Purkiss released the arm and caught the briefcase deftly by the handle with his left hand. He dropped the bolt cutters back in his pocket to free up his right hand and raised it, prepared for a counterattack by Billson. But his blow to the man’s neck had been effective, not quite knocking the man unconscious but stunning him. Billson slumped against the stone wall, his hands gripping the top to keep himself from sliding down. He didn’t look round, but rather shook his head as if in dazed wonder.
Purkiss ran.
He headed back the way he’d come, in a straight line away from Billson and directly behind him, so that the man would have to turn round fully to see him. The side street from which Purkiss had emerged, and into which he now plunged once more, led to a short maze of unlit alleys. Purkiss dodged and weaved, taking a different route from the one he’d followed while checking for surveillance earlier, before he came out on a broader thoroughfare. There he slowed, controlling his breathing, dropping to a purposeful stride. An informally dressed man sprinting though the streets with a briefcase in his hand would arouse suspicion at the very least, and might even trigger pursuit.
When once again Purkiss was confident he wasn’t being followed, he entered a small piazza, one he didn’t recognise but which probably, like most places in Rome, had some historical story attached to it. The square held a scattering of evening strollers, mainly tourists by the look of them. No police.
Purkiss sat on a stone bench and examined the briefcase. It was a plain leather one, neither brand-new nor battered, with two combination locks. He took a Swiss Army knife from another of his pockets and jemmied the hasps open, ruining the locks in the process.
Vale had instructed Purkiss to procure evidence that Billson was being paid for information by the Chinese. He hadn’t told him to examine that evidence himself, but Purkiss knew he was justified in opening the briefcase, and that Vale would see it the same way.
The case was full of paper, but not in the form of banknotes.
Instead, there were reams of A4 and A5. Some had Chinese characters printed on them, in the format of text or letterheads or sometimes both. Some of them were completely blank.
Purkiss didn’t read or speak Mandarin, or Cantonese, or any other Chinese language. He’d therefore need to keep the paper for scrutiny by somebody able to interpret the writings.
But he was fairly certain the writing was junk. That the paper in the briefcase was just that. Paper. Filler.
Purkiss placed the contents carefully on the bench beside him. He set to work inspecting the briefcase itself. The inner lining, the leather exterior. The handle.
There were no hidden compartments. No flash drives stitched into the seams. No microdots secreted behind the metal rivets.
Purkiss replaced the stack of paper in the case, closed it, and, holding it shut beneath one arm, made his way out of the piazza.
He didn’t go back to his hotel room. He’d done a comprehensive sweep for bugs, which had come up clear, but this latest development changed everything.
He had to assume his hotel was under surveillance.
Instead, Purkiss took a metro train to the Trevi Rione. It was a quiet area, but not so desolate that anybody could make a move on him without being seen. He found a cafe and sat at a window table with a clear view of the street. The noise level in the place was just enough that it would interfere with any long-range audio device which might be used to try to eavesdrop on his conversation.
Any known audio device. The Chinese regime might have, and probably did have, access to technology far in advance of anything the Western or even the Russian intelligence services were aware of.
Purkiss called the only number on his phone. Vale’s number.
During the silence that followed his thumbing of the key, Purkiss again ran through the scenario which had played out, and the possibilities it threw up.
David Billson, the suspected MI6 traitor, had received a briefcase in a clandestine manner from a man known to have links with the Beijing government. That briefcase had turned out to be filled not with money but with decoy material.
It meant either that Billson had been duped, or that the whole thing was a charade. One designed to trick an observer into believing that Billson was being paid by Chinese Intelligence.
The first possibility was so unlikely as to be almost instantly dismissable. If the Chinese were offering to buy information from Billson but reneging on the deal, why go to the lengths of handing over a briefcase full of supposed cash? All Billson would do would be to open the briefcase hours, or minutes, or even seconds after the handover, and discover he’d been ripped off. It would be far less complicated for his Chinese contact simply not to turn up. Presumably, Billson would have no redress. He couldn’t exactly approach his own people, or walk into the Chinese embassy in the city, and complain that he’d been tricked.
So Purkiss assumed the handover of the briefcase was for his, Purkiss’s, benefit. Which meant the Chinese, and very likely Billson himself, knew Purkiss was in Rome and had Billson under surveillance.
That in turn meant one of two things. Either Purkiss had slipped up somewhere, and his surveillance of Billson over the last three days since he’d arrived in Rome had been noted. Or — and this was of greater concern — there had been a security breach at some other, higher, level.
Purkiss had no idea what that “higher level” might mean. He was a freelancer, an independent operator who had once worked for MI6 but was now paid directly by Quentin Vale, a man who was himself once a British Intelligence agent. Vale’s current relationship with MI6 and the British government in general was unclear to Purkiss. Though Vale had access to funding and logistics which seemed impossible for a private citizen, he’d always given the impression to Purkiss that he was no longer in the employ of the official intelligence services. Purkiss believed Vale was answerable to some other governmental body, perhaps the Foreign Office or even the Cabinet Office itself.
It wasn’t Purkiss’s concern. His job, for the last six years, had been to track down and neutralise the rogue elements within British Intelligence. The ideological turncoats, the mercenaries, the petty criminals.
Purkiss listened through the silence, waiting for the ringing to start at the other end. Either Vale would pick up within a ring or two, or the call would go to voicemail. In which latter case, Purkiss would pause for two seconds before ending the call. He never left a message. Vale would call him back as soon as he got a chance.
The rising three-note squeak jarred in Purkiss’s ear. A robotic woman’s voice, English-accented, said: ‘Sorry. This number is not available.’
Purkiss listened to the sequence repeat itself.
He thumbed the end call icon on the screen of his phone.
For a moment he stared at the window of the cafe, at his face half reflected in the glass.
He popped open the back of his phone and removed the battery and went to the toilet at the back of the cafe and dropped the battery into the bowl. Piling a wad of toilet paper on top of it, he flushed. Waited for the cistern to fill up. Flushed again.
He strode out of the cafe, feeling the chill hit his exposed skin — it was as if the temperature had dropped from southern-European October balminess to something altogether colder — and broke the body of the phone apart between his fingers, scattering the pieces.
Vale’s number wasn’t available.
That had never happened before. Not in six years.
Vale had been compromised.