Or for a phone.
He pressed himself into the corner furthest from the door, turned his back so that the sound would be muffled further. If anyone was listening closely at the door, they’d probably hear him speaking. It was a risk he had to take.
Purkiss pulled out the phone handset, switched it on. For a heartstopping moment the screen remained blank, and he thought it must have been damaged, or its battery must be flat. But it flickered into life.
He found a single, unlabelled number in the call log.
He hit the key.
For a few seconds the silence was absolute. Purkiss felt another twinge of dread. Had the FSB shut down the connection, reasoning that it had been compromised and was no longer safe to use?
The ringing chirruped at the other end, harsh and electronic but sweet as larksong to Purkiss’s ears.
A click, followed instantaneously by an abrupt: ‘Da?’
Purkiss said in Russian, speaking rapidly, keeping his voice as low as he dared while still maintaining intelligibility, ‘This is John Purkiss. I was with Wyatt when you called him. He’s been shot dead. It wasn’t me. We were ambushed and I didn’t see who it was. The team leader, Medievsky, believes I did it and has me prisoner.’
‘What did you —’
‘Be quiet and listen,’ Purkiss cut in. ‘They’re going to discover me with this phone before long and take it away and that’ll be it. I heard you say to Wyatt something about a Tupolev that was wrecked. What were you going to tell him?’
‘You can’t expect —’
‘You have to tell me.’ Purkiss spoke more loudly than he’d intended, lowered his voice once more. ‘Your man’s dead. The only response available to you is to send in the troops. It’ll take them ninety minutes to get here, minimum. That could be too late. I’m your only hope of stopping whatever’s about to happen, because I’m here, on the ground. So tell me what you were going to tell Wyatt.’
Purkiss half turned his head. That noise outside, beyond the door… Yes, there was no doubt. Footsteps.
‘Tell me,’ he hissed. ‘They’re coming back.’
The rasp of the key in the unoiled lock.
‘For the love of God, tell me.’
At the other end, the voice said, ‘A Tupolev Tu-22M strategic bomber carrying six Raduga Kh-15 air-to-surface missiles armed with nuclear warheads was lost in the skies over north-eastern Siberia some twenty-five years ago. The aircraft was never recovered, nor were the missiles.’
Behind Purkiss, the door was flung open. He turned. Haglund charged into the storeroom, Medievsky following.
‘Son of a bitch,’ yelled Medievsky.
The rifles came up.
As if spurred on by the background noise, the voice continued, ‘We have intelligence suggesting a person or persons unknown, most likely a terrorist group, has identified the location of the lost aircraft and intends to steal the missiles.’
‘Put the phone down, Farmer.’ Haglund stepped forward, sighted down the Ruger at Purkiss’s head.
‘When and where did it crash?’ said Purkiss.
Haglund advanced another step. ‘I said put it down.’
The voice on the phone said, ‘April fifth, nineteen eighty-eight. The precise location of the aircraft is not known —’
Haglund fired, the shot singing past Purkiss’s hand, so close he felt its breath, and whined off the wall behind him.
Between clenched teeth, the Swede said: ‘The next one goes through your head.’
Purkiss laid the phone down, raised his hands once again. Haglund strode forward and rammed the barrel of the Ruger into his stomach, doubling him up. As he went down, Haglund kicked him in the side of the head with a boot. Agony exploded inside Purkiss’s consciousness.
He swam out of focus, slipping away, the date spiralling and wafting through his disordered thoughts: April 1988…
He went under, curiously content, because of course he knew where the Tupolev was.
Of course…
Twenty
‘Anna,’ Lenilko said. ‘I want you to sit down.’
Her eyes flicking up at his and then away again, she pulled the chair away from the desk and sat down quickly.
He sat in his chair across the desk from her. He’d locked the door behind her.
Lenilko paid an independent contractor to sweep his room for bugs on a daily basis. He knew even his director, Rokva, was cautious about using his own office when discussing matters of extreme confidentiality, hence their meeting that morning in the restaurant behind Red Square. Lenilko thought this was paranoia of an exaggerated, even prissy, kind.
‘Are you loyal, Anna?’
She looked up quickly, holding his gaze. ‘Yes, Mr Lenilko.’
‘To whom?’
‘To you.’
‘To me? Or to the FSB? To the Director? To the State? Which?’
Her mouth worked in confusion. ‘To… all of you.’
He shook his head, patiently rather than in exasperation. ‘Of course. You couldn’t say but otherwise. And I’ve no doubt whatsoever you’re sincere about it. You genuinely feel loyalty to multiple agencies.’ He rested his elbows on the desk, leaned forward. ‘But what if you found yourself in a situation where your loyalties were in conflict? Where the requirements of one party were at direct odds with those of another?’
She blinked, struggling. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What if one party trusted you to do something that another forbade you to do? Which side would you choose?’
She didn’t answer.
Lenilko sat back once more. ‘Anna Yaroslavna, you’re an educated woman. You read history at university. You know of the Great War. During the great battles on the so-called Eastern Front, our armies were an unstoppable, relentless force of nature. By sheer strength of numbers, they overwhelmed the Nazi forces, time and again, no matter how advanced the technology Hitler threw at us, no matter how more efficient a fighting force the German Wehrmacht was than our Red Army. And do you know why?’
No response.
‘It was because our soldiers were not permitted to fail. It was because every teenage peasant in a uniform with a rifle thrust into his hands knew, despite the terror he faced, despite the murderous, raging Nazi machine into whose jaws he was walking, that if he took so much as one step backwards, he would be shot like a dog by the NKVD officers lined up behind him. He walked forward towards likely death because he was more afraid of the certain death at his back.’
Lenilko paused. He drank coffee in the mornings, took tea in meetings. But under conditions of pressure, he consumed water, in small amounts and often. He poured two glasses full, pushed one across the desk towards Anna.
‘The Red Army destroyed Germany. Broke the back of the regime, took Berlin, ensured that half of Europe came under the influence of our country. We won, decisively, unambiguously. A great good was achieved. But tell me, Anna. If you had the facility of prescience, and you had been born sixty years earlier and were a young NKVD officer assigned to the front line… would you have aimed your rifle at the backs of those soldiers? Boys a handful of years younger than you, any of whom might have been courting your little sister at the time? Would you have found it in yourself to pull the trigger as soon as one of them peeled away from the horror of the flames and the shells, holding in your mind the knowledge that this child’s death would spur others on to help achieve the glorious victory we now know came to pass? Would your loyalty have, at that moment, been to the nation? To Comrade Stalin? Or to the poor illiterate boy whose toothless mother back home in some godforsaken hovel would be tortured by his death even as she was being dragged off to a labour camp for the crime of giving birth to a deserter?’