Wyatt spoke in a natural baritone, with a slight emphasis on the sibilants, and those two aspects of his speech came across clearly enough. There was even a moment when Purkiss fancied he caught a word — Purkiss — but he dismissed it.
Purkiss had gone straight from Medievsky’s office to his room, where he’d locked the door and taken out his briefcase and removed the surveillance kit from the false bottom.
It was a gamble. He’d advised Medievsky to send Wyatt to the generators to stand guard, and it was possible Wyatt would head straight there. But Purkiss knew Wyatt hadn’t been back to his room since the discovery of Keys’s body at seven that morning. Wyatt had been herded into the mess with the rest of them at first, and then had gone straight out with Haglund and Medievsky on the expedition to inspect the satellite dish. On his return, he’d once again gone directly to the mess with his colleagues.
So, if he was communicating with someone on the outside from his sleeping quarters, he’d want to take this opportunity to send a message before he was posted to a potentially protracted stint of guard duty.
It took five minutes, less than Purkiss had expected, and the sudden breaking of a human murmur into the silence startled him.
He listened for three minutes, at most. Then the voice fell silent.
Purkiss continued listening, heard the multitude of random noises produced by somebody moving about a room.
Silence followed. Purkiss knew Wyatt had left his room.
He put the receiver and the ear buds away in the briefcase’s compartment and stowed it in the wardrobe.
He hadn’t heard a word, hadn’t heard even what language Wyatt had been speaking in. But he’d confirmed that Wyatt had a line of communication with the world outside. The rhythm of his speech, the flow and the pauses, had been those of a man talking on a phone, alternately talking and listening.
Purkiss left his room and walked the corridors until he was outside Wyatt’s. He wondered what the man had made of the note he must have found when he’d entered, the one Purkiss had pushed under the door, asking for a meeting to discuss a technical point. Possibly Wyatt would have dismissed it as a lame attempt by Purkiss to lure him into a private conference.
This time Purkiss disregarded the risk of traps. He overcame the lock in under fifteen seconds, pushed the door open.
The room was as generic as Purkiss’s own. He searched it methodically and quickly, all need for stealth long past. It came as no surprise that there was nothing obvious to find, no phone or laptop or tablet computer, no documents, no passport.
He found the satellite phone handset, after seven minutes, in that oldest and most classic of Cold War hiding places: inside a waterproof bag, taped under the lid of the toilet cistern.
Purkiss pulled the handset from the bag and gripped it like an athlete brandishing a trophy.
It was, at last, something concrete.
Purkiss had seen the outbuilding that housed the generators a few times since his arrival. It was a concrete block, low and broad, some fifty or sixty yards from the west wing of the main building of the complex.
He reached the front corridor quickly, moving stealthily, ducking back once or twice when he heard somebody moving round the corner ahead. There was a risk that Medievsky or one of the others would come to his room for some reason and become suspicious when their knock failed to elicit a response. It was a risk Purkiss was willing to take.
His outdoor gear was hanging on the same hook he’d left it after returning from the trip to Outpost 56-J. Purkiss stepped into the snowsuit, zipped up, hauled on the heavy boots, pulled down the goggles. The suit was bright orange in colour, its purposeful visibility a potential handicap now. There was no way round it.
Purkiss opened the door and felt the cold leap on him, howling, as if it had been waiting.
He stooped and ran in the direction of the generator building and understood why it was said you had to acclimatise yourself to the tundra on a twice-daily basis if you were to function. He’d last been outside the complex twenty hours ago. Now, it was as if he’d been parachuted in after living for six months in the tropics. The cold was a flurry of needles stinging his face and his hands and his torso, despite their thick coverings, and spreading numbness through his skin and down, deeper, penetrating the layers of muscle and fat and breaching the hardness of bone to suffuse the marrow within the cavities.
He was gripped with a violent impulse to veer away, to forget everything, forget the mission, forget Wyatt, to hurl himself back towards the main door and slam it behind him and give himself over to the embrace of the heat of the building he’d just left. The building housing the generators was a theoretical construct, a compressed cube looming ahead that was as removed from Purkiss’s reality as a Picasso viewed in a gallery.
Purkiss narrowed his consciousness so that it focused on the building and nothing else. He pulled the building towards him.
It slammed against the side of his face and he gripped its sheer slick wall, amazed at its solidity, its actuality.
The door was ten paces to his right, a window in between giving off a faint light.
Purkiss crept along the wall, ducked when he reached the window so that he moved beneath it. He didn’t risk a glimpse inside.
At the door, he touched the wooden handle with his gloved hand. Turned it, infinitesimally, aware that his perception of time and distance was distorted by the cold.
Pushed it a millimetre or two.
There was the slightest give, not enough to open it even a fraction, but sufficient to tell Purkiss that it wasn’t locked.
He twisted the handle fully and charged through the door.
With hindsight, he understood that the terrible, overwhelming imperative to escape the cold had made him reckless, had overridden the precautions he would normally take when entering a room in order to surprise an opponent.
Purkiss felt the heat envelope him, deliriously, as he kicked the door shut, and the relief that flooded his veins delayed him because as he looked right and then left he registered during the second move that he’d seen something on his right but by the time he’d whipped round and dropped into a crouch with his hands raised and ready to deliver a blow that would incapacitate, it was too late.
Wyatt sat against the far wall on the right, on the floor, twenty paces away.
Behind Purkiss, the generators hummed.
Wyatt’s knees were drawn up, his extended arms braced across them. His right hand gripped a pistol, the left supporting it from below.
He said: ‘Purkiss. It’s about bloody time.’
Eighteen
It wasn’t the gun, or even the fact that Wyatt had got the drop on him so effortlessly, that disturbed Purkiss.
It was the fact that Wyatt knew his name.
Entire tapestries threatened to unravel. Had Wyatt been expecting his arrival, which meant his cover had been blown before he’d even left London? Was Purkiss by now so recognisable in the international intelligence community that Wyatt had identified him on first contact?
And, from the bleakest reaches of his mind, the nasty sewer into which Purkiss had first tapped last summer, en route to a possible ambush in Riyadh: has Vale set me up?
Beside Wyatt, propped against the wall, was a rifle. Purkiss assumed it was one of the ten Medievsky had mentioned, the small arsenal for use as protection from bears. It looked to Purkiss like a Ruger Hawkeye.
The gun in Wyatt’s hands was probably his own. A Walther PPK.
Wyatt said, ‘Lock the door.’
The key was in the lock on the inside. Purkiss complied.
Wyatt gestured him closer. ‘We haven’t much time. Sooner or later, someone’s going to notice your absence and raise the alarm.’