Vale knew this, which was why Purkiss was banking on his holding back. He’d be exasperated, furious even, but he might give Purkiss the breathing space to find a way in.
‘Sixteen hours left.’ Rossiter paced, terse choppy steps in a stereotyped route across the office carpet. ‘And nothing. No leads.’
Teague was perched languidly on the corner of a desk. Klavan stood, arms folded. Purkiss was the only one of them to have taken a chair.
He’d told them everything about his tracking of the car into the forest, the ambush and subsequent chase, and the death of the man over the edge. He left out the part about the satellite navigation unit. This time Rossiter hadn’t reacted with fury at his independent action.
‘I wouldn’t say no leads,’ said Purkiss. ‘We have what you’ve discovered.’
In the car on the way back, after Purkiss had finished his account, Klavan and Teague filled him in on what they had unearthed in the mean time. Klavan’s contact at the Ministry of Defence had told her that Abram Zhilin, the dead man from the toilet cubicle in the nightclub, had served in the same unit of the Scouts Battalion, part of the Estonian Maavagi or Ground Force, as Lyuba Ilkun. Ilkun and Zhilin hadn’t been exact contemporaries — he was six years older than her — but their time in the unit had overlapped by a year or so. Neither of them had been especially distinguished soldiers but neither had attracted negative attention, there were no disciplinary offences on record. Interestingly, both had left at the same time, five years earlier.
‘Of Ilkun there’s no subsequent trace until she turned up in the club,’ said Elle. ‘But Zhilin went to work for a private security firm here in the city. My contact found a reference request. Not an uncommon career move after the army. The firm still exists.’ She turned in her seat to face Purkiss. ‘Here’s where it gets interesting. The name of the firm is Rodina Security. Rodina is Russian for motherland. Their website is entirely in Russian, with no Estonian version.’
‘And Zhilin is — was — an ethnic Russian,’ said Teague. ‘Plenty of businesses target a minority clientele, of course. It’s just intriguing, given everything else.’
Elle: ‘Rodina Security handles routine work, according to the site. Bodyguard jobs, patrolling of private and corporate residences, countersurveillance.’
‘Any record of run-ins with the law?’ asked Purkiss.
‘We don’t know yet.’
At the office Purkiss remembered something and asked to use one of the computers. He called up the website he used to store photographs and downloaded the shots he’d taken of the man who had got out of the car along the coast road, the man he’d taken to be the one debriefing Lyuba Ilkun on Abby’s audio feed. The other three peered at the monitor. The resolution was poor but in one or two pictures the man’s face was clear: grim, set, the features of somebody with purpose.
‘Looks military,’ said Elle.
Rossiter: ‘And, dare I say it, Slavic.’
Elle switched places with Purkiss and emailed copies of the pictures to her contact at the Ministry of Defence. Rossiter stood looking down at the desk for a moment, then said: ‘All right. Are we agreed that for the moment our only lead, such as it is, is this security firm? Then we take a two-pronged approach. Two of us use every means at our disposal to find out what we can about the firm. History, personnel figures, finances, complaints, trouble with the police. The other two visit the firm’s offices and try to get an audience with somebody senior, on the pretext of wanting to hire them.’ He looked at them in turn, calmer, in charge once more. ‘Purkiss, you visit the offices. If the firm itself is involved in all this, they’ll know what each one of us looks like from the Ilkun woman, so it makes no difference which of us goes. But we have the local knowledge and contacts to do the financial and other searches. You don’t.’
‘Can’t argue with that.’ Purkiss stood and stretched, easing the stiffness that was beginning to creep back into his limbs. ‘Who comes with me?’
‘I will,’ said Elle. The glances shot back and forth between the three agents, too quickly to be interpreted, but Purkiss thought he knew what they were thinking: whoever went with him would be running a risk. Rossiter nodded.
‘Yes, it makes sense. A woman will be less immediately threatening.’ He removed his tie and handed it to Purkiss. ‘You’ll need this. It’s a bit late to get a suit.’
Elle’s phone rang. She listened, murmured a question or two, then said to the others, ‘My contact. The man in those pictures you took is Venedikt Kuznetsov. Former Scouts Battalion, same infantry company as the other two, but several years before either of them. Reached the rank of ensign, a junior officer, before being imprisoned following a court martial in 1994 for beating a civilian half to death.’
Rossiter said to Teague: ‘Get on to him.’
‘We’ve come across him already,’ said Elle. ‘He’s named on the Rodina Security website as their managing director.’
In the lift down to the basement Elle said: ‘If we don’t make some progress soon, we’re going to have to hand it over.’
‘To the police? The Service people at the Embassy? No.’
‘We might have no option — ’
‘If we do that, Fallon will get away. He’ll go even further to ground than he has already. He’s clever, he knows he won’t be able to escape the combined resources of two countries’ intelligence services while staying active in the field.’
‘But is that so bad? If it aborts whatever he’s got planned, keeps the summit alive, does it matter?’
‘It’ll only postpone his plans. And if he disappears now we may never have another chance to get him.’
‘You may never.’
He stared ahead as the doors opened. ‘If you like.’
She kept a pace behind him as he strode towards the car, then said quietly, ‘I wasn’t being snide. In your situation I imagine I’d do exactly the same.’
She pressed the remote control for the car’s locks, swung into the driver’s seat. Purkiss got in the passenger side. He pulled the door shut and then his head snapped round at her.
The gun must have been in some sort of holster on the side of her seat. She was left-handed and she held it low and pointing across her body at a slight angle upwards towards his head, the barrel grotesquely elongated by the silencer screwed to its end.
Eighteen
The word silencer was a misnomer when it came to guns. Nothing currently in existence would produce the tidy quip sound heard in the movies. Suppressor was more accurate: at best, the shot would be muffled so that the sound resembled a heavy book being slammed down on to a table.
The basement was almost empty and echoes were likely to carry, but with the car doors closed Purkiss didn’t think a suppressed shot would be noticeable by Rossiter and Teague, two floors above. Which meant that she might risk one.
He stared past the muzzle at her eyes. They were steady, unreadable. Hazel, he decided, though he was generally hopeless at distinguishing shades of colour.
She was a trained agent and no doubt a fighter but the right side of her throat was exposed, the pulse beating steadily beneath the skin. He could immobilise her in less than a second, except that her index finger was tight across the trigger and he didn’t think he’d have long enough.
A second passed. Two. She said nothing, made no gesture for him to get out. It was to be an execution, which meant there was nothing to lose by making a move.
Purkiss’s instincts took over. He turned his head a fraction to the right because a shot to the face was likely to take out his frontal lobes. A shot to the head from the side would almost certainly kill him, too, but there was the minutest chance that the bullet would pass through another part of the brain, the occipital lobe perhaps, and blind him but allow him to continue functioning for long enough to take her down. The long muscles of his limbs tensed in readiness for action and to reduce the amount of his body available as a target. The trick was to act before the breathing rate increased, as it inevitably would, because that was a giveaway to one’s opponent.