Wyatt shifted again, adjusting his back against the wall behind him. For the first time his tone was laced with frustration. ‘And while we sit here, contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s all progressing relentlessly. Whatever it is. We don’t bloody know, haven’t an inkling.’
It was the perfect opening. Purkiss reached inside his jumpsuit, brought out his hand, saw Wyatt’s head snap back to face him and the right hand with the gun start moving.
‘Hell, Wyatt.’ Purkiss raised the phone handset. ‘I was just going to say, you need to call your handler in Moscow. Tell him, or her, that they have to provide you with more intel, and urgently. What’s the big thing Medievsky has been sworn to protect? No more bureaucratic secrecy. Time’s running out.’
The phone handset weighed perhaps one pound. The speed it could achieve once flung from a human hand, even that of an Olympic discus thrower, wouldn’t turn it into anything approaching a lethal or even an incapacitating projectile. But Purkiss wasn’t looking to disable Wyatt with it. Rather, he was aiming to shock and confuse, long enough to buy him the crucial seconds necessary to leap up and cross the floor and neutralise the man before he could bring the Walther across and fire with any degree of accuracy.
Because although Purkiss believed Wyatt, accepted that he wasn’t the one who’d tried to kill him or had actually killed Keys or sabotaged the satellite dish, he suspected the man was holding something back, something that Purkiss would have to extract from him using forced persuasion, the current euphemism in use by SIS.
Professional baseball players in the United States had been timed to pitch the ball at speeds of close to one hundred miles per hour. Purkiss estimated he could achieve a velocity of sixty per cent of that. Which meant he could hit Wyatt in the face with the handset in less than one hundredth of a second.
That was assuming his preparatory actions leading up to the throw didn’t provoke Wyatt into aiming the Walther and firing first.
He’d achieve greater momentum if he drew his hand back before hurling the phone. On the other hand, he’d lose precious fragments of time to Wyatt.
Purkiss released the handset in a kind of push, like an awkward shotputting move. It meant he had to arc it slightly upward to compensate for the reduced velocity.
As if the throw had triggered it in some way, the phone began to ring, the shrill hum as jarring as a banshee’s shriek.
The noise delayed Purkiss for a crucial second. By the time he was up and launching himself across the floor at Wyatt, the handset had ricocheted off the man’s partly averted head and Wyatt had the gun up and its muzzle loomed huge.
Purkiss got the wrist of the gun arm in his grip and levered the arm away from his face, at the same time jabbing with a half-fist at Wyatt’s abdomen, seeking the solar plexus but meeting his ribcage instead, a winding blow but not an incapacitating one. Wyatt grunted and tried to bring his knees up and succeeded, his bent legs forming a barrier between him and Purkiss. The blow to his chest had weakened him sufficiently that Purkiss was able with a twist of his wrist to send the Walther spinning from Wyatt’s fingers.
He released Wyatt’s arm and threw himself away from him and towards the gun and caught it before it skittered across the floor. Rolling, Purkiss extended both arms, the gun trained on Wyatt, who crouched against the wall, his face grey.
Between them, the phone handset lay on the floor, still ringing.
Wyatt watched Purkiss’s face, his gaze never dropping to the phone.
‘I need to answer it,’ he whispered.
Purkiss rose to his knees, keeping a bead on Wyatt.
‘You have to let me answer it, Purkiss.’ His voice was a fraction stronger. ‘Moscow may have critical information to impart.’
Purkiss gave it a second. The phone rang again, a steady one-tone pulse.
‘No hints of any kind,’ said Purkiss. ‘You’re guarding the generators, and have nothing new to report. Listen, don’t talk. No stress codes. I’ll recognise them. And put it on speakerphone.’
Wyatt nodded quickly and reached for the handset, grimacing. He hit the receive key, glanced away from Purkiss. Purkiss respected that; it was professional. When you were staring at somebody else in the room, it was hard for some of that intensity not to be conveyed to the person on the other end of the line.
‘Da?’
The reply came tinnily after a second or two. ‘Can you talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘The objective is now clear. In the vicinity of Yarkovsky Station there is the wreckage of a Tupolev plane. Somebody is —’
Wyatt rocked back on his haunches, his head snapping to one side, so that for an instant Purkiss imagined the phone had exploded in his face. Almost immediately after, Purkiss heard the smash of glass behind and to his right, felt the sudden rush of cold from outside as the window was breached.
He dived, rolled, coming up on his back and aiming the Walther at the window even as the next flash of light came, and the next in quick succession, and against the wall Wyatt jerked again and cried out once and slumped like a marionette with its strings cut. Purkiss opened fire, clean central shots at the square of darkness through which the snow was already beginning to swirl. He edged over to Wyatt, loosing another shot at the window to keep it clear. Without looking at Wyatt he grabbed him under one arm, his eyes on the window, and began to duckwalk over to the adjacent wall, out of the line of sight of the window, hauling Wyatt with him. He felt the dead weight, the utter lack of responsiveness.
Back where Wyatt had been crouching, the phone handset lay on the floor, the scratchy distant Russian voice erupting from it: ‘Talk to me, talk to me…’
Purkiss hesitated for a second, pulled three ways. His instinct was to fling open the door and confront whoever was out there. But he’d make an easy target, not least because the disorientating effect of the cold would slow him down.
He scuttled across the floor, keeping the gun trained on the window again, and grabbed the handset. He killed the call, cutting the Russian off in mid-sentence, and shoved the phone in his inside pocket.
Wyatt was clearly dead. All three shots had hit home, two in the chest and one shearing away the side of his neck. For the first time Purkiss noticed how much blood there was, a pool of it beneath the man and forming a smear across the floor where Purkiss had dragged him. The blood was already congealing in the cold coming in through the smashed window.
The hammering began on the door, so hard that Purkiss wondered if a battering ram was being used. He heard Medievsky’s yelclass="underline" ‘Frank?’
The door yielded to a battery of boot heels, splintering free from the mooring of its lock. Medievsky came through first, Haglund behind. Both carried Ruger rifles.
‘My God,’ muttered Medievsky.
Purkiss laid the Walther down, kicked it away. He rose, his hands held away from him. He was conscious of the glue of Wyatt’s blood matting the front of his snowsuit.
Haglund raised his rifle, sighted down it, the barrel steady on Purkiss. He motioned him over to the wall. Medievsky stepped over to Wyatt, gazed down at the body. He’d pulled off his goggles and his mask, and his mouth was a hook of fury and horror.
He turned to Purkiss.
‘Bastard.’
Nineteen
Lenilko had quit smoking seven years earlier after a twenty-a-day habit since his teens, determined to stay ahead of the statistical mortality curve for Russian males. He’d experienced cravings every so often in the intervening years, but usually when he was around other smokers.