leap it, but without the use of his hands it was impossible. He fell back, gasping.

Purkiss looked back. From this distance the building he had vacated suddenly had a context, slotting in among the other parts like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle. On the other side of the building was a row of large, squat, oblong structures that receded away, floodlights illuminating the nearest one. A series of hangars.

He was in an airfield, and a largely disused one by the look of it. Off to the left, far behind the office block and the hangars, an assortment of aircraft shells sat and rusted, their incomplete, gutted state visible even in the silhouettes that were all that was visible of them against the night sky. To the right, disappearing into the shadows thrown by the floodlights, was what looked like a runway.

Figures were emerging from around the building, three, four, their shouts carrying faintly through the rain, their faltering gaits suggesting they didn’t know exactly where he was. He strained eyes and ears for the first evidence of dogs, but there was none. Purkiss thanked Kendrick silently. He’d disposed of all of them back at the farm.

On either side of him the wall stretched as far as he could see. The other side wasn’t visible from this close to the wall, but on his approach down the slope he’d seen the flat field stretching some distance before clusters of trees began to appear. Purkiss scrambled along the base of the wall to his right, where it was darker, and peered at an approaching shape. A shed of some kind.

It was dilapidated, and the wooden door gave easily despite the awkwardness with which he was forced to pull at it, tearing around the padlock. Inside, tools and mechanical equipment mouldered, red with rust. He found a hacksaw that still showed some silver in its blade. Squinting over his shoulder, he clamped its handle in a vice on the edge of a workbench and began to rub the plastic tie around his wrists rapidly against the teeth, feeling the serrations bite through his flesh. His arms sprang free and he flexed them, revelling for an instant in the sensation. Then he picked up the pistol again — another SIG-Sauer, perhaps standard issue with this outfit — and looked out through the door. He saw the figures, blurred through the rain, running towards the wall further back in the direction he’d come from. He stepped out, tested the door of the shed with both hands, and with a sharp tug wrenched it off its hinges.

He lugged the door over to the wall and propped it at an angle, thankful that it reached the top and that the holes punched in it by time and neglect looked as if they would serve as footholes. Instead of running up it, he headed off along the base of the wall on the other side of the shed, the way he’d been going.

His wrists were sticky, the blood black in the darkness. He thought, hysterical laughter rising and threatening to erupt: you’ll need a tetanus shot.

They’d left him his watch, a sports model. He pressed the button for the backlight, saw the time. Five forty- nine.

Two hours to go.

Thirty-Five

The first sharp noise had been equivocal, a far-off echo like something falling, and none of his men reacted so Venedikt disregarded it. The second could not have been interpreted as anything other than a gunshot, muffled to some extent by the intervening walls and the rain, but unmistakeable in character. It was followed rapidly by a volley of gunfire.

Venedikt was already running toward the doors of the hangar when Dobrynin began to move. Venedikt shouted, ‘Stay here,’beckoned with his fingers to two of the others — he needed Dobrynin and Lyuba unharmed —