Purkiss sat back in the chair. ‘It’s going to take a while.’
Montrose said nothing.
He watched, poised at Purkiss’s shoulder, until the moment had stretched out to an unbearable length. With a sigh, he walked slowly away, back over to his own work station.
Purkiss kept his position, leaning back into the support of the chair in a posture of bored waiting.
His left hand crept into the pocket of his trousers and felt for what was inside. Carefully, his eyes on Montrose’s back, he extracted the end of the lead, inserted it into the second USB port. He shuffled slightly so that his leg was raised, his foot propped across his other knee beneath the desk, obscuring the wire which snaked into his pocket.
Purkiss reached out a hand, as surreptitiously as he could, and clicked on the menu on the screen. With the fingers of his other hand he rubbed his eyes, sighed in exasperation.
The window came up within ten seconds: Copying contents.
Cloning a hard drive wasn’t difficult, but the speed of the reproduction was dependent on several factors, among them the specifications of the parent drive and of the device to which it was being copied. The portable hard drive in Purkiss’s pocket was brand new, and had a memory which was an order of magnitude greater than that of the computer on the desk in front of him. The computer, on the other hand, dated back to the end of the last decade. It had a processor which might as well have been powered by steam technology, and a memory capacity of similar vintage.
The bar crept across the window. Download 11 % complete.
It stayed stuck there.
Purkiss called up the software he was running from the flash drive. The program had finished. He started it again.
The minutes on the wall clock ticked by.
At his own workstation, Montrose raised his head and stared at Purkiss, his eyes obscured by the light off his glasses. Purkiss waved his hand at the monitor in front of him, raised his eyebrows.
The window read: Download 87 % complete. Again it had stopped.
Purkiss leaned back in his chair again, stretched, closed his eyes in mock frustration. When he opened them, Montrose had risen and stepped out from behind his desk.
Purkiss glanced at the display on the screen. Download 92 % complete.
He thought: come on.
Montrose made his way across the floor. He was ten paces away. Five.
Download complete.
Purkiss pulled the lead from the USB port and slipped it into his pocket in one fluid movement as he stood up. He shook his head.
‘No good. It’s found nothing.’
Montrose crowded in alongside him, gazing at the screen. The program from the flash disk had run its course again. Please contact your service provider, was its sheepish advice.
Without ceremony Montrose withdrew the flash disk, prompting an angry message on the monitor about failing to eject properly.
‘Hey.’ Purkiss watched Montrose stride over to his own computer and insert the flash disk. He sat and explored what came up for a minute while Purkiss stood by, feigning exasperation.
‘What, you think I copied something?’
Montrose ejected the disk and tossed it to Purkiss. He looked put out.
‘As you said. It doesn’t hurt to check.’
Purkiss sighed. ‘Well, I’ll get out of your way.’ He nodded to Budian and left the laboratory.
He had no idea if there’d be anything of use on the cloned drive in his pocket. It had been a spare computer, after all, and it was too much to wish for to expect it to hold clues as to what was going on at the station. What Wyatt was intending.
But it was worth a look, because Purkiss didn’t have a vast number of options.
Thirteen
Lenilko’s office wasn’t grand, but one of the privileges of his rank within the FSB was the view from his window. Across Lubyanskaya Square, almost submerged as it was beneath a sea of snow, the lighted façade of Detsky Mir, the great toy department store, drew his eye.
He gazed through the window, and gave up trying to ignore the voice of his conscience. He’d done the wrong thing.
Right up until the very moment Wyatt had said down the line: ‘What is it?’, Lenilko hadn’t been sure how he would answer. He’d rung the satellite phone and, as expected, it had gone to voicemail.
‘Call me,’ he said tersely.
He had no idea when Wyatt would check for messages, but he knew the man would call back as soon as he received it. The rule was that Lenilko didn’t initiate contact. If he did, it must be for a reason of the most pressing importance.
Lenilko had tried to distract himself with work, but it was a lost cause. When the phone rang thirteen minutes later — he’d been watching the clock — Lenilko snatched it up and thumbed the receive button.
Wyatt: ‘What is it?’
And Lenilko said the words he now regretted. ‘John Farmer, Martin Hughes, is untouchable.’
Wyatt waited, and Lenilko explained. When he mentioned the man’s real name — John Purkiss — he sensed rather than heard Wyatt’s sigh of recognition.
‘Purkiss. Yes. I’ve heard of him. Five, six years ago he left the Service. His fiancee, another operative, was murdered by a colleague.’
Lenilko took this in. ‘He must be a current agent still. His identity will have been expunged from the MI6 records.’
‘Why, do you think?’
‘It’s unusual. He might be in deep cover within MI6. I don’t know.’ Lenilko closed his eyes. ‘In any case, my instructions are clear. You’re to keep your hands off him.’
There was a pause on the line.
Wyatt said, ‘Your instructions. Does that suggest you don’t agree with them?’
‘They are my orders, and therefore your orders,’ Lenilko said thinly.
‘Understood.’
‘Any developments?’
‘No,’ said Wyatt. ‘It’s gone midnight here. I’ve been taking apart the damaged snowmobile, the one Farmer — Purkiss — was riding. There’s nothing to find; it’s too wrecked.’
‘Then I’ll leave you be,’ said Lenilko. ‘And remember. Untouchable.’
‘Yes.’
Beyond the window, the haze of snow was letting up, allowing the night sky to seep through more blackly.
By conveying to Wyatt the orders he’d been given by Rokva, the Director, Lenilko was doing the correct thing. The disciplined thing. He was being a loyal, trustworthy senior FSB officer, one who bowed to the superior knowledge of those who had a far better grasp of the big picture than he did. He was doing his duty for Mother Russia.
But, if the situation were viewed differently, he was betraying not only his agent, Wyatt, but the State to which he had sworn his loyalty, too. He was granting a blanket protection from interrogation and harm to a known British agent operating in close proximity to one of his own men. Inevitably, he was compromising his man’s safety. And without knowing what Purkiss’s motives were for being at Yarkovsky Station, he had to assume the man was a member of the opposition.
By allowing Purkiss to retain his untouchable status, Lenilko was, potentially, aiding and abetting an enemy of the Russian state.
Lenilko turned from the window and looked at the picture of Natalya and the twins on his desk. Once, he’d have been able to share his dilemma with her. He’d have curled up beside her on the sofa with a glass of Georgian red and batted the broad principles back and forth, without going into the specific, she taking the devil’s advocate role and he arguing against the points she made, until he came to his decision. Now, the twins were her life, and she and they were increasingly dwindling within his, and there would be no further such sharing of his problems.