Medievsky answered. ‘We do not speak Russian here at Yarkovsky Station, Mr Farmer. Not everybody here is fluent, so English is the lingua franca. It’s an iron rule, which I would be most grateful if you’d be sure to respect.’
‘No problem.’ Purkiss pretended to sip at the remainder of the liquid in his shot glass. ‘Makes life a lot easier for me.’
‘And it makes life a lot more interesting for me,’ said Avner. He reached over and began to refill the glasses. Purkiss put his hand over his own. ‘Studying fellow Russkies who aren’t allowed to speak their own language, even when engaging in technical scientific discourse with a compatriot. It’s enormous fun.’ He peered at Purkiss, his eyes mischievous and unclouded by the vodka. ‘I’m the anthropologist here. But you probably knew that already, John.’
‘Yes,’ said Purkiss.
‘Skol, then.’ Avner emptied his glass, still watching Purkiss.
Medievsky stood up. ‘John, let me show you a little of our facility. And then, of course, your room.’ He bent and muttered something to Budian, who nodded without looking at him. A meeting, or some kind of instruction, Purkiss thought.
Purkiss rose and followed Medievsky, conscious of the eyes at his back. He was aware also of a sense of anticipation, of imminence.
Because he hadn’t yet met the person he’d come to the station for. The target.
The door of the mess quarters swung open and as if on cue, as if the whole process had been cheesily choreographed, a man came in and stopped and stared straight at Purkiss, and Purkiss felt the electric tingle of recognition, of first contact.
Medievsky turned slightly.
‘Ah. John Farmer, the remaining member of our team. Dr Frank Wyatt.’
The man who’d come through the door was in his middle fifties. He had the lean, ascetic build of an athlete, the set mouth of a man committed to an ideal. Purkiss had studied a host of pictures of the man in innumerable files, and he knew Wyatt’s thick shock of hair had turned its current slate-grey twenty years earlier and stayed there.
The man paused for the briefest instant before stepping forward and extending his hand.
‘Farmer. You’re the journalist.’
‘Dr Wyatt.’
Even before the handshake, the symbolic clasp that offered nothing more than a meeting of skins, two realisations branded themselves on Purkiss’s mind.
Vale had been right about Wyatt.
And Wyatt knew why Purkiss was there.
Three
Some of Purkiss’s most productive thinking over the years had been done on beds just like this one, in anonymous rooms, with his hands behind his head and an impersonal ceiling above him and silence all around.
But the environment, this time, was different. The quiet was almost absolute, the low hum of a distant generator so faint as to be quickly ignorable by the brain’s auditory cortex. And yet Purkiss was aware of a sense of immenseness, of a huge encroaching landscape stretching in all directions for thousands of miles. He’d read about the region extensively; had studied Solzhenitsyn’s excoriation of the Soviet Archipelago, and the numerous travelogues by users of the Trans-Siberian train. But though he’d gained from these accounts a sense of the sweaty, claustrophobic immediacy of the Siberian experience, he was unprepared for the crushing vastness of the terrain, the dead and cold implacability of the millions of square miles of harsh Earth in the centre of which he was nestled.
It was the closest Purkiss imagined he would ever come to experiencing the surface of another planet.
One of the first surprises he’d encountered after entering the room was the en-suite bathroom. It was little more than a shower cubicle which one could reach only by stepping over a squat toilet, but it was more than Purkiss had been expecting. He wondered whether all the rooms were equipped in the same way, or whether he was being accorded special treatment as a guest upon whom Medievsky was keen to make a favourable impression.
Purkiss had unpacked his clothes, two weeks’ worth of heavy-duty woollens which would have to be recycled at least once, before testing the shower. The water had come as a shock, so immediately scalding that he’d had to step out. By working the control knob he’d found a happy medium, and he’d stood under the jets for fifteen minutes, scrubbing away fourteen hours of staleness and grime.
Fatigue would arrive suddenly, and drag him under. But for now, lying on his back on the single bed, Purkiss was wide awake, and able to reflect on the events of the previous seventy-two hours, and in particular those of the last two.
He hadn’t heard from Vale for nearly eight weeks, since just before Christmas and the Hong Kong affair. Vale wasn’t one for New Year’s greetings, or casual contact of any kind. When he’d engaged Purkiss in an operation, he was as close and as affable as a lifelong friend. But in between, he might as well not have existed as far as John was concerned.
The call had come as Purkiss was emerging from Tottenham Court Road Station, into the rain that had shrouded the country almost continuously ever since November. Purkiss pulled his phone from his overcoat pocket and glanced at the caller display. Name withheld.
It could be only one person.
‘John. Quentin.’
And so it had begun, the familiar rise in tension within Purkiss’s gut as he’d listened to Vale’s precise yet understated pitch. There was no small talk, no exchange of how have you beens. Not even a coy preamble by Vale along the lines of I’ve a job you might be interested in or are you available at short notice?
Instead, after the two-name introduction, Vale said: ‘I’d like you to go to Siberia.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘I don’t think so.’
It was by now the standard first question Purkiss asked. Vale called him when a member of the British Secret Service, SIS, needed investigating. Purkiss was former SIS, and might therefore be expected to know at least some of the men and women he was sent after.
‘All right,’ said Purkiss. ‘Rendezvous?’
Vale told him.
Purkiss felt a prickle of anticipation. An outdoor meeting in the rain. It practically guaranteed that they wouldn’t be subject to any meaningful surveillance. Which meant secrecy was of the highest importance.
So he’d met Vale in Hyde Park, at the Marble Arch entrance, the vast lawns traversed only by people scurrying towards their destinations and the odd die-hard jogger. Vale was as skeletal as the umbrella he angled over Purkiss’s head, a man in his sixties of Caribbean parentage who oozed the commingled odours of fresh and stale cigarette smoke.
The brusqueness that typified Vale’s initial phone calls was never in evidence when they first met afterwards. The two men walked companionably, like friends catching up after a few months’ separation. Vale asked with genuine interest about Purkiss’s life, about his thoughts in regard to the last two missions he’d been despatched to undertake — in Pakistan and Hong Kong, respectively — and about Kendrick, Purkiss’s friend who’d caught a ricochet bullet in the head last summer. Purkiss answered straightforwardly. He didn’t ask Vale about himself in return. He’d learned years ago that it was a fruitless task.
They reached the Serpentine. A lone mother attempted to coax her sodden child away from the water’s edge where he was trying to lure the ducks nearer by hurling sticks at them.
Purkiss said, ‘So. Siberia.’
Vale handed the umbrella to Purkiss. He lit up, took a deep drag, breathed a profile of grey smoke into the rain.
‘Francis Wyatt. Does the name mean anything to you?’