Purkiss closed his eyes to slits, just enough not to exclude all visual data. He drew a deep breath through his nose, centring himself.
Into an impossible cube-shaped container, with no visible seams, he placed mental images of Vale and Hannah. He could still see them hazily through the opaque walls of the box, so he thickened the sides like the cataracts in an elderly eye, until the faces within had disappeared.
Then he allowed the box to plunge, impossibly deeply, into the most inaccessible reaches of his being.
He released the breath. Opened his eyes fully. Found himself not in the tortured past, or the speculation-riddled future, but in the now.
Purkiss left the coffee shop, strode the length of the terminal towards an all-night car rental kiosk he’d seen earlier. He was aware of the soft peeling noise of his soles on the polished floor with every step he took, of the coffee-and-spices aromas breezing around him, of the murmur and susurration of a cleaning machine that hummed robotically past, its driver seemingly less alive than it was.
At the kiosk he considered the options offered to him. Technical requirements — speed, reliability, protection in the event of a collision — always had to be weighed up against the need for discretion and lack of obtrusiveness when choosing a vehicle in a hostile field. After a few minutes’ thought, Purkiss selected a two-year-old silver Audi saloon.
Even in the two hours since he’d stepped off the plane, the heat had built up outside. Purkiss glanced at a digital display on the terminal wall as he walked to collect his car. Twenty-eight degrees Celsius already, at half-past one in the morning. By dawn it would have reached thirty, at least. By noon, forty or more.
He hadn’t been in the Middle East for six years, and was therefore not acclimatised. It meant that any confrontation with the enemy would best take place in the next few hours, before Purkiss was at a distinct disadvantage.
The Audi’s engine felt smooth and beautifully tuned, the air conditioning kicking in immediately. Purkiss took it for a few turns around the car park, getting a feel for the way it handled. Then he headed for the petrol station near the exit. He filled up the tank, marvelling as he had done when he’d first visited the Gulf at the astonishingly cheap price of fuel, before taking the sign for King Fahd Road towards Riyadh, a little over twenty miles to the south.
Despite the bright lights of the highway, the surprisingly active traffic, the sky overhead was clear and luminous with stars, light pollution from the distant city having little effect here. Clear skies were dangerous, in Purkiss’s experience. They reminded him of happier times — Marseille, chiefly — and tended to have a mesmerising, lulling effect. He forced himself to focus on the immediate environment.
Night-time countersurveillance was tricky, because you could never be as certain as you could in daylight that the set of headlights behind you were the ones that had been tailing you since the start of your journey. But the highway was vividly lit in sodium, and by the time the traffic began to build up and slow on the outskirts of the city, Purkiss had identified the tag.
Forty
Riyadh’s broad highways and boulevards, elaborate mosques and palm trees all gave Purkiss the impression of a showcase city, a little tatty around the edges and without quite matching the garish kitsch of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
He used the Audi’s satellite navigation system to identify the Diplomatic Quarter, then took a deliberate wrong turn, braking late as though in frustration at having missed the road he wanted. As planned, he found himself in a one-way system and therefore couldn’t double back.
In his rearview mirror, the black Lexus hung back, keeping pace with him.
Purkiss had identified it through a simple manoeuvre back on the highway leading from the airport. He’d accelerated to overtake two marginally slower cars in front of him and had dropped in ahead of the first one. The Lexus, not wanting to lose him, had muscled in one car behind. His move had been unremarkable, unlikely to attract suspicion. That of the Lexus confirmed what he’d thought: it had been tagging him since he’d left the airport.
One car, then. Not so much a welcoming committee as a scout party, there to make sure he did indeed head to the Scipio Rand headquarters rather than going off and doing his own thing.
It left Purkiss with a dilemma. He was now in no doubt that if he ventured near the Scipio Rand building he’d be walking into a trap, one from which he was unlikely to escape given all the advantages the enemy had, knowledge of the terrain being one of them. On the other hand, if he very obviously avoided heading there, the person or people in the Lexus would become suspicious, and might surmise that he was on to them. They might call for backup, which would further tip the odds against Purkiss.
He needed to isolate the Lexus, somehow. Draw it away and create a scenario in which he could interrogate its occupants.
The commercial centre of the city was beckoning brightly ahead, most of the lighting from the windows and awnings of shops that wouldn’t open for many hours yet. Light traffic continued to pass Purkiss, a scattering of pedestrians, exclusively male, here and there on the pavements: workmen, mostly, maintaining the city’s infrastructure. Once, a police patrol car eased past him in the opposite direction, two faces turning to watch him as they passed.
On the corner of a quiet-looking junction, beside some kind of walled park, Purkiss indicated and pulled on to the kerb.
He climbed out of the Audi, not looking directly back but noticing the Lexus draw to a halt fifty yards down the street. Purkiss popped the bonnet, propped it open using the thin stick hinged to the body, and peered underneath.
Beyond the bonnet, he saw a man approaching. He shifted position and noted a second man advancing from the other side.
Purkiss drew out the dipstick, examined the end. He touched the radiator cap, winced.
‘Got a problem?’ said a man’s voice, in English.
Purkiss glanced up. The man who’d approached from the left side of the car was Arabic, in his late twenties, sleekly dressed in a business suit. He was the one who’d spoken, in slightly accented American English. On the other side, the second man was similarly attired. He was European, British-looking. Older, in his late thirties, maybe, shaven-headed and brutal featured.
‘Something’s not right here,’ Purkiss muttered, as though exasperated.
As he spoke, he saw the Arabic man’s hand move inside his jacket.
Purkiss grabbed the bar that was propping the bonnet up and twisted it upwards and sideways, yanking it free from the notch in which it was resting and at the same time wrenching it off the hinge at the other end. It was no thicker than his thumb, but rigid. As he swung it lefthanded in a backhand slash the bonnet crashed shut, the sudden noise disorientating.
The steel bar whipped across the Arabic man’s face and he yelled, spinning away and backwards, his hand emerging from his jacket, a handgun dropping onto the pavement. Purkiss swivelled and brought the bar whipping in a forehand motion across his body. The second man, whose gun was already in his hand, caught the blow across his wrist but managed to hold on to his gun. Purkiss moved in with an elbow strike at the man’s neck, connecting before he could step aside, the tip of his elbow driving into the mastoid process below the man’s ear. He wheezed and sagged, bouncing off the front bumper.
The first man was already up again and coming back at Purkiss, palms open before him in a fighter’s pose. Purkiss aimed a kick at the man’s torso, which he sidestepped in the direction Purkiss had been expecting. Purkiss smashed a hammer fist down onto the back of the man’s neck and he crashed against the bonnet, managing somehow to keep his feet. Purkiss drove a foot into the backs of the man’s knees. This time he went down, banging his head again against the metalwork at the front of the Audi.