Ratcatcher

choice would appear to be about money. In any case the crop-headed man had walked on past the bus stop and turned on to a pedestrian crossing. Purkiss boarded the bus, watched the man disappear into a multi-storey car park, not looking behind him.

Purkiss held on to a support pole as the bus tried to sway him loose. He focused on the feeling that was tightening his chest, trying to give it a name and thereby reduce its grip. Apprehension? He’d failed to reach the contact, Seppo, even before entering the field of operations. From the moment he’d set foot in the field, he’d been identified. Somehow Fallon had been expecting him.

Not apprehension, no. Fear.

On the plane, with nothing to read or otherwise occupy his thoughts for three hours, Purkiss had given himself up to memory, promising himself it would be the last time for a while.

In his mind’s eye was Fallon as he’d been four years earlier. Forty years old, average height, slim build, shortish brown hair. Nothing conventionally distinguished about his looks, but he had a smile that could charm the paint off a wall. He was erudite without being affected, a supremely self-confident Harrow and Oxford boy without a trace of arrogance. To the amusement of those who worked with him he always carried round a particular book as a kind of totem, a paperback copy of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Apparently he’d been reading it during the mission in which he’d most narrowly escaped death.

And, as it turned out, he was corrupt. Corrupt and corrupting, his taint seeping into the lives of other people, spoiling them irreversibly. Purkiss had left the Service after Claire’s murder, and while his colleagues accepted tacitly that he’d done so because to remain would have been to be reminded daily of what and whom he’d lost, in his more honest moments Purkiss admitted to himself that it was Fallon’s rottenness that had driven him out rather than the offer that Vale had subsequently made him. It was like refusing to live any longer in a house in which a body had been found walled up and decomposing into the stonework.

Vale had appeared out of nowhere during the trial, turning up every day and sitting in the same spot behind Purkiss. He was obviously Service or retired — the trial wasn’t being conducted in public and the spectators were being vetted carefully — but it wasn’t until Vale fell into step beside him after a long day in the courtroom and suggested they go for a bite to eat that Purkiss had any conversation with him. Purkiss’s instinct was to decline the offer. His social life had dwindled to a minimum since he’d lost Claire, and he wasn’t anxious to change that. But he was curious despite himself about this quiet, gloomy man, his Afro-Caribbean ethnicity unusual in a Service employee of his generation.

In the Italian restaurant, Vale told him he’d taken early retirement from the Service twelve years before, his story a familiar one of a former field agent unable to adjust to life in mothballs. In the seventies, he’d infiltrated Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow under the guise of a Tanzanian postgraduate exchange student, had his cover blown by a KGB agent provocateur and got out hidden in a freight train with a bullet in one lung. After that his deep-cover days were over. He spent the rest of the seventies and the eighties working the diplomatic circuit in southern Africa, in the thick of the proxy Cold War battles between the superpowers. The nineties brought him back to London and, essentially, desk work.

They traded war stories for a while, both aware that this was preamble. Over coffee Vale made his pitch.

‘One searches for a less hackneyed expression than the tip of the iceberg, but that, really, is what Fallon is.’ He shovelled sugar into his cup. Purkiss wondered how he stayed so gaunt, though he’d learn later about the sixty-a-day cigarette habit.

Purkiss stared down at his fists, flashing back to the man in the dock. ‘He hasn’t got a hope.’

‘Oh, they’ll convict him, all right. He’ll get life. But that’s because he got caught in the act. It was a stupid mistake he made, and his punishment isn’t going to deter anybody else, because all it will teach others is that they have to be more careful than he was.’ He steepled gnarled fingers. ‘When an agent goes rogue, the Service would prefer to dispose of the problem quietly. In a case like this, the murder of an agent by a fellow agent witnessed by yet another agent, there’s no question of any cover up. Justice has to be swift and merciless. But if Fallon had stopped short, been caught with nothing more than his fingers in the till… The top brass would have sacked him, yes, but might have bought his silence rather than prosecute him. The Service is still punch drunk after the Iraq inquiries and the catastrophic intelligence failures which were brought to light as a result. It can’t afford any more scandal, least of all the public outing of criminals in its midst. What I’m saying, John — may I? — John, yes, is that if you’re a member of the Service, whereas you might not quite be able to get away with murder, you can get away with pretty much anything short of that.’

‘And you have examples of this happening?’

‘Plenty. I’ve made it my business to seek them out. In effect, I’ve been doing what your fiancee was doing on a smaller scale in her investigation of one man.’

Purkiss studied Vale, trying to prise his way behind the gaze. ‘So why don’t you go public? Blow the lid off the whole thing? They’d threaten you with the Official Secrets Act, but you could find ways around it. Plant rumours, be ambiguous.’

Vale watched him in silence, his eyes and mouth serious. He reached across for the salt and pepper cellars and placed them a few inches apart.

‘You were what, fourteen years old when the Wall came down? Sixteen when the Soviet Union folded. Too young to have had any strong views one way or the other on the nuclear disarmament debate. I was against unilateral disarmament myself. Still am. I believed in like for like, matching the enemy’s destructive power with one’s own. But while many of us, most of us, perhaps, in the multilateralist camp were putting our trust fervently in the idea of deterrence, believing that if deterrence failed then it really didn’t matter who had more weapons, there were others who saw the annihilation of the human race in nuclear fire as not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the other side didn’t win.’ He tapped one of the cellars. ‘Better dead than Red, better rubble than roubles. I’ve no doubt such people existed on the Soviet side as well. Ideologues who believed ideas could exist without a population of actual people alive to hold these ideas in their heads.’

Some of the salt had spilled. Purkiss swept it into his hand and disposed of it on his empty plate. Vale said: ‘What I’m getting at, John, is that to blow the lid off, as you put it, corruption and crime within the Service is to take the fanatic’s approach. Let the whole structure burn as long as it keeps its purity. I don’t take this view. I believe in the Service. I want to save it from itself. But I don’t want to destroy it in the process.’

Purkiss learned a great deal that night, which stretched on into the early hours. Vale had had his eye on Purkiss, and Claire too, for many months before the murder. The man knew almost more about Purkiss than he remembered himself, not only details of his degree at Cambridge and his prior upbringing as the son of a Suffolk farmer and landowner, but names of people from Purkiss’s childhood whom he hadn’t thought of for decades.

Purkiss learned about drug rings, national and intercontinental, in which Service personnel were suspected of having a hand. He learned of deals between Western oligarchs and foetid tinpot dictatorships brokered by British agents. He heard about terrorist atrocities the commission of which had been assisted by undercover operatives, who had walked away scot free because the outrages had taken place in impoverished third world areas which lacked the blessing of a large population of lawyers.

What Vale was proposing was that Purkiss leave the Service and work for him instead. Purkiss’s role would be to track down and shut down the renegades, avoiding the ponderousness and potential for scandal which would attend the normal official investigative process.

‘You’ll be hated,’ Vale said. ‘Hated, and despised as a turncoat. But if we do this right, in time you’ll become a legend. And we know the power legends exert, the atavistic awe they inspire. Awe enough, perhaps, on occasion to deter.’

Purkiss asked Vale for a week to think about it.

Five days later Fallon was convicted of murder. The next morning Purkiss resigned from the Service. By the river in sight of Legoland, the name by which insiders referred to the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, Purkiss shook Vale’s bony hand. It was all the contract they’d ever have.

The Jacobin watched the monitor as the zoom on the camera was adjusted and the image sharpened. Kuznetsov’s man had chosen well, a position in a coffee shop with a head-on unobstructed view of the arrivals corridor. The other two men were among the crowd lining the railing, one of them visible on the periphery of the