‘But you must have speculated about it.’
Medievsky shrugged. ‘I assume there is some sort of government base nearby that we don’t know about. Military, perhaps.’
Was that it? Purkiss wondered. Had the site of the mammoth fossils, the Nekropolis, been taken over for military purposes? But why that particular locale?
‘It seems we’re on the same side here, Oleg,’ said Purkiss. ‘In answer to your question about the security breach I’m here to investigate: my employers are being as tight-lipped as your visitors, as you call them. I don’t know quite what I’m looking for, either. I’ve just been told to watch out for suspicious behaviour among the staff at this station, and to look into it further.’
‘Then I am prepared to cooperate with you,’ said Medievsky. ‘Within the bounds of reason, and of my responsibility to this station and my team.’ He stood up. ‘I will interview the others, for completeness’ sake. And I will tell Frank to stand guard over the generators.’
Purkiss rose also. ‘How long will it be before anyone on the outside notices we’ve been cut off?’
‘Forty eight hours,’ Medievsky said immediately. ‘We establish routine contact every two days with Moscow and London and New York. The weather here causes temporary connection failures from time to time, so a loss of contact for twenty four hours isn’t considered remarkable.’
‘And the nearest manned location is the other station to the north?’
‘Correct. Saburov-Kennedy Station, almost one hundred and forty kilometres away. But the terrain in between is harsh, John. Harsher than anything you have seen so far. There is no road. It would be hazardous in the extreme to try to make the journey.’ He gestured around him. ‘We have food and fuel to last us many times over. Forty eight hours, and assistance will come.’
Unless something else happens first, thought Purkiss.
Sixteen
The call came at ten past ten in the morning, an hour after Lenilko had returned to the office.
He’d left, finally, at eleven the previous evening. Natalya had greeted him with less hostility than he’d been expecting. The twins were fast asleep.
‘I’ll spend some time with them tomorrow,’ he promised. And he had, waking at seven to prepare Sunday breakfast for them all, romping with them on the new carpet of the apartment’s living room floor. He’d left standing instructions for any call from Yarkovsky Station to be routed to his personal cell phone, but it had stayed silent through the night.
At eight thirty, with a sense of guilt assuaged, which made him feel guilty in itself, Lenilko set off through the new snowfall to Lubyanskaya Square.
When Anna put the call through to his office, he detected a trace of her usual exuberance again. She was one of only four of five other staff in on a Sunday, and as he’d expected had got there before him, her greeting pleasant but nervous.
From nearly six thousand kilometres away, Wyatt’s voice said: ‘There have been major developments.’
Lenilko felt his pulse stir. He glanced at the time-zone clock on the wall. Just after four p.m. in Yakutsk.
‘The doctor, Keys, was killed last night. And the satellite link is down. The dish has been sabotaged.’
Lenilko listened to Wyatt’s concise, impassive account with a growing excitement, avoiding interruptions until it was clear Wyatt had finished. He said: ‘Purkiss?’
‘I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel right.’
‘Why the doctor?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
Lenilko breathed deeply. The sabotage of the communication system meant some kind of action was imminent.
Wyatt asked, ‘What am I looking for, exactly?’
‘I’ll find out.’
‘Time’s short.’
‘I know,’ said Lenilko.
‘Medievsky’s told me to guard the generators. I’m on my way there after this.’
Lenilko thought about it. ‘He trusts you.’
‘Or he wants me out of the way for a while.’ Wyatt paused. ‘Purkiss may have put him up to it. The two of them have just been talking in private.’
Lenilko closed his eyes. Yes. Of course it had been Purkiss.
With a sense of stepping off the edge of a precipice, he made his decision.
‘My order to you yesterday. About treating Purkiss as an untouchable.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m revoking it.’
Silence for a few seconds.
Wyatt said: ‘You’ve received new orders?’
‘Whether or not I have is my business. You take your orders from me.’
‘Yes. I understand.’
‘Call me three hours from now, if you can,’ said Lenilko. ‘Regardless of whether you’ve learned anything new.’
‘Yes.’
Lenilko put down the handset and turned gently in his office chair, one way and then the other.
The second satellite dish had been his idea, something he didn’t regard as a stroke of genius so much as a prudent precautionary measure. There was always the possibility of the Siberian storms knocking out the main communication system, and that would have cut Wyatt off entirely. Engineers employed directly through Lenilko’s department had installed the dish twenty-five kilometres to the south east of Yarkovsky Station a week before Wyatt’s arrival there.
Wyatt was right. Time was short, and Lenilko didn’t know what Wyatt was looking for. He owed it to his agent, and to himself, to find out.
He picked up the phone, his gut tight.
‘Anna. Get me Director Rokva. Yes, at home.’
He replaced the phone and waited.
The restaurant was no more than a quarter full, caught as it was between the breakfast and lunch surges. Many of the people at the tables looked as if they’d come in only to escape the cold.
Rokva was there already, alone in a corner booth. He’d ordered tea for them both. There’d be bodyguards nearby, but Lenilko failed to identify them among the clientele of the restaurant.
‘Semyon Vladimirovich,’ said the Director, after Lenilko had sat down. ‘You understand what it means, that I’ve asked you to meet here.’
‘Yes, sir.’ When Rokva had called back, Lenilko had said he needed to talk to him about the Yarkovsky Station project. Rokva interrupted him immediately, telling him to be at the restaurant in twenty minutes. Not his own office in the Lubyanka, not one of the usual dining venues frequented by officers of the FSB, but this middling establishment several blocks from Red Square. It meant that Rokva wanted to minimise the risk of their conversation being overheard. Audio surveillance was less likely here than even in his Lubyanka office.
Rokva poured tea, added lemon to his cup. When he looked up expectantly, Lenilko realised he himself was supposed to start the ball rolling.
‘You no doubt know the essentials of my Yarkovsky Station operation, sir. I have an asset at the station, the Briton, Francis Wyatt. I placed him there in response to chatter on the Spetssvyaz channels, in which Yarkovsky Station was starting to come up as a topic too frequently for it to be coincidental.’
Spetssvyaz, the Special Communications and Information Service, was the Russian Federation’s cryptologic intelligence agency, the service dedicated to among other things the interception and analysis of foreign communications. It was the approximate equivalent of the National Security Agency of the United States. Its relations with the FSB’s various departments were complex, and its willingness to share information varied. The agency would sometimes release raw data to the FSB, leaving it to do the analysis. It was a series of these data dumps which had alerted Lenilko to the mentions of Yarkovsky Station, though the context was too garbled to bear analysis.