He replaced the panel and pressed it into place. Reaching blindly into his pocket, the narrow space restricting his ability to manoeuvre, Purkiss brought out the transmitter, no bigger than a fifty pence piece. Kneeling precariously on two steel beams, the ceiling pressing against his back, he attached a tiny clip to the transmitter and affixed it to the edge of one of the beams, in a spot where it wouldn’t be knocked free if the ceiling panels beneath were pushed aside. The transmitter jutted up like a small stud. It would be discovered easily if anything more than the most cursory search was carried out. But it would have to do.
Purkiss turned within the space in a wide, ungainly arc, and made his way back to the gap in the ceiling above his own room. Once inside, he stowed the rest of the apparatus in the false bottom of the briefcase. There was no use for it yet, not until Wyatt returned.
On his way towards the west wing and the laboratories, Purkiss tried to fit the pieces together.
In the early hours of the morning, someone had accosted Keys in the infirmary, overpowered him, and strangled him, cutting his wrist to make it appear he’d committed suicide. The deception was a clumsy one, and wouldn’t stand up to proper forensic examination, but Purkiss assumed that wasn’t the point. The illusion of suicide was supposed to be a short-term one, to divert suspicion temporarily. Which meant that the killer — Wyatt — was buying time.
Why had Keys been in the infirmary at that hour of the night? It was possible he’d gone for a heroin fix, but it seemed an odd time for an addict to need one. No: Purkiss thought Keys had been lured there. Either someone — Wyatt — had summoned him, citing acute illness, or whoever it was that had leverage over Keys, that knew about his addiction, had demanded a meeting there.
Wyatt remained the most likely perpetrator. But Purkiss was aware of the dangers of dismissing other possibilities out of hand, no matter how fanciful they seemed. It was plausible that one of the others was blackmailing Wyatt, and had met him in the night to issue further threats and to question him about what he had told the journalist Farmer earlier that evening. An argument might have intensified into a physical struggle, and the killing may have been an unintended consequence.
There was the other matter of the disrupted communication with the outside world. It could turn out to be the result of weather damage to the satellite dish. But Purkiss knew that was a coincidence too far. Somebody — and this time Wyatt was the only plausible candidate — had sabotaged it, either the dish itself or some other component in the communications chain. Medievsky had said the dish was located forty kilometres to the west of Yarkovsky Station. Wyatt could have taken one of the snowmobiles in the dead of night, either before or after he’d killed Keys, and made the round trip in an hour, assuming the weather and terrain permitted it.
Once again, the reasons for the sabotage weren’t clear. Sooner or later, contact would be re-established, not least because the outside world would start to get suspicious and investigate. It suggested again that Wyatt was buying time, or more accurately borrowing it. Which meant he had something pressing on his mind, some action or event.
But by breaking the line of communication with the outside, Wyatt was cutting himself off as well. Two explanations came to mind. Either he was operating entirely independently, and had no need to keep in touch with anyone beyond the station. Or, more likely, he had some other method of contact, perhaps a link via a second satellite dish which was unknown to Medievsky and the others.
Purkiss suspected the second, which was why he’d planted the surveillance device in the ceiling above Wyatt’s room. It was a long shot. Wyatt might not even be communicating from his room. But Purkiss’s options at this point were limited.
He hadn’t brought any kind of weapon to Yarkovsky Station, not least because he wouldn’t have got it past the several airport security checkpoints he’d passed through on the journey from London. The surveillance equipment was more easily smuggled, and from the outset Purkiss had been looking for an opportunity to use it.
He found Montrose in the main laboratory with Budian, both of them working at separate desks. Montrose glanced up as Purkiss put his head round the door. The harsh light from overhead flashed off his spectacles.
‘Dr Montrose. Ryan. Could I have a word?’
He’d expected reluctance, but Montrose stood up immediately and came over, his face grim. ‘What is it?’
‘In private?’ Purkiss murmured, glancing over at Budian, who didn’t look up. She still looked ashen. Next to Avner, she seemed to be taking Keys’s death more badly than any of them.
Montrose led the way down the corridor to his own office. Inside, after he’d closed the door, he said again, ‘What?’
‘I’m at a loose end here now,’ said Purkiss. ‘I can’t continue with the interviews, not after what’s happened.’
‘And?’
‘You’re in charge of the station in Oleg’s absence. I wanted to ask if I could be of some use.’
‘How?’
‘I have some IT skills. Let me use one of the computers, see if I can work on the internet connection.’
‘It’s the satellite system that’s down. The dish, probably. The fault’s not with the computers.’
Purkiss pulled a flash drive from his pocket. ‘I have a program on here that runs an advanced diagnostic check on connection problems. It’s worth a try, even if only to confirm what we already suspect.’
Montrose peered into Purkiss’s face. ‘Why didn’t you mention this earlier?’
Purkiss glanced away in embarrassment. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t think of it. I’d forgotten I had the program with me. It was only a few minutes ago, when I was working on my laptop and inserted this drive for something else, that I noticed it.’
Montrose took a step back. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Why?’
Montrose blinked, as if he hadn’t been expecting Purkiss to question him. ‘Because there’s classified data on these machines. We can’t have some journalist accessing them.’
‘So find me a spare. A PC that’s linked up but doesn’t have anything on it I shouldn’t be looking at.’
Montrose hesitated. Purkiss could almost hear the calculations gong on in the man’s mind. If Purkiss succeeded, Montrose could share the credit for it. It would be one in the eye for Medievsky.
Purkiss shrugged. ‘Look, it was just a thought. Forget it.’ He turned for the door.
Montrose opened it, jerked his head. ‘Come with me.’ His face was impassive, but Purkiss knew he’d won.
Back in the laboratory, Montrose indicated a desktop computer that looked at least five years old. ‘That one doesn’t get used much.’
Purkiss seated himself at the office chair and started up the computer. He said, ‘You can watch over my shoulder if you want. Make sure I’m not stealing anybody’s secrets.’
‘I’ll do that.’
The computer took an age to boot, the back-and-forth whirring cutting through the silence of the laboratory. Purkiss waited patiently. He’d noticed the two USB ports on the body of the unit as he sat down.
At last the desktop presented itself on the monitor, together with a prompt for a username and password. Montrose said: ‘Avert your eyes,’ and reached in past Purkiss. He tapped on the keyboard.
Purkiss looked again after a safe interval. The wallpaper was a motif featuring the flags of the five nations participating in the Yarkovsky Station project. He plugged the flash disk into one of the USB ports.
The disk held a number of files, all of them titled with obscure monikers. He selected one and opened it.
The program began its search. He saw the hourglass freezing, heard the renewed churning of the moving parts within the computer. The machine’s age would buy him some time.