He’d spoken quietly, but Haglund and Montrose had clearly overheard him. Haglund said, ‘No chance. You stay where you are.’
Purkiss stared into Medievsky’s eyes. ‘Oleg. What have you got to lose? You keep a gun aimed at my head while I make the call. What could I possibly say that would make things worse?’
He saw no change in Medievsky’s face. No hint of wavering.
‘If we had the time, and the access to forensic equipment and expertise, you’d see how things really were. You’d discover that the bullets that killed Wyatt didn’t come from the gun you found me holding, and that they were fired through the window of the generator building. You might even find evidence that I fired the gun back through the window at the attacker. You’d learn whose DNA was on the most recently worn snowsuit, apart from yours and mine and Haglund’s, hanging there on the pegs next to the door. And speaking of DNA, there’ll be plenty of it under Keys’s fingernails, by the way. None of it mine.’
Was that the slightest flicker in Medievsky’s eyes, a twitch of the surrounding muscles? Purkiss pressed on.
‘The satellite phone was Wyatt’s. Call his FSB handler if you have to. Ask him. He’ll probably confirm it. But it all fits with what you told me. Don’t you see? You were tasked with protecting a secret, and were ordered to report suspicious activity here at the station. The secret is the crashed bomber with its nuclear arms. The suspicious activity is the operation of a terrorist cell under your nose.’
Yes. A definite shift, a sense of calculation behind Medievsky’s eyes.
‘And the snowmobile, Oleg. You know it was sabotaged. Do you really believe I’d go so far as to blow up my own vehicle in order to direct suspicion towards somebody else?’ Purkiss dropped his voice even further so that the words came out in a hiss. ‘There isn’t much time. You don’t have the luxury of mulling this over. Cut me loose now. Let me make the call.’
Medievsky straightened. He reached inside the pocket of his trousers, pulled out a Swiss Army knife.
He moved behind Purkiss. For an instant, Purkiss wondered if he’d misjudged the man, was about to feel the press of sharpened steel against his throat, the awful sense of violation as his carotid artery was sliced open.
A tugging at his hands behind the back of the chair gave way to release, and his arms were free. He rubbed at the grooves the plastic had imprinted on his wrists. Haglund and Montrose burned him with their stares.
Medievsky handed him the phone.
‘Do it.’
Purkiss hit the key, listened to the distant whirr and whisper as the connection was sought.
Then: a single, continuous, fluting note.
He cancelled, tried again.
The same.
And a third time.
Purkiss lowered the handset.
‘The link’s dead,’ he said. ‘It’s not the satellite connection. The phone at the other end has been switched off, or taken out of service.’
Through the silence, Purkiss made out the faint screaming of the wind beyond the walls.
Twenty-two
All Lenilko could do for the moment was wait, at a time when keeping busy was what he desperately needed. Waiting opened up even the most disciplined of minds to invasion by the demons of regret, of doubt, of fear.
He’d set Anna to work drafting the report he would be required to produce after this was over, in which he justified the course of action he had chosen. Now he wondered if he might have been better served writing it himself, to keep his thoughts and his hands occupied. Alone in his office, gazing out as he was so accustomed to doing over the square, he had no option but to face what he’d done.
It wasn’t so much the fact that he’d disobeyed the orders of his superior, Rokva, and had gone over the head of even the Director of the FSB, that tormented him. It was the understanding that he’d lied to the President of the Russian Federation. It had been a lie of omission rather than commission, but the distinction was of no relevance.
In his summary of the situation to the President, Lenilko hadn’t mentioned the presence of a British agent at Yarkovsky Station. More significantly, he hadn’t mentioned the name of John Purkiss.
Purkiss. The man who’d saved the President’s life. The untouchable.
Lenilko had no doubt that if he’d used Purkiss’s name, his request would have been refused. The President would have notified the FSB Director immediately, and Lenilko would have been suspended if not summarily dismissed. Thereafter, Eshman or whoever was assigned to take over the operation would have sent in the troops. But they’d have been under strict instruction not to harm Purkiss, and this would have caused them to pull their punches. To handle the situation with more delicacy than it required.
And the mission would be lost. The missiles would be extracted by the opposition, and the world would become an infinitely more dangerous place.
Lenilko clenched his fists at his sides so hard that the nails bit into the palms. No. He’d done the right thing, regardless of what the outcome for him personally would be. His way, the deceitful, lying, taboo-violating way, was the correct one.
The FSB had its own special forces centre, the CSN, comprising three divisions of around four thousand operatives in total. If the Counter-Terrorism Directorate were to get involved, it would be Spetsnaz troops from the CSN whom they’d send in. That was why Lenilko had approached General Tsarev. He was chief of a military Spetsnaz unit, distinct from the FSB’s divisions and coming instead under the control of the military.
Lenilko’s request to the General had been unambiguous. The personnel at Yarkovsky Station had to be neutralised. Every one of them. The stakes were too high for it to be otherwise. There was no time for niceties, no time to identify who the terrorist saboteur was, to separate out the innocent from the guilty.
Lenilko hadn’t mentioned the presence of a British agent to General Tsarev, either. As with the President, if Tsarev knew he would be sending his men to kill a foreign intelligence operative, he would have refused the request. The potential ramifications would have been too serious to ignore.
High above the square, its shape made indistinct by the white sky, a helicopter clattered past. Lenilko thought of the other helicopter, six thousand miles away, that had by now been airborne for a quarter of an hour. General Tsarev had given Lenilko the details. At such short notice, it wouldn’t be possible to deploy a fully functional team with the ideal hardware, for example gunships. However, there was a small company of special operations soldiers currently engaged in training manoeuvres at a base two hundred kilometres south of Yakutsk. They had at their disposal a Mil Mi-26 heavy cargo transporter, designed for carrying almost one hundred troops. Tsarev could spare twelve men.
‘It’ll be enough,’ he said.
The helicopter had a range of almost two thousand kilometres, and a cruising speed capability of 250 kilometres per hour. The distance to Yarkovsky Station was 480 kilometres. Assuming acceptable weather conditions, the troops would reach the station in just under two hours.
Lenilko turned from the window. He thought about the Englishman, Purkiss.
It was possible that Purkiss had told him the truth. That somebody else had killed Wyatt. Lenilko didn’t think Purkiss was part of the terrorist cell; he’d sounded genuinely unaware of the disappearance of the Tupolev aircraft with its missile load. Which meant Purkiss was at the station in a different capacity, perhaps even with the same goal in mind as Lenilko and Wyatt themselves: to detect and prevent a terrorist threat.