He’d played her, and his lesser assistant Kenny, with finely honed skill. Giordano’s people in Amsterdam had removed the CCTV cameras from outside Jablonsky’s and Taylor’s apartments and sent the footage electronically straight to Giordano. The footage wasn’t continuous — Giordano hadn’t thought it worthwhile having continuous twenty-four-hour surveillance on his former partners — but rather in a series of bursts of film. The man entering Jablonsky’s apartment was the one Giordano soon identified as John Purkiss.
Giordano assumed back then that Purkiss was the killer, so he’d kept the footage from Naomi, pretending it had been removed, and had sent those two idiots, Campbell and Barker, to monitor the arrivals at JFK Airport. He was correct in assuming that Purkiss would arrive there, but wrong in thinking he planned to kill Grosvenor, whose murder occurred before Purkiss set foot in the US. Campbell and Barker, the idiots, had bungled Purkiss’s capture. If they hadn’t done that, Purkiss would have been in Giordano’s hands now for over eighteen hours and would have given up Pope’s name. Pope might have been taken down by now.
As for Nina… the watchers Giordano had put in place for her, Druze and Laymon and the rest, might have taken her into protective custody if Giordano hadn’t told them to hang back at first, keeping close to her but seeing if they could spot if she was being followed by somebody else. That was Giordano’s mistake and nobody else’s. If he’d let them take Nina immediately instead of trying to use her as bait to flush out Pope, she’d be safe now, and Pope would have no leverage.
If, if, if. If he could change the past, Giordano would go even further back. Of course he would. Now, though, he needed to focus on making decisions that would minimise the damage that was going to be done. He’d already phoned Naomi, apologising for his delay in replying to her calls earlier and saying he was on his way back to Langley. This was to head off any move she might make to put a trace on his phone, worried as she no doubt was about his failure to respond. He didn’t need her discovering he was in this particular building. She might send someone in to get him, and that would interfere with whatever plan Pope had and thereby jeopardise Nina’s safety.
He was going to die, Giordano knew. He had no way of avoiding this, but it didn’t matter. What mattered to him was that Nina not suffer. He had nothing with which to bargain with Pope, no hands to play. If Pope had wanted a simple swap, Giordano for Nina, he would have gone along with it without hesitation. But that clearly wasn’t what Pope had in mind. He wanted Giordano to suffer, and deep in Giordano’s mind, hidden yet present like a walled-up body, was the dreadful suspicion of what Pope intended to do.
Nine fifty-five. Five minutes.
Giordano placed his phone on the table before him, and watched it.
Forty-Five
9.50 am
In his career Purkiss had broken into more places than he remembered, both as an SIS agent and in recent years in his new role. He’d learned the correct techniques for picking old-fashioned mortice locks, had become practised in the art of using a credit-card or similar strip of plastic to crack a Yale; he’d also mastered the subtler skills of deception to gain entry into places he wasn’t welcome.
This time he went for brute force.
The pathway directly behind the building gave on to manicured gardens. A concrete sculpture in the form of a Greek god, some three feet high, adorned the edge of a pond. The garden was unoccupied. Purkiss had shoved his way forward into the milling throng at the front of the building, holding his passport aloft like a staff ID card of some kind and pretending he was helping to herd the occupants of the building away from the doors. He’d edged close rot the corner and, when he was as certain as he might be that nobody was looking directly at him, or at least registering what they were seeing, he slipped round it.
The statuette was freestanding. He lifted and hefted it, then advanced to the nearest window. The ground floor of the block seemed to be like that of a hotel, without apartments but instead taken up with offices and residents’ facilities such as the gym he could see beyond the window.
Purkiss swung the base of the statuette against the window, wielding the object like a hammer rather than like a battering ram. The glass first chipped, then starred, then bulged spongily inwards. He knocked the webbed hole until it was large enough to fit him; then he threw the statue aside and climbed in.
Another noise had started up — a burglar alarm, he assumed — but it was drowned by the steady two-tone note of the fire alarm.
Purkiss ran through the gym into the corridor beyond, turning once and then again and finding himself at a bank of lifts. Pope’s apartment was number 1926, on the nineteenth floor.
He mounted the fire stairs, prepared all the time to encounter somebody coming down but meeting no-one. He supposed many if not most of the people who lived here were wealthy professionals who were out at work.
His phone rang and he slipped it out as he ascended.
It was Berg: ‘We’re in. You?’
‘Yes. Any trouble?’
‘Just a little. I told the cops we were involved in a hostage situation but they had to shut up about it. Then we just ran and got in past the bomb guys. The cops are too busy with crowd control to come after us.’
‘Good.’ He reached a landing and said, ‘I’m on the sixth floor. Fifteen to go.’
‘But the apartment’s on the nineteenth storey.’
‘I’m going two up, directly overhead. One up and he might hear me through the ceiling. Head up to as near as you can get to straight opposite his apartment. The eighteenth to twentieth floor, probably.’
‘Got you.’
*
Purkiss reached the twenty-first floor and paused on the landing, catching his breath. A full-length window gave on to a spectacular view of the skyline. When he felt ready he moved down the passage from door to door, reaching number 2126.
The locks, four of them, took him five minutes. He fumbled at the last one and forced himself to slow down. Beyond, a plush furnished apartment showed signs of having been recently abandoned: magazines were in disarray on the floor and two half-full coffee mugs stood on the table.
At the far end of the living room was a set of glass doors opening on to a balcony. Beyond, he could see the Loomis Building stretching upwards. He unlocked the doors and peered out, the sudden air chill on his face. A helicopter swung past and he ducked back inside.
‘I’m in the apartment two floors up,’ he said into his phone. ‘I’m coming out for a moment.’
When he was confident no choppers were coming he stepped on to the balcony, scanning the building opposite and seeing nothing in any of the windows, before going back in again.
Berg said, ‘Yeah, I saw you. We’re around four flights down, diagonally across to your right.’
‘Stay out of sight,’ said Purkiss. ‘The moment you see anything in Pope’s window let me know.’
He hung back beside the drapes and waited.
*
Berg’s voice was low, but excited so that it sounded like a shout: ‘He’s there. Coming out on the balcony. He’s got Ramirez with him. He’s talking on the phone.’
Purkiss opened the doors of his own balcony once more and emerged, crouching behind the wall. He peered across at the sheer steel-and-glass face of the Loomis building, letting his eyes rove across it, allowing the sensors in the periphery of his vision to detect any movement rather than seeking it out actively.
There. Below him but in a straight line opposite. Two, perhaps three floors down.