Alone in his office, he was glad he’d got rid of the pack he used to keep in his desk drawer in order to test his resolve. Because he knew there was no chance he’d be able to resist now.
As he did with all calls on the satellite phone, he’d recorded this one. He played it back.
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 —
Then the cry of pain, the sound of glass shattering and the clatter as the handset was dropped. Followed by two sharp reports, distant but unmistakeable: small arms fire.
Lenilko listened to his own voice. What’s happening… are you shot… talk to me.
A volley of new shots, closer this time, from a different handgun. Sounds of scuffling and rasping static.
Then a click as the call was ended.
Lenilko stood at his desk, picked up the phone. His thumb hung poised over the call button.
Wyatt wouldn’t answer. He was certain of it.
Lenilko wondered, his thoughts detached, if Wyatt too had been recording the calls. If so, whoever now had the handset would also have the message about the Tupolev aircraft, the one Lenilko had been in the middle of conveying when the shots had come.
He took his thumb away from the key but continued to hold the handset, as if it might somehow tell him what had gone on at the other end.
The realisation crept through his veins, his marrow, where he couldn’t ignore it.
The mission was compromised. No. The mission was blown. His contact with Yarkovsky Station was terminated. So was his asset on the ground.
Lenilko had to assume the opposition had discovered the whereabouts of the crashed Tupolev, which was why they were upping the ante, severing communication links. They were buying time while they took what they were after from the aircraft. Action on their part was imminent. Delay on Moscow’s part would be fatal.
Which meant Lenilko had to do what Rokva had originally ordered him to. He had to hand over the case to Counter-Terrorism as a matter of urgency. Had to recognise that he was out of his depth, had failed, and that more reliable hands than his were required to take control of the situation.
Shame burned in him, clawed at his innards.
For a full twenty minutes he stood before the window, watching the Sunday families picking their way across the snow-carpeted square below on the way to the toy store, no longer scurrying in dread before the Lubyanka’s presence as they would have done thirty years before.
Twenty minutes, every one of them a further delay, every one of them a nail driven into the coffin of the guilt within which he felt encased.
He had no alternatives. There was no point in debating himself, and debasing himself. His humiliation was complete. No point in adding criminal negligence to his failings.
Lenilko returned to his desk and, still standing, picked up the office phone.
‘Anna,’ he said. ‘Get me Director Eshman, please. Yes, Counter-Terrorism.’
His heart leapt, the sudden shock preventing him from breathing for a few seconds. It was only then that he fully registered what was happening.
In his other hand, the satellite phone had begun to ring.
At the front door Medievsky barged ahead of Purkiss and flung it open and stood aside with the rifle readied. Haglund jabbed Purkiss in the back, herding him through. The warmth flooded Purkiss, affording blessed relief despite the circumstances.
Medievsky faced him, unwilling to turn his back on Purkiss, and walked backwards down the corridor.
‘Oleg,’ said Purkiss.
Behind him, Haglund muttered: ‘Shut up.’
Purkiss hadn’t had a chance to say anything in the generator room. The two men had hustled him outside without delay, and during the short trot back to the main building, the keening of the wind had been such that Purkiss wouldn’t be able to make himself heard if he’d tried.
‘It wasn’t me who shot Wyatt. You have to find out where each of the others has been in the last few minutes. One of them opened fire through the window. They’ll be out there still, or they’ll have just got in and be taking off their snowsuit. There’s no time to waste.’
Haglund rammed the barrel of the Ruger between Purkiss’s shoulder blades, propelling him forward so that Medievsky had to back away more quickly. Purkiss stumbled, regained his footing.
‘Oleg, you’re feeling like a fool right now, because you think I played you for one. You’re looking for revenge. I can understand that. But your primary responsibility is to the staff at this station. If you don’t get the person who did this right now, more of you will be killed. Probably all of you.’
Medievsky banged on a door set into the wall of the corridor. ‘This one.’ He pulled a huge ring of keys from his pocket, selected one and fitted it and shoved the door open, stood aside again and jerked the barrel towards the opening. ‘Get in.’
Purkiss stepped inside. It was a storeroom, a spare by the look of it. An old-fashioned lightbulb hung from a cobwebbed comma of flex in the ceiling. The dusty shelves were bare apart from a few ancient, yellowed cardboard boxes.
Purkiss turned. Medievsky stood in the doorway, the rifle aimed at Purkiss at belly height.
‘You didn’t kill Frank?’
‘No.’
‘Then where did you get the gun you were holding?’
‘It was Wyatt’s.’
Medievsky looked as if he was going to spit.
He lifted the gun, the barrel now centred on Purkiss’s chest.
So this is it, thought Purkiss. This room isn’t a prison cell. It’s an execution chamber.
The one chance they had was the phone. If Medievsky used it to call Wyatt’s FSB handler in Moscow, they could have assistance here from Yakutsk within ninety minutes. It might not be soon enough, but it was worth a try. But help might already be on its way. The FSB man would have heard the gunfire, would assume Wyatt was dead, and may already have scrambled support.
Purkiss needed to tell Medievsky about the phone before the man opened fire. His shots might destroy the handset in Purkiss’s pocket.
‘Oleg,’ he said. ‘You need to let me —’
‘We’ll be back once I’ve decided what to do with you,’ Medievsky snapped. He slammed the door. Purkiss heard the key grind in the lock.
He stood in the centre of the storeroom floor, aware for the first time of the hammering of his heart, the surge of adrenaline like amphetamines through his vasculature.
When the rushing of the pulse in his ears had quietened, Purkiss moved quickly to the door and put his eye to the keyhole. As expected, Medievsky had taken the key with him. The field of vision was minimal, only the wall of the corridor immediately opposite presenting itself. Purkiss held his breath and waited. Nobody paced past.
He turned his head and pressed his ear to the cold metal door. The building echoed and clanged, the sounds transmitted though the walls from all over. He shifted and put his ear against the keyhole.
There was no sound, no other cue to suggest that somebody was standing on the other side. That didn’t mean there was nobody there; Haglund, maybe, his rifle trained on the door, ready to fire the moment he had an excuse. But it did mean that if someone was standing guard, they were being stealthy about it.
Purkis backed away to the far end of the storeroom. They weren’t professionals, Medievsky and Haglund, that was clear. Professionals in their own fields, certainly, but not in Purkiss’s line of work. For one, they’d made the mistake of not searching him, of being lulled by the fact that they’d seen him lay his gun down into believing he was unarmed. A skilled operative would have searched him for a backup weapon.