The security leak, which had resulted in the sniper’s attacking Purkiss in his home even before he’d taken on the Jokerman operation.
The apparent coincidence of the gunman having been poised outside Arkwright’s house at the very same time Purkiss and Hannah had been questioning him.
Vale?
The horror grew within Purkiss as the rumbling of the plane’s engines rose to a roar, then a shriek as it launched into the vast and unknown sky.
Thirty-nine
Purkiss had travelled through King Khalid International many times en route to Iraq during his time there, and then as now he never failed to be struck by the enormous, city-like sprawl of the airport in the desert below the plane, or by the colossal mosque which dominated the passenger terminal as he emerged from the arrivals area.
It was a little after midnight, local time. Still, the terminal bustled as if night hadn’t fallen outside. The building was efficiently airconditioned but Purkiss had received a dose of the night-time heat as he’d stepped off the plane. Riyadh in August: not the best time for a visitor from a temperate clime.
Purkiss switched on his phone, waited for the international roaming function to kick in. He had one text message waiting. It was from Hannah: Call me.
She answered immediately. ‘I have Scipio Rand’s address,’ she said. ‘I managed to stay out of the Service databases, but I had to call in a couple of favours with contacts in the Foreign Office.’ She gave a street address in the Diplomatic Quarter.
‘Good work,’ said Purkiss.
‘Also, I’ve booked a Saudia flight for ten-oh-five — that’s half an hour from now. I’m at Heathrow. Landing time’s seven twenty in the morning at your end.’ She told him the flight details.
Seven hours to go. Purkiss had managed to catch a couple of hours’ sleep on the flight, and didn’t feel tired now. He wandered the length and breadth of the terminal, trying to look purposeful so as not to attract attention as a loiterer. When the shop windows had exhausted his meagre interest, he found an all-night coffee shop that served meals, and fuelled up with caffeine, carbohydrate and protein.
He thought about Hannah as he ate, and the night before. Had it been an outlet for the tension they’d both built up after such a chaotic, threatening day? Probably. But Purkiss found himself genuinely looking forward to seeing her again. He checked his phone for messages, but there were none. Why there would be any, he didn’t quite know. He supposed part of him was anticipating news from the hospital, news about Kendrick. And it wouldn’t be good.
Purkiss’s thoughts tacked back to Vale, no matter how he tried to rein them away. He’d thought it through, and there was no more thinking to be done on the matter. Not now, not until he got back.
Vale had deceived him once, over a complicated matter. He’d led Purkiss to believe that Claire, Purkiss’s fiancée, was the innocent victim of a murder by another agent. That agent had turned out to be one of Vale’s men, and on the side of good, whatever good was in this particular world; whereas Claire was corrupt. Purkiss thought he had forgiven Vale for his deception because Vale had had Purkiss’s best interests in mind, even if Purkiss didn’t agree with his approach.
But this… this was different. If Vale was mixed up in all this, working for Strang, then he was putting himself on the other side of an unbridgeable divide from Purkiss. Had Vale’s shakiness, his nerves, been the outward manifestations of a guilty conscience as he sent Purkiss, a man he’d worked with closely for half a decade, into a trap and to his death? Or was the older man simply human, prone to the drawbacks of ageing — tremulousness, faltering courage — like anybody else? Was Purkiss reading too much into it all?
There were the niggling details, though. The coincidences, the leaks. And treachery on Vale’s part could explain most, perhaps all of them.
A group of women walked past the shop, dressed in full-length abayat. Purkiss wondered whether Hannah would remember she was obliged to cover up or risk falling foul of the mutaween, the religious police. He also wondered how she’d react to being forbidden to drive.
Then he realised how different his attitude was towards her compared with other agents he’d worked with. Normally he took it for granted that colleagues had done their homework. Now, he was fussing over Hannah Holley as if she were a neophyte.
Purkiss shook his head. She’s really got to you.
The buzzing of his phone shook him out of his thoughts. He picked it up.
It was Hannah.
‘John, I’m sorry about this. I missed the flight. Delays at check in, and at the scanner.’
‘Do you think you’ve been compromised?’
‘No, it’s unlikely. Nobody took much time over me. Just large numbers of passengers to process, and too few desks to cope.’
Purkiss looked at his watch. One o’clock.
‘There’s another flight at six in the morning,’ Hannah said. ‘Seven hours from now. I’ve booked a seat on that. But it means I’ll be there with you only around two in the afternoon.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Can’t be helped.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘No point just sitting here at the airport,’ he said. ‘I’ll head into the city. Scout around.’
‘Don’t approach the Scipio Rand offices, will you? Not without me.’
‘I won’t,’ he said.
They rang off.
Purkiss sat sipping his coffee, thinking.
Don’t approach Scipio Rand, she’d said, and he’d agreed. But they both knew the temptation would be too great for him to resist. He wasn’t given to loitering about for any length of time, not when there was a target to be investigated.
It was of course entirely possible that Hannah had missed the flight. Heathrow was a notoriously busy airport, and it wasn’t as if Hannah could use her Security Service credentials to buy herself special treatment, working off the books as she was.
But it was also possible she’d deliberately not taken the flight.
The vast, echoing terminal around Purkiss seemed suddenly frighteningly smaller, as though the walls and ceiling were closing in, squeezed by the crushing emptiness of the surrounding desert outside.
If Hannah had missed the flight on purpose, it suggested that she knew Purkiss was going to investigate Scipio Rand on his own, regardless of what he told her. And that meant she knew he’d be walking into a set up. A trap.
His mind rewound and replayed the events in order.
Hannah, appearing out of nowhere just before the bomb in Mohammed Al-Bayati’s Range Rover had gone off.
Hannah, just happening to have found a notebook of Morrow’s with leads pointing to Dennis Arkwright.
Hannah, present at the interview with Arkwright at the very moment he had come under attack.
It didn’t make sense. It didn’t tie together neatly, or even at all. But, as with Vale, it was a series of seemingly unconnected little coincidences and oddities which, in the light of Hannah’s failure to board the plane, unsettled Purkiss.
Without turning his head too obviously he scanned the terminal, or at least as much of it as he could see from where he was sitting. People stood around or ambled or hurried, singly and in pairs and small groups. There was no evident surveillance in place. But then, if it had been obtrusive, it wouldn’t have been surveillance at all.
Purkiss felt the gnawings of unease which would, if indulged, progress to panicky helplessness. A rat in a corner, with no apparent means of escape, will lapse into acceptance of its situation. Purkiss was in a different position, because he didn’t know where the danger was, or which direction it would come from.
Except he did, in a sense. Part of the danger was internal. The corrosive effects of mistrust, of suspicion of those once thought loyal, could be every bit as hazardous as an external threat.